KoA: Reckoning - Answers from the Team

The Reckoning team has their latest collection of dev answers to community questions. No official mod support is on major response but here's a snip on quests:

Q: I would love to know more about the quest system. How it is incorporated in the game. Are there any secret hidden quests? Any big yellow questions marks? – By mhowrad
A: We've worked hard here to walk a very specific line: we don't want to bog down the game with too much required dialog for the folks who want action, but we still want to deliver the goods for those who like deep story and living worlds. As a result, we do indeed have icons floating over our quest givers, and icons on the minimap. We have also found some clever ways of hiding some starts to quests, though, and giving some of them multiple endings. Sometimes you'll help someone in one place, and you'll find them again a ways down the road, doing better or worse depending on how you helped.
Do quests in a village, and the villagers will start commenting on how things have changed; get far enough into the main quest and the people in cities and other places will begin to recognize you as that hero — the one they heard about from the front. – By Ben "Tesseract" Schneider, Narrative Designer

More information.

Icons floating over quest givers in a singleplayer game? Come on…

Better be optional.

I no longer care about yellow exclamation marks over quest givers. I guess I'm too used to it now. Just don't have a dotted line pointing me exactly where to go.

The minimap icons I can live with or without. What I want and they seem to have delivered is that you will see how your actions affected the world around you.

I could definitely do without the marker bullshit in a game like this.

I don't mind them in a "hack/slash" game, where I'm not really supposed to immerse myself.

But in a "serious" RPG with a ton of lore and characters meant to convey real emotions… It's not appropriate.

Even Fable I didn't have these floating exclamation marks.

Who do they believe we are ? Infants ?

I don't mind the map markers since it is entirely realistic for someone to mark on your map where to go but icons over the npc's head better be optional. I can handle it in mmorpgs since you can't really be immersed in an mmorpg but in single-player rpgs that would ruin the immersion.

I have not much against quest icons on maps nowadays - but quest icons floating over people's heads is a "no-go" for me.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
I could definitely do without the marker bullshit in a game like this.

I don't mind them in a "hack/slash" game, where I'm not really supposed to immerse myself.

But in a "serious" RPG with a ton of lore and characters meant to convey real emotions… It's not appropriate.

I have a feeling I'm going to be saying "I told you so" after this game is released.

Well you are going to get this in Skyrim as well. They are going to have "light bulb above the head of an NPC" to indicate they have quests.

I actually prefer map markers these days in game given that hardly any effort goes into the quest text. So its pretty impossible to do the quest on huge world like TES games.

Quest markers above the head on NPC are definitely immersion breakers for me and I prefer the option to turn them off.

Since the whole graphic design yells "cartoon" or "comic book", it only makes sense to have the little !!! above everyone's head. I wonder if we'll get "bam" and "pow" when we connect in melee? It almost seems as if the limited intellect of Kurt Schilling is making all the game design decisions. Hard to believe the guy that designed Lazarus is working on such a fluff piece as Reckoning. Who knows? Maybe it'll end up game of the year.

The lack of modding is yet another poor decision. I understand it though. They really want to make an MMO and this is just a stepping stone. If they allowed this game to be modded, then people might be able to mod the MMO and totally mess it up.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Well you are going to get this in Skyrim as well. They are going to have "light bulb above the head of an NPC" to indicate they have quests.

Where is your reference. I can't seem to find this anywhere; including all the footage that has been released. Did you pull this out of your ass, or do you have confirmation?

I don't think the upcoming MMO has anything to do with the lack of modding support. I buy their argument that this is their first game so they don't wan to complicate things.

Originally Posted by crpgnut
Where is your reference. I can't seem to find this anywhere; including all the footage that has been released. Did you pull this out of your ass, or do you have confirmation?

I am not one for pull things out of my ass I wish I can though!

Anyway I saw it here,

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php…world-as-well/

Apparently you can turn the feature off.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Well you are going to get this in Skyrim as well. They are going to have "light bulb above the head of an NPC" to indicate they have quests.

The difference is that there will no doubt be mods to remove things like that in Skyrim. If KoA is truly going to be unmoddable, then I hope there will at least be menu options to toggle stuff like that on/off.

I'm not holding my breath though..

Originally Posted by JDR13
I have a feeling I'm going to be saying "I told you so" after this game is released.

You could be

But what did you tell me?

Something about this game being more akin to Fable than anything else.

I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but that's just the vibe I'm getting so far.

@lostforever-those quest markers aren't over the npcs, they're the markers on the map. Quest markers are for showing what location to travel to, it's not an icon over the quest giver's head. The reason Skyrim does this is because you can have 60 or more quests going at the same time, if you try real hard. I still prefer the ability to turn them off, which Pete says you can do. It isn't built into the game though. That will be one of the first mods I bet. From reading between the lines, it sounds like many Oblivion mods will be very easy to convert to Skyrim. Time will tell.

Back to your regularly scheduled KOA griping

Originally Posted by JDR13
Something about this game being more akin to Fable than anything else.

I sincerly hope I'm wrong, but that's just the vibe I'm getting so far.

Ah, that's right.

Still, I don't think it will be THAT much like Fable.

It should be said that I really liked Fable (the first one) - with my primary complaint being that it was just too small and limited. A "huge" Fable 1 would have been a great game to me.

I'm not really against the "fairy tale" atmosphere with bright colors, as long as it all fits together in a consistent manner. Fable did that part very well, but ended up not being anywhere near meaty enough to live up to the original promises.

But I'm getting a sort of "confused" vibe from the developers. I'm having a hard time seeing this game as having started with a coherent vision. I think it's burdened by how it came into being, by mixing the ideas of different people - and trying to cram all of them into a single wholesome game.

I'm still very, very interested in it - but I'm far from convinced that they've made the right decisions everywhere.

If it's true that they're going for a serious CRPG with massive and deep lore behind it, I don't think this idea of quest markers is the right one.

One huge appeal of deep and meaningful lore, is that you can often figure things out by yourself, simply by contemplating or remembering the history of locations/NPCs. To spoil it by having pointers to everything is a missed opportunity in a big way, if your lore is really strong.

It's as if they want two different games from the same game.

Originally Posted by crpgnut
@lostforever-those quest markers aren't over the npcs, they're the markers on the map. Quest markers are for showing what location to travel to, it's not an icon over the quest giver's head. The reason Skyrim does this is because you can have 60 or more quests going at the same time, if you try real hard. I still prefer the ability to turn them off, which Pete says you can do. It isn't built into the game though. That will be one of the first mods I bet. From reading between the lines, it sounds like many Oblivion mods will be very easy to convert to Skyrim. Time will tell.

Back to your regularly scheduled KOA griping

Are you sure? That forum post say

In TGS (Tokyo Game Show), I just witnessed quest markers being shown not only on the compass, but in the actual world as well. Like a light bulb above the head of an NPC, except that it's a marker icon

However it does say further below that you can turn them off.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Ah, that's right.

Still, I don't think it will be THAT much like Fable.

It should be said that I really liked Fable (the first one) - with my primary complaint being that it was just too small and limited. A "huge" Fable 1 would have been a great game to me.

I'm not really against the "fairy tale" atmosphere with bright colors, as long as it all fits together in a consistent manner. Fable did that part very well, but ended up not being anywhere near meaty enough to live up to the original promises.

But I'm getting a sort of "confused" vibe from the developers. I'm having a hard time seeing this game as having started with a coherent vision. I think it's burdened by how it came into being, by mixing the ideas of different people - and trying to cram all of them into a single wholesome game.

I'm still very, very interested in it - but I'm far from convinced that they've made the right decisions everywhere.

If it's true that they're going for a serious CRPG with massive and deep lore behind it, I don't think this idea of quest markers is the right one.

One huge appeal of deep and meaningful lore, is that you can often figure things out by yourself, simply by contemplating or remembering the history of locations/NPCs. To spoil it by having pointers to everything is a missed opportunity in a big way, if your lore is really strong.

It's as if they want two different games from the same game.

I think KOA will be the "Fable" equivalent of open world RPGs (TES and Gothic games). Everything I have seen so far indicates that. I am not saying that is bad things but KOA will be sort of RPG Lite like Fable.