I feel silly for confessing this, but I'm always terrified to go off and do side quests when the game tells me I don't have time. I meekly bow to my imaginary questgivers and go do what I'm told, just in case this time the game really will go on without me-- as if there is a hidden countdown timer.
I feel like should know better, as a student of game design, AND YET. What if this time they decided that you really do only have 100 turns to find the King? I'm pretty sure I didn't actually have a turn-based time limit to finish Baldur's Gate, say, and I know you don't in Neverwinter Nights because I know how that world uses event triggers, but Tunnels of Doom (which I played from a 5.25" floppy disc in the 80s) did impose an arbitrary time limit. You really were on a countdown timer! When I worry about this happening to me in modern games, am I being oldschool, or naive? Did I just miss out on basic epic quest RPG training 101? It seems like FF-style RPGs, with their wealth of side quests and discoveries that are jewel-like little rewards in and of themselves, represent the opposite of turn-based time limits. I like this idea, I really do, but I may need a little moral support telling the NPCs no.
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I feel silly for confessing this, but I'm always terrified to go off and do side quests when the game tells me I don't have time. I meekly bow to my imaginary questgivers and go do what I'm told, just in case this time the game really will go on without me-- as if there is a hidden countdown timer.
I feel like should know better, as a student of game design, AND YET. What if this time they decided that you really do only have 100 turns to find the King? I'm pretty sure I didn't actually have a turn-based time limit to finish Baldur's Gate, say, and I know you don't in Neverwinter Nights because I know how that world uses event triggers, but Tunnels of Doom (which I played from a 5.25" floppy disc in the 80s) did impose an arbitrary time limit. You really were on a countdown timer! When I worry about this happening to me in modern games, am I being oldschool, or naive? Did I just miss out on basic epic quest RPG training 101? It seems like FF-style RPGs, with their wealth of side quests and discoveries that are jewel-like little rewards in and of themselves, represent the opposite of turn-based time limits. I like this idea, I really do, but I may need a little moral support telling the NPCs no.