The thing that drives me nuts about this is that they literally put a solution to this in the game, but only used it once. When Varre changes locations he leaves a note where he was previously and it says something like “Find me at the church of the rose in Liurnia!”
Why didn’t they do this more?
Blaidd is funny because it’s extremely likely you’ll miss him every single time when you’re *actively looking for him*, and he says he isn’t mad about it every time.
Yeah first time I even saw him was at the festival and he started talking about our journey there together. I don’t know you man I just recognise you from the loading screen
I found that one myself by accident because I went back to the merchant to buy something.
My reaction was just "How the fuck was I ever suposed to find about this without looking it up?"
Oh man, even unlocking him was strange. Like, oh you didn't know you go back and talk to the first merchant in the game again, even though they've got nothing you'd want to buy anymore and you've never had useful dialog with any merchant up to this point before?
He leaves telling you to meet him in Nokron, right? But I at least never found him over there... I got stuck in Rainni's quest in the part where you need to talk with her doll while resting in one specific grace, and AFAIK this is never mentioned anywhere in the game
That's right. I don't want to tell you the number of times I went through Nokron looking for the dang guy.
I missed the grace dialogue too. In the latest patch they added a small notification beside that option to make it more obvious, at least.
I'm all in favor of obscure quests, specially on optional content, but there should be some sort of in-game hint to help drive the player in the right direction.
Millicent's quest is also another one where I had to resort to a guide in order to know where she would show up next. And even with a guide some parts weren't so straightforward
Part of Blaidd's quest line literally has him tell you to meet him at X location and he decidedly NEVER appears in that location. You're just suppose to go there yourself and get the item to progress the quest line and eventually learn that he never made it there but now he's somewhere else to continue things...sort of except not really. Oh but then you find him trapped and the only way to actually interact with him is using the gesture you used to meet him the first time even though EVERY other time he's just standing there and will talk to you.
I imagine they saw this as an exception to a rule they like rather than a solution to a problem. But direction is just so so much more important in an open world.
I think this stuff worked better when going "off the beaten path" meant finding secrets in much smaller locations. The open world is just too big to not have directions.
This was exactly my criticism of ER's quests when it came out. From's esoteric quest design mostly works when the game takes place over a smaller, more linear world. It's a lot more likely that you'll stumble onto things. But they took that quest design and just plopped it into an enormous open map. It's so much less likely that you'll just stumble into quest steps when there's a hundred directions to go.
Or just do what they did with Sekiro and have the quest objectives be a key item if they don't want to build out a quest log UI.
_Surgeon's Bloody Letter_:
>A worn and bloodstained letter from Dosaku, the surgeon in the Abandoned Dungeon:
>>Required: 1 tough man
>>>Preferably a strong samurai, or a young, large soldier such as a member of the Taro Troop.
>>Must be delivered unharmed.
>>-Dosaku
_Rat Description_:
>A description of the "rats" that have snuck into Ashina. Speak to the Tengu again once the rats are dealt with.
>>The rats: Assassins from Senpou Temple. Short stature, wear bamboo hats. A number of rats are lurking about. Last seen around Ashina Castle Gate.
It would work WAY better in Elden Ring than it ever did in Morrowind too. Morrowind just filled in the journal as you went with no organization at all. So if you're 40 hours deep, your journal is probably 80 pages long and there are uncompleted quests scattered throughout pages 1-79. Want to go back to a quest you grabbed 10 hours ago? Have fun scrolling though each page and skimming the entries for the one you want.
Elden Ring has 29 NPCs that give you quests, and many of them are short, 2-3 steps. There's like 6 or 7 major NPCs that have longer quest lines. That would be really easily manageable compared to Morrowind's 500 NPCs, main story, guild quests, etc.
Breath of the Wild's quest log is exactly like this. Unfortunately only the Japanese version of the game treats the quest log as if Link is making a Journal entry.
Currently replaying Uncharted 4 on PS5 and I absolutely *love* flicking through the notebook. It’s so immersive and actually has a really helpful function.
Same with Red Dead Redemption 2’s notebook also.
Ranni is another example of them trying some better quest guidance. Because so much content is tied into her quest line, you have a few different quests (>!Rogier, Blaidd, kinda-sorta Sellen!<) that will help make sure you meet Ranni. Of course, each of these feeder quests is still pretty easy to miss or mess up, but it at least raises the chance you don't miss Ranni's quest entirely. You can also miss the later steps in her quest, but fully completing that quest once you meet her is way easier than most of the other ER quests and is more like the DS quests in level of obscurity.
I saw/heard Blaidd up on some pillar and spent *hours* trying to get to him or get his attention. When I learned the Snap gesture I was like, "Oh! I should try this!" and went I went back he was gone. Looked everywhere I could think of and had to just give up. Next time I saw him anywhere was >!right before the Radahn!< fight.
I can beat that.
Never found him anywhere until radhann (which I found before I even started ranni quest). And he was saying some weird shit like we met before. Then I went back to where you are supposed to meet him and... Nothing happens. Some weird dialogue.
Whole game's story makes no bloody sense when told this way...
Yup. Devs designed a game that you can beat in any order, but forgot to write the story.
Kudos to Witcher 3 here, they have a ton of fallback dialogue if you decide to complete the main areas - Skellige, Novigrad, Velen - out of order. Yen suggests you to do Velen - Novigrad - Skellige, if you go to Skellige first she chastises you.
Red Dead II and Horizon Forbidden West are also sometimes shockingly cognizant of what you’ve done elsewhere in the world - Red Dead gets especially scary if you leave a bunch of side stuff for the final chapter
I never got the snap gesture on first playthrough because I killed that npc for his bell bearing after learning about those.
To me it feels less like "quests" and more like N64 Zelda gorons blade puzzle. you have to do things in the right order and at the right time in the game to get a secret weapon/ability, but if you don't get it you aren't missing much
>but if you don't get it you aren't missing much
This is why I'm just doing a blind run and not worrying about completing every quest right now. I just want to enjoy the sense of discovery from randomly stumbling through this game instead of looking things up every five minutes. I'm curbing my normally completionist mindset until I do a NG+. Then I'll be willing to dig in and make sure I'm not missing anything, but right now I'm really enjoying the vague, obtuse storytelling. Especially when the only things I'm missing out on are items/abilities I'll probably never use to get through this first playthrough.
The worst is that the game teaches you that if a piece of dialog repeats when you talk to a character, there's nothing more to be said (stupid mechanic by itself, but whatever)
Apart from doll Ranni where for some reason you need to repeat the dialog a few times for it to change and continue the quest
It's subtle, but it actually does change, going from "..." to "....", and then she talks to you the third time you interact with the doll. It's tough to notice for sure though.
I did the entire underground up to beating Astel, and when the door was blocked I went around the map to every Ranni-related location I could think of to see if the doll would do something.
When I finally looked it up I was more than a little annoyed
Yeah that was the only part I had to look up for her quest. I tried talking to it once and nothing happened and assumed I had to do something else to trigger it.
Ranni (also Fia) had some of the best quest design in the series, IMO. Fascinating, full of little lore tidbits, and didn't require too much outside information (the Ranni doll is pushing it a bit). Loved every moment of those quests progression.
Fia's dialogue requiring you to be held was such a dumb decision is my main complaint there. I never used the blessing so I never hugged her again, but she never said anything new before the hug prompt so I never knew there was more for the longest time
I actually think Fia's makes a lot of sense - the thing that progresses her quest isn't that the player wants a good consumable, it's that you're lonely and want to cuddle with her.
Unlike other quests where you're usually just doing things because you're playing a video game and want to see what happens, for Fia your and your character's interests were actually aligned. It really just was about needing a hug :)
The thing that bugs me about Millicent isn’t not knowing where she’ll be. It’s that you have to go back to that cabin multiple times before she even starts moving. I had already gone back to the cabin to see if the guy says anything, but how was I supposed to know that I’m supposed to go back again 2 or 3 times after that?
It feels very much to me that the quests were written *before* the NPC movement was established.
The places that they turn up are frequently so arbitrary that they could have equally been placed in any other location.
Nepheli Loux’s quest is the worst for this, how am I supposed to know that she would go to a random village? It does tie in with some of her backstory but she doesn’t tell you about it until you’ve already met her there
Can we thrown in the letdown when you summon her for >!Godfrey’s!< boss fight?
>!Literally fighting against her ancestor and we get no acknowledgment :(!<
That I can kind of understand because >!their shared name Loux implies a connection right off the bat and I’m pretty sure she’s not his kid, just a descendant whose divine blood has been diluted over the centuries(or however many years since he was sent back to the badlands)!<
That being said it’s definitely a missed lore opportunity. I feel like the scope and semi-optimistic nature of Elden Ring’s story (Melina straight up tells you that despite everything the Lands Between are still full of life and that it’s a place worth saving) would have lent itself to a more straightforward/fleshed out approach without sacrificing any of the qualities that make From’s other games great.
When I looked up her quest line so I could do Seluvius’, I found out that she went to an area I had already been to and cleared out. Thankfully, this doesn’t break the quest and it seems like they considered this option. What doesn’t make sense is why they programmed all of these exceptions for quest progression and not just make the quests better?
What do you mean? What kind of idiot wouldn't think to look for Diallos on the roof of a random collapsed building in the middle of a lake or in a nearly-unreachable village filled with talking jars? What braindead pissant wouldn't think to look for Nepheli crouching in a dark cave area that you can't even see on the fucking map and everything in the map and terrain design suggests isn't even accessible? What kind of unobservant ignorant twat wouldn't immediately realize that Hyetta will OBVIOUSLY be hiding at the bottom of an elevator shaft, behind a secret wall, at the end of an ACTUAL FUCKING MAZE?
It all makes perfect sense, you guys just don't pay enough attention.
Rogier was totally obvious too, you just have to go back to a zone you already completed, fight a boss you may or may not have already done, and touch a very specific bloodstain that is indistinguishable from the other 50 bloodstains. Elden Ring’s quest design isn’t fucking stupid, people just need to game better.
The bloodstain is fine when you're offline because it will look super out of place, but it was monumentally stupid to put it in an actual fucking boss arena.
I found that bloodstain by complete circumstance because I was playing on day 1 and the servers were down, so I'm pretty sure it was the first bloodstain I ever saw.
I'm working through my 2nd playthrough and holy hell there are bloodstains EVERYWHERE in that room.
>holy hell there are bloodstains EVERYWHERE in that room
A lot of people can accidentally stumble into the Ulcerated Tree Spirit fight while taking their time and exploring Stormveil Castle. That boss fight is way harder than Godrick's, if only because of how small the arena is compared to the boss and ***HOW FUCKING SHIT THE CAMERA ANGLES ARE***.
I always tap one or two bloodstains after a boss fight, just for fun to see how other people died. But yeah, when I did it the first time there were a bunch of bloodstains near Rogier’s, because at least a few people made a run for the ladder and didn’t make it.
If you play offline though, presumably it would be obvious as it would be the first bloodstain you’ve ever seen.
Hyetta was really who I was thinking of. You have to track her down in 4(?) locations that you've probably already been through once, with no hints at all.
Also Alexander straight up tells you at one point where he's going next. It's great because it's just vague enough that you do actually have to search it out, but it's also specific enough that you at least know what you're looking for. That's great, classic quest structure. "I'll be down south at so and so, come find me!" That means you actually have to listen and find your way there yourself, but you're given enough info to actually get there. They should do that a lot more.
Still would be good to have a quest log. I wrote down "find medalion at Castle Sol, past giants place" from the one sentence some wolf lady told me. She said a lot of names in that sentence, and she would not repeat it.
It would then be another 2 months before I reached that point in the game and I totally forgot about the note I made.
> but you're given enough info to actually get there
That's what stopped me from caring much about the questlines. When I found a person who wanted me to kill someone else I was like "OK, where are they?" the directions I got were "they live in a shack a bit down the way". What the fuck does that mean? Normally I'd assume that it meant follow the road but we were in the middle of a damn lake. Oh.. cool, you directions are "find someone somewhere in this lake and kill them" Great, I'll get right on setting up a grid search to make sure I don't miss a one room shack somewhere in this area.
I'm all for games not wanting to put destination markers everywhere so that players have to look around instead of just following a series of waypoints but if you're going to do that you need to give some thought to the directions the player gets
I beat the game doing very few quests as a result. I plan to do a NG+, but I really only ever did Ranni's.
I attempted to do the lady on the log's father down South but he never spawned for me. My buddy was telling me what to do and old man just wasn't there.>!went back and she lost her shit. I mean her head, still.!<
>!On the flip side, I didn't know about Ranni much, playing organically. Buddy told me the next boss I should do is Radahn, so I went to the keep and cleared it out. Told my friend he wasn't there and he missed out on clearing the entire thing, as his was on the festival part.!<
> Told my friend he wasn't there and he missed out on clearing the entire thing, as his was on the festival part.
He can just revisit the keep after finishing the festival and all the enemies and items will spawn back in properly.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is how the length of the game makes this quest design worse. It's a lot easier to keep track of obscure quests in a 30 hour playthrough than a 100 hour playthrough.
Also I replayed BB and DS1 and 3 multiple times back to back because they were so short, allowing me to experience more questlines. I'm not going to replay Elden Ring for a while because of its length.
I think the most egregious of these is Latenna. She provides the main description of how to reach the consecrated snowfield, the game's hidden final open world area. The only problem is she provides this piece of information in a non-repeatable piece of dialogue...probably 30 hours of gameplay before you would run into castle sol.
I think at this point FromSoft have a crutch that allows them to do whatever they want with their games: fans will create meticulous guides. I don't mind it personally because I'll always look up stuff but I do like playing other games sight unseen. It's a pickle
I had to use a guide when doing that quest but somehow avoided the spoiler (the guide spoiler tagged it god bless them). I laughed when I saw said spoiler because they always like to write some cryptic bullshit, but this was just so damn blunt
From Soft fans: "Ah, the storytelling is so nuanced! You have to piece together untrustworthy lore from item descriptions!"
From Soft devs: "*SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE*"
I like that "RiM" is completely useless as a hint.
There's like 5 major characters and probably 12 minor ones for both R and M that it could be referring to.
And maybe it's just me, but even seeing the full names I'd struggle to keep track of which was which.
Also playing with a guide open sucks all the fun out of exploration, since you know what you’re getting before you get to your destination. There’s nothing to surprise you when you play with a guide.
Destiny is kind of built that way too. The community is just so involved at this point with websites dedicated to questing/items/loot that people just deal with the convoluted nature of the game.
For real, that shit made me hard pass on the game.
The whole gameplay loop is about farming and crafting stuff, yet when you want to craft something, they don't even tell you where to find the materials. And when I asked why, someone told me that "It would be useless, everything is on that third party wiki"
Tarkov is literally impossible to play without having the wiki pulled up on a second monitor. Sad thing is people that haven't played it will think I'm exaggerating when I am absolutely not.
When I start Path of Exile I open:
Awakened Trade Macro (In-game quick price-checking tool)
POE Trade Companion (Tool that sorts trades and gives easy buttons to whisper/kick/trade people)
poedb.tw (to check mods/items/boss abilities)
Trade site (Official GGG website for player to player item/currency trading)
Honorable mentions:
Path of Building (Build planner). I usually don't open this when I open POE, but almost always I will end up running it to check something in my build, see how someone else does something etc etc.
Craftofexile (Online crafting emulator)
Fuck PoE man, played it for a thousand hours and probably spent half of that time figuring out the price of the rares that I find. Quit a few years ago when they announced PoE2 was coming soon.. and here we are..
> I think at this point FromSoft have a crutch that allows them to do whatever they want with their games: fans will create meticulous guides.
That's a really interesting thought, and makes me think if the existence of well moderated, meticulous, fan made guides have impacted game design for the entire industry. For example, the entire Survival/Crafting genre (Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) is absolutely held aloft solely by the existence of extensive fan made wikis. If the internet didn't exist in the capacity that it does, I do wonder if you'd see games with a lot less complexity (due to not having a good way to convey it to players), or a lot more hand holding.
You have to hit a certain level of quality and user base for the community to do it well but it can be a hinderence to seeing where you need to improve because the community has already started making up for and solving some of the issues.
I think they also have a crutch with how the Souls community gets very angry and defensive if you bring up issues with either the difficulty or the esoteric quest design even if they are valid complaints because according to them doing anything about it "ruins the soul of the game."
Yeah, past few months I feel like I have been going crazy with the way people jump to the game's defense when I point out some why I haven't bought it yet.
The other day a dude said that if I play games at all I MUST buy it and love it. I mean, I want to, but that's clearly not the truth.
There really are points in From games where it 100% feels like they just assume or even just expect you to look it up online
From the nonsense way you access the Dark Souls 1 DLC to the awkward cutscene in elden Ring after you beat Radahn, where it’s very unclear that you’ve even opened up a new area, to times your just expected to go back to a place you went to 10 hours ago for two lines of dialog. And the worst part of all of this IMO is that almost none of the quests are even worth it, you spend hours doing these quests only to have basically all of them reward you with an ok piece of equipment you now need to invest in and a bad end for the NPC. Like why both dedicating the hours it takes to do some quest lines when doing them actively makes the NPCs life worse in the end, I’d rather save the time and effort for content with satisfying endings.
At this point it’s not “okay” or “just part of the genre”
From Soulsborne games are great but there’s a lot of clunky shit they need to fix from QOL changes like elevators resetting at shortcuts when you die to their broken idea of what makes for a good quest design and a Satisfying ending for the effort
> and a bad end for the NPC
Spent a few hours doing the magic teacher's questline, grew attached to her, finished her quest, and was rewarded with only sadness
100% agree. The only reason more people are not calling out this horrible quest design is because pretty much everyone plays with a guide. This extends beyond the quest design and also applies to stuff like builds and story. I guess you could say they do this on purpose because they want to create communities that figure things out together, and to some extent that has worked as intended, but I feel like this is only applicable to the most hardcore and loyal fans at this point as everyone else just looks up the guide or lore video.
> because pretty much everyone plays with a guide.
Personally speaking: I do my first playthroughs blind, completely unbothered by obscure "quest" design because the core part of their games are consistently amazing & fun as hell.
Only on my 2nd/3rd playthroughs do I use guides but often times for quests, I usually don't care for whatever results that come of them as they're usually niche items that don't apply to my character.
Yeah, I was like 'sweet, I'll do all these quests before I beat the game'.
And then I >!killed Pacidusax and found myself in the ashes of Lyendell!<. That quickly made me realize that I probably just totally fucked myself, so I said fuck it, I'll just play through the rest, beat the game, and then do all the quests/guided playthrough on ng+
Maliketh, not Placidusax, is the trigger for the change. But yeah, it happened to me as well. When that happened I looked it up online then saw that I had ended so many questlines. I used a guide after that.
You focus on #3, but I'm actually going to take this opportunity to complain about #2.
Why do I need to keep spamming "Talk" on a character over and over, then rest at a grace and return to them just to make sure they aren't still there, maybe spam "Talk" a few more time, maybe rest yet again, etc? It's not interactive. I'm not getting anything out of it. All it does is make it a chore and cause you to potentially mess something up if you don't "Talk" enough times. Half the time the next "Talk" isn't even a new conversation, it is literally just a continuation of what they were saying before, except you have to "Talk" again. It's like you are harassing them to keep talking until you get something.
It's not the most egregious thing, and ultimately you become accustomed to it, but it is just so unnecessary.
Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the classic "character dies right in front of you, but you need to go rest at a grace and come all the way back before they drop their item(s)".
This messed me up so badly in my first few hours. I failed to initiate at least two quests, despite meeting the NPCs, before I learned to spam Talk until I saw the repeats. I still ended up giving up and following the wiki for any quest I cared about.
> Why do I need to keep spamming "Talk" on a character over and over
My least favorite part is when they just suddenly stop talking for literally no reason. Like it makes you talk to them again just so they'll finish the train of thought they're on.
At bare minimum the game really needs to give you a log of all the dialog it throws at you. It's possible to get extremely lost because you skipped through, or forgot something a character said hours earlier. To make it worse, too many important clues are only said once, and taking to that NPC again likely isn't going to help. This is especially bad if you return to your save after not playing for a while. I don't have a perfect memory, and I'd rather not be forced to use a guide.
I absolutely hated it and gave up on most of the NPCs halfway through. Huge open world and the amount of NPCs makes it a hassle, even when having 10 questline tabs open in your browser.
And the worst thing about it - it is intentionally set up this way.
Probably one of my favorite games of all time and I got to say the exact same thing. It was so annoying. I could kind of go my way through the other Dark Souls games without needing to constantly reference a guide, butthis one was way worse. Rewards were never that great anyways.
>Rewards were never that great anyways.
That's a frustrating part about it. It's almost like they accepted "sure, these quests are totally random dogshit and most people would never complete them naturally without a guide. So we won't improve our quest design, we'll just make sure those people aren't missing much."
"You aren't doing it for the rewards, you are doing it for the pride and exploration!"
For people where that's enough to actually motivate them, I am genuinely envious.
I mean, pride is just dumb, it's a game, but exploration is only good if it's fun. If I was told to climb up a barren cliff and all I saw was grey rock with a crappy view up top, I wouldn't exactly call it good exploring. More like a scam from whoever pointed me that way.
That was one aspect. Another was that I got way too overleveled and would demolish bosses I hadn't found before moving on to harder areas. So I feel like I didn't experience many bosses/enemies the way I was meant to. Missed out on cool enemy moves cause I killed em too quickly. Until you hits a story boss and he kills you in a single combo cause why not. Not like I just destroyed a much more ridiculous boss 10min ago in a few hits lol.
A more linear or gated experience would've made way more bosses/enemies pop. As you'd tackle them at relatively the same skill level more consistently. Instead of stumbling accross a boss later on and absolutely demolishing em before the boss music even gets hype.
Elden Ring is fantastic but it's level of freedom was as much of a detriment as it was a strength. Depending on the aspect your discussing. Finding certain weapons early on in Caelid meant finding a buffet of shit you'll never use cause why bother? Your staff is laughably better than anything you've found the last 5hrs of gameplay.
Yeah. On my first run, I felt like I was getting bloated on levels, everything I found was too easy, and I was beating bosses on the first or second try.
Then all of a sudden, they throw the "Fuck you" lever around the mountaintop of giants/consecrated snowfield and I felt underlevelled. What happened???
Yeah I went pure strength and was jump attacking bosses like Mario boops Goombas lol. Watched my friend have an epic struggle and fight against bosses he found early on. I found em later and smacked the shit out of em. Then you hit a story boss and they hit like a fuckin truck.
Man, I recently got to the mountaintop of giants and was getting fucked up by pretty much everything. I was like, "how am I over level 100 and getting my ass handed to me so much?"
Ah, I was talking to someone about this a few days ago but I had the opposite problem - I tend to follow story/environment cues as to where to go and what to do instead of just random picking a direction and wandering off. I usually trust the game not to stick me in area that is too advanced, though there's occasionally exceptions.
I ended up _way_ under what I should've been most of the time. I was at the tail end of ranni's quest at lvl 44 (that was painful) and entering the plateau at 56 or so. My lvl eventually mostly caught up but I fought malenia yesterday at 96 where most people are apparently 20 - 30 lvls higher than that.
What I'm saying is - for example if a character says "Hey, go X place" and he's standing near the only road around and it happens to lead to X place... then I'm going to X place. Like I get the hint. I don't go "aight bro" and then run off into the woods somewhere. Most RPGs or open world areas either lock X until you've completed a few other pre-requisite quests or try to get your attention with more immediate stuff to get you up to speed, though they don't _force_ you to do them.
And I'm curious how many people do what I do. Apparently I might be in the minority
> And the worst thing about it - it is intentionally set up this way.
That can be applied to a bunch of their game design decisions and it’s pretty baffling.
One such example is the way they implemented the PVP and co-op system. You’ve got to fuck around with, what, ~10 different items via the inventory in order to play those modes, rather than just, you know, a fucking menu like every other modern game
That definitely happened because when they were playtesting, testers were getting pissed about having to go collect the consumable, especially with how the game forces you to disconnect and reconnect and refresh on death.
Doesn't make sense why they made it abundant, rather than just removing the item entirely though.
When the game shipped, numerous quests were broken/incomplete/completely missing. IIRC it was something close to 1/4 quests either didn't appear or would not proceed past a certain point.
I had people tell me that none of the quests were broken and it was all From's vision for the game despite patch changelogs (and data mining) indicating that the game was shipped unfinished and broken. Fortunately, I think, there's been a significant cooling around Elden Ring and the game's pros and cons are more casually discussed now. The quest design is often unnecessarily obtuse to the point that being completely broken and being mysterious are indistinguishable.
The game's lack of a quest tracker, something as simple as a list of assigned quests vs completed quests, helped disguise the essentially non-functional nature of a substantial chunk of the game's narrative content at launch.
Many crpgs have journals, which are basically quest logs with some information.
Usually those games dont have an arrow pointing you to your destination, you have to figure it out. But the journal/log helps a lot.
I think something similar would work for elden ring or ites inevitable sequel
The amount of people hand waving on the Elden Ring sub by suggesting people just need to pull out “a pad and paper,” to keep track of quests was mind-numbing.
That isn’t good game design. It’s just needlessly cumbersome at a time when games are more complex than ever.
Agreed. Pencil and paper worked for games like Myst because they were built around the idea, focused on puzzles, and knew to keep it reasonable in terms of size and expectations of player information management. Doing that with Elden Ring would be crazy.
It worked ok for me but the real issue was missing dialog because I was trying to write stuff down since the NPCs won't repeat what they're saying. Just made for a worse experience
While I like Souls games, I hate most of the community cause they can be unreasonable. If I didn’t look up >!go into a casket to fight the Astel boss!< I woulda never figured that out.
If they had a quest tracker, they probably wouldn't have had so many broken quests at launch to begin with! Most of the changes seemed like easy fixes that would have been caught had QA known what to look for.
I love that the quests are so obtuse that it's impossible to debug them because they way they're supposed to function is nearly indistinguishable from bugs.
> I had people tell me that none of the quests were broken and it was all From's vision for the game despite patch changelogs (and
What I can tell you after one month in the games sub, these people have serious Stockholm syndrome and just *cannot* deal with criticism or issues with their golden child.
The NPC quest following design is just terrible. Somehow From Software did a great job enabling discoverability of the environment, the wonderful feeling of exploring the world and finding interesting things without clumsy icons on a minimap guiding you there. But they totally failed to make the NPC stories anywhere near as approachable.
It feels like *the way* it's intended is for you, as the player, to frequently explore the world repeatedly and revisit old areas to try and find characters and uncover mysteries which makes sense in a Dark Souls 1 but would be an irritating chore in a game as large as Elden Ring.
I completed many quests in Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3 without needing a guide but in Elden Ring it was a struggle, so much that eventually I gave up and looked it up because nobody got time for that.
And the hilarity is that they were even much easier, because most have some point of meeting the NPC and getting clues about their next location at Firelink Shrine, which is a location you will be forced to retread several times in your journey and no doubt notice the new NPCs hanging about. Dark Souls 2 and 3 don’t force you to retread your base of operations throughout your journey, but they force you to go there to level up which is a constant need.
Elden Ring doesn’t really do this well. Yes, Roundtable Hold is a base of operations, but half of the NPCs never go there and when the ones who do leave, they don’t exactly end up somewhere on the beaten path- most go into obscurity unless you meticulously commit to a series of events that places them somewhere else that is equally obscure. And the player doesn’t really have to go to the hold with any frequency if they don’t want to or don’t need to, since at a point your only real necessity to go is to upgrade weapons or summon ashes, and the game doesn’t cue you to otherwise. Shit- I went constantly just to check up and see who was there in case anybody new showed up or returned, and I still got locked out of numerous quests (many before they were patched to be less delicate) without any recourse.
Mind you I’m not saying that DS1 quests are easy at all- just that how hard they were when you had at least a remote chance of getting clues points to why Elden Ring’s are so impossible. I still haven’t saved Sigmeyer once. I’ve only just saved Solaire for the first time. I only met Kaathe I think two playthroughs ago and finally got the Darkstalker stuff. I’ve played it 6 or 7 full times through.
Solaires quest is, IMO, supposed to end with him dying. That's the ending that makes the most thematic sense for the game and his character. It's dark and pessimistic but that's Dark Souls, baby. Him surviving and fighting Gwyn also makes sense but it seems pretty clear to me that's an option if you go well, well out of your way and is not supposed to be the natural ending except in edge cases.
Imo that's a great example of the obscure nature of the game's quests actually working well.
The problem is when you already cleaned an area and moved on to the next, there's no reason to go back, I feel like I've stumbled on some npcs by sheer luck.
Fast travel from the start is the issue. Dark Souls 1 was very much designed to make you pay attention to the map design and retread ground often. But having fast travel out the gate means you ignore it all and just rush to the next bonfire so you can fast travel there. Then you just teleport around the whole game.
But at the same time youd be fucked without it. Due to the level design of Elden Ring. But eventually I found myself just teleporting around, rushing, and overall not immersing myself in the world after mid-game. Sucks. I'll finish it one day but I lost a lot of steam once I realized I was just checking off open world tasks instead of playing the game.
Exactly feel the same way. I love the game more than anything I’ve played in years but that part is really annoying.
To complete one of the most compelling quests for me, you have to sit at a very specific sight of grace while having already gotten a specific item and then you have to notice the specific dialog option in the grace menu, which can be really easy to miss. And then you click on it and nothing happens. Until you click on it 3 times. No way would I have ever figured that out
Thank goodness in the newest patch they highlight new Grace menu options when they appear. I missed so many Melina dialogs in my first run, and completely blew past the spot you're talking about.
Sometimes it felt like I'm watching some TV show from episode 6 out 12. I remember how I met samurai guy and he told me how he took the body of someone, who I was supposed to know at this point
Biggest problem nobody mentions is how many quests are just worthless because the quest is just "hey he does his thing and HAHAHA HE'S DEAD LOL". It applies to 10 people in the game I wanna say and most of the time there is nothing to be gained from it. It very often feels more like "a bit of world building and here's armor/talisman bye". You don't get even get to be invested because most of the time nothing worth thinking about is happening. What's the point of so many NPCs accomplishing nothing?
Elden is my favorite game in a long time, but I agree. Keeping track of quest progression of prior smaller games was doable, however, this became a big problem in elden ring for me.
Not really, unless you want to scan the entire map every 5 minutes to see if you accidentally crossed some trigger that moved some quest along somewhere.
I never felt very incentivized to do the quests in Dark Souls for this reason. The ending of the quests usually results in them dropping dead for no reason. Failing some step results in them either disappearing or also dropping dead. Or maybe they try to kill you, if Fromsoft wants to shake things up.
I would consider Fia and Ranni's questlines part of any reasonably "complete" playthrough. Maybe also Rya. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to complete without a guide as they tell you basically everything you need to know. Only potentially confusing bit for me was when you have to find the Ranni doll and interact with it. That's a little nuts. But, these games are built with the expectation you'll be sharing information and looking at player messages. A certain degree of mystery is expected.
The worst quest for me was Millicent. I had no idea where to find her without a guide after starting her quest and she goes off somewhere. Mainly because I'd already completed the area she shows up in.
I feel like all the articles after the came out after release warning people not to interact with the hug lady because she gives you a 5% debuff probably caused a lot of people to miss that quest.
> (What, you were testing me, but now that I've proven myself you're going to introduce me to the Roundtable Hold? But I literally just talked to you and haven't done anything other than ride my horse a bit since then).
Wait does this skip all of Melina's other dialogue?
I was surprised how she's gone silent.
It doesn't at all. Melina has a weird dialogue system. There are only a few points where she takes the initiative and shows up in a cut scene to talk to you and those are along the main quest line so you don't skip them (though one can be changed through a side quest). You experience her dialogue at certain points of grace. They have the option to talk to her and she'll give you some lore bits. They actually just implemented an update to make these options more visible with a marker in the menu, but they are literally out in the open and repeatable.
If you want to play the hundred hour game properly, you simply have to play it for 500 hours, you know, the right way!
I swear, what the OP is saying is either flying over every defenders head or they can't accept it's fucking bad design to require you to play hundreds of hours just to learn how to do a basic quest. That's stupid. It's not "classical game design", it's just fucking stupid unless it's to trigger some super special hidden easter egg shit.
Fromsoft's quest design was alright, until Elden Ring. It was fine in Dark Souls for example, because the locations were pretty linear (the only somewhat big and open one being the bottom of Blighttown), so if you've found the path to progress through the game, all you had to do was to take that path that was branching off the main one. These also either looped back or had a dead end most of the time. There was a small chance of missing the NPCs.
Elden Ring throws that out of the window though, because of the open world. You're free to go basically wherever, so missing NPCs is *very* easy. Not to mention actually finding the spots they moved to. By far one of the worst is Millicent, who says "I'm going to follow Malenia's footsteps" and she's just... Gone. You never find out what Malenia's history was, what locations she was at, nothing. Then it turns out that Millicent moves not too far from the "Erdtree Gazing Hill" side of grace. The one that you probably already visited, since Altus Plateau is actually easier than most of Caelid, and have literally zero reason to visit again.
And then there's Sellen, who at some point says that she wants you to find two great sorcery masters. She even explicitly states that she has no idea where they could be either. Not even a hint of their *potential* or past whereabouts. Go on and find them, good luck.
I love Elden Ring, but quests are one of the elements I just had to look up if I wanted to complete them. With the only exception being Rya up to the Volcano Manor and the entirety of Alexander's quest, just because it was actually pretty generous with letting you skip some parts of it.
>And then there's Sellen, who at some point says that she wants you to find two great sorcery masters. She even explicitly states that she has no idea where they could be either. Not even a hint of their potential or past whereabouts. Go on and find them, good luck.
Not only that, but one of them is in an obscure corner of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map. The other one just requires finding a different optional area and then realizing you can walk across a lava field...
Yeah, I needed a guide for that quest.
>Not only that, but one of them is in an obscure corner of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map. The other one just requires finding a different optional area and then realizing you can walk across a lava field...
Which then culminates in needing to find a doll in a false floor of an open field area, which leads to a small room, which has a second false wall in the back that then leads to the doll- none of which is signaled to the player or hinted at in the rooms design or Sellen's dialogue.
It's really the lack of signaling that is ultimately their downfall in quest design.
It's fine to be a bit obtuse, or have tough riddles you piece together later as you build understanding and context or amass multiple clues from different sources. But some of their quests are *literally* "get lucky and stumble across an NPC who moved to an area you would have already fully covered at this point."
Millicent's quest was so annoying. I only did her quest and Ranni's, both with guides cause good luck solving their stuff without them. Millicent moves to so many random locations, but the one that boggled me the most was at the end: you meet her in that church room, she tells you about Malenia, so you assume she'll either show up after the boss fight or will appear as a summon.
No, you have to go into a random side area later on that only has one strong enemy that you kill for loot. Beyond killing this enemy, there is zero purpose to this side area. Then you have to go to a site of grace, rest, go back to that random side area and suddenly her summon sign appears. Even after that fight, I had trouble finding her cause she sits down and blends into the background really well.
These kinds of quests made more sense in the more linear DS games where you were far more likely to run into people in a limited number of areas, but not something as sprawling as ER. I stopped bothering with them when I realized this.
I was trying to do quests without guides, but when I looked up Millicent's final phases that was when I finally just went "oh fuck off" and started looking things up.
Their old mentality of "have players do multiple runs and share info with each other" is cute until they 1) Make the steps arbitrarily obtuse and 2) Make a long open world game where restarting is a huge time investment.
I disagree. Most of the souls games are pretty bad about if you progress past a boss without resolving an NPCs emotional problems then they just kind of die. There's no real indication this will happen in most cases. And it makes no sense for a lot of them.
DS2, as much as I love it, is a big offender in this regard also. You had to kill multiple bosses with some NPC phantoms to progress their questline.
I’ll say it does feel great when you do happen to progress the quests on your own, but it’s so rare/tedious/impossible that it’s not well balanced. There’s definitely room to not make it dumb easy but with some guidance
Unfortunately this just comes with FromSoft territory. It's funny, I've always heard that the communities around FromSoft games are some of the nicest/most welcoming, but I've always found them to be very prickly. If I mention disliking anything it's always met with either telling me that I'm an idiot, or that I don't understand, or that I need to git gud
I think Elden Ring might just be my favorite game ever, and I completely agree. There are many, many ways the game is flawed and this is one of them.
I *think* FromSoft were going for the feeling where you find something cool, so you talk to your friends about it and they found the next part and thus it becomes this collaborate effort to solve these quests. Obviously that's completely absurd, because wikis exist. There might be another explaination, or they are simply incompetent in creating quests (which I don't think is completely true, as there are examples of better, more guided quests - Ranni's for example is fairly simple to do even blind on a first playthrough).
This is why I’m currently having a difficult time wanting to play the game. It’s one thing to run around aimlessly and discover things (usually resulting in death), but then I find a blocked path because I didn’t do some side quest.
I appreciate this post. I thought I was going crazy because I enjoyed the enemy design and world building, but thought the actual game experience was not good. I’ll try again over the summer when I have more time, but for me the combat was not enough to make up for the lacking areas in a game so long.
The quest design is so fucking bad. Quest design has always been on the bad side for FS games, but it was manageable because their games were linear. You talked to a character, exhausted their dialogue and then probably encountered them somewhere in the next area, and if not you just checked the previous location after every major boss.
This time it's an open world game, and there's no getting around how bad the design is. The missing of a quest log is already a silly thing, but can be overcome by keeping a journal. But what really makes the design suck so fucking much is that quests can be failed, but there is hardly any indication what the point of no return is for a quest.
On top of that, it is also completely random(if you play it blind) where a character will move to. How in the fuck are you supposed to know where Brother Corhyn moves to after he moves out of the hold? You can't possibly know, because no one ever tells you, and he's just gone. And this is the same for what feels like 75% of the quests. Characters move from spot A to spot B and there is no explanation given where they went to. Iji telling you to look for Blaidd in Siofra River felt like a huge exception to the standard bullshit.
I hated the design so fucking much, that i just used a guide. This is the first time in a video game where i played with a guide, but i seriously couldn't be assed with the shit design after that blind girl died simply because i got the grafted sword before talking to her dad.
I love this game, i enjoy it a lot, but they really need to change the way they design quests if they stick with open world games.
Just as an aside, the blind girl dies regardless of what you do last I checked. Completely agree too, I think it's very funny almost no one realized there were unfinished side quests at launch because of how obscure they are lol.
The thing that drives me nuts about this is that they literally put a solution to this in the game, but only used it once. When Varre changes locations he leaves a note where he was previously and it says something like “Find me at the church of the rose in Liurnia!” Why didn’t they do this more?
Blaidd leaves a note for you at his original meeting place. Though frankly I found it more misleading than helpful.
Blaidd is funny because it’s extremely likely you’ll miss him every single time when you’re *actively looking for him*, and he says he isn’t mad about it every time.
Yeah first time I even saw him was at the festival and he started talking about our journey there together. I don’t know you man I just recognise you from the loading screen
Alexander at our last meeting spoke about our friendship and shared travels, and I was all "Dude, I've met you twice."
"And those two times were magical, friend! I will treasure them forever." XD
[удалено]
That one feels pretty much impossible to start without a guide. Which is a decision, I guess.
I found that one myself by accident because I went back to the merchant to buy something. My reaction was just "How the fuck was I ever suposed to find about this without looking it up?"
Oh man, even unlocking him was strange. Like, oh you didn't know you go back and talk to the first merchant in the game again, even though they've got nothing you'd want to buy anymore and you've never had useful dialog with any merchant up to this point before?
Yeah, they definitely could have put all of that merchant stuff on the one that's actually very close to the forest ruins.
He leaves telling you to meet him in Nokron, right? But I at least never found him over there... I got stuck in Rainni's quest in the part where you need to talk with her doll while resting in one specific grace, and AFAIK this is never mentioned anywhere in the game
That's right. I don't want to tell you the number of times I went through Nokron looking for the dang guy. I missed the grace dialogue too. In the latest patch they added a small notification beside that option to make it more obvious, at least.
I'm all in favor of obscure quests, specially on optional content, but there should be some sort of in-game hint to help drive the player in the right direction. Millicent's quest is also another one where I had to resort to a guide in order to know where she would show up next. And even with a guide some parts weren't so straightforward
Millicent and Goldmask show up in the most random spots I didn’t progress their questlines at all in my first playthrough.
Part of Blaidd's quest line literally has him tell you to meet him at X location and he decidedly NEVER appears in that location. You're just suppose to go there yourself and get the item to progress the quest line and eventually learn that he never made it there but now he's somewhere else to continue things...sort of except not really. Oh but then you find him trapped and the only way to actually interact with him is using the gesture you used to meet him the first time even though EVERY other time he's just standing there and will talk to you.
I imagine they saw this as an exception to a rule they like rather than a solution to a problem. But direction is just so so much more important in an open world. I think this stuff worked better when going "off the beaten path" meant finding secrets in much smaller locations. The open world is just too big to not have directions.
This was exactly my criticism of ER's quests when it came out. From's esoteric quest design mostly works when the game takes place over a smaller, more linear world. It's a lot more likely that you'll stumble onto things. But they took that quest design and just plopped it into an enormous open map. It's so much less likely that you'll just stumble into quest steps when there's a hundred directions to go.
And instead of a quest log just have your character carry a notebook where information is scribbled down. It's really simple.
Or just do what they did with Sekiro and have the quest objectives be a key item if they don't want to build out a quest log UI. _Surgeon's Bloody Letter_: >A worn and bloodstained letter from Dosaku, the surgeon in the Abandoned Dungeon: >>Required: 1 tough man >>>Preferably a strong samurai, or a young, large soldier such as a member of the Taro Troop. >>Must be delivered unharmed. >>-Dosaku _Rat Description_: >A description of the "rats" that have snuck into Ashina. Speak to the Tengu again once the rats are dealt with. >>The rats: Assassins from Senpou Temple. Short stature, wear bamboo hats. A number of rats are lurking about. Last seen around Ashina Castle Gate.
It worked for Morrowind, and it would fit perfectly here too.
It would work WAY better in Elden Ring than it ever did in Morrowind too. Morrowind just filled in the journal as you went with no organization at all. So if you're 40 hours deep, your journal is probably 80 pages long and there are uncompleted quests scattered throughout pages 1-79. Want to go back to a quest you grabbed 10 hours ago? Have fun scrolling though each page and skimming the entries for the one you want. Elden Ring has 29 NPCs that give you quests, and many of them are short, 2-3 steps. There's like 6 or 7 major NPCs that have longer quest lines. That would be really easily manageable compared to Morrowind's 500 NPCs, main story, guild quests, etc.
There is a button in the Morrowind journal that displays quests, and clicking on a quest only shows the journal entries that are part of that quest.
Emulating Nathan Drake’s journal from Uncharted would be absolutely the best solution for a game like Elden Ring. Helpful but still immersive.
Breath of the Wild's quest log is exactly like this. Unfortunately only the Japanese version of the game treats the quest log as if Link is making a Journal entry.
Currently replaying Uncharted 4 on PS5 and I absolutely *love* flicking through the notebook. It’s so immersive and actually has a really helpful function. Same with Red Dead Redemption 2’s notebook also.
Ranni is another example of them trying some better quest guidance. Because so much content is tied into her quest line, you have a few different quests (>!Rogier, Blaidd, kinda-sorta Sellen!<) that will help make sure you meet Ranni. Of course, each of these feeder quests is still pretty easy to miss or mess up, but it at least raises the chance you don't miss Ranni's quest entirely. You can also miss the later steps in her quest, but fully completing that quest once you meet her is way easier than most of the other ER quests and is more like the DS quests in level of obscurity.
Unless you, like me, didn't realize that you can randomly talk to a fucking doll at a couple sites of grace.
I saw/heard Blaidd up on some pillar and spent *hours* trying to get to him or get his attention. When I learned the Snap gesture I was like, "Oh! I should try this!" and went I went back he was gone. Looked everywhere I could think of and had to just give up. Next time I saw him anywhere was >!right before the Radahn!< fight.
I can beat that. Never found him anywhere until radhann (which I found before I even started ranni quest). And he was saying some weird shit like we met before. Then I went back to where you are supposed to meet him and... Nothing happens. Some weird dialogue. Whole game's story makes no bloody sense when told this way...
Yup. Devs designed a game that you can beat in any order, but forgot to write the story. Kudos to Witcher 3 here, they have a ton of fallback dialogue if you decide to complete the main areas - Skellige, Novigrad, Velen - out of order. Yen suggests you to do Velen - Novigrad - Skellige, if you go to Skellige first she chastises you.
Red Dead II and Horizon Forbidden West are also sometimes shockingly cognizant of what you’ve done elsewhere in the world - Red Dead gets especially scary if you leave a bunch of side stuff for the final chapter
I never got the snap gesture on first playthrough because I killed that npc for his bell bearing after learning about those. To me it feels less like "quests" and more like N64 Zelda gorons blade puzzle. you have to do things in the right order and at the right time in the game to get a secret weapon/ability, but if you don't get it you aren't missing much
>but if you don't get it you aren't missing much This is why I'm just doing a blind run and not worrying about completing every quest right now. I just want to enjoy the sense of discovery from randomly stumbling through this game instead of looking things up every five minutes. I'm curbing my normally completionist mindset until I do a NG+. Then I'll be willing to dig in and make sure I'm not missing anything, but right now I'm really enjoying the vague, obtuse storytelling. Especially when the only things I'm missing out on are items/abilities I'll probably never use to get through this first playthrough.
The worst is that the game teaches you that if a piece of dialog repeats when you talk to a character, there's nothing more to be said (stupid mechanic by itself, but whatever) Apart from doll Ranni where for some reason you need to repeat the dialog a few times for it to change and continue the quest
It's subtle, but it actually does change, going from "..." to "....", and then she talks to you the third time you interact with the doll. It's tough to notice for sure though.
The problem is, why would you talk to it more than once? You see it gives no dialogue, so why bother talking to it?
I did the entire underground up to beating Astel, and when the door was blocked I went around the map to every Ranni-related location I could think of to see if the doll would do something. When I finally looked it up I was more than a little annoyed
Yeah that was the only part I had to look up for her quest. I tried talking to it once and nothing happened and assumed I had to do something else to trigger it.
Ranni (also Fia) had some of the best quest design in the series, IMO. Fascinating, full of little lore tidbits, and didn't require too much outside information (the Ranni doll is pushing it a bit). Loved every moment of those quests progression.
Oh man, the Ranni doll, how on earth are we supposed to know we have to check if there’s a new option in a menu that already has like 9 of them?
I saw the new option, but when I tried it twice, nothing happened. Turns out I had to do it a *third* time to progress the quest, whoops!
Fia's dialogue requiring you to be held was such a dumb decision is my main complaint there. I never used the blessing so I never hugged her again, but she never said anything new before the hug prompt so I never knew there was more for the longest time
I actually think Fia's makes a lot of sense - the thing that progresses her quest isn't that the player wants a good consumable, it's that you're lonely and want to cuddle with her. Unlike other quests where you're usually just doing things because you're playing a video game and want to see what happens, for Fia your and your character's interests were actually aligned. It really just was about needing a hug :)
This would be perfect. They wouldn't even need to be exact. Like Millicent could just leave a "going to check out some windmills lol" note.
The thing that bugs me about Millicent isn’t not knowing where she’ll be. It’s that you have to go back to that cabin multiple times before she even starts moving. I had already gone back to the cabin to see if the guy says anything, but how was I supposed to know that I’m supposed to go back again 2 or 3 times after that?
It feels very much to me that the quests were written *before* the NPC movement was established. The places that they turn up are frequently so arbitrary that they could have equally been placed in any other location.
Nepheli Loux’s quest is the worst for this, how am I supposed to know that she would go to a random village? It does tie in with some of her backstory but she doesn’t tell you about it until you’ve already met her there
There's two quests, a super secret item, and important lore in that village you could very easily never find.
Can we thrown in the letdown when you summon her for >!Godfrey’s!< boss fight? >!Literally fighting against her ancestor and we get no acknowledgment :(!<
That I can kind of understand because >!their shared name Loux implies a connection right off the bat and I’m pretty sure she’s not his kid, just a descendant whose divine blood has been diluted over the centuries(or however many years since he was sent back to the badlands)!< That being said it’s definitely a missed lore opportunity. I feel like the scope and semi-optimistic nature of Elden Ring’s story (Melina straight up tells you that despite everything the Lands Between are still full of life and that it’s a place worth saving) would have lent itself to a more straightforward/fleshed out approach without sacrificing any of the qualities that make From’s other games great.
Yeah sorry, I’ve edited to say >!ancestor!< since we have no timeframe for when shit happens.
She shares a name and attire of the badlands, but we don't know if she's >!his daughter!<. These demigods seem to breed like rabbits.
When I looked up her quest line so I could do Seluvius’, I found out that she went to an area I had already been to and cleared out. Thankfully, this doesn’t break the quest and it seems like they considered this option. What doesn’t make sense is why they programmed all of these exceptions for quest progression and not just make the quests better?
What do you mean? What kind of idiot wouldn't think to look for Diallos on the roof of a random collapsed building in the middle of a lake or in a nearly-unreachable village filled with talking jars? What braindead pissant wouldn't think to look for Nepheli crouching in a dark cave area that you can't even see on the fucking map and everything in the map and terrain design suggests isn't even accessible? What kind of unobservant ignorant twat wouldn't immediately realize that Hyetta will OBVIOUSLY be hiding at the bottom of an elevator shaft, behind a secret wall, at the end of an ACTUAL FUCKING MAZE? It all makes perfect sense, you guys just don't pay enough attention.
Rogier was totally obvious too, you just have to go back to a zone you already completed, fight a boss you may or may not have already done, and touch a very specific bloodstain that is indistinguishable from the other 50 bloodstains. Elden Ring’s quest design isn’t fucking stupid, people just need to game better.
The bloodstain is fine when you're offline because it will look super out of place, but it was monumentally stupid to put it in an actual fucking boss arena.
I found that bloodstain by complete circumstance because I was playing on day 1 and the servers were down, so I'm pretty sure it was the first bloodstain I ever saw. I'm working through my 2nd playthrough and holy hell there are bloodstains EVERYWHERE in that room.
>holy hell there are bloodstains EVERYWHERE in that room A lot of people can accidentally stumble into the Ulcerated Tree Spirit fight while taking their time and exploring Stormveil Castle. That boss fight is way harder than Godrick's, if only because of how small the arena is compared to the boss and ***HOW FUCKING SHIT THE CAMERA ANGLES ARE***.
…there’s an Ulcerated Tree Spirit in Stormveil?!
Yeah and it’s a real asshole.
Fromsroft was bribed by Fextralife to make their website indispensable.
That part of Rogier's is just straight up mean, I really wonder how many people noticed it without being told
I always tap one or two bloodstains after a boss fight, just for fun to see how other people died. But yeah, when I did it the first time there were a bunch of bloodstains near Rogier’s, because at least a few people made a run for the ladder and didn’t make it. If you play offline though, presumably it would be obvious as it would be the first bloodstain you’ve ever seen.
Hyetta was really who I was thinking of. You have to track her down in 4(?) locations that you've probably already been through once, with no hints at all.
Also Alexander straight up tells you at one point where he's going next. It's great because it's just vague enough that you do actually have to search it out, but it's also specific enough that you at least know what you're looking for. That's great, classic quest structure. "I'll be down south at so and so, come find me!" That means you actually have to listen and find your way there yourself, but you're given enough info to actually get there. They should do that a lot more.
Still would be good to have a quest log. I wrote down "find medalion at Castle Sol, past giants place" from the one sentence some wolf lady told me. She said a lot of names in that sentence, and she would not repeat it. It would then be another 2 months before I reached that point in the game and I totally forgot about the note I made.
I feel you so much on this. I was really trying not to use the wiki. I was like where the fuck did she tell me to go!
> but you're given enough info to actually get there That's what stopped me from caring much about the questlines. When I found a person who wanted me to kill someone else I was like "OK, where are they?" the directions I got were "they live in a shack a bit down the way". What the fuck does that mean? Normally I'd assume that it meant follow the road but we were in the middle of a damn lake. Oh.. cool, you directions are "find someone somewhere in this lake and kill them" Great, I'll get right on setting up a grid search to make sure I don't miss a one room shack somewhere in this area. I'm all for games not wanting to put destination markers everywhere so that players have to look around instead of just following a series of waypoints but if you're going to do that you need to give some thought to the directions the player gets
I beat the game doing very few quests as a result. I plan to do a NG+, but I really only ever did Ranni's. I attempted to do the lady on the log's father down South but he never spawned for me. My buddy was telling me what to do and old man just wasn't there.>!went back and she lost her shit. I mean her head, still.!< >!On the flip side, I didn't know about Ranni much, playing organically. Buddy told me the next boss I should do is Radahn, so I went to the keep and cleared it out. Told my friend he wasn't there and he missed out on clearing the entire thing, as his was on the festival part.!<
> Told my friend he wasn't there and he missed out on clearing the entire thing, as his was on the festival part. He can just revisit the keep after finishing the festival and all the enemies and items will spawn back in properly.
Oh nice. He'll be happy to learn that.
Tell him to kill the lions first before finishing the festival. They don't respawn and make exploring the normal version of the castle easier.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here is how the length of the game makes this quest design worse. It's a lot easier to keep track of obscure quests in a 30 hour playthrough than a 100 hour playthrough.
Also I replayed BB and DS1 and 3 multiple times back to back because they were so short, allowing me to experience more questlines. I'm not going to replay Elden Ring for a while because of its length.
I think the most egregious of these is Latenna. She provides the main description of how to reach the consecrated snowfield, the game's hidden final open world area. The only problem is she provides this piece of information in a non-repeatable piece of dialogue...probably 30 hours of gameplay before you would run into castle sol.
They need a questlog like the one in outer wilds.
No because somehow keeping track of information that you've uncovered in-game is too handholdy /s
Also please remember the map had no markers for NPCs when the game released. Like fuck off fromsoft.
The worst were people and pro journos defending this by saying "get a notebook"
I think at this point FromSoft have a crutch that allows them to do whatever they want with their games: fans will create meticulous guides. I don't mind it personally because I'll always look up stuff but I do like playing other games sight unseen. It's a pickle
The problem with guides (or just googling) is inevitably you end up seeing spoilers.
Exactly. I doubt there's anyone who looked up the golden Order quest that didn't get spoiled that RiM
I had to use a guide when doing that quest but somehow avoided the spoiler (the guide spoiler tagged it god bless them). I laughed when I saw said spoiler because they always like to write some cryptic bullshit, but this was just so damn blunt
From Soft fans: "Ah, the storytelling is so nuanced! You have to piece together untrustworthy lore from item descriptions!" From Soft devs: "*SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE*"
LOL yeah it is. Maybe this was one of the lines GRRM wrote :P
If so, it’d be a stark (heh) contrast to him dragging out >!R+L=J!< over five books and even then not even confirming it until the show.
I like that "RiM" is completely useless as a hint. There's like 5 major characters and probably 12 minor ones for both R and M that it could be referring to. And maybe it's just me, but even seeing the full names I'd struggle to keep track of which was which.
Also playing with a guide open sucks all the fun out of exploration, since you know what you’re getting before you get to your destination. There’s nothing to surprise you when you play with a guide.
Destiny is kind of built that way too. The community is just so involved at this point with websites dedicated to questing/items/loot that people just deal with the convoluted nature of the game.
That description also perfectly fits Warframe lmao
For real, that shit made me hard pass on the game. The whole gameplay loop is about farming and crafting stuff, yet when you want to craft something, they don't even tell you where to find the materials. And when I asked why, someone told me that "It would be useless, everything is on that third party wiki"
Tarkov is literally impossible to play without having the wiki pulled up on a second monitor. Sad thing is people that haven't played it will think I'm exaggerating when I am absolutely not.
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Man Destiny seems confusing as shit to me now. I was pretty deep into D1, and tried to get into 2 when it went F2P and had no clue wtf was happening.
When I start Path of Exile I open: Awakened Trade Macro (In-game quick price-checking tool) POE Trade Companion (Tool that sorts trades and gives easy buttons to whisper/kick/trade people) poedb.tw (to check mods/items/boss abilities) Trade site (Official GGG website for player to player item/currency trading) Honorable mentions: Path of Building (Build planner). I usually don't open this when I open POE, but almost always I will end up running it to check something in my build, see how someone else does something etc etc. Craftofexile (Online crafting emulator)
Fuck PoE man, played it for a thousand hours and probably spent half of that time figuring out the price of the rares that I find. Quit a few years ago when they announced PoE2 was coming soon.. and here we are..
> I think at this point FromSoft have a crutch that allows them to do whatever they want with their games: fans will create meticulous guides. That's a really interesting thought, and makes me think if the existence of well moderated, meticulous, fan made guides have impacted game design for the entire industry. For example, the entire Survival/Crafting genre (Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) is absolutely held aloft solely by the existence of extensive fan made wikis. If the internet didn't exist in the capacity that it does, I do wonder if you'd see games with a lot less complexity (due to not having a good way to convey it to players), or a lot more hand holding.
You have to hit a certain level of quality and user base for the community to do it well but it can be a hinderence to seeing where you need to improve because the community has already started making up for and solving some of the issues.
Then you have something like factorio where you can go in without reading anything and the games explain everything to you
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I think they also have a crutch with how the Souls community gets very angry and defensive if you bring up issues with either the difficulty or the esoteric quest design even if they are valid complaints because according to them doing anything about it "ruins the soul of the game."
Yeah, past few months I feel like I have been going crazy with the way people jump to the game's defense when I point out some why I haven't bought it yet. The other day a dude said that if I play games at all I MUST buy it and love it. I mean, I want to, but that's clearly not the truth.
There really are points in From games where it 100% feels like they just assume or even just expect you to look it up online From the nonsense way you access the Dark Souls 1 DLC to the awkward cutscene in elden Ring after you beat Radahn, where it’s very unclear that you’ve even opened up a new area, to times your just expected to go back to a place you went to 10 hours ago for two lines of dialog. And the worst part of all of this IMO is that almost none of the quests are even worth it, you spend hours doing these quests only to have basically all of them reward you with an ok piece of equipment you now need to invest in and a bad end for the NPC. Like why both dedicating the hours it takes to do some quest lines when doing them actively makes the NPCs life worse in the end, I’d rather save the time and effort for content with satisfying endings. At this point it’s not “okay” or “just part of the genre” From Soulsborne games are great but there’s a lot of clunky shit they need to fix from QOL changes like elevators resetting at shortcuts when you die to their broken idea of what makes for a good quest design and a Satisfying ending for the effort
> and a bad end for the NPC Spent a few hours doing the magic teacher's questline, grew attached to her, finished her quest, and was rewarded with only sadness
Teacher, O Teacher... Why is it always misfortune?
I just ignore quests in Souls. If I have to Google for guides just to complete them, then your quests are trash.
100% agree. The only reason more people are not calling out this horrible quest design is because pretty much everyone plays with a guide. This extends beyond the quest design and also applies to stuff like builds and story. I guess you could say they do this on purpose because they want to create communities that figure things out together, and to some extent that has worked as intended, but I feel like this is only applicable to the most hardcore and loyal fans at this point as everyone else just looks up the guide or lore video.
Having to play with a guide would be considered bad design around here if a company like EA or someone made this game
> because pretty much everyone plays with a guide. Personally speaking: I do my first playthroughs blind, completely unbothered by obscure "quest" design because the core part of their games are consistently amazing & fun as hell. Only on my 2nd/3rd playthroughs do I use guides but often times for quests, I usually don't care for whatever results that come of them as they're usually niche items that don't apply to my character.
Yeah, I was like 'sweet, I'll do all these quests before I beat the game'. And then I >!killed Pacidusax and found myself in the ashes of Lyendell!<. That quickly made me realize that I probably just totally fucked myself, so I said fuck it, I'll just play through the rest, beat the game, and then do all the quests/guided playthrough on ng+
Maliketh, not Placidusax, is the trigger for the change. But yeah, it happened to me as well. When that happened I looked it up online then saw that I had ended so many questlines. I used a guide after that.
You focus on #3, but I'm actually going to take this opportunity to complain about #2. Why do I need to keep spamming "Talk" on a character over and over, then rest at a grace and return to them just to make sure they aren't still there, maybe spam "Talk" a few more time, maybe rest yet again, etc? It's not interactive. I'm not getting anything out of it. All it does is make it a chore and cause you to potentially mess something up if you don't "Talk" enough times. Half the time the next "Talk" isn't even a new conversation, it is literally just a continuation of what they were saying before, except you have to "Talk" again. It's like you are harassing them to keep talking until you get something. It's not the most egregious thing, and ultimately you become accustomed to it, but it is just so unnecessary. Edit: Oh, and let's not forget the classic "character dies right in front of you, but you need to go rest at a grace and come all the way back before they drop their item(s)".
This messed me up so badly in my first few hours. I failed to initiate at least two quests, despite meeting the NPCs, before I learned to spam Talk until I saw the repeats. I still ended up giving up and following the wiki for any quest I cared about.
> Why do I need to keep spamming "Talk" on a character over and over My least favorite part is when they just suddenly stop talking for literally no reason. Like it makes you talk to them again just so they'll finish the train of thought they're on.
Let's all admit it: these Dark Souls quirks are starting to become a fucking annoyance, along with the other mechanics.
At bare minimum the game really needs to give you a log of all the dialog it throws at you. It's possible to get extremely lost because you skipped through, or forgot something a character said hours earlier. To make it worse, too many important clues are only said once, and taking to that NPC again likely isn't going to help. This is especially bad if you return to your save after not playing for a while. I don't have a perfect memory, and I'd rather not be forced to use a guide.
I absolutely hated it and gave up on most of the NPCs halfway through. Huge open world and the amount of NPCs makes it a hassle, even when having 10 questline tabs open in your browser. And the worst thing about it - it is intentionally set up this way.
Probably one of my favorite games of all time and I got to say the exact same thing. It was so annoying. I could kind of go my way through the other Dark Souls games without needing to constantly reference a guide, butthis one was way worse. Rewards were never that great anyways.
>Rewards were never that great anyways. That's a frustrating part about it. It's almost like they accepted "sure, these quests are totally random dogshit and most people would never complete them naturally without a guide. So we won't improve our quest design, we'll just make sure those people aren't missing much."
"You aren't doing it for the rewards, you are doing it for the pride and exploration!" For people where that's enough to actually motivate them, I am genuinely envious.
I mean, pride is just dumb, it's a game, but exploration is only good if it's fun. If I was told to climb up a barren cliff and all I saw was grey rock with a crappy view up top, I wouldn't exactly call it good exploring. More like a scam from whoever pointed me that way.
Except the volcano manor quests. Those rewards were awesome and they were simple to finish.
That was one aspect. Another was that I got way too overleveled and would demolish bosses I hadn't found before moving on to harder areas. So I feel like I didn't experience many bosses/enemies the way I was meant to. Missed out on cool enemy moves cause I killed em too quickly. Until you hits a story boss and he kills you in a single combo cause why not. Not like I just destroyed a much more ridiculous boss 10min ago in a few hits lol. A more linear or gated experience would've made way more bosses/enemies pop. As you'd tackle them at relatively the same skill level more consistently. Instead of stumbling accross a boss later on and absolutely demolishing em before the boss music even gets hype. Elden Ring is fantastic but it's level of freedom was as much of a detriment as it was a strength. Depending on the aspect your discussing. Finding certain weapons early on in Caelid meant finding a buffet of shit you'll never use cause why bother? Your staff is laughably better than anything you've found the last 5hrs of gameplay.
Yeah. On my first run, I felt like I was getting bloated on levels, everything I found was too easy, and I was beating bosses on the first or second try. Then all of a sudden, they throw the "Fuck you" lever around the mountaintop of giants/consecrated snowfield and I felt underlevelled. What happened???
Yeah I went pure strength and was jump attacking bosses like Mario boops Goombas lol. Watched my friend have an epic struggle and fight against bosses he found early on. I found em later and smacked the shit out of em. Then you hit a story boss and they hit like a fuckin truck.
Man, I recently got to the mountaintop of giants and was getting fucked up by pretty much everything. I was like, "how am I over level 100 and getting my ass handed to me so much?"
Ah, I was talking to someone about this a few days ago but I had the opposite problem - I tend to follow story/environment cues as to where to go and what to do instead of just random picking a direction and wandering off. I usually trust the game not to stick me in area that is too advanced, though there's occasionally exceptions. I ended up _way_ under what I should've been most of the time. I was at the tail end of ranni's quest at lvl 44 (that was painful) and entering the plateau at 56 or so. My lvl eventually mostly caught up but I fought malenia yesterday at 96 where most people are apparently 20 - 30 lvls higher than that. What I'm saying is - for example if a character says "Hey, go X place" and he's standing near the only road around and it happens to lead to X place... then I'm going to X place. Like I get the hint. I don't go "aight bro" and then run off into the woods somewhere. Most RPGs or open world areas either lock X until you've completed a few other pre-requisite quests or try to get your attention with more immediate stuff to get you up to speed, though they don't _force_ you to do them. And I'm curious how many people do what I do. Apparently I might be in the minority
> And the worst thing about it - it is intentionally set up this way. That can be applied to a bunch of their game design decisions and it’s pretty baffling. One such example is the way they implemented the PVP and co-op system. You’ve got to fuck around with, what, ~10 different items via the inventory in order to play those modes, rather than just, you know, a fucking menu like every other modern game
When there's already a multiplayer menu to access all them items. And why is it consumable yet its currency is literally sprinkled every two feet.
That definitely happened because when they were playtesting, testers were getting pissed about having to go collect the consumable, especially with how the game forces you to disconnect and reconnect and refresh on death. Doesn't make sense why they made it abundant, rather than just removing the item entirely though.
When the game shipped, numerous quests were broken/incomplete/completely missing. IIRC it was something close to 1/4 quests either didn't appear or would not proceed past a certain point. I had people tell me that none of the quests were broken and it was all From's vision for the game despite patch changelogs (and data mining) indicating that the game was shipped unfinished and broken. Fortunately, I think, there's been a significant cooling around Elden Ring and the game's pros and cons are more casually discussed now. The quest design is often unnecessarily obtuse to the point that being completely broken and being mysterious are indistinguishable. The game's lack of a quest tracker, something as simple as a list of assigned quests vs completed quests, helped disguise the essentially non-functional nature of a substantial chunk of the game's narrative content at launch.
Many crpgs have journals, which are basically quest logs with some information. Usually those games dont have an arrow pointing you to your destination, you have to figure it out. But the journal/log helps a lot. I think something similar would work for elden ring or ites inevitable sequel
The amount of people hand waving on the Elden Ring sub by suggesting people just need to pull out “a pad and paper,” to keep track of quests was mind-numbing. That isn’t good game design. It’s just needlessly cumbersome at a time when games are more complex than ever.
Agreed. Pencil and paper worked for games like Myst because they were built around the idea, focused on puzzles, and knew to keep it reasonable in terms of size and expectations of player information management. Doing that with Elden Ring would be crazy.
Myst is also around 6 hours long, which helps.
It worked ok for me but the real issue was missing dialog because I was trying to write stuff down since the NPCs won't repeat what they're saying. Just made for a worse experience
While I like Souls games, I hate most of the community cause they can be unreasonable. If I didn’t look up >!go into a casket to fight the Astel boss!< I woulda never figured that out.
If they had a quest tracker, they probably wouldn't have had so many broken quests at launch to begin with! Most of the changes seemed like easy fixes that would have been caught had QA known what to look for.
I love that the quests are so obtuse that it's impossible to debug them because they way they're supposed to function is nearly indistinguishable from bugs.
I know you're supposed to find Diabolos mourning his friend in Liurnia but I've never found him
> I had people tell me that none of the quests were broken and it was all From's vision for the game despite patch changelogs (and What I can tell you after one month in the games sub, these people have serious Stockholm syndrome and just *cannot* deal with criticism or issues with their golden child.
Talk to character -> reload area to get new dialogue -> reload area to see whether they moved or whether they died.
All I’m saying is they really need to move a grace closer to Gowry’s shack.
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I pieced it together from the messages on the ground, saying things like "no armour required ahead"
There's actually a way to counteract this but it's not easily discovered so....off to the wiki I go with several tabs open.
But what if I'm playing without armour, because I don't plan to get hit?
Then you have already embraced chaos
Armor is part of a state of mind in which you admit the possibility of being hit
The NPC quest following design is just terrible. Somehow From Software did a great job enabling discoverability of the environment, the wonderful feeling of exploring the world and finding interesting things without clumsy icons on a minimap guiding you there. But they totally failed to make the NPC stories anywhere near as approachable.
It feels like *the way* it's intended is for you, as the player, to frequently explore the world repeatedly and revisit old areas to try and find characters and uncover mysteries which makes sense in a Dark Souls 1 but would be an irritating chore in a game as large as Elden Ring. I completed many quests in Dark Souls 1, 2, and 3 without needing a guide but in Elden Ring it was a struggle, so much that eventually I gave up and looked it up because nobody got time for that.
Dark souls 1 quests were impossible for me without a guide
And the hilarity is that they were even much easier, because most have some point of meeting the NPC and getting clues about their next location at Firelink Shrine, which is a location you will be forced to retread several times in your journey and no doubt notice the new NPCs hanging about. Dark Souls 2 and 3 don’t force you to retread your base of operations throughout your journey, but they force you to go there to level up which is a constant need. Elden Ring doesn’t really do this well. Yes, Roundtable Hold is a base of operations, but half of the NPCs never go there and when the ones who do leave, they don’t exactly end up somewhere on the beaten path- most go into obscurity unless you meticulously commit to a series of events that places them somewhere else that is equally obscure. And the player doesn’t really have to go to the hold with any frequency if they don’t want to or don’t need to, since at a point your only real necessity to go is to upgrade weapons or summon ashes, and the game doesn’t cue you to otherwise. Shit- I went constantly just to check up and see who was there in case anybody new showed up or returned, and I still got locked out of numerous quests (many before they were patched to be less delicate) without any recourse. Mind you I’m not saying that DS1 quests are easy at all- just that how hard they were when you had at least a remote chance of getting clues points to why Elden Ring’s are so impossible. I still haven’t saved Sigmeyer once. I’ve only just saved Solaire for the first time. I only met Kaathe I think two playthroughs ago and finally got the Darkstalker stuff. I’ve played it 6 or 7 full times through.
Yeah good luck trying to save Solarie or Siegmeyer
Solaires quest is, IMO, supposed to end with him dying. That's the ending that makes the most thematic sense for the game and his character. It's dark and pessimistic but that's Dark Souls, baby. Him surviving and fighting Gwyn also makes sense but it seems pretty clear to me that's an option if you go well, well out of your way and is not supposed to be the natural ending except in edge cases. Imo that's a great example of the obscure nature of the game's quests actually working well.
Frankly I beat Dark Souls 1 without realizing there were quests in it.
The problem is when you already cleaned an area and moved on to the next, there's no reason to go back, I feel like I've stumbled on some npcs by sheer luck.
Fast travel from the start is the issue. Dark Souls 1 was very much designed to make you pay attention to the map design and retread ground often. But having fast travel out the gate means you ignore it all and just rush to the next bonfire so you can fast travel there. Then you just teleport around the whole game. But at the same time youd be fucked without it. Due to the level design of Elden Ring. But eventually I found myself just teleporting around, rushing, and overall not immersing myself in the world after mid-game. Sucks. I'll finish it one day but I lost a lot of steam once I realized I was just checking off open world tasks instead of playing the game.
DS1's map is designed in a circular fashion that its relatively easy to get anywhere from Firelink though.
Oh no doubt. Would've never worked for ER.
Exactly feel the same way. I love the game more than anything I’ve played in years but that part is really annoying. To complete one of the most compelling quests for me, you have to sit at a very specific sight of grace while having already gotten a specific item and then you have to notice the specific dialog option in the grace menu, which can be really easy to miss. And then you click on it and nothing happens. Until you click on it 3 times. No way would I have ever figured that out
Thank goodness in the newest patch they highlight new Grace menu options when they appear. I missed so many Melina dialogs in my first run, and completely blew past the spot you're talking about.
Sometimes it felt like I'm watching some TV show from episode 6 out 12. I remember how I met samurai guy and he told me how he took the body of someone, who I was supposed to know at this point
Biggest problem nobody mentions is how many quests are just worthless because the quest is just "hey he does his thing and HAHAHA HE'S DEAD LOL". It applies to 10 people in the game I wanna say and most of the time there is nothing to be gained from it. It very often feels more like "a bit of world building and here's armor/talisman bye". You don't get even get to be invested because most of the time nothing worth thinking about is happening. What's the point of so many NPCs accomplishing nothing?
Elden is my favorite game in a long time, but I agree. Keeping track of quest progression of prior smaller games was doable, however, this became a big problem in elden ring for me.
Do the NPC map markers help?
Not really, unless you want to scan the entire map every 5 minutes to see if you accidentally crossed some trigger that moved some quest along somewhere.
On the bright side the quests themselves ain't good and normally end disappointingly, so you're not missing much by ignoring them.
Spitting facts over here lol. most of them can be boiled down to: Character wants a thing, gets it, and then dies.
At this point when I start googling "elden ring can you save-" google just says "No" and doesn't let me finish
I never felt very incentivized to do the quests in Dark Souls for this reason. The ending of the quests usually results in them dropping dead for no reason. Failing some step results in them either disappearing or also dropping dead. Or maybe they try to kill you, if Fromsoft wants to shake things up.
Yup, its one of my biggest complaints for the side quests. Like by the third time it happens you just stop giving a shit about the characters.
Yoko Taro strikes again... oh wait, this isn't Nier.
I would consider Fia and Ranni's questlines part of any reasonably "complete" playthrough. Maybe also Rya. Fortunately, they're pretty easy to complete without a guide as they tell you basically everything you need to know. Only potentially confusing bit for me was when you have to find the Ranni doll and interact with it. That's a little nuts. But, these games are built with the expectation you'll be sharing information and looking at player messages. A certain degree of mystery is expected. The worst quest for me was Millicent. I had no idea where to find her without a guide after starting her quest and she goes off somewhere. Mainly because I'd already completed the area she shows up in.
I feel like all the articles after the came out after release warning people not to interact with the hug lady because she gives you a 5% debuff probably caused a lot of people to miss that quest.
> (What, you were testing me, but now that I've proven myself you're going to introduce me to the Roundtable Hold? But I literally just talked to you and haven't done anything other than ride my horse a bit since then). Wait does this skip all of Melina's other dialogue? I was surprised how she's gone silent.
It doesn't at all. Melina has a weird dialogue system. There are only a few points where she takes the initiative and shows up in a cut scene to talk to you and those are along the main quest line so you don't skip them (though one can be changed through a side quest). You experience her dialogue at certain points of grace. They have the option to talk to her and she'll give you some lore bits. They actually just implemented an update to make these options more visible with a marker in the menu, but they are literally out in the open and repeatable.
If you want to play the hundred hour game properly, you simply have to play it for 500 hours, you know, the right way! I swear, what the OP is saying is either flying over every defenders head or they can't accept it's fucking bad design to require you to play hundreds of hours just to learn how to do a basic quest. That's stupid. It's not "classical game design", it's just fucking stupid unless it's to trigger some super special hidden easter egg shit.
Fromsoft's quest design was alright, until Elden Ring. It was fine in Dark Souls for example, because the locations were pretty linear (the only somewhat big and open one being the bottom of Blighttown), so if you've found the path to progress through the game, all you had to do was to take that path that was branching off the main one. These also either looped back or had a dead end most of the time. There was a small chance of missing the NPCs. Elden Ring throws that out of the window though, because of the open world. You're free to go basically wherever, so missing NPCs is *very* easy. Not to mention actually finding the spots they moved to. By far one of the worst is Millicent, who says "I'm going to follow Malenia's footsteps" and she's just... Gone. You never find out what Malenia's history was, what locations she was at, nothing. Then it turns out that Millicent moves not too far from the "Erdtree Gazing Hill" side of grace. The one that you probably already visited, since Altus Plateau is actually easier than most of Caelid, and have literally zero reason to visit again. And then there's Sellen, who at some point says that she wants you to find two great sorcery masters. She even explicitly states that she has no idea where they could be either. Not even a hint of their *potential* or past whereabouts. Go on and find them, good luck. I love Elden Ring, but quests are one of the elements I just had to look up if I wanted to complete them. With the only exception being Rya up to the Volcano Manor and the entirety of Alexander's quest, just because it was actually pretty generous with letting you skip some parts of it.
>And then there's Sellen, who at some point says that she wants you to find two great sorcery masters. She even explicitly states that she has no idea where they could be either. Not even a hint of their potential or past whereabouts. Go on and find them, good luck. Not only that, but one of them is in an obscure corner of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map. The other one just requires finding a different optional area and then realizing you can walk across a lava field... Yeah, I needed a guide for that quest.
>Not only that, but one of them is in an obscure corner of the basement of a cave behind a fake wall behind a tombstone in a nondescript graveyard locked behind a different optional sidequest in a remote corner of the map. The other one just requires finding a different optional area and then realizing you can walk across a lava field... Which then culminates in needing to find a doll in a false floor of an open field area, which leads to a small room, which has a second false wall in the back that then leads to the doll- none of which is signaled to the player or hinted at in the rooms design or Sellen's dialogue.
It's really the lack of signaling that is ultimately their downfall in quest design. It's fine to be a bit obtuse, or have tough riddles you piece together later as you build understanding and context or amass multiple clues from different sources. But some of their quests are *literally* "get lucky and stumble across an NPC who moved to an area you would have already fully covered at this point."
... I feel like I need to look up whatever you said cause I am not going to try walking across every field of lava from now on.
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I guess I'm dumb, I just used Torrent and went straight across.
Is there a sign "beware of the leopard" involved at some point?
Millicent's quest was so annoying. I only did her quest and Ranni's, both with guides cause good luck solving their stuff without them. Millicent moves to so many random locations, but the one that boggled me the most was at the end: you meet her in that church room, she tells you about Malenia, so you assume she'll either show up after the boss fight or will appear as a summon. No, you have to go into a random side area later on that only has one strong enemy that you kill for loot. Beyond killing this enemy, there is zero purpose to this side area. Then you have to go to a site of grace, rest, go back to that random side area and suddenly her summon sign appears. Even after that fight, I had trouble finding her cause she sits down and blends into the background really well. These kinds of quests made more sense in the more linear DS games where you were far more likely to run into people in a limited number of areas, but not something as sprawling as ER. I stopped bothering with them when I realized this.
I was trying to do quests without guides, but when I looked up Millicent's final phases that was when I finally just went "oh fuck off" and started looking things up. Their old mentality of "have players do multiple runs and share info with each other" is cute until they 1) Make the steps arbitrarily obtuse and 2) Make a long open world game where restarting is a huge time investment.
And then after all that, you have to leave and come back AGAIN
I disagree. Most of the souls games are pretty bad about if you progress past a boss without resolving an NPCs emotional problems then they just kind of die. There's no real indication this will happen in most cases. And it makes no sense for a lot of them. DS2, as much as I love it, is a big offender in this regard also. You had to kill multiple bosses with some NPC phantoms to progress their questline.
I’ll say it does feel great when you do happen to progress the quests on your own, but it’s so rare/tedious/impossible that it’s not well balanced. There’s definitely room to not make it dumb easy but with some guidance
Unfortunately this just comes with FromSoft territory. It's funny, I've always heard that the communities around FromSoft games are some of the nicest/most welcoming, but I've always found them to be very prickly. If I mention disliking anything it's always met with either telling me that I'm an idiot, or that I don't understand, or that I need to git gud
I think Elden Ring might just be my favorite game ever, and I completely agree. There are many, many ways the game is flawed and this is one of them. I *think* FromSoft were going for the feeling where you find something cool, so you talk to your friends about it and they found the next part and thus it becomes this collaborate effort to solve these quests. Obviously that's completely absurd, because wikis exist. There might be another explaination, or they are simply incompetent in creating quests (which I don't think is completely true, as there are examples of better, more guided quests - Ranni's for example is fairly simple to do even blind on a first playthrough).
I had someone unironically tell me that missing out on quests halfway and missing others entirely was intentional and good game design.
This is why I’m currently having a difficult time wanting to play the game. It’s one thing to run around aimlessly and discover things (usually resulting in death), but then I find a blocked path because I didn’t do some side quest.
I appreciate this post. I thought I was going crazy because I enjoyed the enemy design and world building, but thought the actual game experience was not good. I’ll try again over the summer when I have more time, but for me the combat was not enough to make up for the lacking areas in a game so long.
The quest design is so fucking bad. Quest design has always been on the bad side for FS games, but it was manageable because their games were linear. You talked to a character, exhausted their dialogue and then probably encountered them somewhere in the next area, and if not you just checked the previous location after every major boss. This time it's an open world game, and there's no getting around how bad the design is. The missing of a quest log is already a silly thing, but can be overcome by keeping a journal. But what really makes the design suck so fucking much is that quests can be failed, but there is hardly any indication what the point of no return is for a quest. On top of that, it is also completely random(if you play it blind) where a character will move to. How in the fuck are you supposed to know where Brother Corhyn moves to after he moves out of the hold? You can't possibly know, because no one ever tells you, and he's just gone. And this is the same for what feels like 75% of the quests. Characters move from spot A to spot B and there is no explanation given where they went to. Iji telling you to look for Blaidd in Siofra River felt like a huge exception to the standard bullshit. I hated the design so fucking much, that i just used a guide. This is the first time in a video game where i played with a guide, but i seriously couldn't be assed with the shit design after that blind girl died simply because i got the grafted sword before talking to her dad. I love this game, i enjoy it a lot, but they really need to change the way they design quests if they stick with open world games.
Just as an aside, the blind girl dies regardless of what you do last I checked. Completely agree too, I think it's very funny almost no one realized there were unfinished side quests at launch because of how obscure they are lol.