Nowadays an indie game dev apparently needs to pay extra for DDoS protection for their servers just as a small business pays for a security system for their office. It’s not fair that it has to be that way, but it’s just the cost of doing business.

Thanks Ninja O and Lumino for your awesome donations, I’m sure they are helping pay for the upgraded VPN hosts so we can play!

I missed NEStalgia more than I realized I would these past three days. Hooray for having it back!

Just a thought as on occasion I have ended up with quite full quest logs (granted generally as a lock having not been back to a town for several hours) and can see the potential for blockages.

Would suggest using similar logic to when inventory was expanded to include worn/quest items as well as geenral items.

Good times.

Looking back on it, I’ve never had that issue with any other game. I just can’t see FF7 without those crazy menu coloration now.

/random

I just wanted to note that I won’t be adding a toggle for this. With every new feature I add it would be easy to default to the idea that “Well you can’t please everyone so let’s just add a toggle for this”, and that’s a dangerous path to go down. Although I just said above to Lumino quote, “Trying to force a very specific play style on people won’t make the game more enjoyable for everyone”, as a designer you also can’t go too far in the other direction and work to please everyone all of the time.

My philosophy of design falls very much inline with people like Steve Jobs, in that at the end of the day I believe that I know what’s right for the game. Giving players options to customize every aspect of their experience just doesn’t sit well with me. That’s also why you’ll never see stuff like options to set the RGB of your menu backgrounds; the thought of someone playing NEStalgia with clashing orange menu backgrounds disturbs me. The thought of them taking screenshots of it disturbs me even more!

NEStalgia is built upon the premise that the design sensibilities for classic games were awesome, and a large part of that was indeed that they didn’t hold your hand. I’ve designed NEStalgia to be a difficult game that doesn’t go out of its way to make things easy for players, but I also don’t believe in making something less convenient for the sake of less convenience. It’s a fine line to have to walk.

As PuppetShow touched on below, there are just certain modern design innovations that are true improvements to the formula. I view Quest Indicators as one of those innovations, and with the advent of more daily quests in almost every region of NEStalgia, those indicators are going become incredibly useful to players both new and old. Being able to quickly spot which quests you have yet to do in an area helps prevent people from forgetting stuff. Furthermore, the nature of MMOs is that many players take days/weeks off a time, and quest indicators can help ease their return by jogging their memories.

No one is ever going to change “strategy guide players” who just want a paint-by-the-numbers game where they mostly don’t have to explore stuff or think for themselves. That may seem contrary to how you’re supposed to enjoy a game, but the reality is that many people enjoy games in different ways. Ex: If a guy truly doesn’t want to talk to NPCs then he won’t talk to them, regardless of quest indicators. Trying to force a very specific play style on people won’t make the game more enjoyable for everyone, it will just make it more frustrating for some.

So yeah, that’s my two cents

There are two schools of thought here. “I talk to everyone” and “I just want the quests”.

These changes aren’t going to really impact players on either side of the fence from a gameplay perspective. Player A is still going to speak to everyone. And Player B now knows which parts of the town are relative to his interests.

So there is this.I guess it can be said that part of the appeal of NEStalgia (and one of the compliments I hear most often is “This is just like the games I played growing up”) Obviously that isn’t mechanically true since this is an online game with a player driven market and all that jazz. But visually and thematically, it totally is. NEStalgia has a really distinct vibe to it. Maybe the quest icons would take away from this since the visual aesthetic is what makes the game so durned charming to look at? Maybe this is modernizing the look of the game too much? I could see an argument about that. Perhaps the best thing to do would have a toggle for the quest icons being displayed or not?

Probably hugely over-thinking this at this point though.