Uzbekistan has long been one of the largest natural gas exporters in the world and that is set to increase as they have huge untapped reserves. Same story with oil although they aren’t yet a top exporter, so far as I know.
Any well-travelled guy is familiar with women who ask them to pretend to be married to allow them to escape constant, occasionally dangerous male pestering. In Turkey, I even met a woman who carried fake wedding bands for this purpose. We hung out for a few days as a “married” couple so she could get relief from the constant harassment.
I was asked to do that in my hometown with a girl I had never met before. It’s not only tourists, and it’s not only in foreign places.
BTW, that girl had to be 5% handsy with me to sell the lie, and when I met her real boyfriend that same night, he pretended to be royally pissed for five seconds and I was so scared. He laughed it off. Good guy.
Perhaps this explains why Fromsoft npc quests are easily the most inscrutable in all of gaming. Like, okay Hyetta, have another “grape”, aka eyeball, oh now you’ve moved to the bridge in Liurnia, cool. I’ve exhausted your dialogue but you’re stuck. Oh I have to reload the area and exhaust it again to advance your quest. Okay, cool. Now you’re in a random church and you want a “fingerprint grape”. What?
It’s all part of the Fromsoft experience but man, who writes these things?
RE who writes these things: I know you're probably referring to code here but on the actual dialogue side, there was a charming interview recently with the person responsible for translating Miyazaki's vision into English. He apparently did all of the writing (dialogue, item descriptions, UI text) for Dark Souls, and split the work with just one other person for all the later games including Elden Ring.
More topical, I do actually appreciate some of the persistent jankiness like this that hasn't changed since their original games. They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub. I personally hated this -- one element I really enjoyed in the earlier games was this sense that the world doesn't revolve around you. The NPCs feel like rich characters with their own goals and motivations
Having them leave when you're finished talking to them sort of reduced them to utilities, which of course they are ultimately, but the gamefeel suffered a bit from making that more explicit. Don't me wrong though, I love DS3, but I didn't care for that particular change
Anyway, handling NPC progression in this way where the player needs to reload the area is more about navigating a technical limitation than anything else. But like many constraints it conspires with others to produce a certain gamefeel that I enjoy. It would feel a bit less impactful if Hyetta just moved on the instant I exhausted her dialogue -- it's more interesting for me to return and see that she has moved on
Another example of this sort of thing is FromSoft supposedly historically being bad at animating eyes, hence many critical NPCs being blindfolded or with faces hidden by helmets or otherwise obscured. This imagery plays nicely with their other sensibilities around character design and is thematically pretty rich
> They experimented with different approaches in DS3, where certain NPCs you encountered would essentially evaporate after you exhausted their dialogue, and they would later materialize back in the hub.
I can't really talk about DS2 because I didn't play very far in that one, but in DS1 there are a few NPC who do that, like Laurentius, Griggs and Ingward
Elden Ring quests are implemented in a totally different set of systems from the one described in TFA, mostly something called EzState (dialogue trees) and EMS (map events). These are basically very primitive bytecode interpreters with unusual execution models and a small API surface to interact with the game world, so I think you're onto something. I can imagine the designers having a hard time implementing nicer interactions without constantly modifying the engine.
According to [1], earlier versions of the EMS editor were built on Microsoft Excel, took 30s to open, and didn't support undo/redo. They rewrote it for Elden Ring, but Dark Souls quest design makes a lot more sense when you realize how hard it was to change anything.
When I finally started using the internet to figure out what I'm supposed to do next on some of the quests, I couldn't believe how many of the answers were "Talk to the NPC three times in a row to exhaust their dialogue".
Like, are you shitting me? Why? After a while, I would do this to every NPC, every time. But, yeah, it's a bad design.
The entire franchise is filled with what one would consider objectively bad designs
It makes for a deeply unique experience overall
Perhaps the one you’d most object to is the DS1 DLC, that people paid money for, lacking instructions for access. It involves killing a specific enemy and returning to a previous location.
At the time, people forked over cash and had to prowl the whole game playing spot the difference.
It has gotten worse. Shadow of the Erdtree requires you to kill a boss (Mohg) hidden within a SECRET AREA (Mohgwyn Palace) hidden within ANOTHER secret area (Consecrated Snowfield).
And the Consecrated Snowfield is only accessible if you find two parts of a hidden medallion, the first in a castle later in the game than the lift it operates. The second is hidden in a jar underneath a mountain. But you can't just smash the jar, you have to talk to the NPC inside the jar twice before you'll get the medallion.
To be fair, there is a different way to get to Mohg. You can talk to Varre at the Rose Church in the Lakes of Liurnia, and he gets you on the quest line that gets you there. You basically have to invade 3 (i think) people's worlds, PvP, doesn't matter if you win or lose, or there is one NPC that you can do an invasion on in Altus Plateau. Then he'll give you an item that just needs to be soaked in the blood of a maiden (and it's made explicit what you need to do, not just left for you to figure out). After that you get the letter and he will take you to Mohg.
It's not secret, but it's not exactly easy; you can find one part of the medallion just by exploring (iirc its description says what it's for), but not sure if the second half is that straightforward.
And even then, while an item may say "use it here", if it's been dozens of hours since you got it you may just straight up forget about it.
That said, I think that the target audience for the DLC was always people who thoroughly played through the game.
Same with the other games' DLC; for Bloodborne's you need to be yoinked by an invisible enemy while in posession of an item; while it's very possible people were accidentally yoinked on their first playthrough, they will forever know that the item is a trap and will avoid getting yoinked.
(unless the item in question explicitly said "get yoinked to go to DLC", I forgot)
Oh, yeah, the Snowfield itself is secret enough, but getting to the palace afterwards is just a matter of exploration. The teleport is not that hidden.
FWIW, after you get one half of the medallion, get invaded by Gideon's lackey and then talk to Gideon, he will tell you to look for the Albinauric woman, so at least they give you this much.
All in all, I find the quests in the base game relatively straightforward, but anyone with any prior experience in their games will have an inkling that if they care about quests' results, you need to double-check with the wiki.
Well for DS1 DLC, you had to kill an enemy from one of the latest area you unlock, then go to the back of an early zone, without any indication that you had to do so.
> That said, I think that the target audience for the DLC was always people who thoroughly played through the game.
That's true, but it is strange that you get there and get early-game upgrade materials, like Smithing Stone 2, etc. It seems like they wanted to emphasize that the Scadutree Fragments are the important things for scaling, and not your Base Game level, but you already have to be pretty high level and upgraded to beat Mohg.
Partly the jank is just a cost thing. Even major studios struggle with branching and merging stateful quest lines in game. I guess From picked a system that is cheap, robust, but kind of annoying for players, who forgive it because they otherwise love the game.
To some extent it's a design decision maybe. From makes games that are harsh and unforgiving, but not too harsh - you can mess up bits of quests but not end up unable to get an ending (afaik) which kind of matches the gameplay (harsh but not rage-quit inducing).
Yeah, it did always get me as a design issue. I get that "there's more to ask them" is valid. But there's never an indication of "OK I've said everything now". You only find out when they start repeating themselves.
"Make the person repeat what they just told you" as a process is very immersion breaking.
It's... interesting design, in that there's a puzzle or chance element I suppose. Especially Elden Ring encourages exploration, because there's almost always a reward for wandering and exploring in terms of items / abilities.
The NPC / quest thing means that, unless you go online, you will need multiple playthroughs and exploration to get every quest done, OR you need to engage in a community - the quests and lore are often all discussed, disseminated, notes compared, theories crafted, etc in the community after the release of a new game.
Whether that's good or bad design I'll leave up to opinion, but it's interesting.
(personally I don't have the time to do multiple 100+ hour playthroughs so I followed guides online)
It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes).
Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.
thats game design not something engine related. its been like this since before demons souls, i think it started out way back with the first kings field. its just the way fromsoft do things. everyone knows what to expect from them.
Just to underline your point, Sekiro's NPCs behave in a much more obvious and linear way relative to From's other games, so it's clearly a game design decision and not a technical one.
I would agree, but there are still some interactions that require doing the same thing repeatedly in order to make progress (eating rice balls, eavesdropping).
Especially in Elden Ring, it also contributes to the ludonarrative cohesion. Hyetta's quest (no spoilers!) isn't meant to be completed by everyone, her story is a foil to Melina's "default" questline that is mandatory for beating the game. Other characters (eg. Boc, Sellen, Selivus, Thops) also have quests that are easy to start but deliberately obfuscated towards the end.
The JRPG logic is annoying, but From uses it to beg important questions about the game world and the player. Fromsoft characters like Lautrec live in infamy for being so slippery and deliberately misleading.
They're victims of success. Lautrec was so infamous some people (read: me) are too scared to play the game without a guide now.
"What if I missed some NPC and I can't level up anymore?!"
That's what I had; I was going through Elden Ring thinking "I will just play the game straight / naive the first time, no guides". Got close to the city and thought "...this feels like a point of no return / the end, better check if I missed anything important!". 100 hours later (or whatever) and I found out it's more like the halfway point.
I just accept I'll miss things / get some sub-optimal outcomes for my first play, though I do try to explore a lot and sometimes player messages help rather than troll/spoil/be funny. Guides only come out for NG+ and beyond.
And even before King's Field, this is just the way games used to be like. Games couldn't elaborate too much, so your options were:
a) you lucked out and it turns out your brain works exactly like the designer's and the cryptic hint make sense to you,
b) you use a guide/ask a friend/call a hotline,
c) you like the game so much you end up brute forcing your way through all of that stuff,
d) you just ignore that sidequest. I sure hope for you that finishing the main quest doesn't need you to guess something unreasonably obtuse... *COUGH* Legend of Zelda's final dungeon's location *COUGH*
This post seems to be mostly (although not entirely) concerned with the combat AI. The plot based NPC interactions don’t seem to be very dynamic at all, mostly just a graph with a lot of dead-ends, haha.
You picked the most filler, unfinished questline to make a point for your argument lol
And yet, that's still way better than having a quest log UI, constant screen notifications, and narration that babysit you all the time, treating you like you have never played a RPG before, acting like you are too stupid to read and listen to npc dialogue and items lore
I'll take the jank over what the western industry is filled with
For their first real open world, it holds pretty well
reply