I have been thinking: One of the recurring complaints with the game is the repetitive stories. I understand that the devs are working on adding new stories, but here’s a suggestion on how to reduce the repetiveness:
When you arrive to an island or port, why not separate from the Explore the port event the evnts which you have already discovered by having previously used the explore event? So every time you press the explore island/port button, you get a previously undiscovered event instead of a repeating one, and if you want to "find" the previous event which you have already discovered, you just select it from the story menu.
I’m not sure if I have made my suggestion clear, let me know if I should explain it a bit better. Any thoughts if this could help lower the reptiveness or improve the gameplay?
Eh… it’s a roguelike. They’re always repetitive. I’ve probably played “through” - if by “through” you mean “gone a long way and died” - Angband hundreds of times. And every time I find an artifact or encounter a legendary beast, it’s the same critter. That’s the nature of this kind of game. The point is to explore the branching story paths and hope for new material!
I’m just suggesting that the same stories over and over again from exploring the ports might be a bit repetitive. If you already find a new location through exploration, shouldn’t you be able to remember where it is or where an NPC likes to hang out out at? I understand the the rogue-like nature of the game, and with every death you should start from 0, but if you have already explored an island previously with a captain, and the next time you explore the island you just get the same encounter through the RNG, I just find that to be repetitive. I’d like to find something new everytime I explore the same island after leaving it for awhile, atleast until there aren’t any new events to be found.
This would horribly break the balance of most of these stories. Most ports have a few middling-to-meh possible Explore results, along with some very good Explore results. If you could just choose the good ones every time that renders the meh ones irrelevant. Worse, they’d have to tone down the benefits of the good results to maintain balance.
That said, there is at least one place where this already happens. If you find the restaurant in Venderbight, you can always visit it again. Most of the other Explore results aren’t a specific location (or aren’t an easy to remember location), they’re just things that happen to you while wandering the area. edited by Olorin on 2/23/2015 edited by Olorin on 2/23/2015
You want to solve the complaint of people about there not being enough stories to ensure randomness and variation by instituting a system that would make it less varied and random?
I’m not sure I understood the OP correctly or they haven’t thought this through as well as they might have.
I take Macciavelo’s point: I believe they are suggesting that, to increase diversity in the stories, once you have finished a story/event at port it be moved to a branch of replayable options - taking it out of the pool of randomly occurring stories. This would mean that when you opt for a random event/story, you’ll be sure to get a new new one, rather than possibly replaying one you’ve already seen.
I’m not sure it would make a huge difference, but as someone who has never encountered a certain vendor in Khan’s Heart, I can appreciate the suggestion.