Recently I’ve been bored of gaming and remembered this game, so came on here to read a few topics and it got me wondering how do your set your own goals and make your own fun in games?
I usually establish some sort of personality for my survivors, and drive it from there. When I can’t think of something, I lift a character/archtype from anime or something, just to have a framework. I prefer this over gamestate goals as those tend to be a bit meta-gaming in the sense that why would my survivor know I want to collect a thing at the bottom of a dungeon she’s never seen before. Nothing wrong with that, and I have done runs similar to that where I wanted to experience X content, I just find they lose steam after the goal is hit, whereas a personality helps set successor goals.
I’ve had some dumb fun ones, like an obese internet movie critic who’s mind snapped during the collapse, declared himself Grognak and wanted to set himself out as an avenging angel of the world, find the people who opened the portals and kill them (To stop it, I guess? he wasn’t very smart) - A run that resulted in him wearing an american flag which protected him from the worst of an explosion in a basement, and later with him riding a motorcycle at full speed, charred flag flapping in the background, past a turret that somehow managed to not hit him despite its best efforts.
Currently, I’m just playing a girl lifted straight from an anime since I’m just getting back into the game, and she’s become fixated on a little magical instruction book she found, and wants to find more magical knowledge. She found an orc camp and its resultant products and nearly died trying to clear it out, so she’s been gathering gear on the side to try and take the fight to this orc menace that she blames for killing most of the other survivors. Assuming nothing else pops up, she’s on the path towards some shotgun toting arch-mage.
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So basically, role playing? Mh, interesting. I don’t really like playing a different role and always self-insert in games, but I guess I’ll think about how this approach might work for me.
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So I had another idea.
There seem to be 2 different opinions here: 1) The journey is the destination, just have fun and survive. and 2) You have to set your own goals.
But, I have never been able to set goals that motivate me in games. If it was a story driven game and I had to for example kill the ultimate bad guy, I think I was driven by curiosity, like how would that fight look like, what would happen if I defeat him, etc. But once I have beaten a game, there is now a different reason if I chose to replay it, and that is how the game makes me feel in the moment while playing it.
So considering this, goal based playing may not be the thing for me, and instead I should just try to make my playthrough enjoyable/fun/exciting/etc.
I think this might be the correct answer for me, and not “goals”.
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Incidentally, this is the thing I’ve been QQing about recently. I just can’t do this. If the game doesn’t track the goal for me, it doesn’t exist in my mind. It’s fun to imagine peaceful fishing in post-apocalyptic wasteland, but further than that make-believe doesn’t work for me.
Easiest quick fix I can think would be an expanded achievement tracker, where you could pre-select the ones are you want for the run. Just tick the boxes. Then it’d let you know when you’re done. Not exactly same as new content goals, but I think it’d still be huge =)
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Roleplay yourself then.
With all respect, I don’t think you manage to sound truly empathetic towards the players’ concerns.
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I’ve roleplay myself a lot, and I always find that roleplaying my decisions on story things is still tons better than roleplaying where I’ll go, what I eat, what I’ll fight with, if I’ll fight, and every other more nuanced thing CDDA lets you do.
Even accomplishing background missions makes me feel accomplished sometimes. Maybe a more tangible effect to my character’ll make it better, instead of it merely being seen in a Completed Missions tab.