My thoughts regarding random encounters

In the first random encounter i was dragged i unseathed my weapons and fought the ambushers until none of them were standing. After the fight i roamed a bit trying to find something useful, and found nothing. Next random encounters i killed a couple of enemies and then thought "why bother? i'm on my way to a map where i can also fight and gather resources and earn more experience". At the moment, a random encounter is just a loading screen, a runaway to the exit, and another loading screen. Current concept is you're being ambushed... If i'm ambushed, fleeing shouldn't be that easy.

I like the idea of having random encounters, and i know they're a recently implemented feature... just wanted to state that for random encounters to be meaningful they need to have a purpose by themselves, for example by giving them a background and supporting the lore at the same time, same way they had in Fallout (1997). Some examples:

1. A wandering merchant is under attack from the red sashes, if you save his life he will give you a reward.
2. A guard is on the verge of death surrounded by skeletons. Killing them will allow you to hear his deathwish where he asks you to tell his relative he died performing his duty, and triggering a quest requiring you to look for an specific villager in an specific town.
3. A bunch of gatherers are assaulted by creatures. After clearing the fight, you may take advantage of the resource nodes in the scene.

Other encounters may have a virtue related content, allowing you to express the role of your character. Maybe you can threat the merchant of the first example to make him give you more money, or reject the reward showing kindness. That's the kind of random encounters i'd love to run into.

 

Adding a reward to random encounters if completed, would make them more interesting, I suppose this is what they have in mind for future releases.

 

I think this is more of a place holder for the things that are to come. As it is now the random encounters are both ambushes and roaming encounters combined. Both will open the instances that are being tested here now.


To me it makes sense that there would be random encounters for no reason at all. Just consider all the opportunities for encounters as you are in zoned instaces. All that danger is there as you travel across the world. But I think roaming monsters will fill some of that.

That is not to say that I dont thing there should be some random encounters with a purpose and back story. I hope to see those types of random encounters mixed in there as well.

As for gathering... I hope even random instances have things to gather in the area after you defeat the enemy. Maybe even having a chance for better and more stuff since you cant just choose to go directly there.

 

As with most systems in the game, random encounters are incomplete. This is the first introduction of them in the game. Right now they are not much more than a proof of concept, see they work. Not much work has been done on the encounters themselves. But hey they work.

 

You're right, not every random encounter needs to have a background, but they should have an attractiveness to stay and clear them, like an above average enemy with chance of rare loot or as you said, resources to gather so exploring the scene worth it. My point is making them "just a fight" encourages the player to just run away and feel he was forced to pass through two loading screens for no reason.

 

I like #1, we need more Bandits attacking shipments in wagons (or maybe not wagons), we can make a moral judgement... When the guard dies telling us where he was headed, we can either take the Gold/Silver bars for ourselves or continue the delivery...

At the very least put in some resources to gather, a silver or gold node only found in an encounter scene...

 

Agreed. I was quite disappointed that there were no resources that I could gather. Could provide a once off of something.. anything