Alright, time for another fascinating and exciting editorial from Max!  Please, try to contain yourselves.  Anyways, I thought I’d try to make it clear to everyone reading, and to myself, what I’m focusing on with all of these seemingly random editorials.  As some of you may know, MMOs have an astounding amount of detail, ins-and-outs with almost everything that comes with the game.  What I’m doing is focusing in on certain aspects of the genre, or at least what has become standard as of right now from precedents, and then seeing what the Twin Skies staff could do, or is doing.  That whole spiel aside, most of the elements I’m checking out are in comparison to World of Warcraft, as that is the leading MMO as of right now.  The way Blizzard Entertainment implements these standards are unique and a good place to compare with.  Now, we can get into the fun part, today examining how Quests might work.

We need to cover what a quest is, even though that might sound simple. My definition is a story or part of a story told as a means to progress a character or the overarching lore of the game world.  That might sound a bit complicated, and reading over to myself it sounds a lot complicated, but it’s fairly easy to grasp.  A quest giver is in trouble, you help them, creating a story but still leading up to a bigger portion of another story.  Granted, some quests are just there for experience or items for your characters, but they are much more interesting then killing 15 gazillion Spotted Bears for the experience.

But how will quests be implemented in Twin Skies.  Part of the reason I chose this topic was the recent release of information regarding how a lot of aspects of the game will work.  Previous games have taken players on quests in much the same fashion, an exclamation mark over a quest giver, talk with them, do what they ask, and then return with whatever is requested, to a question mark.  This works, and as the old saying goes, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  My guess is this is going to end up in the final game, but that fine by me.

Content is pretty much the allure of most games, so everything must be fully fleshed out and meaningful to the games own lore.  One of the biggest disappointments in most games is the fact that most quests are just repeats of each other, i.e. go kill x amount of monster x, or collect 3,000 buzzard gizzards from buzzards.  Frankly, it’s boring, and hopefully Twin Skies will bring out something that is awesome.  From some of their recent posts, it looks like they are on their way to doing just that.

“Puzzle based quests are hard to do, those will be probably implemented in flash and live on the TS web site. Quests are going to be a lot more interesting than simply killing and collecting, those are just the easiest ones to implement so expect to see a few in early alpha/beta.” From this quote we can tell they are probably going to do a plot-like style on their website, Neopets-style.  The early plots they worked on were awesome, so let’s hope they can pull out another hand of aces.

“Some quests will be race-specific, but those will be in the minority. Humans will certainly be able to go to Elevere to complete the quests there.” This is an interesting quote, as that means any race can complete the quests lines of another races starting area.  This has been done in WoW, but it means that you can be anything you want, but still level up where ever you want.  Aces!

All of this is going to wrap up into what is a truly epic quest system.  Now, we still need to catch a glimpse at how receiving, returning, and the general UI of your quest log (where you keep your quests). UI, by the way, means User Interface, which is basically how you see and control almost every aspect of your playing experience. It’s a nice abbreviation, so I use it a ton!  Let’s look forward to quests, and also to my next editorial.  There’s a hint to the next one in the title of this editorial, so let’s see who can figure it out.  If you have any questions that you want me to answer or ideas for a topic, feel free to email me at maxveldink@gmail.com!  I look forward to your feedback and am grateful for all of the people who message me on Twin Skies with support.  Have fun playing mini-games, till we meet again!

]]> http://www.twinskiesplanet.com/guides/editorials/hop-on-the-lore-wagon-editorial/feed/ http://www.twinskiesplanet.com/news/twin-skies-news/november-9th-site-updates/ http://www.twinskiesplanet.com/news/twin-skies-news/november-9th-site-updates/#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:26:02 +0000 Brendon http://www.twinskiesplanet.com/?p=919 Yay for updates. We finally get to see some Petiole Concept Art.

New Fan Art was also added to the site!

And two more Screenshots were added. One of the Static Shore and the other of the Mountains. How lovely =D

About Houses:

• Yes, we are planning guild and communal housing. This isn’t going to be in the initial release however but it’s certainly planned. And yes, guild members of a certain permission level will be able to move furniture around.
• You’ll be able to set permissions on who can enter your house. You can set it to allow everybody, just your friends or a pre-determined guest list.
• We’re planning to allow user-generated content in the houses, but it will have to be pre-approved (so unlike Second Life). The winners of art competitions may have their art transferred to an in-game Twin Skies item
  We’re not sure on limits to items in the houses, we’ll have to see how that goes during testing. Probably enough to cover all your walls a few times over

About Quests:

• Puzzle based quests are hard to do, those will be probably implemented in flash and live on the TS web site. Quests are going to be a lot more interesting than simply killing and collecting, those are just the easiest ones to implement so expect to see a few in early alpha/beta.
• Some quests will be race-specific, but those will be in the minority. Humans will certainly be able to go to Elevere to complete the quests there.

About Characters:

• Character Death - Not permanently… we may make you do something annoying and/or silly in order to return to life however.
• You’ll be able to create quite a few characters per account, we’re not sure how many yet but it’ll certainly be a fairly substantial number.

About the Economy:

• Yes, of course We’re not going to ruin the in-game economy before the game has launched though. Meteorites will always be a seperate site currency and won’t be redeemable in the game. You’ll certainly need to collect both Meteorites and in-game gold though. Much like honour points, gold, and badges of justice in WoW, you gotta collect them all

Hello everybody,

Been so busy that I haven’t posted for a while, so I just wanted to keep everybody up to date on how the game is developing.

We’re still on for a launch next summer, and things are going really smoothly right now (they really are, this isn’t one of these OMG things are going wrong and we have to pretend they’re not threads We have Shoal, Four Farms and the Munching Grounds laid out and mostly finished and we’re working on Petiole, the Canopy Elf starting town right now. It’s going to be HUGE, full of crazy plants, floating platforms and tunnels.

On the development side we’re implementing our first quests this week and also working on monster spawn locations so we can put wolves in one area or rat men in another. The first design of the UI [user interface] is getting implemented right now and more importantly - the human female has a “walk backwards” animation, finally! Incidentally, I’ve been bugging Tom and Aaron to put up another blog so we should see one soon. We just don’t have much to show right now.

The Facebook app is going awesomely well, we think you’ll like it when you see what it’s about. We’re not strictly tied to Facebook and we don’t necessarily want people to sign up there to play it, it’s just the easiest social network to write games for. We eventually see the game being playable on multiple websites, including of course Twin Skies.

Player Housing is on the way to being implemented too. Right now if you go into a house you’ll teleport into a private instanced version of your own home. We’ve even got the UI coded so you can move your furniture around, put pictures on the wall etc. We hope to have some initial elements of that playable early next year.

So, I thought I’d basically let everybody ask any questions they want, then I’ll compile a list of the best ones and answer them over the next few days. Ask away!

Thanks,
Adam

How nice! =D

Click links below for more images
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First of all, the Wraith is out (see post bellow for more information).

Week 9’s Fan Art Competition winners were announced (including some pretty delicious treats).

New Screenshots made their way to Twin Skies too, all coming from the Elevere Forest.

Rattling chains and a plaintive howl are the first signs you’ll get when a wraith is drawing near. And second will be glowing lights swinging in the darkness and fog. And by that point, you’re a fool for not having already run away.

Wraiths come out only in dark places and are violently repulsed by sunlight. That being said, it seems to be their only weakness. They float through fog and night, skulls hanging from their chains; skulls considered to be those of the people they drug off into the night. Ghostly light seeps from the skulls’ sockets, rumoured to be the trapped souls of their victims.

You’ll know that you’re in a region haunted by wraiths when you see icons of the sun drawn on doors or hanging from windows. They’re charms said to ward away the ghastly creatures.