Markers/Quests/Triggers/Dialogue

[Inja]

So, I'd been wanting to pick this game up forever, but I couldn't quite commit to it for a while. Just didn't look ready. Now I've played 113 hours in the first two weeks.

I'm an industry veteran who's done a fair amount of research into games, successes and failures, what made them so. Ultimately it always seems to come down to two general questions; what is fun, and what will the community love?

To that end, you guys already have a solid modding tool that's fairly easy to use. Even with the incomplete dialogue system I'm already recruiting sand ninjas out of my own prison cells. So, it seemed a good answer would be what would enable modders?

One issue that got called out in a thread I saw was there not being a good reason to not turtle, which had the first effort to that end in the form of the survey ability. I think the target to address was right, but I think a better way to accomplish all of these goals would be to focus on the next four features:

1. Map Markers: Specifically, ones that can follow targets and live update. For example, if a target with a specific bounty on their head is in Clownsteady but heading North, the map could show that. You could get more complex with this later (tracking as opposed to direct markers, etc.), but just start with this.

2. Quests: Simply the ability to have quests. Based on what I've seen in the modding tool, the easiest way to do this would be to have an invisible/weightless inventory for the squad (similar to money) that can have specific things added and subtracted in specific quantities. Then there would be a check for the existence of these items when attempting the turn-in (which could also activate a map marker for the assigning NPC).

3. Triggers: There are already a fair amount in here, but just fleshing out some of this to enable things like killing a specific NPC at all triggers the invisible inventory addition to enable questing, for example.

4. Dialogue: Prioritizing finishing the dialogue system and associated modding utility handlers would be the last part to tie this all together.

What this does is allow the player base to create complete custom questing mods. I saw one person wanting Leviathan Hunters. This would enable that. You can already make custom factions and cities, so now you can mod quests to interact with these modded factions, etc.

The features in the roadmap do look exciting, but I think prioritizing the 4 features I list above will let the player base stay way more interested for quite some time while the other things get worked on. They may even come up with some really great ideas that you would eventually like to include in the base game.