Extending the game

Game Talk The Drawing Board
41

To be honest, I don’t really mind being all-powerful. It spares me from having to “go through the motions” of early game over and over to get to the most interesting parts, which for me are exploring special locations, crafting rare stuff and altering the landscape via building or digging.

I excel in late game stuff. When I can get a character to “take off”, I usually end up playing a lot. If I have a string of early or mid-game deaths, I usually get bored and quit unless I can take a new character to the old one’s stuff and books.

I prefer challenges that introduce setbacks instead of killing my character. Example: if I can’t find a smart way to disable turrets in a compound, then I have to waste resources destroying them one by one. It’s still fun even if my character doesn’t stand a significant chance of dying.

What I want is more in-game problems that take time and thinking to solve, not just more powerful monsters or more stuff to grind. Something that makes you seek alternative approach here and there. Deteriorating stuff and harsher winters sound like a good start.

42

That’s a pretty good plan, but it’s more of a claim to ownership, really. And claims can be disputed (ie. during robberies). Also for example: I’ve claimed ownership of my laptop by buying it from a retailer, but if i leave it out on the street and walk away someone will inevitably pick it up and take it home. That person has then made a claim of ownership to my laptop.

I don’t see how ownership can’t work the same in Cata:
The PC and NPCs could first claim ownership of the overmap tile they’re on (the house they’re taking shelter in for instance, or the area around their vehicle), provided the OM tile doesn’t already hold a claim.
By extension everything on the local map that the overmap tile contains would hold the same claim to ownership. (provided they don’t already have a claim, so NPCs visiting your shelter won’t suddenly lose ownership of their stuff)
Ownership should only hold is the owner is there to enforce it. (If the PC isn’t there to guard his stash when he goes out hunting it’s fair game for NPCs. Likewise he can lose ownership by simply throwing his junk out.)

I know it’s not a perfect plan, it just popped up as a way to quell the nay-sayers.

Focusing on perishable food sources is a no-brainer, even lore-wise. The game starts IIRC five days into the Cataclysm, and it seems logical that dwindling amount of survivors during those five days would need to eat.
Additionally it’d increase the value of MREs and similar non-perishables, which is something i’ll gladly accept.

43

[quote=“Binky, post:38, topic:5691”][quote=“Adrian, post:35, topic:5691”]While we’re talking about kleptomaniac gnomes and loot fairies, i think Cata first needs some way of tracking ownership of items.
Getting that out of the way first will mean friendly NPCs won’t steal your stash anymore, and we can let loose the gnomes on anything not marked with ownership.

We could also take the second option of simply spawning less stuff the farther from the PC’s spawn point. That way we can bypass all of the nay-sayers who oppose the klepto fairies, while still progressively ramping up Cata’s difficulty over time.[/quote]

Agreed, but I imagine that’d create a mad rush to place ownership on everything. For instance, if the gnomes started gradually stealing stuff after the first two weeks, you’d want to explore as quickly as possible to place ownership/grab useful stuff.

Your idea for just spawning less stuff further from the PC’s spawn point is a good way to tackle this, although it’d discourage exploration which we kinda want to encourage by this.

That’s why I suggested shifting it most food sources towards perishable food - no one would find it unfair if their food perished (as it just does) and we don’t need to actively go around and delete stuff. This wouldn’t mean destroying all the canned food in the game, it’d just be instead of a 50/50 ish split, it’d be more like a 90/10 split.[/quote]

I could accept quality of things degrading over time/exposure to weather; electronics & books aren’t gonna do well if their roof caves in and snow gets all over 'em. Transferring 40% of consumables to “useless after the first few days” seems questionable. Characters can only consume so much perishables, so having more of the problems people have with milk and the recent (now dialed-back by popular demand) zom-crittter changeover strikes me as a rotten idea.

YEEAAAHHHH!

Loot all you like: just have the looted gear end up somewhere. Somewhere dangerous, even, or maybe consumables can be partially/totally consumed by the looter prior to xyr death and/or rezzing. Just disappearing the stuff is the problem: store shelves are already quite barren and there’s no need to reduce that further.

44

[quote=“KA101, post:43, topic:5691”][quote=“Binky, post:38, topic:5691”][quote=“Adrian, post:35, topic:5691”]While we’re talking about kleptomaniac gnomes and loot fairies, i think Cata first needs some way of tracking ownership of items.
Getting that out of the way first will mean friendly NPCs won’t steal your stash anymore, and we can let loose the gnomes on anything not marked with ownership.

We could also take the second option of simply spawning less stuff the farther from the PC’s spawn point. That way we can bypass all of the nay-sayers who oppose the klepto fairies, while still progressively ramping up Cata’s difficulty over time.[/quote]
Agreed, but I imagine that’d create a mad rush to place ownership on everything. For instance, if the gnomes started gradually stealing stuff after the first two weeks, you’d want to explore as quickly as possible to place ownership/grab useful stuff.

Your idea for just spawning less stuff further from the PC’s spawn point is a good way to tackle this, although it’d discourage exploration which we kinda want to encourage by this.

That’s why I suggested shifting it most food sources towards perishable food - no one would find it unfair if their food perished (as it just does) and we don’t need to actively go around and delete stuff. This wouldn’t mean destroying all the canned food in the game, it’d just be instead of a 50/50 ish split, it’d be more like a 90/10 split.[/quote]

I could accept quality of things degrading over time/exposure to weather; electronics & books aren’t gonna do well if their roof caves in and snow gets all over 'em. Transferring 40% of consumables to “useless after the first few days” seems questionable. Characters can only consume so much perishables, so having more of the problems people have with milk and the recent (now dialed-back by popular demand) zom-crittter changeover strikes me as a rotten idea.

YEEAAAHHHH!

Loot all you like: just have the looted gear end up somewhere. Somewhere dangerous, even, or maybe consumables can be partially/totally consumed by the looter prior to xyr death and/or rezzing. Just disappearing the stuff is the problem: store shelves are already quite barren and there’s no need to reduce that further.[/quote]
Why not implement the ‘gnomes gradually looting everything’ idea, but have the game keep an inventory of every item that’s disappeared from the map?

NPCs could spawn with some of the looted items dumped into their inventories, and large amounts of the items could also later spawn in survivor hideout locations and such.

45

Yeah keeping an inventory of the stuff and putting it in survivor compounds would be a great idea. Even if the survivor compounds were currently just fenced areas with loads of zombies and turrets (due to them being eaten and whatever) it’d mean that nothing was permanently gone.

46

Uh, I DO NOT want gnomes per se, but looting and survivor hideouts are brilliant ideas!

47

I think by Gnomes he means that it disappears over time without actually having NPC’s collect the gear as it would take too difficult of coding to do in a reasonable amount of time with all the other things being planned and developed… thats my interpretation of it anyways i could be wrong.

48

hahahah they’re not actually gnomes! (although great idea for a mod)

It’s just as Alpha says - having real NPCs go and collect stuff would be good, but that won’t be feasible for a long, long time. Even if NPC development skyrocketed, there’s the problem with the ‘reality bubble’, and most of it would probably have to be abstracted/behind the scenes anyway.

I don’t think it’d be too difficult to run through the spawn list once and hold the ‘looted’ object (even if they weren’t exact, it would hardly matter for food/drinks/supplies/base level stuff) and then re-spawn it in a compound later.

49

That seems like a really good idea!

50

I like that idea, but it would also be cool for the gear to go to selective groups, like in Fallout, The brotherhood of steel goes around collecting all the old computers and electronic, type things (in theory, they dont really but thats what the story of fallout says they do)
It would be nice for certain factions to value certain things more
Say a group of doctors/scientists or those from a FEMA camp, would value meds highly, so if you find an active NPC FEMA camp that has progressed for a year or so should have much more than that of a camp that is in beginner game. Also the amount of NPC’s in said camps should increase/decrease over time, food reserves lowers, yada yada yada(You get the point)
This would be nice to allow for increased difficulty towards endgame when you run across ones when you are at the higher level that we spoke of earlier being so powerful wouldn’t always mean success in these places, with a nice progression on these things, these places wouldn’t be as simple as breaking into a bunker.

Sadly this is all daydreaming for the time being but i imagine 2015-16 we will have what seems like a whole different game if the development continues… for which its community driven in many aspects so i don’t see that happening in the foreseeable future.

51

[quote=“Alpha, post:50, topic:5691”]I like that idea, but it would also be cool for the gear to go to selective groups, like in Fallout, The brotherhood of steel goes around collecting all the old computers and electronic, type things (in theory, they dont really but thats what the story of fallout says they do)
It would be nice for certain factions to value certain things more[/quote]

Again, an interesting idea but we’re a long way off that. It would be interesting to have ‘themed’ survivor camps (even without survivors in it) which had predispositions to certain stuff though.

Other than this suggestion though, are there any smaller changes that anyone things would help?

52

[quote=“Binky, post:51, topic:5691”][quote=“Alpha, post:50, topic:5691”]I like that idea, but it would also be cool for the gear to go to selective groups, like in Fallout, The brotherhood of steel goes around collecting all the old computers and electronic, type things (in theory, they dont really but thats what the story of fallout says they do)
It would be nice for certain factions to value certain things more[/quote]

Again, an interesting idea but we’re a long way off that. It would be interesting to have ‘themed’ survivor camps (even without survivors in it) which had predispositions to certain stuff though.

Other than this suggestion though, are there any smaller changes that anyone things would help?[/quote]
Yeah thats why i said its all day dreaming right now but the idea is there for future reference i suppose