Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Stashes as Battle Loot

You know what a great idea was in STALKER? When you were rifling through a body, occasionally you would be alerted to a place on the map where the ex-human had made his stash - where he his some ammo, radiation medicine, and medkits or whatever. The stashes were a real incentive to go off the beaten path and explore some new and possibly more dangerous parts of the Zone.

What if all the significant battle loot in open-world games were dealt with that way? It's a further drive to keep playing, which is useful in any sort of video game. Shamus Young tells us stories about "just keep playing" motivators like crafting systems, leveling, and small quests, and I think this sort of mechanic for loot could function very well as another such motivator.

Thoughts?

Ben

1 comment:

alex said...

I like this idea so much that I will try desperately to explain it away!

Obviously a real soldier cannot carry 50kg worth of guns and shit because it would not volumetrically fit in any backpack or other way to carry stuff. So every dude has a hammerspace portal that transports the goods to a stash that he has planted somewhere, where the volume of the goods is hidden, but due to physics limitations on teleporting mass around (it would be quite broken!), the mass stays with the portal itself. Upon a soldier's death, the portal breaks and the laws of physics engage in autocopulation, causing the goods to actually manifest themselves in the designated stash location, which is also conveniently communicated to anyone who walks over the corpse because gameplay. >_>

The thing I like best about this is that I get all the fun of getting realistic and thorough loot (it makes no sense in games where one out of every five bad guys is actually carrying a gun or ammo), but without loot breaking up the action (in a game like Deus Ex or Stalker, if you are mowing through a baddie-thick area, you are constantly stopping to check for loot).

Man we needs to make an FPS