suggestion for integration of user generated story-content/quests in houses in randomly generated maps

[broadsword]

This games is fascinating, I prefer playing pve with friends. I really like the idea of the dungeons, making random buildings more interesting to explore. We just fantasized a bit about what could make exploring buildings in PVE even more interesting and rewarding not just for getting loot or being dangerous to explore because of the sleepers/ triggerd events.

What would you think if these places would tell little stories. Imagine you´d find a guy who hanged himself and then you want to find out what happened there. There could be some notes giving you hints, or just the surroundings could tell the story.  You just would have to keep your eyes open to get some extra story/ reward. The reward could be a weapon you can find if you analyze the clues correctly or something else.

I´m talking about emergent story telling, making the world in PVE more interesting.

These stories could be community-based. Each house-type could have several community-made versions presenting some user-generated content, randomly assigned when the map is generated.

The author could be named on the doorplate or somewhere else. Users could generate this content with a tool which would allow modifications of existing house models including notes telling some background story, trigger points, zombie locations or even generate new ones. Maybe this could be also related to a specific quest. Users could upload their suggestions and would need clearance by the developers to have their version added to a stock of house versions.  What do you think?

[doughphunghus]

From what I believe ( I'm not 100% in the know for current development/plans so I may be wrong about this...And things may change or may have already changed):

 

1. You currently cannot direct a person to a specific POI (yet) using a quest (or anything).  Because of this you cannot have a player find something (like a note) and then have them go to another *specific* place to get "the next part of the story".

2. The only place you can send people to is a trader (via trader missions). You *can* probably make your own custom quests so the traders give you notes, and somehow daisy chain them there (I read this idea on the forums a bit ago), but only by going to a specific trader POI.  Meaning: only the trader and trader given items can likely be chained in any given order.

3. There are some mods with NPC's that when you meet them you an have basic dialog.  I believe the "Winterween" mod has things that you can get from the NPC's (or find/buy them from traders or random loot) that then give you locations to go to. But I also believe Winterween has a custom/handmade map?  (leads to next item)...

4. If you made a completely custom map and hand placed POI's you might be able to direct people to a specific POI, especially since you know the exact location and the exact POI that exists (and can make it unique), etc. 

5. I believe that if a POI has signs (the wooden signs you can write on, not the placed letter blocks) that the text on the sign does not get "saved" when the POI is placed in a new world.  Of course, if you hand placed the POI on a custom map (or I guess, generated a map then went in and handle placed signs and then saved the world and then shared the map) and write on the sign and then share the map you can get around this.

6. You can make "find specific loot (like a note) in a specific container" by making custom look containers and only having 1 item be in the loot table...but that's a custom container for every single thing you want to "find".  Since loot containers are referenced by numbers, it might be an issue if you wanted to load mods (as loot container ID's mods may have may collide) and I also believe the loot container "max number" is something like 1-1024 so you only get that many custom containers, minus whatever containers the Fun Pimps are using.  So, once again, you could probably do this, if you are also hand placing the custom loot container in the POI and then sharing that custom map.

 

Anyway: From what I believe, doing this as a community TODAY with the above limitations might not be too do-able in the way you mention.  If the game is updated and allows you to direct people to specific POI's (or unique loot containers?) or also if the loot container ID limit is raised (if its 1024.. I could be wrong!) and then the community were careful about the loot container ID's when making mods maybe its doi-able?  It seems to get "the effect you want" you're going to have to make a custom map (and story/mod items for the map) and share the map, IMHO.

 

I would love if anyone who worked on Winterween or anyone who has tried would share their thoughts/experiences creating "in game stories".

 

Oh, and another idea I have toyed with: People can randomly find "scraps" of paper/notes/articles/etc.  Then they have to find all 4 scraps ( for example) to then craft "the entire paper". So each scrap can have some fragments of text, and then "final crafted note" can have additional text to finish it out. You could then keep going ( finding more paper, crafting a chapter, then crafting a book...each time you get more of the story.  The dilemma is that there's no *easy* way I can sees to give the player a specific part of the paper/note/puzzle in a specific order, 1 at a time...unless its done via custom/modded trader quests where each quests rewards a specific piece of the puzzle.  Its not my idea, just "pieced" together from what I've heard people discussing on the forums for "some linear story" ideas.

[ElCabong]

That's a great idea. Last night I was digging up a guy's driveway for gravel and I said to myself "you know this belongs to somebody." I didn't know if this person was still alive, dead, has kids. I'm trashing his home up. but then I thought it could have been that crawling zombie I beat to death a few minutes ago. Lol