This Quest Takes Forever
Today I ran into something that I haven’t in quite a while. I was playing Wildstar and got into a questline that took too much time. Not too much time actually, but more time then I had to spend when I started it. How can a game prevent a scenario like this?
The first time I encountered something like this were on the Positron Task Force in City of Heroes. It actually was one of the reasons why my buddy quit that game. We would start the quest line at 8 PM and it would have us traveling all over the different maps defeating many different heroes but it would end up taking us till two or three in the morning. Wow! This was a lot of fun but it was way too much of a time investment. And particularly one that we could not do starting in the evening and playing all night. As somebody with classes in the morning or a job there really was no time to get started after six pm.
Today’s questline was much shorter but I had allocated about an hour to play Wildstar this morning. Definitely not enough time to get this mission accomplished. I didn’t even realize it was a quest line that would take so much time when I started it. And I don’t think it would naturally take so long if you went straight for the goals but I was taking my time. The bottom line is I started out the questline, was given one mission and went along and got attacked a bunch of bad guys -actually got swarmed by a bunch a bag guys and survived and accomplish the first mission and I was pretty pretty pleased. Then I got another mission…I got swarmed by a bunch bag guys…killed them all and barely survived and got another mission. This went on for about 45 different sections and part of the issue was I was never certain that I had completed all the tasks within the mission before I was moving on to the next task. This resulted in me running around a lot looking to see if I had done everything. I really didn’t mind since I was a enjoying myself and killing all the swarms of bad guys attacking me but before long the time that I had allocated was up. I suppose it wasn’t so bad because after that hour was done I was going to process some of the video, take screenshots and use them for this blog post. Instead I used the time that would go into processing to try to finish off the quest and I still didn’t finish it…I just kept going.
Fortunately I had just received the ability to teleport back to my bind point and after continuing with the quests for an extra 30 minutes I decided I couldn’t keep going and used my teleport. I suppose I’ll go back this weekend and run through this quest line again to see if I got everything or even better I’ll go online and see what the details of the quest are and what I need to accomplish to get this thing completed.
I suppose that because the quest line indicated it was an instance I should have known that there was more to it than just a simple set of missions but I really didn’t recognize it at the point that I started. Is the instance tag a flag that tells you that a mission or set of quests are going to take a extended period of time? Or is there something better that developers can put on a series of quests to let you know that it’s going to take a while? Hey I didn’t even know this quest was supposed to be soloable with all the swarms of creatures attacking me – it could very well have been meant to be undertaken by a group rather than just me. I was able to get through everything and it was fun except for the timeframe.
At least in City of Heroes, they told you that a Task Force was gonna take a while to complete.
Looking at Jabbithole, a Wildstar website, I found the following for the ‘questline’.
Apparently this was a ‘public event’ and not a questline. As you can see there were tons of tasks to complete before finishing the event. It was pretty crazy to try to do all this in an hour this morning.
In any case I’ll finish up the quest line this weekend and let you know how it goes.
Morning Ramble 2.91