I had this idea back in June and posted it in the oficial forum but since there is too many new toís it quickly got down and not som many ppl had chance to give some feedback, the least few did like it thought, so here it goes, hope you guys like it too.
Courrier System (similar to the Death Stranding game)
Based in the lore released so far, the world of sanctuary is breaking apart, humanity is colapsing, so one of the best ways to keep it holding togeter is making it more connected (i mean, commerce, information and etc).
Basically the mechanic would be based on quests that the objective was to be taking something (item, consumable, letter, information, coin, wood, mineral, so many possibilities) from point A (town, camp, city, random place) to point B.
The rewards could be based on the time you took to make the run, the number of players doing it could have influence too (say too many players are doing a quest to transport wood to vilage X, so the reward would be less gold as payment)
There could be diferent types of quest, some with route freely choosed by the player (remember, geting to the objective faster will give better rewards), some with a defined route for exemple: go throught this villages but be carefull they are suffering some kind of invasion from Hell or Heaven who knows, kill this or that demon and get there asap kind of thing or protect a caravan you found in the middle of the road to certain city or village.
Since they said the mounts will have some itemization, i believe the mounting system will have some kind of dismount on hit chance similar to wow classic making you avoid hordes of demons to make to your objetive faster but making you take longer routes.
Here enter the mounting itens, like in the witcher 3, giving you resistance to dismount, slow effects, making you faster, with more stamina (diablo 2 style but in the mounts), even increasing your inventory with bigger saddlebags in your horse, could even have the same item lvls (normal, magic, rare and legendary, crafted or only droped [crafted only would be more reasonable i think]).
The focus of the game would still be slaying all sort of demons in dungeons or rifts, invasions or random events, and this would provide a new machanic that would improve the wandering and exploration part in the open world (going faster, without dismount so often, and with more space in inventory) and still giving a new way of playing the game killing some demons on the process. As i said, could even start a new way to compete inside the game, of who do that quest faster, of course being the person with best mount and equips.
(after blizzconline 2021 update) - i felt this idea would make even more sense after the information displayed in this blizzcon, since this encampments will be improvable, you could make them improve faster with and this way opening new townportals or crafting recipes. one think thought, these encamptments should not be permanent, haveing somekin of event that can and will probably destroy them or at least weaken them (a demon or heaven invasion, so they will never stay the same adding even more randomness in the game. This ideai i think is the better of the 2 because it makes so much sense and the part of mount equipment and dismounting on attacks is already on their plans.
Demonic/Anngelic/Ancestral system:
Other thing that got me excited is the angelic/demonic/ancestral system, we dont know much about it so far but they can have some really cool ideas here, for example:
Instead of items giving a fixed value of power (angelic/demonic/ancestral) the itens give a increase % in angelic prowess gains and at the same time give a decrease % of demonic prowess you loss.
Ex: regular item (withe) - low prowess gains/ have a bigger prowess loss
rare/legendary - bigger prowess gains/ loses less power from one of
the other 2
So, as far gear get better you can gain more angelic power and losing less demonic, since in the end you will want both powers (i guess) to gain all bonus from gear or skills (dont know if they will influence them, but they could adding even more variance).
And here comes the other part, since we are humans and can be both evil and good, they could insert a new kind of rift, where it transport you to Pandemonium and when you open this rift you could choose for which side you want to fight, hell or heaven. I need angelic power for my build? lets fight for heaven and slaughter hosts of demons, now i need demonic power, lets bring heaven down, and in the end of seasons they could reset this power values and see who was the worst/best human in the realm. Just here we could have an infinite ramification as monster families for each demon lord and angel in the angiris counsil, skins for itens, mounts, portraits, skills effects,man even wings in this scenario wouldn’t be so awkward (kidding )
So, these where a few ideas i got, hope you guys liked and maybe this reach the eyes of the developers so that they could add something of it in the game.
(after blizzconline 2021 update) - creating a rift or sendind us to Pandemoniu would make more sense instead making an area of the worldmap a pvp freezone,de Pandemonium could be someking of Dota map style, 3 lines, 3x3 ppl and hosts from hell and heaven clashing and yu could exchange the ears you get for demonic or angeliz power.. besides after a certain number of battlegrouds the winner for the day could be decided (until next dawn) and the pandemoniu would become somekind of hub town for hell and ppl with a certain amount of demonic power.
Some interesting ideas! I hope Blizz considers anything and everything for D4 endgame. The only thing I dislike is putting a DOTA-style element to the game. Keep that in DOTA.
1. There's definitely big value in adding diverse activities, but I think devs have to be careful that the activities are actually replayable without feeling "oh it's this minigame again."
In WoW, they add a lot of minigame type world quests (they're objectives that spawn across the expansion's entire open world and have 24 hr respawn cycles or smaller, some 2 or 3 hrs). These include puzzles, timed activities, kill x y amount of times, fetch quests, kill rare spawns, etc.
Although I think most people enjoy the varied, new content like puzzles and timed activities at first, they generally avoid them within a couple weeks of a new expansion or patch introducing it, and general chat turns into "ugh this thing again."
Longterm, players always end up maximizing whatever is the quickest and simplest end to efficiently get whatever valuable thing is rewarded. In WoW's case, people basically just do the quick and easy rare spawn kills, then the kill x of y monster quests, then the fetch quests or puzzles, depending on which is quicker.
2. The rewards have to be able to justify the time/effort investment without the content feeling mandatory because the rewards are too good. I'm not informed enough on D4's character progression to make any points here, but I think it's important to think about.
3. You make a good point here, and I think this is worth discussing:
(after blizzconline 2021 update) - i felt this idea would make even more sense after the information displayed in this blizzcon, since this encampments will be improvable, you could make them improve faster with and this way opening new townportals or crafting recipes. one think thought, these encamptments should not be permanent, haveing somekin of event that can and will probably destroy them or at least weaken them (a demon or heaven invasion, so they will never stay the same adding even more randomness in the game. This ideai i think is the better of the 2 because it makes so much sense and the part of mount equipment and dismounting on attacks is already on their plans.
Any world upgrade rewards (like camps that you mention) add the appeal of immersion and visual progression. One of my criticisms of D3's endgame systems is that most of them you just jump in a portal into some random realm and do a thing. It made the game (to me) feel less grounded, more fantastic, and not as rooted as the first two.
I like this idea you bring up of camps being able to degrade, but the camps would have to have a function or value in terms of character progression to make them worth sustaining in an area. Like, when they're maintained, a passive buff to drops in the surrounding overworld area and dungeons, or a buff to xp (ONLY if they're doing something like paragon leveling again--otherwise XP buffs would be useless for endgame), or a passive reduction in certain crafting types while at the camp. (I'll admit here I haven't really kept up with news so this might already be a thing.)
The lack of permanence is also critical like you point out--if you can just upgrade them all the way and they never degrade, it sort of just becomes an assumed endgame system. Like upgrading vendors in D3--once you do it all on your main (and it doesn't take long) you just never think about it again and most of the vendors don't really have much additional depth beyond itemization quirks.
I don't really know anything about the ancestral system, so I can't comment there.
Yeah, the main reason was to introduce a mechanic that would make sense in this world and would increase the feeling of realism, even if we are playing a game where we fight demons and angels.
Maybe they could make somekind of invasions (like in wow) if a certain number of players lets say (50 for example) doesnt show up, the invasion (from hell or heaven) will destroy the encampment (loosing the townportal, vendors and crafters..) but if 50 or plus apear you can defeat the event and get a few rewars in the process, like the caches from dailys D3 events.
The capacity of loosing something would add more replayability to the game since it could always change from the last time you logged. Again as you said, in the D3 you just had to lvl up your crafters once and that was it, and a point here, defending the encampments should be hard, encouraging people to go there and now just thinkign, nah, a few guys can handle it.
Unfortunately i havent seen anything yet in this direction of degreadable encamptments, just making them similiar to crafters in D3 witch i think is a major waste of oportunity. The courrier sistem would help lvl this encampments more faster and rebuild to after an invasion, well it could even influence the itens in vendors tabs.
About the courrier mechanic, like you said many people would find somekind of meta for this, but as always this would be a very small number compared to the whole comunity. This mechanic would be just another way to encourage people to explore more the maps of sanctuary, valuing even more the work they are imputing in this game,and avoiding the current system in D3, just using TPs from one point to another.
At least the part from mounts items looks they are going for it, hope they do something close to the witcher 3 as i discriberd before, but i agreed with you about the rewards from this kind of quests, not becoming something indispensable but not to simple too.
Regarding the Ancestral (demonic and angelic powers too) they are really giving almost no info in the lasts development, at leat i hope they make something like i said in pvp (a pandamonium map) where you could choose a side (heaven or hell) and farm this powers to unlock the bonuses from itens or/and upgrade skills to higher lvls (giving new skins and effects to them would we awsome, but o'm dreaming here lol).
I had this idea back in June and posted it in the oficial forum but since there is too many new toís it quickly got down and not som many ppl had chance to give some feedback, the least few did like it thought, so here it goes, hope you guys like it too.
Courrier System (similar to the Death Stranding game)
Based in the lore released so far, the world of sanctuary is breaking apart, humanity is colapsing, so one of the best ways to keep it holding togeter is making it more connected (i mean, commerce, information and etc).
Basically the mechanic would be based on quests that the objective was to be taking something (item, consumable, letter, information, coin, wood, mineral, so many possibilities) from point A (town, camp, city, random place) to point B.
The rewards could be based on the time you took to make the run, the number of players doing it could have influence too (say too many players are doing a quest to transport wood to vilage X, so the reward would be less gold as payment)
There could be diferent types of quest, some with route freely choosed by the player (remember, geting to the objective faster will give better rewards), some with a defined route for exemple: go throught this villages but be carefull they are suffering some kind of invasion from Hell or Heaven who knows, kill this or that demon and get there asap kind of thing or protect a caravan you found in the middle of the road to certain city or village.
Since they said the mounts will have some itemization, i believe the mounting system will have some kind of dismount on hit chance similar to wow classic making you avoid hordes of demons to make to your objetive faster but making you take longer routes.
Here enter the mounting itens, like in the witcher 3, giving you resistance to dismount, slow effects, making you faster, with more stamina (diablo 2 style but in the mounts), even increasing your inventory with bigger saddlebags in your horse, could even have the same item lvls (normal, magic, rare and legendary, crafted or only droped [crafted only would be more reasonable i think]).
The focus of the game would still be slaying all sort of demons in dungeons or rifts, invasions or random events, and this would provide a new machanic that would improve the wandering and exploration part in the open world (going faster, without dismount so often, and with more space in inventory) and still giving a new way of playing the game killing some demons on the process. As i said, could even start a new way to compete inside the game, of who do that quest faster, of course being the person with best mount and equips.
(after blizzconline 2021 update) - i felt this idea would make even more sense after the information displayed in this blizzcon, since this encampments will be improvable, you could make them improve faster with and this way opening new townportals or crafting recipes. one think thought, these encamptments should not be permanent, haveing somekin of event that can and will probably destroy them or at least weaken them (a demon or heaven invasion, so they will never stay the same adding even more randomness in the game. This ideai i think is the better of the 2 because it makes so much sense and the part of mount equipment and dismounting on attacks is already on their plans.
Demonic/Anngelic/Ancestral system:
Other thing that got me excited is the angelic/demonic/ancestral system, we dont know much about it so far but they can have some really cool ideas here, for example:
Instead of items giving a fixed value of power (angelic/demonic/ancestral) the itens give a increase % in angelic prowess gains and at the same time give a decrease % of demonic prowess you loss.
Ex: regular item (withe) - low prowess gains/ have a bigger prowess loss
rare/legendary - bigger prowess gains/ loses less power from one of
the other 2
So, as far gear get better you can gain more angelic power and losing less demonic, since in the end you will want both powers (i guess) to gain all bonus from gear or skills (dont know if they will influence them, but they could adding even more variance).
And here comes the other part, since we are humans and can be both evil and good, they could insert a new kind of rift, where it transport you to Pandemonium and when you open this rift you could choose for which side you want to fight, hell or heaven. I need angelic power for my build? lets fight for heaven and slaughter hosts of demons, now i need demonic power, lets bring heaven down, and in the end of seasons they could reset this power values and see who was the worst/best human in the realm. Just here we could have an infinite ramification as monster families for each demon lord and angel in the angiris counsil, skins for itens, mounts, portraits, skills effects,man even wings in this scenario wouldn’t be so awkward (kidding )
So, these where a few ideas i got, hope you guys liked and maybe this reach the eyes of the developers so that they could add something of it in the game.
(after blizzconline 2021 update) - creating a rift or sendind us to Pandemoniu would make more sense instead making an area of the worldmap a pvp freezone,de Pandemonium could be someking of Dota map style, 3 lines, 3x3 ppl and hosts from hell and heaven clashing and yu could exchange the ears you get for demonic or angeliz power.. besides after a certain number of battlegrouds the winner for the day could be decided (until next dawn) and the pandemoniu would become somekind of hub town for hell and ppl with a certain amount of demonic power.
Well what do you guys think.
ps: sorry for my bad inglish.
at least no one is criticizing the ideas lol
Some interesting ideas! I hope Blizz considers anything and everything for D4 endgame. The only thing I dislike is putting a DOTA-style element to the game. Keep that in DOTA.
the idea was just to take us to another place instead some area in the open world, but i do understand your point.
what i really enjoyed was how it fit in to the lore, heaven x hell and we could decide which side align to.
I do really like the idea of skills changing based on your placement in good or evil. That could be a really fun and dynamic aspect.
yeah would be very cool finding variations for skills or itens acordinly your alignment (which power you have the most)
Regarding your courier system idea:
1. There's definitely big value in adding diverse activities, but I think devs have to be careful that the activities are actually replayable without feeling "oh it's this minigame again."
In WoW, they add a lot of minigame type world quests (they're objectives that spawn across the expansion's entire open world and have 24 hr respawn cycles or smaller, some 2 or 3 hrs). These include puzzles, timed activities, kill x y amount of times, fetch quests, kill rare spawns, etc.
Although I think most people enjoy the varied, new content like puzzles and timed activities at first, they generally avoid them within a couple weeks of a new expansion or patch introducing it, and general chat turns into "ugh this thing again."
Longterm, players always end up maximizing whatever is the quickest and simplest end to efficiently get whatever valuable thing is rewarded. In WoW's case, people basically just do the quick and easy rare spawn kills, then the kill x of y monster quests, then the fetch quests or puzzles, depending on which is quicker.
2. The rewards have to be able to justify the time/effort investment without the content feeling mandatory because the rewards are too good. I'm not informed enough on D4's character progression to make any points here, but I think it's important to think about.
3. You make a good point here, and I think this is worth discussing:
Any world upgrade rewards (like camps that you mention) add the appeal of immersion and visual progression. One of my criticisms of D3's endgame systems is that most of them you just jump in a portal into some random realm and do a thing. It made the game (to me) feel less grounded, more fantastic, and not as rooted as the first two.
I like this idea you bring up of camps being able to degrade, but the camps would have to have a function or value in terms of character progression to make them worth sustaining in an area. Like, when they're maintained, a passive buff to drops in the surrounding overworld area and dungeons, or a buff to xp (ONLY if they're doing something like paragon leveling again--otherwise XP buffs would be useless for endgame), or a passive reduction in certain crafting types while at the camp. (I'll admit here I haven't really kept up with news so this might already be a thing.)
The lack of permanence is also critical like you point out--if you can just upgrade them all the way and they never degrade, it sort of just becomes an assumed endgame system. Like upgrading vendors in D3--once you do it all on your main (and it doesn't take long) you just never think about it again and most of the vendors don't really have much additional depth beyond itemization quirks.
I don't really know anything about the ancestral system, so I can't comment there.
Yeah, the main reason was to introduce a mechanic that would make sense in this world and would increase the feeling of realism, even if we are playing a game where we fight demons and angels.
Maybe they could make somekind of invasions (like in wow) if a certain number of players lets say (50 for example) doesnt show up, the invasion (from hell or heaven) will destroy the encampment (loosing the townportal, vendors and crafters..) but if 50 or plus apear you can defeat the event and get a few rewars in the process, like the caches from dailys D3 events.
The capacity of loosing something would add more replayability to the game since it could always change from the last time you logged. Again as you said, in the D3 you just had to lvl up your crafters once and that was it, and a point here, defending the encampments should be hard, encouraging people to go there and now just thinkign, nah, a few guys can handle it.
Unfortunately i havent seen anything yet in this direction of degreadable encamptments, just making them similiar to crafters in D3 witch i think is a major waste of oportunity. The courrier sistem would help lvl this encampments more faster and rebuild to after an invasion, well it could even influence the itens in vendors tabs.
About the courrier mechanic, like you said many people would find somekind of meta for this, but as always this would be a very small number compared to the whole comunity. This mechanic would be just another way to encourage people to explore more the maps of sanctuary, valuing even more the work they are imputing in this game,and avoiding the current system in D3, just using TPs from one point to another.
At least the part from mounts items looks they are going for it, hope they do something close to the witcher 3 as i discriberd before, but i agreed with you about the rewards from this kind of quests, not becoming something indispensable but not to simple too.
Regarding the Ancestral (demonic and angelic powers too) they are really giving almost no info in the lasts development, at leat i hope they make something like i said in pvp (a pandamonium map) where you could choose a side (heaven or hell) and farm this powers to unlock the bonuses from itens or/and upgrade skills to higher lvls (giving new skins and effects to them would we awsome, but o'm dreaming here lol).
Thanks for sharing informative information.
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