After reading the blog entry, I imagined the scenario of a King's most trusted adviser secretly pulling strings to increase the influence of the cult he secretly follows. Corrupting the king (in a non-fantasy aspect), possibly poisoning him to keep him pliable. Similar to Wormtongue (Lord of the Rings).
If you massacre a number of cults, would it be possible for other cults to recognize your hostility to the "lesser" beliefs and immediately have a negative or hostile opinion of the PC?
Will religions evolve over time as our "modern" religions have to incorporate various different tenets/beliefs?
I've gently caressed the topic of torture previously, but forgot to ask something: with a wide variety of options for careers available to the PC after character creation, will there be the option to become a Captain of the Guard, Royal Torturer, or Executioner?
How about the other positions based around a leader's court or advisers? Being on a secondary or tertiary tier of the political system, maybe even lower on the ladder, would be interesting to play as you use your mind to outmaneuver your "allies" to grab at the next step up.
With dungeons, especially more ancient ones, will we see nifty traps? While many people think trapped ruins are something of Indiana Jones-esque fantasy, I know of at least one tomb in China that still isn't fully explored due to the danger of delving further into it. Maybe have some text pop up (You hear a gentle *click* or You feel something tug on your ankle.) before the trap activates depending on the trigger, giving the PC a moment to react before they get arrow'd/boulder'd/pitted/buried alive.
What about the use of "alchemy"? Something that some civs may perceive as magic but what we know is science?
Also, on a totally different tangent (as you may have noticed is my M.O. by now), will you be able to set up suppliers as a merchant or craftsman? If I'm a metalsmith I'd rather spend all my time beating the hell out of some hot metal than punching rocks. Will royal commissions also be possible? For example, if a civ is going to war but is short on equipment, would it be possible to see them request that local smiths mass produce arms and armor at a base price?
Will the medical "profession" (since it was practically guesswork in many cases back then) be open to the PC as well? If so, how will the more complex procedures be handled?
Keep up the great work.
EDIT: Changed out the yellow color. Holy balls, my eyes.
I really like the cults-being-careful idea; on the other hand, wiping out one cult could also make another like you all the more. Religions will evolve over time, and that will be a component of sometimes splitting into sects, if they just cannot agree on a key theological dispute. I think that kind of climbing the ladder - through non-combat means - is something you don't often see in games, and something I'm really keen to include. It's basically "intrigue", I guess! Dungeons are going to be absolutely full to the brim with traps, and various generated puzzles (tomb of Qin Shi Huang?). As for the puzzles, don't worry, it's not that stupid sliding block puzzle, or anything like that. I'll be saying a lot more about this in later blog entries, but I really enjoy the kinds of puzzle you get on IQ tests and the like, spatial puzzles, logical ones, and I'm in the (very) early stages of working on a way to get the game to generate those puzzles, and have them (in SOME dungeons, I stress, not all) appear in relevant areas, and have them get harder and harder as you go further in a dungeon. Some might have punishments for wrong answers - pick the wrong shape, and the room starts to flood, etc. I'm not yet sure how traps are going to work , but I *love* your suggestion for a click, or something similar, when you're moving in the wrong direction, or maybe some one-frame visual cue. Great idea! I shall definitely include that. I'm not yet sure how to fully include traps - I don't want a "traps skill" at that seems absurd, I think the player needs to be able to spot them, but I don't know how to do that in an ANSI game. Working on it. Alchemy... as in, "proper" alchemy, metals, immortality, Great Work, transmutation, etc, might actually become a significant element. Not sure yet. Yes to suppliers, I think, and I like the royal commission idea a lot. Could add to the history generation particular families of blacksmiths etc that are favoured by particular rulers? I think I want a reasonable, though not immense, amount of detail to medicine etc - but I have no clue whatsoever yet what form that will take! And thanks
Man of paper, a couple of things you and URR have mentioned have brought up something I want to ask. If commissions and requests exist, it would make sense to include it in the same vein as trades. For personal scale, legal trades, a local market would be a place to deal in both items and promises (Commission a local blacksmith to construct armour for you and half a dozen good men in return for partial prepayment), personal scale, illegal trades could be carried out at either a location in-city or at a local black market or dive bar located in a dungeon or ruin (organised murders to improve your position, following someone to an illegal sanctuary to hold over them as blackmail, illegal drugs and other shady deals). Larger scale deals would generally require meeting someone much higher up the chain, or making a variety of smaller deals, like visiting a local lord for a militay commission, gathering an alliance of merchants to peddle your war loot, or meeting a tribal chieftain to gather promised support for an upcoming campaign.
I don't see that any of these need specialised interfaces, honestly. It seems to me that the basic structure of Give/Promise A in return for Give/Promise B would work neatly for everything, and provide a vast scope for trading, wheeling and dealing. Even better if you can namedrop other people to bolster your petition ("The clans of Anglia, Gallaway and Fife have already pledged their swords and pastures to our victory", or "I have received a commission and early payment from The Regent for one thousand swords, although I understand if his gold isn't good enough). The red words denote names and agreements (I think "contract" is probably the best catch-all term) that you've already made. Such a system would also mke it easy to keep track of contracts via an information screen, perhaps with tabs for military, economic and other types of contract, and also, of course, the person or group with whom the contract was made.
I love the sound of basically everything in that first paragraph. I see your point about interfaces, though as I'm "hand-making" much of the game, they might end up with different interfaces. On the other end, I very much see the strength of your suggestion. But some kind of screen for keeping track of contracts, deals, agreements, promises, etc, seems like a must. As for namedropping, once I get the speech system going, I love the idea of being able to namedrop in that context!
no magic, astrology,
Not even fake Magic and fake astrology?
I somehow suspected witches and warlocks would be in there somewhere.
Ah, fake magic, well... very likely, actually.
I've played the first versions, and stoped until today. When fisrt creating a world, something amused me, there are actually planets. Not only restricted to th eone where you play but a whole solar system. But can someone clarify what will be possible to do with them inthe future versions?
You can only play on "the Earth", but planets will be important to religions, cults, puzzles... and they just look nice. For now, the second half is the focus
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I'm more interested in the quality of procedural generation for history, world, civs, religions, and pretty much everything. These kind of things are important if you want to have the feel of changing the history, which is what I want to do in this game. I really want to create chaos in a civ by assassinations and sabotages then see what happens.
It's turning out well I think.
By the way, will there be something like the Legends mode we have in DF? If you don't know, it allows you to have a look at everything in the world you created (and affected). From big things like wars to simple individuals who didn't really affect the history anyway.
That's one thing games don't seem to do well: Feeling like you're changing history. I really hope this game delivers that.
I agree, I think the ability to "change history" is absolutely vital. Even games that allow you choices, like Mass Effect, are just "good"/"evil" ones, and outcomes are rarely too different. I'm hoping - thinking about the long-term here - that choices will actually totally change the world. Yes - there is an in-game encyclopedia (which I am currently working on) which has a VAST amount of information on everything ranging from noble families, civ histories, poisons, famous ships, famous battles, historical figures, known settlements, and everything else. It's a big part of 0.3, and at the moment my focus is largely on getting the required code/data structures for it working nicely, and more importantly, quickly. "Normal" citizens will not be in the encyclopedia, simply because I want populations of realistic nation-size, and those are large numbers.
Think of it this way.
In URR, if you uttarly harass someone of equal power what do they do?
Plot is really the game to recognise people's actions and reactions and have the game restructure itself to the player. In otherwords it needs to construct a narrative.
A game like this can't have a plot. I wouldn't really like it if the game had a plot anyway
It can have plot.
Though as you know the three requirements: Plot, Intrigue, and significance... are just the requirements for it to be on my list of "great games". Though not the only way.
-Plot: It needs to act and react to the player and construct a narrative based around that.
-Intrigue: The game needs depth and for history and characters to act in a way that isn't nessisarily about dirrect confrontational conflict. An ability to pry further so to speak.
-Significance: The game needs to have the player's actions to feel significant at least within his/her sphere of influence.
All these are linked to eachother and you either have all three or none of the three.
To put it simple, not having plot just means the game doesn't care about you. You are a completely insignificant nobody in a world where no one cares or does anything of significance. You may be power but no one really cares about power, they may oppose you but only because that is the rule of the world.
THAT is what having no plot is. Dwarf Fortress is definately trying to have a plot.
Narratives are important. Just as the game can construct narratives for myths, legends and deities and all that (see, hopefully, the next blog entry) I also intend to get it to generate written, encyclopedia-like narratives for civilizations, people and families, and the like. I've got the early stages of this going already. I like your definition of the three - I'm definitely after that. The player's actions, if noteworthy enough, will get them an entry in the encyclopedia as a mass-murderer, great diplomat, warrior, general, explorer, or whatever. That entry will then update as you go along. YES, clearly, in the real world in the 1600s there was no such function, but I think it's sufficiently cool to omit realism just here. However, only entries you "know" about will be in the encyclopedia; undiscovered civs won't appear until you find them.
I think what Neonivek is saying is that the game needs cause and effect. In a "make your own story" kind of game, you act on the world and it doesn't act back. For example in Skyrim you can advance in two factions that don't like each other (like the thief's guild and near anyone else) and neither faction's members will dislike you no matter how obvious it is that you're playing both sides. This is because cause and effect in Skyrim is very scripted; if you steal from someone, for instance, that person will dislike you and the guards will attempt to arrest you, but after that the way people react to you doesn't change at all. Law-abiding citizens that really shouldn't want to associate with a thief (or a murderer!) will still cheerfully greet you as long as they weren't directly wronged.
What DF is going for is a little more complicated. You can do what you want but you're only kind of making your own story because the results of your actions are unpredictable. In Skyrim if you set out to kill a necromancer you're gonna kill a necromancer and get your quest reward, even if you have to reload a few times to do it. In DF you might kill the necromancer or you might die trying, or suffer some lesser failure like capture, retreat, or loss of limb, and the story will continue either way. People and factions will reevaluate what they think about you based on killing the necromancer, and the fact that the necromancer is dead will influence the fate of the world or at least the local region. You're strongly influencing the story, but the world as a whole exists and reacts independently of the player.
Personally I think this sort of thing is awesome. Steal your neighbor's silverwear and become the subject of bad gossip, kill the dragon and be showered in gifts. Assassinate the tyrant and watch as your civilization descends into infighting and everyone is enslaved by goblins. It all sounds like good fun.
Fakeedit: I spent a bunch of time typing this up and I'm posting it even if it overlaps with what Nelia said
I think "the story will continue either way" is the key point. The entire world should react to one's actions (and the actions fo NPCs) - sure, yes, clearly, someone in a city half-way around the world won't give a damn if you stole a chicken from someone, but that person certainly will (yes, painfully mundane example, but still). I do want to set up a situation where not all locations, civs, cities etc are safe for the player because of their actions. One thing I don't like in games with "choice" is that you still have access to basically everything, regardless of choice, in a lot of these games. I'd prefer that actions that make one civ like you mean another civ puts out a bounty on your head; I want to really encourage the player to make their alliances carefully, I suppose, and that those will have negative, as well as positive, consequences.
Oh, I get it now. I agree completely. When I think of "plot" I think of something that's enforced by the game. Like how it's done in Skyrim like others mentioned. In Skyrim, whenever you enter a new city which you have never entered, you see all kinds of things. An execution, people running up to you and asking for help, people talking about something which you overhear and start a quest, etc. NOTHING happens when you are not around. When you complete a big quest (like completing the Imperial or Stormcloak storyline) there isn't a big change in the game like you should have expected too. Most games which allows the player to make big decisions lack this.
I'm optimistic about URR though.
Yeah, the lack of big change is a shame. I hope to reach the stage that if a civ is sacked, it stays sacked, and that's it. No more city!
I imagine unless your a big important person (or you kill a big important person) you won't have a huge effect on the world.
I hope to have other methods. For instance, if you're an explorer and you find a non-combat artefact, returning that to someone relevant might get you noticed, get you more quests for similar, gain influence with some people, have offers for payments for similar, etc etc...
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress meets The Outer Wilds? "Ultima Ratio Regum", v0.10.1 out Feb 2023 (Read 635306 times)