Overworld Overhaul - (By Silent Sage)

[arctic lake]

Produced by @ornate rose

I am posting on their behalf

Bringing Perspective

Overworld is all about poaching these Illuvials. It’s like a sci-fi version of hunting in RDR2. Players should be able to choose whether they hunt in the name of Science, Poaching for Credits or out of the desire to Protect …the core element of Overworld is about hunting and that’s how it should be marketed.

Quick Fix - Mini Regions

Each region should be “separated” into different mini-regions, with each mini-region being given its own name that appears on the screen for a short time then fades away (Dark Souls, RDR2)

Hunting Illuvials / Gameplay Loop

There should be an Illuvial or small group of Illuvials for every 10-15 seconds worth of travel time.

Once you get within a certain proximity of a creature, a symbol should appear over its head (Metal Gear Solid). Once that occurs the Player has only a certain amount of time to shoot the creature before it vanishes.

Each Illuvial has a unique awareness level and certain suit coloring cloaks better in certain environments. Creatures that vanish will not reappear until the player leaves that mini-zone.

A focus on Stealth and cloaking consumables should be added to the game.

Ninety percent of the creatures should always spawn in the same general area each time a player pays to travel to that zone (WoW, Dark Souls), but there should always be certain creatures that only spawn on occasion and some ultra rare.

Once an Illuvial is shot, that creature will flee. Certain ingredients can be added to your bullets to reduce the fleeing speed of an Illuvial. Players must follow that Illuvial and maintain a certain distance for a certain period of time until the Illuvial drops and falls asleep.

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The projectile sedative has varying levels of potency, and must be crafted (at least once) by the player. Certain Illuvials are more immune to sedatives than others & certain ingredients will increase the potency of a sedative against certain types of Illuvials (fire, water, etc).

Illuvials can be harder to catch due to their sedative immunity, speed, cloaking abilities, disorienting attacks and ability to fly.

Once the Illuvial sleeps, the player can frisbee toss an Illuvigem (a very thin, oversized credit card-shaped object of crystalized glass) over the head of the Illuvial. The Illuvigem will rotate and hover over the Illuvial briefly, then shoot out a UFO-type beam over the Illuvials head and beam the illuvial into itself. Once this occurs the thin glass transforms into a spherical object, a crystal-like orb that is glowing within. The orb shakes a couple times then either catches the Illuvial or does not. If failure, the illuvial wakes up and vanishes.

When the Illuvial sleeps, the player has a certain amount of actions they can perform. The player can perform one of four options while the Illuvial sleeps; Scan It, Attempt to Catch It, Harvest Resources or Implant Tracker.

Attempt to Catch Failure and Implanting Tracker will cause the Illuvial to awaken and vanish.

If a player puts down a rare creature but doesn’t have the resources to feel they would catch it, they can just implant tracker and harvest resources…then could come back to that creature on a later visit.

Scanning it will add it to the players Illuvidex which can have some type of lore related purpose/be part of a quest objective/be part of an achievement system important to player advancement, etc.

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Alternative: Get rid of “catching” the Illuvial. Just make it so you scan the Illuvial and can harvest resources. In this case, DNA is collected each time and transported to an NPC scientist. This scientist can create Illuvials with a machine that just requires a certain amount of DNA samples, which is how you get your Illuvials.

This may actually be better, considering the variations certain Illuvials have and the sci fi gameplay aesthetic. It also separates Illuvium from Pokémon’s original idea. The more I think about this alternative, the more I think that it would be the best option here.

Suits

Current clothing style does not match the poacher-style gameplay that the game has (in the case that the above-mentioned overhauls were implemented). You can still do some style of a space suit while more-so incorporating some unique, rugged vibes to the attire (masks, Illuvial-resourced items made through crafting, hunting belts, space bandoliers, etc. Think RDR2 but outer-space alien vibes.

Robot Function

Your robot should not be used to catch Illuvials. The robot should be able to be sent off to harvest resources for you. Upgrade the robot to increase harvesting speed, capacity and range from user. Once a robot visits an area, notifications pop up somewhere that say what type of resource he discovered. Sometimes the robot can discover rare things which can be added to your map for your current visit for you to check out yourself.

You could also make it the robot can do it’s thing while you stand in one place and use your characters technology to check your land production, check on your island via drone footage, look at your collectibles, etc.

The robot 100% needs to have added functionality. This was an issue in an early version of God of War w/ Kratos’s son, which was then fixed and perfected.

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Harvestable Resources

Plants need to be added to the game that can be harvested by the robot. It could be set up so that players can’t harvest the plants themselves, so you could skip making a bunch of different plants to add to the game. Where the robot found them? No one knows and it’s not a big deal.

I believe implementing all of the above changes will completely shift the current perception of Overworld, it will become as alluring as it was always intended to be, and Arena will be seen as almost secondary to the Overworld. In the current state, it is hard to see it as so…and auto battlers will not garner the attention of the average gamer like an open world creature hunting game would.

Congrats on all you guys have accomplished so far and I hope you like these ideas!

By - @ornate rose