Is that what we're doing? I thought this discussion was about how to sustain the challenge of the game past the first twenty turns or so.
If there's one thing that has become clear, it's that the game is different things things to different players.
mmm... we're talking about ways to delay the onset of "insanely easy".
Done that. What was good about Reccetear?
- The dungeon delving. OK, a graphical dungeon interface would be nice, if a fair chunk of work.
- The fairly loan-shark with the increasingly insane repayment schedule? That does sustain the challenge in Reccetear, although I can't see the WM MC putting up with Tear the way Reccette does.
- Customer interaction. Have a set of regular faces come into the brothel and a bit chat from each of them. "Hallo sonny!" says the smiling little old lady. "I need to get my cunt licked by three identical redheads with Irish accents and I need it by next wednesday? Can you help me out?" I confess, I'm having difficulty with this one.
- Adding vending machines? I'm running out of good things from Reccettear
So as I see it, the things we could use are the diablo style dungeon, and the money sink. The dungeon has always been a good idea. It wouldn't do much to extend the challenge, although it would slow down game progression if we made it the central point of the game, which would have a similar effect. Of course we'd need to force people to go down the dungeon, and I expect we'd get complaints about that. So that probably isn't going to solve the problem at hand.
As for a money sink, leaving aside the likely fate of Tear in Crossgate, I'm not sure of the justification for demanding a repayment that rises that sharply. I mean it only works in Reccettear because Tear is insane and Reccette is a pushover. In Whoremaster it would be less painful to go to war against the loan sharks.I guess we could have the rivals throwing more money at the mayor, meaning that the player needs to pay more bribes to keep the watch from raiding the premises. Needs tougher rivals with more money but it could be done.
That's an easy fix, but here's what I mean.
In the first month, make it so the girls you can get are one-eyed, hook-handed, old 60 year old whores with AIDS. (exaggerating) Make the area you start out in complete shit, and make it impossible to visit the slave market, since you owe them money from your father.
When you fill up your brothel with the ugly whores, have that be the first gang attack, and have them kidnap a large number of them.
Then with only the remaining ones, make it so no one will join you for a few days due to your bad reputation.
Then, have a mysterious man hand you a card to a secret meeting spot for your father's old gang members. The ones that are still loyal.
Put together a gang, and have them start kidnapping. Have higher-level gangs protecting girls in better areas for themselves to kidnap.
Make it so instead of just recruiting more people in a gang by selecting something, you have to personally hire groups of people to add to a gang, and meld the stats in relation to how much damage it took. Example, if it's 5 left, and you want to add 5: Original group's strength is 100. New 5 are 50. New stats are at 75.
Now, in the higher-level areas, make it so that enemy gangs can attack in much larger numbers, or have them have stats that go above 100.
Now, in the early-game, make it so you can take out loans from a loan shark. High-interest, you can pay when you want. But if you start to go in the black, then they'll take 80% of what you made that day and use it to pay off your debt. Have them have extremely high-level gang members in large that are hard, but possible, to overcome with your own. You can just borrow more money when hard times hit.
You can even make it so you can refuse to pay them at some point, to force a battle. Sorta like fucking with the King of England in Civilization IV.
This is what I meant by Recettear-like. Put in a progressing story, and have an optional sandbox mode after you finish the story once. Now, I understand some people won't like that, and all I can say is... Fuck 'em.
The problem is that I don't TRUST you with a story. You're likely to put in corny, overly realistic characters. I don't know why. I just get that vibe from you.