I’m building Lowborn Rising, a medieval rise-from-nothing RPG, and one of the bigger design decisions I’m making is removing the traditional quest log.
Not because I want the game to be confusing, but because I want progress to come from what the player learns.
Instead of:
- “Talk to the miller”
- “Collect 5 sacks of grain”
- “Return to Rolan”
I’m trying to build around:
- rumors
- NPC knowledge
- reputation
- social consequences
- remembering who said what
So if a farmer mentions the miller is shorting grain, the game doesn’t add “Talk to the miller” to a checklist. The player is expected to understand that the miller might matter.
The obvious risk is frustration. If the player misses key info, gets overwhelmed, or feels like they need to interrogate every NPC about every topic, the whole thing falls apart.
I wrote a longer post about the design problem here:
flawedspoongames.com/blog/why-no-quest-log.html
But I’m curious from a design perspective:
Where’s the line between rewarding discovery and just wasting the player’s time?