Claim cleared keeps as home

Post » Sun May 05, 2013 12:03 am

Well, the topic is quite self explainatory, but could it be a new feature in a future game perhaps? Maby with a grand keep as the ultimate price? :)

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Vera Maslar
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 7:18 am

In Morrowind, it was possible to "vacate" a home and take possession of it with no ill consequences because the world was static (and every item hand placed!). You could clear a cave and use it as your base, or a tomb, or any other interior and exterior place.

The biggest problem, since Oblivion, is that the cells (a cell is the virtual place where all the game mesh are arranged to create indoor/outdoor areas) are periodically reset and containers are filled with random (mostly crap) stuff. Incidentally, this is why you find fresh food in tombs which have been sealed for millenia or recent books.

Implementing what you ask for in today games would involve attaching a script to every cell and container within that check ownership and status. I'd rather go back to a fully static world (like the Pirana Bytes games) with only corpses disappearing after a while.
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Genevieve
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 6:29 am

Some combination, where the game tracks the last time the cell was entered, and has a SMALL chance of a respawn each day after something like 30 days, would offer the best of both worlds. It wouldn't respawn and lose your stuff as long as you visited within 30 days, but after a few months of in-game time, you could start checking out old sites again.

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Farrah Lee
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 9:07 am

Sorry, but it wouldn't work. People are emotionally attached to whatever they decide to hoard home. A system where you would randomly loose something if you don't perform certain actions would be extremely unpopular among the TES players.
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luke trodden
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 12:08 am

I thought something like this would be good, however; Bethesda GS is dead set on their recent "take nothing from the player" attitude where nothing can be stolen from the player, no experiences are barred from the player, and the player isn't punished for in game choices (like being barred from Solitude if you are a stormcloak or losing skill for jail time, or capital punishment for anything [think wearing ordinator armor or announcing yourself as the incarnate].

If I could, I would love to be able to take a fort and hire friends or mercinaries to defend it. The longer you are away the higher the chances of raids on your forts. This could range from radiant events looking similar to mistwatch (your surviving friends are camped out waiting for you to retake the fort), to mutiny, your hired bandits and mercs abandon you taking and ransoming people or things, to a master thief taking everything from the highest valued container in your home. Then you go hunt the people down and take back your things.

Some other dynamic environments that I have thought of include:
Level-expanded locations- mines/ ruins/ dig sites/ questlines that get deeper and harder as you level up.
My favorite example of this was a thieves guild heist quest of my own design. It is a variable quest where one of a few things can occur.

1. Player can never experience the quest location. In this instance the heist occurs without the player's assistance and is a failure resulting in the thieves going to jail. The player can hear about this through the rumor mill or through the associated organization.

2. Player experiences quest location (in this case the jewelry vault) via radiant quest but not the associated quest-givers. In this case the player will be asked to return to the location by the radiant questgiver, and the details of the quest will correlate with the person involved. The example in this instance would be that the robbers were successful in stealing the jewels from a vault owner you did a mission for before, he then asks you to retrieve them.

3. The player experiences the questgiver before visiting the quest location. This shows the player the allotted progress of the questline and freezes its progress. In the example case. The mission will go on without the player until the player is level 20 and occurs in 4 stages. Stage 1 (level 5) is determining the point of entry, stage 2 (level 10) is gathering partners, stage 3 (level 15) is the digging from the sewers into the vault and stage 4 (level 20) is completion. In the case of this mission, the player can hear of this quest from the city guard if the player is trusted or can hear about it from the thieves guild, or the player can hear about it directly from the questgiver. In each case, the player only hears about the mission based on its progression, the player's trust in certain circles and choices the player has made in the game thus far. (if you are a known snitch, you wont hear about it from the TG, but you can hear about it from the guards @ stage 3 when the guards would have caught wind of TG recruitment.

4. DIY. You can hear about these missions and do them with the associated people. Or you can leave them behind and figure out the alternative method of acquiring the mission results. In the case of the example mission, the player discovers the anonymous buyer of the jewels, travels to their home, steals their deed of ownership, walks into the shop and takes the jewels to the patron to receive payment without needing to cut the payment.
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Leah
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 2:16 pm

How is that different from now? If you leave something in a dungeon, in three days it will vanish. You will lose your stuff in three days, guaranteed, unless you buy a player home.

My suggestion is not to have dungeons respawn at all until 30 days after the most recent visit, so you'd either need to return every 30 days, or risk a random respawn. After that, it would have a slim chance each day. By the time another month had passed, there might be a significant possibility, like 25-30%, and by the end of a year of in-game time, it would be extremely likely to have been reoccupied by bandits or creatures.

There are two reasons to do so: one being that you can't simply repeat the same handful of places every three days and "milk" places like "RockMILK Cave"; the other reason being that you could use them as "temporary" player housing. They could then allow you to buy various grades of locks, which would reduce the odds of respawning, or hire guards who would insure that it would never respawn, thereby turning them into longer term or permanent housing accommodations.

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Richard Dixon
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 1:19 am

I don't like the idea of being able to keep places you've cleared as a home. It makes it too easy to set up a "safe place", and seriously devalues the idea of buying your own home. I mean, why buy a home in Morrowind (not that you can), when you can just kill everyone in the http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Council_Club_(Balmora), which you're actually asked to do for a quest, and then have the place all to yourself? Prime location, too. What's the point in laying down a ton of gold for one house, when you can have any other for free with just a little bit of killing?

I actually like what they did in Daggerfall. Although the dungeon respawn time was insane (everything would come back in a dungeon the moment you left it), it ensured there was always a threat for staying out. You were also required to sleep every few days, or you'd pass out from exhaustion. This meant you either had to camp out away from towns and cities (where there was the possibility of creatures attacking you), or find and pay for an inn. That really helped increase the feeling that you're a wandering adventurer, with no set home.

You could buy a home in the larger cities, and I think there were even several options per city. They were extremely expensive (as the UESP says: "the cheapest ones cost nearly 400,000 gold", compared to Skyrim where even the most expensive, fully-upgraded player home is less than 10% of that). Combine that with the fact that gold had weight, how you'd often use banks to store your wealth, and how you could even take out loans, it really added depth to the whole player living situation that's been completely absent from the series ever since.
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Fanny Rouyé
 
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Post » Sat May 04, 2013 11:43 pm

I wouldnt mind a mixup between morrowind and oblivion.
U clear out a bandit hideout. The chests and storage spots never respawned. BUT after maybe 15 or 30 days, the bandits rehabitate the hideout and have access to the containers, but they never leave the hideout. The bandits can only take a set amount of items and also only take what items they are skilled at.
Ur a hoarder and u leave a bunch of high level weapons and armor in the cheata, u come back and some are wearing said items. Potions and poisens have a good chance of being used so unless ur skilled and fast, u can get ur armor back but a good chance of not ur potions and poisens. This could open up new possibilities for playera as they could calm or even befriend bandits as long as they have the spells for it. Etc etc etc.
established homes I would love to see it actually robbed if u are not part of the theives guild faction. To prevent robberies, u could join the tg, wipe out the tg, or hire protection for ur house like the house carls in skyrim. U could actually equip said carls and they sfay equiped unless their skills are in a different area. They never take anything from house and fight to the death.
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Chris Duncan
 
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Post » Sun May 05, 2013 2:27 pm

I think it could be done and it eas demonstrated in several ways in skyrim. Skyrim spoilers below

1. Anises cabin. Doesnt respawn and most of it can be used as storage/base. Shouldnt be difficult to do this for a fort or dungeon

2. Fort amol. Cleared out and next occupants are ver different. Cant see why this couldnt be done for more dungeons in next game

3 hearthfire homes attacked by random monsters and spouse can be kidnapped. Should be able to be done. Ive seen bandits take items and i would assume you can lose them?

4. Couriers could be used to say the keep is
being attacked you need to go back defend it. Or followers could be told to stay and guard it. Followers would "leave your service" if you ignored them for several days etc and you would lose keep
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Cathrin Hummel
 
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