[crossfire] reorganizing the entire world

[Brendan Lally]

Been a while since I played cf, so I will be commenting on the game as it 
played a year ago; but this is a subject I've touched on before in 
#crossfire, so I hope the following is helpful.

On Thursday 14 June 2007 20:18:22 Juergen Kahnert wrote:
> What do you think about reorganizing the entire world to get regions
> for characters in a range of levels?
>
> For example the starting region has maps for character with level 1-5,
> than move over to a region for level 6-10 character, ...
>
> Every region should have a storyline quest which leads through this
> area. After the quest is solved, you're able to enter the next region
> and so on.

The way I had thought of this before was in terms of a 'home town', that being 
the place where a character would store most of their items, and set out to 
quest from.

In order to have a progression in the difficulty in maps, it is useful to also 
have a progression in 'home town'.

For example: a player should start out in scorn, hang around there for a bit, 
visiting the other nearby villages before heading to navar, at high level 
establishing themselves in brest, before finally (maybe) moving into a guild 
hall.

In order for that to work, there should be three things that are true.

1) it should be more useful to a mid-level character to live in navar than 
scorn
2) it should not be distinctly more useful (nor obviously enticing) for a 
low-level character to leave scorn (although they should be free to do so if 
they want)
3) the degree to which a character can be 'locked in' to having scorn as a 
home town, and thereby be discouraged from moving should be limited (probably 
there needs to be some kind of python-based house moving support to help 
there)

The reasons why this didn't work last time I played;

navar had a worse apartment than scorn, with less useful portals
scorn had plenty of high level maps easily accessible.
Brest had a portal leading directly there from scorn, making the approach 
quest meaningless (I don't see any changes to scorn apartment, suggesting 
this is still the case)

In order to fix this then;

Define the 3 major home cities (allow others, but assume the natural 
progression of scorn->navar->brest)

in each city, have portals which go back but not forwards, (so navar to scorn, 
but not scorn to navar).

Move some of the very high level maps from scorn and its nearby cities to 
navar (or brest) - for example, the entrance to pupland would probably move.

Make the other apartments available at least as good as the one in scorn 
(changing the portal layout probably achieves most of that anyway).

Move the guild hall purchasing place to Brest.

From what I remember the game world looking like then, you would have a 
structure like
  
Scorn -------------------Navar---------------Brest--------Guilds (maybe)
   |					|
Euthville			Wolfsburg			
Santo Dominion	pupland (moved)
				darcap

(hopefully that's vaguely readable to most people)

So in this case then, a low level character could go straight to navar (they 
could try to go to brest and get killed en route as well....), but they would 
find there wouldn't be much to interest them, that they couldn't afford an 
apartment, and they would probably leave to go back to scorn for a bit.

The quest based progression could be interesting, for example if the reward 
for some intermediate stage of the scorn royalty quest was an invitation to 
see the mayor (or whatever it is, I forget the backstory) of navar (write it 
as a diplomatic visit or some such), who would send his own dragon to give a 
free ride there, then you get a strong indication that maybe your character 
is 'ready' to move