Selling out escorts to Zigur: Confusing for newbies?
Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2012 3:19 pm
First off, let me say that I'm really excited to be able to burn some arcanist scum without comitting myself to full-on antimagic. One thing that I'm a bit leery of, though, is how new players will understand what's going on. Imagine you've never played the game before, then you sit down, roll up a cornac, and two levels in the game is suddenly assuming you know portal-disruption techniques and is making you choose whether you're allied with these "Zigur" folks you've never heard of. I'd wager the average player will think there's some sort of glitch in the script that's making the game assume he's completed some other quest.
What I'm suggesting is that maybe we leave that option locked until the player knows a bit more about what's going on. I don't mean reverting things so that the player has to go to Zigur again, but perhaps there could be some Ziguranth NPCs in Derth and/or Shatur who could rant a bit about the evils of magic and offer the player some kind of nature-infused Totem of Recall Redirection. Keep the infodumping to a minimum here; the player really only needs to know that the Ziguranth hate magic and will reward the player for sending arcanists their way. The totem would be like the transmo chest, in that the profile remembers it and all future characters get it at birth, so the only real gameplay change would be that a newbie's first couple of escorts don't have the betrayal option (and an unspoiled newbie wouldn't know what rewards are available in the first place).
What I'm suggesting is that maybe we leave that option locked until the player knows a bit more about what's going on. I don't mean reverting things so that the player has to go to Zigur again, but perhaps there could be some Ziguranth NPCs in Derth and/or Shatur who could rant a bit about the evils of magic and offer the player some kind of nature-infused Totem of Recall Redirection. Keep the infodumping to a minimum here; the player really only needs to know that the Ziguranth hate magic and will reward the player for sending arcanists their way. The totem would be like the transmo chest, in that the profile remembers it and all future characters get it at birth, so the only real gameplay change would be that a newbie's first couple of escorts don't have the betrayal option (and an unspoiled newbie wouldn't know what rewards are available in the first place).
