Remove leveling up or make it harder and fun

We have not received permission from Astrolite to share the quoted post.

Questing is for immersion, though.

People are just bad at writing quests because it's not the sort of thing they teach you when you want to learn these things.

Game design courses don't seem to have quite gotten to things like 'RPG quest design', and TableTop games don't teach the same principles so even a good "DM" doesn't come up with good quests just because you hire them to work on an RPG, they make 'narratives'.

XP for fighting mobs has an entirely different purpose and the design stuff around that isn't the same. The part that is similar is simple. If quests are not immersive, they are just there to waste your time. If the things you do to level aren't immersive, they're also just there to waste your time, but the thing stopping them from being immersive (outside of the preferences of a subset of the population that should probably be playing different games') is developers being brought on who don't know how to make it good, but the game getting released anyway.

We have not received permission from novercalis to share the quoted post.

As much as I'd want this and would love it, in this day and age the absolute majority would just go look up a guide and there'd probably be some 3rd party app that tells you what to do step by step.

The only way to avoid that is to completely randomize word/action requirements of personal quests. The main quest line could be the same and simple, but every other quest would have random details that can't be put into a guide.

But I'm, like, 90% sure people would COMPLAIN at length if this was the case

We have not received permission from novercalis to share the quoted post.

There's a thin line for Intrepid to walk when it comes to the "this ain't for you" approach. If we assume that Intrepid do in fact want to mainly target the older audience who remember old mmos and might even love their designs, we should also consider that not all of those old mmos were the same. So while some oldschooler might think fondly of long quest texts that didn't give you a direction, the other oldschooler would only remember the days of grinding they had to do because they couldn't be bothered to read those texts.

Both of those activities take a fair bit of time, while pretty much 99.9% of the oldschoolers have families or at the very least full lives, so their playtime is limited. And when you add the potential of someone else attacking them while they're reading quest text or grinding mobs - that time becomes even shorter.

And at this point we gotta ask ourselves, do we tell the biggest potential target audience "this game is not for you" or do we cut a few corners here and there to at least not drive those people away. The corruption system is supposed to cut the corner on the grind side of content, so imo it'd be only logical to cut a corner on the questing side too.

There's obviously the artisanal part of the equation, but we got 0 info outside of the "you can cut wood and rock" stuff, so it's hard to determine whether there's corners that need to be cut.

We have not received permission from Strevi to share the quoted post.

Except even cities aren't safe

We have not received permission from novercalis to share the quoted post.

That's my whole point though. His target audience are the people who remember those old mmos that were exactly as you described. But for those people the life is now different, so even if they preferred those kinds of games before, they physically can't do the same stuff now.

And like I said, the corruption system is there to prevent mass killings of people who're just chilling and as for grind, Steven did say that they want to try and move away from the repetitive design of pve grind. And the sees are not full loot, they just have no corruption, though I do think that sees will be more of a guild type of thing rather than a solo one.

My point is mainly about how small the target audience will be if every single part of the game pushes people away in some way. We all know that the game will be niche, but there's a scale of how niche it can be and I'd prefer Ashes to be closer to the top than to the bottom. And so far it seems like Intrepid are trying to achieve the same thing, and I think that having super complex and hard to parse quest design would be detrimental to the game in the long run.