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.