Hello. As the beta approaches it’s end, I feel it’s time to post all quest-related problems I’ve found during this last month. To avoid creating several threads, I’ll list them all here.
• First and foremost what most bothered me concerning quests: how often and easy it is for quest related items to be obtained in greater quantities than necessary, just for the NPCs to ignore the excess items and leave them forever stuck in your character’s inventory. By the time you’re at a high level most people will have multiple items from various quests stuck on their inventory. Example: http://i.imgur.com/1I6uitk.jpg
What’s most aggravating about this is that it has no reason to happen. Multiple quests in the game allow you to gather more than necessary of the quest item (such as the Light Attack (1) quest in Tenet Chapel B1), but then the NPC simply takes them all away from you when the quest is completed. There’s absolutely no reason for this not to be the case for every quest in the game; instead of having NPCs check for x items and take away only x items, leaving you stuck with the excess, they should always check for x items and, if you have that amount, take away all of that item from you. As a few NPCs in the game ALREADY DO.
There’s also the possibility of allowing players to discard quest items. I understand why the devs could wish to avoid this if possible as it would mean making sure the Klaipeda Warpstone and the Seal of Space items specifically can’t be discarded, and it could lead to some stupid players screwing over their own quests and potentially having to start over, I think this is something that should be considered.
• Some quests are gone forever if you abandon them. Other players have told me of this happening to them at various quests, but to me it happened specifically with the Corrupted Lantern (1) quest in Royal Mausoleum 3F. I picked up the quest, but it’s event with the Stone Lantern started only for my group members and did not include me. Thus I tried to abandon it so I could restart it to see if that would help, but the quest was then gone from the NPC and I could not pick it up again.
• The game has many “defend x for y time” quests, but most of the time the monsters that attack you during such missions don’t even try to destroy what is being protected. Even if you DIE, enemies will just stand there instead of threatening what was supposedly in danger. That means you can just run in circles until the time is up, or (at least under the current system where self resurrection is possible) just straight up die and wait for the timer to go by in order to complete such quests, with no need at all to actually protect the objective. Sometimes that is even more effective than actually fighting the monsters, since while trying to hurt you they can actually hit the quest target by accident.
• On Royal Mausoleum 1F, the Collapsed Protection System story quest asks you to wake up the Sleeping Boowooks in order to proceed. A bit deeper into the map, another quest (Guardian Purifying Device) requires you to kill enemies near large cubes in order to charge them up. However, if you walk up to the location of the Guardian Purifying Device quest while you still have Collapsed Protection System ongoing, you can “wake up” the cubes and turn them into Awakened Boowooks.
• The Star’s Tracing quest in Goddess Ancient Garden has a rather serious issue when done in a party that other players have claimed to happen on some other quests as well. On my experience with this quest (more than once as I’ve been through the zone on various characters), when party members kill a burning mob and acquire charcoal, it adds to your total count of charcoals, but doesn’t actually give you the Charcoal quest item. Thus when you reach 10 charcoals in the quest counter, it’s actually the added up numbers of your actual Charcoal items plus the kills of your party members, and you end up not actually having 10 Charcoals on your inventory. The quest then advances to the next step and you can no longer use the special quest item needed to burn enemies in order to get charcoal, but you also can’t proceed since the next step requires exactly 10 Charcoals to be present in your inventory in order to be completed.
The only way to fix the situation is to either find another person that just started the quest, so that he may use the quest item to burn mobs for you to kill and extract charcoal from, or to abandon the quest and start it over, as the Charcoals will remain on your inventory.
[Edit fixed a misleading typo, added Sabin’s info on Star’s Tracing issue]