Adam_H

Join Date 03/2009

[Suggestion] Add neutral settlements to replace the countless Humble Inns

I realize this would be no small amount of work, but large parts of the game still seem to be in flux, so I’ll just throw it out there.

In the early game, it’s really strange how the post-apocalyptic world seems devoid of any human survivors, but is dotted with a startling amount of lonely inns and nobles’ estates. Of course, they’re there to provide you with quests, but I think they both feel out of place and oddly limit your interaction with people outside your command.

What if instead there were a few neutral settlements of survivors throughout the map? They would serve multiple purposes: Early on, they have an inn to pick up quests (or serve as destinations for them), an item shop, a place to regen HP away from home. Later, diplomatic players could trade with them, while the warfare-oriented ones raid them for money and resources. Ultimately, around the mid-game, they get absorbed into someone’s empire, whether by force or diplomacy.

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AFAIK neutral settlements/factions are already in the internal build (haven´t seen them in Beta 2 though).

I agree with you though. This whole Humble Inn/ Estate thing feels like a crutch to get certain Quests into the game. To me, it´s REALLY annoying that they pop-up/ vanish based on quests. It really breaks immersion IMO ("Hey, wasn´t there a Humble Inn (TM) just seconds ago?"). Same goes for the Dragon Fountains.

I´d like to see the Neutral Factions taking over the function the Humble Inns and Estates have right now in the game.

Another idea would be to have the Inns/Estates/Fountains be more rare and of more use than just spanwning/de-spawning Questhooks/-destinations. Why not make them claimable ressources (ala the refugee camps). An Estate would be there from the beginning and - if claimed - could give you a certain number of population and a small presitge boost or something like that. Inns could perform a similar function than Pubs, maybe with a higher Prestige boost. They could still function for Quests - even if integrated into the city. But the world would feel much much more consistent and less generic than it feels right now due to this mechanic.

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Inns serve no purpose other than occasionally giving you a quest. And there is no telling if said inn has a quest available unless you run across the map to find out. There should be atleast an icon indicating quest availability. Or atleast reduce the starting areas to only one inn.

Also you should be safe in an inn and creatures shouldn't be able to walk into an inn tile.

You should be able to heal up and rest at an inn. If you already can - I couldn't obviously tell.

You should be able to speak to the inn keeper and get word about new quests and passerby champions

If inns are only placeholders for quests then remove them and find a better way of questing. Like the above example.

Perhaps in this supposed "post apocalyptic world" there lays a dead champion on the ground, you walk over to him and discover a "clue" - opens up a quest.

Inns are easy and uncreative right now. But wait - we will get an editor and can do this ourselves - that's right!

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Quoting lswallie,

reply 2

Or instead of half a dozen inns there are a band of nomads settled around some wagons. And they need water or food, or there are wolves attacking them at night, or there are bandits attacking them. Do you help? And how do you help?

Inns serve no purpose other than occasionally giving you a quest. And there is no telling if said inn has a quest available unless you run across the map to find out. There should be atleast an icon indicating quest availability. Or atleast reduce the starting areas to only one inn.

Also you should be safe in an inn and creatures shouldn't be able to walk into an inn tile.

You should be able to heal up and rest at an inn. If you already can - I couldn't obviously tell.

You should be able to speak to the inn keeper and get word about new quests and passerby champions

If inns are only placeholders for quests then remove them and find a better way of questing. Like the above example.

Perhaps in this supposed "post apocalyptic world" there lays a dead champion on the ground, you walk over to him and discover a "clue" - opens up a quest.

Inns are easy and uncreative right now. But wait - we will get an editor and can do this ourselves - that's right!

I like your ideas!

I'm sorry to say that right now the RPG elements seem tacked on. Inns are uncreative and maybe WE will need to turn this RPG-lite into something more. It's possible the editor tools are more important than the meat of the game (minus the campaign) because the community will create the content as with games like LittleBigPlanet. I feel:

You should be safe at an inn.

You should be able to heal.

The innkeeper shouldn't just hand us quests, but instead tell us where to go/who to see for one.

The inn should occasionally have rare goods 'acquired' from traveling patrons to make us frequent their establishment.

An innkeeper should be able to tell us facts/rumors/locations of local Champions and landmarks of interest.

Quests should come from random objects (lost purse, dragon bones, etc) as well. No one wants predictability and ALWAYS getting quests from inns is boring.

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I really don't think that innspam will be how the game does quests - someone said somewhere that humble inns gave level one quests. Which makes me think that the inns will be around every so often, but not as numerous as they are now. Once-in-a-blue-moon sort of thing.

I do like the idea of inns being more than just a quest location. In fact, I think that inns...

Should be a permanent location, until destroyed by someone or another.
Should have more than just quests for interaction. See ghog69 for examples.
Should be able to be used to increase city recruitment (Hey, 'tender, I've a nice city growing to the north. Send some people my way if they want a home)

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I agree with with this post. I also think questing in general should fit the more typical RPG feel. Inns should offer multiple activities as listed above. Feels the RPG feeling of the game is just an afterthought.

Also feel some quests SHOULDNT show you the way to go. Yes escort should, but one time i got this quest where i had to find a dragon shrine.... i found one before in another game that did nothing, so i was eager to to go searching for one again. But it showed up in yellow on my map, and there was no reason to go explore for it. My eagerness to do a quest just died.

Im sure we will be more pleased with questing as the beta moves on..... maybe. Maybe thats all they are showing us till release, or maybe they had no intention to enhance the RPG feeling, and we should persuade them.

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I think a god-like sovereign stumbling onto a tiny village and performing a task for them in exchange for their sacred relic is a lot cooler and makes a lot more sense than all of those humble inns.

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Wintersong

Join Date 07/2006

+235

Inns outside of "developed territory" should be just "Survivor camps" or something where the Sovereign can find rumours, quests... A poor settlement makes more sense than a Inn if we are talkiing of wastelands.

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I want to bump this b/c i feel that there is a huge RPG element missing.Granted it being a beta, but I would like to hear more responses about what they think. Not just about the Inns anymore. But about what is written below

Quoting ghog69,

reply 3

Quoting lswallie, reply 2Or instead of half a dozen inns there are a band of nomads settled around some wagons. And they need water or food, or there are wolves attacking them at night, or there are bandits attacking them. Do you help? And how do you help?

Inns serve no purpose other than occasionally giving you a quest. And there is no telling if said inn has a quest available unless you run across the map to find out. There should be atleast an icon indicating quest availability. Or atleast reduce the starting areas to only one inn.

Also you should be safe in an inn and creatures shouldn't be able to walk into an inn tile.

You should be able to heal up and rest at an inn. If you already can - I couldn't obviously tell.

You should be able to speak to the inn keeper and get word about new quests and passerby champions

If inns are only placeholders for quests then remove them and find a better way of questing. Like the above example.

Perhaps in this supposed "post apocalyptic world" there lays a dead champion on the ground, you walk over to him and discover a "clue" - opens up a quest.

Inns are easy and uncreative right now. But wait - we will get an editor and can do this ourselves - that's right!

I like your ideas!

I'm sorry to say that right now the RPG elements seem tacked on. Inns are uncreative and maybe WE will need to turn this RPG-lite into something more. It's possible the editor tools are more important than the meat of the game (minus the campaign) because the community will create the content as with games like LittleBigPlanet. I feel:

You should be safe at an inn.

You should be able to heal.

The innkeeper shouldn't just hand us quests, but instead tell us where to go/who to see for one.

The inn should occasionally have rare goods 'acquired' from traveling patrons to make us frequent their establishment.

An innkeeper should be able to tell us facts/rumors/locations of local Champions and landmarks of interest.

Quests should come from random objects (lost purse, dragon bones, etc) as well. No one wants predictability and ALWAYS getting quests from inns is boring.

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I would really, Really, REALLY like to see a few "Neutral Settlements" in the world of Elemental. The problem here-in though lies with the Lore of the Game. According to the Lore everything has been blasted by a Cataclysm. It's 100 years later and it's time to rebuild civilization.

Naturally I think some survivors would have banded together to try to survive, and maybe even built a small community or two. If these get included in the base game though they would have to be Super Rare to fit in with the Lore.

Example:

"This small community of people have banded together to form a village. They can't grow food and must rely on what they can scavenge, none the less there is safety in numbers and so they have stayed together."

These small villages or outposts could be "Diplomatically Swayed" to join with one Sovereign or another. Perhaps the Sovereign can "recruit" the village, or get them to agree to follow him. At this point the player should be given the option to rename the village/town and then start building things as normal. The Sovereign would also cast the spell that brings the land back to life at this point, sealing his pact with his new followers (and costing essence on top of bribing the villagers).

Excellent Idea.

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I really want neutral kingdoms. Earlier, Frogboy had talked about the possibility of releasing cities as "vassals" and allied states. I really hope this is still in, even though I'm not sure how practical this idea is.

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MagicwillNZ, neutral settlements are still in. I asked Frogboy in the June FAQ, and this is his response:

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 107

Quoting Satrhan,
reply 105
Frogboy (or any other dev), is the vassal system still in the game? Because I haven't heard anything about it for a while and I saw somewhere that you are redoing the diplomacy system, and I was wondering if the whole vassal system was included in those changes?

Neutral cities are in.

The diplomacy changes are mostly related to the AI. I have to have the AI do a decent job on that and I'm not in love with the traditional cheese in there. I'm almost inclined to eliminate some features in the diplomacy system because it becomes very hard not to cheese it (I've slowly been converted by the "no tech trading" camp).

So although its a little unclear in exactly what form (small settlements? Single city states? Small kingdoms?)and what you can do with them, they will be there.

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Just as something worth noting for this discussion, there are already, as noted previously in the thread, "Refugee Camps" as a tile in the game, they don't have function as quest givers but should be proof enough that people have banded together during the period between the cataclysm and now.

as an aside, the argument that inns\nobles shouldn't really exist yet is as dubious as the argument that inexplicably during the last one hundred years no one anywhere has built themselves a house (however primitive), I don't care how much of a cataclysm you have had nobody forgets the need for shelter, there would be hundreds of hamlets and odd huts dotted about the wasteland, largely near the coastal and river areas, I'd argue people are thinking too much nuclear fallout when they think of apocalypse, which is probably why they called it the cataclysm, the viewpoint taken to paraphrase Raven X, is that it's a hundred years since the cataclysm and time to rebuild civilisation, what it should be is that, it's a hundred years since the cataclysm and civilisation has started to rebuild, ie already an ongoing process of which you are a part.

sorry, minor rant there. Yes I agree way too many inns, that you are visiting nomadic groups makes a lot more sense, on the other hand, nobles are probably something I would like to see taken a more interesting use of, as implicitly nobles are the people with power and control out in the wasteland.

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Diplomatically swayed...by food. It's a settlement, it will never grow, and it takes some of your food resource to sway it to your side. However, you get some benefit from it (like a quest). In the lore of the game you can't found villages on non-healed ground, so these people in these settlements shoudn't be able to grow either. Unless it comes into your domain, and the land is healed, then you can grow it, maybe.

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Perhaps the easiest FIX for now would be a simple name and Graphic change. The term "Humble Inn" implies a very cohesive assemblage of things. Room & Board, Food, Drink and possible Entertainment, all packaged into one (1) building.

What we find is an isolated outpost, likely with no means to provide any of those "luxury" items, save R&B, so why not call them "Outposts" and make them 1 tile with 3 huts on it, with a Fire Pit burning in the center, and maybe a Meat/Fish drying rack for fluff...

Now for the solo Mansions in the middle of nowhere? Perhaps a 1/2 sized Garden and it be where you could get HP, and also other quests based on the owners Talents...

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MagicwillNZ, neutral settlements are still in. I asked Frogboy in the June FAQ, and this is his response:

Kick ass.

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