Dev Diary: Missions

[Tamur]

I may have somehow missed this, but at the .com there is a new (to me, anyway) dev diary on Missions by Penny, the voice behind the recent castles/cities video.

A few points I had not heard before:

1. Missions can be given to you by other factions. Very cool concept. Can the player give missions to AI factions? Hmmm.

2. re: missions from other factions... "These can come from individuals within the faction, seeking external help to further themselves within the faction, or from the faction as a whole."

Wow. This seems to state that there is no long a single AI per faction, but a number of them, and sometimes they are working against each other. Does this mean that the leaders of AI-faction settlements can make agreements with you exclusive of their faction? If so, that opens up a huge new area design-wise, allowing the player to create unrest, convert, send merchants, assassinate, all with another faction's city or castle leader as the sponsor, etc etc. The mind boggles.

So this probably isn't true for M2. Really cool concept for future development, though.

3. Mechanics. It seems like they did a lot more work designing mission conditions this time round, good news.

4. UI - yay for the missions scroll! Whoever added that should be given a well-funded retirement account... and then made to go back to the low-fi prototyping slavepit so we can get more like this.

All in all, this is very exciting! Of course, it's probably mentioned weeks ago in another thread and I'll look like an idiot posting here. But ah well...

edit: added link