Make it easier to find quests + add more quests

[Modest Grouse]

After playing for a while, I decided I would like to do all of the quests, or as many of them as I can find. However it seems like finding a quest to do is often more time consuming than actually doing many of the quests.

If this post

https://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=57.0

is correct in that every 15 days there is a quest that is triggered in a village, but it is not immediately clear which one, then perhaps make it somehow easier to figure out which village it is that has the active/open quest?

I'm thinking maybe a dialog option where you ask NPCs "Ask for gossip" or "Ask about troubles in the area". And the response -- if there is a village with an active quest nearby -- is something like "I hear that the village six miles northeast of here in 'Sausage heath' having some problems". Or maybe that can just be part of the response to "how's it going?".

Alternatively (or additionally), consider having the possibility of more than one open quest at a time rather than this "one every fifteen days" logic. It is just kind of . . . weird that one can walk/ski across miles and miles, discovering dozens of villages over a period of weeks, and everyone is like "We're doing fine, no problems here". Maybe like a fixed 5-10% chance of there being a quest on initial village generation there is a quest, something like that.

Secondly, maybe consider just adding more (and more complex, multi-stage) quests as part of game development? While one can I suppose make up challenges for oneself (island survival, explore everything, etc), it is sometimes nice to have (or at least be able to choose) more structure and narrative.

[dangerousbrick]

I'm thinking maybe a dialog option where you ask NPCs "Ask for gossip" or "Ask about troubles in the area".

Sounds like an awesome idea. There's travelers walking from village to village, so that's a perfectly reasonable and lore-friendly way to get info on quests.

[Erkka]

Or maybe that can just be part of the response to "how's it going?" 

This should already be the case. The news.txt file in the game installation folder mentions that for version 3.40 beta 1 this was added:


          So the general "How is it going?" chat option now serves as a way to ask if somebody in the village has a known quest
          or problem of which the other NPCs are also aware of. If there is, NPCs will hint you about it and mention who you
          should talk to. This kind of hints about quests are often quite vague and call for asking the NPC in question for more
          information. Within this sort of quest hint dialogue you can pretty much always ask where to find the NPC in question.

          Notice that NPCs may also rarely have personal problems or quests of which the other villagers are not aware of.

[Modest Grouse]

It is the case in the same village (other than these "personal problems" quests). However, that part of my feature request is to have this also be the case for nearby villages as well. In other words, if the NPC "knows" of the location of a nearby village (in response to "Are there any nearby villages?") then they are also able to tell the player that there is an active quest there.

[Plotinus]

I think the timer is 14 days not 15, but if you're not keeping track of what time of day the quest appeared then 13 days ago but it was just before midnight then and now it's only just after midnight then that might seem like 14 days to the player if you're just subtracting but the game may count that as 13 still. So aiming for 15 accounts for rounding errors.

I think also if you enter a village that you visited less than a week ago, there won't be a quest there yet. I put a light lever trap near the villages I visit so that the game will keep track of how long it's been since i went there and try to rotate through the ones that have items I might want to buy.

In practice what I do is I spend an entire day at a village, to give the "personal problems" quest giver time to find me and I talk to a few people in case there's a publicly known quest, and then I move on to another village if I'm really seeking quests, otherwise I try again next week.

For some of my characters, this leads to doing a quest almost every 2 weeks, but some of my other characters only get a quest every few months -- probably because there's a quest giver that I'm not encountering somehow, they're not all in villages, some you can only get from the random guys you run into in forests, which I usually try not to run into if I can help it because random guys can be robbers, and then it takes a while for the quest to expire and new quests to be generated again. I think there can be a few active quest givers at a time but the first one that you notice is the one that sticks and then you have to wait 2 weeks for new ones to be generated? I'm not 100% sure, the mechanics are pretty complicated.

[Erkka]

that part of my feature request is to have this also be the case for nearby villages as well

OK, thanks for the clarification.

[PALU]

My understanding was that the game can generate multiple quests, but once you encounter one the others are muted, but I'm not certain this is the case.

However, there are some long duration quests that can be active in parallel with "normal" quests (I know this from experience). The quests involving spirits tend to have long duration (so you can get the water spirit in late autumn and not fail it just because all water freezes during the winter, not to mention your character won't fare well from waiting naked for hours when it's freezing cold).

[Aldenllaw]

How would you prioritize the implementation of the suggested features, such as the ability for NPCs to provide information about active quests in nearby villages and the introduction of more complex, multi-stage quests, considering the potential impact on gameplay dynamics and player engagement?