Ambitious Idea For More NPCs In Love

Disclaimer: This idea challenges a fundamental aspect of what LOVE is perceived to be, yet I feel that there is nothing more in-line with LOVE's central focus on players cooperating in order to achieve a great goal. This is not an argument for making LOVE into another copy-pasted battle royale sort of game, please do not read it as such.

Well, I played LOVE in the Alpha and have been following it in its Beta, hoping to see it fix some of its earlier issues and really grow into a beautiful game with its own unique style and be a rewarding gaming experience. Two of these three things it has done with surpassing brilliance, Eskil working hard around the clock to correct any and all bugs we report and to keep the game's playability intact while also designing a game world and structure that has been toyed with before in games but never really expanded and used as extensively or ambitiously as it is in LOVE. But, sadly, I didn't feel rewarded when playing LOVE and it doesn't look like I would now either.

The problem with LOVE is that it's boring. Yeah, there's the cyclical change of the world in LOVE and you defend against the AI and attack them back, but at the end of the day you make no real progress; the world eventually rebuilds itself and you are, again, left to battle an enemy that is little more than a nuisance with no understood motivation. Why do the AI fight you? For your tokens, for control over your settlements, or just because they don't like you? It doesn't matter either way because they do fight you and they won't stop fighting you and the only thing you can do is build a better settlement than they do in order to survive longer. But surviving isn't the same thing as living, to be alive is to have a sense of well-being and direction in your life, not to live in order to survive. I'm not saying battling the AI isn't fun, and building your settlement is a joy to behold, but for me the game ends up seeming like little more than two groups of kids running around building pointless forts and knocking each others' down. Which is boring.

In essence, I want there to be more action in LOVE than just fighting AI and finding tokens. I want there to be some challenge in this game beyond trying to keep my trigger-happy neighbors from coming over to wreck my home before I wreck theirs.

I want there to be monsters.

Not monsters like in the RPGs where you run into them and they fight you and you gain experience from them or anything like that, which is little more than a time-waster. I want creatures that are monstrous titans, wondrously large and formidable behemoths lumbering across this vast and beautiful world like silent guardians of the pristine nature in LOVE. The best comparison I can use is to the Colossi from Shadow of the Colossus, beings that are at once as much a part of the gameworld as they are enemies--an extension of the world itself in the form of a living creature that the AI cannot live up to. These creatures would be so enormous that no player could conquer one on his own and even a large amount of players would have to use their powers intelligently to bring it down, and to succeed in winning a victory over one is a great reward for the players and something to be admired.

Here is where you say to me, "Regal, this is little more than an argument for introducing what are basically boss fights into LOVE, how could you not understand that LOVE is about breaking away from this kind of game focused around mindless killing and is about the triumph of teamwork and synergy?"

In order to refute this accusation I ask you look at World of Warcraft: players join groups in order to defeat particularly hard enemies in the game. Is the glory and the joy that the players feel after a successful battle not the joy of having been a part of a group that, against the odds of the game's design, triumphed through their collected powers and their intelligent planning and expert execution of that plan? While World of Warcraft's true appeal may be in its other various aspects it is undeniable that players feel a sense unity with one another, and of pride in that unity, when they work together in this manner. What could be more in tune with LOVE's ideal of cooperation than that?

The game's design is player vs. world wherein the AI represents the hostile force in the world. The problem is that defeating the AI doesn't produce anywhere near an appealing amount of excitement for one to want to continuously battle against them. Another issue is that the AI themselves are easily killed, their settlements (typically) easy to raid and their relation to the player has become nothing more than an annoyance and a tool for farming tokens. This is not to say the AI can't be challenging enemies (monitor lizards anybody?), but they usually amount to little more than annoyances to be squashed in the player's all-powerful clutches. As well, there is no feeling of accomplishment in destroying an AI settlement or in destroying the AI. After all, they will eventually rebuild and come back to attack the players again; I liken it to playing whack-a-mole, the player keeps hitting them down and they keep coming back up.

And, most of all, once you understand how to beat them, AI battles are just boring and time-consuming.

Now, I haven't described these monsters yet so please allow me to explain. These goliaths would be like moving mountains, born from the world and a part of it; they are hostile to both AI and the player, serving as a sort of prevailing natural chaos in the world, similar in spirit to the Armageddon flood and the constant restructuring of the game's world. As well, these gargantuan creatures would direct their attention towards destroying cities, both AI and player-built, giving players another incentive to create powerful cities capable of being well-defended against such an imposing force.

Here are where some unspoken, yet certainly important, questions should be answered before we continue.

Q) What reward is there in killing these monsters?
A) These monsters, in typical RPG style, drop "loot" in the form of very, very, very rare and powerful tokens, such that cannot be obtained anywhere else in the gameworld. What these tokens are and what they do can be decided later, but suffice to say that these monsters would be the only source of really unique ones.

Q) That's it, they just drop tokens?
A) Indeed that would be quite a disappointment if a settlement was able to successfully defend against a monster trying to destroy it and the only reward for their success was to get another token, no matter how useful or rare. These monsters' deaths would signify a great achievement and thus there should be something given to the players to show their cooperation and participation in this achievement, some medallion or badge or something that the player can carry with them through the rest of the game as a sign of their achievement. Perhaps they would dispense these "reputation points" Eskil has mentioned. In whatever form that it takes, these monsters would provide the players with something that shows their accomplishment to the world.

Q) How can they be killed?
A) Like any other living thing. Any weapons can be effective against it, but it will take more than just ordinary blaster firepower to take these creatures down; you'll need your city to be well-fortified with turrets and defenses, and have an organized power grid set up as they attack your power sources first, knocking your defenses and weapons out of commission if you're not prepared for them, and resorting to using simple blasters against them would take players a long time to even pound a dent in them, by which time your precious settlement will be another sacrifice to the all-powerful gameworld.

Q) What if a monster kills a settlement when no one is around to defend it?
A) The monsters' combat system would be designed so as to take into account the number of players present in a settlement before it attacks in order to ensure that a small group of players isn't overrun by an impossible enemy; this has the secondary benefit of creating the incentive to players for more of them to be online at the same time, and thus the motive for players to recruit new people to play LOVE with them.

Q) Okay, so a monster comes and attacks; what happens to it when it kills a settlement?
A) The monster goes away. These roaming destructive statues are not hostile to the player itself, only to the settlements they build, and thus once the settlement dies it moves on to destroy other settlements or, if there are no more to attack, they simply roam the world until another one is created.

As well, how awesome it would be to explore the gameworld and happen to venture upon a valley wherein walks a giant. How breathtaking it would be to see this massive creature walking between two mountains or crushing through a forest or rising like the leviathan out of the depths of the ocean.

This is my idea. Take it or leave it.