(Sent as feedback)
[email protected] subject=Publish 93 Feedback
OOC:
My feedback about The new Eodon quest:
I declared for the Eodon side, which is kind of strange, since the Barrabs and Myrmidex are also Eodonian, you know.
o We need a healer in both Geoffrey's camp and in the Barrab's equivalent
o Get rid of the "click on chaos banner" in Geoffrey's camp mechanism. Make the Myrmidex pit fight a real quest so that you will know what it is that you are supposed to be doing, i.e. killing Barrabs and Myrmidexes. Put another NPC in the camp to get that started. Have the other NPCs tell you to talk to that one first because "I have nothing for you" is annoying when "Sign up by talking to [name of NPC] would be much more useful and much less fiction-breaking. This NPC should also point the direction to the pit.
o Let me emphasize: Anywhere you have the words "Double Click On" in game, it's a fiction breaker and you have destroyed immersion in the role-playing fantasy world. If Runesabre or Designer Dragon were still with you, they would tell you not to do that.
o On May 27th, no tribespeople spawned for the "Eodon" side in the Myrmidex pits, so it wasn't really the Eodon side at all. It was the Britannian side.
o I know you love Regent Blackthorn, but if we're on the side of Britannia, we're fighting for Order, not Chaos. C'mon guys, after Ultima IV, Geoffrey was firmly on the side of Lord British and Order. So... Order banner please.
o It took me about three hours to do the Myrmidex pit fight solo. This is kind of long. Three hours is well into naptime for us senior citizens (you bought Ultima V the day it came out in stores, right? You get a discount at Taco Bell if you ask for it.)
o I know you like things that take more than one person. But get real, Baja is severely underpopulated these days. Why are you testing something that takes a lot of people on an underpopulated shard?
o It took a large group about 40 minutes to finish the Myrmidex pit from the Britannian side. Oops, I mean Eodon side, except I don't.
o Check that text for the next quest in the chain, where you're asked to bring back a bunch of stuff. Does it tell you where to get that stuff? Not immediately (you have to check that NPC an additional time without the stuff, to be told where to get it). Fix that. Put that into the initial text for the quest.
o Does it make sense to get those items at those places? How did the people at those places get those items?
- The sad gambler. Where did he get the insecticide? How come you can't go to where he got it and get it there? Fix this by explaining, "I was a renowned alchemist and mixed this stuff myself. It's all I have left of my defunct alchemy business which I lost to my gambling habit."
- The Delucian gardener. He doesn't explain why he has Myrmidex pheromone nor where he got it. You could fix that with just a sentence in his quest text, "An explorer friend sent the pheromone bottle, because in Eodon it scareth away the herbivorous dinos and she thought it might scare away herbivorous rabbits too, but it doth not."
There's a HUGE problem with the premise of the rabbit quest: THERE ARE NO RABBITS. You can fix that too with a couple of sentences in the quest text: "Thou seest no rabbits because they are underground now. Thou needest lure one up by using a using a green thorn as bait."
- The population report. That's good as is. No need to change it.
o Professor Rafkin...
- Great, you're sent to kill the Queen.
So... how is it that the queen repeatedly regenerates?
Add this text to the quest. "*Frowns* Under circumstances where the queen dieth, a lower caste member may become queen, as happeneth with certain insects. Killest thou the queen nonetheless."
- For gosh sakes, "larvae" is plural. The singular is "larva." ...and that doesn't work well because ant larvae are legless. Re-use the rotworm artwork? No? Then the word you were looking for was "worker."
o Insecticide & Regicide
- Oh wait, you can't enter unless you're on the quest! It tells you that right at the door. "You must be on the "Insecticide & Regicide" quest to enter. Visit Professor Rafkin in Sir Geoffrey's camp to the East." Yes, that's another fiction breaker. DON'T DO THAT.
Instead, let anyone enter. On the quest? Hey! Great. Not on the quest? You can enter anyway, but should get this text when you do:
"Thou rememberest that thou'lt not get a reward without having been sent by Professor Rafkin."
- HUGE problem again. Rafkin clearly wants you to die, since she sends you in without the pheromone and insecticide. Fix her quest text with
(She dabs a drop of pheromone on your clothes.) "Thank thee for this. The rest will be distributed to the Britannian forces in the pit."
- Why can't you pick up the moonstone crystals here? Does double-clicking on them to make them disappear do anything useful? If it does, then they re-spawn too fast.
- So you killed lots of the lesser Myrmidexes. They respawn too fast too. Seriously, they do. It takes a large group to keep them in check. We couldn't get that done with a mixed group of five, and it's hard to get even five people together on Baja these days, especially for a quest where there're big preparation tasks.
- You have an outer ring of falling rocks that dismount. Yeah, don't do that. Don't dismount. It ticks off every ninja, sampire, and gargoyle in your group. Speaking of which, are mystic, necromancer and spellweaver forms dismounted? Are ninjas singled out for that? If so, why do you have a mechanism that singles out to cripple ninjas? This isn't fun. Why do you have something in your game which decreases the fun?
- You have an inner ring of falling rocks that deals damage and does bleed attack. They deal too much damage. Cut back on that a little.
- The queen throws a group of four "larvae."
- You have noxious goo. It is TOO noxious. It can't be cured by grandmaster healer / grandmaster anatomy. Cut back on that. As it is now, the effective characters are the mystic who plants a rising colossus and leaves, or the spellweaver who plants a reaper and leaves. Allowing curing would allow some other character types to have fun too.
Also note: This is a spoilsport mechanism because it remains in effect after the queen has been killed, making it hard to loot the queen's dead body. That's not fun.
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I did not do the tinker quest leading up to Zipactriotl. Again, large group needed, this is Baja, and the large group did the Queen instead while I tagged along.
Same complaint about dumb mechanism for keeping people not on the quest out as for the Regicide.
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The Kotl aren't supposed to be an alien race. They're native to Eodon. They're small dinosaurs, and Eodon is the valley of dinosaurs. Their creation the Myrmidex kicked them out of their city, and their descendants lost their technology and became the Sakkhra.
It's odd that the UO Dev team didn't use the lizardman artwork for the Sakkhra, and instead changed them into another human tribe.
You could still fix that.
