Feeling railroaded into secret missions

[Penumbra]

Nope, they show you exactly what spell with what modifier you're going for. Kind of ruins any chance at a sense of mystery. I have several missions I'm just ignoring until they time out now because the spells have modifiers I'm not interested in. If it didn't tell me up front, I would probably be running them 'just in case'.

I get that, but, how frustrated would you be if it felt like you only ever got modifiers you didn't like?

But then you would get a new mission. That one, yeah, maybe that one will give you what you want. 

[JBSpook]

The Diablo series is another good example of this.

People put in thousands of hours completing the games over and over looking for that perfect weapon or armor sets.

[BobTheJanitor]

Yeah, it's the traditional RPG loot impulse. If every monster in the dungeon had a bubble over its head showing exactly what sort of sword it's going to drop, you would run past all of them and gank the one guy with an epic and the rest would be left behind.

Also on that note, if this hide-the-loot method is implemented it would be nice to have a very rare chance at getting the rare/epic/legendary classes of spells from missions. If I understand correctly you can currently only get those via crafting.

[tigersfan]

I'm not opposed to the idea of "hidden loot", in fact, I kinda like it. I was playing a bit of Devil's Advocate to see how you guys would react.

[Mánagarmr]

I'm not opposed to the idea of "hidden loot", in fact, I kinda like it. I was playing a bit of Devil's Advocate to see how you guys would react.

With HOLY VENGEANCE!
No, but seriously, partly hidden loot would definitely add to the glee factor, I think.

[Mysterial]

I think a big part of the problem here is the auto levelling spells. I started a new game with 1.2 and early on things worked as they were supposed to: I did a mix of missions for spells and exploration for ingredients, found a few secret missions which gave me useful scrolls including a wind shelter or two, got enough stuff to take on a lieutenant, etc.

However, at around level 3, once I stockpiled some orbs and crafting ingredients (plus more from playing around with NPC dispatches) that changed; most of my spells were auto leveling at least once or twice, so even after killing the next lieutenant, I was immediately ready to move on to the next. No need to hunt for loot, so no finding much in the way of secret missions for buildings. The only obstacle that remained to progressing was wind shelters. In my experience so far in the game, it's really fun when I have multiple simultaneous goals and breaks down really badly when there's only one thing I want.

IMO an easy first part answer is to just lower the auto leveling amount by 1, i.e. Common - 0, Uncommon - 0, Rare - 1, Epic - 2, etc. Uncommon orbs aren't that rare, they're still desirable for the extra bonus modifier, and it seems self-defeating for the most common way to acquire materials for spells to directly cause you to need/want to do less of it.

I also feel like there should be some defensive upgrade that you want to make between lieutenant fights to go with the offensive upgrades. Perhaps shielding shouldn't be automatic but acquired somehow? Would that be too complex/unintuitive/hard to keep track of?

Re: the mission discussion, I think the way it's set up now is really good for the early game - gives new players some clear focus and direction and is OK for a while beyond that because it can tempt players with new modifiers or combinations they haven't seen (which is a note against all missions being hidden reward, although some could be). However, after a while, I just start doing a quick pass to make sure nothing I hadn't seen before popped up and then ignoring them. It seems like it's probably not necessary for 100% of world map missions to be spells. Maybe seed a few of the more essential scrolls at reduced rates as well?

[Misery]

I'm not opposed to the idea of "hidden loot", in fact, I kinda like it. I was playing a bit of Devil's Advocate to see how you guys would react.

With HOLY VENGEANCE!
No, but seriously, partly hidden loot would definitely add to the glee factor, I think.

I agree with this.

Hell, just hide it entirely even.   Or something.

The current way of "Ok, this mission gives me this exact spell that does exactly this" isnt very exciting.   I find myself not doing too many missions currently, aside from secret missions.

[TechSY730]

Just posted this in another thread, and though it was relevant here too:

I do feel like the reward structure/probability distribution is mostly geared towards new players/new worlds. This is fine, as it helps you get started up faster, but then it becomes annoying later on, because then you start getting handed stuff you don't need nearly as much, and this indirectly, makes it hard to get stuff you need to progress past the mid-game.

Maybe probability distributions and eligible rewards from different types of missions, stash rooms, and caves should shift some as you go up in level and continent, to reflect that now character building is less of a priority and "world" and settlement building becomes more important. (This might include having map missions give non-spell rewards with slightly higher and higher chances of non-spell rewards as you go up in level, though even at minimum probability, spells should still be relatively common reward for map missions)

[Ulrox]

Well yes. I'm not doing any missions at all either because it's more interesting getting uncommon - rare gems and using them to get more powerful spells. I personally would not mind at all if you stopped getting spells from missions and only were able to craft them. That would just make the game more fun imo. I am of the belief that missions should serve a different purpose than what they do now. If missions gave me conciousness shards then they would be very very valuable and useful to do, because they would always futher your goal of taking down the overlord. Right now conciousness shards are much easier to farm underwater with a ring of fire spell to oneshot high level bosses.

It is sad imo that missions dont serve much purpose because they break up the gameplay in various ways by creating goals and "rules" to get to those goals. They are minigames which obviously creates new gameplay which removes the "grindy feeling" from the game.

[tigersfan]

Well yes. I'm not doing any missions at all either because it's more interesting getting uncommon - rare gems and using them to get more powerful spells. I personally would not mind at all if you stopped getting spells from missions and only were able to craft them. That would just make the game more fun imo. I am of the belief that missions should serve a different purpose than what they do now. If missions gave me conciousness shards then they would be very very valuable and useful to do, because they would always futher your goal of taking down the overlord. Right now conciousness shards are much easier to farm underwater with a ring of fire spell to oneshot high level bosses.

It is sad imo that missions dont serve much purpose because they break up the gameplay in various ways by creating goals and "rules" to get to those goals. They are minigames which obviously creates new gameplay which removes the "grindy feeling" from the game.

Just throwing this out there... but what if we made the spells considerably more expensive to craft? This would have the effect of ( I think ) making the missions have more meaning because each spell would require more work before it could be crafted. The missions would then be a much less time consuming route to get spells.

[Mick]

I think I'd rather have a mix of both. Harder to craft spells AND missions giving you crafting components (and possibly shards) instead of straight up spells.

The crafting system is pretty cool, so I don't see why there needs to be a mechanism in the game that bypasses it.

[Ulrox]

Just throwing this out there... but what if we made the spells considerably more expensive to craft? This would have the effect of ( I think ) making the missions have more meaning because each spell would require more work before it could be crafted. The missions would then be a much less time consuming route to get spells.

The crafting system is a minigame in itself. It requires you to either enter houses to get uncommon/rare gems and/or go into the depths of the earth to find gems and possible face higher level monsters in the process. I personally would still be focussing on the crafting aspect of the game as I feel that it is much more rewarding and interesting than doing a mission and then getting a spell from said mission. I obviously cannot speak for anybody but myself though and everyone has different tastes as to how they wish to take on the overlord, but rewarding your players with conciousness shards would still leave things quite "open" for players to do with what they want.

[TechSY730]

Not sure how many of some of you have been around, so this may seem like old news.
Not too long ago, overworld missions and secret missions gave crafting ingredients, and/or guardian scrolls and/or buildings. The rational behind the change is rather involved, but some reasons included making overworld missions and secret missions more distinct, giving something for stash rooms to have (some of the rarer crafting ingrediants were moved to stash rooms), and providing a relatively easy way to keep your spells "up to date", especially given the new level mechanics.

Now is there room for improvement? I most certain think there is. But it still is better than what we had. Perhaps some of the old system can come back someway, like have a chance for missions to seed something that they used to. Or perhaps take up my earlier suggestion, which was to reverse the rewards from map and secret missions (make secret missions offer spells, and make overworld missions offer scrolls and buildings)

[tigersfan]

Now is there room for improvement? I most certain think there is. But it still is better than what we had. Perhaps some of the old system can come back someway, like have a chance for missions to seed something that they used to. Or perhaps take up my earlier suggestion, which was to reverse the rewards from map and secret missions (make secret missions offer spells, and make overworld missions offer scrolls and buildings)

I agree that there is room for improvement, absolutely. My issue with switching the different mission rewards around is that people are already complaining that finding the secret missions is grindy, and if you have to do that to find spells, I think that would get even worse. I think that perhaps having map missions give BOTH scrolls and spells might work. I also like the idea of secret missions giving some of the harder to find (but not required) scrolls, as well as perhaps rarity orbs. Then make the secret missions harder to find to balance it out.

[BobTheJanitor]

On a related note, I'm not sure how much I like the arcane crafting ingredients now being limited to only stash rooms or dispatch missions. For example, I'm trying to get a couple comet shards (I think that's what it was anyway) and none of my settlers have enough of a survival/success chance to make it worth sending them. So I look to see where it can be found. Seems the best place is swamps. I ran through some swampland, and apparently buildings there are extremely rare. I think I found one, maybe two? Plus stinging nettles everywhere that barely can be seen sometimes because they spawn low in the ground, plus wisps grabbing me all the time. I got out of there with 1/10th of a health bar and no crafting ingredients to show for it. Next most likely is craggy highlands, of which I have none on this continent. So the last place to find them is thawing woods. So I go clear out all the stash rooms in all the buildings for several chunks, but still not a single one of the ingredients I need. All told this was probably 1-2 hours of game time with a clear goal that I wanted, but I never got even one of the ingredients I needed. Of course under the old system it was just as likely that missions wouldn't spawn with what I needed either. So the whole thing might be a wash either way.