OddjobXL
Recruit

This is just a roping together of ideas I've discussed to tack onto the duc's discussion list. I take a shotgun approach to these things so my ideas tend to be all over the map.
Ideals:
1) Simplicity. M&B is a very simple game at the core which is what makes it so broadly appealing and addictive. As much as possible should be intuitive and transperant to the player.
2) Combat is Central. Despite the temptations of heading into other directions ultimately the commander out there fighting is the focus of events.
3) The Visual Feel is Cinematic. Visuals and animations should continue to feel almost lifelike-movielike with impressive landscapes, tableaus and little technical interface clutter.
4) The Setting is Dark And Gritty. This is largely based on the world-weary flavor text about Calradia. It's filled with cutthroats, mercenaries and little glory. That should be reflected in art direction (realistic cultures, weapons and armor but dirtied up and worn down) and storylines-event management. There should be plenty of room for Pyrric victories and situations that don't turn out at all well but always the ability to play through and make the best of things.
5) Gameplay is Dynamic. Random maps, random encounters. These things should be the building blocks, as they are now, of our experience. Little should be predictable. The life of a mercenary, even one with heroic intentions, is riddled with uncertainties and comprised of rolling with punches.
6) Gameplay is The Story. Ultimately in a dynamic game like Mount & Blade the actual experience of playing that game creates the opportunity for emergent storytelling. Just talking about what's happened in a round of gameplay is a story. Anything more limiting that railroads a player on a particular narrative at the dev's whim can take away from that personal sense of ownership. To that end story elements should work within the dynamic rules of the game rather than simply create a forced framework outside of it.
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Previous Suggestions
More Troop Types.
Appeals to Ideals 5 and 6. If you decide your story is about freeing refugees to get revenge on their captors, training them up to be Sword Sisters, then having that type available is a plus. Also the unpredictability of what might be available (through recapture or recruitment at obscure locations) at any given junction is more detail for a story. You might want more Swadian Crossbowmen but instead are forced to put together a motley collection of whatever you can find. This also reinforces the slapdash nature of a mercenary outfit. Ideal 4. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.
Battlefield Promotions and NPC Leaders
Ideals 5 and 6 again. Having NPC heroic characters (like Marnid) come up through Battlefield promotions within the ranks (perhaps as a result of some outstanding performance on a battlefield or randomly) creates a sense of story around that character. And grooming these hardwon individuals into valuable characters, similiar to squaddies evolving into tough leaders in X-Com, creates a sense of identification that's invaluable. Like X-Com, however, what skills a particular Heroic character picks up shouldn't be at the discretion of the player. This makes those heroic characters that do pick up particularly useful skills more valuable. Additionally some heroic characters with leadership skills might be used as subunit commanders or lead seperate forces (should that become desirable).
Do We Need Rendered Cities?
This goes to Ideals 1 and 2. Is the tradeoff for the time spend hoofing around and talking to NPCs worth it? Or should cities be essentially simple screens with menus. Having to talk to an innkeeper day after day after day when I just want to train my troops for a week seems repetative and excessive. It's only worse in a fully rendered town like the starting city where you also have to walk into the Tavern before you can walk over to the innkeeper and talk to him. Similiar concerns about having to repeat chats with the arena owner and the practice dueling master. If something's getting in the way of a good time it should probably go. That said, if there is to be some kind of real use for rendered cities in the future that we don't know about this might be moot.
Sim Inspired Suggestions.
Padlocking: Ideals 1 and 3. Assumes the character's head could be animated to turn in a specific direction and bring the player's field of view along with it. A player selects a particular type of target (nearest ally, nearest enemy, last guy to yell for help, last guy to hit me) and his character's head turns to face it and keeps facing it until the padlock is toggled off. By switching between target types with the padlock on it's as if the character's actually looking around from one to the other. This wouldn't require any visual indicators, the turning head itself would offer enough indicators of bearing, and could be expanded to other target types and situations. Padlocking should be dependant on Line of Sight.
Ambient Communications: Ideals 1, 3 and 4. NPC troops might react vocally to situations. They could respond to orders issued through the use of war or hunting horns. When they sight an enemy they could shout warcries. In the thick of fighting there should be curses, grunts and shouts of pain. Think bloody. If just the sounds of battle don't evoke a wince or sense of panic they're not doing all they could.
Named NPC Units: Ideal 6. Another aspect of one sim in particular, Red Baron 3D (also known as Red Baron II), was the inclusion of named aces and named enemy squadrons in uniquely painted up aircraft. They'd be going about their business on patrol or escorting or attacking targets just like more generic units. But over time you'd certainly develop feelings about them and a sense of identity as to who they were whether friends or foes. If The Flying Circus showed up you'd have a much different feeling than if it was the local boys in their outdated machines. I wonder how possible it would be to do that in M&B. Generate recurring, within a particular game, NPC leaders with their own coats of arms and forces similarly attired.
Event Engines
Ideal 6. It would be interesting to see if there could be some different "paths to glory" that could be influenced by careers but that might muddy the waters right now. Still, if there was a conditional-branching event engine running in the background it might look at one's character class in deciding what's going to happen. If an event engine was developed, like the rest of M&B, it should be easily accessible to modders. This would allow players with particular knowledge of or interest in a career to compile quite a variety of potential situations. Groups of players might well cooperate to sort out the best collections of events and probability trees giving this whole aspect very long legs indeed. You can see this very clearly in forums for games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis II on the Paradox site.
Online M&B
One model for persistant universe servers I always liked was a fairly obscure space sim called Terminus. One group called TerminusPoint was running an ongoing campaign on a server with changing events and situations scripted into the persistant universe over time. In many ways this kind of model is already similiar, with its economy, wars and missions, to what we see in M&B. Albeit Terminus was a bit more dynamic - generating missions as a response to events in game and prices adjusted for resources and trade goods based on what trade and manufacturing was actually going on at spacestations (essentially the "cities" of Terminus).
Note: The Event Engine could well be put together in such a way it might not only be used by modders but server admin-gamemasters to control global events as well as ones that are character specific.
Ideals:
1) Simplicity. M&B is a very simple game at the core which is what makes it so broadly appealing and addictive. As much as possible should be intuitive and transperant to the player.
2) Combat is Central. Despite the temptations of heading into other directions ultimately the commander out there fighting is the focus of events.
3) The Visual Feel is Cinematic. Visuals and animations should continue to feel almost lifelike-movielike with impressive landscapes, tableaus and little technical interface clutter.
4) The Setting is Dark And Gritty. This is largely based on the world-weary flavor text about Calradia. It's filled with cutthroats, mercenaries and little glory. That should be reflected in art direction (realistic cultures, weapons and armor but dirtied up and worn down) and storylines-event management. There should be plenty of room for Pyrric victories and situations that don't turn out at all well but always the ability to play through and make the best of things.
5) Gameplay is Dynamic. Random maps, random encounters. These things should be the building blocks, as they are now, of our experience. Little should be predictable. The life of a mercenary, even one with heroic intentions, is riddled with uncertainties and comprised of rolling with punches.
6) Gameplay is The Story. Ultimately in a dynamic game like Mount & Blade the actual experience of playing that game creates the opportunity for emergent storytelling. Just talking about what's happened in a round of gameplay is a story. Anything more limiting that railroads a player on a particular narrative at the dev's whim can take away from that personal sense of ownership. To that end story elements should work within the dynamic rules of the game rather than simply create a forced framework outside of it.
-----------
Previous Suggestions
More Troop Types.
Appeals to Ideals 5 and 6. If you decide your story is about freeing refugees to get revenge on their captors, training them up to be Sword Sisters, then having that type available is a plus. Also the unpredictability of what might be available (through recapture or recruitment at obscure locations) at any given junction is more detail for a story. You might want more Swadian Crossbowmen but instead are forced to put together a motley collection of whatever you can find. This also reinforces the slapdash nature of a mercenary outfit. Ideal 4. You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.
Battlefield Promotions and NPC Leaders
Ideals 5 and 6 again. Having NPC heroic characters (like Marnid) come up through Battlefield promotions within the ranks (perhaps as a result of some outstanding performance on a battlefield or randomly) creates a sense of story around that character. And grooming these hardwon individuals into valuable characters, similiar to squaddies evolving into tough leaders in X-Com, creates a sense of identification that's invaluable. Like X-Com, however, what skills a particular Heroic character picks up shouldn't be at the discretion of the player. This makes those heroic characters that do pick up particularly useful skills more valuable. Additionally some heroic characters with leadership skills might be used as subunit commanders or lead seperate forces (should that become desirable).
Do We Need Rendered Cities?
This goes to Ideals 1 and 2. Is the tradeoff for the time spend hoofing around and talking to NPCs worth it? Or should cities be essentially simple screens with menus. Having to talk to an innkeeper day after day after day when I just want to train my troops for a week seems repetative and excessive. It's only worse in a fully rendered town like the starting city where you also have to walk into the Tavern before you can walk over to the innkeeper and talk to him. Similiar concerns about having to repeat chats with the arena owner and the practice dueling master. If something's getting in the way of a good time it should probably go. That said, if there is to be some kind of real use for rendered cities in the future that we don't know about this might be moot.
Sim Inspired Suggestions.
Padlocking: Ideals 1 and 3. Assumes the character's head could be animated to turn in a specific direction and bring the player's field of view along with it. A player selects a particular type of target (nearest ally, nearest enemy, last guy to yell for help, last guy to hit me) and his character's head turns to face it and keeps facing it until the padlock is toggled off. By switching between target types with the padlock on it's as if the character's actually looking around from one to the other. This wouldn't require any visual indicators, the turning head itself would offer enough indicators of bearing, and could be expanded to other target types and situations. Padlocking should be dependant on Line of Sight.
Ambient Communications: Ideals 1, 3 and 4. NPC troops might react vocally to situations. They could respond to orders issued through the use of war or hunting horns. When they sight an enemy they could shout warcries. In the thick of fighting there should be curses, grunts and shouts of pain. Think bloody. If just the sounds of battle don't evoke a wince or sense of panic they're not doing all they could.
Named NPC Units: Ideal 6. Another aspect of one sim in particular, Red Baron 3D (also known as Red Baron II), was the inclusion of named aces and named enemy squadrons in uniquely painted up aircraft. They'd be going about their business on patrol or escorting or attacking targets just like more generic units. But over time you'd certainly develop feelings about them and a sense of identity as to who they were whether friends or foes. If The Flying Circus showed up you'd have a much different feeling than if it was the local boys in their outdated machines. I wonder how possible it would be to do that in M&B. Generate recurring, within a particular game, NPC leaders with their own coats of arms and forces similarly attired.
Event Engines
Ideal 6. It would be interesting to see if there could be some different "paths to glory" that could be influenced by careers but that might muddy the waters right now. Still, if there was a conditional-branching event engine running in the background it might look at one's character class in deciding what's going to happen. If an event engine was developed, like the rest of M&B, it should be easily accessible to modders. This would allow players with particular knowledge of or interest in a career to compile quite a variety of potential situations. Groups of players might well cooperate to sort out the best collections of events and probability trees giving this whole aspect very long legs indeed. You can see this very clearly in forums for games like Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis II on the Paradox site.
Online M&B
One model for persistant universe servers I always liked was a fairly obscure space sim called Terminus. One group called TerminusPoint was running an ongoing campaign on a server with changing events and situations scripted into the persistant universe over time. In many ways this kind of model is already similiar, with its economy, wars and missions, to what we see in M&B. Albeit Terminus was a bit more dynamic - generating missions as a response to events in game and prices adjusted for resources and trade goods based on what trade and manufacturing was actually going on at spacestations (essentially the "cities" of Terminus).
Note: The Event Engine could well be put together in such a way it might not only be used by modders but server admin-gamemasters to control global events as well as ones that are character specific.