Suggestion: Camp system

[Jynx]

*Image shamelessly taken from Trine*

Imagine if you will instead of quing up for your dungeon with your pre-made party and standing around waiting for something to happen you were able to enter your parties "camp" a Unique instance somewhat like housing but it would be just a area infront of the dungeon in question. Any part member is free to enter/leave the camp and for the duration of the Instanced content all Camp effects will remain "None of these camp effects would take place in the open world and only be available within the instance. This camp system could be made to work with the Duty finder as well cross realm depending on implimentation but as this generally focuses on dungeons with more complex and demanding mechanics I will be focusing it soly on Pre-made groups.

Upon entering the camp you character will be seated at a campfire doing some mundane animation (Pacing, preparing a pot of food, checking out his gear for wear, whatnot) and you were then presented with a menu with a list of option it would look somewhat like this.

• Party Makeup
• Shared Inventory items (Another system I may touch on afterwards)
• Limit Break selection (Another system)
• Provisions (Another sub-system perhaps part of shared inventory?)
• Lore
• Bestiary
• memoirs (Contains your information for this dungeon (How many times run, beaten, time, whatnot)
• Feast (Another system)

Let me touch on these menu options a little bit.

Party Makeup
As simple as it sounds, this is where you can check the makeup of your party in great detail, being able to examine any party member wether or not they are in the camp at the time. (Will use the gearset of the character when they registered to the Duty Finder) As well as allow players to view any other information they may want to share (other players memoir pages bassically togleable of course for privacy and elitist jerk reasons)

Shared Inventory
Often I have found myself in a Duty finder where the mage is running dangerously low on MP in certain situations and as a career Alchemist I often carry the solution to their woes on my person! Unfortunatly for us when in a instance we are unable to trade items. So I can not give a potion to the mortally wounded palladin, nor can I spare a strip of steak to the Dragoon. With this system there would be a single bad that all players could dip into during the instance allowing us to share our combined characters wealth of provisions.

Limit Break Selection
Now I know this one will probably get me in hot water with some people but whatever!

As it stands limit breaks are predictable and boring. I suggest that based on the party makeup allow different limit breaks to be available, make each job have it's on special limit break and give the party the 3 basic slot types (Tank, Healer, DPS) and allow us to choose what limit break we want giving some more variaty and strategy to the choices we make and the party makeups we take into battle.

I'll leave balancing these limit breaks to SE!


Lore/Beastiary
How often have you wanted to read more about a dungeon than the small spat the NPC at the door gives? How often do you wonder what the history of the named monsters in the dungeon are or basic information on the beast that lay within the cavern you are about to descend into.

The camp system would give a perfect place to put textbooks worth of beefy information for the lore nut in all of us.

Memoirs
Basic records on your time in this particular dungeon, wins/losses/loot aquire whatever. give people an option to rewatch CS's from this particular dungeon if they want another thing to kill the time.

Feast
One of those things I noticed about cullinarians and Alchemists is the lament of having much of any real impact on how they contribute to the endgame scene. Allow Cullinarians and Alchemists to cook/concoct rare and powerfull party buffs that last through the entire instance and is not lost upon death. As this system is focused on endgame dungeons it would give us a real reason to have 1-2 star recipes that DON'T DROP FROM CHESTS IN DUNGEONS!

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Before we all jump to conclusions let me preface with this. This system is entirely my idea and something I decided to write as a excercise with the forum populace I in no way expect Square Enix to entertain my ideas but I do think the logic behind the idea has some great potential.

If anything this was a fun topic to write about, let me know what you guys think.

[Neasa]

It sounds like a lot of work to implement, and probably more load on already overstressed instance servers... But I like the idea(s). The game could always use more personality like this.

[Jynx]

Of course in the form I suggested it would be a massive undertaking, but I think that kind of undertaking is something SE could use in a expansion. The game may have content (Small as it may be) but it lacks depth and no real way to emerse yourself into the lore.

Hopefully my idea has something for every kind of player to enjoy....asides maybe speedrunners to a extent?

[Miltani]

Totally sound like nyzul to me

[Jynx]

I think if anything the shared inventory would be usefull I still can't count the times I wanted to give someone some food or a potion but can't.

[Knives]

This would be a really fun addition, I think Not a single bad idea in the bunch! What I would like to see is for SE to build up our content such that it takes time to complete, and then spend some time on aesthetic things like this that fulfill the world's desperate need for immersive content. As it stands now this game is mostly just teleport-style everything, pop in pop out... which is nice as an option but I really feel like I'm playing stages on a game rather than experiencing the world. At any rate, thumbs up!

[Pinworms]

I don't really understand what your suggesting. Why would I want to just sit around a camp fire while I am waiting to go into a dungeon?

[STARSBarry]

I think its more of an idea to keep a bunch of players from across different worlds, if you find a good group in the duty finder you want to keep

[Jynx]

Why would I want to just sit around a camp fire while I am waiting to go into a dungeon?

Why would you just sit around town while waiting to go in a dungeon, my suggestion gives some lore, options within allow for teams to focus on strategy without needing to rely on a handholding guide found online and buff systems that give crafters (Alchemist and Cullinarian) actual reasons for their recipes to be one-two stars and also a place to examine your party members prior to bounding into a dungeon with them.

Perhaps it's the "Not in a rush" part of me but I like to gather my thoughts before running headlong into a dungeon, and again this isn't really concieved around the duty finder (Like SE) I feel higher end dungeons require a pre-made group from people you trust on your own server. Hell they could even meld this in with Company housing so you are having a feast before you march into battle with your company members. A place to gather thoughts, opinions, stories all before running into glorious battle!

but no reason to get defensive.

You are right I'll correct my statement and move out the slightly irate comment I made. But I will take this chance to speak to your comment about how I'm suggesting tweaks and I agree there will always be a better way to impliment a system I just found the camp scenario to be a neat idea from a execution standpoint.

I always start my ideas as a "bundled" package as I feel it's the best way to present a new set of ideas or changes to core system mechanics. I always tend to throw my slant for wanting more immersion in the game as well it's personally a bit robotic at this point.

[WellFooled]

...but then again who am I to waste your time when your playing a video game that's designed to do that...what was I thinking?

You've got some neat ideas, but no reason to get defensive. Our Lalafell friend was literally just asking you to explain your reasons why to add in this feature.

As for your idea itself, I love campfires! But I feel like its an awkward way to go about adding all of this. It seems to me you just want a variety of different, but current, features to be tweaked (make items tradable, food more powerful, limit breaks customizable, some sort of lore book) but you're combining all of these tweaks into one new feature. I'm all for almost everything you said, but I think the implementation of them in your design is kinda clunky. Occam's razor applys here I think, the simplest solution is often times the best solution.