Eagle's Peak
No real intro to this one, let's dive right in. We start off talking to Charlie, one of the zookeepers at the Ardougne Zoo. He's a bit agitated about something, and Twoie takes that as a sign from Saradomin:
Twoie's real keen for quests, and who can blame her. As luck would have it, Charlie does have a quest for us: the Zoo contracted out to a hunter called Nickolaus to capture a ferret for their new exhibit, but he's gone missing around Eagle's Peak. We can go look for him, sure; how hard could that be?
I had a fear, when I was told this was my task, that it wouldn't be clear where I was supposed to be looking; recent experience has taught me to be careful with quests that ask me to search for things over large areas of the map. I wasn't encouraged when I saw no defined quest area on the map; much as I mocked it in Jungle Potion, it does help narrow the playing field a bit. But I needn't have worried; I wasn't poking around Eagle's Peak for a minute when I spotted this:
Yep, that's the thing I want. Investigating turned up a book on birds, which gave me two things:
- Literally, it gave me a metal feather; as a gamer, this screams out "key to door"
- It told me about secret entrances in the mountain
So, okay, up the mountain. There's only one path, and it leads to a door with a slot in it. Key, meet door.
Bit of a graphical miss there, guys, but that's okay. Now I'm inside the mountain, and I find a journal on the ground. Some interesting fluff text contextualizing why all these signs of civilization are in these caves, and also setting up some of the puzzles I'll be solving later. It probably wasn't strictly necessary, but it makes the world feel alive so I'm 1000% in favour of it. I also had to laugh at this:
There's a reference that won't make any sense to new players! And by "new players" I mean players who started in, like, 2012. I like it as a reference, bringing (then-current) game mechanics into the world, but it's definitely aged...interestingly (this problem will be revisited, I expect, when Twoie gets to Beneath Cursed Tides).
Another random thought: this means that every day civilians of Gielinor were tormented by the random events as well. For some, like the Drunken Dwarf and the Mysterious Old Man, that would have been annoying but not hugely intrusive. But what about the Evil Chicken? How many level-3 Men and Women were slaughtered by a rampaging chicken? Where's their memorial, Jagex?
Moving on, I continue down the path and quickly see Nickolaus, ever-so-slightly trapped in the next of a giant eagle. I kind of like Nickolaus' character, and I sort of wish he turned up in more content. I'm not exactly sure why; something about his unflappable optimism about his shitty, shitty circumstances just gets to me. Anyway, we have a short conversation in which Nickolaus reveals that he has discovered giant eagles (or they discovered him, either or), and Twoie completely fails her spot check:
Yep, the mythical giant eagle, four of which are immediately within your field of view. Nickolaus has been trapped by the eagle guarding the nest he's in (for unclear reasons, frankly, which is a bit of a plot hole), but he has an idea for how to get out: go to the fancy dress shop in Varrock and commission some giant eagle costumes. This will fool the guard into thinking we are eagles, and he'll be allowed to leave. This plan is just crazy enough to completely not work, but I don't have any better ideas so I go for it. At my own suggestion, I pick up a bunch of giant eagle feathers from the ground; ten should be enough, right? (as it turns out it's exactly enough, and I swear I didn't check the wiki this time; I'm just that great).
So I head over to the fancy dress shop, and shockingly it seems that he normally has them in stock (I'm not sure I want to know who's buying them). There's just one problem:
...wait, I thought giant eagles were considered myths? How do you stock their feathers, then? Funnily enough this is actually addressed in dialogue (Twoie has essentially the same question), and the answer is kind of delightful: Ali Morrisane, the unscrupulous merchant king of the desert, has been selling him chicken feathers. This is another little story element I love, because it ties disparate elements of the world together, and makes it feel like Gielinor is a living, breathing place; Ali Morrisane isn't just a quest NPC (albeit for a quest I haven't done yet), he's a figure in the world, making deals and having a life outside of it. It's fantastic, I love it.
As luck would have it I have enough giant eagle feathers for two costumes, but I need two more things: some swamp tar and some yellow dye. So I go grab though things (incidentally, I take back some of the bad things I said about Aggie's dyes back in Goblin Diplomacy; they're still useless for fashionscape, but they come up in quests so tutorializing them was more useful than I gave credit for), and now I've got two eagle costumes!
Foolproof. I return to Nickolaus, but for some reason I can't just chuck the costume over the (very small) gap, I need to physically get over to him, which requires opening the locked door left behind by the cave's previous occupants. For this, I need three keys, which requires three puzzles. Pretty standard so far.
The first one I do is the bronze key puzzle (I actually did it before I went to Varrock, because I was exploring). Not very much to it, and I was kind of disappointed: just trigger the incredibly obvious trap, then wind the four winches to let down the net. Yawn.
Next up, the gold feather. This was a puzzle I quite liked; I can see my goal, and I need to figure out how to move the eagle statues out of the way so I can get to it. There's an additional level of complexity in the "eagle doors", which block the statues from moving. This puzzle is a good example of what Mod Jack refers to as "concentric circle design": you start out with a very constrained number of things you can do, which gradually opens up. It's not a very taxing puzzle, but it's unique and requires some thought, and (crucially) it's easy to undo mistakes. Also, some nice examine-text tutorialization:
Since I'd missed the bird seed dispenser when I came in, this was very helpful. Gold feather in hand, it's time for the last one. This is kind of a neat puzzle because it's just a Hunter tracking encounter. What I like about it is that the quest required 27 Hunter as a pre-requisite, and this is why: you need your Hunter skills in order to complete a puzzle. There are definitely quests (none come to mind at the moment, but I'm sure they'll be made as apparent as I continue this project) with prerequisites that don't feel significant to the quest, just arbitrary requirements to even begin. So I like that the Hunter skill is actually used here.
The tracks, unsurprisingly, lead to a hole in the wall, out of which springs an absolutely massive kebbit!
Nothing much else to say here, except that I appreciate the foreshadowing of this boss fight in the journal I picked up earlier. After punching the massive kebbit to death, I pick up the final feather and can free Nickolaus. Meeting him back at base camp, he offers to teach me how to capture ferrets (remember when this quest was about ferrets?), so we can take one back to Charlie. Twoie is characteristically childish about the process:
But we get a ferret, and take it back to Charlie. Quest complete!
So, I liked this quest, but it's interesting to think about why. After all, it did two things I've complained about other quests doing in the past:
- The plan to resolve the central conflict was utter nonsense, which annoyed me about Once Upon a Slime
- It had a fake-out call to adventure (the quest isn't really about ferrets in any meaningful way), which annoyed me about Dwarf Cannon
So, why did those things not bother me this time?
Well, the first one didn't bother me because the characters believed in the plan. It's amazing how much the audience is willing to accept if the characters themselves buy into it. That's what annoys me about a lot of modern comedy films, which are full of wink-to-camera "boy isn't this a silly premise" moments; it takes me out of it because if the characters aren't taking their situation seriously in-universe, why should I? Once Upon a Slime fell down because the player character spent the bulk of the quest very loudly complaining that the solution was nonsense, which calls attention to the fact that the plan is nonsense in-universe, which begs the question of why we're pursuing it. In Eagle's Peak everybody's on board with the plan, which signals to the audience "yes the plan is nuts, but this world is also nuts so just go with it." Suspension of disbelief ensues.
The second one I'm less sure about, but my instinct is that it comes down to what the quest is supposed to teach us. Dwarf Cannon was meant as an in-universe contextualiztion of the dwarf multicannon, but it didn't do that very effectively because the cannon wasn't tutorialized in any meaningful way, and was barely featured in the content that was meant to introduce it; it felt like an afterthought. Eagle's Peak, on the other hand, was meant as a spotlight quest for the newly-introduced Hunter skill, which came out a week before this quest. It's very clearly not an introduction to the quest, since it requires level 27, but it features Hunting elements quite prominently:
- The main action takes place near a major low-level Hunter area
- The primary NPC is literally a hunter
- Another NPC (the fancy dress store owner) is a significant NPC in the Hunter skill; he's where you get your camo outfits from
- Significant amounts of fluff text revolve around hunting and taming the giant eagles
- One of the puzzles is a literal application of the Hunter skill
Despite the quest not really fousing on you, the player, performing Hunter (except in a few places), the Hunter skill is deeply embedded in the quest's DNA, so it feels less egregious when the thing we're hunting switches partway through.
I don't know, I'm not 100% sure about that explanation yet; I may have to think more on it.