Extending the game

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve seen a lot of posts and threads currently which have talked about extending the game and adding better progression. This is split into two parts; the time it takes the player to get from start to one-shot supercrafter, and the time it takes for all the world changes/events to play out.

Obviously there are great plans for this, we’ve had talk of leading NPC factions, changing the world and all sorts, but I’m talking about smaller changes we can make now to spread the game out and make it feel more like an epic journey rather than a quick bit of survival before it becomes an top down RL shooter.

(The main one)-Picking a point where the player can’t get hugely better from - a soft cap at a certain level (on all stats/attributes/damage/defense) would mean that we could work balance around that. We’d be able to create monsters that were ALWAYS challenging and not have to worry about the player getting to a point where they’re never worried about anything. This is a soft cap, so you can keep improving, but the improvements drop off so don’t get to the point where you’re invincible for a long time.

-The skill cap has helped this a lot. You can’t insta-grind up to the high crafting levels, and you need to actively search for better stuff to improve.

-I’m always for encouraging more exploration - getting rid of some of the alternatives in recipes and making the higher-end recipies require harder to find parts. This might require new buildings (or old building to be re-purposed) as ‘mid-level’ loot places. This could be things like recipes requiring high quality electronics which can only be found in power stations, which are covered in zombies and sludge monster type things.

-The word needs to deteriorate - Things breaking down over time due to rust, decay and general monster shenanigans would help create a sense you were coming closer and closer to destruction. This may be difficult with some things, but things like replacing a lot of the canned/tinned food with fresh food (everyone in the future is more organic - as we’re already seeing happen) would help, as would making the rivers poisonous after a while and doing a destruction sweep over tiles after a certain amount of time (which can be done I believe).

These are just my ideas, slightly unformed. I just feel that with a bit of JSON editing and some light coding we could move a little bit further towards an epic adventure. Whatddya thing?

2

Chiming in to show my support before i hit the hay.

3

Well, While in some ways i agree, i have this natural feeling that i don’t want freedoms taken away… To me soft caps and limits tend to become something ingame that goes beyond annoying… that and it gives you the feeling once you have gotten to the soft cap that you are at endgame and then you get bored… at the same time the way it is now can get boring due to the fact that you have no challenge… Im going to agree and support the idea but only if the option to disable soft caps is also added.

4

When I say soft caps, I’m thinking REALLY soft caps. Basically that you can still get stronger but that the gains diminish over a while - So it’s more like a ramp than a cap really. This is obviously extremely difficult to balance - it’s something to aim for that will take a while to get right.

The core problem is that now you can get significantly stronger than the strongest enemy. Just adding stronger monsters will end up in a ridiculous escalation, so we need to set what the top limit is and work backwards from there. With it being sandboxy I know we can’t (and shouldn’t) make it really tight balance wise, but I think the game would be significantly better with a longer curve.

5

I haven’t yet played from start to finish with the new skill system (I started in 0.A, but I never grind skills anyways), but I enjoy it quite a bit even though most of my skill gain is from books.

I would enjoy as a mid-late game addition of several forms of decay.
First would be natural decay of no more humans maintaining things. Cities collapsing, fires breaking out and burning them down, plants overtaking them. This, you can’t stop short of rebuilding and hacking down nature yourself. Maybe a well maintained exterior would be a hint of human occupation in later seasons.
Next would be decays stemming from slime pits, triffid and fungal groves, portals, maybe mines and temples given more time and darker things. These could be stopped from each source by delving inside and clearing the ‘bosses’, either events or units or however. Their corruption would start with a delay to give some time, but their effects would not be reversible without great effort (i.e.: beating the event doesn’t reverse it, only stops it from that point).

6

Right but just as they gave the option to remove skill rust and other things of these sorts it should have the option to disable, i know that there was a lot of stuff that wasnt optional in my first run of cataclysm, i grew tired of some of the difficulties as i do with many roguelikes, not cause they are too challenging but often times just turn into more of a game of frustration than actual enjoyment. As i agree fully that making the game more extensive in this way would be pretty nice, only if implemented correctly and give the opt out ability. Thats whats nice about the new way cataclysm is going, you can set up the game to your own enjoyment for the most part, not what the developers think how it should be but how you think it should be.

While some may think it would be more extensive, others would consider it to do the exact opposite.

7

I think we need to get a consensus on how long we expect an average game of Cata to last with a knowledgeable player.
And i mean Cata 1.0, with working factions/NPCs/etc.

Because when we know that we can scale and smear out the rest accordingly.

8

[quote=“Adrian, post:7, topic:5691”]I think we need to get a consensus on how long we expect an average game of Cata to last with a knowledgeable player.
And i mean Cata 1.0, with working factions/NPCs/etc.

Because when we know that we can scale and smear out the rest accordingly.[/quote]

Good point, however I think it’s difficult to judge an average as many people play at completely different speeds and have different priorities. Similarly, as there is no end goal (or other type of goal) of any kind, it’s tricky to reach an average game length, as there’s no top end (like with skyrim you could say 'once you’ve finished the main quest and x amount of other quests).

I’m unsure what the answer is, and this was where my thought about soft-capping/ramping up the level gain significantly after a certain point came from. With this there doesn’t need to be an end game, as some things are always challenging. Sure, you might work out how to kill hulks, mi-gos and whatever without it always being life or death, but you’d never be able to absolutely dominate them as you can now.

As far as decay, I don’t think it needs to be a toggle-able option, but there could be a ‘rate of decay’ modifier which controlled how much. The downside with so many options is that we eventually get to a point where it’s impossible to balance all (or any) of the options to make a coherent game. Again, I agree, but I think we should use a bit of restraint.

9

This idea sounds awe inspiring.

If different materials decay at different rates, forests can spread and similar than this would be even better.

10

It would make sense to have a world evolution scale, where 5 is the standard, 0 turns it off, and 10 makes it go super quick (possibly starting decayed already?), and keep it abstract, rather than attach a specific time frame to options.

11

Ideas:

Rebalance for more distant endgame:
Force people to move on frequently, and make zombie-killing cost scarce resources. Adjust player:monster balance to compensate. Eventually people will either die or reach a point where they can stay self-sufficient for a long time, but it’ll come later and eventual death from reasons of failure to survive, rather than boredom and over-zealousness, will be more probable. This one’s less technically difficult, but will change the way the game plays, which many people would consider a downside.

For example: Make everything but firearms terrible; make ammunition scarce; and chop wild animal spawns to force people to scavenge or go out hunting if they want to eat. Adjust enemy spawn rates and starting player power to compensate. Bonus points if you remove electric motors from the game and make fuel more scarce. (The “I Am Legend” re-balance, essentially.)

Dungeon Delve Endgame:
Add some dungeons, put macguffins in them, and give the player a reason to want the macguffin and knowledge that the macguffin exists. This one takes some code and some environment design and regional population design, but doesn’t affect the established gameplay.

For example:
+Set up a doomsday clock.
==“you are turning into a zombie, omg”
==“the forces of hell are going to overrun the earth”
==“skynet is going to activate and carpet-nuke the entire region”
==etc.

+Inform the character that the doomsday clock exists
==“you feel like you are turning into a zombie, omg”
==nightmares, premonitions, etc
==documents found on corpses, labs, military bases, etc
==radio broadcasts

+And give them a good estimate on how much time they have left.
==obvious symbolic dreams (you dream of an hourglass that is [fraction] empty, etc)
==direct observations with straightforward numerical analysis (the sun has gone [fraction] red, etc)
==documents, radio broadcasts, etc.

+Inform the player of the macguffin and what kind of place it can be found in.
==documents, radio broadcasts, etc
==symbolic dreams, etc

+When the player finds the macguffin, reset the doomsday clock.
==“you have stopped yourself from turning into a zombie and given yourself another [however many days]”
==“you have delayed the full-scale hell invasion and given the world another [however many days]”
==etc

+If the player doesn’t find the macguffin by the time the doomsday clock ticks over, the player dies, game over.

12

[quote=“Binky, post:8, topic:5691”]…
Similarly, as there is no end goal (or other type of goal) of any kind, it’s tricky to reach an average game length, as there’s no top end (like with skyrim you could say 'once you’ve finished the main quest and x amount of other quests).
…[/quote]
There doesn’t have to be an end goal for the game to end. We can just as easily interpret it as “how long do we expect a knowledgable player to survive on average”.

In the end, i think “balance” will be the buzzword. Because if the player never survives until the late game he’ll get frustrated and leave the game, while we (and by we i mean the coders and content creators) at the same time waste a bunch of time and resources on content that will never get experienced.
Contrary, if the player makes it to the late game unchallenged he’ll get bored and leave Cata after 1-2 games.

[size=16pt]GODHOOD =/= FUN[/size]

That said, my suggestions for making the game last longer that (probably) won’t break everything:
-Let higher skill levels require increasing amounts of experience.
-The first winter should become something to be feared. Dwindling food supplies, hungry wolves around your cottage, too much snow to drive through to town, frostbite, etc. Simply making the seasons last 25 days or longer would make the first winter a lot more challenging.
-Make firearms rare and ammo even rarer than the guns they belong to. By curbing the ability to project death from a distance the player will be less likely to run into a town and raiding everything for high-end stuff, and as a bonus it will put more emphasis on hand-loading sub-par ammunition. And as a bonus-bonus it will stop the self-perpetuating cycle of using guns to raid towns for more guns.

I doubt unescapable death would be fun.

13

All good ideas. I like the idea of a ‘doomsday clock’ as a something that happens as a ‘random mega-event’, rather than something that always happens. Forcing the player to explore and adapt more is key though. I know some people like building static bases, and that should be an option, although it should be a harder option survival wise.

A round up of ideas from what we’ve got:

-Nerf long lasting food/supplies. This causes the player to always be searching for stuff, and that later a lot of food is gone/rotten. This can be achieved by shifting more food from long lasting types to stuff that goes off. This makes the game take a minor realism hit, but means that there is plenty of food when you’re starting (which is great) and it gets progressively more difficult to find it.

  • Ramping up the experience required for later levels of skill. An obvious one, and I think the plan was to have 10 as the top limit in most skills.

  • Firearms is a tricky one - Although I agree that they should be rare and difficult to find, this has been discussed many times and it always comes down to ‘guns in N.E are extremely common so we need to have guns everywhere’. A compromise can be made by making a lot of guns found around the place being rusty/not usable. Similarly, ammo can be very rare due to most of it being spent in the first few days (no matter how quickly it hit)

-Harsher winters (and summers) - I’d say that we should go more extreme on the weather, and this could be over time as conditions ‘degrade’ (the second winter being worse than the first).

-Global degradation of buildings and stuff. A few passes over houses and buildings with decay would mean that electronics and other building materials would become more scarce (appliances being broken, furniture being smashed).

Any other ideas? If there’s more consensus on these things I can start making some minor inroads, and I’m sure others (with more knowledge) would be happy to help.

14

Magical loot fairies / kleptomaniac gnomes

15

I’m skeptical as to the utility of soft caps. Basically they have the positive side that they make increasing skills by grinding require more of a resource (time, as well as food, water and ingredients, but the last three are very common in a typical game) but they have the negative side that they replace grinding with… more grinding. So for them to have a real impact we would have to make time a much more valuable resource, which is a reasonable idea.

You could also make food or water or basic ingredients (sticks, rocks, rags, etc) rarer, I suppose. Making critters spawn less seems like a good idea, but the other two seem difficult to meaningfully restrict without being ridiculous (i.e. “there are no rivers in pennsylvania,” “you fail to cut your sheet into a rag”)

The problem with time-based world advancement is when you “balance” the game (in the sense of making the world more dangerous) with time on the x axis, then players who grind or read or whatever will have a big advantage over those who develop their skills naturally (I was recently talking with someone online who butchered corpses to get survival to level 2 at day 3 or 4, whereas I had it at that in a few hours before leaving the shelter.) So if the world becomes more challenging for the former, it might become impossible for the latter. I actually like the idea of hard caps more - say, skills are capped at 6 by default and you need some fancy superhuman mutagen/eldritch artifact/brain implant to raise skill caps.

16

Interesting points. Here’s how I envisage ‘soft caps’ working is this:
-Leveling up to level 10 (top level) has a steeper slope. Getting from 1-2 is relatively easy whilst getting up to the top levels is time consuming. Most players that aren’t exploiting/grinding might reach level 10 in one skill by the end of the game, but that’s with a heck of a lot of specialization and work.
-This is mixed with the recently implemented caps on recipes/activities capping off after a certain level, so grinding is harder.
-After you’ve reached the ‘cap’, you can still improve, but the benefits are marginal. You might slowly increase the speed in which you can build stuff, or reload time, but nothing which will make you superhuman. Basically, you get some progress, but nothing you’d want/need to grind up - this means end game monsters will stay hard, and whilst you may get a little bit of an edge on them, you’ll never be able to just go and destroy them completely.

I’m also not too bothered if it messes up the balance for people that grind, as long as we take away the obvious ways of doing it (so you have to go out of your way to grind/find exploitable things).

As far as making things more valuable, I think you can do this through a mixture of decay and world events. I’ve often suggested the rivers becoming more poisonous as time goes on, and this could be mixed with (very well regulated) loot faries, general item decay/rust and other things. I just love the idea of a transition from everyday life to mad-max style apocalypse that you can actually play through

17

Hard skill caps ain’t gonna happen until & unless there’s working NPCs to handle missing skills. I’ve had the non-fun of trying to make meaningful use of skills in a hard-cap system: that failed my test for whether the game was worth playing.

Arbitrary clocks aren’t useful and some of those counter the lore. Nether critters are NOT hellspawn, forex. This ain’t Doom.

Cities and roads decaying, yeah. I’ve strongly opposed loot fairies and continue to do so. Omnipotence might not be fun in the long term, but god-with-portfolio-hood* might well be worthwhile: Marloss mutations would cover that to some degree, and Plant/the various Beast subtypes might as well.

*As in polytheistic models: you’re dominant in one/few areas. Planned endgame for MUTCAT_MYCUS is an avatar of the fungus, cultivating the world and (eventually) some NPCs. Slime mutants can spawn backup slimes now. Pack mechanics are planned, and so on.

18

I think having water be abundant is okay. Food should mostly come from wildlife after a good while, with the exception of certain stashes of nonperishables. Buildings should decay over time, and on a staggered timeline from that, the items in them should decay as well (electronics should rust and short as they’re exposed to the elements, clothing would get mildewy, books would become illegible, some basic tools should remain intact, but the advanced ones should break and rust like the electronics), wildlife should grow more numerous after a time, with zombified wildlife starting to appear around cities then expanding outward, and other cataclysmic vestiges (fungus, triffieds, ants?, bees?) should expand unless their hubs are destroyed. Possibly expand the eldritch horror stuff and give them stuff to do inside the hellmouths and rifts, and turn those into full fledged underground environments that expand like the rest.

Limiting water by killing rivers is going a little too far IMO. There should almost always be more than one way to defeat an obstacle, and at that point, you’re basically forcing people to use funnels. I would think that absent human interaction and some contrived dimensional excuse that the rivers would actually get cleaner, at least as far as pollution is concerned.

Repairing items should be possible, but not always successful, and should require multiple tools/spare parts. A repair of a small electronic device might take a soldering iron, superglue, tweezers, electronics scraps, and copper wire. Items could have a set of tags for how damaged they are, so you might have a “damaged mp3 player” in your inventory, with the tags “SHORTED, DIRTY”. Attempting to 'a’ctivate the damaged item brings up a “Repair using [10 charges soldering iron][5 units solder][1 unit superglue][tweezers][1 electronics scrap][5 units copper wire][knife][rag]?” (with the tools and items required based off of the damage tags, in this case, the knife and superglue would be to open and then reseal the device, soldering iron, solder, tweezers, scrap, and wire for the SHORTED tag, and the rag to clean it up for the DIRTY tag). 'e’xamining the damaged item should show you all the tools and components you need to repair it. The ability to both assess needed repairs and do the actual repair should be based off of your skill with the type of item. If you’re unable to repair an item, or attempt to repair it and fail, it should still be able to be disassembled for spare parts. There should be a chance that if you fail the repair, it becomes irreversibly damaged (and a fair bit of items should spawn this way), and you can only scrap it for parts at that point.

This turned into a pretty long post about repairing. I didn’t really mean to do that.

19

[quote=“KA101, post:17, topic:5691”]Hard skill caps ain’t gonna happen until & unless there’s working NPCs to handle missing skills. I’ve had the non-fun of trying to make meaningful use of skills in a hard-cap system: that failed my test for whether the game was worth playing.

Arbitrary clocks aren’t useful and some of those counter the lore. Nether critters are NOT hellspawn, forex. This ain’t Doom.

Cities and roads decaying, yeah. I’ve strongly opposed loot fairies and continue to do so. Omnipotence might not be fun in the long term, but god-with-portfolio-hood* might well be worthwhile: Marloss mutations would cover that to some degree, and Plant/the various Beast subtypes might as well.[/quote]

Hard caps: I’m not sure if I explained it correctly - it wouldn’t be a hard cap on total experience, it’d just be a hard cap on what you could max out/get to ‘incredible’ level. If we’re going at 10 being the best (in a crafting discipline) in whatever it is in the world then 7/8 should be all you need to do most things, 9 for really awesome stuff and 10 for extreme stuff. This would mean you could probably reliably get to 5-7 for most skills without insane grinding or whatever, and there’d be no need for NPCs.

I don’t know what you mean by ‘Arbitrary clocks’ but the game needs some progression. Granted, it might change each game and be random (and influenced by external events) but I think we can definitely say ‘after around 3-4 seasons you’ll see moderate decay in things’ without it feeling arbitrary - as long as it’s kinda gradual.

20

[quote=“KA101, post:17, topic:5691”]Cities and roads decaying, yeah. I’ve strongly opposed loot fairies and continue to do so. Omnipotence might not be fun in the long term, but god-with-portfolio-hood* might well be worthwhile: Marloss mutations would cover that to some degree, and Plant/the various Beast subtypes might as well.

*As in polytheistic models: you’re dominant in one/few areas. Planned endgame for MUTCAT_MYCUS is an avatar of the fungus, cultivating the world and (eventually) some NPCs. Slime mutants can spawn backup slimes now. Pack mechanics are planned, and so on.[/quote]

Perhaps I am reading things wrong, but does this means that ultimately CATA’s will be balanced under the assumption that your character has to become some sort of nether dark overlord or some sort of superhero out of a comic book? Because if so:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I mean I would love for the end game to be some sort of post apocalyptic society simulator instead of your frantic rush for conquest. You know, the working with a small group of fellow survivors thing instead, either hunting or working as a looter for a settlement/ protecting trade caravans/ running a settlement/ raiding the shit out of others. gives you more of an idea of surviving an apocalypse, you know the apocalypse brings out the best and worst of people. A story of hope and rebirth, a story of teamwork and great effort, a story of X and Y when X and Y are slightly related positive nouns. And you get the idea.