SUGGESTION: Replace "Clear" mission type with "Eliminate Target".

[t1slam]

I think most people would agree with me that "Clear" missions and their variations are low key annoying - mostly because there is a way better mission type - "Fetch" - that allows player to decide the level of engagement with location on their own. 

 

Having to clear all zombies is maybe a good idea on paper, but in reality it is more bothersome rather than interesting. Most of the time they just take too long and force player to midlessly run around the location looking for the missed zeds, and sometimes (very rare though) may bug out and hide zombies somewhere and even force player to abandon the mission (happened to me once). 

 

I think fixing that can be achieved by replacing that type of missions with new type: "Eliminate Target".

 

ET would work in same way as "Fetch", but the goal will be killing a specific enemy:

 

The target would spawn in main loot room (or random room, like supplies in "Fetch" missions) and it will essentially be a miniboss of location - either a stronger zombie than current game level (irradiated zombies, soldiers, etc.), or location specific miniboss (like Grace, for example), or a specific group of zombies in specific room.

 

The idea is that player wouldn't need to kill all zombies in location, but only specified target - and seeking this target out would be as easy and uncumbersome as finding supplies on "Fetch" missions. 

 

That way players will be able to decide how much they want to complete the locations on their own, without need to spend time on finding all of the zombies.

 

So on later tiers of missions these types could be easily combined into "Fetch/Eliminate Target" to replace "Fetch/Clear" missions - locations would simply have two separate goals.

 

I believe that small change will drastically increase enjoyment of mission grinding process.

Edited November 13, 2022 by t1slam
Small additions and rephrazings (see edit history)

[khzmusik]

On 11/13/2022 at 2:28 PM, t1slam said:

I think most people would agree with me that "Clear" missions and their variations are low key annoying - mostly because there is a way better mission type - "Fetch" - that allows player to decide the level of engagement with location on their own.

 

I'm not sure most people would agree. What you call "deciding the level of engagement," other players might call "cheesing the POI."

 

But regardless - there isn't a way to mod in exactly what you want, but I think you can come close. Unfortunately it involves modifying all the POIs that support clear quests.

 

If you open a POI in the prefab editor, you can select each of the sleeper volumes. There will be a "Quest Exclude" option for each. If that sleeper volume shouldn't be part of a clear quest, then select "Yes".

 

You could use this feature to exclude all sleeper volumes, except one. You then set the non-excluded sleeper volume to spawn one zombie, and that zombie becomes the one that you have to kill.

 

You will probably need to set the "ShowQuestClearCount" value to 1 in the prefab's XML file (if it's not already set to 1).

 

You would have to do this by hand for all POIs too, 7D2D doesn't support XPath for prefab XML files like it does for Config files.

 

I believe the game will still have the same user experience as a normal clear quest - so that zombie (and only that zombie) will show up as a yellow icon until you activate the sleeper volume, then it will turn to a red dot.

[t1slam]

Thanks for the advice!

 

Quote

I'm not sure most people would agree. What you call "deciding the level of engagement," other players might call "cheesing the POI."

Yes, sure! I believe that in this context if player when given choice decides to "skip" engaging with game mechanic it's mechanic's fault for not being interesting enough.

 

If someone wants to complete missions at faster pace, leaving unkilled zombies (exp) and containters (loot) behind - it's his choice and he should be able to do so. 

 

Quote

You could use this feature to exclude all sleeper volumes, except one. You then set the non-excluded sleeper volume to spawn one zombie, and that zombie becomes the one that you have to kill.

 

That seems to be straightforward. Can i change what type of zombie spawns as that sleeper? I mean it's strength relative to current game stage? To make essentially a miniboss.

 

Quote

I believe the game will still have the same user experience as a normal clear quest - so that zombie (and only that zombie) will show up as a yellow icon until you activate the sleeper volume, then it will turn to a red dot.

What do you mean by "same user experience" - you mean player will still have to kill most zombies for icon to appear, or the icon will appear immediately (because all other sleepers are deactivated) and the "same" is about only final stage of clearing?

[BFT2020]

1 hour ago, t1slam said:

What do you mean by "same user experience" - you mean player will still have to kill most zombies for icon to appear, or the icon will appear immediately (because all other sleepers are deactivated) and the "same" is about only final stage of clearing?

 

No, I think what khzmusik meant was that if you set only one sleep volume in the POI as the quest objective, the yellow dot will only show up for them (and probably would show up right away).  All of the other zombies in the POI would be treated the same way as a wandering hoard that showed up - you might have to kill them just to get around them, but they wouldn't affect when the quest dot appears.  So basically, the second part of your question (icon appear immediately).

[a_jp]

(translation)
I am very interested in this proposal.
If this works server side
looks like a lot of fun

khzmusik,
"Possible with control at the POI level"
I think that's the answer.
And it is possible.
It just changes the sleeper spawn of existing POIs.

However, in this method, when a trader proposes
I don't understand the change.

I thought about writing this far.

name the POI
"Company 01. Defeat only the boss."
and in the POI details
・Excludes quests other than bosses
ShowQuestClearCount" value set to 1

if,
"Destroy only specific zombies"
I think it will be a quest.

 

 

 

[khzmusik]

11 hours ago, BFT2020 said:

 

No, I think what khzmusik meant was that if you set only one sleep volume in the POI as the quest objective, the yellow dot will only show up for them (and probably would show up right away).  All of the other zombies in the POI would be treated the same way as a wandering hoard that showed up - you might have to kill them just to get around them, but they wouldn't affect when the quest dot appears.  So basically, the second part of your question (icon appear immediately).

 

Yes, that's what I meant. It would behave as if you had already cleared all the sleepers from the other sleeper volumes (even though you didn't). As far as the "clear" quest objective is concerned, those other sleeper volumes don't exist.

 

Keep in mind I haven't tested this myself. I have done POIs where one or two sleeper volumes are excluded, and that's how those POIs behave. I have not tried it where all sleeper volumes except one are excluded.

 

57 minutes ago, a_jp said:

(translation)
I am very interested in this proposal.
If this works server side
looks like a lot of fun

khzmusik,
"Possible with control at the POI level"
I think that's the answer.
And it is possible.
It just changes the sleeper spawn of existing POIs.

However, in this method, when a trader proposes
I don't understand the change.

I thought about writing this far.

name the POI
"Company 01. Defeat only the boss."
and in the POI details
・Excludes quests other than bosses
ShowQuestClearCount" value set to 1

if,
"Destroy only specific zombies"
I think it will be a quest.

 

This will not work server-side, because it requires replacing all the POIs. Custom POIs require both client and server installation.

 

Please keep in mind that my proposal changes the POIs themselves, not the quests. It would be exactly the same "clear" quest as usual.

 

Unfortunately, it is impossible to create a new kind of quest. For quests that target POIs, they map to the values that you can put into the POI's "QuestTags" property in the XML. The only working values are "clear", "fetch", "restore_power", and "trader" (which is used with the "white river citizen" and "opening trade routes" quests). Those values are hard-coded by TFP.

 

So it's impossible to have one kind of "clear" quest that only targets POIs with one non-excluded sleeper volume, and another kind of "clear" quest that only targets POIs with multiple non-excluded sleeper volumes. The quest objective will choose POIs that have a "QuestTag" value of "clear" and that is all it will do.

 

There is another way to target POIs, but it requires a custom quest objective that I wrote which is in SCore. It's called "RandomTaggedPOIGotoSDX", and it can allow you to target POIs with certain values in its "Tags" property (which is not the same as the "QuestTags" property, and can accept custom values).

 

I mainly wrote it for going to POIs containing human NPCs, but you could use it to include POIs with any tag you want.

 

If you want to do this, then you should make a modlet. Here are the steps you need to take:

 

1. Create one or more POIs, or modify vanilla POIs, as I suggested in my first post (only one sleeper volume that isn't excluded, spawns only one entity). These would be put in your modlet's "Prefabs\POIs" directory.

 

2. Choose a custom tag name for those POIs, like "clearboss" or whatever.

 

3. Add that tag name to the "Tags" property (not the "QuestTags" property!) in the XML files for those POIs.

 

4. Create a new quest type that will target only those POIs. It is probably easiest to copy and modify the vanilla "clear" quest.

 

5. I the new quest type, use the "RandomTaggedPOIGotoSDX" objective as a replacement for the vanilla "RandomPOIGoto" objective, and add the "include_tags" property like so:

<objective type="RandomTaggedPOIGotoSDX, SCore">
    <property name="phase" value="1" />
    <property name="nav_object" value="quest" />
    <!-- Only include POIs with these tags -->
    <property name="include_tags" value="clearboss" />
</objective>

 

6. To make sure the vanilla quests don't go to these POIs, replace the vanilla "clear" quest's "RandomPOIGoto" objective, and add the "exclude_tags" property. This is the XPath to add to your modlet:
 

<append xpath="//objective[@type='RandomPOIGoto']">
    <property name="exclude_tags" value="clearboss" />
</append>
<set xpath="//objective[@type='RandomPOIGoto']/@type">RandomTaggedPOIGotoSDX, SCore</set>

 

7. When distributing your modlet, make sure your users know it is dependent upon SCore, and that they will need to download and install it separately. Also make sure users know that SCore and your modlet will need to be installed on both clients and servers.

 

It seems like a lot of work, and it is. I'll leave you to decide if it's worth it.

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by khzmusik (see edit history)

[khzmusik]

13 hours ago, t1slam said:

That seems to be straightforward. Can i change what type of zombie spawns as that sleeper? I mean it's strength relative to current game stage? To make essentially a miniboss.

 

Sorry! I forgot to answer this.

 

In the prefab editor, you can choose the spawn group for each sleeper volume. There are a couple that could be used for boss volumes, such as "Group Zom Badass Only"; and there are also spawn groups that only spawn one specific zombie, like "zombie Biker Radiated".

 

If those aren't good enough for you, it's possible to create your own - I did this for the NPC Core sleeper volumes that spawn NPCs. But it's complicated, and the vanilla spawn groups are probably good enough, so I won't go into details.

 

(There is also a setting called "Boss Volume" but as far as anyone can determine, it does nothing. It's probably either left over from a previous alpha, or supports some planned feature in a future alpha.)

[t1slam]

Thanks!

 

Seems like what i want can be implement almost perfectly - the only problem is the amount of work that could take.

 

Personally i don't have any experience with prefab editor, but the nature of explained actions seems to be quite simple.

[BFT2020]

8 hours ago, t1slam said:

Seems like what i want can be implement almost perfectly - the only problem is the amount of work that could take.

 

Welcome to modding where the only check on how much we want to change something is tempered by our inherent laziness  🤪

 

I got a list of things I want to do with my modding and my eyes glaze over every time I figure out how much time and work it is going to be.

 

Best advice I can give you - do it in bits and pieces.  Sometimes just doing a few things at a time and evaluating those changes will motivate you to keep going.  Do too much at once and it can seem overwhelming.

Edited November 18, 2022 by BFT2020 (see edit history)