To easy to break the npc questlines....

[Valar Morghulis]

Souls games have historically had easy to break questlines... with shadow of the erdtree though, its far easier to mess this up will plaiying naturally. The map design while beautiful, is hard to navigate and find way into certain areas... leading a player into navigating to far into the game breaking questlines. Nearly all questlines can be broken at the shadow keep if you don't catch things before progressing... I like the natural souls feel but I really hope in the next game they make the questlines more blatant. I have only killed a few bosses and not a single damn npc is left on my map besides the hornsent grandam. Really annoying because I wanted to enjoy the first playthrough untainted by online material. anyways... just a rant.

[Wheee333ee33e3e]

2 NPCs are found in black keep. You need to do a fetch quest till one of them disappears. There is a battle between NPCs where you have to side with either NPC. Do not even enter Messmer's room till you done the fight, it drops the most OP PVP ash of war in the game.

You're right though, quests are really badly designed in this game.

[Knavenformed]

I never even found the person tied to St.Trina people keep speaking of, I got to know of him by re-listening to Leda's theme on YouTube

[P.]

At this point, I think their devs consider peak design to make players fail quests by skipping a dialogue or killing a boss in the wrong order

[Rust Vendor]

at this point I don't even care about side quests, if I get it I get it, if I don't then whatever I can skip the item I won't use and the two lines of boring dialogue with them inevitably either killing themselves or you fighting them.

[Kraxiloth]

Is this really the case, though? If you pay attention to what the NPCs are saying, it's pretty clear what they want from you.

[Zoid13]

Originally posted by Valfader:

Is this really the case, though? If you pay attention to what the NPCs are saying, it's pretty clear what they want from you.

for the most part yes :)

and i also dont really understand the "easy to break the quests"

i entered the "seal is broken" reigon exploring early on and managed to still have all the quests function fine. they just skip some steps (like Moore wont give you the item to give Thollier) but their quests still progress regardless.
i also missed the confrontations in the black keep cos i missed the runes on the floor but their quests still worked and continued fine. you again jsut skip that part of the quest (and in turn an item) but the quests continue. they dont break...
i did the entirety of Tholliers quest when i was already up to the end of the DLC burning the tree
its actually extremely hard to "break" the quests. the only thing that can happen is some steps get skipped.

[Kraxiloth]

Yeah, I did the same thing during my first playthrough. In fact I broke every single NPC questline that way in addition to reaching Radahn too quickly. It didn't bother me much as I was better prepared for the next playthrough. Now that I've completed the game five times I have a good sense of which route to take, but I agree that the whole "rune broken" thing doesn't make much sense.

[AlmaDarkSpell]

Fextralife. My first DLC run was to chill and explore.
My second character will go with Fextralife on her pocket 24/7.

[Rust Vendor]

Originally posted by Valfader:

Yeah, I did the same thing during my first playthrough. In fact I broke every single NPC questline that way in addition to reaching Radahn too quickly. It didn't bother me much as I was better prepared for the next playthrough. Now that I've completed the game five times I have a good sense of which route to take, but I agree that the whole "rune broken" thing doesn't make much sense.

So you broke every quest the first time and now that you have played 5 times you can do them? that's literally the complaint here, that they are unintuitive and hard to follow. I find them so obscure that they aren't even interesting. It's akin to entering a cheat code to get an item, just a series of random steps to get a sword or spell.

[Dam Stark]

Yes and I get why this pisses off people but it's cool imo. I like when things are difficult and hard to figure out. Eventually you get into a habit of just talking with everyone after every new area or major boss.