Cyclic selections

[alphaTECH]

I've been having an irritating issue with Daggerfall in that it seems to give me the same dungeon for quests over and over instead of picking one of the other hundreds out there to send me down. It's not a consistent issue, as I can get quests that do send me to somewhere new but I'll see the same damn dungeon come up twice more in a row after a while. This also presents itself with questgivers. Oftentimes I'll be offered the same quest that I've just completed.

It would be much nicer if the game randomized its selection from a list of places that you haven't been to and quests that you haven't done yet. Once all available quests from a faction have been completed (or rejected) or all possible quest locations have been visited (yeah right), reset the list and start picking randomly from it again.

Any thoughts?

[pango]

Hi,
Random quests usually (?) pick dungeons from your current region, so if you want different dungeons, move to a new region (a large region will usually have more dungeons to choose from, too).
Hope it helps!

[alphaTECH]

Well there's hundreds of dungeons in each region but I seem to keep getting the same ones over and over. That's the problem. I'm currently in Dwynnen which is quite large and The Fortress of Ashsly is repeatedly chosen.

[pango]

By the way are you talking of Daggerfall classic or Daggerfall Unity?
If that's Daggerfall classic, I've experienced that too, say Castle Necromoghan being selected again and again when in Daggerfall region. That's probably some kind of bug (quality of implementation bug, at least); And that's why I gave the advice above: there's nothing else you can do about it in classic.

If you were talking about Daggerfall Unity, from looking at the code it should really pick dungeons at random, and since there's about 150 dungeons in Dwynnen it shouldn't happen. Then again something may be happening at runtime.

[Interkarma]

This can depend on the type of dungeon requested by quest as well. For example, any quest asking for a human stronghold in Daggerfall region will basically get Privateers Hold each time.

Just good quest authorship can improve this a lot.

[alphaTECH]

This can depend on the type of dungeon requested by quest as well. For example, any quest asking for a human stronghold in Daggerfall region will basically get Privateers Hold each time.

Just good quest authorship can improve this a lot.

EDIT: I'm still playing Daggerfall Classic, but I'm assuming that in keeping parity with the original game, DFUnity would not try and change the random selections.

I think I understand the issue a little better now. The Fortress of Ashsly is one of only three Barbarian Strongholds in Dwynnen. Still, that's some irritating design, especially when the dungeon designs don't change enough to feel different, and you see heaps of various enemy types in each regardless of what it is. Any chance of giving players an option to turn off this pigeonholing and choose something new each time?

[Jay_H]

That's hard-written into each quest. With that said, the quests could be rewritten to make use of any dungeon rather than a specific type.

In writing my custom DFU quests I was entirely ignorant of the ability to distinguish dungeon types so that won't be an issue when running the custom quests made so far. I agree that it's much more limiting than beneficial as a feature.

[pango]

I agree that it's much more limiting than beneficial as a feature.

Well, it goes both ways, if you have two quests that each enforce a dungeon type but not the same type, then you are sure they won't select the same dungeon.
And it can be a part of the quest (or could be, because I agree that the dungeon types are hard to tell apart as they are; but that's something that could be worked on!).
To me, we should just make sure that the dungeon types enforced by quests are about equitably used by each guild, etc... Any statistics on that?

[alphaTECH]

I agree that it's much more limiting than beneficial as a feature.

Well, it goes both ways, if you have two quests that each enforce a dungeon type but not the same type, then you are sure they won't select the same dungeon.

That's a half-measure at best unfortunately. It still doesn't solve the original issue of having 151 dungeons in Dwynnen but only three that can be picked by certain quests. It's such an arbitrary limitation considering how little difference the dungeon type makes.

[pango]

2/3 of dungeon selections in quests are unspecified; When a type is specified it seems to be usually related to the quest (I verified this for the rare types, it could be checked for others), but one counter example is Q0C10Y00, that uses 3 different dungeon types probably to be sure to pick 3 different dungeons (maybe this could be a standard "meta rule" in random quests generation to pick different ids when several resources of the same type must be chosen?).

I have some ideas about how it could be made more flexible; For example, a quest mentioning harpies may enforce the choice of a "harpies nest" dungeon, when in fact several types of dungeons have harpies. Some substitution rules could be used when the pool of matching dungeons is too small.

But what's interesting is that no quest seems to enforce the selection of a Barbarian Stronghold (dungeon15), so it must not be the reason for your recurent trips to The Fortress of Ashsly...