Okay, this is one topic of which I have thought multiple times and I still have no idea.
It is about a very basic direction of C:DDA and I would be glad if some core developers would join in here, too.
Will or should C:DDA ever have a goal or any victory condition?
What do you think?
If you think C:DDA should have a victory condition, what should it be? Do you have multiple victory conditions in mind?
Both cases may have their benefits and drawbacks.
In the first case, C:DDA would be actually a game. Without a goal, C:DDA is technically not a game, “just” a sandbox. A pretty challenging sandbox, however, but still a sandbox. So this is quite a difference. Currently, C:DDA is the latter. I am not saying this is bad, however, that’s just how I define those terms.
I ask all this because I want to know in which direction C:DDA is going to. Also because I just want to know what you think.
I would rather it be like minecraft’s end game, if it went that way. You get a nice battle, a trophy that does nothing, some credits, and back to normal game knowing you’re a badass.
Second paragraph, first sentence of the design doc seems pretty clear to me:
To unpack that: “freeform” means that there’s no set goal.
So, no victory condition. Only thing that takes your character away is getting xem killed, and if you feel like finagling around in the file structure, even death doesn’t have to be permanent.
The end game is re-creating the world… like in 10-20 years… getting proper 4D engine…
and getting the whole population of the Earth to play C:DDA inside C:DDA with their 10th gen
virtual reality smart watches!
“ever” is a difficult word. I’d say that at the current time, adding an overarching “end goal” isn’t particularly compelling, but it might develop to be so at some point in the future. However I’d love to have goals and even story arcs of various kinds the player can progress in.
A somewhat obliquely related feature could be “retiring” a character, meet certain conditions and the option to retire becomes available, which establishes the player as a NPC or something, assumed to be able to survive indefinitely due to the resources they’ve accumulated. It’s not something you’d normally call “winning”, but it’s as close as the scenario reasonably calls for, and at least provides an alternative to simply quiting or killing off the character.
With scenarios I could see adding personal win conditions, where accomplishing certain predetermined goals unlocks an achievement and opens the retire option. You haven’t saved the world, but you’ve accomplished what’s important to you.
+1,000,000 on being able to retire a character someday. In a world like Cataclysm’s, “winning” means “not dying”. After a certain point the character just isn’t going to have difficulty surviving anymore, so “settling down” might be worthwhile.
And being able to meet that character later would be great…
Retiring would not be ‘endgame’ material, in that sense, and I prefer cata this way.
I feel similar to what has been voiced previously here: the reward ought to be lore, not ‘completing’ the game. Much like I can follow a job for part of my life and then move on. It’s part of the story but it’s not the goal.
If retirement led to your character and their base being implemented as npcs/part of the map, how would you handle successive play-throughs with them present? Would they be hostile to your pc? I ask this because locating a well-equipped survivor home by memory would make said new character’s life go from ‘hell’ to ‘assured safety’ really quickly.
Seeing permanent changes to the world like that would add a long-term sense of control over the survivor’s world (really cool), but at the same time, would change game balance ridiculously.
I already have a habit of doing this when my character dies: I make a new one, and run to my corpse to pick up their thus-far accumulated loot for a head-start if I can.
Mitigating this would be alternative location starts: we have this already with randomized shelter placement, as well as non-shelter start locations. Also mitigating this, I feel, would be the NPC overhaul, which will alter significantly how we interact with anybody, previous character or not.
Just a collection of thoughts. I really do like that retirement option.
Hostility level would be based on the type of retirement you achieved, if you just accumulate enough stuff to ensure your safety, you’d probably be neutral or even helpful, if you achieved safety by being the biggest, baddest, meanest killer around… probably not that friendly.
This would hinge on having NPCs developed to the point where the player can interact with them in general without breaking the game, and a retired player would just be a special case of that.
My past-self shall serve as an antagonist until my future-self presents itself. In any case, present me apologizes for those other two time-abusing ass-holes.
And prevent over-hyphenation. It really is a tragedy these days.
