DLC Feedback and suggestion for a possible patch.

[lugaruclone]

I'm finding that by default the quests are kinda fast and furious and I'm usually doing two or more at a time, plus the first one at very least is kinda predictable... helping out a noble to get initiated into the royalty system.

I really think it would be cool to use the Royalty artwork to create a Royal Storyteller, give HIM the first Royal Quest and also give him the current quest frequency while reducing it between 75% and 50% for other storytellers.

What would this mean? If you play with 'Richard the Royal' or whatever his name would end up being you get the current DLC experience that many players are finding to be a bit too guided or overbearing. If he needs more personality than that I would say fast ramping but also fast crashing (get rich quick, get raided hard).

If you play as Cassandra, Randy or Phoebe then you get a few less quests a year AND you kinda choose to side with the empire or rebelion as a combination of luck and convenience. Gone are the big 'turning point' events and now you work you way up a little bit at a time becoming psychic slightly later in the game.

Any thoughts?

And because this is not very ambitious compared to the usual request... I cant wait for patches or DLC adding Corporate, Criminal, Scientific and Military factions with ranks like 'Cadet' or 'Associate' and their own enhancements, equipment, furniture and stuff. I mean we have the infrastructure built with this DLC.

[Bozobub]

I'd guess you're far more likely to see this in some sort of mod.  Modded storytellers are quite common.

[Serenity]

A new storyteller would really make a lot of sense given the artwork. Some people already thought there'd be one.

I've read something that you get royal quests very early on. Like your usual first raids and animal attacks it's "protect a noble being chased by a squirrel". And you have nobles demanding fancy stuff when you are scraping by in survival mode.
This doesn't even make sense lore wise. Why would these nobles seek out your help when you are a bunch of primitives, barely being able to survive? It would make more sense to gate these events behind colony development. So you've established yourself, became a bit powerful, and now you become interesting to them.

Of course the thought process was probably "people need to see the new DLC stuff right away to hook them and not spend hours grinding towards it". That makes sense from out of universe perspective, but it's ultimately worse.
This is also where a storyteller or some scenario setting would really help. Maybe have Richard Royal spam you with royal quests right away, but delay them for the classic storytellers.

[lugaruclone]

Yeah, I'm really fond of the new content but the delivery feels a bit too unsure of people who generally have 10k hours 'not giving it a chance' like it instantly plunges you into the world of royalty and gives you what would normally be a really rare gift in the scarce economy of Rimworld.

I think I'm about 6 to 8 hours into the new content and I'm loving it... I fell out of favor with the empire and then back into their good graces. I decided 'why not' and elevated my luciferium addicted psychic into Knight status with all the annoyances it brings.

It is all really fun... but I still insist the quests are too frequent and having very hard defined story beats is kinda unlike Rimworld like this is much more than the old suggestion of 'yo there is a ship really far away from you'.

I hope it gets considered it would be good for the long term health of Rimworld.

[Tynan]

It's tricky to balance the frequency of quests.

In principle player can just ignore a quest if he doesn't want one at that time. But of course you're still cued to read and notice them.

Do they come too often? This is something that was tuned pretty intensively during pre-release, because I didn't want it taking 5+ years to get to endgame content. But the quests are quite frequent. It's a tricky balance.

Very open to feedback on this, I may tune them in upcoming hotfixes.

The other option is to start looking at new ways of handling this. E.g. player can get a scanner-like building that creates quests. So by default you get half the current quests for free, but you can apply pawn time to get more quest opportunities if you want. Something structurally like that might work, though it's hard to justify fictionally (or is it? Pay for the rimworld equivalent of google ads...).

[Serenity]

Do they come too often? This is something that was tuned pretty intensively during pre-release, because I didn't want it taking 5+ years to get to endgame content. But the quests are quite frequent. It's a tricky balance.

I think this is precisely where a setting would be helpful. So people can tune things to what they want. What is appropriate is after all a bit subjective. And such settings in Rimworld are usually story tellers. Storytellers also already regulate some of the event frequency through their difficulty I think. So you could have higher difficulty = more royalty events

Then you'd need something to differentiate "Richard Royal" from the classic storytellers. IMO when royal quests start appearing would be good here. People who want to experience the new content right away can choose him. But if people play Cassandra or Randy they get a more classic experience where the empire only contacts you later on. And they'd get the new mechanoids for example without dealing with all the other stuff right away.

Though an issue I can see right away is that  the other settings for the storyteller would have to be based on one of the classic ones. So Richard Royal would probably be mostly Casssandra, but you can't have Phoebie or Randy + maximum royal content that way. So maybe a separate setting would be better

[lugaruclone]

So I did a quick count (love that the game loads up real quick!) and I have 44 quests offered over 240 days and it is hard for me to tell if that is 'too few' or 'too many' since quests are not like events... but each quest feels like 'a lot' especially involved ones babysitting animals from hunters or looking after prisoners who I swear are always sick. These last for days and overlap with each other and positively speaking makes the 'one more day' of play aspect even more addicting but ultimately just feels very content dense.

In terms of having a quest economy there was something like that in a couple of mods... some events required an up front payment for information when it came to loot stashes or other 'all upside' things like "give me $300 and I will tell you where you can find...". I'm for this I guess, and in general I LOVE when I get non royal quests, just for the sake of variety it is nice to do stuff for my neighbors.

In terms of access to endgame content I feel like the game is a lot faster now especially since people love giving me stuff like advanced components but this is not something I'm gonna complain about... getting really nice gadgets in my first season feels weird but by the end of my first year I rarely have a broken character, just a guy who has little 'gadgets' like poison claws or an elbow blade. He can stun or blind people but he is not blowing up heads. What I had experienced in my previous playthrough when I kinda took 'every quest' was that I built up wealth faster than I built up defense with the empire enabling me but that is a classic trade off in this game, just slightly accelerated.

[Breadbox]

Personally don't want to be handed a royal title and psychic ability essentially for free at the start of the game, I really had it with the token manhunting chinchillas, I understand the need to introduce new content to new buyers quickly, but an option to disable this/make opportunities to gain favor much rarer/harder would be nice

[Breadbox]

Maybe lower the base generation of royalty quests while adding the ability to send envoys to the Empire to juice up the generation of Empire related quests?

[RicRider]

I would say go with the storyteller options as others have suggested and leave the quest frequency alone.

I should state I haven't bought the expansion yet and I want to, but what I want to know is what if I want to play just with the 1.1 stuff and not the expansion even if I own it, will it disable the whole empire and psionic stuff? I just don't know how this works.

But if it does disable the whole empire and story stuff maybe this is where you could give players an option who own the Royalty DLC where they could, either through a storyteller or various settings, turn on or off aspects of the DLC so they can still experience the sandbox they're after.

So an example, maybe a player doesn't want the psionic powers or have to deal with the psionics (for instance if I'm running the Medieval Times mod or some of Chicken Plucker's mods) but I still want to retain the royalty aspect and maybe even have those royalty aspects and faction reputation etc. interact with other tribes and factions on the map? I guess what I'm saying is make the royalty system less dependent on the Empire.

Of course tell me if I'm totally misunderstanding something because like I said I haven't bought the DLC and am only going off what I see people doing on YouTube videos.

[SpaceDorf]

I haven't played long with the royals update.
But those insolent, demanding pests have always been fun in Dwarf Fortress, and since Rimworld Nobles seem to be at least useful in a fight, this is a big step upwards.

Concerning the frequencies of the quests I have not formed an opinion yet, lacking the playtime.
But I too find it weird that the first quests started two days after I crashed ( Randy Extreme ) especially since my survivors/colonist don't even have a way to comunicate.

It is sensible that remnants of an empire, spacer pirates and the industrial factions have a way to detect a crashed space ship and find your three little piggies in their sad little hovels, but to give out quests you should have at least met the other factions.

The referenced Mod where you pay for quests is this one Jecrells RimQuest
I would prefer the quest giver/caravan approach as well and/or a message similiar to space traders that a faction is calling on your comunications console would you like to accept/call back .. or a royal messenger.

The distressed Noble quest on the other hand works quite well for a new colony, and is a good introduction to the quest and royalty system.

Orions Faction Discovery this should also be in the core game, or at least a debug option

[Bozobub]

The other option is to start looking at new ways of handling this. E.g. player can get a scanner-like building that creates quests. So by default you get half the current quests for free, but you can apply pawn time to get more quest opportunities if you want. Something structurally like that might work, though it's hard to justify fictionally (or is it? Pay for the rimworld equivalent of google ads...).

Why not simply tie it to the Comms Console?  It makes sense that, while you can get quests by word-of-mouth/rumor, many require talking to others much farther way/in a wider area.

Of course, compared to a unique building, this would also cause some issues for those who still want longer quest intervals, once built, but it would gate the extra quests much further into a colony's future than what we see presently.

[lugaruclone]

I was able to finish the royalty story line last night and it is pretty great. I was a little shocked that I got a quest that was like a remedial 'in case you did not sign with the empire you will now' as it offered 3 healing serums and 52 (!) royalty to babysit 6 prisoners. I'm not sure if that would rocket you all the way to count but it would get you really far up that path. I ignored it as I was about to start my last two weeks on the planet but it was a real shock, it did not even have 'mechanoid clusters' in it.

[ShadowKatt]

I'm happy with the DLC. I'm not a skilled player so i find it plenty challenging, I like the new quests and even if it's a little annoying sometimes I like the community leadership and ascension of my own colonists. I'm having a good time. Mostly.

Mechanoids. I have never been a fan of mechanoids but I've accepted that they are there to be hated. They're the enemy over there and we need to kill them before they kill us. Until now. Let me say first that I actually like all the mechanoid additions, the turrets and new needle shooty boi. I detest the auto-mortar but I'm not a fan of being mortared (shocker). What I absolutelly cannot abide though is that every time a mechanoid cluster shows up, coin toss whether or not it lands IN THE MIDDLE OF MY GOD DAMN BASE. This is as bad as tornadoes. You're going to drop an entire, fortified mechnoid base INSIDE of my own base. There is nothing I can do to prepare for this, nothing I can do to counter it, and 4 out of 5 times no way I can win against it. Bands of scythers that can mob my scattered colonists one at a time and cut them to ribbons. A handful of inferno centipedes to set everything on fire. This is wrong. At least with a tornado I could potentially evacuate my base and run. The tornadoes didn't actively pursue and murder me. I don't know if this is the new mechanics running wild and need to be checked or if this was the intended consequence, but I've lost several bases this way and if I see a cluster landing inside my base I pause and do the calculations as to whether its worth the time to even try to fight it off or just consign them to death and start over. There really aren't many other options.

[dearmad]

The tornado analogy is apt... agreed!!!