A thought for, if not DQ1 HD, perhaps a future DQ. World map events?

#1

On the world map you move from one node to another. Time is assumed to have passed with nothing interesting occuring between those two points.

It might be interesting to add either fixed events, or events randomly drawn from a pool of available events. Moving to the next available story node would have Azra freeze on the path between the nodes and a menu popping up, like the Tips or Movies menu. You get some flavor text and a few options to choose from on how to handle it, which either expands on the lore of the Pit, a chat between the characters, an item or perhaps - if it’s worth the extra coding - a change in an upcoming battle.

So you could have events like:

Azra finds a pit dug out in the wastes, apparently a trap for the mindless Revenant for Ozimal Kaz to capture. You see the remains of an adventurer thrown within it to serve as bait. Seems Ozimal at least let him keep his sword. What do you do?

  • Distract the Revenant at one side up top, send Slak down a rope at the other to fetch the sword. (Awards a random Sword suitable to the area 100% of the time, 50% of the time Slak gets caught and is rendered Bleeding for +100% damage throughout the next story battle.)
  • Enter the half-way world, allow Ketta to rain down upon them with arrows and fetch the sword from the remains. (Awards a random Sword suitable to the area 100% of the time. Azra is fatigued in the next story battle, starts with 10% less PSI.)
  • Quietly hurry along, hope you aren’t noticed. (Nothing happens.)

I only ask because I noticed ReignMaker, a match-3/TD game on Steam, has a random event that occurs between every level that doesn’t actually do that much but all the players of the game appear to enjoy it immensely. I dunno how feasible this would be for Defender’s Quest, especially since now that you’ve translated it into so many languages adding any amount of new text would be rather costly.

#2

What is classified as “sword suitable to the area”?

#3

Any sword in the shops relative to the region the event is triggered in, and maybe 1 sword rank higher than that.

It’s more an example, though. :stuck_out_tongue:

#4

Ah I see, well the rewards and penalties could be a bit lighter, this kind of event kinda changes the next level enough so that the whole game needs to be balanced accordingly.

#5

The vast majority of events in ReignMaker don’t really do anything but add flavor text to the game to be honest, but I’m not sure you could balance around the player ignoring an event or taking a small penalty in exchange for getting a new piece of equipment. Maybe gameplay changing events aren’t terribly necessary, though.

#6

The bad part about this is that battles can be harder if the player chooses skipping the items and avoid the penalties and/or easier for the player that chooses to take the minor risk.