I agree with this wholeheartedly. I think Funcom just needs to ensure the following:
- The player should be guided towards the information we already have in the lore (i.e. journals, notes, and NPC dialogs). Ideally, they should be able to discover this information before filling up their purge meter.
- The game should make it clear to the player that the purge will damage their buildings. On PVE and PVE-C servers, the expectation is that nothing can damage your buildings, and the purge breaks that expectation.
Unfortunately, neither the old journey system nor the new one accomplish this, in my opinion. However, the new journey system at least makes the player aware of the purge more easily, because the player quickly learns to pay attention to all the journeys and to actively seek more information about the journeys’ topics.
It’s not an easy problem to solve with the subtlety with expect, though. Like you said, it’s not fun to completely spoil everything and lead the player by the hand through it all.
There are two ways they could try to improve this:
- Make the purge meter fill much more slowly until the player has talked to certain NPCs. Right now, if my memory serves, there’s only one, Gilzan the Treasure Hunter, but they could perhaps add one more, or give another one more dialog lines.
- Add one or more journey step to talk to these NPCs.
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