Hey guys’n gals.[li]
quick question. I recently did the Adventuress’ new Quest Line, and I’m a bit confused as to the resolution of the storyline. What was it meant to do? I’m not going to mention what happened (cause, spoilers, y’know.) but to those who have done the quest line… what do you think about it? What was the whole deal with that thing in the place with the people? it seems a little… odd to me.
You could check the Icarus in Black thread for some of the community’s thoughts, though the general consensus seems to be sadness and disappointment.
I for one am just really disappointed we barely get anything for sacrificing the current game’s best Gunnery Officer. No big unique legacy item, replacement Officer/Mascot, stockpile of loot, much less an upgraded Officer. It was just typical miserly Abbey Rock.
Unlike the other Officer storylines her quest just seems so streamlined and half-baked, with all choices essentially leading to 1 outcome regardless of what you do. With the whole Vake encounter the ending really looked like it was shaping up to a Legacy item for Veils akin to the Page-boosting Horizon Codex but alas…nothing much was gained and I’m putting off the game until the Diamond Update.
edited by Bardigan on 1/7/2015
Has anyone done it at Godfall? I saw that was an option.
I tried it but they just tell you and her to go somewhere else.
[color=#009900]Some of the Officers’ storylines are deliberate experiments in form. I’ll blog about it when I’m done, but the Adventuress’ is definitely one of them, and the arc is unusual. I am really interested in feedback on how people reacted to it - but if you feel a sense of loss because you didn’t get enough stuff, then it’s kinda operating as intended. :-)[/color]
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[color=#009900]oh dear that sounds very indie dev, doesn’t it? Let me rephrase: I think the story will provoke a variety of responses, from ‘meh’ to ‘huh?’ to ‘eek!’, but although you strictly turn a good profit on pure Echo value, the rewards are deliberately minimal.[/color]
While I respect the dev team for their boldness in experimenting with the officer storylines, I foresee this quest becoming one of those instances in a game where future players will just put off until the very endgame of their current captain or not finish at all (until the Irrepressible Cannoneer gets an upgrade or the devs add another and better Gunnery Officer into the mix anyway).
Unless the Presbyterate constantly sends its Prester John Ninjas to attack your ship whenever you dock at FL, Port Carnelian or Apis Meet, or your Captain becomes hampered by some other crippling inconvenience related to the Adventuress ’predicament; there really is no incentive to finish the questline beyond that initial phase of curiosity from a gameplay standpoint. Oh, you get echoes? Well 1 Searing Enigma is chicken feed the way the player is allowed to farm them in the current build of the game (welp here comes the nerf). I make more from being a glorified tourism operator than killing my best gunner. I just don’t see new captains becoming desperate enough to kill the Adventuress for a measly 1k, especially since it’s offset by the 5 hentai books you have to purchase from the Mongols to even finish the story.
Sure you’ll provoke varied utterances of ‘meh’, ‘wut?’ and ‘holy shit!’ from players who encounter the quest for the first few times, but eventually those exclamations will fade into mutters of ‘oh…this quest again? Meh, not finishing it’. The novelty wears off, particularly once it gets onto the Wiki and Guides.
Even from a role-playing standpoint I can’t see any moral incentive to complete the questline as it stands now either. Is it abhorrent to my values that the Adventuress and her kin are allowed to live for centuries? Nope, not in this type of setting. Is it abhorrent to my values that children be punished for the sins of their fathers and such backward traditions be upheld? You bet your delicious posteriors it is.
So until the player gets the option of sailing up Darkgryphon to attempt the overthrow of the College of Mortality, this quest goes nowhere for me.
This prominent quest just doesn’t seem to promote replayability in a sea of other branching storylines, choices and endgames that do.
But that’s what you intended all along, isn’t it? I await your blog on this subject.
edited by Bardigan on 1/8/2015
Even if the Cannoneer were an unambiguously “better” gunnery officer, strategically speaking, I still wouldn’t want to kill the Adventuress, so.
On the subject of the Adventuress, I have to say that for me, while I understand the narrative of her story arc and that she wants what’s going to happen, it is a little easy to get through that arc if that’s what you want to do, which in turn I suspect is why the reward for getting through it is simply monetary and not an upgraded officer (because if it were an upgraded officer for effectively a little sailing and about 400 echoes worth of goods, it’d be too easy…). As for the better officer, in strict numerical terms, the adventuress is better than the Cannoneer, but for the purpose of the officer slot, the Cannoneer wins every time…
I’m rather fond of the Adventuress. In short, I think she’s badass as hell. Were I in the captain’s position, I’d be crying "Change your name! Change your face! …maybe not like that, but the Rubberies can do things… anyhow, you don’t have to die just yet! You’re only a hundred - there’s loads of people older than you about. Come adventuring with me and tell me stories. Go on - just a few more months. Or maybe a year or two. C’mon, it’ll be fun." Honestly, I like the story, but she’s such a cool character, it saddens me that she just disappears. I want to carve a memorial to her or something. A tasteful inscription of her punching a Master in the face.
Of “Good” Deaths, she’s got one, but I think that things like that should be for the captain of the ship to achieve, something like that would be an excellent way to end the game in my opinion, even if my next captain got nothing but bad memories :)
>(1)…replayability… (2) a little easy to get through that arc
[color=#009900]Both true. These are compromises with the larger game framework.[/color]
[color=#009900]Replayability: all the stories lose much of their emotional heft on replay, and I expect a lot of captains will just not trigger the Adventuress’ story on some playthroughs. (Her story only begins when you dine with her - unlike the Campaigner, who you have to fight to save and whose story is the formal inverse of the Adventuress’ - so you can just keep her in future games, if you like).[/color]
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[color=#009900]Short arc: similarly, people will bring different goals to the game. Some players will only be interested in the mechanical optimals and regard the story as fluff - some are pure roleplayers - the vast majority are somewhere in between. So I was keen not to make the Adventuress too much of a piñata, but I realised that if I put her at the end of a Curator-sized goose-chase and then didn’t give a big reward, people would be understandably upset.[/color]
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[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]It’s all compromise, variety and experiment. I don’t want to suggest I have a perfect artistic vision here![/color]
[color=#009900]There are currently, I believe, four good-death-like endings, with a couple more to come.[/color] :)
Thanks for the brisk reply and explanation.
Now that I think of it I was also disappointed with how quickly the quest ended and thought it was a lost opportunity to further explore the lore and culture (and loot) of the Presbyterate along with an actual native friend with first-hand experience.
I had thought that while the Adventuress asked for a "Good Death" your captain was free to bugger that idea and engage in a longer, much more difficult questline involving a long trek into the Garden from Apis Meet and facing the Presbyter and the College or somesuch. Maybe even tying it with that incomplete "Found your own kingdom" legacy with the takeover of the Presbyterate under the Mountain’s patronage through strength of arms or subterfuge.
Is it too late to add an alternate, harder path for the storyline in future patches? Perhaps after the projected full release?
edited by Bardigan on 1/8/2015
[quote=Alexis Kennedy]
[color=rgb(0, 153, 0)]It’s all compromise, variety and experiment. I don’t want to suggest I have a perfect artistic vision here![/color][/quote]
You have a vision though, and that’s the best part of it.
On the subject of whether or not things trigger naturally, I believe they should, I don’t like the idea that you have someone sitting there as a placeholder when they have a good story to tell, the campaigner storyline is a good one and because it triggers no matter what, it gives it a sense of being urgent, whereas the adventuress will sit there quietly (Possibly for years in game time) keeping her thing to herself, and that doesn’t make for a good storyline.
[color=#009900]The Presbyterate and the Mountain are firmly off-map, although they might make an appearance in future SS expansions or FL content (or even other games) - I’m afraid the tempting light of the Mountain on the distant horizon is a pretty concrete metaphor. The ‘found your own kingdom’ legacy is much more humble in scope - we originally had slightly grander ambitions for it, but the game as it emerged just didn’t support it.[/color]
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[color=#009900]We have to be careful with this stuff: too many timed stories and people start to feel panicked, and the game is already (by design) short on resources. But I wanted to put a variety of trigger mechanisms in the game and watch how people respond to them; and the Feedback Machine gladly feasts on your feedback![/color]
Are most people playing at maximized stats where having her would make a difference? I use secrets occasionally to improve, and with the fluctuating conditions out at sea, I don’t really know what +3 veils does. (I do feel panicked when I think of all the officer’s stories! While I like that advancement in this storyline is only based on the player’s curiosity, I wonder if her loss is also about culling the officer lists down - a tiny part of me has never been able to reconcile why officers don’t count as crew. This isn’t a thing that should have any bearing on playing the game, but when I made my way up Adam’s way, everybody on my crew left, but somehow none of the officers did. I hallucinated them like Lilac, maybe?)
I think the adventuress is my favorite out of all the dying well storylines - it’s a great story, and all that lore was also great. It’s a necessary counter to the Curator and the Principles, who both seek an end having wearied of this very exciting world, so she’s - I don’t think relatable is right, but the desire to make a permanent mark would appeal to all captains who have the sea as the dangling sword over their heads, instead of senescence and ninjas - rage against the dying of the light and all that. (I read recently The Kingdom of Gods which also has the adventures of an young immortal coming to terms with unexpected aging and mortality, so my fondness might be partly due to that echo)
I would like something unique from the completion of her quest, though - I understand how someone might be driven to sell her gun, but we have the sentimental lockets from the sweethearts and it’s hard to remember that all those outlandish artefacts are individual treasures. I second the permanent token commemorating her - a more substantial quality in the journal would work, like the ones for the principles and the curator.
Panicked is how the Campaigner’s storyline makes me feel. So I just don’t get her. The state of your map and of your player knowledge has a big impact on whether you have a prayer of finishing that storylet in time. I’m ok with it in that ultimately the differences between most officers are kinda minimal. But I suspect it’s tied to Time the Healer or something, because in my fresh game from the last update I waited probably 8 or 10 hours to get her…she immediately went into her storylet, practically after I left port. That left a sour taste in my mouth.
On replayability, it’s just the nature of the beast. That hasn’t stopped me from, like, re-reading and playing my Lone Wolf books about 50,000 times in my life. The unfortunate side effect for me is I start clicking through stuff by habit, and sometimes miss stuff >.> From a purely mechanical/gamey standpoint, a part of game play is learning what’s "not worth the time" to do. The fact those are all wrapped in wonderful stories is what makes it tolerable, to me.
edited by Nenjin on 1/9/2015
Yes, it’s interesting that no-one expects the rereadability of a book or the rewatchability of a movie to be predicated on how much it changes between viewings. I wonder why it is different for games. Audience-side: expectations? Creator-side: intentions?
Anyway, yes, it’s tied to Time, the Healer – I think someone said 200, 300, and 400, though I can’t confirm that since I’m terrible at paying attention to TtH. It was definitely a very frantic feeling at the time; I think it was the correct response for the game to provoke, but I would not like for all or most of the officers to have timebomb stories, so to speak. And it doesn’t look like things are shaping up to be that way, so I’m not too worried.
huh, I didnt have any trouble with the campaigner’s storyline, but then I played a +40 hour run and my time the healer never rose above like the 190s because I would intentionally use up my SAY at Hunters Keep/Mutton Island. The reason for this is I was smuggling things (42 mirrorboxes per trip is a lot of cash dollars), and the excise men (and time the healer) never trigger if you don’t have SAY.
There’s not really any reason or incentive to ever return to London with SAY once you have a decent set of officers and a Scion. Even the terror reduction isn’t really an incentive to bring SAY to london as you can just kill 4 bats or the tiny crabs that are right there just outside of london in a single shot once you’ve got a marginally good weapon and that nukes terror just as effectively without the risk of gaining a nightmare. Or if you have the echos, sleep in your lodgings isn’t a bad deal since it heals wounds and gives restful nights. In fact, the terror reduction was a disincentive for returning with SAY for me because
it would reduce my terror low enough that I would lose Lilac if I tried to sleep in my lodgings to heal wounds. I had to grind terror to near mutiny 6 or 7 times to get her back because of this :/
I don’t really think you could prevent someone from halting TTH and the excise men indefinitely. Is there any reason to advance time?
Wait, TTH only increments when docking in London with SAY? Then are the dates in the logbook totally arbitrary?