Registered Member #24041
Joined: 4:19:01 am GMT 01/24/17
Posts: 2145
Hey all!
As alluded to at the Town Hall, one of the projects I and a number of other staff members have started to move forward on is to update the "Main quest" to be a bit less obscure but also to make it accessible to non-good characters who might want to learn more about the island as well. To that end, I'm creating this thread to ask: What parts of the main quest, for those of you that have done it, are your favorites, and what are your least favorite?
The goal of this is to completely rebuild the quest pretty much from the ground up, incorporating only the things that we think already work well.
Apart from that, some of the general goals are: -Reduce the amount of fetch-quests in favor of a more open-ended exploration-style quest. This will involve characters choosing from different factions to progress the quest, allowing both for characters to discover more of the island naturally through the quest as well as making it so that one "run" of the quest might be different than others (as you will have to choose one of several options to proceed, and the others will no longer have the quest dialogue once you've made your choice).
-Remove the “saving the world” aspect of the quest and instead have it be a way for characters to make faction allegiances and explore parts of the island as more a journey of self-discovery. The current quest, to everyone I've talked to at least, feels more like something you would do in a single-player game versus a multiplayer experience like Thain.
We're just starting the process of really thinking about this now, so don't expect this to happen in the next few weeks, or even months. This is going to take a while. And please do note that while I would love to know what doesn't work for you, there's no guarantee we will scrap everything that people don't like, or add more of the stuff people do. Sometimes we are limited by the constraints of the server, and sometimes there are story or mechanics reasons.
Registered Member #24916
Joined: 2:58:00 pm GMT 01/23/19
Posts: 604
Favorite: Invading the abyss. The tension, the party you likely have with you, the RP that is likely to go down. Doing it can be an amazing experience.
Least: Finding it. I don't know if you have added in ways to get it started, but I came upon it by chance. Could be fun if the study quest is also done trough NPC's you have to find here and there, instead of grabbing some books from the library.
I wouldn't call it a single player feel, as every main character I have done those quests on always had company, and I had fun RPing trough them. Like most other things on Thain, it is what you make it.
Registered Member #1593
Joined: 12:25:12 pm GMT 06/30/10
Posts: 418
Discovering Thain lore, the Abyss adventure. An idea might be if we're talking about different factions for self-discovery, maybe there is a different endgame boss or subboss beneath the main baddie at the end of the quest? Of course, I imagine that's more work. I do like the idea of mixing different factions to be utilized in the main quest. I guess my question is then would those individuals who took part with those factions be locked into them? Could they simply serve as "deputies/assets" of the faction for the time being but still have the choice to join?
Registered Member #673
Joined: 1:05:08 am GMT 12/22/05
Posts: 380
Personally, I found the Celestial Temple in the Wastes seemed unfinished. I would like to see more lore and puzzles showing the history of Thain. With the removal of the Empyrean encampment in the Wastes, it has removed the RP of why to go there, (afaik)
Registered Member #24148
Joined: 5:42:35 am GMT 11/06/17
Posts: 260
Always, in all quests, my least favorite part is running back and forth between same places. A big part of the main quest should be showing as much of the island as possible, and having to run the same routes over and over again doesn't serve this, it only makes it time consuming and, frankly, boring.
I don't know for sure how necessary the running back and forth is atm, but every time I try to do the main quest, I find myself going northlands-greenvale-northlands-steinkreis-greenvale-northlands-steinkreis-northlands wondering who the hell I'm supposed to talk to to make it advance. So now that I think of it, could be the problem is more that it's not clear enough where I should go next.
Registered Member #1189
Joined: 1:04:10 am GMT 10/20/07
Posts: 814
Am I the only one who actually just dislikes the entire thing? I can’t remember the last time I did it on a PC. I find that it’s more fun to learn, through PC-interactions and exploring. Personally, I like the idea of no main quest. Maybe faction-area based quests, that allow lore coordinated to specific areas. These quests allow citizenship, certain awards gifted to those of allegiance, etc. (Again, there may be something like this already; I’m just newly coming back and not really a quester.)
Registered Member #1033
Joined: 12:18:42 am GMT 04/25/07
Posts: 1107
Hi y'all, it's been a while, just lately starting to pop back in for an hour or so now and then. Kudos to the team updating various locations like Greenvale and Feywood that all so different to come back to.
I saw this question, and because the very constraints on my playtime are relevant to this, I'll chime in.
Since I have hardly ever had huge chunks of free time to do any quest task that necessitates gathering up a large strong party (which takes time and is usually a huge feat just by itself) and then budgeting to spend 4-6 or even 8 hours on a play session for a big event, thus even after more than a decade of playing Thain, I've never completed the Abyss task with any of my three characters, nor even been able to attend. So the more parts of a quest that can be done without needing a large strong party or massive session time, the better... with the best situation being quest tasks able to be done solo and in intermittent small chunks of time. My characters have done a lot of the main quest as pertains to the investigations and learning about Thain history, and that was workable (in play sessions of an hour or two) and quite enjoyable. Could do all that solo, which was also for the best because otherwise you would have other party members just waiting around while you try to read books.
Since I haven't ever done the endgame of the main quest, I have no idea how much it would mean to me to win that endgame of saving the world. I expect I'll never know. But it seems like this all could be done better, and I will be interested to see it made more accessible. Exploration activities and everything mentioned in the OP sounds really good to me. Just please make the steps of any larger main quest to be in short doable sessions for the freetime-challenged.
[ The Island of Thain ]
Main Quest Restoration Project
