Versequest - Review by archivebro

Alright, finished the first two threads. I haven’t started the 3rd live thread, but I figure it’s enough to give the review.

Versequest is a quest that harkens back to the old, old /tg/ days. A drawquest with a really frequent update schedule. Chaotic, little structure, very open-ended in what it allows anons to do. When you’re starting off with the PC being the God of Existence and creating everything from scratch, it makes sense that the level of freedom is huge. Prompts exist, but I’d say they’re there to make people feel more comfortable with write-ins since they’re very generic.

You’ve done well with creating a plot out of this chaos. Characters and events often end up veering off in unexpected directions, past events crop up and form the bedrock of history, and anons being occasionally sadistic and/or trollish justifies the low-level spite that seems to exist to thwart anon’s designs, even when they try doing good. Not that it becomes overwhelming since there are characters whose suffering is circumstantial and benefit often from the MC, but go figure that a world would in some way reflect its creator.

I applaud the gradual introduction of introspective opportunities and realms beyond the MC where their power is more limited, and the possibility at a backstory they’ve (or something else) made themselves forget. Having an endgoal in mind (which I assume some of these things lead to) is important since the alternative is futzing around with omnipotence until you as QM or the anons get bored and drop the quest or tie it up in a hurry. That’s no fun way to end things.

That said, this quest isn’t for everyone as a participant. The rapid update schedule is a killer for people who want to play a consistent character since it only takes a couple votes to swing the MC’s behavior wildly. It’s already happened in the quest with the misery dot, and perhaps other places I didn’t notice since I was only skimming the votes. The lack of cutoff points for when votes are being considered also makes what get in feel arbitrary, which can be fine given the general zaniness of the setting but the long-term effects of actions may leave some players feel jilted. I personally am one of the players who struggle in quests like this, the reboot of the gynoid fighting league that was run a while back showed me how much a rapid-fire quest drains me.

As a READER though, those concerns are far less since I’m not beholden to voting windows. And as you’ve seen in the thread, there’s a good hunger in /qst/ for these old-style /tg/ quests. So these “drawbacks” just mean you’ll pull in a different audience than me, and not a niche one at that.

The only thing I could suggest is asking anons in the thread if they want you to post when you’re cutting off votes since you’ve started writing/drawing. Maybe you already have and I missed it? Either way, it would address some of the concerns anons brought up about how arbitrary the votes are sometimes. Some anons are there for that sort of thing though, hence why I suggest asking for specific feedback. Anons are always more likely to answer a question directly than suggest it when you ask the general “what can I do better” question.

I’m very unlikely to join as an anon in your threads, but I expect I’ll be reading it in the archives for some of that old-school feel. And for anyone who is reading this and somehow hasn’t read Ruby Quest, fix that. I’ve seen anons say it launched the idea of “quests” into mainstream /tg/ back in the day it’s a damn persuasive argument.