So, some people have been discussing that anomalies would make a good game mechanic. But what are anomalies? Well, anomalies were originally shown in the book Roadside Picnic, but more people remember them from STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. Anomalies manifested as strange places where the laws of physics were ignored. Some anomalies would make gravity in the area higher then Jupiter, others would cause you to have a heart attack two hours after you went into it. Now, doesn’t that sound like a fun and bizarre addition to Cataclysm?
Well, why would it happen? Due to the massive amount of portals from the alternate dimension, reality has taken a bad beating. There are even spots where reality has become ripped, like an old scarf getting holes from moths. This has created anomalies in space-time where things really drop off the deep end.
So, how’d it effect gameplay? Think about it. You’re walking along the fields when suddenly, you see a moose get eaten by the ground near an old tree. You toss a rock in the patch where the moose got eaten, and the rock disappears into the dirt too. You go past the old tree at a respectable distance, then arrive at a forest. You see a house! Awesome! You go in, and find it has a basement. You walk down the stairs, and see that it’s lit up for some reason. There is blue jelly that glows, and you guess it’s probably an artifact. You go over to pick it up, and suddenly your arm registers as broken. What the hell? You check your @ and find that your arm no longer has any bones in it because you tried to pick that up. You get the hell out of there and run into the forest, but you enter a patch of ground where things are randomly teleported to random places, and you find yourself in the middle of a zombie horde in a town several miles away.
So, it’d be a good reason to keep on your toes in forests and fields. It wouldn’t be very common, obviously, and there’d be signs as to where anomalies are. What do you guys think?
