@OP your suggestion is a great one. Temporary inventory items tied to quests are a nonsense thing to make players account for in bags. They're often called weird things, too, things you might not even realize are associated with the quest that created them, so making them flags in the quest system, where it knows you "looted" or have whatever it is, that's the future of questing.
Trasak said:
zewtastic said:Although I understand your rationale. Creating carebear inventory systems better spent on RNG P2W Grind games is not what Pantheon seems to be about.
Anything, any oject, quest, loot, armor, weapon or otherwise is subject to handling. It's up to the player to manage this. it's part of the immersive game. Which is based on D&D.
Yeah it was a pain, but it did drive home the value and importance of some items over other items.
You had to have space for it. You needed to be careful where you put it.
Creating bottomless storage is not really in line with this games philosophy, just like instancing is not a thing in this game.
Volume based Inventory is not and never has been Carebear and as for referencing D&D all bags of holding and haversacks all had volume limits as well as maximum weights. So no, not carebear, it's more true the source material and not limited by a UI with a maximum pixel size and the database limitations of a 20 year old data storage system.
Asking for quests to be based on actions and the perception system more than taking token A, B, C and D to NPC 2 in the quest line is not asking to do away with inventory management all together. Its just shifting the design focus away from being a hoarder of random monster body parts and useless trinkets to one of action and consequence.
At no point have I asked for or suggested bottomless storage. I am simply requesting intelligent item storage where a single gold ring does not take up the same amount of inventory space as an entire ring mail shirt. In fact the volume suggestion is actually going to be much more limiting on the total volume of items a character can carry around. It will force players to focus on collecting small high value items rather than full suites of armor, i.e. gems given as rewards in D&D always being looted but sometimes you need to leave behind the large marble statue art object despite being worth 2000gp. I could even see emergent game play of specific players offering to buy the bulky items in the zone at cut rate and earning money by carting them back to civilization.
As far as the search function goes there is also the Handy Haversack as a precedence. All you needed to do was think of the object you want and immediately pull it out without searching for it.
So for one liners:
Volume inventory is more hardcore than slot based inventory and should be heralded by the “deep immersion” crowd and the “non-carebear” crowd.
Inventory should mater and there for picking which backpack to use based on the amount of volume and weight reduction you expect to need should be a plus not a minus.
There is no reason the list could not be a scroll-able list of images that are sortable, see the inventory of Divinity Original Sin.
Guess we'll have to disagree.
As a real systems, software and DB engineer with decades of actual job experience, including years in the game industry, as well as playing pretty much any serious MMO starting with UO thru BDO.
I have found slot-based to be much more involved, complex and immersive for the simple reasons I stated above.
For the same reason as trying to remember where you put your phone charger, simple slot storage makes you more immersed in your characters game play. You pay attention to important items and have to make decisions about what items are more critical.
I know all this because I played the games and experienced the differences.
Now it has been said, Pantheon is not going to be as quest centric as EQ1 was. How different remians to be seen. But lots of quests require lots of work. As the VR team is fairly small, few quests seems to match that equation.
zewtastic said:
Guess we'll have to disagree.
As a real systems, software and DB engineer with decades of actual job experience, including years in the game industry, as well as playing pretty much any serious MMO starting with UO thru BDO.
I have found slot-based to be much more involved, complex and immersive for the simple reasons I stated above.
For the same reason as trying to remember where you put your phone charger, simple slot storage makes you more immersed in your characters game play. You pay attention to important items and have to make decisions about what items are more critical.
I know all this because I played the games and experienced the differences.
Please expand on how a slot-based system where all items take up the same amount of space is more involved than one where you must consider both weight and volume. The bags themselves could have volumes rather than slots and when you drop an item onto the bag it adds a slot and deducts the volume of the item from the available volume remaining in the bag. The number of slots in the bag increases until the volume or the maximum weight is consumed.
So long as object have both reasonable weight values and reasonable volume values the system would be fairly realistic and still limiting while being flexible on what you pick up. This is again much closer to any D&D game I've ever been part of vs a purely slot-based inventory.
Feyshtey said:
@Trasak -- Honestly the one thing I dislike the most about Skyrim is the inventory system. If you're not 100% sure what the exact name of an item is, it can be a royal PITA finding it. It's alphabetical but rigid. Take for instance "Ingredients". That's a preconfigured subset of your inventory. You have to scan thru about 50+ alchemy ingrediants to find other kinds of ingrediants. Sucks, IMO. Conversely, if you always put things into your slot-based inventory in a consistent way (strategy, forethought) you greatly limit the searching required to find it.
Definitely agreed that base Skyrims inventory organization left a little to be desired. It would have benefited from a few more organizational tools and several of the mods I tend to use add them. Skyrim was also weight based only and I think it would have benefited from volume as well. Skyrim also had too many unique alchemical item ingredients and could have streamlined it a bit but that's a different discussion.
Zigzag said:@OP your suggestion is a great one. Temporary inventory items tied to quests are a nonsense thing to make players account for in bags. They're often called weird things, too, things you might not even realize are associated with the quest that created them, so making them flags in the quest system, where it knows you "looted" or have whatever it is, that's the future of questing.
I wouldn't mind a combo system where if you had a journal, it made a note of what the item was that you collected for a quest to avoid the issue you're stating. But, I'd still prefer the items to take physical space. The future of questing to me would be to improve on existing systems rather than replace them for convenience.
The system could be designed where the 'items' are first gathered then immediately become 'ghost items', appearing in your quest journal. Then, once you've gathered everything and you go back to the quest giver, he then hands you a NoDrop container which then pulls the items out of your journal placing them in the box. You then combine, and hand them back to get your reward.
zewtastic said:Guess we'll have to disagree.
As a real systems, software and DB engineer with decades of actual job experience, including years in the game industry, as well as playing pretty much any serious MMO starting with UO thru BDO.
lol, "trust me, I'm an engineer"
I'm not certain a feature like this will be necessary or not. It really depends on how many quests there are, how big the bags are, what level of inventory sorting we can do, etc. It's a good idea though and should be applied if there are going to be tons of quest items.
fazool said:Nope.
I want *items* even if trivial, because I hate the concept of imaginary flags as an imnmerive quest.
I want some object that I obtain and I want my inventory cluttered. My character needs to store things, get bags, boxes, organize them, keep track of them etc.
this one, +1
NO FLAGS!
also no achievements lists, and as little as possible tokens and extra monetary currency.
@Raidan, @Vandrad
The problem with the auto-questlog idea is that it elminates the situation in which you loot a thing you've never seen before and don't know what it is. There's no, "I wonder if this thing matters...". I'm sure some people really dislike there even being a possibility that you can sell something rare to a vendor or drop it on the ground because you don't know what to do with it, but i actually really like that. I enjoy asking other players if they've ever seen it before, and what it might lead to.
I am an avid quester, but this game with fewer quests sounds interesting. What I hope is that rather than getting quests, we make our own! Either via exploration or by other players, through word of mouth, telling of rare or unique places and enemies that drop unique items. Then you make your own quest to find these place/enemies. Why make the devs do all the work for all the scripting? Just go out there and discover this stuff! Of course they would have to make a bunch of unique stuff to discover, so lots of scripting there...
Raidan said: @Feyshtey Good point. I was meaning to make an auto-journal note for items collected for currently obtained/active quests - I didn’t think of the issue you mentioned for quests that weren’t active. I suppose my workaround would be to only flag it/journal it as a quest item if the quest was active. If you aren’t on the quest, it wouldn’t. That way you could still ask around regarding unknown items - I also enjoyed having to interact with others regarding them.
Yeah, don't get me wrong. I'd rather have a quest log than another 3-ring binder full of quest information on my desk. But I do like the actual process of investigation rather than only following the steps outlined for me in a log.
Another reason that I like the physical items is that if you don't know a quest exists but you're killing the mobs associated with it for hours you stand the chance of getting the quest item and being led to the quest. It was so frustrating in other games to kill for hours, then go to town and get a quest to go back and kill the same mobs, and then kill them for hours trying to complete that quest. You thought you were ready to move on then...
MauvaisOeil said:I liked MQing, because it left you with choices to get help from greater guilds for something you can't achieve yourself, sometimes. I got help for the Robe of the Kedge and 15 years after that, I still remember that as a shortcut for a very painfull camp that was, when I did my epic, often soloted or duoted by a few classes, and thus permacamped.
However, MQing nowadays has the downside of favoring permacamps for selling purposes. While it was uncommon back then, because unthought by most, that type of behavior will probably more common now.
In the end : I think items are important to track your progression and give you a feeling of steps accomplished, but they don't need to be the SOLE quest tracker you have. It was, I think, a technical solution back in EQ to avoid endless new data lines (I'm not even sure SQL was out back then), which is probably why quests were either item based or faction based, and sometimes you had to do entire questline backs to spawns a single NPC .
Multiquesting turned into a cash cow for players. Especially guilds that pushed others out of content.