[2019] Re-playable Early Quests

It wasn't only with Sliske's Endgame. We've experimented with replayable quests a number of times over the years, and using a number of different approaches. The results have always been very few players actually replaying, nowhere near enough to justify the additional work required to make quests replayable (in one experiment, barely breaking double digits). It is not ideal, but lower level quests are at least easy enough to reach on a new account. I wouldn't say it will never happen (we may experiment again at some point), but I also wouldn't suggest holding out any hope that it will.

So, some of this is due to how the existing systems work, which I won't go into.

If we're creating a quest from scratch, then it's an increase of workload but it's something we can factor in. Dev wise, not too bad, but you are effectively doubling and sometimes tripling the QA load because they need to test it repeatedly in various scenarios. So there's a definite cost there that we need to factor in. Basically we need to choose whether to make it replayable, or whether we add in an extra action moment (or several) into the quest (i.e a puzzle, boss, interaction section etc) or a more interesting reward. Generally players are more interested in the first time feeling great than replaying existing.

However, if we're converting lower level quests that effectively requires us to rewrite the backbone of the quest and we need to do so finding a way that allows for existing players to keep their save states AND allow players currently doing the quest to not get disrupted. That's a not insignificant amount of work and it's something that most people simply won't engage with, so it's not really proven useful.

We will likely experiment with replayability again, it's certainly something that we lore mods would love to do, but judging by the results so far it's a niche update so we need to consider it appropriately as such.

Some people would do that, sure. None of our experiments so far have suggested anywhere near enough players would do that, even for additional reward. We would rather spend what resource we have for creating quest content on new quests.

Like I said, though, never say never. No doubt in the future someone will want to experiment with a replayable quest. Maybe things will go differently that time.