A little background first, before I get to my question...
A "Red Herring", for those not familiar, is a piece of information or clue that is designed specifically to be misleading.
I cut my teeth on Everquest, which, as many of you can attest to, did NOT have a journal or quest log. Anywho, about 5 levels into my first foray game, I ran into a NPC. He rattled off a bit of dialogue which had a underlined word. If I said "What *underlined word*?", the dialogue would continue with another bit of dialogue, which also had an underlined word. You could keep this going until he ran out of things to say, and this is how you learned what he wanted you to do, although it was quite often vague and could be quite misleading. But this is how questing was done in EQ.
Anyway, after about 10 or so dialogue progressions, he simply ended his spiel. I was perplexed, as I didn't feel like he was very specific in what he wanted, so I shouted out to the zone asking if anyone had any ideas. A helpful soul chimed in moments later: "I think that quest is broken". Ok, so it was a quest, and it was borked, so I could move on. But now as I think about it... Was it really broken? Or had it just not been solved? I pondered this for sometime before I died when an iksar monk trained some bixies into my ruminating body. But I continued to think...
One thing I have always hated as a game player is metagaming. Don't get me wrong, I'm as guilty of it as the next guy. I tend to meta everything, movies, books, games... anything where a perception of how things and people work in certain situations that will help me solve a puzzle, figure out what happens ahead of time, or just give me some kind of edge. I can't really NOT do it anymore. It's too ingrained. But I think it hurts the mystery.
In most games these days, its not hard finding the quests. Just look for the guy with yellow marker point over his head. Everything is laid out right before you. All you have to do is just follow the bouncing ball and connect the dots.
But Everquest, either by design or failure (or perhaps both) had created a questing system that was mostly guesswork. You had to figure it out. Use your head. I mean, first question, was it actually a quest? Then, you had to figure out both where you needed to go, and what you had to do. Were you going to need help? (Quick answer: almost always yes). You then had to wonder if the reward was worth it, as you weren't shown what that reward specifically was. And the game was so broken code wise, you never knew if you were just following a quest line that was just really vague, or if you were just wasting your time on something broken. It was a big guessing game, total mystery. You know, kind of like real life. Yes, you could look a lot of it up on Allakhazam, but even that was often filled with incomplete answers and guesswork. A lot of times, people just didn't know. And that kept the mystery up.
So, my questions are: Are there going to be intentional red herrings from perception pings or quest NPCs? Or are we going to know that every time we get a perception ping that there is something to be done there?
For example: Upon climbing up the side of a mountain, you see a ping: There is a small silver flower growing here. Does this mean that there HAS to be something to do with this? That whenever we get a ping, there is ALWAYS something that can be done it with it? Or could it be that its just a red herring? That it doesn't have any actual purpose whatsoever?
Not that I am in favor of sloppy, broken code that creates these problems, but laying down some false trails might go a long way towards keeping the mystery. If no one figures out what the small silver flower ping means, eventually everyone starts calling it a red herring... until a few years later when someone finally figures it out. Or doesn't.
Anyway, was just wondering if this had been considered or was being implemented. Thanks for your time!
~Hiwin
I loved that old style questing. I also remember several trigger words that weren't underlined or hinted to. Random NPC in a zone accross the world, mentions they have family back home. you find a guy with the same last night and ask, "do you know rashar?" and it triggers a bunch of dialog and or quests (or turns them hostile lol) i miss that system
vthorm said:Upon climbing up the side of a mountain, you see a ping: There is a small silver flower growing here. Does this mean that there HAS to be something to do with this? That whenever we get a ping, there is ALWAYS something that can be done it with it? Or could it be that its just a red herring? That it doesn't have any actual purpose whatsoever?
We do know that some perception pings will just be about Lore and not always tied to a specific quest. I would hazard to guess though that even those Lore only pings will often help lead you to places where quests may be discovered. I doubt there will be any deliberate 'red herring' perception pings, but who knows... maybe Joppa was a secret fan of Punk'd and will troll us with useless perception pings.
Given the goal of a "large world" and one that goes about its own business rather than being centered around *you* - I would guess that there will be qute a few things that are there just because they are there. Though there could be some achievement, perhaps with a title, for finding 100 otherwise useless landscape clickables.
As the OP knows, the world has changed since 1999. I doubt if the team will invest too much effort into mystery and misdirection in order to slow us down since by the end of a week there will be a Pantheon wiki with reams of information about every dialogue and quest. Okay maybe a bit of an exaggeration but a lot of truth to it as well.
I like the idea of having several items that mean something later. Perhaps VR could add a "Violet Thorn" somewhere that is a red herring and a subtle nod to @vthrom. In fact, it would be fun if they added several items that were subtle references to the people who suggested / inspired it. Figuring out the reference could be an interesting metagame.
On a semi-related note, will all the lore descriptions be recorded in a journal for us to read later? I'm far more likely to actually participate in it if that's the case, since I can't really read and absorb / enjoy it if I'm grouped or doing anything else (due to ADHD working memory deficiencies).
I've been playing on P99 a bit lately and have found a few items in-game that have zero information about them online. I often wonder the same thing. "Are these just here to be here? Or are they part of something bigger that no one has solved yet?"
I think it's so important to have things that are just there to be there. Rocks to climb with nothing on top, caves to explore with no named boss or treasure, perception pings that tell you something, an NPC wandering the wilderness just because he is.
All the stuff like that makes the world feel more like a world.
I'm not sure intentionally misleading clues are a great idea, but I'm sure VR are being really quite subtle with some of the pings and other cues to finding lore and doing quests. There are examples already.
I'm with Renarius too, that not everything needs to be 'significant', even if it isn't misleading.
I would like to see a lot of 'flavour' that isn't anything to do with anything but flavour, but that intrigues you to explore nevertheless.
It's too early to know how all quests will work. Preception pings on the other hand can be vague. If you go back to the 2019 twitch stream of Amberfate I believe the first perception ping encountered in that stream is vague or only gives a general sense of what you are looking at. As you explore the zone more perception pings start hinting at what is going on and what you may be able to do with certain artifacts. I think there is also another example with a key hidden under a fallen pillar in Halnir, which was shown off in an earlier stream as well.
Personally, I am ok with vague hints in the perception system or in the world. I don't really want to see vague hints in quests at least for quest objectives. I don't mind vague hints in relation to location or location markers, but I don't want vague quest objectives.
Vandraad said:if I'm doing a quest for an NPC, does it not stand to reason the NPC wants me to complete its quest? Why would it deliberately give me false or misleading information? That's just...dumb. That is the NPC sabotaging itself.
I guess it kind of depends on the purpose of the quest. If they are hoping to accomplish or gain something I definitely agree. But what if it is some sort of a test? Some way for them to learn more about you...I don't know, a test of character, or a test of problem solving skills, a scavenger hunt of sorts.
Vandraad said: if I'm doing a quest for an NPC, does it not stand to reason the NPC wants me to complete its quest? Why would it deliberately give me false or misleading information? That's just...dumb. That is the NPC sabotaging itself.
I don't know what real world you live in, but the one I live in has plenty of people - seemingly friendly, well meaning people - who will devoutly defend the absolutely wrong, easily disproven "facts" that they try to tell you. There are many motivations for such behavior. The info they believe - and the affects from believing and spreading it - often work against the obvious best interests of those people, 'sabotaging them' you could say.
I see no difficulty in believing some inhabitants of Terminus might behave this way as well. Old myths of evil places, horrible monsters or viscious enemies, that have been passed down so long that no one living has ever investigated the truth of it.
Not interested in being intentionally mislead, but I don't mind vague information that takes some work on the players part to solve or decypher. I also don't mind information that is given now, but not of any use or solved until later after other "events" take place, that bring several peices of information together in a larger information gathering.
But a in-game journal definitely would make these types of things much better and easier to maintain. My long term memory on insignificant things is not what it was 20 years ago.
Fulton said:Not interested in being intentionally mislead, but I don't mind vague information that takes some work on the players part to solve or decypher.
Absolutely. Vague is fine. Confusing is fine. Cryptic is fine. But deliberately or intentionaly misleading? A hard no.
The "problem" with in-game logs that I've epxerienced in the past is that they do all the work and solving for you. I sure hope VR does the in-game logs in a way that doesn't just summarize the entire NPC chat down to a single line of "go to X and do Y"
I have no problem with the game helping us organize information (many of us used to just have a notebook by the computer for this). But leave it up to us to decide how to use that information.
Ranarius said:The "problem" with in-game logs that I've epxerienced in the past is that they do all the work and solving for you. I sure hope VR does the in-game logs in a way that doesn't just summarize the entire NPC chat down to a single line of "go to X and do Y"
I have no problem with the game helping us organize information (many of us used to just have a notebook by the computer for this). But leave it up to us to decide how to use that information.
Some games let you revisit the quest dialogue itself. I'd like that. To expand, if I could add specific notes to each set of dialogue, that would be pretty great as well.
To answer the original post though, we know for sure that some perception pings won't lead to anything more. They'll simply be observations, bits of lore, or as I like to call it: flavor text. Given gamers' tendencies to overanalyze stuff, any of that could be considered a red herring for individuals who don't see the value in flavor text.
