While a new horse I eventually bought started off in an excellent mood, I do not understand why my initial starter horse did not at least start out with “okay”. To get a horse into a good mood, one either has to come online to do horse care chores every single day for weeks, or spend Star Coins on either ongoing stable care, or the veterinarian’s treatment. At the same time, my horse has levelled up and gained various improvements to its stats, which includes not only how fast it runs, but also how quickly it reacts to my inputs.Īnother factor that confounds me is that my starter horse was in an awful “mood” from the very start. I am significantly less bothered by this problem by now, which is due to a handful of factors: On the one hand, since I sort of forced myself to play the game again regardless of how I felt about it, I simply got used to it. Imperfections of InputsĪ core complaint in my initial review was the awful handling of player character and horse. And this is one of the more polished quest lines, with dedicated animations and camera angles. Needless to say, this setup ruins any sense of urgency that the dialogue and cutscenes try to build up. Wait for the race starting countdown to run outįinally start your escape by racing through a few checkpoints Stroll casually back to the quest giver to finish the eavesdropping quest, which is concluded with a dialogue tag along the lines of “we should get out of here, they’ve seen us.”Ĭlick the quest giver again for a new quest where she tells you “We should run.”Ĭlick ‘Yes’ to accept a quest with the objective “escape”Ĭlick the “Ok” button to start a race type quest Once a dialogue box reveals that they caught you and are coming after you, you have to The limited structure of dialogues, tasks and cutscenes can also lead to bizarre situations like this one: A quest mechanic involves you eavesdropping on two NPCs. This completely breaks natural dialogue flow, and makes the interactions feel incredibly awkward. Such quests tend to give you 5 experience points and are necessary simply to continue in the dialogue. Dialogues are always serviceable, often entertaining and sometimes downright hilarious.įrom a User Experience perspective (more on that below), the flow of following any quests in the game is hindered by the quest structure: since practically no dialogue exists outside of the Receive Quest / Complete Quest framings, the game often makes you accept quests with objectives like “Keep talking to Character X”. Many quests are relatively banale, some are a bit dumb and some are genuinely interesting. The writing quality in these quests is solid, for the most part. I’m happy to see this has been addressed, at least. The game only just added differentiation between what is “main quest” and what are less important side quests, meaning that for much of my playthrough, I had no way of knowing what I was getting into, apart from starting to develop a hunch for what characters are generally involved with the more interesting quest lines. While you sometimes get brief cutscenes and custom animations, many of the more trivial quests feature only a progress bar at the bottom of your screen that tells you what action your character is performing, rather than showing any specific animation. It’s always easy to abstract any game mechanic to the point where it sounds boring, but what makes many quests feel frustrating is that the presentation and polish around them is lacking. The resulting gameplay often feels extra clunky, as though the quest designers did what they could to bring in some variety, but were too limited in their toolset to add anything that actually feels good. There are rare occasions where the mechanics deviate from these norms: the game offers a handful of stealth missions, for example. Unfortunately, all too many of the quests’ mechanics boil down to the bog-standard “go there” and “pick up five of that”, aside from the ever-present “race through these checkpoints”. Some of the quests feel epic, urgent and important, others focus very much on the daily life in horse-crazy Jorvik. As can be expected with such a scope, these quests vary drastically in their quality, both in terms of writing and presentation. Star Stable Online boasts of offering ten thousand quests to play.
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