The Fruma quest design simply does not work on a 2nd playthrough.

[compact briar]

It's no secret that the approach to story telling and quest design in Fruma is a massive shift in both quality and design from everything Wynn had to offer before. The impressive immersion, immaculate boss design, and character writing is unlike anything before it. And experiencing it for the first time is genuinely one of the best gaming experiences I've had in 2026.

I generally really enjoying 100%ing games, which remains true for even weirder games to 100% such as mmorpgs like Wynn. I even 100%'d 2 classes as I awaited Fruma, as well as have done all quests for a third time on a 3rd class. I mention all of this as a bit of insight into my perspective and experience into the replayability of the rest of Wynn.

The only thing I actively disliked doing on a repeat playthrough was proffing. That was, until the Fruma expansion. The main reason this post is about Fruma and not about proffing is for a simple reason. Proffing is clearly not designed to be done on too casual of a playthrough, on every class, or to even be enjoyable. Its explicit purpose in the game is to offer more optimization for those willing to grind for it, and another endgame activity.

The Fruma storyline stands in contrast, is of immense quality and importance to the game experience. and the player is massively, MASSIVELY incentivized to go through it, even on repeat playthroughs. As it offers lots of fun content, great rewards, and a hefty amount of xp, which is harder to come by naturally in such endgame levels.

The problem is that because a massive part of the enjoyment of Fruma is exploring the story, speaking to characters, and understanding their place and relation to the world, once the player has done so, it leaves a large amount of the quest structure increasingly hollow.

This cannot be fixed by simply changing the textbox speed or even adding a skip cutscene button. As the problem on a repeat playthrough goes deeper than that. in my next message I'll try to justify why I think that:

[timid plover]

can’t this be said for the replayability of any story in a game?

[compact briar]

I said in my last paragraph that I am gonna explain, be patient please :p

[viscid frigate]

Fruma quests so good it makes the other quests look bad

Is that basically the post?

[compact briar]

tru

[viscid frigate]

I mean they'll probably get to it, they already gave some npc's custom frames and also gave aledar portraits since launch

They REALLY need to give seaskipper one lol

[compact briar]

The first thing I wanna point out is that the wonderful content team is definitely aware of this issue, and as far as I am aware is diligently working towards adding a skip cutscene button to many of the quests. As well as having added a bandaid solution of increasing the text box speed from 1.3 to 1.7, to both of which I am very grateful.

The reason why I think neither will ultimately solve the issue is that the structure of the quests themselves does not work on a repeat playthroughs like many other quests in the game.

To demonstrate this point, I have decided to categorize the quest stages of the quest "Ensemble of Hope" into 2 categories:
1 - Green: These are for stages that I find to offer an engaging gameplay segment, whether through traversal, parkour, exploration, combat, puzzles, or minigames.
2- Red: Does none of those. Mostly consists of going to a nearby place and reading dialogue.
For EoH, in my opinion it would result in something like this:

[echo wave]

fighting the quest bosses on different classes is great replayability

you can just skip dialogue its not that hard..

[compact briar]

the green here are as follow:
start of the quest, necessary stage for every quest. The combat section at the dam, and the incredible escape from mirror realm and palace sequence. And finally of course the closing stage.
These alone would make for probably a quest better than any quest before that. The highs of Fruma are EXTREMELY high, the problem is the red.

As someone mentioned earlier, "you can just skip dialogue, it's not that hard". That's why I went out of my way to measure how many textboxes one must skip through in some of the earlier fruma quests:
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing queen's recruit: ~400 + super long cutscene
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing a journey home: ~100
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing a new beginning: ~200
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing the cursed one: ~350
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing solidarity of steel: ~400
lines of dialogue player must skip through when redoing the price of ingenuity: ~500

this amounts to around 2000 text boxes that must be skipped. At a rate of the now improved 1.7 boxes per second, that is around 20 MINUTES where the player can do NOTHING except press shift to continue through dialogue.

20 minutes may not sound like much in comparison to the amount of time you'd be spending on the green content, but when factoring in the amount of stages that are just "go to the room right next to you and continue talking", and that even when pressing shift at all time, there is still down time between skipping to let npc interactions play out, this easily adds up to hours of gameplay in which the player straight up does nothing.

[tame grotto]

By the way, if you /class in the Queen’s Recruit cutscene and go back to the door, you can skip to the palace.

Also do you use toggle shift?

[compact briar]

including all the bosses?

bc I don't wanna skip the bosses

[tame grotto]

No just the long ass cutscene when Zhiraok brings you to the palace.

You’ll get spat out at the first Queen interaction (the balcony speech).

[compact briar]

Ah I see. Regardless, I would still argue that the rest of the quest still has a problem with the amount of green compared to red. Let me draw it up

[compact briar]

for example here is the ratio for Queen's recruit. the areas marked in red are the stages where you run from room to room and then press shift. This is exploration and story on a first playthrough, but just tedium on a 2nd one.

My immediate intuition from 3 classes that did all classes, is that if I pick ANY quest from before Fruma, and tried to divide it like this, I would find way better results.

Infact, I will do that now, I will generate a number and see which quest it is, and then divide it into red and green

here I got a little unlucky got one of the shortest quests, 23 "lost tower". let's try again

[lost crane]

idk but like thats just a thing with most games, the first time you play a game is the one that you will enjoy the most (unless they have some sort of replayability with time travelling or something else that makes the game different in each play), fruma quest design is by far, the best storyline made is not the best sure, but like, if i wanted to replay a quest i would rather do all fruma storyline than RoL 1 for example

and if the problem is the text, let me tell you that most RPG with a fantasy setup works like that

[pliant copper]

My main problem with fruma quests on replay classes is that literally not one of them use the skip cutscene feature lol

[lost crane]

yeah but overall the same could be said about RoL cutscenes or even Discoveries

like, thats not a issue of designing the quest but rather a QoL that wynn needs in quests

[pliant copper]

RoL3 uses it, you can skip the like 60 dialogue cutscene

[compact briar]

here for example is quest 53, rise of quarton. Don't get me wrong, the Fruma quests listed above are obviously way better. what this is meant to illustrate is that on a 2nd playthrough, much of the quest stages are practically filler, this simply wasn't as big an issue in previous quests

[pliant copper]

Add a item which if used at the start of fruma it will make you insta complete all fruma story quests and tp you into the ||fight against the Queen|| in Apotheosis, but to make up for all the skipped content, every single boss in fruma ||except Anathema|| is included in this fight.

Its like a true test of strength and willpower. Instead of spending like 8 hours redoing quests you can just do the most bullshit bossfight ever

[compact briar]

My suggestion would've been something like after beating wtp you unlock the option to toggle "fast fruma quests" on any non-ironman classes from now on. the toggle will just make it so the quest stages that the content team will view as just "fluff" on 2nd playthrough would just be skipped

ik that's a massive ask, to expect the content team to pick and choose which stages to gut from quests they created, but also I view it as less bad since you have to had already seen all of it inorder to be able to do it.

And from a game designer standpoint, I genuinely believe it would help the enjoyability and longevity of the game

ok I think I got it all out of my chest

[flat heart]

There should at least be a skip cutscene option for fruma quests after you've done them once.

[arctic linden]

Massive agree, So much of these quests are pure dialogue.

[compact briar]

Thanks, it's a massive relief to see support from those who bothered to read the whole thing after the first round of hate

[viscid frigate]

Actual breath of the wild logic right here 💡

[dusk vapor]

unironically would love that with one slight change
all bosses have double attack speed, and it’s instanced content

also i like the idea behind this post, but not the phrasing
i genuinely enjoy getting to reread the text, but i also wish it was faster to skip at times

[kind jolt]

I'm in, but only if friendly fire is enabled (on the bosses' side ofc )

[kind jolt]

Would it not be possible to give the player the possibility to select the difficulty of the boss right before the battle ? (Like "normal" "hard" "masochistic" "utter bullshit" ...)

[frigid jasper]

this is true but it's also a very tricky thing to find solutions for

[frigid jasper]

notably it's also kind of a massive ask with regards to implementation

[compact briar]

oh absolutely

not denying that in the least

[frigid jasper]

i'm not sure what the best solution for this is ultimately

[compact briar]

Understandable, hope one is found someday, bc it does kinda sour how much I genuinely love fruma

[frigid jasper]

the skip cutscene feature kind of sucks to implement on the scripting end, from my understanding. it's on our radar but it's not quite as simple as hitting the Add Skip button

[compact briar]

add skip button?

How is that different than the skip cutscene button?

[flat heart]

it's been done before with RoL questline cutscenes

[compact briar]

yeah that's the skip cutscene button that's on the radar. what's the "Add Skip" button

[compact briar]

yeah I guess I just assumed skipping the quest stages that massively extend the downtime on fruma quests would be easier to implement than going through each of those and implementing a fast forward kind of approach

[flat heart]

after the whole lag issues are resolved, I would not mind a skip cutscene button being added because right now, the most amount of people are going through that content for many / all of their classes.

[kind jolt]

p sure they meant "adding a skip for a particular cutscene isn't as easy as clicking on a button to make this cutscene skippable"

[compact briar]

ahhhhhh

ok now I get it. that makes a lot more sense lol

[frigid jasper]

and you might not remember this but i believe we had some issues rolling those skip buttons out to those quests

again, it's on our radar

it's something we do want to do

but it's not a super simple thing to add

[compact briar]

good luck to the team