Open world with interaction.

[DarkDagger]

It's probably to avoid bugs and issues with some triggers. I don't get irritated with loading screens. I mean what, every time you get a loading screen you just go "C'MOOOON! C'MOOOOON! C'MOOOOON!". Relax, have a drink, crack your fingers etc. That video posted up there showed us a guy that completes a cave in 10 seconds.
And lastly I think if game creators can avoid loading screens-they will. They aren't some evil society trying to make gamers "suffer".

[hohner]

Originally Posted by Platinumoxicity

Imagine if one would have needed to travel from Bafford's Manor to Cragscleft. And then imagine how ridiculously short that distance would be when recreated as an open world continuous playable area, and how ridiculously little time it would take for Garrett to run all the way from downtown to a mountainrange supposedly far out in the wilderness. And alternatively, imagine the start of a briefing cutscene where Garrett is seen sitting in a horse carriage on his way to the mountains, while some keeper quote scrolls on the screen. Infinitely better.

In the Deadly shadow they addressed this. As you could flat out walk up to some places like the Cradle and Hammer Temple, but not others like the sea side mansion. Granted most of the games was based in the city and never left. Sea side mansion the only one that coming to me right now where you left the area to a degree. It was just another loading screen that was the travel to there, and when you loaded you finished getting there as in the row boat to the mansion. Would of been cooler if it had some cool picture action like in tdp though

[nirvana1]

sure,open world

80% of thief is: buying selling and the important thing is stealing and being a thief

[george12123]

Originally Posted by nirvana1

sure,open world

80% of thief is: buying selling and the important thing is stealing and being a thief

It should be 2% buying Equipment and 98% being a thief and and doing thief-y things like causing a large plan to kill the city bakfire.

Garrett is very good at back-firing plans.

[nirvana1]

Originally Posted by george12123

It should be 2% buying Equipment and 98% being a thief and and doing thief-y things like causing a large plan to kill the city bakfire.

Garrett is very good at back-firing plans.

why a thief steals things?thats simple, to sells them
is that really 2% and where can it trade them? in stores? underground stores? or a person,all of them can be in an open world places in a game

[george12123]

Originally Posted by nirvana1

why a thief steals things?thats simple, to sells them
is that really 2%

Boi back during the days of ye olde. . .
*Snooze*
Wait where was I. Oh yes.
During the war, we did none of that sellin rubbish, in thief we just bought our stuff at the beggining shop menu and played our damn game.

Nowadays people have automobiles and radio, uuhh damn work of the devil.

[Platinumoxicity]

Originally Posted by hohner

In the Deadly shadow they addressed this. As you could flat out walk up to some places like the Cradle and Hammer Temple, but not others like the sea side mansion. Granted most of the games was based in the city and never left. Sea side mansion the only one that coming to me right now where you left the area to a degree. It was just another loading screen that was the travel to there, and when you loaded you finished getting there as in the row boat to the mansion. Would of been cooler if it had some cool picture action like in tdp though

The original concepts for the pagan sanctuary were set in a gloomy swamp village in a thick forest. A pagan village somewhere in the wilderness. That was before the open world concept was worked on. Before Deadly Shadows, when the game was still Thief III.

When the devs decided that there would be an open world, and insisted that the player should always need to travel to the locations, they had to sacrifice the city-hating nature of the pagans by putting them inside the City. One unimportant aspect that nobody would miss managed to cause de-canonizing changes in major factions, and diminished the scope of the core story by forcing the most important conspiracy in the saga to fit inside a NY city block. Literally nothing good came from including the mission locations in the open world level.

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by Hamadriyad

Maybe Tryst talked about just roaming. You know, If you don't enter anywhere but just walking around, there are no loading screens. I don't know about Skyrim and Fallout though.

You got it. I don't mind a loading screen before I enter a mission location, I expect a lot of things would need to be loaded that can't really be done on the fly so easily. It's not an issue. You could actually do it while the player is sorting out their equipment for the mission.

However, the city could be huge and still have no loading screens from one zone to the next. Just look at WOW, a whole continent and a considerable amount of roaming mobs, (all tracked by the way, which is why you can do a protect quest and protect a NPC through 3 zones), with no loading zones at all. The only time it has to load is when you move from one continent to another or when you enter an instanced dungeon.

The city itself could be easily as large as Skyrims map, (I'm not talking about 2 weeks travel here, I mean the game map where Markath to Riften takes no more than 10 minutes REAL TIME on horseback), with areas outside of the city limits as well for Pagan areas and such. If you wish to fast travel like Skyrim allows, why should it be a problem? Going from one location to another without fast travel is your choice, on horseback if need be since Garrett is a thi4f so stealing a horse should be no problem for him. When it comes to closed areas like the docks etc in TDS, it is no problem to have locked gates preventing access to them but you can still load the zone on the fly when they eventually open.

TMA was a fairly large city, especially considering the limited amount of RAM we had in PC's back then but there was still no loading until you entered a mission.

TACTICAL LOADING.
Inside a huge city, loading zones on the fly wouldn't be a problem since most of the city would be obscured by the buildings around you anyway. Done smartly, roads going around a corner could mark the end of a zone so you don't see people etc mysteriously appear and disappear as they enter and leave your grid but that isn't necessary either (see below regarding tracking NPC's).

If you use the thieves highway, it can be done with an overlay the same as Skyrim does for distant objects, the backdrop method has been used successfully for years in the movies. the height restricting your view to the single road directly below could also be used to prevent the problems with things appearing and disappearing as they enter and leave your grid since you can't see down both sides of the building simultaneously.

MEMORY USE.
Using this method, you have nine grids loaded at any one time, the one you are currently in and the ones around it. They are small enough to remain in RAM since they are simply numeric representations of the various sprites used to make up the buildings and the x/y/z locations of each one, 8 bytes for each sprite allowing a 16 bit x/y/z location data and 16384 different sprites. Even 10K sprites for each location which would be pretty detailed equates to just 80K per grid, how fast can that load? Plus 9 grids (720K) is hardly likely to kill the RAM. Double it up for 32bit locations etc and it's still less than 2Mb, you would hardly see the light blip with modern hard disks. The renderer uses that data to display what you can actually see from your current location.

TRACKING NPC's
The character sprites for people and creatures etc and their current x/y/z location are not part of the map, they are generated separately. However, using a 16 bit location and 16 bit sprite ID, you can accurately locate any character anywhere in the city so there's no need for respawns beyond the next corner like TDS had. I didn't like following someone around a corner to pickpocket him to find he just vanished as he left my sight. A very easy and lightweight system could track a single NPC across the entire map so you can follow them all around the city if you want. Even a thousand NPC's and allowing 32 bit location data would take only 16K, allowing for 32K different sprites. Give each NPC a unique name as well in a 10 character name field and it's still only another 10K on top. Honestly, 26K to track one thousand NPC's, each with their own unique names, on the map isn't exactly overloading the RAM.

CONCLUSION.
So, in total, we have less than 2mb to keep a track of every NPC in the game plus have the current map grid and all those around you loaded. Each time you move forward into a new zone, 3 grids are unloaded and 3 are loaded, you might be quick enough to see your disk light flicker.

So really, there's no reason for modern computers, (even consoles), to have so many loading screens and every reason to have huge maps to explore seamlessly. Why not take advantage of that and have a game you can enjoy for a lot longer than it takes to complete just 40 missions?

[Platinumoxicity]

Originally Posted by Tryst

The city itself could be easily as large as Skyrims map, (I'm not talking about 2 weeks travel here, I mean the game map where Markath to Riften takes no more than 10 minutes REAL TIME on horseback), with areas outside of the city limits as well for Pagan areas and such. If you wish to fast travel like Skyrim allows, why should it be a problem?

It would be too small. The only way you could get this thing to work is if you would have a single district of the City the size of the game world in Skyrim. Or a part of a district, a little smaller. But if you attempt to model the entire City, and you can travel from the wester City limits to the eastport edge in 10 minutes, that's a village compared to the scale of the City that the games have portrayed.

10 minutes to travel from all the way across South Quarter market district? Acceptable. 10 minutes to travel from areas outside the City limits on the west side to areas outside the City limits on the east side? Ridiculous. The worst mistake an open world in Thief 4 could do is portray "the entire City" in a seamless open world level. Because the level designers simply don't have the time to make it huge enough. The best compromise is to leave the scale unknown. It gives you all the freedom you need. You can make sections as large or small as you want. As long as you never show the western and eastern edges of a City district in on continuous level structure, the scale remains a mystery, therefore it remains larger than you can imagine. The Thief games have always only showed small pieces of the City at a time on purpose.

You didn't think that the mission hub in DXHR was supposed to be the entire metropolitan Detroit did you?

Anyway it's ironic that I hated the loading zones in TDS but I oppose seamless City structure in an open world Thief 4. At least in TDS the loading zones served one good function. They worked to separate the gas-station-sized miniature City sections from one another. South Quarter, StoneMarket, the Old Quarter and Docks are most likely situated around the abandoned areas of the pagan sanctuary and the Walled Section. If the City would have been seamless in TDS, it would ahve been ridiculously small. The combination of those 4 quarters would have been smaller than the accessible Walled Section in TDP that is supposed to be in between those 4 quarters.

Therefore the annoying blue fog in TDS made it so that the player only had access to 1% sized little snippets of each district, and there was an indetermined distance in the transitions. They prevented the City from looking like it's the size of a parking garage.

[DarkDagger]

I think the City should never be fully shown, or all of its secrets.

[george12123]

Originally Posted by DarkDagger

I think the City should never be fully shown, or all of its secrets.

Indeed.
We shall never know what will happen to the ruins of Soulforge or of Baron who runs the city or other things like the afore mentioned and beyond.

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by Platinumoxicity

It would be too small. The only way you could get this thing to work is if you would have a single district of the City the size of the game world in Skyrim. Or a part of a district, a little smaller. But if you attempt to model the entire City, and you can travel from the wester City limits to the eastport edge in 10 minutes, that's a village compared to the scale of the City that the games have portrayed.

Why can't we have a large city with only small portion of it available for now? By creating a large scale model, DLC's and other mission packs as well as missions created by modders could flesh it out. For example, if you had 100 buildings and 40 missions in the game, it leaves only 60 buildings for modders, DLC's and so on to create more missions with. Ultimately, we would be using the same buidings over and over with different interiors etc. All games have a modding community and it would give modders something to work with, especially if there is a mission editor included.

Create the small area in which Garrett can do the main missions for the game and only when he has completed his final mission or a mod is installed that uses locations outside the mission area, is the entire map unlocked. It still doesn't need to be the ENTIRE city, you can call it the "South Side" or whatever to create the illusion that it's still only a portion of the city. Gates to an outside wooded are where pagans would be allows for lore to be upheld regarding the Pagans hatred for cities. There doesn't even need to be a physical boundary outside, I can imagine Garrett refusing to go on and saying "I don't want to stray too far from the city, the things that live out here don't have money and there's no profit in dying."

[Platinumoxicity]

Originally Posted by DarknessFalls

Maybe it was explained in T1/T2 that Pagans lived nearby, but I like to imagine the Pagans live in some far away distant land; far from the city... sometimes in a different time and/or place altogether (i.e., the transport you travel through in T2's Blood mission). Not four blocks East and through the wooden gate.

I think what Tryst meant were those red misty gates that the pagans used in Thief 2 to travel between the City and the forest, and between the forest and the Maw. Using those portals the game designers wouldn't need to set boundaries for the City, or the forest. There could be some burned-down abandoned apartment building with lots of overgrowth, and in the basement there could be a pagan portal that the pagan agents use for transportation. On the other side there would be a pagan village far away in the wilderness outside the City somewhere. The City would preserve its vastness this way, because you would never be passing the City limits, and you would never be counting your steps.

And no I don't think the pagans live nearby. The cloudy sky is very bright in the Wayside market district a second before Garrett passes through the gate in the graveyard. When he is on the other side in the forest, the sky is entirely dark with no clouds, and none of the City lights reflect from the skies. It can't be very near. Have you ever looked at how far the lights of cities can be seen in the clouds above?

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by DarknessFalls

As soon as boundaries and perimeters are set, even implied ones (wooden gate blocking out pagan land), my imagination is confined and the universe seems far less wondrous than it did. That's what happened to me in TDS.

TDS was very small even compared to TMA really. At least, that's the impression I got, but maybe that was just due to the loading zones. The actual size of all the zones together could have been larger than TMA but it just didn't feel like it.

The gate to the pagan areas could be a portal as Plat said but there should be a reason for having to wait while it loads at that point. Not sure if you've seen the Stargate series but maybe a brightly lit graphical effect showing the transition while it loads, followed by a brief time of darkness with the scenery fading slowly in as your eyes adjust to the darkness again. The brightness of the transition messes up your night vision and you have to wait a few seconds while your eyes re-adjust. That could be done as the zone loads so you don't just have a static picture to look at with a loading bar under it.

As for the size of the game area, Garrett works at night (mostly) so in reality, he is unlikely to travel far on foot from his home. Spending most of the night just getting there leaves little time to do the job. There are some ways he could be outside the area, going to prison for example, whether he planned to get arrested or not, escape could lead down a series of winding tunnels back to home, it wouldn't take much to design those. Another way is for someone to get the drop on him since he's still human for all his skills and he's most vulnerable when he's sleeping. Another would be as TDS did it with a boat or TMA with a submarine. Again, loading transitions could load a small area he has to clear or pass a few guards before moving on. While that happens, the zone could be background loading. Using the 9 grids as I said before, you don't have to load an entire level at once.

Finally, database records load faster than an entire sequential read mission file into memory, it's the way most MMO's are written to reduce loading and network traffic. There is no need to load a huge file once the main engine is loaded, just open a database and you can read parts of it straight from disk as required.

[Platinumoxicity]

Originally Posted by Tryst

The gate to the pagan areas could be a portal as Plat said but there should be a reason for having to wait while it loads at that point. Not sure if you've seen the Stargate series but maybe a brightly lit graphical effect showing the transition while it loads, followed by a brief time of darkness with the scenery fading slowly in as your eyes adjust to the darkness again. The brightness of the transition messes up your night vision and you have to wait a few seconds while your eyes re-adjust. That could be done as the zone loads so you don't just have a static picture to look at with a loading bar under it.

There doesn't need to be a loading zone at all. There could be an entirely separate area in parallel with the City level or whatever place it is that the portal is located in, and there could be a seamless transition from a portal in some rusty basement to a portal in some far-away forest. Seamless portal technology has existed in games for a long time, but was just recently brought into popularity by the Portal-games. There's no loading between portals. One second you're here, the next you're there. In the end of Portal 2, you establish a real-time seamless portal between the Aperture Science facility and the Moon.

[cGREGgo]

The games today require more than a simple method of loading the next mission when you complete the one you're on. Don't give me the same style game I played 20 years ago. We need some sort of interaction with the environment. Making a trip to your fence for supplies was great, right along with side missions. Not only will the fans be pleased, but crucial rating groups & TV shows out there rating video games today will give better ratings. Are these things important? Yes! Nobody will purchase a boring game with bad ratings unless they purchase it used from a place like Gamestop.

Having a free-roam area is a MUST. Let me complete this game at my pace, not yours. Let me go check out the environment between my missions. Let me figure out what that noise was I heard in the back alley when I get a chance, LOL.

Just don't make it as bad as it was in T3.

If games like GTA can let you roam an entire city with very little (if any) loading times, why can't Thief?

[Platinumoxicity]

Originally Posted by cGREGgo

If games like GTA can let you roam an entire city with very little (if any) loading times, why can't Thief?

Because GTA hasn't got intricately detailed special mission locations that are the main focus of the gameplay. In GTA it's the free-roaming area that is the main playground. In Thief it would be secondary.

[Daegal]

I still think that despite what TDS may have got wrong, they were on to something with the city hubs. The main issue I think was the cramped size. I agree that an open world would work, but Bethesda style would not, and even Assassin's Creed wouldn't quite work because Thief is a much more "interior" game more centered on infiltration. I think that missions should be linear, but you shouldn't be forced to start one until you are ready. Although the first two games really helped you focus on objective by not letting you meander, I think it might be even more fun if you could explore and find some things out for yourself. In essence, I think the missions should stay the same, but there should be an open world in between.

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by Platinumoxicity

Because GTA hasn't got intricately detailed special mission locations that are the main focus of the gameplay. In GTA it's the free-roaming area that is the main playground. In Thief it would be secondary.

On that point, I will agree. Thief will definitely have some reasonably large loading before a mission. However, this can be covered up with a cutscene of Garrett picking the lock or working a shim down a window to lift the catch to get in etc. While this short cutscene runs, the initial mission data can be background loaded. Since you won't be in the last room at the start, it only needs to load the first few rooms, not the entire mansion. As you progress, any necessary rooms can be background loaded in the same manner as the city is.

Whatever needs to stop the game to load more should be covered up with something. We have progressed with processing power and graphics way beyond static pictures while loading now. Short cutscenes and even equipment selection where necessary can all be done while the mission is loading in the background. This provides a more positive and seamless effect that doesn't break the immersion so much.

From my point of view, I like to "be" the character in the game and looking at a static picture while the next part loads is a massive immersion breaker.

I don't walk through my front door in real life and be unable to move while I have a poster with some relevant picture on it stuck in front of me for 2 minutes before I can walk into town. I walk out, I turn and pull the door shut and lock it then, when I turn again, I can see down to the end of the road.

Similarly in a game, I get a cutscene, (in first person or third person depending on what I have selected to play in), of my exiting the house, turning to close and lock the door and turning again, by this time, enough has loaded for me to see to the end of the road, more data background loads as I walk down the road. The only difference is that, in the game, you have no control over the cutscene but the effect is that it remains a fluid and unbroken move even though a substantial amount of data has loaded during the cutscene. You now have a transition from one zone to another probably without even realising it was loading a new zone.

It's little things like this that get games noticed. Players appreciate the unbroken immersion and reviewers would go gaga over a game that never appears to load anything more after the initial engine and data has loaded when the game was launched. I will not profess to knowing every game on the market but I'll wager there isn't one single game that doesn't have a static loading screen at some point.

[keeperr]

Gahh got up to DLC and i must protest! NO DLC! (though its inevitable)
I want a city, where i can have a roam around and get my nose in here and there, i dont want my city hubs to consist of two streets per zone, i want lots of back alleys, dark doorways, sewers, climbable objects, the THIEVES HIGHWAY if they gonna do it, at least give us that.
I wasn't a fan of the getting around the city in T3 because it was so much of a chore to manage, say i knew to steal a few things from some unknown home i know 2 extra guards. I want to check out the shop as well, i steal a couple more things = 1 more guard again. I knock out this guy maybe another guard again next time i visit this area after next mission. It was a chore to manage, and once it got so bad, it could only get worse. Even though in some way it was fun to be able to steal side stuff.
Biggest dissapointment was having a 'city' with no feckin roof tops.
Also, i couldn't care less about a city zone, it has potential to be amazing but i would be content with 20 odd missions, well made, with good movies, and a good plot.
Having some huge sprawling city level is going to be such a pain if you cant fast travel, get on the rooftops, or cant be seen by anyone. Take that back the locals wont care about you, less you threaten or rob them, but the guards are going to spot you a mile off, and search and persue you relentlessly.
I didn't care about zones, or loading times, just the city was so small and the loading zones were annoying if you were trying to get away the last thing you could do was run to another zone or they all wait for you there for next time.
You have an open ended map as big as skyrim your going to end up making an RPG. Imagine a city the size of skyrim i think were going on assasins creed here, all with buildings we can access, break into, AI's doing their daily crap, guards, markets, churches, schools, aristocracy, work force, docks bla your going to play skyrim with none of the 'level up stats', none of the weapon choices, no magic, no aurmor etc. I havn't played skyrim but i played oblivion as a thief, and its so easy after a certain level. This is madness!

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by keeperr

I havn't played skyrim but i played oblivion as a thief, and its so easy after a certain level. This is madness!

I agree, in Skyrim, I have maxed out my sneak skills and can now sneak past a person in broad daylight who is looking directly at me, I have even pushed one out of the way to get through a door and he still didn't see me. I'm the invisible man, it's totally ridiculous.

The idea is not to have level up stats, gear and enchantments etc in Thief so it doesn't get any easier as you progress. In fact, the number of guards can be increased as the game progresses to make it harder - Too many places get robbed so the rich are going to start hiring a few more guards to protect their valuables.

I want to see an open world but the loading zones are so 1980's now. Even TMA had a large open world with very few loading zones and hardware has moved on considerably since then with much faster hard drives and far more memory and multi-core processors etc. If they could do it back then...

[keeperr]

Yea i made a mistake. Having an open world wouldn't enhance Garretts 'character'. It would be nice, but to answer the question bluntly I dont think it would have much of an effect to enhance, possibly more the opposite.
It would make a different kind of game, could possibly make the game more interesting, and if anything would make the character more open ended? not sure i've got that right either, you get my point tho?
Oh i dont know what to think, those 'side missions' in thief 3 made me want to kill.
Find a note telling me this is hidden somewhere in the streets that was ok, untill day 2 that was so repetitive. Randomly getting into someones house and finding a nice loot on the way to a mission was a nice surprise though.

[Tryst]

I get your point. Repetition can get boring but so can blindly following a set of scripted missions.

Let's say you have a choice to make, a choice of 2 missions that can change the outcome of either the other mission or even the entire story. No clues to guide you, it's purely intuitive.

Overal objective (not essential but helpful to you with the story): Make a lord accuse his rival of having someone steal his prized possession. It doesn't matter which one accuses the other as long as they both fight. If you can get one to accuse the other, it would cause some City Watch guards to be taken from a nearby heavily guarded place deal with it, you need to get into the place so less guards would be helpful. If you fail, there will be more guards there for you to deal with.

Mission A: Steal a valuable object from the house of one lord.
Mission B: Steal a valuable piece of art from the house of the second lord.
Bonus if you can do it without being seen or heard at all.

You can do one or the other but not both as this would point to a third party being involved. You choose Mission A as this seems a logical choice for you since the lord is richer and there's bound to be more loot lying around.

FAIL! The lord accuses his guards.

Mission B would have been the better choice since you would have found another valuable item in a glass cabinet in the same room as the artwork that you knew nothing about and only the other lord knew about. You only knew of the items in each house you originally chose to steal, a note on the table outside mentions to a servant that this item only arrived today and it is to be locked in the cabinet immediately. We all know a locked door with valuables inside is very soon an unlocked door with nothing inside when Garrett is around I can almost hear Garrett saying in his usual sardonic tone, "now that's a nice surprise, it must be my birthday."

Using this sort of system, you can utilise an open world to create choices so a playthrough doesn't always have to be the same game twice.

In addition, as I have said before, modders can use an open world to create far more missions to play, using the dynamics of the open world as well. Similar to the TMA mission where you were not allowed to go down into the street at all. Also The Courier where you had to follow the courier without being seen by him.

[keeperr]

That sounds like a very good idea!
Initally I was going to say, why stop me from taking both? If it was one or the other, and was open ended, it would be good to be going on more than one clue. Maybe a bit of hearsay, a few pay offs, rumors, and the ability to scout an area.
The only thing i dont like about these two way stories, means i miss out on half the game, less i play through again and means there should be more than one ending. Hope for a thief 5! lolz
Then if we were to make choices, we could use the level we wearnt going to use at another point in the game, perhaps. All that about him blaming someone, and not a third party is a storyline thing.

Say if we were to have a city comparable to something out of GTA(3?) then i'd like most of the buildings to be available for entry, not just a handful.
The bad things i see with TDS city hubs were the small zones/loading. And how the guard numbers were calculated. These zones were a real pain. Even though I really wanted some time on the rooftops, and still do, I know with a 'city' that size, its entirely pointless. Also meant all 12 or so missions were crammed into just 5 or 6 zones! Terrible.
Thief 2's rooftop mission set the standard. (even though slightly linear) It had all the toys, the journey their, apartments to cut through, the conversations (lady van vurnon lol!), and the mission to suit. Then we had to get back to the bell tower if i recall. All with the risk of falling to our deaths.
I dont even understand why they put the city hub in TDS, with the first couple of missions, and clearing out the zones I had enough money to start my own business! And i was just getting started. apparently. Now that I think about it the only reason i didn't just 'pfft. forget the guards and run from A to B was because I did want to sneak round and explore explorables.

since we're talking about being able to steal to some unprecedented size city then the problem we again face is what to spend our money on! If we have the freedom to go robbing a huge city, it would be my playground I just wouldn't stop. Regardless, if most houses just have a few coins or just one item not worth the effort, then still until the whole city is BARE i will not get bored. I'd be a millionaire before 'mission 2'.
It would be awfle if more places opened up as the game went on, I always ask why now is it available? Why not before?

If we have a big city, we disable fast travel but instead we have to pay horse and carriage to get about?
There could be checkpoints at certain areas of the city, where guards will demand fees.
I dont want equipment to be too expensive, but i dont want to end up going in without vitals.
We can pay for maps, rumors, hearsay, tips, clues, or even payoff the guards?
Maybe there could be some way to initiate some kind of deals with people to do things for you, maybe leave doors unlocked, or leave a ladder, create a disturbance, not shout guards when they see you, or the ultimate pay off all the guards in a mission.
Paying for mission equipment.
Maybe even paying a fee to open new merchants.
Hell, if we get our 'ghosting' difficulty (or equivalent) then make it so we have to steal/buy food, or Garretts belly rumbles and the guards hear us. jokes.

Our safe house could be a day to day thing, we may have to go find a new safe spot after every few missions. Not day to day. We could have to run round all the Inns, and taverns, etc maybe have a few landlords about willing to offer a permanent house at different prices.

I didn't get too attached to the pagans, they creeped me out actually so their whereabouts in regards to the city dont bother me i would be happy to drop down a well or go through some abandoned gate at the back of a cemetery etc and be there, like the hammers they just erect a church somewhere within the city and all is well.
Actually side missions in T3 were comparable to excrement and should not be referred to as such. Shooting stones and beetles? Pathetic. No no no no. I cant even explain how I feel about this, it aggravated me so much why it even made sense was the worst excuse to even bother. How was it?
"Oh! I found a moss arrow on this mound of grass!" *walk away*
"NO! There must a rock around here somewhere to use this said arrow on." *Shoot the stone*.
*somewhere in a distant land, 2 streets down, and around the corner the pagan leader celebrates*
"Yes! Garrett is helping us cover the streets in grass, soon we will be victorious! One large stone at a time."

I found having the hammers and pagans being on your side pointless anyway. I think the pagans can go top themselves, we killed their god. And the hammers should worship me, for saving their sorry scared foolish selves. Oh but no! They will however like me if i go round SHOOTING BEETLES.
/rant over. wow sorry.
EDIT: Not over last serious question: What was the significance of these beetles? Did they eat at the Hammers buildings? Did they corrupt the foundations of their beliefs? Do they smell bad? We're they mechanical? Where did they come from? Why do the Hammers hate the beetles so much? Why did i never see any Hammerites squishing them with their huge hammers? What was the reason to cover a brick on a mound of grass with more grass? How did these groups know of Garretts progress of wiping out the beetles, and in effect planting plants on stones. Ugh. Where did the beetles come from? Why the birds, or rats, or crazy sized spiders or cats or dogs or any vermin but they chose massive huge crazy looking dung beetles. because its dung.

This isn't world interaction, its a sorry excuse for something in a game. but world interaction, is questionable. I remember they wanted to incorperate the factions in some way, but that i feel in itself was a bad move. Why not the thieves guilds, or Lords, or anything but the Hammers or Pagans.These factions are suppost to be against me, why would they ever want anything to do with me?

[Master Taffer]

I like the idea of a more expansive City. My only request is to have statistics for loot be seperated from the main missions loot statistics.

Like this...

Loot stolen on missions: X
Loot stolen in The City: X
Total loot stolen: X