A Thank You to the Developer and some Rebalance Ideas

[pohd0h]

I first want to say thank you to the developers for remastering this game since I spent countless hours with it when i was younger and it was the hidden gem of the app store.

This forum has given me a rare opportunity to talk directly with redshift after so many years and I just wanted to give some feedback. I apologize in advance if you heard these critiques many times already and are planning to fix them in the sequel or already have in the remastered.

Also just to let you know, my priority is making the game as immersive which tends to mean that i like the game more difficult.
My priority is also end-game balance so some of these imbalances may not sound like a big deal but they do trivailize huge aspects of the late game.
And i am also aware that The Quest is an RPG so there is also the option of just not exploiting these imbalances and artificially making the game harder for myself using handicaps. But I want to help make this game the best it could possibly be and these critiques are things which i genuinely percieve to be spots of potential improvement.
So that is my bias when making these comments so I hope they don't conflict too much with your direction for the game.


1. Wands

In my humble opinions, wands make almost all other forms of combat and free-cast magic obsolete. They can be recharged with just mana which is an infinite resource (as discussed later) and that makes them cheaper than any form of combat. They also do strong damage do all enemies that are not immune to magic and require no prior investment to use effectively. They also can have restorative properties which make restoration magic completely obsolete and also makes certain aspects of alchemy obsolete such as crafting cure poison or cure disease potions.

All of this means that you can fully invest in endurance and dexterity for maximum health and AC while ignoring a ton of other skills and this makes the game easier than it was intended.

I propose the following...
-make this spell based on the environmental magic skill and the cost of the spell based on the strength of the wand. The player will not automatically fully charge the wand but the recharge amount will be based on the environmental magic skill and it will cost much more mana.
-heal magic wands will be extremely expensive to buy and recharge while combat wands will be noticably more expensive as well
-powerful wands such as wand of full restore (forgot the exact name lol) will be a 1 time item or a quest item that cannot be hoarded
-wants will weigh much more so you can no longer hold 30 at a time lol

Despite all these changes, i believe wands will still be a powerful if not essential item which speaks to how powerful they are currently.

2. Create Food

The issue with this is that it allows for mana and health to become an infinite resource inside dungeons. You can create food at least 2 times, then rest, then repeat the process for infinite food. This completly removes the aspect of preparing food supplies for a trip and also trivialize certain dungeons where you can abuse the rest mechanic.

I honestly think this spell should just be removed since i cannot think of a good reason for it to stay.


3. Useless Skills and Attributes

Some skills will be more useful than others. But some in the game are just plan useless in many cases lol. If you are a player reading this, I am about to give you a guide to optimizing your character with this list lol. (assuming no big changes happened so far)

The useless attributes are as followed
-Strength - useless since it governs a very meh skill (heavy weapon) and has subpar effects of increased carry weight which is completly useless since dexterity provides enough

The powerful attributes are as followed
-Dexterity - governs way too many skills and also can completly replace strenght. also governs so many powerful skills like light weapon, block, dual wield, and repair
-Endurance - governs heavy armor which is great and increases health noticable. i wouldn't say need rebalancing but for guide purposes i would put this here as essential for survival

The okay attributes are as followed
-Intelligence - governs good skills like alchemy and enviro magic and has good magic resistance.
-Personality - underrated but essential for persuade for quests and mercantile is also nice


The useless skills are as followed
-light armor - completly inferior to heavy armor. the carry weight different is nothing and the enchanting difference is neglible in combat (but useful in enchant suits lol)
-heavy weapon - completly inferior to light weapons. does less damage, more expensive, less enchantable, more rare, among other things. its not as inferior to light weapons as light armor is to heavy armor but its still obsolete barring aesthetic or handicap purposes.
-mind magic - useless outside of gimmicky poison+calm setups...and also because of wands lol
-protection magic/heal magic/attack magic/undead magic - useless because of wands lol
-lockpick/disarm - useless because of strong unlock/disarm scrolls and wands lol
-pickpocket - fun....but so useless lol. would help alot if you could look at their inventory and they had things like keys and other pickpocket exclusives

The powerful skills are as followed
-environmental magic - so powerful since enviro spells are so damn good (enchant, create food, recall, mark, teleports, etc)
-light weapon - a better heavy weapon and can be dual wield and have more damage output. essential for magic immune mobs
-heavy armor - more durability is always needed
-block - same reason as heavy armor
-repair - you would think this is useless but it save so much money, time, and its just too convienient to ignore lol
-alchemy - robot oil

The okay skills
-merchantile/appraise - bordering the useless side due to robot oil but still useful for saving time and if you are a gold junkie like me lol
-dual weild - has its pro's and con's as a combat style but overall its fine to invest in

Well mostly just used this as an excuse to ramble on but in short,
nerf - dexterity (mild), endurance (slight), enviro magic (alot), light weapon (slight), heavy armor (mild)
buff - strength (mild), light armor (mild), heavy weapon (mild), mind magic (mild), lockpick (alot), disarm (alot)

oh and i can also go on about leveling and skilling in much greater detail if anyone wants me too lol. feel free to ask about

4. Resting

Similar to the previous point, i believe resting is too powerful in the late game since it is so cheap since it only requires any kind of food and water. This makes all food besides the cheapest one avalible to be obsolete and makes it so you can just hoard 40+ food and ignore the mechanic of rationing food and saving rests.

The basic food should definently fully heal the player in the lower levels (1-6) but that shouldn't be the case later on. There should have a greater emphasis on proper resting and preparing food for the a journey.

I propose that the following
-health and mana restored from resting be dependent on the type of food
-addition of a variety of food each with their different restorative properties depending on the race and other aspects of the player
-food weight significantly increased so you can't just carry a year's worth of food

I think this would add a new layer of preparation to dungeoneering and opens up potential for expanding city economics (which i also heard is coming in Quest 2 so that is amazing!)


5. Books

I think you might be aware of this already, but books can be used to increase one's skill level beyond 100. This highly encourages players to hoard books and not read any of them until they hit max skill. I think the change here is self explanatory lol.


6. Leveling

It is rather easy to hit max level in just 2-3 expansions. This was the original reason why i quit playing since i got max in everything so there really wasn't much incentive to continue playing.

This is inevitable but i do have some changes to delay or make that almost infeasible.
-trainers get exponentially more expensive and no trainers can train to max level. redshift college got me to max in a blink of the eye lol.
-make skills require more skill points as the level increases. so getting from 9->10 light armor cost only 1 skill point. but getting from 95->96 light armor cost up to 30 skill points.
-create new spells, armor, or weapon for each max level stat so there is a strong incentive to spend a ton of skill points to get a skill to level 100

This would also help reduce skill and level inflation in expansions and help reduce massive level barriers to late expansions. Also its just fun to know that you are always working to improve your character even if it is slowly.


7. Robot Oil

Lol. Trivializes gold pretty early on. With this, the player can be swimming in gold in the early game. Not sure why its so darn expensive and yet so easy to make. I didn't mind back then but still would be nice if it was balanced.


8. Restore Spell(s)

Having a spell fully restore health no matter and also a spell that can health all afflictions (paralysis, poision, etc) makes restorative magic even less useful than it already is. I don't think these max heal spells should really exist at all for balance purposes.


9. Poison, Paralysis, Disease and Curing

I think these spells are way too easy to cure in the late game. Makes them a nuissance for the most part and never a threat which is no fun. (disregarding HOL1's nasty magic resistance diseases lol)

I propose that
-poison is generally stronger with high tier poison being percent based and not a static number. But poison will not kill the player but leave the health at 1 hp
-player can rest while poisoned to get rid of it but you will end up with 1 hp and 1 mana.
-paralysis healing can fail and chances depend on the player's restoration magic skill/potion strenght and the strenght of the paralysis (based on the monster/trap)
-disease's effect will build up over the days and will eventually start to drain health and magic if left alone for too long. the drain will be percent based and not a static number so you can't just ignore it if you are at a high level


10. No reason to linger in cities/overreliance on house

I think the world of The Quest is beautiful and that we should be encouraged to hang out in certain locations and revisit them. After visiting an area, there is almost no incentive to ever come back and the only location i ever needed was my house where all my stuff was stored at.

This is one of the more ambitious and ambigious changes (and i apologize if these changes will already be coming in The Quest 2)
-alchemy/enchanting table or other crafting positions. this will give players a reason to enter buildings for reasons other than questing/shopping
-shops being enterable and being able to directly talk to the person inside. its a bit immersion breaking talking to a door everywhere lol
-stores having random events such as owner becoming sick or closing the shop for a long period of time. prevents players from returning to one location indefinently.
-stores having widely varying supplies of gold ranging from broke to 3x more than usual


11. Lack of NPC interaction/Crime

As much as i love The Quest, it gets very lonely and the world (especially the cities) can feel very dead.

Some more ambitious changes incoming lol
-commiting crimes causes citizen npc's to run away into houses
-commiting crimes causes guards to become hostile block the official exits to the city
-commiting crimes causes guards to spawn and move towards your location. when they approach you, they will ask you to surrender and if you refuse, you can fight which will cause even more guards to spawn
-guard levels depend on the city with large city guards being either extremely powerful, very numerous (to restrict movement), or move twice or 3 times a turn to prevent you from running away or stalling
-nearby mage guards will prevent teleportation and attack with magic
-guards will stop chasing player after a certain distance
-guards will attack nearby mobs if they approach however most mobs will run after a few blows or not approach the town at all to prevent people from abusing this mechanic


12. Enviro magic shenanigans

Enviro magic is near busted. Between the ability to freely teleport, enchant, recharge wands, and make food its has way too much utility and power.

Especially the aspect of enchanting is a big problem for late game due to enchant-suits (and to a lesser degree repair-suits and persuade-suits). For those that don't know, enchant suits is a full set of armor that is fully enchanted with maximum enviro magic. This will make you be able to enchant obscenly powerful gear for free and make powerful suits to get around the restriction of leveling

Would recommend the following
-cannot enchant gear with enviro magic
-cannot raise attribute or skill beyond 50% of the original

I like enchant suits and whatnot but i just feel as if they are too powerful and make gearing at the end game a joke


13. Xp draining spells

Can exploit this to get infinite skill points by leveling up, then deleveling, the leveling up again.
I can imagine this has been fixed already but just in case, now you know lol.

14. Exploits with Low Level but High Armor/Weapons and other Money Exploits

There are ways to rush to high level expansion areas, get high tier armor while avoiding mobs, tele back and use them or sell them for insane prices and make the entire game a joke lol.

I propose the following
-shopkeepers will hide their best items if your persuade (or other stats) are not high enough
-shopkeepers buy items from player with a cap depending on the apraisal/merchantile level. So a lvl 15 merchantile can get a maximum of say 100 gold per sell even if they somehow got armor worth 7k
-shopkeepers will replenish their stock and gold on a random day at a random time to prevent player from spamming save states to get an item they want. this will happen anywhere from every 3-7 days.
-somehow add bank npc whose inventory space depends on personality/merchantile/persuade
-gold now has weight to prevent lvl 1 millionares lol


Conclusion

I thank you for reading my long nostalgia filled ramble and will be following the developers for sure. I am very excited for The Quest 2 and will revist the remastered Quest once i have the time. Hopefully i didn't give too many redundant critiques and thank you again for revisitng and continuing to work on this classic mobile game!

PS. Glad you also fixed the 100% resistance too since that also made combat so easy very early on lol

[Elendil / Redshift]

Glad you've enjoyed the game and thanks!

We are busy with The Quest 2, The Quest will not receive any more updates (we'll fix any serious bugs, of course). And as for difficulty/balance: A lot more people complained about the game being too hard, than being too easy. This is not something where we can please everyone, although we'll try, of course. :)

I won't comment on most of the things (but we read it all). Just a few things: The skill limit has been increased to 500. Robot Oil is not in the game (or in our expansion). We can't control what people put in their expansions. We had our forums for quite a while, it can even be easily accessed from within the game. ;)

And finally, if you haven't already, please consider writing a review! Thank you!

[pohd0h]

thank you for the response and im very happy the post was read. I hope at least some of the comments will be of some help when designing the quest 2

and i always wondered why HOL and the later expansions were so different in tone and game direction than the first 2 expansions. Thanks for clarifying that lol.

And ill be sure to write a review after i put in some good hours into the pc version. Will be fun playing the game again with new graphics and other good changes.

[catacomber]

Will balance Robot Oil when we get around to Asteroids. : ) Thanks.