Oh speaking of reputation; I have a few reputation bits of paper but the reputation part of the quest book is empty; is there something I need to do to cash in those reputation letters?
They're remnants of a removed feature. There was originally bigger plans, with quests gated behind rep gateways. But it was scrapped, in favor of a new plan of gating the quests behind other quests... which was eventually scrapped (along with further quests) due to a number of reasons, partly the surprisingly large time it took such a large group of people to write quests.
Seriously, once we got the quests in the book (which was no mean feat, with me personally pulling several all-nighters to learn and complete the Witchery questline once it became apparent that with days before the planned release, the original writers had vanished, leaving nothing but breadcrumbs), a third of the original team left, Jadedcat, left, I found myself in charge and then had so much personal junk, I went missing for about two months. Others tried to step in, and failed.Looking back, the team was WAAAY too big. We originally had about 2 quest writers per chapter in the book of varying quality and putting various amounts of effort into them, and not all saw eye to eye.
Don't get me wrong. What we have in the pack is great. It works, and gets people who may know nothing about magical mods started down the right path for setting up some cool bases themed around a particular (or couple of) mod(s). It's just that if the original plan - of an RPG-style playing one house off against another, rep based rivalry storyline that'd cater for players of all skills, had panned out, then this had the potential to have been a truly epic pack.
Well, this post turned into more of an eulogy of Mage Quest than I planned. So I'd better list some key points of what went well, and not so well with this pack. Modpack creators, listen up!
Positive
- Lightweight
- Good beginning for new players to Magical packs/mods
- Varying styles of writing in the same modpack
- Quest structure - Clear and easy to follow paths
- No "grindy" quests
- No gating quests behind tedious requirements. (Except for the Cow Quest. You know the one if you've played the pack)
- Pop culture references! Oh so many pop culture references. Most of them relevant.
- Mostly funny AND relevant quest descriptions and instructions
- The theming of each "house" to an individual deity, culture or religion is something I personally really enjoyed. ESPECIALLY from a writing point of view. I read so much Norse mythology in one week to write those Witchery quests, I swear my flatmates thought I had issues.
Negative
- Way too big a team. NEVER have 13 writers working on the same pack. My main takeaway point from this project.
- Lacked focus. Too many people with too many different visions for the pack
- Too big in scale - We had a vision that takes some game designers literally years to flesh out. I kid you not, at one point, I was tempted to use string.
- Lacked a strong leader for most of the time (hint- I led them for quite a while after Jaded left. That says enough
)
- Slow to release updates - again, I'll take the fall for this. Most, if not all of the newer releases were compiled by me after Jaded left
- Never fulfilled half the promises it made
- Varying quality of quests
Will there ever be another quest based pack from the FTB team? Only time will tell. But I know that I at least will learn from the lessons we've learned from the pack.
