Temple Quest Ideas Thread

retract350

retract350

Member
Hello, all! I have spent the past week or so familiarizing myself with QEdit with the goal of creating some quests, and due to the lack of quest selection, I am opting to create a Temple-focused quest first. I have a few ideas and design decisions of my own that I will likely be trying to adhere to and implement, but I also wanted to get some community feedback on what the sentiment behind temple is. This is your chance to voice complaints about temple quests (we all hate enemies in maze rooms), any cool ideas you may have, any suggestions at all.

I want to hear what everyone has to say, as I have thought of a lot in my planning process, but there is always something I will not have considered or may have missed completely. Thanks in advance to anyone who may share some ideas, and I hope I can make something that brings the same enjoyment I get out of temple to others who may not have explored it or have not enjoyed it in the past :)
 
Agreed. Keep labyrinth rooms limited to transition rooms and not filling them with enemies, boxes, or switches. Navigating them is a pain.

Those labyrinth rooms would be FANTASTIC if PSO was the sort of game where you could snap to cover (ie. Gears of War or The Division), but they are terrible for PSO's simplistic movement / combat engine.
 
So apart from the basic advice of "stay out of labyrinth rooms" I have a little more to share on this subject.

You have a lot of good opportunities with Temple to create something really memorable and fun. Temple is an area that doesn't see a lot of attention and, on top of that, Temple has really great architecture in its objects. As you'll come to find out, Temple objects are very pretty and interesting, diverse and ancient. A lot of Temple quests don't often use the object architecture in their quests as it becomes difficult to find where to use them; much like in Ruins Wreckage, I'd like to recommend that you use that object architecture to your advantage, in big and open rooms especially. Even more so in labyrinth rooms. If you're going to go out of your way to avoid combat in labyrinth rooms, that's a design choice that I doubt you'd see pushback for, but this opens up a really good opportunity to for you to use the labyrinth rooms for puzzles or even just further accentuating the maze-like structure of them. Use the maze rooms as a stepping stone to get back into interesting combat scenarios, rather than having the fighting take place inside of these tight knit arenas.

An idea you could use, is using the ancient pillars to further tighten the grip on the chokeholds of the maze rooms, dimming the lighting down a lot, and forcing players to follow narrow and dark corners of these rooms, interlacing warps here and there around specific corners that either lead to box goodies or, in some cases, leading you back where you came from. You can utilize this idea by having the first half of the floor be combat sections, then having a middle section of your quest be dedicated to the maze rooms, where you force players to learn the route layout to escape quickly and then get right back into the ladder half of the action. It acts as a break in the action to have a little bit of exploration in it; even if people don't like it and think its unfun, some times something being unfun can really strengthen the rest of the quest for individuals. Having to do something not fun often makes doing the fun stuff so much better.

These are just some of my many thoughts. I'll always be around for help or advice, and I look forward to seeing what you make.
You know where to find me~
 
I wonder if it's possible to make bigger labyrinth rooms with wider corridors... that may be interesting and less annoying to play, but probably annoying to code.

Or you could pump up those Hildelt/Rappy/Lily numbers so people want to spam it in RER week but balance it by filling it with labyrinths or some other obstacle (like the minigames in Rappy's Holiday) so the server admins approve it. Wait, maybe don't do that.

I don't really know what's possible/feasible in making quests- could you spawn monsters on the Barba Ray platform (without spawning Barba Ray)? Could be neat to fight a few waves of enemies there first (and maybe you could spawn the boss afterwards).

Penumbral Surge #1 is a really good temple quest, though some spoiled Ephineans don't like quests that involve splitting up.
 
That reminds me!
Try not to make your Temple quests around the idea that they're going to be in the RBR quest rotation. I know I already spoke to you about this but I'll say it here for posterity reasons.

When you develop a quest you should be creating it to be standalone. I know how much RBR rotation can affect a quest's play around here and a lot of people don't even play quests that aren't in RBR rotation, but you never want to create something with the intention of it being RBR. You should make your quest good as a standalone entity rather than shooting for something that might never happen; this is what I did with Subterranean Patrol #1. It stands alone by itself really well and doesn't require RBR to be good. If it does ever get added to RBR I'd be happy about it obviously, but it doesn't need it to be good. Creating quests centered around RBR often requires you to nerf your own quest down exponentially to make up the difference in power it receives from RBR rotation; this is what happened with Virtual Limits #1 and #2, which is why they aren't ever going to be included in RBR without significant reductions in enemies.

Just something to remember.
 
diemildefreude said:
I wonder if it's possible to make bigger labyrinth rooms with wider corridors... that may be interesting and less annoying to play, but probably annoying to code.

Or you could pump up those Hildelt/Rappy/Lily numbers so people want to spam it in RER week but balance it by filling it with labyrinths or some other obstacle (like the minigames in Rappy's Holiday) so the server admins approve it. Wait, maybe don't do that.

I don't really know what's possible/feasible in making quests- could you spawn monsters on the Barba Ray platform (without spawning Barba Ray)? Could be neat to fight a few waves of enemies there first (and maybe you could spawn the boss afterwards).

Penumbral Surge #1 is a really good temple quest, though some spoiled Ephineans don't like quests that involve splitting up.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it is not possible to update or edit the map wireframes themselves - only to add objects and enemies and such. I'm not certain if this is something devs like Ender could do with their skillset (omnispawn being something they have the ability to do, for example), but whether due to my lack of knowledge or simply limitations of the game it isn't something I can actually change.

That being said, I do want to utilize the maze rooms that are spread throughout the maps strategically to make them a bit more engaging than simply "run around the room trying to find an angle on some enemy". How I'll do this is yet to be determined as I am still in the beginning stages of mapping out the route of the quest first, but it is a consideration I am keeping in mind to ensure that even the most annoying rooms have some small level of engagement and aren't just a walk-a-thon.

In regards to point #2, I am trying to pump the number of rappies/lillies up a small amount over existing quests as I want a decent temple quest option year-round, since the current Lost Shock Rifle is the best existing one for RM/Vivienne hunting but requires rolling on RBR during RER week. However, I have done a lot of number crunching and find that the balance for the area will almost certainly come from including some spaceship section in the quest. This allows for IDs other than the standard Pink/White temple runs to get comparable value, thus making the quest competitive for many ids. This solves the biggest issue temple has, IMO, that the drops are so stacked on rare hildes, rappies, and lillies which makes running temple quests outside of Rare Enemy Rate weeks feel worse. The balance seems to be had from non-rare hunts that open up new opportunities.

Re: Penumbral Surge #1, I do like the quest but I am personally not a fan of the enemy counts differing simply based on whether or not you can fill a party. I typically don't prefer splitting groups in quests, unless it is something like the final room of VL1 as an example, where you are still in reach of supporting the other half of your team if needed. That being said, if I do a split, it'll be something along those lines in which your team is separate, but still able to support whether through shifta/deband/jellen/zalure range or by jumping back and forth between groups. This is something I'll have to explore later on when I have a feeling of what sort of flow I want in the quest though.
 
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Varista said:
That reminds me!
Try not to make your Temple quests around the idea that they're going to be in the RBR quest rotation. I know I already spoke to you about this but I'll say it here for posterity reasons.

When you develop a quest you should be creating it to be standalone. I know how much RBR rotation can affect a quest's play around here and a lot of people don't even play quests that aren't in RBR rotation, but you never want to create something with the intention of it being RBR. You should make your quest good as a standalone entity rather than shooting for something that might never happen; this is what I did with Subterranean Patrol #1. It stands alone by itself really well and doesn't require RBR to be good. If it does ever get added to RBR I'd be happy about it obviously, but it doesn't need it to be good. Creating quests centered around RBR often requires you to nerf your own quest down exponentially to make up the difference in power it receives from RBR rotation; this is what happened with Virtual Limits #1 and #2, which is why they aren't ever going to be included in RBR without significant reductions in enemies.

Just something to remember.
Click to expand...
Yes, I'll add my response to this here as well in case it is seen by someone that has a similar suggestion. I am actively hoping to make my quest a standalone quest that performs regardless of RBR, weekly boost, event buffs (save for anniversary since that's always a massive buff), etc. The current temple quest selection focuses on either 1) lots of rare enemy chances at the expense of the player's time, or 2) fewer rare enemy chances but the individual quest runs are shorter/less time spent outside of combat. Unfortunately, these both fall into the category of effectively being nerfed on non-RER weeks. My goal is to find a way to combine enemies of value across most, if not all ids in order to make this a quest that can be a part of people's normal rotation with things like New Mop Up 3 (just as an example). The value will almost always be higher in the later areas of ep1/2, or in ep4 due to things like weapon patterns or staple drops like Heaven Striker, Lame D'argent, etc. But I am hoping to find a way to make temple (and maybe some spaceship) feel good enough that people will get out of their comfort zones and stop running TTF and Tyrell's Ego all day long. There is so much more to the game than that, and I'm hoping I can start with Temple (my recent favorite area of the game) to get people to push their limits and find new things to enjoy.
 
It could be nice to have all rappies spawn before entering each room, instead of dropping down during subsequent waves.

Finding a rare rappy sitting there is a treat. Accidentally scaring one off that just fell across the room, less so.
 
rend said:
It could be nice to have all rappies spawn before entering each room, instead of dropping down during subsequent waves.

Finding a rare rappy sitting there is a treat. Accidentally scaring one off that just fell across the room, less so.
Click to expand...
I may be able to toy with this a bit for sure. There would be the concern of having too many rappies at once such that the monster reader sees if there's a rare rappy earlier than intended which would encourage resets. But I could probably play with some event triggers to get the timing pretty tight with initial spawns. I've been thinking of doing a similar idea with the belra spawns, since they have the 3 seconds or whatever of being untargetable while they power up
 
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