One thing that really bothered me in Queen's Wish was stun-heavy combat. Most every enemy had stunning ability, and my party often spent several turns just standing there doing nothing after a few successful attack by the enemy, and I found no way to really counter this. Skipping turns is not fun at all, especially when you do it in every combat - I get that a boss can stun the whole party and let mooks pummel it for a little while, but when it happens constantly, it gets very tiring.
I feel this changed a lot from the previous games, where only a few enemies had stunning abilities (and whey they did, they were super-annoying and became first targets!). Did it happen accidentally, or was it a planned change to the pace of combat? Will QW2 combat be the same? Or did I just suck at building/equipping my party, and nobody else had this problem with the game?
Thanks for detailing your thoughts here! I've been a fan ever since I first found Exile: Escape from the Pit on AOL. But I was somewhat disappointed in Queen's Wish 1. To be clear, it was still a fun game, but it didn't grab me in quite the same way- so I'm excited to see how you'll be evolving the game and will certainly be backing.
Anyway, there was one "choice" you made in Queen's Wish you didn't address... the lack of interesting loot to find. I played about a third of the game (finished one of the factions and got a decent bit into the second), but found that I never got the excitement from finding a cool new unique weapon / spell / whatever in a dungeon backroom. (Especially if I had to solve a puzzle / find a secret to get it!) All my best gear came from the forts I built up. (Which is a cool system, btw. Happy to see more branching choices coming from it. But it should be possible to balance that with unique findable loot, right?)
In the end, a sense of exploration is one of the things I love most in games and has traditionally been very strong in your games, but I just didn't feel it in Queen's Wish. There just wasn't the reward for really scouring every nook and cranny of dungeons and the overworld... and I really missed that.
Yes, I know there were random chests to find, but it didn't *feel* as rewarding as finding some new weapon with an enticing unique name. I still remember finding the "alien blade" all the way back in Exile 1 and being like... woah. This thing has to be *awesome.* Please try to bring some of that back for Queen's Wish 2. :)
I think it would be more true to the narrative of the game if the unique loot was followers (either in your party, or at camp). It's not really believable that a prince from one of the most advanced countries in the world is going to find better gear on the floor of a cave.
The only way to balance that out would be to find epic loot you couldn't maintain without a sufficiently developed colony. (I played it on release, I thought he did something similar?)
I think the best solution is a hybrid. The bases you build up give you forges, crafting tables, etc... that can use better and better stuff.
So, bases let you make stuff, and the ingredients USED to make stuff comes from your adventures. This could include unique components with particularly epic effects and unique items that upgrade the entire workshop.
Thanks! I would add that for me, it was a combination of interesting loot *and* encounters. In the original Exile trilogy, those white dots were everywhere- inviting you to find out whatever new excitement might be there. (I'm fine that the white dots have been long dropped; but until Queen's Wish, the density of those quick-and-interesting decision encounters remained.)
Longtime fan of Spiderweb games and a backer of QW here and I'm so glad the next installment is now up for backing, which I will do as soon as I finish writing this comment.
Loved QW and I align with you on those 5 choices.
I have no doubt QW2 will be an even better game and I can't wait to play it.
With that said I do have 2 requests for you:
1º Can you pleeaase someday reveal the significance of each letter for the endgame code? I've saved all of mine and can't wait to use them but having some of the letters still have unknown effects is driving me crazy.
2º Make the choices we've made in QW1 have some effect in the sequel(s).
I'm already expecting this due to the endgame code of the original game, but I really want my main "loyal princess that disagrees with some of the decisions from my mother but still loves my family and wants to improve her people's lives" to have some repercussions for the choice I made and will make, in QW2 and hopefully in QW3 ;)
the truth is that we play the game because of the storyline(not graphics) the opportunity given to make your decisions determine the end of the game is why we love your games. you are an excellent writer if i may say. Family was new but its makes things all the better. you get more involved emotionally. Look within, produce what you feel called to. it will find its way to those who shall the love. :)
Just finished playing the first Queen's Wish, and absolutely loved the new directions there. As kind of a quickfire round of things I'd personally like to see tuned in the upcoming games:
1) No need for a large number of new attributes, just a few contextually useful ones
- fighting mobs and early parts of dungeons started to feel pretty boring and repetitive by the end game due to need to save up energy for the big bosses; a few weak but useful attributes /skills against mobs with low or none energy requirements would avoid repetition of simple attacks against weak enemies
2) Addition of new options for fort building and specialization would be amazing. Aside from that , did anyone actually use the extra space in the houses for scenery or what was the point there? Just asking because I spent at least 15 minutes trying to figure out ways to rotate or place more than one shop in a building..
3) Loved that picking your party felt something like throwing a dart at the wall and picking from a slew of uniform (non-)characters, this felt very much in character for the game and setting. What I was more expecting was that once dead, each character would remain dead and the only one in the party whose death would matter (in a game ending way) would be your own.
All that said, I'm so happy to see that Queen's Wish is going to get the continuation it deserves. I'm already excitedly waiting to see how you'll end up tuning these mechanics in the new game.
Another choice you made - one of my favorites - was that you were an actual ruler, a person of power. That's why your henchmen were generic and interchangeable, because to a ruler they're just bodies for hire. That's why you didn't get coins for selling each individual rusty sword or other generic equipment, because ruler's don't operate on that level.
Very excited to be backing QW2. I've been a fan since I stumbled across the Geneforge demo on, of all things, RealArcade way back in another time. From there I got into Nethergate (one of my personal favorites) and the Avernum series and I've been hooked since. Since life is about opinions and entitlement, I thought I'd drop my entitled opinion. Briefly.
I liked the ideas that QW1 brought to the table, but not so much the implementation. Doing a dungeon in one go is definitely a more intense experience than having the ability to drop in and out and refresh, but there's a careful balance of spending time vs higher intensity. If I spend time getting 85% of the way through a dungeon only to be completely out of abilities, potions, etc. and have to leave and restart, I have nothing to show. No experience, no loot to drop off for a few copper, no junk to hoard. Minor, incremental changes to slightly increase power even just through a few coppers worth of junk to upgrade gear feels a lot more valuable to the time spent, as the character and PC grows in experience.
The other big problem I ran into (on lower difficulties especially) was that I often found that I took the "RPG potion" approach to EVERYTHING I did, rather than using abilities. Which turned a lot of minor enemy fights into normal attack fests, because I was saving up abilities for the bigger, badder boss later on, only to not need it and thus making the earlier dungeon a bit slower because of it. I think my takeaway here is to take a really careful look at the balancing of abilities and enemies within the context of one shot dungeons. I much prefer to have some lower tier, not-OP abilities to help deal with non-boss mobs.
Final note: I love garbage. No, really. I love sticking my sticky fingers into every container and corner in the world, because the location of garbage sometimes tells its own story. Corner with bones and garbage in it? Probably rats nearby. Rocks, sticks and stones? I'm in a forest and these are objects. Glassware and test tubes in geneforge? I'm in a laboratory. I've been playing nethergate recently, and the first dungeon has garbage and guts and things strewn about, representing the goblins takeover of the place. Bring back garbage.
Final Final note: Advertise! Advertise more! I actually missed the first kickstarter for QW because I think it was only in one spiderweb software email??? Drop it onto all of your steam pages for all of your games. Drop it in reddit. Harass/sponsor youtubers.
I really liked the option to build decorative stuff in your forts, but having it use gold (which was also needed to buy things that made you better in a fight) meant I was always afraid to price myself out of stuff I needed to finish the game. It'd have been way better if decorative items cost me a currency whose only purpose was buying decorative items.
Can I add that I really really miss the perks on character creation and the uniqueness of individual characters. While changing skills on the fly does prevent growing your character into uselessness, it makes characters feel interchangeable and mostly pointless.
Regarding that constant dopamine drip you mentioned from killing enemies as a staple of the genre, that doesn't necessarily have to be something that factors into a character's very direct mechanical advantage, like their experience. You can avoid some of the obvious power creep by offering an alternative reward, like "reputation" or something which might result in some other characters praising them or maybe unlocking some cosmetic items for their forts like trophies and banners to commemorate their accomplishments.
It might not have the progression impact experience does, but it'll tap the same "number go up" nerve that players have.
I loved Queen's Wish. I've been a fan since 2009 (when you said it was ok for my unemployed ass to play your games and pay later (which I did)), and have bought, backed, played and beaten 12 of your games. Queen's Wish was definitely in the upper tier for me, and in some ways felt like the game Avadon was trying to be. I love how the mechanics reinforced the fact that your character was not a murderhobo, and that's what made the game unique for me.
I hated 1 at first, but actually grew to really like it for the same reason you did. I think an npc that spit a few different barks if you retreated from a level might improve the experience. However, I think part of that hate came from
2. Retreating didn't just mean you failed, it also meant you wasted time. Just utterly wasted it. If you had combat experience decline each time someone entered a level, that might dissuade farming.
I would add one. Late game resource sinks / prestige projects might be a good idea. Once you have lots of bases up and running, finding more stone isn't exactly exciting.
I have followed Spiderweb games for some years, as interesting games, but not my style. But I wound up coming back every few years to see what was new and how things were going. When you announced Queens wish I was really intrigued. Because it was different from the others that I thought were interesting but didn't quite click. So much so that when it came out I bought it. And loved the heck out of it. It was my first Spiderweb game. I have since bought the rest of the other series going back to Nethergate and Blades of Avernum. The new Avernum series and the old Avernum series. Then Geneforge and am getting Geneforge1- Mutagen. And will get Queens Wish 2 no matter what changes. I haven't finished playing all the other series yet. Mostly Avernum Escape from the Pit and Geneforge 1 and QW1. Of all of them QW1 is my favorite.
Keep doing what you are doing and After QW2 could you do a remake of Nethergate? Just a thought.
Another long term fan here. Queen's Wish was the first spiderweb game I didn't finish, like others I found the lack of any unique loot took a lot of fun out of exploring. I quite liked the requirement to finish a dungeon all in one go though.
+1 on needing to finish dungeons in 1 go being a good change. I love the way it turned the dungeon into something of a combat puzzle, especially on torment. (Note that the auto-replenishing-but-non-hoardable potions was a *great* companion system to this. Please keep that!)
Maybe a simple prompt warning that the monsters would respawn when the player attempts to exit would help with the people caught unawares by this change?
Thank you for sharing! I'm planning to back Queen's Wish 2, and reading design analyses like this has encouraged me to finish my current QW1 play-through.
I'm usually the last person to ask for sharper graphics, but just this once I may have to. Being able to better distinguish my party members in QW2 would be great, both with regards to their profiles and their in-battle sprites. The overall visual style doesn't bother me -- it's part of the Spiderweb charm -- but it would be great if my crew were more visually distinct in battle.
I'm looking forward to expanded fort-building options! Building something up from ruin and customizing it is a lot of fun. Building on QW1, maybe different forts could have unique features or adding cosmetic features could have (slight) mechanical effects? I'm not a fan of picking up junk items, but building them is another story -- especially if they tie into a quest!
Yeah, with the skill trees basically being the exact same between characters, I didn't care at all about my companions. Literally flushed the first three down the toilet in favor of unique ones as they unlocked. If they aren't mechanically different and they have a semi-generic look, they are rarely distinguishable.
One thing that really bothered me in Queen's Wish was stun-heavy combat. Most every enemy had stunning ability, and my party often spent several turns just standing there doing nothing after a few successful attack by the enemy, and I found no way to really counter this. Skipping turns is not fun at all, especially when you do it in every combat - I get that a boss can stun the whole party and let mooks pummel it for a little while, but when it happens constantly, it gets very tiring.
I feel this changed a lot from the previous games, where only a few enemies had stunning abilities (and whey they did, they were super-annoying and became first targets!). Did it happen accidentally, or was it a planned change to the pace of combat? Will QW2 combat be the same? Or did I just suck at building/equipping my party, and nobody else had this problem with the game?
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for detailing your thoughts here! I've been a fan ever since I first found Exile: Escape from the Pit on AOL. But I was somewhat disappointed in Queen's Wish 1. To be clear, it was still a fun game, but it didn't grab me in quite the same way- so I'm excited to see how you'll be evolving the game and will certainly be backing.
Anyway, there was one "choice" you made in Queen's Wish you didn't address... the lack of interesting loot to find. I played about a third of the game (finished one of the factions and got a decent bit into the second), but found that I never got the excitement from finding a cool new unique weapon / spell / whatever in a dungeon backroom. (Especially if I had to solve a puzzle / find a secret to get it!) All my best gear came from the forts I built up. (Which is a cool system, btw. Happy to see more branching choices coming from it. But it should be possible to balance that with unique findable loot, right?)
In the end, a sense of exploration is one of the things I love most in games and has traditionally been very strong in your games, but I just didn't feel it in Queen's Wish. There just wasn't the reward for really scouring every nook and cranny of dungeons and the overworld... and I really missed that.
Yes, I know there were random chests to find, but it didn't *feel* as rewarding as finding some new weapon with an enticing unique name. I still remember finding the "alien blade" all the way back in Exile 1 and being like... woah. This thing has to be *awesome.* Please try to bring some of that back for Queen's Wish 2. :)
I think it would be more true to the narrative of the game if the unique loot was followers (either in your party, or at camp). It's not really believable that a prince from one of the most advanced countries in the world is going to find better gear on the floor of a cave.
The only way to balance that out would be to find epic loot you couldn't maintain without a sufficiently developed colony. (I played it on release, I thought he did something similar?)
+1 to unique camp followers as upgrades.
I think the best solution is a hybrid. The bases you build up give you forges, crafting tables, etc... that can use better and better stuff.
So, bases let you make stuff, and the ingredients USED to make stuff comes from your adventures. This could include unique components with particularly epic effects and unique items that upgrade the entire workshop.
I agree with this whole-heartedly. The lack of interesting loot was a huge problem for me.
Thanks! I would add that for me, it was a combination of interesting loot *and* encounters. In the original Exile trilogy, those white dots were everywhere- inviting you to find out whatever new excitement might be there. (I'm fine that the white dots have been long dropped; but until Queen's Wish, the density of those quick-and-interesting decision encounters remained.)
Hello Mr. Vogel,
Longtime fan of Spiderweb games and a backer of QW here and I'm so glad the next installment is now up for backing, which I will do as soon as I finish writing this comment.
Loved QW and I align with you on those 5 choices.
I have no doubt QW2 will be an even better game and I can't wait to play it.
With that said I do have 2 requests for you:
1º Can you pleeaase someday reveal the significance of each letter for the endgame code? I've saved all of mine and can't wait to use them but having some of the letters still have unknown effects is driving me crazy.
2º Make the choices we've made in QW1 have some effect in the sequel(s).
I'm already expecting this due to the endgame code of the original game, but I really want my main "loyal princess that disagrees with some of the decisions from my mother but still loves my family and wants to improve her people's lives" to have some repercussions for the choice I made and will make, in QW2 and hopefully in QW3 ;)
You're going to retire in a few years? Is it burnout?
the truth is that we play the game because of the storyline(not graphics) the opportunity given to make your decisions determine the end of the game is why we love your games. you are an excellent writer if i may say. Family was new but its makes things all the better. you get more involved emotionally. Look within, produce what you feel called to. it will find its way to those who shall the love. :)
Just finished playing the first Queen's Wish, and absolutely loved the new directions there. As kind of a quickfire round of things I'd personally like to see tuned in the upcoming games:
1) No need for a large number of new attributes, just a few contextually useful ones
- fighting mobs and early parts of dungeons started to feel pretty boring and repetitive by the end game due to need to save up energy for the big bosses; a few weak but useful attributes /skills against mobs with low or none energy requirements would avoid repetition of simple attacks against weak enemies
2) Addition of new options for fort building and specialization would be amazing. Aside from that , did anyone actually use the extra space in the houses for scenery or what was the point there? Just asking because I spent at least 15 minutes trying to figure out ways to rotate or place more than one shop in a building..
3) Loved that picking your party felt something like throwing a dart at the wall and picking from a slew of uniform (non-)characters, this felt very much in character for the game and setting. What I was more expecting was that once dead, each character would remain dead and the only one in the party whose death would matter (in a game ending way) would be your own.
All that said, I'm so happy to see that Queen's Wish is going to get the continuation it deserves. I'm already excitedly waiting to see how you'll end up tuning these mechanics in the new game.
Another choice you made - one of my favorites - was that you were an actual ruler, a person of power. That's why your henchmen were generic and interchangeable, because to a ruler they're just bodies for hire. That's why you didn't get coins for selling each individual rusty sword or other generic equipment, because ruler's don't operate on that level.
Jeff,
Very excited to be backing QW2. I've been a fan since I stumbled across the Geneforge demo on, of all things, RealArcade way back in another time. From there I got into Nethergate (one of my personal favorites) and the Avernum series and I've been hooked since. Since life is about opinions and entitlement, I thought I'd drop my entitled opinion. Briefly.
I liked the ideas that QW1 brought to the table, but not so much the implementation. Doing a dungeon in one go is definitely a more intense experience than having the ability to drop in and out and refresh, but there's a careful balance of spending time vs higher intensity. If I spend time getting 85% of the way through a dungeon only to be completely out of abilities, potions, etc. and have to leave and restart, I have nothing to show. No experience, no loot to drop off for a few copper, no junk to hoard. Minor, incremental changes to slightly increase power even just through a few coppers worth of junk to upgrade gear feels a lot more valuable to the time spent, as the character and PC grows in experience.
The other big problem I ran into (on lower difficulties especially) was that I often found that I took the "RPG potion" approach to EVERYTHING I did, rather than using abilities. Which turned a lot of minor enemy fights into normal attack fests, because I was saving up abilities for the bigger, badder boss later on, only to not need it and thus making the earlier dungeon a bit slower because of it. I think my takeaway here is to take a really careful look at the balancing of abilities and enemies within the context of one shot dungeons. I much prefer to have some lower tier, not-OP abilities to help deal with non-boss mobs.
Final note: I love garbage. No, really. I love sticking my sticky fingers into every container and corner in the world, because the location of garbage sometimes tells its own story. Corner with bones and garbage in it? Probably rats nearby. Rocks, sticks and stones? I'm in a forest and these are objects. Glassware and test tubes in geneforge? I'm in a laboratory. I've been playing nethergate recently, and the first dungeon has garbage and guts and things strewn about, representing the goblins takeover of the place. Bring back garbage.
Final Final note: Advertise! Advertise more! I actually missed the first kickstarter for QW because I think it was only in one spiderweb software email??? Drop it onto all of your steam pages for all of your games. Drop it in reddit. Harass/sponsor youtubers.
I really liked the option to build decorative stuff in your forts, but having it use gold (which was also needed to buy things that made you better in a fight) meant I was always afraid to price myself out of stuff I needed to finish the game. It'd have been way better if decorative items cost me a currency whose only purpose was buying decorative items.
Can I add that I really really miss the perks on character creation and the uniqueness of individual characters. While changing skills on the fly does prevent growing your character into uselessness, it makes characters feel interchangeable and mostly pointless.
Hey, you note Kickstarter already way past GOAL Any doubts you have about your skills and product should be dropped. Go For It!
Regarding that constant dopamine drip you mentioned from killing enemies as a staple of the genre, that doesn't necessarily have to be something that factors into a character's very direct mechanical advantage, like their experience. You can avoid some of the obvious power creep by offering an alternative reward, like "reputation" or something which might result in some other characters praising them or maybe unlocking some cosmetic items for their forts like trophies and banners to commemorate their accomplishments.
It might not have the progression impact experience does, but it'll tap the same "number go up" nerve that players have.
I loved Queen's Wish. I've been a fan since 2009 (when you said it was ok for my unemployed ass to play your games and pay later (which I did)), and have bought, backed, played and beaten 12 of your games. Queen's Wish was definitely in the upper tier for me, and in some ways felt like the game Avadon was trying to be. I love how the mechanics reinforced the fact that your character was not a murderhobo, and that's what made the game unique for me.
I hated 1 at first, but actually grew to really like it for the same reason you did. I think an npc that spit a few different barks if you retreated from a level might improve the experience. However, I think part of that hate came from
2. Retreating didn't just mean you failed, it also meant you wasted time. Just utterly wasted it. If you had combat experience decline each time someone entered a level, that might dissuade farming.
I would add one. Late game resource sinks / prestige projects might be a good idea. Once you have lots of bases up and running, finding more stone isn't exactly exciting.
I have followed Spiderweb games for some years, as interesting games, but not my style. But I wound up coming back every few years to see what was new and how things were going. When you announced Queens wish I was really intrigued. Because it was different from the others that I thought were interesting but didn't quite click. So much so that when it came out I bought it. And loved the heck out of it. It was my first Spiderweb game. I have since bought the rest of the other series going back to Nethergate and Blades of Avernum. The new Avernum series and the old Avernum series. Then Geneforge and am getting Geneforge1- Mutagen. And will get Queens Wish 2 no matter what changes. I haven't finished playing all the other series yet. Mostly Avernum Escape from the Pit and Geneforge 1 and QW1. Of all of them QW1 is my favorite.
Keep doing what you are doing and After QW2 could you do a remake of Nethergate? Just a thought.
Thanks for your time,
Chris
Another long term fan here. Queen's Wish was the first spiderweb game I didn't finish, like others I found the lack of any unique loot took a lot of fun out of exploring. I quite liked the requirement to finish a dungeon all in one go though.
+1 on needing to finish dungeons in 1 go being a good change. I love the way it turned the dungeon into something of a combat puzzle, especially on torment. (Note that the auto-replenishing-but-non-hoardable potions was a *great* companion system to this. Please keep that!)
Maybe a simple prompt warning that the monsters would respawn when the player attempts to exit would help with the people caught unawares by this change?
Thank you for sharing! I'm planning to back Queen's Wish 2, and reading design analyses like this has encouraged me to finish my current QW1 play-through.
I'm usually the last person to ask for sharper graphics, but just this once I may have to. Being able to better distinguish my party members in QW2 would be great, both with regards to their profiles and their in-battle sprites. The overall visual style doesn't bother me -- it's part of the Spiderweb charm -- but it would be great if my crew were more visually distinct in battle.
I'm looking forward to expanded fort-building options! Building something up from ruin and customizing it is a lot of fun. Building on QW1, maybe different forts could have unique features or adding cosmetic features could have (slight) mechanical effects? I'm not a fan of picking up junk items, but building them is another story -- especially if they tie into a quest!
Yeah, with the skill trees basically being the exact same between characters, I didn't care at all about my companions. Literally flushed the first three down the toilet in favor of unique ones as they unlocked. If they aren't mechanically different and they have a semi-generic look, they are rarely distinguishable.