On risk, reward, goals and purpose

[jacob.exe]

However - player activity and skills CAN. If I have certain key player actions trigger major changes to the game world, or open access to late game areas that are otherwise sealed off, then I can create stepped challenges in the game. Terraria does a great job of this, while still retaining a fairly ‘open-world’ feel to it.

I love the idea of a player weighing game changing losses agsinst the reward of a more powerful, yet lesser understood, technology/anolomy. Although lore-wise, the player is not alone and they are not the only one who would be triggering these kind of events. If the evolution of the world depended on the player alone, the game would fell like a sandbox controlled by the player rather than an emerging, volatile, ecosystem that the player happens to exist in.

That being said, I personally think that mixing in the idea of these player induced hazards with other long term hazards that are not brought about by the player would be pretty cool.

Makes everything seem purposeless when the world that I’ve got means nothing because there’s always fresh milk yonder.

This is the sole reason that I choose a nomadic lifestyle in almost every play through I have ever done.

[TheZoneWizard]

Island games always come up short. I mean. EVERY friggin game out there uses this cheap ass method. The continents make much more sense as that is always going to pertain to the largest population of people.

Plus it would make sense that herds of creatures would migrate. Think about it. 300 million americans alone and not including canada and mexico. Even if half that population melted like ice in a desert. The other half lumbering around would be overwhelming to say the least.

[Casio]

Maybe a path of progression that would be available at world creation could help?

Maybe instead the vanilla survive-until-you-die could be set into a mode, with a story mode alongside, where the player goes for the endgame goal of "fixing, " the cataclysm, either by finding someway to destroy all enemy factions or making peace, like an idea above said, Try and make a treaty with the migo, or find a way to make the mycus sentient enough to where you could speak with them and compromise on sharing the world. Then, the faction you make peace with would then work alongside, you, Suddenly, a migo showing up might be a godsend rather than a another body to the pile if you were being attacked by a horde.

If this would make the game too much like a player-driven world, then have factions other than your own team up with enemies, like the merchants or bandits teaming up with the gracken to find tech from our world, slowly converting merchant or bandit locations into technologically advanced utopias. Then, you would have to raid them for something a faction you are allied with needs, creating full-on war between factions. Cataclysm then turns from survival in the wild to political survival, dodging assassins that would be tailored to your fighting abilities and current weapons and juggling relations with the various lifeforms slowly colonizing earth.

Heck, make mutants a faction, where you have to achieve one of the mutation thresholds to join, making it impossible to join or even talk peacefully without looking like a bipedal mosquito.

I’m new, so I apologize if this seems… I dunno, uninformed. Thanks for reading.

[Jcd000]

I’ve had a dream for a long time of a base building mechanic revolving around rescuing scientist and engineer NPCs and having them research and develop new tools to help you fight the apocalypse.

A giant part of blandness in the game comes from player’s ability to “specialize” in everything, given time.
Having a player be only able to fulfill a limited set of roles could be good both for replayability and NPCs.
Say, a mechanic player would not be able to craft mutagen without a scientist NPC to help, a scientist player would not be able to utilize all bionic slots (once those are ready for the game) and high-tier bionics without the help of a cyborg engineer etc.

Though I have no idea how could the specialization picking be done. All complex jobs are learned over many years in pre-cataclysmic universities. But then, having a literal moron craft a railgun all by himself isn’t any more sane than arbitrarily picking a specialization and having it only get “truly unlocked” later. Could require having non-zero skill - ie. can’t pick mechanic as specialization with 0 skill in it at chargen.

A possible solution to that problem could be the concept that people have an (almost) finite learning capacity. This can create an interesting mechanic (and major rebalancing issues )

Knowing this community, the mechanic has been proposed at least twice before, but i cannot remember this variation, so i will elaborate (just my 2c):

1. New concept: Characters have a finite learning capacity:

• Learning stuff (skills) uses up learning points (LP)
• Lower level skills cost less LP than higher level ones
• Not all skills cost the same LP at the same level
• Each character at any given time has a set amount of maximum LP and available LP
• Available LP at any given point equal maximum LP minus used-up LP
• When available LP are zero, a character is severely penalized to his learning rate (though he should never completely stop learning), to the point that skill rust will cause him to slowly forget some of the skills he knew.
• When LP are nonzero, learning rates are affected by the ratio [available_learning_points/max_learning_points]: Learning is a bit harder for people who do not have many LP left. (near their max learning capacity)

2. Interplay with existing cata mechanics:

• Intelligence, traits, mutations and bionics all modify max LP: Not everyone is a genius, but some people are gifted.
• Skill rust should be reworked and the default rust rates nerfed: Eg. up to lvl 3-5 of a skill, no player will lose a skilllevel once he has attained it, but rust will increasingly become a factor afterwards, especially when nearing lvls 9-10.
• Re-learning something previously known (lost due to skill rust) takes much less time than the first time but uses up the same amount of LP: Easier to re-learn what you once knew.
• Learning rates are affected by focus as it happens now.