When I was around level 20-30, I felt like the game mechanics were pushing me to start multiple seasons at the same time, but I found it confusing to experience five slices of the story in parallel.
Background
- Players gain access to the current season, as well as the season archive, at level 20
- I’m encouraged to start each season’s story early because:
- Season-story battles are one of the few game modes to grant full XP
- Main-story and side-quest battles grant slightly less XP than needed to stay at-level
- Seasons have unique rewards
- Season stories are written to make sense if you play through the main story, then 1.1, then 1.2, etc
- I was not able to play through the seasons in this order around level 20-30, because:
- Each season, enemies start at level 20 and quickly reach higher levels as the story progresses
- Season enemies are tougher than other enemies even at the same level
Possible solutions
- Give players tools to keep the stories straight
- Ability to rewatch previous conversations
- Ability to “review the story so far”
- Grant access to the season archive at a higher level, when players are ready to clear season 1.1 before moving to season 1.2
- Add an optional lower difficulty for each season, so low-level players can complete the stories.
- Enemies level 15-25, perhaps
- Grant the main rewards from this optional difficulty to players who choose to complete the season on a higher difficulty (like Adventures)
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Hi jruderman, nice seeing you drop in with such a great post! Pls have my “like” Have seen your joining the fan discord as well.
There are some excellent suggestions you made and I totally support this. Furthermore I would suggest a small summary for every season(al chapter) when new players drop in much later and have not the chance or will to play “older” chapters at first.
Besides that a lot of additional explanations are missing because they mix up elements from different games (Puzzlequest series, Warlords (Battlecry) series, …) what leads to huge gaps in understanding plots in a proper way. The best example is the appearance of Gornak Elfeater who is/was explained in one or two sentences (what a shame). This could have been much better if there would have spent more effort in story dialogues.
I mean what are we talking about? … A really huge game series universe to pick from
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And I never even considered all the issues that were raised above by jruderman. Following the story must be extremely difficult for new players.
Every time I’ve played a season I wished I could have re read the previous season quickly just as a recap as to what was going on. For the most point the story has been simple enough that I get the jist of where it was quickly enough and remember what was happening, but I still don’t remember the finer details. I’ve considered making a suggestion but I didn’t think I had a strong enough case or any good ideas for implementation. The original post definitely fulfils both of those criteria though.
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