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Author Topic: "You pull the lever... What do you wish for ?"  (Read 2074 times)

Vestin

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"You pull the lever... What do you wish for ?"
« on: August 09, 2009, 18:47 »

Thinking about randomization and choice coming together gave me an idea (although - a crazy one). We could have a "wildcard" unique that would allow the player to choose what he wants to get, from a list of (previously seen, perhaps) uniques (with the addition of "???", which would randomly pick a unique the player has NOT seen yet ?).

Sure - it sounds undoomish. I mean - what could this possibly be ? A wish-granting demon in a beer-bottle ;) ?
Then I thought "Wait... How about making it a lever effect ?" You might explain it as being a one-time access to the local locker network (rather than having the peculiar message I put in the title ;).
You might even want to make it into two different lever effects. One granting you the ability to choose any non-unique item (standard weapons, armors, boots, consumables and mods) and one unique-oriented. The messages could be "Accessing item database...<more>" for the former and "Level 5 access granted...<more>" for the latter (implying, I guess, that some high ranking officer managed to punch in the password but got possessed before he could get that secret gizmo he wanted to protect himself with. Adding a FH Commando and/or a FH Captain in such a room wouldn't be too hard... and wouldn't even give away too much as they tend to hug the levers anyway. At least now there'd be some reason.)

With all the power-ups scattered about, most of us are not willing to take their chances with levers too often. This idea might make you think twice before leaving them be...
Bonus points if we get a higher chance of a wildcard lever on acid- and lava-floodable levels :>.
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Generic

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Re: "You pull the lever... What do you wish for ?"
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2009, 19:07 »

An indirect reason to give Intuition a reason? Sure! :P
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Zi

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Re: "You pull the lever... What do you wish for ?"
« Reply #2 on: August 14, 2009, 20:39 »

I wouldn't mind better lever rewards.  Right now I hardly ever pull them as the risks outweigh the rewards, especially when the outcome is uncertain.

Pre-N!, in the past, after clearing a level out, I would find levers 1 space away from the walls (or door) of a room, use a barrel to remove the wall but not the lever (unnecessary if door is adjacent), then pull the lever - if it flooded the area with lava/acid, move away, no problem.  (Also move barrels away, in case of a 'barrel explode' lever too.)  Since enemies have been cleared out, the very dangerous "erases walls" lever is not so dangerous.

However, the benefits aren't worth the risk, unless you're desperate for healing.  And the 'damage enemies in same room' lever is rarely useful - if there was a few enemies in the room that weren't dangerous, there's not much benefit, yet if there's dangerous enemies in the same room, chances are you've already a smoldering blob before you can even take advantage of the lever.

If you've developed a sufficiently high damage per second output, then the 'spawn enemies' lever can also be beneficial for extra xp, but it can backfire.
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