Converting Towns


Lots has changed, but it has mostly been tweaks and bugfixes, not really things that needed to be journaled. However, I'm not mulling over how to make the quest system more relavent. The quest system itself is one of the things that I have reworked, in particular you no longer get rewards for quests. I didn't like rewards because it's kind of isolating, i.e., that way the only benefit for doing a quest is whatever the reward is, which may only interact with the rest of the game in a very limited way (e.g., what if it's a gem that you could just get by shooting a monster; makes the quest kind of pointless.)

@p Instead, I think quests should give a more useful benefit, one that makes them a vital part of the game. My feeling is some kind of system whereby you can "convert" cities by completing enough quests. So for instance, say a city has 5 quests. If you complete those, the mayor sends you an email or something hailing you the Town Hero. Then, this town appears as green on the minimap. People in the town are now much more helpful, for instance a store may offer you items at a reduced price, the passport office might do the same, whatnot. Basically whatever I can think of. We boost all the NPC favour by a fair bit (but this isn't enough, since we always allow for other, sometimes easier ways to boost favour.)

@p We can extend this further, and perhaps link it up somehow with the yet-undecided senate system. It just somehow makes sense. My current idea right now for the senate is that basically, there will be some NPCs that are senators. This might be, one per planet, or, one per culture per planet (like, the Oogian senator from Ol-oth, as well ast he Balinux senator from Ol-oth, if both those cultures were present on that planet.)

@p The flipside of this is antagonism. Basically, supposing you bust into town and murder somebody. You have perhasp a bit of lead time (before the cops catch you) where you can continue your raid, but at some point word gets out and the town hates you. Now that town appears red, and you are considered an outlaw there. There is still cultural outlaw status, which basically would colour every town of that culture red for the given time (I think it's 72h.) But if you were particularily hated in a given town, it would be on permanent outlaw. You could really screw yourself over if you had the wrong cities as permanent outlaw, but then, that's part of the fun. The truth is that the only absolute problem would be obtaining passports, so maybe that could be done illegally anyhow. Like perhaps if you are declared an outlaw, you start to get illicit offers in the email =) That would be cool.

@p Anyhow, I basically like the town-conversion system. NPCs have to be reworked some more so that they don't offer services unless they like you, and then I can experiment with how much favour to add, and so on. Finally, I can figure out what the role of the senate is really going to be.

2005-03-14


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