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Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you

by cgh 3mo ago

Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What? It’s all part of the Fromsoft experience but man, who writes these things?

tancop 3mo ago
thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.
- mostlysimilar 3mo ago
  Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.
  - SerpentJoe 3mo ago
    I would agree, but there are still some interactions that require doing the same thing repeatedly in order to make progress (eating rice balls, eavesdropping).
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  Especially in Elden Ring, it also contributes to the ludonarrative cohesion. Hyetta's quest (no spoilers!) isn't meant to be completed by everyone, her story is a foil to Melina's "default" questline that is mandatory for beating the game. Other characters (eg. Boc, Sellen, Selivus, Thops) also have quests that are easy to start but deliberately obfuscated towards the end. The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.
  - badprose 3mo ago
    They're victims of success. Lautrec was so infamous some people (read: me) are too scared to play the game without a guide now. "What if I missed some NPC and I can't level up anymore?!"
    - Jach 3mo ago
      I just accept I'll miss things / get some sub-optimal outcomes for my first play, though I do try to explore a lot and sometimes player messages help rather than troll/spoil/be funny. Guides only come out for NG+ and beyond.
    - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
      That's what I had; I was going through Elden Ring thinking "I will just play the game straight / naive the first time, no guides". Got close to the city and thought "...this feels like a point of no return / the end, better check if I missed anything important!". 100 hours later (or whatever) and I found out it's more like the halfway point.
- cgh 3mo ago
  Yeah, I’ve been playing these games since DS1 (currently on my umpteenth DS3 run as I recover from surgery). The quests never fail to make me laugh.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- guizzy 3mo ago
  And even before King's Field, this is just the way games used to be like. Games couldn't elaborate too much, so your options were: a) you lucked out and it turns out your brain works exactly like the designer's and the cryptic hint make sense to you, b) you use a guide/ask a friend/call a hotline, c) you like the game so much you end up brute forcing your way through all of that stuff, d) you just ignore that sidequest. I sure hope for you that finishing the main quest doesn't need you to guess something unreasonably obtuse... *COUGH* Legend of Zelda's final dungeon's location *COUGH*
bee_rider 3mo ago
This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.
vector_spaces 3mo ago
RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring. https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5 https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5 More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich
- baud147258 3mo ago
  > They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I can't really talk about DS2 because I didn't play very far in that one, but in DS1 there are a few NPC who do that, like Laurentius, Griggs and Ingward
dvngnt_ 3mo ago
It made more sense in Demon's Souls where the game was more linear so you'll more likely to encounter the NPC without a guide.
H1Supreme 3mo ago
When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue". Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.
- technion 3mo ago
  Yeah, it did always get me as a design issue. I get that "there's more to ask them" is valid. But there's never an indication of "OK I've said everything now". You only find out when they start repeating themselves. "Make the person repeat what they just told you" as a process is very immersion breaking.
- lelandfe 3mo ago
  The entire franchise is filled with what one would consider objectively bad designs It makes for a deeply unique experience overall Perhaps the one you’d most object to is the DS1 DLC, that people paid money for, lacking instructions for access. It involves killing a specific enemy and returning to a previous location. At the time, people forked over cash and had to prowl the whole game playing spot the difference.
  - jjmarr 3mo ago
    It has gotten worse. Shadow of the Erdtree requires you to kill a boss (Mohg) hidden within a SECRET AREA (Mohgwyn Palace) hidden within ANOTHER secret area (Consecrated Snowfield). And the Consecrated Snowfield is only accessible if you find two parts of a hidden medallion, the first in a castle later in the game than the lift it operates. The second is hidden in a jar underneath a mountain. But you can't just smash the jar, you have to talk to the NPC inside the jar twice before you'll get the medallion. The market rewards abstruse design.
    - mscbuck 3mo ago
      To be fair, there is a different way to get to Mohg. You can talk to Varre at the Rose Church in the Lakes of Liurnia, and he gets you on the quest line that gets you there. You basically have to invade 3 (i think) people's worlds, PvP, doesn't matter if you win or lose, or there is one NPC that you can do an invasion on in Altus Plateau. Then he'll give you an item that just needs to be soaked in the blood of a maiden (and it's made explicit what you need to do, not just left for you to figure out). After that you get the letter and he will take you to Mohg.
wisty 3mo ago
It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes). Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.
thechewanater 3mo ago
Elden Ring quests are implemented in a totally different set of systems from the one described in TFA, mostly something called EzState (dialogue trees) and EMS (map events). These are basically very primitive bytecode interpreters with unusual execution models and a small API surface to interact with the game world, so I think you're onto something. I can imagine the designers having a hard time implementing nicer interactions without constantly modifying the engine. According to [1], earlier versions of the EMS editor were built on Microsoft Excel, took 30s to open, and didn't support undo/redo. They rewrote it for Elden Ring, but Dark Souls quest design makes a lot more sense when you realize how hard it was to change anything. [1] https://cedil.cesa.or.jp/cedil_sessions/view/2662 https://cedil.cesa.or.jp/cedil_sessions/view/2662
WhereIsTheTruth 3mo ago
You picked the most filler, unfinished questline to make a point for your argument lol And yet, that's still way better than having a quest log UI, constant screen notifications, and narration that babysit you all the time, treating you like you have never played a RPG before, acting like you are too stupid to read and listen to npc dialogue and items lore I'll take the jank over what the western industry is filled with For their first real open world, it holds pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF0NyeCARf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF0NyeCARf4

by cgh 3mo ago

tancop 3mo ago

thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.

mostlysimilar 3mo ago
Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.
- SerpentJoe 3mo ago
  I would agree, but there are still some interactions that require doing the same thing repeatedly in order to make progress (eating rice balls, eavesdropping).
bigyabai 3mo ago
Especially in Elden Ring, it also contributes to the ludonarrative cohesion. Hyetta's quest (no spoilers!) isn't meant to be completed by everyone, her story is a foil to Melina's "default" questline that is mandatory for beating the game. Other characters (eg. Boc, Sellen, Selivus, Thops) also have quests that are easy to start but deliberately obfuscated towards the end. The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.
- badprose 3mo ago
  They're victims of success. Lautrec was so infamous some people (read: me) are too scared to play the game without a guide now. "What if I missed some NPC and I can't level up anymore?!"
  - Jach 3mo ago
    I just accept I'll miss things / get some sub-optimal outcomes for my first play, though I do try to explore a lot and sometimes player messages help rather than troll/spoil/be funny. Guides only come out for NG+ and beyond.
  - Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
    That's what I had; I was going through Elden Ring thinking "I will just play the game straight / naive the first time, no guides". Got close to the city and thought "...this feels like a point of no return / the end, better check if I missed anything important!". 100 hours later (or whatever) and I found out it's more like the halfway point.
cgh 3mo ago
Yeah, I’ve been playing these games since DS1 (currently on my umpteenth DS3 run as I recover from surgery). The quests never fail to make me laugh.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
guizzy 3mo ago
And even before King's Field, this is just the way games used to be like. Games couldn't elaborate too much, so your options were: a) you lucked out and it turns out your brain works exactly like the designer's and the cryptic hint make sense to you, b) you use a guide/ask a friend/call a hotline, c) you like the game so much you end up brute forcing your way through all of that stuff, d) you just ignore that sidequest. I sure hope for you that finishing the main quest doesn't need you to guess something unreasonably obtuse... *COUGH* Legend of Zelda's final dungeon's location *COUGH*

bee_rider 3mo ago

This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.

vector_spaces 3mo ago

RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring. https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5 https://youtu.be/vIbKALhzHVc?si=WRAQs77WG2QwVkt5 More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich

baud147258 3mo ago
> They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I can't really talk about DS2 because I didn't play very far in that one, but in DS1 there are a few NPC who do that, like Laurentius, Griggs and Ingward

dvngnt_ 3mo ago

It made more sense in Demon's Souls where the game was more linear so you'll more likely to encounter the NPC without a guide.

H1Supreme 3mo ago

When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue". Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.

technion 3mo ago
Yeah, it did always get me as a design issue. I get that "there's more to ask them" is valid. But there's never an indication of "OK I've said everything now". You only find out when they start repeating themselves. "Make the person repeat what they just told you" as a process is very immersion breaking.
lelandfe 3mo ago
The entire franchise is filled with what one would consider objectively bad designs It makes for a deeply unique experience overall Perhaps the one you’d most object to is the DS1 DLC, that people paid money for, lacking instructions for access. It involves killing a specific enemy and returning to a previous location. At the time, people forked over cash and had to prowl the whole game playing spot the difference.
- jjmarr 3mo ago
  It has gotten worse. Shadow of the Erdtree requires you to kill a boss (Mohg) hidden within a SECRET AREA (Mohgwyn Palace) hidden within ANOTHER secret area (Consecrated Snowfield). And the Consecrated Snowfield is only accessible if you find two parts of a hidden medallion, the first in a castle later in the game than the lift it operates. The second is hidden in a jar underneath a mountain. But you can't just smash the jar, you have to talk to the NPC inside the jar twice before you'll get the medallion. The market rewards abstruse design.
  - mscbuck 3mo ago
    To be fair, there is a different way to get to Mohg. You can talk to Varre at the Rose Church in the Lakes of Liurnia, and he gets you on the quest line that gets you there. You basically have to invade 3 (i think) people's worlds, PvP, doesn't matter if you win or lose, or there is one NPC that you can do an invasion on in Altus Plateau. Then he'll give you an item that just needs to be soaked in the blood of a maiden (and it's made explicit what you need to do, not just left for you to figure out). After that you get the letter and he will take you to Mohg.

wisty 3mo ago

It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes). Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.

thechewanater 3mo ago

Elden Ring quests are implemented in a totally different set of systems from the one described in TFA, mostly something called EzState (dialogue trees) and EMS (map events). These are basically very primitive bytecode interpreters with unusual execution models and a small API surface to interact with the game world, so I think you're onto something. I can imagine the designers having a hard time implementing nicer interactions without constantly modifying the engine. According to [1], earlier versions of the EMS editor were built on Microsoft Excel, took 30s to open, and didn't support undo/redo. They rewrote it for Elden Ring, but Dark Souls quest design makes a lot more sense when you realize how hard it was to change anything. [1] https://cedil.cesa.or.jp/cedil_sessions/view/2662 https://cedil.cesa.or.jp/cedil_sessions/view/2662

WhereIsTheTruth 3mo ago

You picked the most filler, unfinished questline to make a point for your argument lol And yet, that's still way better than having a quest log UI, constant screen notifications, and narration that babysit you all the time, treating you like you have never played a RPG before, acting like you are too stupid to read and listen to npc dialogue and items lore I'll take the jank over what the western industry is filled with For their first real open world, it holds pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF0NyeCARf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF0NyeCARf4