Mission
One thing people hopefully will do a lot is mission running. I started with few basic ideas. First, I though of this sentence "Missions affect game world,
Game world affect missions". Secondly, I thought of having 2 types of missions, storyline and repeating/random.
Storyline missions
Storyline missions are hard to fit into this concept, since I still don't have any background story, so it's hard to think exactly how they should be.
But few key points about them.
Firstly, they are one-time only, once you finished them that's it. I've had some hope of maybe even creating some kind of mission
tree with them, so if you start another character and do missions for different group, or finish them in different way, you would get whole another mission tree.
Secondly, instead of having impact to the game world, these missions would affect the player and what he becomes.
Repeating/random missions
These are the missions that affect and are affected by game world. Few examples to make it clearer.
1) City is under repeating attack from raiders, so the city will have large amounts of "kill x amount of raiders" solo missions, but also "assault raider base"
group missions. If during one game time cycle (1 week would be good) enough people finish these missions, the attack is repelled and everything is fine again.
If not, the attacks get more intense for the next time cycle and if still the attack isn't repelled, the city gets under martial law,
meaning that every player with even a hint of being a raider gets shot, commodity prices go up, missions are non-existent, etc.
2) City has a plague in it. All the cities around them get courier missions to bring medical supplies to the city. Again 2 types of missions. Solo, where you load
your car with supplies and take them to the city and group, where you must protect convoy of medical supplies. Or you can buy medical supplies somewhere and sell the
on black market in that city, but if you get caught by police doing that, you'll be in big trouble. Note that black marketing the goods doesn't help the city.
Again, if enough people finish these missions, all is good, if not, it's martial law.
3) Accident on major road. Maybe it's a tunnel collapse, maybe a mud slide has covered the road, but main thing is, that something bad has happened to some road.
What happend, is that a section of the road is closed and players must bring tools, supplies and equipment to the site where the accident is. Also the cities
which that road connect will have large amount of courier missions, but these are much harder than usual courier missions cause you have to find alternate route.
Only after enough of these missions are completed, will the road be open again.
In addition to this, every city will have it's own varying amount of different attack, courier, scouting, etc. missions available at all times,
except during martial law.
Mission rewards
When you complete a mission, you get your reward. Storyline missions may give you items, but mainly the reward will be either xp, money or mission points.
I thought of some system, where when you complete mission, you get three sliders, so you can decide youself the ratio between those 3.
Money is self-explanatory. For more info about what's the deal with xp (since there are no levels), check skills and abilities section. Mission points are somewhat
similar to EVE online Loyalty points. You can use mission points when making deals with NPC corporations (see crafting section) or you can buy corporation shares
with them or even buy yourself out of sticky situations (corporations don't like it if you fail missions, especially repeatedly). I may even invent more ways to
use mission points, shall see.
More about storyline mission trees
Had some new ideas about these. All would start by some of the corporations contacting you, asking if you would like to do a job for them. Next, after you accepted
a mission a rival corporation might contact you and give a counter offer. So most missions would have several ways to finish them. Let me give you an example:
After the tutorial, the player is contacted by corporation A, they say they have a work for him, transport some documents from one office to another, they are
classified documents, so they don't want to attract any unnecessary attention, which is why they chose freelance to the job. Player accepts the job, grabs the docs and
just as he is leaving he gets a call from corporation B, saying that they would like to have those documents and the reward they offer is much greater than the reward
from the initial transport job. Now, the player has a choice, either serve corporation A or take the docs to corporation B. This time the player is greedy and goes
after the bigger reward. Obiviosly the corporation A doesn't want to have anything to do with the player anymore, so that quest tree is lost forever for that player.
After this, player works for a while for corporation B, when after completing few missions he gets a call from corporation C, saying that they have been watching
the player and like the way he works. So now player has once again 2 quest trees available, but this time they won't rule out each other.
There's the basic idea how it should work, one more mentionable thing is, that player doesn't get new quest after he finishes one, at least not all the time,
instead, the corporation thanks the player for a job well done and promises to be in contact later. This way, only few thousand missions can be used to give player
something to do at certain intervals. In the meantime, player could be doing some repeating/random missions or whatever he likes.