The Question of Fruma - A Meandering Examination

The Question of Fruma is: Fruma is very good. It is Wynn's best story. How do you make the rest of Wynn as good as Fruma?

(TL;DR: Dev time/content suggestion/make the questlines and quests longer)

Fruma is good primarily because it is long. It is also good because it is tightly designed. Fruma is essentially linear. It has five zones and one finale dungeon; these are arranged in a spiral, with the Wastelands being an offshoot of both the main province and the main plot. It has thirteen main quests in its questline. In consequence, it has excellent pacing and is able to create a large number of truly strong characters. Every Sovereign and rebel has plentiful time to exist. Two's mystique wouldn't have worked if she didn't have nearly a dozen quests between her cryptic first appearance and her being properly met in the Thalas garden. Sui's character arc wouldn't have worked if we didn't have several quests to experience her at each stage of it. Zeph and Yuman's relationship couldn't have worked if there weren't so many quests to develop it; either it would have been extremely flimsy, or it would have drowned out everything else in the story, but instead there's ample time to have it simmer in the background and still invoke emotional investment.

The problem is that nowhere else in Wynn is set up like this.

Gavel and Wynn Provinces do not have the clarity of direction of Fruma. In Wynn, you take a coiling, random zigzag. In Gavel, there's a solid westward direction, but you zigzag north and south and fork occasionally. What is more troubling to me is the level breadth; each region is 10 levels, but the total province is 60-70, so individual regions are tighter than Fruma even if you fully fill them with questlines while the whole province is extremely decompressed.

Of course, that's not necessarily bad. These are the main areas of the game; Fruma is a small footprint on the map. You don't want your whole game to be essentially a line (although I will say that the 40-75 range being two-provinced isn't very good). But it makes it hard to directly use Fruma as a formula for What The Good Writing Direction Is.

I'd say that the best way to do it would be to thread a ~20 quest questline through each province in full. Wynn already has a substantial questline running densely in 1-10, and less densely in 10-30; this could perhaps be the first act of a broader one. Of course, "20 quests" is easier said than done. Fruma took years to make, and it wasn't constrained by over a decade of prior existence. The Corruption is Wynn's great conflict, but it's not really a resolvable one - the fighting can only ever be on the defensive, because of the nature of the War of the Realms. Until both Orphion and Saphanis are dead, there will be Corruption. The Decay by comparison is resolvable, but currently that resolution is via a five-part questline - not long enough to be a whole Province's main plot.

Why 20 quests in one questline and not 5 4-quest questlines? Well, the latter is what exists in-game, and it's... I mean, it's not bad, but with Fruma as a standard it could be substantially better.

Spoiler: Rattling off the non-Fruma questlines

My memory of most of these is quite dull.

• Tutorial questline: King's Recruit (1), Infested Plants (4), Mushroom Man (6), Taking the Tower (8), Elemental Exercise (11), Arachnid's Ascent (14), Recover the Past (25), The Mercenary (30). The last two are fairly good, but from what I remember the rest are... really kind of mid. I think this suffers for trying to stitch together the original early quests; when Wynn's rebuilt, I think most of these should be scrapped.
• WynnExcavation: Site A (35), Site B (46), Site C (55), Site D (70). This is nostalgic to a lot of people, but in my opinion it sucks. Site A is maybe good, the rest are. Not. It isn't unsaveable, though! You could get a lot of mileage out of investigating a conspiracy collecting ancient macguffins connected to the Cosmic mystery and the Olm, but you'd need more time to develop this idea - so, interstitial quests.
• An Iron Heart: Part I (49) and Part II (58). It's actually fine. This doesn't need more time. This is fine.
• The Realm of Light: The Worm Holes (54), Taproot (62), A Headless History (64), Finding the Light (71), The Realm of Light (79). This is recent, and it's not half bad, but it's still quarter bad. A Headless History is particularly weak, and Lari could be written better.
• Aldorei's Secret: Part I (74) and Part II (78). I remember it being fairly good, but you don't get enough time with Olon (the Quest Friend), especially given the three real time day post-quest interaction with him, which players have mistaken for being unimplemented due to the non-telegraphed realtime element. I think the Big Crime of the elves is also so catastrophically bad that it's downright jarring to be attributed to such a minor area. The elves still damned the entire world to the War of the Realms getting restarted. Literally everywhere in the game except for Corkus was put through a thousand years of hell over this! The elves are responsible for the entirety of the game's overarching plot! Sure, Overture to Despair frames them as having just unknowingly broken a seal put in place by, presumably, the Runic Civilisation which is never really described. But Two doesn't imply that this seal would have ever broken otherwise - she doesn't even frame it as a seal at all, but this can be inferred.
• Corkus: The Envoy Part I (83) and Part II (89), The Feathers Fly Part I (91) and Part II (93). Eh. Corkus is old. That's all there is to really say about it.
• Dwarves and Doguns: Part I (91), Part II (92), Part III (93), Part IV (94). I'd say this is one of the more notable questlines re: suffering for time. I remember it very dimly, but I do remember the climax falling flat because we don't really care about Axelus enough by that point.
• Notable mention: Temple of the Legends (68). It's an ancient attempt at a capstone quest, which used to require you to submit a staggering amount of nonsense from random regions and quests. Temple of the Legends has been spot-patched to require less of that, but it still needs to be completely redone when the blessed day of Wynn Reborn comes.

Wynn's got 2-part questlines, 4-part questlines, a 5-part questline, an 8-part questline that's kind of mid even still. Some of these are good! Most are mid. (I am loyal to Wynn anyway.) Hence I think they should probably all be longer...

 

Honestly part of this comes from the fact that most regions in the game get a few sparse quests, not a central focused questline. Sure, Ragni/Nivla/Detlas has this... kind of, and all of the Molten Heights quests are a part of the story, but it's weaker everywhere else. Fruma is the first place to remotely attempt this style of main questline for the region. I'm not sure how well it would fit everywhere else, though.

 

Two things

To add to this I'd say this questline isn't even the whole province's main plot, it's the forest's. Gavel as a province doesn't have a main plot the same way Fruma does. It's just a few more or less connected storylines per area (orcs in the llevigar plains and pre ligh forest, the decay and war of the realms in the forests, the meteors in gylia, the colosus in the canyon and the war in the molten heights, other areas don't really have a main plot imo)
This is already a major step up from the pre gavel reborn days though better links between areas' plotlines could help create a more cohesive, and on par with Fruma, Gavel. Something we already have some "seeds" for with the colossus going haywire because it has to keep the decay out for example.

And

The elves broke the seal because orphion sent a vision to the elder asking him to do so. So in a way the "outbreak" hapenned not because of unwitting elves but because of orphion's manipulation, something I think is kinda cool recontextualization of the most frustrating moment of my playthrough of gavel reborn.

 

feeling it a hot take, but i think this is kind of an over-optimization tangent. in the first place, fruma wouldn't be as good as it is without the rest of wynn. the queen's initial "exposition" as to your invitation in queen's recruit entirely banks on your journey throughout the world, lest we forget the quests required to start: recover the past, the realm of light, a journey further.

though i do agree with the general idea that anything can be improved, in this case early wynn, i think the ongoing story is infinitely more interesting than what's already been told. and honestly i could see any changes to older content just being massively retconned into the ongoing story in possibly jarring ways.

oh and just a small comment on the sudden linearity of the map, i would make the assumption that as the player draws closer to the endgame, it makes sense to limit their exploration options a bit; i enjoyed exploring wynn early on when i first started, but now as someone who's been around for so long, i just want to get from point a to b

 

Certainly true. It's no excuse not to improve earlier parts of the game, but it does mean you can't apply Fruma fully to everywhere else.

The thing is, even though Wynn lets you out into fairly open-ended areas, you aren't really ever meant to explore. You can physically enter Nesaak as a level 20 player, but you can't do anything there and if you stay around you'll die.

 

I really think that the Wynncraft storyline would work so much better as multiple questlines for each region that's loosely tied together in a way but each area has it's own focus. Like I think the first questline is totally fine as simple as it is because it gets players into the game pretty quickly and tells them what they need to know. And honestly most of Gavel while RoL could use a rewrite I do think it works mostly fine. I especially like the tightly connected story of the Molten Heights while The Canyon Colossus is more of a loose anthology with The Breaking Point as a capstone quest (with hints of the Colossus in quests like Marauder's Dues, Canyon Guides, The Lost, Canary Calls, One Thousand Meters Under, etc.), which I think works really well.

The Wynn province is the biggest area that needs improvement though, especially around the Lvl 30-70 range (honestly Nemract and Tempo Town are a step in the right direction with how good Grave Digger and Deja Vu are but the other quests in that range could use some improvements).

WynnExcavation deserves to be better, and I think they're already working on making it better. I wanna guess that they're actually going to use the Wynn soldiers we see in both The Mercenary and Queen's Recruit (Aledar, Linton, Mel, and Lanu) as actual major characters and I'm really excited about it if they do. They could even do like what they did with Fruma and just have The Mercenary be part 1 of that entire storyline and just connect the desert, ice forest, ocean, and jungle together, and I'm gonna go into a summary of that so read at your own will.

Spoiler: My long rant for possible Lvl 30-70 improvements in Wynn

• The desert lore wise is... eh, it could be fleshed out a bit more and I really think quests like Green Gloop, Meaningful Holiday, Canyon Condor, and Tribal Aggression absolutely deserve to be completely reworked, and maybe a capstone quest could be nice. Junes (that desert researcher) could serve a larger role in these quests like in Kingdom of Sand or maybe even extend to beyond the desert which would be cool.
  
• Honestly the ice forest is probably the best of all these areas because of the Twain family but it's still not perfect. Underice feels just kinda thrown in and House of Twain is a good concept but I dont like the fact that it involves a helmet. The 3 quests actually involving the Twain family (Fate of the Fallen, Frost Bite, and A Grave Mistake) still mostly hold up. Could use a rework too though.
  
• Oh my, they REALLY need to rework the Ocean, all of it, give it lore, actually utilize the islands besides just Mage Island and Pirate Town. And I truly believe that Half Moon Island and Skien's Island absolutely deserve a rework and a better quest, those two islands have so much potential it's crazy. Maro Peaks needs the helmet gone. Ice Nations, Zhight Island, and Haven Antiquity need a rework. I had this random idea for Beneath the Depths and oh my goodness I genuinely think a rework of it would go so hard. Cluck Cluck works fine as a comedic quest but I think it and the other animals could tie into Bob better. I'm kinda surprised there's technically no real Selchar quest. Order of the Grook is actually fine as it is. Even like Bear Zoo could use a short early game quest to maybe hint at bigger things happening in the Ocean. What if nature senses some forces beneath the depths first, then maybe the lunar cult in Half Moon Island worships it, the war in Ice Islands was caused by it and not caused by greed, Zhight Island profits and denies it, Dead Island died to it, Sarnfic sunk because of it, etc etc.
• The only two decent Jungle quests are Out of My Mind and Corrupted Betrayal (and maybe Jungle Fever for pure batshit insanity but I wouldn't necessarily call it good), there I said it, and even then we could've spent more time with Ariodo or learning about Slykaar. Yeah this entire area just needs a rework from the ground up, especially the Dernel Jungle which I don't even like traveling through. I don't have as many ideas for this one because I don't know what they're planning to cook in the Level 50-70 range of the game lore wise, but I really think that when they rework WynnExcavation, they really oughta change up The Passage, Lost in the Jungle, Lost Royalty, Lost Soles, Temple of the Legends, Grand Youth, WynnExcavation Site D, and Troubled Tribesmen.

So yeah TL;DR I think the areas I just went over have a lot of potential but need some major improvements to actually be good.

 

That used to be filled by Craftmas Chaos, which was removed for Reasons.

 

There was also Sister City, it's like they specifically gave Selchar the most boring quests possible

 

...I didn't even know that was a thing.