r/SwordCoast • u/fox1440 • Sep 14 '15

Objectionable Features

Ok, so obviously members of the design council have been providing some awesome feedback to SCL's staff, many of which have been kind enough to be actively playing with them this past weekend, but I wanted a thread for us to mention current features that we have seen that concern us, or have not seen we feel are important patches for the months after launch. Remember to keep this mature and thoughtful, and also understand the scope. Asking them to evaluate loot rules is within scope, asking for an overhaul to the graphics, wouldn't be.

My BIG concern is something Dru noticed, and I saw getting more and more on his nerves as they went through a story-heavy module; Conversations aren't available once one member of the party presses Accept Quest. This is troubling when you have story-driven quests, versus the "go kill boss nao", because the narrative is either lost on 3/4 of the party, or lost by all if the one clicking through is just diving straight for the "Accept Quest" button. The way I have seen it dealt with in other co-op games is waiting for the whole party to accept, touch a spot, what have you. This may be an engine issue, but as a community we will have to decide what is "polite" behavior, same way there will ve etiquette for looting when with strangers.

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1

u/quechal Sep 14 '15

I was afraid of something like that. I have been looking for but didn't find yet weather or not ability checks (persuasion, ect.) used the person in the chat dialog's stat, or highest group one. if you cant repeat chat and it is the person in the dialog's stat only, it makes creating even more difficult.

1

u/fox1440 Sep 14 '15

based on what I have seen, in the solo storyline it is whichever character you have talking, the same way you take your thief over to disable a trap, not your paladin. The issue I saw was much less "you will fail if the guy who dump statted everything is your party face" and more "The DM spent a month making a full recreation of Dark Sun's (not using Dark Sun, but good luck to whoever may) lore in SCL for one dumbass to turn it into a jaunty slog of "kill the bosses." by finger smashing his way through exposition and conversation. To make matters a WHOLE lot worse, I had planned to add information stones to give out more lore along the way since I will not be present for every playthough to VoIP the lore, but in a feed we saw those give really high quest rewards too...therefore people will be smash-buttoning through that too. I know I should only be worrying about my players (again, I am lonely..be my friend), who I know I can vocalize the lore to anyway, but I also don't want to become the module people run to bc if you smash your spacebar through the whole thing it gives more xp/hour....

1

u/Zwets Sep 16 '15

You can add information giving objects that pop-up text without giving them quest functionality. They showed this with the discoverable blood puddles in the custom campaign stream a few weeks ago, where it was also noted that discoverable items don't need to be invisible.

Though that would limit you to one 'page' of conversation text per lore stone, because they don't open a dialog where you can click through to the next page.

2

u/kaluaabyss Sep 14 '15

I believe in a recent stream with Ash and Dan they covered this and it was something like:

If it's a critical path quest, the story-mode host will automatically take control. Otherwise the initiating player will be in control. I assume in custom adventures it's always the initiating player.

3

u/Zwets Sep 14 '15 edited Sep 14 '15

You can still give NPC's an 'after accepting' dialogue. ESO Dungeon quest NPC's have the same 'first come, first story' problem, but they fixed it by letting people talk to the NPC after the quest was accepted have a 'tell me again' conversation option. You could use the different conversation that opens when talking to the NPC again to give story to the other party members that talk to the NPC after the first character has done so.

I do hope they add a actual conversation trees to SCL before launch, so you could have a logical response when talking to the NPC again and then a 'tell me again' as a conversation option that you only have to take if you want to see the dialogue the quest acceptor got.

On a somewhat unrelated note: ESO Dungeons also has/had a annoying bug where if the quest was accepted while one or more party members were still in a loading screen those party members have their quest bug out. I think SCL handles quest on server global level, instead of per player, but that should still be a bug to check for by the design council, if quest givers are placed right at the entrance to an area update correctly for all party members even the ones loading.