I had taken a long break from Rainbow Skies and decided to start over recently. Right now I am still in North Borgtonko and I am getting CONSTANT reminders from the game to frequently visit the blacksmith to upgrade my equipment, don't forget to visit the book seller to purchase new skill books or to upgrade my characters with skill stones.

These messages are almost constantly rotating out giving me these reminders. They are all things I've done already, so I am not sure why it keeps telling me. I do not remember the game doing this the first time I played through this part. It may have given me the tip once, but that was it. However, this is non-stop.

What can I do to get this to stop?

Hi Hobbun,

We've added these notifications in patch 1.10 to help newcomers getting familiar with the game and to avoid making mistakes that will have a negative impact on gameplay. So for example, if you don't merge your materials to your weapons or gear, battles will just be harder. The same applies to not spending coins for gear etc.

The messages are only displayed if certain conditions are true, so if you get the notification for crafting for example, you definitely have some materials in your list and some unused free slots in your equipped gear, that you could use for merging.

If you don't want to get these messages displayed, just follow the advices (i.e. use your materials and visit a blacksmith) or just keep playing. All these messages will only displayed in the beginning of the game and will be automatically suppressed, once you've reached certain milestones.

Hope that helps.

Marcus,

Thanks for your reply. I see your reasoning on why you put the notifications into the game, but will have to admit they probably triggered a bit too often. Every 20 minutes or so would have been plenty, but they were coming up every couple minutes at minimum.

I'm at Sun's Glade now and have now stopped triggering. They either stopped due to getting to the city or because I crafted/bought enough books/upgraded my characters enough with skill stones.

And to be honest, I didn't buy that many books just for the fact I couldn't afford to do so. And with the crafting, I did craft, but didn't fill all available slots as I didn't need to. And I also like to keep a small stash of available skill stones (not use them all) in case I need to make some larger upgrades and need the extra. Not sure at which amounts triggered those notifications, did you need to craft all available slots/buy all available books and spend all skill stones? If so, I think that was a bit extreme, as well.

I am past it now, and I am guessing you probably aren't going to do anymore updates/patches, but if you did, it is something I would recommend in toning down a bit.

Thanks again though for your help, Marcus. I really wish the game did much better than it did. It's sad to see this being the last Rainbow game. I can see the heart all of you put into the game, it is truly a gem.

Hi Hobbun,

Many thanks for your feedback as always and I'm sorry to hear the notifications have been triggered too often for you.

It's indeed a sensible topic. In fact all information is explained in the tutorials, but many players do not read them and ignore all these mechanisms. They just play it like a standard RPG, only fighting and leveling and do not or hardly make use of crafting, skill stones, purchasing books and equipment and so on. We've seen that when watching gameplay videos. This way, the game indeed becomes grindy and tedious very early, because battles are getting really hard and this is what have been criticized very often.

So, the notifications have been an attempt to bring those players back on track and for that reason they have to be a bit persistent. If there would be an option to disable them, they probably will be disabled and we're in the same situation as before.

However I admit that they are pretty much useless for experienced players like you, that exactly know what they're doing. Commonly, those players don't see these notifications at all, except they start a new game. If we would support a "player profile", we could make sure these messages are only displayed on your first playtrough, but we store all information in the savedata only, so it's technically not easy to recognize who's an experienced player and who's not.

I hope they are not that annoying that the fun is really suffering. In fact you can just press tab/select to make them despawn and it's only in the early beginning of the game. Thanks for your feedback though, always important to us!

Regarding sales, there are numerous factors that determine whether a game will be successful or not and it's really quite complex. At least we're glad that most of our core fans have been really happy with the game, that's very important though. So, thanks a lot for your constant support and for staying true to us too!

All the best.

Marcus,

No worries. I understand your motivation on putting in the notifications. Honestly, it’s pretty sad, as the gameplay is not that complicated. I don’t know if it’s because it’s an indie game and people just expect simple and straight to the point, but I’ve played RPGs with way more complicated mechanics than Rainbow Skies. It’s simple enough to understand, but complex enough to make it interesting and enjoyable.

But I think a lot of the people (including many of the critics) are just lazy and don’t want to bother, they just want the character to improve fully by ‘leveling up’.

Same kind of thing applies to the tutorials. There is a plethora of information in the tutorials if they just bothered to read them, and would fully understand how things work. However, you are correct, many of the people just blow past the tutorials. And again, it’s because they are just lazy, as well as impatient.

Marcus, I don’t know what your (and SideQuest Studios) future holds now, but if you do ever decide to make another RPG game, I will be the first in line to play it.

Hobbun wrote:
Thank you so much, that's very kind