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An hourglass? REALLY?


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I just wish things like this would be foreshadowed in dialogue, so they don't seem so random when they come up. In some ways Jeff is good with plotting, in some ways not so much. At least now your party (sometimes) refers to themselves as "we" rather than "I." That always made me totally tune out when playing the original Avernum series. (Yes, I know you can play as one character, doesn't make it kosher.)

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"Unknowable in advance" is not relevant here since there's an hourglass in the same area. The possibility of missing it in that area is pretty relevant, though.

 

Jeff has moved in that direction before -- witness the removal of the Test of Mind from Vahnatai lands, an entire dungeon of verbal riddles, because he got so many complaints about it. It's a real matter of preference, I guess, whether or not you like puzzles and riddles in your RPGs. But the problem is, if you don't, you feel like you're being locked out of something.

 

I guess "notice that the item you need, is somewhere else in the same dungeon" would go in that category, even if it's pretty minor.

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Sad that Jeff had to cut a dungeon of riddles. That would have been awesome. :(

 

Re: Halls of Chaos, though, would it help if there were more of a direct hint that everything you need is lying around there in the zone?

 

I mean, in a game with puzzle-solving like the Legend of Zelda series, typically, everything you need to get through a dungeon's puzzles is found in the dungeon. People know the conventions of the series / genre and trust the designers that when they see an obstacle, they have or will soon find the means to surmount it. I wonder if the issue is that RPG designers haven't engendered that same kind of trust (or done anything to earn it?), leaving players with the sense that they're facing ridiculously difficult demands. If you trusted Jeff to not treat you that way, instead of worrying when you see need X, you'd just think "Okay, I guess I'll around in here for X."

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...foreshadowing in dialogue, the specific defenses of a secret dungeon whose defenses have been "perverted" by the enemy... who could do that? and specifically, that the dungeon both yields and demands an hourglass? Or what?

 

Someone could say, "headed to the Halls of Chaos? I hear time gets out of joint there, you might wanna grab something to keep yourself from getting distracted..." a clue like that. It doesn't have to be rocket science. Whether or not you figure out that that person meant "an hourglass," when it came up you'd think "oh, that makes sense" rather than feeling like it's a random placeholder.

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You need three items in the Halls of Chaos, all of which are already present. If you have explored the area at all, one of the three items is obvious enough that you should be able to think to yourself: "I remember where one of those is". The hourglass and the other item are not necessarily as obvious, putting a sign on a room with a label of lab supplies, or maybe a label of math equipment on one room and time keeping equipment on another would probably work. If you hit the room in which you need the three items first, then it can be frustrating, but if you have explored the open areas of the level then it might be less so.

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I hadn't happened on any of the 3 when I first entered the room where the statues give you the passwords, nor did I see the food lying around in the place where the statues need to be fed. Whether you find it obvious or not that the items are in the location you're in is really about personal predilection -- I'm more of a story-oriented gamer, so missing any cues from the story about these items I assumed they were elsewhere. Signs on some of the rooms would be fine, I guess.

 

On a related note, there are a truly absurd number of "permanent" quests in this game -- i.e. in every single town a shopkeeper wants you to get books for them, or Empire records, or cheap wine, or sugar, or iron bars or XYZ. Some of these are fine, the ones that are related to fighting the war, but after the Nth trivial one pops up, it's like... "hey mighty hero of Avernum, I know you're running about saving the world, but gosh I've got all this pocket lint! Find me a lint remover, would ya?"

 

Some may enjoy these, it would just be good if there were separated from the quests that move the game along. Since they're just scattered in-between the story-oriented quests I have to keep picking through the quest log to see what I'm gonna do next. It's a simple fix, just separate the perma-quests on the quest bar with a bracket, or a different font or color. (I realize Jeff will never see this.)

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Whether you find it obvious or not that the items are in the location you're in is really about personal predilection

Aha, here I think is the real point of disagreement: that the issue is having an obvious solution. That's not what this is about.

 

Edgwyn's scenario is no doubt what happens for many players, but I don't think all players find it obvious -- including those who have no problem with the item requirement. What's important here isn't having an obvious answer immediately at hand; what's important is how you respond to an unexpected challenge where an obvious answer is not immediately at hand. What do you do when you're exploring a dungeon and you meet an unexpected obstacle? Do you look around the dungeon for information and clues? Do you consider even briefly revisiting other rooms now that you have a new context to consider? Even in the most linear mainstream RPGs, these things are still expected of the player...

 

In fairness, there's nothing exciting or interesting about the item requirement. It's basically just an alternate version of "push the switch at location A to open the door at location B", which there are already a lot of in the Halls of Chaos. So I don't think anyone would cry if it were removed. But suggesting that RPGs should not have any challenges that require exploration or information-gathering to solve, and where Bob does not give you a closely leading hint as to what to do? I dunno...

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