Treasure hunting ? (Dev) Replied

This was a great feature UO did very well. Stumbling upon a map and having to figure out what it was, and needing skills that let you figure it out in the end.

Maps could also lead you to a secret hideout, or maybe it was part of a mission that someone lost, and there might still be time to complete that mission for them, or maybe the mission was lost weeks or months ago.

 

Yes, agreed - treasure hunting was great, and you really had to spend time and frustration hunting around for the correct spot which was great, as opposed to modern mmo's where players are being led towards every objective.

I mean take a look at Neverwinter, where all the quests have a kind of sparkling line that leads you toward the next objective. Not exactly great for immersion.

 

I would have to admit, I'm fond of treasure.

 

Treasure hunting in UO was awesome.

 

Yes I agree that treasure hunting brings back great memory from UO. I like the adventure feeling about the hunt, packing my stuff and go in the wild for the hunt. The treasure is great but the best is the actual hunt for it

 

How do you imagine this kind of hunt on dualscale map? For me its quite hard - it's not detailed at all. So it could be extremely hard or extremely easy like
"Fast travel in overworld to hex marked with X, jump into small instance, 5 minutes of search with some kind of skill like helping arrow, and.... ta da, here's yer swag!"

 

Agreed , KFC. My two main concerns with duelscale is the potential loss of immersion and the loss of certain skills, mainly tracking skills that added a level of depth to the world.

In trying to keep the sandbox effect it is important to not overload the game with vastly complex rulesets left and right, but it also makes no sense to polish combat and housing, but completely skip over exploration and skills.

 

Well if the treasure map was only a piece of the map, for which there were more than one that you could assemble, it could be a small part of the overland map and hard to find unless you had other pieces that showed some kind of landmark... ala Pirates!

Once you do find the location, there must obviously some sort of command to zoom in and start your search.

 

Ieolus good point plus if POI Areas would be quite big, and designed for exploration, gathering etc, not so tiny as shown Gypsy Camp - this could work also like in UO with some kind of minimap of this area + our map and skills.

 

This sounds AWESOME! I'm very excited about it

 

Treasure hunting in UO was the reason kept me going.

 

Dual scale really leads to your idea of treasure hunting as it allows you to place cool new areas in between existing areas. That kind of work is really difficult in single scale games like UO. You typically had to add some teleporter (Think T2A recsu recdu), find an obscure place in the wild, or just place it as an event in the ocean.

With dual scale - implementing a play area that acts as a scenario for a treasure hunt is easy. The map would lead to a random location on the over-scale map, and once the player discovers and travels to that location through whatever means required, they are given an option to spawn a treasure map instance that happens inside the small-scale map.

With that system - the treasure could lead you all over the world without it causing immersion issues finding 4 people camping the "common" treasure caves.

 

I agree with Gooberdom here. Treasure hunting could potentially be more challenging and rewarding on a dual scale map than it ever dreamed of being with UO. Just as in UO when you get a treasure map, the map has a few landmarks that helps spot the treasure. Well, now imagine such a map that is drawn using such landmarks but from a less obvious (but more realistic) perspective.

It somewhat reminds me of the scene in The Last Crusade of "X Marks the Spot". Such a new dimension added to treasure hunting would be fantastic.

 

This applies to adventuring in general. In UO, for example, the spawns were static. You knew that Liches spawned in the ruins north of the Crossroads, and Lizardmen in the swamps outside Trinsic, and that was that. With the dual scale maps, the devs can alter spawn locations like that on the fly.

 

What gooberdom said.


I was, and still am, a huge treasure hunter on UO.


I've spent hours just running around dungeons picking boxes open, and digging up maps.

It'd be really fun if there were elaborate quests that center around treasure hunting, as opposed to just "Find the X. Dig it up. Kill stuff. Loot!"

 

This is one one of favorite threads. Just sayin'.

 

Thanks Chaox, I'm glad we all managed to get the treasure hunting blood pumping for SotA.

 

Thanks Chaox. Sounds like treasure hunting may be a done deal. Just sayin'.

 

I would totally love to see a skill-based treasure hunting system!

Some ideas:
- Cartography skills, perhaps even formally in-game. The better the skill the better you can 'read' a map, or put a series of map puzzles together, etc.

- Navigation skills. By land, sea or air, players having any sort of navigation skills based on the 'puzzle' of the treasure hunt, such that they could be given visual cues or riddles to figure out, and having to apply that to in-game 'markers' (objects, landmarks, etc), to know which direction or turn to take. Perhaps compass skills, true north vs magnetic north, take into account declination on a map, etc.

- Maps that need to be put together. Pieces of it could be given as rewards in other quests, or found via exploration of instances, or drops from some 'interesting' NPCs. Would promote further exploration of talking to more 'related' NPCs or locations, and of course with other players to figure it out

- Cryptography or having to 'break' the code of the wording on the map to reveal more clues about the 'next' location, so to speak.

- Secret doors, passageways, instances. Perhaps in some room of an old building, you slide some books around or move a statue, and it opens up to another hidden instance. The secrets could come from riddles on the map or quests, causing players to think about what it means and figuring out how to solve it would reveal what action to take to see the secret door.

- Hunts that require collaboration to trigger dynamic in-game events. That is, for quest progression, another player in a different part of the instance or map, has to trigger some event, before you can perform the next step in your area of the instance / map.

 

Oh, and personally, any treasure hunt that involves challenges, a good amount of risk are much more exciting and rewarding. While just a series of puzzles and fetch quests wrapped in an interesting story is fun, making it risky to do so is even more fun!