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What kind of fan missions would you like to see?


Melan

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This is not a promise, nor any kind of pressure on other mission authors to make a specific kind of mission. But I am interested in what kind of missions you would like to see made and released for TDM. I will start with a few I would enjoy.

  • Giant Bonehoard-style tomb-robbing mission. Self-explanatory. Something with a large area to explore, various tombs to break into, a few puzzles and traps to spice things up, and maybe some common thread to link them. I have wanted to make one for a long-long time, but haven't gotten to it yet.
  • Weird Pagan mission: either Constantine's mansion-style craziness, or something that brings out the creepy and unsettling side of Pagans. Maybe even something like The Maw of Chaos.
  • Mines and other underground locations. Rusty machinery, forgotten and haunted sections, flooded areas and so on.

There are a lot more kind of fan missions I enjoy, of course (I enjoy most of them), but these are the ones I would love to see more of.

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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A well made heist with good focus would work for me.

 

1) give player a clear target "get the crown jewels" (not "get in somewhere and figure out what to do.")

2) give the player a map so that they can make informed decisions on where to go.

3) make the mission non-linear and such that the player can choose which route to take.

4) let the location tell its story, or make a plot, or gossip, or something interesting for the player to discover. Could be a simple conversation where the location inhabitants talk about their lives, or could be an elaborate plot twist that affects the objectives.

5) make it challenging, but give tools to the player.

6) give players decisions to make, and have the decisions come with consequences.

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I would love to see something with forest villages, something a bit mystical involving pagans living in a village out in the middle of a forest perhaps.

 

Also I would love to see things that are a bit more out there, add in space travel to a mission, travelling on a zeppelin/submarine. Just something that takes the player out of what they expect a TDM mission to be and introduce these new elements either in a mystical way or a science fiction way.

 

Apart from that i'll always love mansion and city missions too

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I'm with Sotha. I would like to see more missions where the focus lies much more on foreplanning. MAny missions feel like aimlessly stumbling around for me. (Although many players seem to like this "exploration" gameplay).

 

Generally FMs that are more focused on the gameplay would be nice.

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FMs like Ominous Bequest, Rowena's Curse, and Emilie Viktor, so the right combination of challenge, story, and the surreal.

 

For visportaling forests, I recommend the kissing cylinders design, areas are rough cylinder 'rooms' connected at asymmetric VP'd touchpoints. If you hide the walls well, it feels like just dense forest that goes on and on. Baddcog used it for the Left for Dead swamp.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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For me, it is everything very connected with playing a THIEF.

If I wanted to solve puzzles, run around shooting people, just collect stuff or exploring some adventurous scenery, there are many other games that can do that, often a bit better.

Whatever theme, location and story may be - as a THIEF, I enjoy being at places I am not supposed to be, doing things that are illegal or socially inacceptable, enriching myself,

defeat authorities, overcoming social restrictions.

And usually, being subtle about it, while overcoming resistence to my goals in a clever, thief-like way, finding and exploiting weaknesses or using skills and tools that make me feel

like a master thief, not just like a figure in some shooter game that has a stealth component.

There should be a constant threat of being socially exposed - not necessarily killed - in the background. This should be built in story and level design. I'd like to see more motivation

in a thief game for using strictly stealth and acting very deliberately thief-like than just to avoid having to fight a guard or losing some health or causing a commotion.

I have difficulty to find words for it, but there is a special magic in a game that is about you transgressing social norms, and by sheer ability and power of tools, in the end, get away with

it.

There is something special in about "being a shadow", free of observation from any other people, free from social control - and thereby really being able to act free.

In remaining and acting and achieving being undetected, there is a specal kind of personal freedom possible lacking in all other types of freedom I am aware of.

 

All this interwoven in a story of ... overcoming an obstacle, being it social, financial or human.

By means of "special logistics", maybe the core ability of a thief; not necessarily just about stealing stuff, but also things like stealthily delivering things where they not belong to

denigrate or blackmail somebody or just to acquire information you are not supposed to have - something uncommon like a mission around creating an eavesdropping opportunity to learn

about a valuable secret, without having to steal a single coin, may be very enjoyable and thief-like. In that sense, it might be even more realistic and profitable not to just steal another pot of gold,

but changing the account books in some company without anyone noticing for huge reward. You know, giving a mission title like "The accountant" we already have a whole new direction ...

 

For any good thief mission there should be some constant level of tension, because the whole time you are doing something illegal and socially damned, and your really, really

need to avoid detection or rather disclosure.

Maybe, in some harmless way, for the sake of experiment, try entering a place you are not supposed to be in real life, maybe in darkness. Not illegally or with mischievous intent -

just for experiencing the real thrill + suspense of being and feeling stealthy, the danger of becoming detected, enjoying the special kind of freedom only this kind of activity offers.

Exactly this should be somehow (I have currently no idea how exactly) made into the mission itself for being a real good thief-style mission. If this is lacking, you may only get a

"wandering around simulator" , all without that special extra that makes it "thiefy".

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly while bad people will find a way around the laws." - Plato

"When outmatched... cheat."— Batman

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A Pagan mission would be my vote (though mostly for variety).

 

I'm a city mission and horror mission fan so I've got plenty of the kinds of missions I prefer now.

 

You can see why I always bring up Lord Edmond Entertains, it's got both... :) (I wanna TDM remake of this one, originality be damned! :P )

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Two of my favorite missions in Thief were Assassins and Song of the Caverns. They're missions where you start with a simple objective but end up somewhere completely different. The first time I played SotC I went "Whoa, I'm actually going in the opera house? In this mission right now? Cool." The sudden change startles you out of your expectations and shows the circumstances of the situation you are in are not entirely within your control. It's something you must adapt to on the go, rather than having the mission be all spelled out for you in the briefing, like a puzzle waiting for you to solve it.

 

With Thief-style games there's always this constant stream of micro-scale unknowns the player has to deal with - a guard or a light where the player wasn't expecting, what's really in the next room that's not marked on their map. Pretty much as soon as the problems are introduced, the player can formulate some way to solve them. Doink the guard, douse the light, check for hazards/loot/your objective in the new room. Put something like that on the macro-scale though and it makes the player look at the mission with a new set of eyes. The place they were meant to rob turns out to have completely burnt down last night, do they just go house to house now? The item that they had to get has changed location, how are they going to go about finding where it is? Grave robbing goes wrong when the tomb entrance caves in and they have to find a way out through the catacombs.

 

You can sorta see this to an extent in most of Thief's missions: e.g. both Return to the Cathedral and Strange Bedfellows contain previously established locations that turn out to house way more than you were led to believe. Even a tiny subversion of expectations like that can go a long way for me. That's not to say every mission should be like this, missions that play it straight like Framed or Shipping And Receiving in T2 are great examples of how a steady and methodical untangling of a level's knots can still keep you on your toes.

 

 

On a more banal note, I do love me city missions and the best thing for me is being able to just look at a house, say "I wonder what's in there?", then be able to actually break in and see for myself. Especially if the door is locked but you can find some very obscure way of breaking in that makes you feel smart. Oh it's hell to make every house on a street explorable, both for mapping and for gameplay focus purposes, but even a bit of it gets a big plus from me when it comes to any sort of city FM.

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Some really good suggestions here!

 

I too feel like we should have exploration in to the pagan life. A forest mission might do well, or even a city mission in a "pagan slum" or something similar.

 

Down in the Bonehoard was one of my absolute favorite original missions in the Thief games, and I would love to have something of a similar scope in TDM. A place ridden with traps and the remains of other explorers, with a deeply occult overtone.

 

Mages and magic!! Not like the Mages Guild in Thief Gold, more along the lines of Rocksbourg: Ink and Dust, that would be sick, and the potential for making cool custom content is much greater in TDM which is great! :)

 

Not sure about crazy settings like outer space and airships, but maybe a submarine mission would be on the cusp of what could be believably steampunk. I think that could have very good atmosphere, knowing that you are 10,000 leagues under the sea and there is no escape.

 

Lastly, of course one can never have too many city missions. I feel we need more highly explorable ones... ones which permit partial rooftop exploration as well! These are the hardest to build of course, but so worth it if you ask me!

My Fan Missions:

   Series:                                                                           Standalone:

Chronicles of Skulduggery 0: To Catch a Thief                     The Night of Reluctant Benefaction

Chronicles of Skulduggery 1: Pearls and Swine                    Langhorne Lodge

Chronicles of Skulduggery 2: A Precarious Position              

Chronicles of Skulduggery 3: Sacricide

 

 

 

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A couple of threads on related themes:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/15738-when-is-someone-gonna-make-an-egyptian-based-mission/

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16980-missions-in-exotic-locations/

 

One thing I want to try after I finish my current project is a mission where the sun sets or rises in real time (using a variant of the rough day/night cycle ambient light, combined with a variant of this, and a moving parallel light if it can be persuaded to work).

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Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Bank jobs (like the one in Thief 2...), castle missions, weird pagan stuff. Especially the pagan stuff i think is greatly missing so far, of course i do understand the reasons behind it. Would be nice to see anyway.

 

Just saw the reply of Bikerdude. :) How far away is the campaign anyway? No need to hold the breath yet?

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Bank jobs (like the one in Thief 2...), castle missions, weird pagan stuff. Especially the pagan stuff i think is greatly missing so far, of course i do understand the reasons behind it. Would be nice to see anyway.

 

Just saw the reply of Bikerdude. :) How far away is the campaign anyway? No need to hold the breath yet?

 

The prologue (which I hear is massive) is in beta testing already.

 

As for the other missions.... Well it seems most are burnt out on that project and other mappers are more interested in their personal projects.

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I would actually like to see more simple, linear missions on building skill of classic Wolfenstein or Doom.

 

There's a lot of room to extensive gameplay when the mapper doesn't go overboard making every room as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel.

 

Lots of properly set small areas can be just as fun as the massive ones. Except small areas have a lot less potential bugs to worry about.

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A rather esoteric request, but one I'd love to see all the same.

 

An assassination mission where the only truly discreet way to gain an opening on the target and kill him without affecting stealth score or having a body found is to taint his food/drink with laxative, and then shoot a fire arrow up the toilet while he's using/sitting on it.

 

I am quite the mature person, you see, and doing this would most certainly not fit any sense of humor I have.

(Disclaimer: the above sentence is pure fiction.)

Edited by V-Man339

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If that request is wrong, I don't want to be right!

 

(But sadly, it is already the plot of A Score to Settle, kinda.)

Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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I must be the only who prefers the straightforward missions, like Thief 2's First City Bank and Trust or Shipping... and Receiving, or T2x's missions. I like them because if I'm in the mood to play a bank mission, I can do so with the expectation that by the end of the mission I won't be in some surreal hyperspace world or some such.


That's part of the reason why I hated the NuThief missions where you start with one kind of mission and then end up having to run through town or a burning building, etc. That sucked! They should have separated those events into separate missions and made those larger. But I guess they were on a schedule with too many hands in the pot. Old game anyway, so too late to complain.


Also, horror missions don't do it for me anymore. Guess the haunts aren't really that haunting. Now castles, monestaries, libraries, quarter of town missions, and the like with humans in it, that's more my kind of mission.


I want the challenge to come from the places, like how to get in or how to avoid that trap or how to get that gem from behind that sealed box, and available tools instead of continuously dodging enemies, especially the undead kind that can't really be beat without lots of holy water. But maybe that's just me....

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The Thief 2 mission "Life of the party" is still my favorite and everything coming close to it is great. It has:

- a huge building with many floors, advanced enemies, different interior and difficulty on each of the floors

- a huge city to explore

- many small sidestories and npc conversations

- a high replay value

 

I would really like to have more missions of that kind.

 

Other than that, I really enjoyed some of the missions that were surprising for the player or unpredictable in its outcome (Ulysses Genesis, A house of locked secrets, The cradle in Thief 3, The transaction)

 

A mission in an egyptian pyramid would be pretty neat, too :D

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