Staking claim in the game world

[soggie]

What if you could settle down in the game world for good? I'm fiddling with the idea of the player character being able to find a shack in the middle of the wildlands (like NWN2's crossroad keep) and build it up to a point where it could eventually turn into a town by itself.

To add to the fun, the location is random on every playthrough, and generated with an economic model behind it. A shack might be generated near a mine and once you stake ownership on it you can start hiring miners to dig iron for you (assuming if you manage to clear the mine first), and then travel to merchant towns to inform them of your little mining outpost and invite them to come over to trade. You then hire a manager for the mine, and months later when you return you'll find the outpost growing into a frontier town.

It is then that you get to play mayor - hire mercenaries to train the local militia, adjust the levels of trade with various other towns, talk to the local sheriff to get some procedurally generated quests, etc.

Would that be a nice thing to have?

 

[Aikanaro]

Why would the character want to set up there? Normally in an RPG you're a rich megabadass - why not buy a nice house in a major city rather than dick around with shacks in the countryside?

BG2's implementation of this idea makes sense - the places that you set up in make sense and are worth the character's time.

 

[Archibald]

I have one problem with such ideas. Building anything like that takes time, lots of time. Usually in rpgs you have some great evil threating to destroy everything. So in the end it doesn`t make any sense to spend time building your city when you should be killing that big evil asap.

This was one of the many reasons why Oblivion sucked balls. You have those gates everywhere with demons and shit yet nobody gives a damn about them, you can travel around the world for 50 years and only then start closing them.

tl;dr if you can make it work with setting and story then sure, it`s a nice feature, otherwise might as well spend more time making other parts of the game better.

 

[soggie]

@Aikanaro

Because there isn't any "big houses" per say in the post-apocalyptic world?

@Archibald

No, there's no big bad evil for a change in my setting. Nobody's conspiring to destroy the world. The main plot involves finding a "legendary city" where you will want to settle down for good, but the game mechanics afford you with the capability to forget about the main quest and instead choose to settle down in one of the towns.

 

[anus_pounder]

What if you could settle down in the game world for good? I'm fiddling with the idea of the player character being able to find a shack in the middle of the wildlands (like NWN2's crossroad keep) and build it up to a point where it could eventually turn into a town by itself.

To add to the fun, the location is random on every playthrough, and generated with an economic model behind it. A shack might be generated near a mine and once you stake ownership on it you can start hiring miners to dig iron for you (assuming if you manage to clear the mine first), and then travel to merchant towns to inform them of your little mining outpost and invite them to come over to trade. You then hire a manager for the mine, and months later when you return you'll find the outpost growing into a frontier town.

It is then that you get to play mayor - hire mercenaries to train the local militia, adjust the levels of trade with various other towns, talk to the local sheriff to get some procedurally generated quests, etc.

Would that be a nice thing to have?

Its a nice idea, provided the plot fits it. Obviously you can't have a big evil looming on the horizon while you dick around building a village of your own.

What I would like is to see this idea expanded. You build up until you're strong enough to have a say in your kingdom's politics, you finally gain enough power to kick out the current monarch. Then you take the throne and try to take over the continent while keeping your people,governors and subordinates happy.

I suppose it would take years to make such a game properly and with non ASCII graphics...One can dream.

 

[laclongquan]

My personal idea is go for it. Good idea. I can play such thing.

First: location. It must have somthing to define such location from the general wilderness. A seperate map for it is okay. But what if we want to enlarge it? Or make things happen to it, like raiders, or monster rampage. Perhaps a pretty big map with your own shack in the center, interesting terrains in 4 corners. You build mostly in the center and if raids or rampages happen it will flow from corner or edge into the town.

Second: Townies. I guess we could rescue homeless wandering people from all over the world and either point them toward our towns or escort them there. Each person is a quest of a sort.

Third: Buildings. Purchase materials from mines, logging stations, farmers, then pay them to transport there (caravans). Then either the building (belong to certain townies) get magically built.

Fourth: Balancing. Since we get our own services it means we dont need outsider's service unless it's too far from the town. But the key thing is that even the town is ours it doesnt mean the shops, smithies, bars, churches will provide service free of charge or cheaply or anything. That will make the economy broken. No, you pay like normal. The reward here is that you can design your own towns, streets, and watch them prosper, not free stuffs. You can have money from them as protection fees, leases, whatever but that is.

Fifth: Interconnecting and interdependancy. Farmers need some repairing from smithies. Not much since they can do it themselves but the need is there. If there's no smith they work suboptimal and the produce to feed townies reduce. Higher food price (due to lower effiency from farms) lead to lower effiency of every other services. Farmers sell to bar/restaurant/shop. Smith buy ores and woods from market and also work less well if there's no local supply and higher price, sell services to farm and general demand (household stuff, farrier...). Stables take care of horses, buy general smithy service and foods from farm. At lesser effiency they cant take care of many horses. At higher they can have a herd. Caravan offices. River transport offices. Apothecary sells herbs and medical items. You get the idea.

Sixth: Your mansion. Hire maids (just for shit and giggle), cooks. Beds and rooms for your followers. Daily cost is wages, cost of foods of occupants. If you cant pay that maids then cooks will be fired. etc...

Hinterland try to do this stuff but it's just no good.

 

[Haba]

Play Unreal World.

 

[laclongquan]

Unreal World got plenty of problems:

Follower's bug are annoying as fuck.
Map of your settlement is buggy as fuck.
You cant command them to do something out of your sight for any length of time.
Combat and economy is broken as hell.
Food gathering activies and food rewards is broken.

But the killing factor in this topic is that You actually cant make your own village. You own shack, yes, but not your village with long term tenants.
You can build an entire villages from ground up if you got the patience for it but you cant have the people.

 

[JarlFrank]

Depends on how much the feature gives in gameplay value compared to how long it takes to implement. It's not a necessary feature for our game, but it sounds like a good idea in principle.

 

[denizsi]

As long as there is slavery and rape, I'm chill.

 

[Phelot]

As long as there is slavery and rape, I'm chill.

I'd actually love to have a sandbox village management sort of game were you can enact laws and basically be this creepy strongman that makes every decision for his citizens.

But to the OP, I'm always game for something like that. I love management of such things. I liked it in Bloodmoon and even in NWN2. My problem with them is they didn't have enough for me so what you're talking about sounds cool.

I didn't read all of this thread, but how would you handle time? Can you pass time as the PC?

 

[soggie]

@anus_pounder

Expanding the scope of the mechanism (other than being a fun timesink unrelated to the main plot) is out of the question for the current project though. Maybe in an expansion, but the core focus of the game is the RPG aspect. The build-your-own-town mechanism is just meant to be a mechanism to encourage (and reward) replays.

@laclongquan

Good ideas. The funny thing is, the way we're structuring our game (with the editor being in-game instead of a separate tool), we can actually turn the editor loose in the game and allow the player to actually build up an area using a limited set of functions from the editor.

Combined with an in-game economy and dynamic NPC timetables, I'm interested to see how this all could pan out.

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

@phelot

Time... is an icky issue. I'm torn between real-time (like Fallout) and fake-time (BG and infinity engine series). That's for another thread though.

 

[denizsi]

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

Who da man? You da man!

But wait I almost forgot!: Cannibalism.

Those are the holy trinity: slavery, rape, cannibalism.

 

[soggie]

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

Who da man? You da man!

But wait I almost forgot!: Cannibalism.

Those are the holy trinity: slavery, rape, cannibalism.

Child rape is a joke. But slavery, rape and cannibalism are actually in the game. I'm serious. You start off as a slave, in your journey will meet a follower who's an ex-rape victim, and then in the game there are dungeons with cannibal mutants. Although, cannibals are not really that much of an element in the game. Just don't see it fitting into the overall theme of the game, so their role are no bigger than dungeon mobs.

 

[denizsi]

So I can't cannibalize on others myself?

 

[JarlFrank]

When you run out of food in the wilderness, you party will fight among themselves and the first one who dies is going to be cooked.

 

[laclongquan]

I dunno. Rape sound a hot topic in today's decadent liberal society, but in medieval setting it's nothing special. Droit de seigneur right, courtesan/whores in Venice, etc. Ex-rape victims, from history's point of view, are nothing special.

That remind me, if you set port towns or caravan towns up, dont forget a bar and brothel.

 

[GarfunkeL]

How does one become an ex-rape victim? :D

I'm all for the town-thingy as well, sounds good!

 

[asper]

These kind of ideas lead to empty Oblivionized gameplay. RPG's are best with a strong story.

Otherwise just make a roguelike.

 

[JarlFrank]

This idea is definitely not a priority for us and just something soggie came up with spontaneously. We're still keeping it in our minds, but the combat, story, quests and cities are our top priorities. Gameplay + story comes first, so don't worry.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

Who da man? You da man!

But wait I almost forgot!: Cannibalism.

Those are the holy trinity: slavery, rape, cannibalism.

Child rape is a joke. But slavery, rape and cannibalism are actually in the game. I'm serious. You start off as a slave, in your journey will meet a follower who's an ex-rape victim,

But will the player be able to turn her into a current rape victim?

 

[sportforredneck]

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

Who da man? You da man!

But wait I almost forgot!: Cannibalism.

Those are the holy trinity: slavery, rape, cannibalism.

Child rape is a joke. But slavery, rape and cannibalism are actually in the game. I'm serious. You start off as a slave, in your journey will meet a follower who's an ex-rape victim,

But will the player be able to turn her into a current rape victim?

Tastefully?

 

[soggie]

@denizi

There's child rape. Don't worry.

Who da man? You da man!

But wait I almost forgot!: Cannibalism.

Those are the holy trinity: slavery, rape, cannibalism.

Child rape is a joke. But slavery, rape and cannibalism are actually in the game. I'm serious. You start off as a slave, in your journey will meet a follower who's an ex-rape victim,

But will the player be able to turn her into a current rape victim?

Tastefully?

Yes. With a spiked dildo, no less. This is a whole new level of grimdark I tell you.

 

[laclongquan]

And talking about building your own settlements, how about a motive for it. Your king/clan-elder/president/alien-overlord command you to build up a series of towns in order to civilize this howling wilderness. That way you got a perfect reason to build one then another, then build the biggest to rule them all.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Well, any medieval or medieval-esque fantasy settings are ruled out because (a) I like toilet paper, and (b) average folk's life expectancy is just a little low for my liking. I want a setting where I can go get antibiotics for my infected cut, not rely on having a fuckload of gold to give to some temple cleric.

Deus Ex has 'world's worst economy', and Fallout is self-explanatorily out. Alpha Protocol just seems like a cop-out, as I'm basically sitting at my desk, and any combination of the Von Braun or Rapture is just masochistic (or will be once the shit hits the fan).

Maybe the Deus Ex prequel? Set pre-fall? I'm sure I can cash out my investments before the stock-market goes belly-up, especially with my metagaming knowledge.