When flying around the Periphery earning your mercenary pay, mission choice is often a matter of trying to predict what ‘Mechs will be present, with what weaponry, and withdrawing if the OpFor isn’t interesting to salvage. But it serves an additional purpose as well. We think loot is cool, and it’s a great motivation to finish a Flashpoint. And we’re going to use these Item Collection mechanics for something else entirely: random treasure rewards for completing Flashpoints in our first Expansion. We’re going to be using shops a lot more aggressively as rewards, as methods for getting interesting items into the game, and as a way to gradually introduce new items into the game economy. You’ll be able to predict a shop’s contents a bit more easily, and we’ll be able to create very specific content-driven shops for interesting planets, Flashpoints, and story locations. What you will see in play is much more highly tailored shops, including both black market shops for the criminally-minded, and faction-specific quartermaster shops only accessible to closely-allied mercenary groups. Here’s an example of the shop table, for minor Liao systems. (Old school nerds: the process is very much like rolling up loot on the treasure tables in the back of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.) Instead of hoping that particular items will show up, we can directly force them to, or we can let random chance pick a handful of interesting things from a given category. Rather than a large pool of undifferentiated items, we’re creating weighted tables of items, and a given planet will have a selection of tables on which it “rolls” to pick out what will be in its inventory. The new model for shops is far more deterministic and structured. But it got me thinking about how I’d like to control shops if I had the chance to go back and revise the system. Modders, again, will see the hacky work-around we used, in which a special shop file looks for a tag that contains a system’s name to include itself. We had to break the shop concept for those ‘Mechs, in those systems. Sandbox players would be gathering parts of ‘Mechs from side content, and increasing their drop tonnage organically, but campaign players were in for a nasty surprise if they tried to take their Weldry-capable lance to Smithon. That meant scattering ‘Mechs - the Griffin and the Dragon, in particular - in front of the campaign player, where they could buy them and fill out their roster. Unfortunately this approach collided with the story campaign very early on, when we realized we wanted to provide a path for people uninterested in sandbox play a route through the campaign.
We could, for instance, expand the game to cover the whole Inner Sphere, and as long as we tagged all the systems in reasonable ways, the shops would just naturally work themselves out. “Appropriate for the location” is the key phrase there - the underlying principle is that we don’t have to look at each individual planet to construct its shops. The intent isn’t to create a consistent shop experience, but to give a random cross-section of possible gear and weapons and supplies that seems appropriate for the location you’re in. If you’re a modder, you’ve seen the jumbled way we assemble the contents of a shop. Shops are an excellent example of this design focus. From the beginning we knew we wanted to do both, but a lot of the early design work was squarely aimed at the sandbox. I’ll also talk about Flashpoint Rewards and how the new Store system factors into them.Īn interesting tension in the development of BATTLETECH has been the opposed forces of “story campaign game” and “simulation sandbox game”.
#Battletech flashpoint kurita shop free#
In our third dev diary, we’re diving into a big revision to Stores that’s going to appear in our next big free Update, 1.3. Hi! For those of you just joining us, I’m Kiva, the Lead Designer on BATTLETECH.
0 kommentar(er)
