Hey everyone! I am currently in the midst of creating a magic-adventure themed HQM pack (without giving too many details away) and was looking for direction from the community.
What kind of quests do you like? Are you a fan of tutorial quest lines on a specific mod? Are you a grindy type who likes building elaborate systems to obtain an ungodly amount of stuff? Do you like crafting a line of items? Do you like having to travel across multiple dimensions to obtain specific items?
What kind of quests do you hate?
What kind of rewards do you like? Reward bags? Items to help complete the next quest?
What kind of rewards do you hate?
I am looking for any opinions at all and I hope to make this a community driven pack that everyone can enjoy.
I don't like HQM in general, except, when the quests aren't a key-feature of the whole pack. (HQM, just isn't my thing I guess).
However, if the quests aren't overly done (too many quests, or to specific quests) it's fine with me.
Quests tend to be boring in any game becasue they always tend to be Kill X gather Y. Unfortunately in most HQM mappacks this is usually 90% of the case.
I'd like to see the quests used as a means to tell a story of the authors creations, but I don't know it HQM has the tools to handle that sort of narration.
As for loot bags, the are OK but they tend to trivialize a lot of tasks.
My experience with HQM is limited to just ME^4 (100% complete) and Regrowth (10% complete) but I will try to answer your questions none the less.
First I personally am an automator. I love spending hours building a cool base and automating absolutely everything with the goal of making all crafting regardless of complexity trivial and cranking out insane amounts of stuff on the quick if need be. I get that not everyone digs this part of the game.
Favorite quests are ones that stretch me early so like killing an enderman in regrowth or making manyullyn in ME^4 or making standard items in a non-standard way like getting cobalt through minechem rather than hitting the nether. I also enjoyed the gather stupid amounts of resources quests late in ME^4 simply because the numbers were so massive that you had to be smart about your build.
I must have spent a few days developing different wheat farms and cocoa bean farms in an effort to get one octuple compressed cookie. I finally worked something out that would complete in a rational amount of time only to learn I would need 50! Awesome back to the drawing board! That forced me to learn fluxed crystals and torcherino which I've never fooled with before. Same thing with 1,000,000 black stained glass. I had to come up with a XU+Chisel+Minechem+EnderIO+Torcherino franken-factory to get that made in a rational amount of time (SSP for me so rational is like 24 hours irl tops).
Quests I hate: Any quest which makes me work hard to make an item that will get stored in the trash can once the quest is complete. Examples from ME^4 include queen's gold, dogberium, and really most of the Metallurgy 4 metals. Metallurgy 4 is a cool mod and I do like getting forced to learn it but do a better job showing me the ins and outs of a mod. Don't just make me craft every item in the mod if there isn't a legitimate use for it down the line.
Good rewards bags: Anything that can be put to clever/involved use to get a jump on progression so for example:
ludicrite ingots in ME^4 I believe came from epic reward bags. These can be used to make XU wings because the recipe was altered to require a ludicrite block.
I also like a mix of good and troll rewards in the lesser bags. Some of the "good" ME^4 reward bags are just tons of minime's in golden lassos. Once you have 2ish golden lasso more are pretty sucky. I like the chance that I might get something really good I might get crap. Epic and Legendary bags are pretty much awesome across the board; you need to draw a line somewhere.
Bad reward bags: See above; done right even the bad is good.
Back to the big picture, a combination of go here, do this, gather this, submit this can force players to follow a certain trajectory through a map which can be good or bad of course. Parcel's use of the go here type was pretty minimal and not great honestly but that could be because of the nature of the map itself. If a dimension was prebuilt by the map maker to include useful or key sites, and go heres were used to guide the player to those honeypots that couldbe pretty fun. Like a crazy awesome place to set up your base or an ideal spot to gather a resource or build a remote factory/site for some nefarious purpose. I know this is a little less fleshed out but hopefully you catch my meaning. Hope this all helps you in developing your map!
Don't make an agranian skies style: 50k of X, if you've played into late game you know what I mean.
Good quests are ussualy ones that give basic guidelines, for example don't tell them to get a silverwood staff core, without telling to get something like a thaumomicon.
Reward bags should have a nice spread of garbage, general materials(iron, diamonds, etc) and a few basically game changers. In my opinion ME^4 reward bags were well made, only because of the amount of reward bags you receive. So give them at a steady rate, so they give a small source of helpful items, while not only giving you complete junk.
Ones that provide a meaningful gameplay experience/achievement.
Grinding XXXX amount of resources is a chore, not an achievement- unless you're driving a specific automation challenge
(in which case the achievement/gameplay is in the machinery and not the itemcount).
Likewise 'rewards'- thematically appropriate, well designed ones periodically unlock new gameplay elements.
This best reward design I've seen is still the original pyramid challenge map, where you had limited resource types- making automation an interesting engineering challenge, and each successful quest unlocked a new resource, giving new machines and mechanics.
I like modpacks with HQM that first help you get started with some crafting quests with rewards that'll help you get introduced in the way the modpack works and how to start using the mods.
after that there's quests that'll ask you to start gathering some resources in low quantities that'll slowly let's you progress with the mods.
at one point you start getting the more difficult quests where getting resources either require you to do numerous steps first, or where you've to do difficult tasks to complete the quests.
with these quests you should be plenty experience with the mods and you'll probably have already started doing your own kinds of builds with the mods.
at the end there's the real hardcore quests, which shouldn't be required, but would be a nice addition if you not yet want to stop playing the pack. these quests shouldn't be completely so quickly, but to keep the players entertained you could add some repeatable quests which aren't too hard and could give you nice rewards (low chance of getting really good rewards to motivate you to keep doing these repeatable quests)
but quests are one thing, the rewards are also very important. if I spend hours completing a quests I also want a reward that's worth doing the quest, otherwise I wouldn't feel satisfied at all with completing the quest.
Personally I dislike "Kill X amount of Mob" quests. They feel like they're just filler to me, and if the purpose is to gather the material they drop, then allow the player to gather that material in a way that they want.
As for rewards, I'd say put an option between a reward bag and an optional item that would make life easier (an example would be, say, a stone lumber axe in the first few quests). I personally would go for the reward bag, because I may have a gambling addiction or something, but others may prefer knowing what they get.
Yes- If represents significantly different pathways; so they player has to make a distinct choice between X or Y, and that choice actually bears some consequence later on in the map.
So choosing Xpath makes certain X-tasks easier, and Y-tasks significantly harder. Both X and Y tasks must be completed- but at no point will the player [or team] have access to both X and Y items.
