Questioning "Free-form" design

[Skeptopotamus]

Am I the only one that thinks that C:DDA would greatly benefit from a over-arching goal? I realize this is contrary to the design outline of the game, but I feel like C:DDA could grow into so much more than it is right now. I know traditionally for roguelikes that means exploring a dungeon and retrieving some sort of item. I think C:DDA could benefit form something similar. Hunting for a specific one-time-spawn enemy to kill, or making a full dungeon-like experience out of strange temples, labs, or mines (Or a new location type entirely) would add a sense of purpose to the game. You could be looking for a time-machine, or a zombie overlord who controls the hordes, etc.

I say this because I just think the millions of crafting, cooking, combat, construction, and vehicle options are much less entertaining when they don’t actually need to be used to survive. It is very easy to scavenge all you need to survive from a few supermarkets and then live comfortably in a tiny woodland shed. I know this isn’t the most imaginative survival plan, but one could argue that it’s the safest and most effective. Wouldn’t the ability construct a custom death-bike be much more fun if you actually needed that cool bike to complete some task, and weren’t just building it just because? This game has so much content, but when the objective is merely survival/exploration most of it seems trivial. And when you do finally explore the depths of mines or the lower levels of labs/temples, you’re a bit underwhelmed. After spending a couple weeks playing the same character you wonder what you’ve really accomplished from day 5-200 other than eating, reading, and hoarding.

I’m sorry if this seems like harsh criticism considering I’m asking to change a fundamental design philosophy in the game. I really do love the sheer amount of content this game has. What I’m suggesting is that a purpose be added to create some use for all of this content. Has anyone given this some thought before?

[gakm4]

I dont know what cataclysm you are living it but a death bike is a necessity for survival in my mind. The necessary thin n order of importance fo rsurvival is water, food, death bike, clothing/armor, weapons, medical supplies, and shelter.

I am not anywhere near end game but i think some sort of very difficult and long tower/dungeon would be a good end game goal and maybe have a map to find it spawn in like a military bunker or a lab. Have it be like a nexus or hub of the hive mind.

[BorkBorkGoesTheCode]

Cataclysm would really benefit from being someone’s primary day-to-day project, like Dwarf Fortress. Then all of these ideas could be tested and implemented properly without having to balance work and family.

A good overarching goal which would match the lore would be the reestablishment of Humanity.

[DeclanFrost]

I agree that a win condition or at least a major, world-affecting action should be present in CDDA. Like a nuke-esque cropdusting of blob repellent that would essentially kill a certain area’s zed population. Maybe you’d have to personally research and synthesize the stuff, building off of a previous, possibly pre-cataclysm project to unfuck the world.

Cataclysm would really benefit from being someone’s primary day-to-day project, like Dwarf Fortress. Then all of these ideas could be tested and implemented properly without having to balance work and family…

Why don’t we have that? If the reason is financial, there’s a lot of people here who I think would provide enough $$$ to at least jumpstart CDDA with a full-time dev. Also, is ToadyOne a hired dev/project owner or was he there from the start? It seems like CDDA is very similar to DF in terms of fanbase size and content, so why don’t we have what they have? Not to sound…whatever - but I just would like to know.

[StopSignal]

Though as everything, it does give a few problems, I think it’s perfect for now. I mean, we can’t really ask for more! There are a lot of really good programmers working on it. The thing though is that it’s a hobby, for free, so they will work of course on what they want to contribute, not on an overarching goal. But it’s good that way. I mean, we may disagree sometimes and even argue, but we have to be glad of all the awesome programmers we have anyways. Some things they do are really awesome and have lots of work into it. I can barely code and I know you have to put lots of care into it, so it’s great that there is all this people contributing in the first place!

[ribblle]

Yup, it needs a plot and a goal. I find the initial beginning unsatisfying and missing one of the most interesting parts of the apocalypse, the initial chaos. When you clamber into town, you meet 50 different, interesting but overwhelming kinds of monsters. That’s not a good learning curve, and it presents a scenario that isn’t that intuitive to a new player. Town full of zombies but i can’t sneak? All on my own but there’s no point in finding people? The game should let us deploy our zombie (etc) apocalypse plans, not start using game logic instead.

This game should be more like “the walking dead but there’s worse then zombies” and less wilderness hermit simulator. Even then, take that with a grain of salt because i’m not sure “post-apocalyptic frontier” is a good enough end goal. It should certainly be there, but some kind of final challenge would keep us on our toes.

[Skeptopotamus]

[quote=“ribblle, post:6, topic:13244”]Yup, it needs a plot and a goal. I find the initial beginning unsatisfying and missing one of the most interesting parts of the apocalypse, the initial chaos. When you clamber into town, you meet 50 different, interesting but overwhelming kinds of monsters. That’s not a good learning curve, and it presents a scenario that isn’t that intuitive to a new player. Town full of zombies but i can’t sneak? All on my own but there’s no point in finding people? The game should let us deploy our zombie (etc) apocalypse plans, not start using game logic instead.

This game should be more like “the walking dead but there’s worse then zombies” and less wilderness hermit simulator. Even then, take that with a grain of salt because i’m not sure “post-apocalyptic frontier” is a good enough end goal. It should certainly be there, but some kind of final challenge would keep us on our toes.[/quote]

I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying a bit. The gameplay and mechanics of the game are great. The learning curve is fine, new players have been having plenty of fun with it. What I’m suggesting is a very challenging end-game task/dungeon that once completed will “beat” the game. Not a plot/quest to follow during the entire course of your character’s life. This way the game isn’t actually changed too much. If you want to survive/craft/explore forever you totally can; there shouldn’t be some kind of quest holding you back from that. But for players that want to work towards something more concrete, a challenge should be waiting for them. Once you’ve made your ultimate post-apocalyptic commando, you should have something to really test his skills out on. The game’s current content doesn’t really offer a challenge like that.

[Nibelung44]

I totally agree with the original poster. A distant goal, and not even a winning one, but just that, a goal, would bolster greatly my interest. I understand also that a part of the players don’t need that, but reversely, some of us would appreciate a long term objective.

So win-win. For those who don’t care, just don’t pursue the objective. For the others, it is incentive.

Personally, my current end term goal is to flatten a Hellspire Citadel with a mininuke after having killed all the bosses around, using PK mod. But I would so much prefer a ‘hard coded’ goal and one I imagine myself.

[ribblle]

Skepto, i’m not saying make it a railroad. I’m saying that this is your key point.

“I say this because I just think the millions of crafting, cooking, combat, construction, and vehicle options are much less entertaining when they don’t actually need to be used to survive.”

The best end goal is one that breathes down your neck, in that case. It doesn’t have to be obligatory, and it doesn’t even have to be the same one, but ignoring it should have consequences. If people want risk-free sandbox mode, they can disable the option.

Man, i think i’m right about the game not being intuitive for newbs. Look at the “Alternative easy start for any profession” in the beginner guide. Apparently the optimal start is hardcore knitting. The lack of realistic goals at the start of the game, and immediate disconnection from real-world parallels because of the useless evac shelter i decided to go to kills a lot of the magic. Why is it that i have no clue about anything outside days into the apocalypse? Why shouldn’t i have my car nearby? A game like this really shouldn’t rely on game logic.

Your goal doesn’t need to be chosen for you, but it should feel like a natural reaction to your circumstances, and we’re not there yet.

[Skeptopotamus]

The best end goal is one that breathes down your neck, in that case. It doesn’t have to be obligatory, and it doesn’t even have to be the same one, but ignoring it should have consequences. If people want risk-free sandbox mode, they can disable the option.

I disagree with you there, the sandbox survival aspect is and should always be the core of the game. I’m suggesting an optional task/location that a character would need advanced CBMs, custom vehicles, high caliber weapons, etc to complete. Maybe I should take back what I said about “beating” the game, the game doesn’t need to be beat, it just needs options for players that want to do something concrete with their characters. And I think it would be best if it was completely optional. If you don’t enter the location or decide to purse the task, then the game really shouldn’t change at all.

[quote=“ribble”]Man, i think i’m right about the game not being intuitive for newbs. Look at the “Alternative easy start for any profession” in the beginner guide. Apparently the optimal start is hardcore knitting. The lack of realistic goals at the start of the game, and immediate disconnection from real-world parallels because of the useless evac shelter i decided to go to kills a lot of the magic. Why is it that i have no clue about anything outside days into the apocalypse? Why shouldn’t i have my car nearby? A game like this really shouldn’t rely on game logic.

Your goal doesn’t need to be chosen for you, but it should feel like a natural reaction to your circumstances, and we’re not there yet.[/quote]

I think the natural reaction to the circumstances is survival, right? Sure, some of the locations/situations seem empty or unrealistic (I agree that evac shelters are pretty lame), but that’s not what I’m trying to discuss in this thread. I really don’t see how starting out in C:DDA is any more difficult or any less intuitive than other roguelikes. I think that the fun of getting into C:DDA (or RLs in general) is learning everything on your own, and figuring out all the neat commands and options at your disposal. When things get dull is when you’ve learned everything and now have nothing to do any more. That why it’d be fun to have a dungeon to conquer.

I’m regretting the title of this thread a bit now because I think it isn’t really communicating what I meant all that well. In concrete terms I think C:DDA could benefit from a location with multiple floors (10+), various difficult enemies, environmental hazards, minibosses, and maybe a few puzzles. So a pretty standard roguelike dungeon built into the game as a place to challenge when you think you’ve created a character badass enough to tackle it. Now that I’ve spoken to the people in this thread, I realize that my initial thoughts didn’t actually conflict too much with the free-form design philosophy of the game.

[Weyrling]

The best suggestion I’ve seen (forget where or who or when) was the ability to go through one of the portals and go wreck some nether monsters’ place like they did to Earth.

It’d definitely be an end-game goal, the toxic environment would kill you in time unless you had a sealed suit (acid rain would eventually disintegrate even that).
It’d be full of all those monsters that couldn’t survive indefinitely on Earth which would presumably be larger, meaner, and/or weirder than the Jabberwocks, Mi-Go, Shoggoths, etc that stuck around.
Naturally there’d also be plenty of those around, and they might be stronger, faster, or regenerate more rapidly when in their native dimension

You’d presumably be able to pick up tons of unique resources and artifacts during the horrifying journey into a hostile dimension all but guaranteed to redefine what an end-game character is while killing off many pretenders to the title.

Worst of all would be when you’re on your way back from slaying whatever horrible nether beast ruled the place to realize you took too much damage to your armor and you start breathing in toxic gases while you stumble back towards the portal as fast as you can while hallucinating, wishing you’d remembered to bring an emergency oxygen pack and an umbrella to survive the hallucinogenic toxic smoke and acid rain for just a few more minutes…

[kevin.granade]

Lots of different suggestions in here, ping me if I miss one.
Caveat that applies to most of these issues, if I say I’m against something, that just means I don’t want it in the main game, I’ll certainly work with people to support things in mods.
Singular, game-ending goal:
As you note, I’ve said I’m strongly against this in the past and I haven’t changed my mind. Cataclysm is about survival, not being a hero, and there isn’t really a feasible way to reverse the course of the cataclysm. Having said that, clearing out a safe zone for humanity and establishing a settlement in it is certainly doable. That sort of thing might be what your looking for, and if so I’m in favor and would be interested in working on it personally at some point in the future.

As for “goals that make all the resources you can acquire meaningful” as outlined in the first post, we can certainly have that kind of thing without it being a game-ending event. Hiding military ordinance in better defended bunkers, wiping out a local group of enemies, building or defending settlements, and retrieving items from dense swarms if monsters are all things that would be worthwhile and require that kind of preperation.

Full-time developer: this is extremely hard to make happen, df had a perfect storm of rabid followers, a single developer spending huge amounts of time on the project and that developer having incredibly modest living expenses. Even if the community were able to supply the kind of money that the df community supplies to toady, I’m supporting a wife and a baby and I don’t own a home outright like today does etc, so it wouldn’t be enough to make me quit my job and work on dda full time. Maybe when I retire that’ll happen:D
Funding someone else to work on it is possible if they have more modest financial needs, but it becomes problematic if the person funded to work on the game has to go through me to get changes accepted.
Some people might not know the history around this, but glyphgryph, one of the founders of the dda fork (along with myself and darklingwolf) ran a Kickstarter about 6 months after we started the fork to fund someone to work on z-levels support for dda. We then proceeded to burn out two good developers working on it, and the remaining funds are currently sitting in a bounty source account to attempt to encourage someone to work on the feature. (Coolthulu claimed a chunk of the rewards last year for implementing a number of the features).

Strong, singular plot introduced at the start of the game.
Not interested, even if we had one it wouldn’t be as mandatory as even FO4.

Quest line that would have bad repercussions if the player ignores it.
I’m sort of for this, i want various monster groups to grow over time and become more of a threat if not halted or neutralized, so starting near one of these would have an effect similar to what is being requested, I think. In the worst case it might devolve into fleeing an expanding zone controlled by a monster group.

Apparently the optimal start is hardcore knitting.
Optimal for what? it’s certainly not optimal for fun. Anyway, there’s another discussion thread active right now about the dominance of tailoring, tl;dr it can use some nerfs.

[Skeptopotamus]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:12, topic:13244”]Lots of different suggestions in here, ping me if I miss one.
Caveat that applies to most of these issues, if I say I’m against something, that just means I don’t want it in the main game, I’ll certainly work with people to support things in mods.
Singular, game-ending goal:
As you note, I’ve said I’m strongly against this in the past and I haven’t changed my mind. Cataclysm is about survival, not being a hero, and there isn’t really a feasible way to reverse the course of the cataclysm. Having said that, clearing out a safe zone for humanity and establishing a settlement in it is certainly doable. That sort of thing might be what your looking for, and if so I’m in favor and would be interested in working on it personally at some point in the future.[/quote]

So the suggestion of a dungeon-like location with many many floors , unique enemies, and a unique artifact at the bottom as a reward wouldn’t ever be considered for the main game? I don’t think it would be important for it to be a game-ending goal. Just something more for a super powerful character to be able to do. Like you said, a singular location like that could easily be someone’s mod project too.

Clearing out a safe zone would be pretty cool too, and building a fortified settlement for NPCs would be even more fun. As NPC’s behavior grows it’d be cool to assign tasks to followers sort of like DF. But that’s a discussion for another thread.

[ribblle]

Points ya missed:

Please focus on making the game a zombie-apocalypse plan simulator and not a game-logic-my-way-through-it simulator. Justify all the conditions you impose on the player, or better yet, take a step back to the initial outbreak so we can really connect with our characters. If i need to look up a plan on the wiki, it’s not intuitive enough.

Improve the learning curve. I dislike the all or nothing approach the game currently has, where you either have 50 different critters right off or just boring Romero zombies depending on which option you enable. Introducing variations gradually would make this a hell of a lot more approachable.

[Weyrling]

Improve the learning curve. I dislike the all or nothing approach the game currently has, where you either have 50 different critters right off or just boring Romero zombies depending on which option you enable. Introducing variations gradually would make this a hell of a lot more approachable.

I think this is a pretty good point.

There’s already a world option for evolution over time, but a ‘starting evolution’ option would allow newer players a bit more leeway to get into the game, whereas veterans could start with heavily evolved enemies.

What might be interesting is some kind of dimensional rubber band effect for portals and such, where zombies and nether creatures get stronger to a peak and new portals open up randomly and it starts raining acid and horrible monsters come through.
Then some portals randomly close, and the particularly unnatural monsters die off and others get weaker like during the original event, then it repeats every few seasons or so (presumably somewhat randomly).

Because clearly what the cataclysm needs is to be a recurring cycle of cataclysms, to ensure that even an established character might have reason to run the hell away from something to survive (If they happen to be near a portal during nether invasion season, anyway).

[vache]

I’ve had a few “long term” game ideas for a long time, but have not had the time to implement them, or the mechanics underneath required to make them happen. The main goals are to reveal more game lore and provide things to do to force exploration.

Here are a few of them:
Several quests and quest lines that tie in new locations with old quests and give them some payoff as well as some new ones related to settlement expansion, exploration, and some end game portal business: https://github.com/vache/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/16
Lab “dungeons” that follow different aspects of the research and technology derived from the blob and related things that fill in a lot of lore and provide powerful/unique loot: https://github.com/vache/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/18
Mutagen lab quest: more detailed description of lab and quest from other issues, revolving around exploring the government research of mutagen, mutated enemies including a super horror boss fight, and mutated NPCs and their place in society: https://github.com/vache/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/12

As for the main subject of the thread, the current system is fine, but it really doesn’t have a good way to motivate people to work on difficult issues outside of bounties and personal gratification. The main issues I see holding up end game content are a difficult, incomplete, and brittle mission system, NPC support in general (especially things like mutations, factions and roles/ranks, and quest offerings), and to a lesser extent z levels and overmap generation. These are all difficult and long term things to work on with little immediate payoff (at least until people start making content using the new systems), and it’s tough to motivate someone to work on them if they aren’t already so inclined.

[kevin.granade]

So the suggestion of a dungeon-like location with many many floors , unique enemies, and a unique artifact at the bottom as a reward wouldn’t ever be considered for the main game?

This would be perfectly fine for the main game, sorry for not making that clear, it’s just the ‘singular’ and ‘game ending’ attributes I object to.

Please focus on making the game a zombie-apocalypse plan simulator and not a game-logic-my-way-through-it simulator. Justify all the conditions you impose on the player, or better yet, take a step back to the initial outbreak so we can really connect with our characters. If i need to look up a plan on the wiki, it’s not intuitive enough.

Making a zombie-apocaplyse survivor simulator has always been my goal, some of the other devs prefer to apply more game logic, but I keep pushing back on it as much as I can.
Modelling the initial outbreak would be a pretty huge amount of effort for likely very little benefit. I don’t see a way to make it happen any time soon.

[quote=“ribblle, post:14, topic:13244”]Improve the learning curve. I dislike the all or nothing approach the game currently has, where you either have 50 different critters right off or just boring Romero zombies depending on which option you enable. Introducing variations gradually would make this a hell of a lot more approachable.

I think this is a pretty good point.

There’s already a world option for evolution over time, but a ‘starting evolution’ option would allow newer players a bit more leeway to get into the game, whereas veterans could start with heavily evolved enemies.[/quote]
The goal of the evolution system is to have 100% vanilla zombies at game start (perhaps with some variation like children, dogs, tough zombies, fast zombies, etc, but pretty toned down) and have them evolve over time. This would be the default mode, the feature just isn’t done yet.

[quote=“Weyrling, post:15, topic:13244”]What might be interesting is some kind of dimensional rubber band effect for portals and such, where zombies and nether creatures get stronger to a peak and new portals open up randomly and it starts raining acid and horrible monsters come through.
Then some portals randomly close, and the particularly unnatural monsters die off and others get weaker like during the original event, then it repeats every few seasons or so (presumably somewhat randomly).

Because clearly what the cataclysm needs is to be a recurring cycle of cataclysms, to ensure that even an established character might have reason to run the hell away from something to survive (If they happen to be near a portal during nether invasion season, anyway).[/quote]
That’s a super cool idea, so basically you have long-term and local or regional events that establish a zone where a particular type of monster is stronger than usual. For example zombies in the area would evolve and perhaps develop special abilities, but when the event ends they lose the special abilities and maybe even devolve to vanilla zombies. The same could happen with fungus triffids, etc.
If the zone was anchored to something the player could interact with, they might be able to make it stop early, alternately it could just be too dangerous and they’d have to run.

[StopSignal]

They are indeed super cool ideas. I guess they refer to “Game-ending” things as dungeons so ridicously hard that finishing them would mean “Well, basically this dude can’t ever die now” and be able to go and create a new survivor with a clean heart. Like, the only example i can really find, the dragon in the minecraft game.

[ribblle]

The same could happen with fungus triffids, etc.

And you too. Chance of mutations/superpowers could give you a reason to keep these things open as well as closed, or at least go looking for them. I’m thinking a cross between the Zone in Stalker (complete with general fuzziness of physics and space-time) and recurring superpower-granting storms in Misfits. Of course, not all the mutations should be good.

Glad to hear about the evolution system.

Modelling the initial outbreak would be a pretty huge amount of effort for likely very little benefit. I don’t see a way to make it happen any time soon.

Ah c’mon. The payoff would be ridiculous, and it’s not that hard to model. Instead of the current starting scenarios, you’d simply do a “where were you when you heard” event. For example, being stuck in traffic in one of the existing cities and towns the world generates when this happens. Being stuck in a office block which the government tries to quarantine and having to go all neo about it. Ditto for hospitals. Something as simple as Shaun of the deads version could cut it, and the good thing about all these scenes is how quickly they descend into typical catacylsm dda conditions.

More or less, if you can do starting scenarios you can do the initial outbreak. The only sticking point, as usual, is NPC behaviour.

Bonus points: it also forces people to confront the meaningful differences between different kinds of apocalypse, much of which is lost in the aftermath. What’s the point of seeing the aftermath of an earthquake or volcano event? Half the fun of Skynet is everything getting hacked while civilisation stands. Triffids, too, are only supposed to be a problem if everyone get’s blinded, and of course, out of control mutants should look like a X-men scene.

This will obviously devolve into a glorious mess eventually, but i think the plan is to have zones of influence. Ideally, just as a noob is getting comfortable with his current post-apocalyptic genre a new one enters his zone and vice-versa.

[vache]

I thought about creating a little non-interactive “scenario” that could play on a new game that would show you at home watching reports of riots on tv or something and then you start hearing fighting and gunfire outside, then a group of soldiers order you out of your home, onto a transport, and then out at a shelter. At first, there are lots of people there with you, and the military people tell you to sit tight while they bring more people, but they never return, and the other NPCs slowly get fed up and leave, and then bam, game starts.