Log Quest Bug ?

[hepidragon]

Hi, i have a question about the quest log for the coffin of Lorus of Eastleaf in Ossuary.

Far before i get the pin number for the chest (which later i know that i should get the pin from the talking tree in Tangletree Forest after i give it a pure water), i already managed to get the pin number from a spoiler post and open the chest and take the bow.

Now, i am already given pure water to the talking tree and it give me the PIN to get the bow. But the quest in my LOG QUEST book never disappear even after i come to the Lorus' coffin again.

Is this some kind of a bug ? I know this is nothing, but it's just bugging me that the quest still written there though i finish it.

Anyway to erase it from my LOG QUEST ?

Thank you !

[BasiliskWrangler]

There may not be any way to erase that from your quest log. Unfortunately, in a game like this where you can complete events in non-sequential order, it's sometimes hard to cover all the open ends and know when to kill a quest if it is no longer valid.

The easiest solution to this problem would be to give you [the player] a more flexible journal so you can erase "dead quests" on your own. The problem with this solution is that inevitably someone would erase an active game-critical quest and then ruin their game. We'll try to find a balanced solution for this problem in the next game.

[Maelstrom]

Hmmm... I thought it would be fairly easy to check for the final state of the quest in a case like this. If item x at location y is in a state other than when it was created, erase quest from book. I noticed something like this happening when I spoke with the shady guy in Blackwater. I message came up that a quest had been removed since I could not complete it anymore.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Yes, that is easy to do and we check each quest fairly often to see if conditions have been met that would invalidate that quest. The problem, however, is that sometimes with all the possibilities that exists to mess up a quest, we overlook certain conditions.

In the example you give, we obviously never assumed a player would get the Bow before getting the quest (in hindsight we should have assumed that many players, after learning the combo number, would do just that!). This would actually be an easy fix, but other quests with more complicated completion conditions might prove difficult to cover all the possibilities that may lead to failure; hence my idea to let players drop quests if they choose. I don't know if that is the right answer or not, but having that option as a last resort might be nice.

[Doug Tenser]

Perhaps allow a player to set a quest to "hidden" and also offer a mechanism to reverse that setting.

That would allow players to hide a quest they either can't solve or don't want to solve.

$0.02

[BasiliskWrangler]

Good idea, Doug!