[Closed] Randomized Loot Opinion Poll (Patreon)

Hey. Still slogging along. Hopefully something more exciting to show off later in the week.

This was just a thought I had about a minor feature I wanted to get some player feedback and opinions on before implementing. That feature being, how people feel about there being an element of randomness to the items you can find inside of generic loot containers like chests, cupboards, briefcases, drawers, boxes, toolboxes, etc.

As of v0.09, all of the loot you could acquire was hand placed by me. So that every player would find the same items in the same place on every play-through. The only random element was the loot that infected enemies would drop when defeated (which was mostly just cloth scraps any way). While this did allow me better curate the player experience, in hindsight, this seems a little too boring to me. I think it would be more interesting for the loot to be generated from an appropriate list at random, that way every play-through will be a little different. It also means that there could be a small chance of valuable loot, like crowbars, shotgun shells, adrenaline shots, or larger sums of cash to spawn in any container, which means it will always be worth while trying to open all of containers you can find. This will also let me take advantage of the "Luck" stat and make it so that it will increase your odds of finding rarer items in containers.

Of course, quest items will still appear where they should (unless it makes sense to randomize them for some reason), specific items dropped by named characters (Robert's knife, Noah's Rifle, etc), some containers will still give out specific items (Like finding valuable supplies in Ali's safe, Robert's shed, boarded up areas, etc) and of course necessary gameplay items in certain areas (like an excess of batteries in dark areas like the Casino)

The way I see it, the negatives of a randomized system like this is that it technically creates an opportunity to get unlucky and find a lot of less useful items. Or perhaps get really lucky and never need to interact with the game's shops. So in that case, some players might prefer loot that has been specifically hand-placed and balanced so that you can always guarantee that you will be able to find ammo/cash in certain containers, while also not worrying about the game being too easy since I've made sure not to put the good stuff everywhere. But honestly, I don't think this is the kind of game where people would mind too much and that would be an issue. So long as I do my job right implementing such a system. Getting lucky/unlucky with the loot you find in containers just adds to the atmosphere and replay value in my opinion. 

But I thought I'd get your feedback on it before I implement randomized loot in most generic loot containers for v0.10. I am also probably going to add a perk that will give the chance of one extra random item appearing in each loot container since I think that will be a fun one to add.

Thanks for your feedback, patience and support!

~ Jim