What Did You Think Of Point Of No Return And A Journey Beyond?

Are you accusing me of cannibalism?

 

Hang on, gotta pull out the script again.

Spoiler: A Journey Beyond

This quest looked over at Dwarves and Doguns and thought to itself "golly gee wouldn't it be a hilarious April fools joke if I took the amount of unskippable dialogue in that quest and quadrupled it?". Unfortunately, that turned out to be true, so here we are. The only good mechanics in the quest are the puzzles, namely what I have deemed the "mario maker puzzle". Everything else is just a tedious snore fest and screw those rapid burst fire mobs in the escort section (I haven't tried post patch though, so I'm just going to assume that out of anything aside from the mini boss, these were the things that received the most changes).

The plot isn't necessarily bad, in fact it's basically passable, but the characters are very bland and forgettable. Lucio is so ignorant the first time you meet him that you know he's going to die by the end of the quest and just stop caring about his existence, I only remember Elphaba because of the "stole my liver" meme, and Aledar jumps from being competent and careful to incompetent and me playing babysitter simulator so many times to the point where I get confused following his line of reasoning at all. Like, he acts as if nothing bad was going to happen when they entered an area they knew had been taken over by some sort of extremely powerful force or entity. What in the flying Jesus on Thomas the Tank Engine were you expecting to happen when you waltzed into the unknown? Even after you just saw a hallucination, you still managed to get vored.

In all honesty, you should've either replaced Aledar with Tasim or had both be there together. Tasim seems way more competent with just one scene alone from A Hunter's Calling. There's a reason why I made a meme in my video thumbnail for Aledar and Axelus being the same person, and that is that both of them feel useless aside from being plot devices, as do the other two main side characters.

tl;dr Basically I dislike this quest and it's respective questline, and Aledar is only slightly less annoying than the Handler from MHW.
If you understood that reference, then BILL will be shortly delivering a cake to your house.
If you don't like cake, then oh well I tried.

Spoiler: Point of No Return

Now that I've filtered out all that, I love Point of No Return. Finally, there's a quest that doesn't need to cram its lore so far down my throat to the point where I regurgitate it back up and forget about its existence. There's only ever one scene that really explains what's going on, but you can figure it out as you go through the quest, basically acting more as confirmation than anything else. On top of this, all the puzzles are very enjoyable and legitimately are tough, albeit they can be very obnoxious if you even lag a little bit. The only real problem I have with it is the ending sequence, as it seems to drag on for too long. I get the point of you forcing yourself to go through it, but after 3-5 times, it just starts getting obnoxious.

While I personally find Misadventure the best quest of 1.19, this definitely comes in second, so well done.

 

PONR>AJB imo, ponr was really fun (minus the platform pressure plate thingy cause it took me forever to figure out that the platform your soul is on is saved, also it's hella buggy and sometimes you fall off anyway) ajb: two words; ALEDAR CART like actually so annoying you have to guard his lazy ass
This doesn't make sense quest wise for him to stop every 2 feet. imo, he should just go really slow and there should be a constant rush of mobs. Much better imo

 

I completely agree and have been speaking on the absurd amount of unskippable dialogue since the first day of the update. I never heard anyone once legitimately say they enjoy 95% of their quests being dictated by a pace they can’t control. It’s way too much information, all at a pace you can’t choose. I dread having to waste a few hours to do this another 4 times on my other classes. With that too I still find issue with the lack of direction in the instructions, it’s definitely better than during the beta but I still think it’s too vague.

With that I thoroughly enjoy the concept and the lore, just think the execution wasn’t quite there. And with that I do very much appreciate how you listen to feedback especially during the beta as things were being worked out, it was nice.

 

Spoiler: A Journey Beyond

Journey Beyond was both good and less good. I enjoyed the characters, and it was cool to see Aledar again (although he turns from professional to getting hurt constantly). I do find the whole "Darkness" thing to be somewhat of a cheap solution to why you can't attack the monster, since we've literally never heard of anything like it anytime before.
The whole liver scene was to me more disturbing than funny, but afterwards it's pretty funny. I still don't really get what happened to Lucio, and Aledar was just dumb to get eaten like that. (Also what's the deal with the Omniperspective Wanderers or something, can you even kill them?)
I forget why we had to Aledar CartTM, he was probably wounded after being eaten or something, but the escort part was pretty tedious. Not hard, but a pain. The worst thing was the damn Sclera at the end that took like 20 minutes to kill. All in all, a pretty cool introduction to the new area with some story too.
Oh but also unskippable dialogue oh my god

Spoiler: Point of No Return

Personally, I don't understand what people thought was so extremely fun with this quest, I'm not saying it's bad but just not phenomenal to me. It does explain why the Lutho citizens are so boring, and the dark mirror place was pretty rad. On the other hand, the platform parkour was long because I never figured out you remained on the platform you were on, and I don't understand the dodging part in front of the mirror. Like, is your soul's movements supposed to tell you something? I was almost always caught by the falling thing and there didn't seem to be any system to it. The labyrinth was pretty confusing, I didn't know you could go underneath.
Then there is the last parts, where I wonder if you don't take lots of fall damage from jumping off the obelisk without using a spell? Also walking 6+ times to that doorway seemed a bit extra.

 

Bro have you ever done mixed feelings????

 

Point of no return was great, but the parkour section was glitchy and frustrating, and the swapping with the spirit was unreliable and confusing when to switch. It was one of my favorites to be honest.

A journey beyond felt mediocre. The plot of “darkness” felt inconsistent and out of place as it was never mentioned again, the wither was VERY glitchy and was sort of comedic. Finding the three people in the city felt frustrating, BUT the tunnel and the sound was very fun and original, overall the story and the quest felt pretty weak but it did set the tone well

 

its not that tho, its annoying to get followed by 10000 darkness mobs when you finished the part theyre in, i think that after you kill the mobs coming for aledar, they'll disappear, not follow you while multi hitting you 50000 times

 

I'm a simple minded person. This is my own, opinionated view of the quest, and I really don't want any of it to come off as hostile on any level, despite some of the sentences looking that way. I just want to draw attention to as many nooks and crannies as I can, present possible solutions, and lay out what I think is done well and what's not.

I like A Journey Beyond. The quest stays captivating through the whole ride with high interactivity, plentiful cutscenes, and great humour (namely, Lucio getting stuck in the ground. Can't leave that unmentioned. The silliness of Aledar cart is nice too). I really like how players are asked to explore the newly unlocked area on their own to progress, instead of being given the opportunity to cheese it with direct coordinates. There's some extra things I'm also really fond of, such as being able to retry the escort mission simply by going to the starting point in-map, instead of having to follow former steps. The removal of arbitrary walking is a great thing as well, since at that level, the Wynn province is already a familiar ground to players who don't want to walk 2 kilometers through it again. Contrary to the popular opinions, I also like the difficulty of some bits, since they really put the skills you've gained over 100 levels to the test.

However, that's not to say the quest doesn't have its fair share of problems, and oh boy are they major.

To start off with minor things, fighting the wither mob inside a heavily crammed space, while under an infinite blindness effect feels really sloppy, since you're never aware of the enemy's location. Once you see it, you're already too close, and are bound to take damage. In certain sections, such as the roots of corruption cave and escort mission, mobs often spawn directly on top of you with no prior warning, and deal high enough damage to unfairly oneshot you.

But as the worst offender of all, we have the Aledar escort mission. The entire section feels like nothing but filler on an already super long quest, and I feel like introducing Lutho could've been handled much better. Right about all of the mobs involved are bullet sponges, aka they keep sucking in attacks without flinching. Taking down a single mob requires you to drain the entire mana bar from full to empty on the mob, before it has time to regenerate its health, which leaves you vulnerable every time upon doing so. Keeping track of which mob's been hit can be problematic, since all of them look the same apart from the health bar. Spawning the mobs in waves is a good idea to counter this, and prevent the player from being overwhelmed. However, this is never told to the player, which can easily result in them thinking, that the stage restarted on its own. Large health pools, super high health regen, sometimes a oneshot dealing damage, and a highly excessive amount of mobs. All of these things combined result in a mind bogglingly jarring and not fun experience. I feel like this could be fixed simply by halving the amount of mobs, and preventing them from regenerating, although, I'm not an expert on game design.

One part in particular really got on my nerves though; The endermen. The endermen are constantly teleporting around, with a downtime of around a second or two. Even though you can notice the pattern and open windows in it, it's usually not enough time to look around and identify the mobs solely on a small health bar. All this without even mentioning, that no GM should never ever in a million years use a vanilla mob such as enderman, that visually teleports on the client's side upon receiving damage, all while utilizing the same feature, teleportation, on the game's side. Combining this with the overwhelming amount of mobs, the supersonic speed of them, a catastrophic environment and limited space, keeping track of the endermen is humanly impossible. Not to mention that crowd control doesn't work as an alternative, due to the endermen non-stop teleporting into a new random location.

I tried this part alone for 5 whole hours in total, with one attempt even lasting 2 hours before running out of potions. Not to flex, but I have a build that solely focuses on survivability and high damage, I had the whole inventory full to the brim with healing potions every time, I experience absolutely no server lag or fps issues, I have a 144hz monitor, 4x supersampling to see details well, and a latency free mouse, and my aim has become impeccable over the years of playing games, yet I couldn't beat the enderman section without exploiting the nearby trees. You know, the one thing that you should actually be barriered off. When a player needs to utilize the game's own flaws to progress, you know something's wrong.

While we're on the topic of barriers, let me remind you how to be a good lil' QA boi, and create proficient walls:
1. Make sure you're giving the player more than enough free space to move in.
2. Draw the borders with a visible scaffold block, by hand.
3. Select individual spots of the wall's stump with worldedit
4. //stack it to the sky.
5. Finally, convert them to barriers.

From the looks of it, it really feels like someone just made a few box selections with worldedit, set them directly to barriers without checking it, and called it a day. As a result, me, along with numerous other players, kept getting stuck on invisible corners that're in the middle of a main path, and taking severe damage as a result.



This limited space had me actively returning to former, more spacious areas, but that didn't come without problems either. If you go too far to unload the chunks Aledar's in, you've softlocked yourself until doing /kill. If you move so fast that a mob gets unloaded the same way, congratulations, you've softlocked yourself again, albeit this time you don't lose the wave restarting button. Speaking of which, the restart button is yet another great idea to add to the list, since players can utilize an intentional feature in case something goes wrong, instead of having to rely on backdoors that sometimes may or may not work. Having to double click the button to confirm is a further great concept for preventing people from accidentally losing work. However, it turns out to be quite useless in execution, since people are going to spam spells near the cart, while fights are undoubtably going to last long enough for the button to appear. This further encourages you to stay far from the cart, and fall victim to something unloading under your nose. A small extra complaint about the cart is the excessively large script region slime, that blocks out most of archer attacks. Quite of an inconvenience.

Even though they don't belong into a quest review, it's hard to overlook all the other unmentioned bugs that made parts of the experience even worse, so I'm just going to throw a few of them here, at the end. They might have been patched by now, but oh well:
-Aledar sometimes take damage from nothing / invisible mobs.
-The entire section often fails to trigger upon entering
-The checkpoints send you one step too early in the section, making you lose progress, which can even spiral you all the way to the start.



In general, these issues aren't be the end of the world. They're hard to overlook though, since the completion of this quest is a requirement to enter half a region, and eventually, an entire realm. You'd expect the average player and worse to be able to complete it, instead of being locked out of content.

PONR review may or may not be coming SoonTM, possibly.

 

A Journey Beyond was... mediocre. It was plagued with a handfull of problems that I wont get too deep into because I've been beaten to it.

Firstly and most obviously, way too much unskippable dialouge. There's no need to get into this any further as it speaks for itsself.

Secondly, the characters. Lucio so dumb and uninteresting he should have just been named Solomon Grundy, which is kinda sad, Elpheba was forgettable and Aledar... Aledar was okish?

Thirly, the Escort Section was rough, those goddamn burst fire mobs holy shit. I will give credit where it is due though, thank you so much for not using a fucking blue named mob so it can attack others holy shit thank you.

Lastly, that Dark Element thing was pretty bullshit.

Overall I didn't hate the quest, partially cuz I was to hyped about the region to carr at the time. It was nice to see Aledar again and I wish old characters where brought back for later quests more often.

Point of no Return was amazing though, holy shit. This may be the best quest in the entire game IMO. I've stated various times before that I really like puzzles and this quests puzzles where really cool. The mechanics where unique, really the entire quest was unique and is immediatly one of my favorites, so well done there.

 

I liked A Journey Beyond. It was effective in setting up the atmosphere for the Silent Expanse and how dangerous it was. However, my primary complaint is in the way the midpoint; the city exploration. I stumbled upon the places where Aledar and the other lady who's name I forget died before I found Lucio's. It felt really artificial that I couldn't go into those places without going in a specific order. I understand this could be a limitation of the quest system but it still irked me. Unlike most people, I didn't find the escort section to be too bad, but I definitely see how it could've been annoying depending on one's build.

Point of No Return was fantastic, even with some bugs. No real complaints other than that.

 

Yeah, I have, and while it’s great it’s also relatively isolated from the rest of Corkus. You never hear about the isolationists before or after

PONR, meanwhile, is basically the foundation of Lutho’s lore, and it really seeps into the whole thing, which is what puts it above and beyond IMO. Like, I don’t remember that the isolationists exist, but every time I walk through Lutho I’m reminded of the quest.

could you explain this to an idiot

 

Regarding the unskippable dialogue, it's worth noting that a few of the longer sections of "unskippable dialogue" are actually skippable. For example the first 17-line dialogue, you can skip it by repeatedly rightclicking on the NPCs. (thanks Pepo!)

Oh and while we're on the subject, I'd like to note that in many sections of the mines cutscenes, mobs will continue to target the player.

Aside from that, I pretty much agree with the rest of your post. I'm less negative toward AJB's mechanics, besides the escort section, but... yeah you already said it all.

 

Hes a dumb ass DC Villian, pretty much what Batman And Robin turned Bane into.

 

Point of No Return, probably my favorite quest. (Haven't done A Hunter's Calling yet, though). I was a bit confused with the swapping places with your soul, but when I figured it out, the puzzles were pretty fun to do, and I liked the story behind the quest. And the ending, when trying to exit the "happier Lutho" or whatever you want to call it, I did like it, though it was just repeatedly running at a wall. In Wynncraft, normally when you get a message that says something like "Something is holding you back . . ." or "You get a feeling that you're not supposed to be there", you stop trying to go there. I did die somehow, while in the darkness place, and respawn in Lusuco, but that was probably my fault.
A Journey Beyond. I did like the dialogue. Most people don't, but I enjoy reading things. It was nice to be with NPCs who are slightly more capable at defending themselves than all of the other NPCs I've quested with, even though I still ended up having to save them. The cart bit when going to Lutho was annoying, and while in the middle of dialogue just before the cart, Aledar (I think that's his name) suddenly disappeared, but that was fixed with a /class, but I was able to complete it without too many complaints.

 

This is half true. Tasim is busy saving Fruma.

 

Done A Journey Beyond, A Journey Further, and Point of Return thrice (twice on live and once on beta) so here we go.

Spoiler: A Journey Beyond

A Journey Beyond definitely gets annoying after the first time. On my second run I was tuning out most of the dialogue and by the third I was just absently walking while all my squadmates died horribly.
Speaking of the little squad we got set up, Lucio got a bit of development in he was less headstrong the second time we challenged the wither, but then he forgot that lesson and walked right into a trap and got consumed. Elphaba was the clear cut leader of the group, and seemed very competent, but the way they died seemed to make them out as really weak. Aledar himself also seemed incredibly competent, and was clearly the big character of the questline due to how he interacted directly with you. However him letting his guard down enough to get vored is pretty sad on his part. After the worm incident he became a piece of fodder you had to carry for the remainder of the quest.

I haven't done the escort part post patch, but I did experience a soft lock when I first did it on live, killed all the mobs but he wouldn't move. Very annoying, but the tp back is nice. Obviously with Alkatraz the mobs were a breeze so I'll focus on my experience with Morph Hive Master archer. That escort was noticeably harder and more chaotic since the enemies didn't melt with a single glance. While I didn't die I did spend a fair amount of time running around and poking at the enemies from range. I feel any nerfs to the mobs are justified.

Overall, the quest is decent for a first playthrough, but doing it on other classes will feel like a chore, especially with the copious amounts of unskippable dialogue.

Spoiler: Point of No Return

Point of No Return lore-wise is the best quest of the update imo. The way everything goes black at the beginning and the Lutho Citizen's only words of wisdom leave an impression. The puzzles and mechanics are very interesting, but with any sort of lag it gets much harder to effectively impossible. Once you reach happier Lutho and merge with your soul the Lutho Citizen's last words come into play with the exit portal. I did find it slightly annoying how it took so long to break through but it does ties some of the beginning dialogue to the end.

The small details at the end are a nice touch. If you've done the quest you notice how the Citizen pretty much gives up before vanishing. If you return later you'll notice that the NPC's eyes have disappeared, the sign you now know means they have decided living in a dream is better then living in reality.

Overall, Point of No Return is a very good quest gameplay and lore wise, especially since it can be ran through fairly fast if you know what to do on later runs.

 

thank you for taking the time to reach out to the community for opinions, unlike SOME people who stay dormant for months and dont tell us jack all when we ask for info on certain things being taken down for certain unclear and untold reasons

Spoiler: A Journey Beyond

ajb was fine imo. the characters were forgettable, and i honestly had forgotten aledar existed up until this point. the darkness/lightness element excuse is honestly horrible, and opens up a fuckton of plotholes like how we fight the mangled proginator and the dern lads in fantastic voyage. the dialogue is long, but i didnt really mind it since i have a bit of patience for shit. of course, i can easily see how after your first or second run the dialogues gonna get grating.

fuck aledar cart and especially dern nightmares

Spoiler: PONR

now that ive finally gotten the chance to play it while its not a buggy mess, its p cool. my main gripe is that "parkour" section where you stand on pressure plates to make platforms appear for your soul. i still have 0 idea how thats meant to function, since some completely disconnected platforms just kinda teleport your soul to them when your soul stands on one platform and you stand on a plate. the ascent things very cool now that your soul actually follows you on the other side. the lore isnt shoved down your throat too, and id debate that this quest probs has some of, if not the best writing thusfar into wynn. the only thing that can make it better is :SaltedCringe:

quick question; does it still call the lutho npc u use to start the quest "Nothing Folk" when you talk to her before you have the proper levels to do the quest?

 

so my opinions are coming from more of a "I have to do these new quests on like, 7 different classes, so let's see how annoying they are on the 5th run" perspective first, then more lore-based.

Spoiler: AJB

A Journey Beyond was pretty cool on the first run, although some things were extremely glitchy (the running part after the darkness mob after you lose your wings, idk why it keeps failing me when I'm clearly past the spikes but whatever), and the NPCs move at a good speed. What I complained about, and will probably still complain about, is the amount of unskippable text. I get that you don't want people to just breeze through on the first playthrough and I don't want to breeze through on the first playthrough either, BUT it's literally so annoying to be tp'd back every time I move an inch away from Aledar & the Gang and they just. talk. so. much. I do appreciate the animations and cool stuff like that, I really do like that part of it (the eye voring Aledar lmaoooo).
Also the cart escorting part. What a nightmare (haha kill me I hate those things so much). It's not so much the difficulty (although the tp'ing endermen and the hp bullet sponge Nightmares are quite annoying) but rather the fact that we have to escort in these quests so much. I don't want to come off super complainy (I think I kinda have tho :/), because I really do appreciate the fact that so much time and effort was put into these new quests. It's just after the 4th+ time of doing AJB it gets really, really annoying to not be able to skip most of the dialogue.


I'm not really sure how Lucio had gotten that far in life by running headfirst (literally) into danger. This sounds terrible, but honestly I'm just glad he's gone because he was such an annoyance lmao. Elphaba... Idk I never really understood them as a character so when she just ran off to find her liver, I'm like "lol okay rip them". Aledar. I expected better of you, seeing as you literally JUST SAW LUCIO GET KIDNAPPED like ????? why are you running at the Miner when you literally have been cautioning everyone else to "make a plan" and "don't be a fool". And then he proceeds to do that for basically the rest of his timeline. Like running headfirst into massive obsidian spikes in AJF? Massive bruh moment there.

Spoiler: PONR

Honestly? One of the coolest quests out there. Not only does it have a really unique storyline, but it also has new and intriguing puzzles. Also the first parkour puzzle (the one where you have to soul switch and parkour upwards like 3 levels) is unbelievably frustrating with lag. The first playthrough took over half an hour because I didn't understand how the puzzle worked, and then when I did start figuring it out, I kept getting tp'd off the platforms because I/the server was laggy. also!!!!! the soul switching!!!! concept!!!! is so cool!!! and actually really well executed, except for potential lag (which messes up everything anyway)
Oh, and can we talk about how broken it gets when done in multiplayer? It feels like it's meant to be done one at a time, because when there's more than 1 person in the quest areas, it just absolutely breaks the puzzles. I love doing quests with my friends, but the way PONR's parkour/some puzzles are set up, it feels very unwelcoming to have a friend in there doing it with you. Probably my favorite parts of it were the upwards "hole in the wall" thing (and the way it mirrors is so cool ngl), and the way the darkness really felt enveloping. (the circle of eye people, they're so creepy, and not a lot of things in this game creep me out the way they do)
Once you understand/remember how all the puzzles in this quest work, it's probably the fastest quest to do and I really like that.

The storyline and ending part of this quest is probably in my top 5 quests. The way it adds more to the darkness/light concepts is so refreshing. It really makes you step back and think "wow, even though this is supposed to be a "light obelisk", it seems to be more of a curse than a blessing by allowing all the Lutho citizens to remain trapped in their own fantasies. It also reminds me of real life parallels, like drugs or things we use to escape our realities, but we think it's a good thing.

 

Spoiler: Journey Beyond

Journey Beyond a few confusing parts, which left me confused on what to do next. This made it worse since I could not play the quest in one sitting. Also, in the beginning, when you are following them, it was annoying due to the small space for you to move in as "HEY STAY CLOSE TO ME". Finally, the escort was annoying in the end due to the moving around projectile spitting wither tping around, making it annoying to hurt and defend the cart. Also felt a bit too long, even for a long quest. The escort took a bit too long, the olm city was annoying to find the areas, especially when I had to log off and find out where to go. Liked the beginning though.
6/10

Spoiler: Point of No Return

PONR is an awesome quest. Though there were some technological difficulties....
Plus the second part of the parkour section was meh.

Rip woman npc, the last one lost to the obelisk.

Spoiler: Journey Further

IMO, I think that one should also talk about the second part of the quest duo if your going only want one.

Pretty nice, feels a bit too quick, compared to part 1. First area (slime zone) was some fine action, then second area was zipping around in holes. Honestly, some of the time doing the quest for part 1 should of either been split between these two quests, or in thirds.
Additional note: During the opening of the EO, some foot lurker appeared and ruined the moment snapping its jaws.

9/10

Also, the animations in these quests were amazing to me, as they enhanced the feeling during the quests.