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Requesting Reviews: Master Wa, NW-DPJ8F64F8
keithejr
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users Posts: 20 Arc User
Hey Everyone, firstly this is my first venture into the foundry. I'd say I put about 10 hours into it. Not sure if that's average or what but the quest will take about 15 minutes I believe. The fights could be challenging. Its a dark plot, mostly hack n slash but there is a small quest line.
Anyone who could take the time to play this and give me feedback I would very much appreciate it and if you'd like me to review one of yours I will of course.
I really like the Foundry and hope they keep adding to it because it is what will really keep this game great.
Thank you, appreciate it,
Terrik
Anyone who could take the time to play this and give me feedback I would very much appreciate it and if you'd like me to review one of yours I will of course.
I really like the Foundry and hope they keep adding to it because it is what will really keep this game great.
Thank you, appreciate it,
Terrik
Post edited by keithejr on
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Comments
I'll start with the good. I actually really enjoyed the ethereal feel of this quest. There aren't a whole lot of details about what's going on, and that's ok. I see a lot of creativity with the effects you're using in your various areas.
Now the bad. It's way too hard. Like crazy hard. I get the feeling that maybe you've only played until level 20 or 30? Stacking piles of enemies is something you should be really careful doing. Once you're near the cap, a group that the Foundry lists as "hard" is actually hard. 3 stacks at once is crazy. I'll get into specifics in my point by point list below, but I'll say that I died around 10 times in the final boss room and went through 20 or so potions as well
I hope you don't feel like I'm beating up on you, but I'm going to provide a point by point list of the things I wrote down while I was playing. Some are minor, some are major, but I want to give you everything I can to help you go back into the Foundry, do some editing, and make this quest a good one to play.
1) A lot of your quest objectives are very brief. For instance, the first quest objective is "Kenwa," where it would be nicer to get something like "Find Kenwa" or "Talk to Kenwa"
2) There are a lot of capitalization mistakes in these first few dialogs. It improves a lot as the quest goes further
3) The very first fight in the game I pulled all three groups of spiders at once by firing one spell from where the apparition was standing
4) I understand that you're trying to make it look crazy, but the dancing emote on the apparition looks more silly than crazy
5) In the outdoor area, there are a couple of sets of bones and swords floating in mid air
6) Nothing actually stops me from walking through the fire, it's just a visual effect. If you want to stop the player from going somewhere, you should use invisible walls inside the flames.
7) The boss area right before the mirror was another crazy hard section. Ambushes can be good, but they are very quickly deadly for squishy characters like Wizards. I generally prefer to have my ambush group be an easy group, then have more groups spawn nearby.
8) Remember when you're suddenly spawning in groups, you have no way of being sure where the player will be. I had quite a lot of enemies spawn literally on top of me. Some were obviously meant to be ambushes, but others seemed to be an accident.
9) When warping to a new area, it's only fair to give the player a chance to look around before immediately dropping enemies on them. The first kobold spawns were so close to the room start that I was still disoriented when I had to fight them.
10) These fights were too hard, and there were too many in a row. I was literally killing one guy, dying, and respawning just to kill one more guy and repeating.
11) Half way through the boss fight you drop a bunch of flaming wreckage and fences to try and constrain the fight. However, you are blocking players from getting to loot that might have dropped, as well as trapping the respawn spot outside the fence. If you really want to constrain the fight that small, you need to be sure the player is going to be in the right area, use invisible walls, and make sure the respawn is inside the area as well. Really, this room is already small enough and doesn't need to be divided further.
12) The final boss was tough enough without another round of minions to fight as well.
So, that ended up pretty long, but hopefully you find it helpful. I'd be happy to run it again when you've made some improvements, but I won't be using 20 potions and 45 minutes of my time the next time.
1. Will add further directions/clarifications - thank you!
2. Will fix
3. Those are 3 easy camps and was on purpose that you'd get all 3 no matter what, was it too much?
4. Thanks, I will consider changing it but did want a drop of silly, lol
5. Was not aware of that, will fix
6. Didn't know about the invisible walls, will try to work that in
7. Was thinking about putting a dialogue or objective in between the boss fight near the mirror to reposition the player, you have confirmed that is probably needed!
8. Probably positioning again as you mentioned
9. :P That was on purpose too, for tempo purposes
10. Sorry, really am, had no idea it would be that difficult at lvl 60, can't wait! Will add a respawn point for heals in the final room, was debating if it was needed and wanted to have the hero feel like their life was really at risk. This way the player can cap off between rounds.
11. Yah I hear you, I did leave a small gap in the fences so people could move through but wasn't aware the debris would cover up loot???
12. yes sorry
So at this point, what do you think should be done to salvage it on a difficulty scale? Advertise it as an average difficulty DUO quest and extremely difficult SOLO quest with a notation that under level 30 it may be fine to SOLO?
9) I had a feeling it was on purpose, just keep in mind varying load speeds and object pop-in can make the first few seconds after a load really tough to maneuver in.
10) Remember that there can only be one respawn point per map, and that you can't heal when in combat.
11) I either didn't find or didn't fit through the gap in the fence. Thankfully, I was able to hop up on the rubble, then on to the interactables, and into the fight. Unfortunately this confused the HAMSTER out of the AI and actually made the final boss glitch out a bit. Also, after every death, the AI would warp around, confused, trying to get back to their places and the fight can't start again until they do.
11 part 2) I had a bunch of loot in the flaming wreckage and decided to jump in the flames to get it. It wasn't a game breaker, but it looked silly to light myself on fire just to get a couple of rings.
Edit: Let me know when the new version posts. I've subscribed to this thread so I'll see it when you post it here.
I pretty much took all of your advice, enhanced the story line, and toned down the fights a little more by putting dialogue breaks and such in between each one.
Please give it a shot anyone, it is a challenge!
Thanks!
Terrik
Brethren of the Five, Campaign. - Story focused
The Dwarven Tale - Hack 'N Slash
Hi, I will give it a go later also, as a first time author myself i am interested to try and gauge the difficulty levels.
Would appreciate if you can take a look at mine sometime, cheers!
The Captains Return Pt 1 - NW-DHEX3XPPU
The Lost Keep NW-DS1XBAK7D An experiment Daily Foundry
The Ruined Temple NW-DBHC7MUBL Latest and last one Daily Foundry
Good story, lots of lower case letters that need to be capitalized, didn't write them all down.
in wa's castle ambrosia was named ambrosia #1
and at the end there is no exit just a floating f to go to next map.
not sure how hard it was before but I found it fairly easy (only using one healing pot) until the last boss fight second wave i died and last wave i died lol. and chugged heal pots as i could cause my healer was toast.
The Lost Keep NW-DS1XBAK7D An experiment Daily Foundry
The Ruined Temple NW-DBHC7MUBL Latest and last one Daily Foundry
Appreciate the tips a lot!! Will make the grammar edits asap.
The Lost Keep NW-DS1XBAK7D An experiment Daily Foundry
The Ruined Temple NW-DBHC7MUBL Latest and last one Daily Foundry
Played this with my 36 TR and even then most of the fights were hard. Didn't die but I think i was lucky and chewed a few potions to get through. Too much stacking of mobs for my liking and I think at 60 would not be a fun quest.
The mobs don't seem to make alot of sense and not sure why I am fighting some of them.
I can see you tried to load this up with detail and atmosphere but it just doesn't meld well together.
Most time you could tell that you just added stuff in, some things were oversized like the portals that you hang the scrolls. It really seemed to cramp the final fight. And things like going home by touching a flag? Insert a door that is interactable or something like that. Also the last map need an exit. Just pressing F to leave map just feels lazy.
I also saw alot of grammer and wording that doesn't flow well. I know it can be hard but when you are trying to tell us alot by text it should read well.
Like the look of the third map but the fire on the stairs looks wrong when you have a flat area just below it.
Overall I guess I just didn't know why I was doing the things I did early enough. Personally I would like to have been told earlier that I needed to clear my conscience. A good start just needs some finetuning to be awesome. I feel your pain my first quest had lots of revisions before I got it to v2.0 and happy with it.
Whispers in the Forest NW-DPJGEXZJ8 - Daily
A Salty Sailor's Brew NW-DMOZP625S - Daily
Bonds of a Brother NW-DCP9XPZHI - Daily
Thank you for the review!
"The mobs don't seem to make a lot of sense and not sure why I am fighting some of them."
This is true somewhat, not sure how to approach fixing that though I agree something should be done and will have to think about it. Any ideas let me know!
" I can see you tried to load this up with detail and atmosphere but it just doesn't meld well together."
If you have specific examples other than the portals and flags (which I completely agree with you on) let me know! Have already fixed the F at the end, you are right about that too! I actually didn't know how to do that effect when I was first building it, lol
I'm going to have to figure out what you mean by fire on stairs in the 3rd map and will make it more "natural" if I can.
"Overall I guess I just didn't know why I was doing the things I did early enough"
I bet most people will feel that way about it. I'll have to think of something creative to give a little more background without ruining the mystery of it. It's tough to pull together and make the abstract cohesive. The original intent was to have disorienting violent environments with challenging fights to give the player the sense of true struggle and frustration with not knowing what is next or really why they are there. The hero in the story doesn't know, really isn't even capable of knowing, so the player should not either. Yet, again, there has to be somewhere someway to add a bit more substance and make things flow better. I'll have to ponder on this for a while! If you have ideas, i'm all ears.
Thank you for your help and awesome feedback. I will do one of your quests soon too and give any constructive feedback I can.
Really? I played this through and thought it was very good.
Thank you appreciate it.
Wanted to update this thread that I have made significant enhancements to the quest based off of feedback from this post and from the foundry review trading comments. To everyone that already played the quest and gave constructive feedback I wanted to share with you my appreciation for your help!
To anyone who hasn't tried it, give it a shot, and post here so with a quest of your own and I will review.
Thanks!
Terrik