Wouldn't it be cool if we could change the appearance of a zone by doing good or evil things in it? If villainy ran rampant in an area it would be covered in graffiti, trash, and general grime. Cars on cinder blocks would be a common occurrence. Petty crime would be come extremely common. On the other side, if the heroes did their job, then a zone would be clean, artistic, vibrant, and well patrolled by police. The plants of a safe zone would be greener. In a safe zone street performers would be common since they felt safer. The npc's would smile more.
The city would be divided into a grid. The base score of each square would be based on the kind of heroic or villainous deed took place in it. Adjacent squares give 20% of their base score to neighboring squares. Squares give 10% of their base score to squares two spaces away.
The reason for this is so the players can actually see the effect they have on a city. Imagine as a heroic guild you ban together, shoulder to shoulder and clean up the worse part of the city. It literally changes. The people smile. The flowers bloom. The hookers get married. It's great for everyone. That would be satisfying.
Alternatively, you could wage a one man war of madness on the most posh and well to do citizens of Titan City. Burn buildings, destroy cars, mug old ladies, kiss young ladies, and putting cats in trees are all things on your to do list. You work harder than you've worked in an MMO before. And one day, after about a week, you see it. You see gang graffiti on the side of City Hall. Success! You have single handily made an impact.
The way this would be implemented in game is you would have some special open world objects that change as the zone changes. You could have an object on the wall of a building. For an extremely low score this would actually be damage. For a medium low score this would be graffiti. For a slightly low score it could be dirty and gum stuck to the wall or a wanted poster. For a neutral score it could be the wall. For a slightly positive score it could be extra clean. For a medium positive score it could be a movie poster. A high positive score might have it be an actual mural or even become another type of material like marble. You can easily see how this could effect flower boxes, cars, or NPCs in the different areas.
Yes, I know this game has multiple alignment axis.
What do you think?
There been talk about something like this already. One the Appearance of the Zone won't change, one reason is time for ART each building would need to be redone number of times to get that effect.
What I do know is players MAY BE able to affect who you see in the Zone. So one Zone is ran by the Black Rose gang, players could work for the Titan City Police to fight the Black Rose. As they do the number of Black Rose spawns would decrease and the number of Cops on beat would increase. Now I'm not 100% sure on that, I'm not a Dev or on one of the teams. Just that what I remember from reading posts. If that idea still going or not I haven't a clue.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Changing the ... geometry ... of what's in a zone ... that's a lot of work.
Changing what SPAWNS in a zone, and the "patrol routes" they use ... that's relatively "easy" by comparison.
Insert a [b]Control Point[/b] in the area to determine which "side" has the upper hand at any given time and ... either grab the mouse or grab some popcorn.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Not the geometry. You just have a spot where you switch out different items. So a bad zone would have a dead tree while a nice zone would have a blooming tree. Think of it as decorative spawns.
I think that would be tantamount to just having different skins and textures for the scenery objects. Green grass turns into barren, brown dirt, nice building turns into bombed-out half-destroyed husk of a building, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I love the idea.
And it seems like graffiti and broken/boarded windows and messed up cars would be relatively easy to spawn in place of the nice in a neighborhood on the downslope.
Also, while it might be more work, maybe in some instances it would be worth the extra effort, making some interior/underground maps and missions available to a zone in place of others depending on how far the zone has shifted to either side. Some badges only being available when the zone is in a certain phase could increase the carving for us badgers too.
If you think about the most recent update they talked about how some things they just have to have generatored somewhat psuedo randomly. That means they might be able to incorperate local and large scale influence on the zones around you, and even let you modify an area, maybe add a tag like you said, as a villain marking territory. I like the idea of doing small or large things to influence the zone, even special event phases? Or limited time, such as right after doing a certain task force. Just stuff to encourage replayability, which with randomer maps means less memorization.
Heh, there are days where I could have hours of fun just tagging obnoxious areas with gang affiliation graffiti if that was an option. I could build a whole character based on that.
Just something else to consider about changing the artwork of a zone based on who controls it, would be that CoT is looking at a 3 axis alignment system for players, which would probly roll over into NPC factions. So apart from a small number of key areas, possibly a contention zone, some places controlled by, say, the Black Rose, would probly be very well kept. So any "lawful" villans probly wouldnt have an impact on the artwork of a zone.
Yeaah, but it would also be nice to have some Gothamy zones, would be too comical though if the segmentation was too small and say, three square blocks were all that was effected, everything else was controlled by whatever, would it just flip or graduate outward slowly as the villains and heroes, lawful, honorable and violent change it up. Heck we could decide as players, in a sense, to turn part of this city into a pit, a hive of scum and villainy, probably without the bad music, and we should. It's our duty. If possible...
That would be a good idea for another update... Probably, dunno.
There is also the concept of decals where you put on the fly a partially transparent bitmap over the actual texure of an object.
The technology also works with bump maps, or if the game uses them, normal maps, and with transparency mappings. This allows changing the appearance of objects by swapping out the textures it gets assigned at render time.
It works great for adding e.g. graffity or bullet holes, or small amounts of damage to objects. Not so great for creating entirely different objects.
What it will not do is to alter the actual shape of the object so that hole you can see in the building you still can not walk through because there is a geometry plane there, it just is not visible.
It is questionable if it is worth the effort to do this for a game that is not built around this gimmick (like e.g. Fable or Black and White). It might be a good idea on the other hand to add hooks into the code and object definitions to allow easy addition later on. Seeing 'environmental damage' as a result of epic monster fights is a lot of fun in and of itself.
I always felt that Lusca should be able to throw heroes -through- buildings rather than merely tossing them a short distance back. Same with the Croatoa monsters. It would have been so awesome if they smashed you away, looking back you would see between you and the monster a tree or two crashing to the ground and realise: 'holy bleep. I just got smashed -through- a tree. And I am so super that I can get up and continue to fight.'
Actually, if you get stunned from a tendril hitting you, Lusca should have Grabbed you and Flung you Far, Far, FAR, Up and little away. :{
And you would still be dizzy when you fell and would take a Heap of falling DMG! ;D