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Is there a reason we don't have quests that involve rebuilding towns or rebuilding areas for npcs by gathering resources etc... and as players contribute the towns perhaps become more functional, new npc's arrive, etc... ? Ac2 had something similar in rebuilding the major cities of Cragstone, Ikeras, and Linvak which was quite fun to participate in. Could we see perhaps events or quests like this in the future?
Well, as to reasons? Time, work needed, other things to do.
The game is still in Beta and working towards release. Working on this type of quest would take away from the progress towards release. New zones, Statehelm, levels 90, 100 and beyond. Revisiting skills, working on melee. Adding new surprises.
And thematically, quests like that would be better saved for release.
We talked about doing this for Halloween, actually. But it was cut due to art time.
My experience with permanent "regrow the city" systems in AC2 was pretty informative. It took a lot of art time to make all the different visual tiers of workstations -- two artists spent several full months on just those. And then they were mostly irrelevant after a couple months: players cranked the cities up to the highest tiers, and kept the workstations up pretty well, so most of that art was never seen again. That's fine for a game with a multi-million dollar art budget like AC2, but it seems wasteful to me here.
So I think the way we'll end up doing "grow the thing" mechanics is as a weekend-long live event, not as a longer-term installations. That way the "low-quality" versions will eventually get used again, and the art expectations for brief live events is a little lower anyway :) but there's a gotcha there: during beta, it's hard to predict how many people will be online in a given month, let alone a given weekend. If we set the bar too high, the live event will be frustrating. If we set it too low, it'll be trivial. So we'll have to do some experiments there, but I'm guessing we won't see a ton of this type of content until after the game leaves beta.