While I think this is a completely unessential idea, I thought of something that may increase the amount of hours of play in story mode, while not throwing off balance, or character/story progression at all. Also, as I have no programming knowledge at all, I have no idea how much baggage is tied to the suggestion.
My thought is having a bulletin/ bounty board in the Collector's HQ that has pseudo-randomized side-quests. I always found that in games like Fable or Radiata stories, where there was a certain guild component, I always got really wrapped up in the side-jobs, and found they made the world feel more alive, but also made me feel more connected to the said guilds.
So, for the side-quests, I think they could each be broken up into basic types of quest, and then adjusted with modifiers. So off the top of my head, I thought of a few basic types of side-quests:
Bounty: Some monster has spawned in X location, and needs to be slain. Said monster would be an elite palette-swap of a pre-existing type of monster in the game.
Escort: An npc will follow your from X location to Y location, while greater numbers of monsters than usual spawn. (ie. Startington to Evergrind)
Defense: You need to travel to X location, at which point a couple waves of monsters will spawn that you need to kill, while protecting some objective.
Courier: Effectively similar to Escort, except without having to worry about someone's health. For courier quests to work, fast-travel would need to be deactivated while the quest is active. (Bring X item to npc, while increased monsters spawn on the way to the objective)
Now, for this idea to work, I think there needs to be incentive to do the quests, but also not allow you to grind out those quests to overpower your character, and throw off the difficulty curve of the game. To do this, I thought of 2 primary reward systems, and I could see either (or both) working. I do not think completing a quest should reward you with experience (other than the experience of killing whatever monsters you killed during the quest). Instead, my first idea would be to have a tally of how many side-quests you've completed, and give you item and cosmetic rewards based on how many you have finished. Said items could have stat bonuses or just be purely cosmetic, for the cosmetic slots. (For instance, 1 side-quest complete= cosmetic hat, 3 complete= new mask, [...], 10 complete= new hair style available at barber, [...], 15=furniture, [...], 25 complete= new pet skin available for some pet, etc.) The reason I could see this working is, the system would not penalize or pressure people who find that type of content grindy and repetitive, but also gives incentive for people who just enjoy the world and gameplay to invest more time into their characters. The other benefit I see is that once the side-quest infrastructure is in place, later-tier side-quest rewards could be patched in at later dates, and as the rewards have an emphasis on being purely cosmetic, I presume they would not take as long for the programmers to implement into the game relative to the other hand crafted content already present. The other thing is, there could be achievements tied to number of side-quests completed (ie. bounty-hunter achievement= complete 10 bounties, Taxi-Driver= 10 Escorts, etc.)
The other reward system I could see working would be a job progressions system. This system would be reliant on creating a new, secondary form of experience that I will for now just call Career Points or CP. Completing a quest would reward you with a certain amount of CP, and after attaining set totals of CP, rather than leveling up, you could visit Quinton, and get a promotion. This would open up the possibility of adding another level of modification to the side-quest system, where you determine difficulty. For instance, you could have the option to choose a bounty quest that has a difficulty of 2/5 stars, and you would be rewarded with 50CP, or you could opt for the riskier option of another bounty quest that is 5/5 difficulty, but the reward would be 250CP. In these hypothetical examples, the 2/5 may spawn an elite slime, but the 5/5 may spawn an elite scarecrow that is a few levels stronger than your character. With each subsequent promotion level, they could either be name purely numerically like Rank 1 Collector, Rank 2 Collector etc, or have more personalized names like Novice Collector, [...], Purveyor etc. The higher your rank could unlock Collector HQ specific rewards, like access to different quarter masters, access to new rooms in the building, access to new options to craft items, or the levels could just give you more traditional, static rewards like the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Anyways, I know this suggestion is unnecessary, and also would probably take a long time to implement (and quite possibly more time than it is worth), but I just thought that there is no harm in sharing ideas. Once again, I am loving the game, and that will probably be the end of the suggestions I come up with.
My thought is having a bulletin/ bounty board in the Collector's HQ that has pseudo-randomized side-quests. I always found that in games like Fable or Radiata stories, where there was a certain guild component, I always got really wrapped up in the side-jobs, and found they made the world feel more alive, but also made me feel more connected to the said guilds.
So, for the side-quests, I think they could each be broken up into basic types of quest, and then adjusted with modifiers. So off the top of my head, I thought of a few basic types of side-quests:
Bounty: Some monster has spawned in X location, and needs to be slain. Said monster would be an elite palette-swap of a pre-existing type of monster in the game.
Escort: An npc will follow your from X location to Y location, while greater numbers of monsters than usual spawn. (ie. Startington to Evergrind)
Defense: You need to travel to X location, at which point a couple waves of monsters will spawn that you need to kill, while protecting some objective.
Courier: Effectively similar to Escort, except without having to worry about someone's health. For courier quests to work, fast-travel would need to be deactivated while the quest is active. (Bring X item to npc, while increased monsters spawn on the way to the objective)
Now, for this idea to work, I think there needs to be incentive to do the quests, but also not allow you to grind out those quests to overpower your character, and throw off the difficulty curve of the game. To do this, I thought of 2 primary reward systems, and I could see either (or both) working. I do not think completing a quest should reward you with experience (other than the experience of killing whatever monsters you killed during the quest). Instead, my first idea would be to have a tally of how many side-quests you've completed, and give you item and cosmetic rewards based on how many you have finished. Said items could have stat bonuses or just be purely cosmetic, for the cosmetic slots. (For instance, 1 side-quest complete= cosmetic hat, 3 complete= new mask, [...], 10 complete= new hair style available at barber, [...], 15=furniture, [...], 25 complete= new pet skin available for some pet, etc.) The reason I could see this working is, the system would not penalize or pressure people who find that type of content grindy and repetitive, but also gives incentive for people who just enjoy the world and gameplay to invest more time into their characters. The other benefit I see is that once the side-quest infrastructure is in place, later-tier side-quest rewards could be patched in at later dates, and as the rewards have an emphasis on being purely cosmetic, I presume they would not take as long for the programmers to implement into the game relative to the other hand crafted content already present. The other thing is, there could be achievements tied to number of side-quests completed (ie. bounty-hunter achievement= complete 10 bounties, Taxi-Driver= 10 Escorts, etc.)
The other reward system I could see working would be a job progressions system. This system would be reliant on creating a new, secondary form of experience that I will for now just call Career Points or CP. Completing a quest would reward you with a certain amount of CP, and after attaining set totals of CP, rather than leveling up, you could visit Quinton, and get a promotion. This would open up the possibility of adding another level of modification to the side-quest system, where you determine difficulty. For instance, you could have the option to choose a bounty quest that has a difficulty of 2/5 stars, and you would be rewarded with 50CP, or you could opt for the riskier option of another bounty quest that is 5/5 difficulty, but the reward would be 250CP. In these hypothetical examples, the 2/5 may spawn an elite slime, but the 5/5 may spawn an elite scarecrow that is a few levels stronger than your character. With each subsequent promotion level, they could either be name purely numerically like Rank 1 Collector, Rank 2 Collector etc, or have more personalized names like Novice Collector, [...], Purveyor etc. The higher your rank could unlock Collector HQ specific rewards, like access to different quarter masters, access to new rooms in the building, access to new options to craft items, or the levels could just give you more traditional, static rewards like the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Anyways, I know this suggestion is unnecessary, and also would probably take a long time to implement (and quite possibly more time than it is worth), but I just thought that there is no harm in sharing ideas. Once again, I am loving the game, and that will probably be the end of the suggestions I come up with.
