Echo Zone Contact NPCs

[mechahamham]

A little while back, I submitted a suggestion containing fairly ambitious plans for rebuilding and revamping Galaxy City. One of the things I suggested was having Oroborous Mender NPCs standing at the entrance to discuss with players what had happened to Galaxy City, and would offer to transport them to Echo: Galaxy City.

 

Fairly often, I answer the question in /help chat, 'What happened to Galaxy City?'. It occurs that we have an opportunity to expand our game world just a bit with those Mender NPCs.

 

Imagine strolling up to the Galaxy entrance in KR, only to see it closed. Immediately next to the former entrance is an Ouroborous Mender who offers an explanation of what happened to the zone and then offers to transport the player to the Echo version. Out of character text could be appended to the explanation giving RL dates of the release of the Destroyed Galaxy tutorial with Issue 21.

 

(After entering the Echo zone, players could then exit to Ouroborous and end up 'Entrusted with the Secret'.)

 

Another Mender might hang out in the Atlas monorail station to give similar information and utility.

 

Additionally, we could do this same thing with Mender contacts in Faultline, Dark Astoria, and the Rikti Warzone; each one willing to present both a dialogue tree and transportation to the appropriate Echo zone.

 

Mender Pertwee (in Dark Astoria): "Here, Mot reigns supreme and has warped the landscape with his hellish desire to consume life. However, in the Echo of Dark Astoria, Adamastor still reigns over the Banished Pantheon presence. Repeatedly destroying his avatar in the mortal plane can only be an act of heroism."

 

Difficulty: Easy-Medium. Character assets for the Ouroborous Menders obviously already exist. You just have to apply them to new NPCs. If we had a 'create a Mender' contest, players could design the characters.

 

Tech for fairly robust dialogue trees exists. Prometheus in Ouro uses it to provide the Incarnate tutorial. The majority of the text for the new NPCs could be quoted from homecoming.wiki. The Menders could even suggest visiting those pages. Only a little bit of new text would have to be written, and again could be sourced from players.

 

We have tech in the game for NPCs to transport players to public zones. This would have to be plugged into the new NPCs to transport to the Echo zones, but would likely be fairly straight forward.

 

I don't see this as overly difficult or that it would have any negative consequences. Rather, I think it would make what's already in the game more accessible to more players, which providing historical information to our historical game.

Edited Saturday at 07:34 PM by mechahamham

[Vic Raiden]

Could be cool, but at the same time it feels kinda wrong to have Menders out in the open and let players casually approach them. Then again, I suppose it's no different than having the Recluse's Victory portal right in Atlas Park and letting player casually go there right from the start to get Entrusted with the Secret early.

[Psyonico]

If people aren't reading the text in the very first arc in the game then they won't read text by random menders either.

 

I'm not necessarily against the idea of doing this, just saying your basis for why it should happen is flawed.

[srmalloy]

7 hours ago, Vic Raiden said:

Then again, I suppose it's no different than having the Recluse's Victory portal right in Atlas Park and letting player casually go there right from the start to get Entrusted with the Secret early.

Back on Live, it used to be that the force-field barrier protecting the elevator that takes you down to the portal room to Recluse's Victory had a level-50 requirement, keeping low-level heroes out of the zone, resulting in that badge being gated behind reaching level 15 and using someone else's Ouro portal or completing Agent G's arc. Then, too, having one of the exploration badges for Atlas Park behind that force field was a serious annoyance, as it prevented you from getting all the exploration badges for the zone -- and hence the 5-merit award -- until you'd reached the level cap.