I was just curious what the overall development attitude was toward gating Professions, Traits, or other character creation sections behind doing certain tasks in the game. So you have small goals to complete in the game in order to unlock professions. I would imagine it’s kind of a love it or hate it thing, but is it something that will ever become a part of cataclysm?
We have a plan for a scenario system where you start the game with a particular character, spawn location, and maybe a unique quest chain, the plan includes these scenrios being unlocked by normal play.
We also plan on adding an override so you can just unlock them if you want to skip the unlock thing.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:2, topic:3826”]We have a plan for a scenario system where you start the game with a particular character, spawn location, and maybe a unique quest chain, the plan includes these scenrios being unlocked by normal play.
We also plan on adding an override so you can just unlock them if you want to skip the unlock thing.[/quote]
As much as I like cataclysmdda’s approach to openness and customizability, I do think it’d be a bit pointless if you could just override it - it’d be good to have some sort of progression to make you feel like you’ve got somewhere. Obviously a mod would come out sooner or later, but it should be more difficult than ‘get everything = y/n’ in my opinion
While some players like difficulty, there is also a large percentage of the player population that likes to roleplay their survivors. Saying “you can’t be X just because you haven’t done Y” to those players is just mean and will drive them away. As is a toggle won’t be too much different from the current debug menu. (Besides, as a developer that switches versions fairly often it’s hard to test starting scenarios without an “unlock all” command :P).
I was thinking it’d be more of the ‘extreme’ professions that were locked, for instance only being able to choose the bionic professions if you’ve already found a CBM in game, rather than things like bikers/lumberjacks. This would add a lot to the discovery and exploration part of the game, and I can’t see that being a bad thing. An unlock mod would be useful and desirable, I just think it should be harder to do than just a switch!
Likely the toggle would be “edit this config file”, not on the options menu or anything, so it wouldn’t be a obvious or mainstream thing to do, but if it really bugs you you can get around it.
This is exactly what I was hoping for!
Except that there are games, like Kerbal Space Program, where this really IS just an option given to you - “Would you like everything, or would you like it to be unlocked as you play?”
The second was a recently added feature that proved immensely popular and which the vast majority of people choose even though that is literally ALL it is and the game quite explicitly asks you “do you want these things to be locked? Well, tell us if you ever want them to not be locked anymore, ok?”
Many games put a little bit more of a barrier in front of you than that, but there’s not been much evidence it’s needed. If the players are given the option of “have a sense of progression or unlock things immediately”, those who prefer the first almost always seem to choose it.
What we COULD do is have this attached to a specific World, so you could unlock scenarios as you play that specific world, but when you create the world you could choose to unlock all the scenarios (or maybe specific ones) from the get go.
Personally, the primary point of locking the scenarios will be to prevent spoilers and provide a sense of accomplishment, I don’t see many players disabling something that did that unless they already accomplished the goals previously and want to avoid repeating them (say, if they downloaded a new copy of the game)