So you have your roaming Death Vehicle, and your Power Armor with attached Gauss Rifle.
Now what?
What exactly do you want to do, what challenges do you want to face? What would be the thing that would make you scream with joy.
Throw all your ideas here for that!
Procedurally generated alternative-pocket-universe-dungeons accessible via portals and/or advanced scifi technology, complete with weird traps/hostile environments, otherworldly monsters to fight, and boss monsters with procedural artifacts for loot.
By the way, good idea for a discussion.
I use “no power armor” and “no energy weapons” mods.
Well mostly Npc factions making alliances and warring each other for resources and places of importance, I think that would be pretty sweet. I really don’t mind much about the tough monsters and epic loot.
Let’s make some places of importance.
That lava rift over there would greatly facilitate smithing, possibly steam generation, and after some Raptor serum I and my children’s chances of survival in the harsh New England winter.
It turns out I’ve set up camp in a non-ice Lab that happens to have a CVD forge. Could do a lot if we could power it, turn out weapons for a small guard force. Kinda worried the Feds are gonna decide we’ve seen too much and might cause Trouble for those “Old Guard” types, maybe tell folks how they’re the ones who caused all this, though…
Hey, intact farm near a river. Let’s irrigate and raise all sorts of crops; can set up a fishery too. And repel raiders who aren’t thinking about the future, or perhaps have so thought and prefer it without us.
This sewage plant is actually connected to sewers that run throughout the town. With proper staffing, we could use it as a staging area to both salvage and later clear out the city, possibly making it habitable again. Conversely, hostiles could pop in anywhere in the city and run the lines back to us…
In a perfect world? Fort Jimbob, manned by my decked out followers, our own farms, power production and manufacturing within the walls, snipers in the towers taking out nastier threats, spiked moat, traps and maybe a machine gunner or 2 dealing with hordes. Periodically my squad and I roll out in the landship, when we get near our destination I hand over controls to a squaddie and drop a side hatch so I can roar out in my loot buggy with designated gunner, after we clean house a bit my people and I go and grab whatever goodies we can find. As we finish our looting a faction we are hostile with shows up and we have a running gun battle back to the landship, where they call for reinforcements so our trip back to base becomes a reenactment of a car chase from the mad max movies. I take over driving and toss mollis and dynamite out the window as we speed along till I run out, with ammo running low I pull the handbrake and our house sized car skids sideways to a halt. When the enemies get close I hit the button that activates the 32 flamethrowers mounted to give 360 degree coverage. Then we drive home through the flames to eat smores and shoot up heroin.
More realistically I want some more challenging enemies within set locations for me to hunt. Something that requires a bit of prep and cunning, wipe out a fort full of nasty, well decked out npcs, ant queens that are actually scary, hunting a super hulk through a mall, go after a pyromaniac npc wielding a flame thrower in a forest, go kill the zombie trex in jurassic park, something like that.
Ive got plenty of rockets, I just need something worth shooting with them 
Let’s make some places of importance.
That lava rift over there would greatly facilitate smithing, possibly steam generation, and after some Raptor serum I and my children’s chances of survival in the harsh New England winter.
It turns out I’ve set up camp in a non-ice Lab that happens to have a CVD forge. Could do a lot if we could power it, turn out weapons for a small guard force. Kinda worried the Feds are gonna decide we’ve seen too much and might cause Trouble for those “Old Guard” types, maybe tell folks how they’re the ones who caused all this, though…
Hey, intact farm near a river. Let’s irrigate and raise all sorts of crops; can set up a fishery too. And repel raiders who aren’t thinking about the future, or perhaps have so thought and prefer it without us.
This sewage plant is actually connected to sewers that run throughout the town. With proper staffing, we could use it as a staging area to both salvage and later clear out the city, possibly making it habitable again. Conversely, hostiles could pop in anywhere in the city and run the lines back to us…[/quote]
0_0
I’d want to gather allies, build a larger base, support it with various facilities (farming, mining) etc.
After that, i’d expect interaction with other factions etc. And with the occasional extradimensional horror thrown in.
Pretty much comes down to having much better AI.
The opportunity to procreate, which would necessitate defense/maintenance of a human fetus, then maintenance of an infant (think Tamagotchi), then maintenance and significantly less defense of an adolescent. Simulated time-lapse between developmental stages of your MiniHuman. As your offspring grows more self-sufficient, your character grows more fragile due to age. Death/maiming of your offspring= Game Over. Eventually you can set off in search of a partner for your now-grown son/daughter, who at this point is dramatically more combat capable than your aging PC; not least of all because they have been trained from birth to survive in a post-cataclysm world, by your PC, who is evidently one of the toughest, most resourceful motherfuckers our species ever produced-after all, they actually managed to keep a child healthy to adult hood post-cataclysm. Up until your trip into the wilderness in search of booty for your impetuous MiniHuman, Keeping Them Safe was your clear and primary imperative. You don’t realize it at first, but your child is now more likely to Keep You Safe. You marvel at their competence. He/she is better at this than you ever were, even in your prime. You raised him/her to be better. This reality is their birthright, the only world he/she has ever known. When the Cataclysm struck, you became an alien, forced to carve out a life in a world for which you were never prepared. The child, though…he/she belongs here. One member of the first generation born after the cataclysm. This is their home now. Either you succeed in finding a worthy mate for your young, in which case, You Win! Or you die on the journey, in which case…your child makes it out of the situation you couldn’t, because you raised a GodDamn Survivor Paragon and as you realize your imminent death, you smile because you know that your child will be just fine on his/her own. You made sure of that, and now your task is done. So… Surprise, You Win! Because in the end, it’s all about the kid. I don’t imagine in my wildest dreams that S such features will be added, but that would be my ideal end game. The aging process would provide a unique difficulty curve; as your kid becomes less prone to sudden, catastrophic illness/injury, you become less able to defend them. Also incentivizes a cycle of high tension/low tension gameplay. Craft and babyproof a fortress, make a supply run in a world which has become even crazier since the Cataclysm, do low-tension house tasks, repeat. Also you likely spend a ton of time building a monster proof sustainable fortress, but then you must venture out into the wild again in search of fellow survivors. I think it could provide a lot of interesting gameplay. I also think it would be nearly impossible to implement in a satisfying way. Coding it would be one set of nightmares and making it fun would be another.
Realistic mining/manufacturing of resources, npc factions diplomacy, cooperation, wars, flight model, space exploration, terraforming, world building, new laws of physics, armaggedon, supernovae, dead suns, intelligent apes…
While I would absolutely agree that many players would have the ultimate goal of making a “settlement,” and improved NPC AI will go a very long way towards making that type of ending feel satisfying, that sort of thing that strikes me as more of a denouement than a climax - the “and they all lived happily ever after” part of the story. If you’ve got a “Death Vehicle” and Power Armor, you’re looking for a final challenge that is worthy of your bassassitude, both in difficulty and in reward.
In the design document, GlyphGryph described four stages to Cataclysm: Survival, growth, influence and transcendence. I would humbly submit that the most compelling endgame would focus more on the “influence” part than the “transcendence” part, for two reasons: First, an endgame challenge will be difficult enough that you will need to have already “transcended” to achieve it, and second, once you’ve completed the biggest challenge(s) the rest of the game is already going to be easy-mode, so overpowered rewards, while nice, are probably going to be superfluous.
Given those considerations, I’d suggest that good endgame scenarios would involve engaging and destroying/subverting major threats in the game in such a way that large chunks of the map are affected, usually for the better, (though worse could certainly be an option.) We already have lesser versions of this mechanic in destroying anthills, fungal towers, and triffid hearts to stop mob spawning, but this dynamic could be expanded and enhanced. In keeping with the style of the game, each of these scenarios would touch on one of the “threat spheres” of the Cataclysm DDA world.
With that in mind, a few ideas:
NPC War: There is a mean, well-organized group of raider NPCs that are mobile and terrorize huge sections of the map. Other NPC groups can’t do a whole lot more than hunker down and scavenge while they’re active. If you can destroy them somehow, (possibly by befriending enough other NPC groups and convincing them to attack,) then not only will will the raiders stop plaguing the countryside, but NPC factions will start building settlements, (which would have been too dangerous before.)
Rewards: Raiders eliminated over a huge map area, local NPC groups start farming/building
Military Robot Armory: The now-defunct U.S. Army had large national guard bases housing military robots. You could figure out a way to destroy the base, of course, but it might be more interesting to take over the command and control facilities, and use the bases inhabitants and strategic computers to your own ends. (Maybe an alternate use for the WIP Rivtech facility?)
Rewards: (Select one.) Robot followers, friendly robots patrol the world map, friendly robots attack roving zombie hordes, excluding them from a huge section of the map.
Subprime Portal: Portals randomly spawned on the map unleash not only nasty critters, but a clouds that cause acid rain. (That was one point of the weather overhaul, yes?) Going in and closing them…stops the rain…(but also exposes you to the horrors beyond. You’ll need insane environmental protection to even think about this.)
Rewards: Acid rain eliminated over huge chunks of map, OP artifacts, unique mutations?
Cult temple: Everyone likes fighting deranged cultists, but honestly I’m having trouble figuring out what the larger benefit would be.
Rewards: ?
Bioweapon Survival Vault:
[spoiler](There’s a WIP on Git that sounds remarkably like this based on what I’ve read, and some lab entries are referenced, hence the spoiler tags.)
Well, the “survival” part didn’t work out for the vault’s inhabitants, but this labyrinthine underground structure has all the food, supplies, and materials needed to rebuild civilization after a biological cataclysm. More importantly, though, the vault has automated pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment for inoculating both the inhabitants of the vault and the area outside following the apocalypse. One of the existing terminal entries in underground labs states that scientists did find an antidote to the blob, but that it was prohibitively difficult/expensive to manufacture, so they couldn’t use it to stop the Cataclysm. If you could figure out how to make it here, though, and disperse it on the surface, though…[/spoiler]
Rewards: More loot than you know what to do with, and a large area of the map where mutant/zombie critters do not spawn. Or, blow the whole thing up and turn the region into a hellish moonscape, that’s cool too.
Anyway, I think that the devs have done amazing work since the “DDA” open source project has been launched, and I know that the main limiter on new features is dev time. I also know that variations on most of this stuff are in the works. As much as I like to follow development I really should probably start trying to contribute, but I haven’t had the time lately. (That, and I tend to find that when I program at work, I don’t want to program on my off-time, too.)
I’d like to see winter a threat instead of something that allows you to put on the extra clothing/storage containers because of the decrease in temp., so yeah i’d like to see it get to -10*C cause why not
Good, good.
At the end of all ends, I want a kiss under the rainbow. No questions asked, just a wet, solid smoochie and a cookie afterwards. That oughta do it; take that, you cruel world.
After the curtains drop, there would be nothing better than to run ye’ ole’ Robot Chicken marathon on my PDA. It’d be a guilt-trip not to, ‘cause every self-righteous Power Armor Knight deserves a laugh on other superheroes’ account. They fail - and it is epic - while I laugh, cause I made it, they didn’t. Afterwards, I’d go and release my Manhacks into the wild - let them decide who-da-slavez of the nature really are. Watch them drift off, shed a tear or two for PAK’s best friends. When I calm down, I’d like an iodine tablet; just to be certain. Who knows what… you know you can never know these days - and having those guys around was a party, day and night. Have a “Coffee-inated MONSTER!!!” cocktail with it. Take a deeeep breath, reminescence a bit.
Then just jump on that raft, jump over bridges Mario-style all the way down that river, get to that sea shore where, the legend says, she sells sea shells - and cause a segmentation fault.
It gets that low in spring now. Kind of annoying actually.
It gets that low in spring now. Kind of annoying actually.[/quote]
And summer. I’ve been told they are working on it.
Endgame?
Personally, the super-mega-survivor-mutant-cyborg-that-looks-like-a-that-fucking-guy-from-Deus=Ex should try and get a group.
A group of what?
Kinsman maybe, if your almost over the threshold or already over it.
like for example…
[size=18pt]DEM HUMUNS[/size] [size=5pt]Humans, in-case you can’t read…[/size]
[size=10pt]Human Mega Survivors that have very few mutations, or ones that don’t make you think like a wolf or something,
(Of course, we could have sometype of multi-personality mutation, like at full moons or maybe going in the water, or SOMETHING can make your character flip the deck and think completely different. Of course, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of your mutations when it happens. Basically, think Werefish or Werewolf. You won’t gain or lose your mutations during night or day, or going in water or whatever. Your personality (And maybe voice?) gets changed.)[/size]
Human survivors, should be very human. As in you shouldn’t be able to drop-kick another human being without thinking "Oh shit, what if she’s NOT a zombie?"
Yeah, not much.
[size=20pt]DAH MUTANTS[/size]
Mutants don’t think like a human, or not completely like one.
Example:
Kauffman, A Special Operator
Mutations: Three.
LEANING THRESHOLD: WOLF
CBMS: ONE
DIARY ENTRY EXAMPLE:
“Last night while me and the guys were raiding a nearby science lab, we got in and we were ambushed by…
Something, its really fucking weird is all im going to say… It just tore up Saniha right next to me, but thank god that Jonas brought a shotgun and shot its leg, and it somehow managed to fall off of a platform…”
“We could still hear it trying to climb up, but Jonas manged to lock the doors, so it couldn’t get up… Thank god he has a Fingerhack CBM from his time smuggling, anyways we went to this room, strange part was that it was something called Mutagen…”
“Jonas took some bottles with him and I took, maybe three I think…”
“He yelled at me to get in the truck while he loots the rest, turns out that the doors he locked, didn’t even hold up against it. He ran out, with a folder saying CASE: 19: NETHERWORLD VIRUS. J SAMPLE. He manged to get in the car, and drive off before it could get us.”
“Later last night, he gave me a bottle of mutagen, and he took a bottle and started to gulp it down…”
“Don’t know what happened next. I passed out on the file, and apparently I got fucking CLAWS!”
“No idea how that was natural, I looked at Jonas, (Who was passed out on the couch by the way…) and…”
“Holy shit, he had those ears, reminded me of the elves from lord of the rings, plus the fact he just suddenly woke up, just staring at me…”
“Wow, apparently his eyes changed to, and they look… Pretty fucking strange…”
“Later, one of the camp dwellers came in the door while we were laughing over what happened, and the girl just passed right out…”
“She woke up later today, and quickly realized that I was Kauffman and he was Jonas…”
"Later, she told me “You do realize that you have huge ass teeth, and claws, right?” I just responded and said “Yep.”
“HOLY SHIT APPARENTLY I CAN SEE AT NIGHT!”
Thats a low-threshold, beginning, he’s not swearing as much, end he’s swearing alot more etc…
Basically, NPC dialogue should VARY alot depending on your state, like mutations and CBMs…
It would be great to see some new areas be opened up to end-game characters. Like the portal ideas that have been floating around for a while. Another that I could think of off of the top of my head would be to stop generation of the map on the right side at some point and place ocean at the end with a large aircraft carrier or some other large ship. Get enough materials to make a boat capable of travelling out to the ship, climb aboard and clear it out for sweet loot, lore items, perhaps unique NPC’s and an option to somehow end the game without dying and marking the character as ‘completed’.
After having a character complete the game in such a way it would be neat to have a sort of new game plus option at the main menu where you start in a new area with tougher monsters and once you make it to the endgame area you find the another ship (partially destroyed) that is completely inhabited by powerful endgame monsters.
I like all of the above. I’d like to see restoring civilization as the endgame. Once you can relatively easily deal with hordes, hulks and hunger, goals like restoring power and water to a base or a section of a town to house your allies would be cool.
After that maybe a bit of a RTS element. Setting up guard posts, assigning NPCS as guards, organizing training, supporting your allies when they’re overpowered, making hard choices between sending your mutated uberbionic overtrained self to the power station or the farms, and maybe lose one while saving the other.
Love the ideas of going into a portal to battle the Cthonic hordes of outsiders. Maybe go back/forward in time through portals (what would happen if we drop your raptorionic self into civilization as it was? Cops shoot you down? Media reports attack of mutants? Start a religious cult?) allowing things like stopping the cataclysm before it started, or seeing the results of your battle on the world. Utopia or utter blob-owned wasteland?
I also would be interested in being able to expand manufacturing, ALA Living steel. EVERYONE needs power armor, right?
All completely off the tip of my skull, it’s 2:00AM so it’s pretty much neuron-to-keyboard atm.
Amazing how many hours I’ve spent playing this game, all you devs are godlike avatars of awesomeness.
[quote=“Stelknecht, post:18, topic:6986”]I like all of the above. I’d like to see restoring civilization as the endgame. Once you can relatively easily deal with hordes, hulks and hunger, goals like restoring power and water to a base or a section of a town to house your allies would be cool.
After that maybe a bit of a RTS element. Setting up guard posts, assigning NPCS as guards, organizing training, supporting your allies when they’re overpowered, making hard choices between sending your mutated uberbionic overtrained self to the power station or the farms, and maybe lose one while saving the other.
Love the ideas of going into a portal to battle the Cthonic hordes of outsiders. Maybe go back/forward in time through portals (what would happen if we drop your raptorionic self into civilization as it was? Cops shoot you down? Media reports attack of mutants? Start a religious cult?) allowing things like stopping the cataclysm before it started, or seeing the results of your battle on the world. Utopia or utter blob-owned wasteland?
I also would be interested in being able to expand manufacturing, ALA Living steel. EVERYONE needs power armor, right?
All completely off the tip of my skull, it’s 2:00AM so it’s pretty much neuron-to-keyboard atm.
Amazing how many hours I’ve spent playing this game, all you devs are godlike avatars of awesomeness.[/quote]
It’s entirely acceptable to start one’s own faction, unify/split other factions, etc. “Rebuilding civilization”, in the sense of keeping the Cataclysm’s effects out of an area or reversing them, is impossible–if anything, Earth is gonna become more subprime over time, not less–but establishing a new post-cataclysm culture is an excellent goal.
In that sense, what you’re describing is a place I’d love to have DDA, but it’ll take a While.
And we do what we can.
I want:
-A happy community of at least 20 leaving in harmony in my home built town
-A huge farm to sustain me forever
-A combat scythe the size of me with a gun attached to it
-Full plate armour because what is damage
-10 pet dogs
-A pet jabberwock called Bob
-A solar-powered shopping cart with a rocket launcher strapped to the top of it
-My very own swimming pool filled with honey
-Ability to not get wrecked by mi-gos
-Nine furry tails because why not
-A crate full of glow sticks
-A wooden hand built mansion
-A dubstep gun
-Granades everywhere
-Mountable NPC in a dinosaur suit so I can pretend to be a badass caveman
-Solar powered vibrator
-A reason to live after I have all these things