SP - Quests Quest rewards need to be ‘buffed’... or do they?

[Peanut_Brother]

I find that during my playthroughs, questing consistently becomes an area of the game that falls off incredibly quick for me. Once I have assembled a solid little war party the small amount of gold and/or relation I gain from questing do not scale well with the needs of the player.

• Gold - Through field battles + selling the resulting loot, the player makes money at a substantially higher rate than they do through questing.
• Relation - Having high relation with notables isn’t good for much. Being able to recruit a few more recruits per village is nearly irrelevant compared to the amount of quality troops the player gets from recruiting rescued prisoners and from recruiting captured prisoners.

I believe that this is clearly not enough to make it worthwhile to pursue questing past the early game. If only Quests had additional rewards that weren’t as easily gained through other mechanics…. Oh wait they do!!

Prosperity, Security, notable power- there are many systems that are impacted by questing. They just aren’t communicated to the player. These are systems that have an impact on the campaign simulation yet it’s currently all happening in the background (I ramble about this much more on another post). If the player knew of the effects that completing a quest has, they may be more incentivized to quest past the early game. I’m not suggesting anything crazy, just that the full impact of completing a quest should be communicated to the player to increase the perceived reward. Even if it just shows up in the message log, I believe it would go a long way.

 

[Apocal]

Yeah, there are a lot of mechanics that are completely buried to a player. Opaque mechanics are cancer, the game can't just do stuff; it needs to clearly signal to the player that what they do is having an effect.

 

[Peanut_Brother]

Agreed, especially if you want the player to engage with the campaign meta game to any significance.

My favorite example is in The Last Days mod for warband. In it, there's a system called 'faction strength'. The player could check the current faction strengths at any given time and the system was clearly explained in the game notes. Upon completing certain quests you would see a message such as 'Rohan's strength has increased!'. And because of this-

I had the most fun questing I have ever had in Mount and Blade. I was also the most engaged in the campaign I have ever been in Mount and Blade.​

I'm not a game designer, so I can't say for certain that this is the solution. However as a player, I can confidently say that there is currently an issue with me being drawn to questing. Maybe the above could be a step in the right direction.

 

[Gojek]

I fully agree that quests needs to have more attractive rewards and they also need to be more interesting/fun to do.
By doing quests for lords, it would be great to receive some influence. Quests should also add some exp this would motivate lower level players to stick with questing longer.

I liked Viking Conquest campaign a lot. It was interesting and fun to do. I would love to see something similar added to Bannerlord.