The funny thing is, I can easily pin down where most of this started, and it was from simply not taking the quest from the prince at first (I wanted to recruit Pallegina first), approaching The Gullet from the right instead of the left, pickpocketing a Market Soule, and entering the Old City via the cage instead of through the Narrows and Dereo. This should've been on a list of issues somewhere following a basic playtest.
What went wrong here?
I remember doing Dereo's quest, via just the Old City Cornett, and not running into any issues.
There are several, and I didn't take any notes:
- You are sent to ascertain the source of The Envoy's Badge, but once you have the Marked Soule (pickpocketed from the overseer-type aumaua in the Gullet) and/or have found your way into the Undercroft, you can't even show it to anyone anymore to ask questions about it. Of course, the issue of finding out what goes on in Delver's Row is satisfied by arriving in the Undercroft, but narratively, it makes no sense to just disregard the investigation into The Envoy's Badge. I still have no idea where it came from or what the Vailians had to do with this, since the Delver's Row is all about the Principi.
- When you arrive in the Undercroft via the Old City and have Tekehu with you, it will prompt a revelation about how the waterbenders are working with the Principi, and you will be asked if you will tell the prince about what goes on in Delver's Row. When this first happened to me, I had not spoken with the Prince about that, had no quest to find Delver's Row or to find out what goes on there, and have legit no idea what Delver's Row was, but the conversation treated it all as if I did. This is ignoring the fact that coming from the Old City, we would have had no idea knowing that we'd even be underneath Delver's Row. All I knew was that I walked out into a cove that had pirates and waterbenders in it.
- When sneaking out of the Undercroft, I faced a guy that asked me how I got in there. I could show him the Marked Soule, despite having no idea that was the right thing to do; he asked me how I got it. I could lie and say that Dereo gave it to me. At this point I had no idea who Dereo was. None whatsoever. Never met the guy. More or less the same odd sequence of events play out when going to talk to the "Mad" captain in the Undercroft, where I again could talk about things I couldn't possibly have known.
- When talking to Dereo, he sends me to collect a sea-shell kind of thing, of which I already have one, having come from the Old City. You can tell him something along the lines of "Do you want to hear about the seashell and the temple" at which point he says something nonsensical and your only response is "I trust this concludes our business?" and the entire quest just ends.
- If you pretend to be retarded and go through the entire quest with Dereo and just not mention that you've been to the temple, go get the second seashell-thing, go back to Dereo, keep playing along like it all makes sense, go back to the temple, look at the mural, and then go all the way back (I want to stress that the NPC that "opens the path" for you from the Undercroft into the Old City still go through the motions... even though you've already opened the path from the other side), you get a ton of extra exposition. But more importantly, if you go straight from the acquisition of the second seashell-thing to the Old City/Ondra's Temple, which makes perfect sense because at that point you know these things are usable in the temple but he hasn't told you to go there yet, you can actually open up an alcove in the temple with some loot. But the seashell-things are consumed, as they are slotted into the wall. Then you go to Dereo, expecting a "Hey, I got the seashell, but I went to the temple instead and.. uh.. it's gone now", you instead get "Is this the seashell-thing you wanted?"; I want to stress that at that point, I literally do not have either of the seashell-things anymore. He then sends you to the temple to look at the mural. You have to go to the mural, look at it (even if you've looked at it three times before by now), and then return to Dereo in order to conclude the quest in a way that makes sense.
Tons of shit like this. Or why not the fact that you can go to the prince and ask about food for the slave-caste in the Gullet, asking him about the queen's inaction, etc. But.. not the queen? She's right there, up on the roof, but it's impossible to raise the issue with her.
Shit like this, over and over and over again. This might sound nitpicky, but these are fairly major narrative issues because they completely break the narrative sequence of events, resulting in a nonsensical experience, despite the quests resolving. It's like they tried to create a complex weave of interacting plots in Neketara, but at some point said "Eh, fuck it, close enough."
