Fulfilling My Hytale Team Members' Goals

Image by geralt from Needpix.com

DISCLAIMER: This post is either based on pre-release information or how I imagine Hytale to work. It may not reflect the final game, so this post is just for fun.

Also, my team members are very busy with their personal lives so I don't have straight answers from all of them at the moment. As such, I'll be making guesses…and I might push some of my team members’ Berserk Buttons in the process.

In my thoughts on CanadianFlash’s “10 Cool experiences we could get while playing HYTALE”, I wrote that different players, including my own team members, derive our sense of accomplishment from different sources, even within the same game.

Since I first wrote about Hytale, I’ve always been the Young Conqueror who treats Hytale as Serious Business. To me, it’s no surprise since Asperger’s syndrome causes me to be hyper-interested in a select few topics (with another interest being martial arts).

BoltOLightnin is a dungeon crawler, and as such, prefers the exploration and the loot. While it overlaps somewhat with my conquest goal since dungeon crawling can help expand territory and make my nation richer, it does not necessarily cover wars that don’t involve dungeons.

YoSquid is a Hunger Games-focused player and…that’s it, as far as I know.

HeadsHoKer seems to be the most casual of the bunch because he claims to want to do things in Hytale “depending on his mood”, though the casual play style is zig-zagged because, despite video games being a secondary interest to his primary interests of history, law, philosophy, and politics, he rages when he loses in competitive video games yet keeps trying after many losses—it’ll take many minutes or hours of losing and shouting until he finally Rage Quits. (Funny thing is, I rage-quit more often than him.) And, yet again, he enjoys playing some games like Minecraft, The Sims, and Warcraft III casually--he often cheats in the latter two games, and in Minecraft, when not playing Survival, he either recreates historical castle design or flies around aimlessly with Flan's Mod aircraft.

In this post, I’m going to make guesses as to how I can fulfill all of our goals and make all of us happy without boring anyone too much, especially in pursuit of my own goal.

However, because I tend to be Crazy-Prepared because I hate to lose, I will inevitably cause varying degrees of boredom by forcing my team members to perform tasks like turtling (slow-and-steady gameplay) and manual labor to maximize our chance of survival.

BoltOLightnin: Dungeon Crawling

Naturally, I will have to do some dungeon crawling to get loot to strengthen our team and support our needs.

I just don’t want BoltOLightnin to do this excessively so we don’t run into overly powerful bosses while we’re underprepared. At the very least, we should have food, weapons, and armor to last us for two days (or a week for very distant dungeons). I suppose, if he doesn’t read any Hytale guides and relies on me for guidance, I could take advantage by telling him to start with the easiest dungeons…

Fortunately, faction warfare is not on anyone’s wishlist so we can comfortably maintain at least a “we hate you a little” reputation with most innately hostile factions (like the Trorks) and keep our chances of being invaded at a minimum. Having our base raided while we’re all dungeon-crawling is the last thing I want to experience, especially without mounts or vehicles.

If BoltOLightnin goes all-out Leeroy Jenkins…well, I’ll have to get back in single player to train myself to mitigate the risks of that infamous tactic. Being both The Leader and the tank is a…heavy duty. (Pun explanation)

YoSquid: Hunger Games

Disclaimer: I haven’t read any of The Hunger Games books or watched any of the movies. I’m using my stock knowledge of third-party summaries as well as Minecraft’s version of the game.

This is the only goal that has next to nothing related to Adventure Mode—Hunger Games is a minigame and Minigames is a separate game mode from Adventure Mode.

I suppose we could put in support for the Hunger Games minigame in our Adventure Mode playthrough—I hope it will be natively supported and won’t require complicated stuff. It would be even more ridiculously good if I could automatically scatter random chests in a large radius and fill them with random loot. There should also be a functional “Toggle Hunger Games” command or something so we can play Hunger Games without damaging our Adventure Mode progress.

Alternatively, I want to see a The Hunger Games-inspired story arc in vanilla Adventure Mode where we actually have to “volunteer as tribute”. Ideally, I want to team up with my mates, fight against AI-controlled enemies, and win if we’re the last ones standing so that we can still safely play with Fire Emblem-like permadeath. However, if we’re playing with actual Hunger Games rules where only one tribute can win (i.e. no multiple tributes winning as a team), I would like the Fire Emblem permadeath to be temporarily disabled so we can respawn, albeit eliminated from the Hunger Games.

(I was gonna make a side note talking about how we would do in a Hytale-themed Hunger Games based on the actual Hunger Games, but that’s for another blog post.)

Some unrelated stuff related to Adventure Mode: YoSquid claims to be good at parkour and has survived 3 weeks in Minecraft Hardcore mode.

Starting with parkour, I hope dungeons have some kind of trigger at the end of a parkour room that “disables” the parkour, say, by bridging the platforms so, after YoSquid does his parkour, the rest of us can walk normally.

As for Hardcore, YoSquid is perhaps the second best survivalist just behind me (who has trained with freaking no-damage runs), so it’ll be hard for mobs to kill him, let alone natural causes like hunger. He claims to be a good agriculturist and fisherman in video games--he's played Stardew Valley.

 

HeadsHoKer: “Depends on My Mood”

This is the trickiest of the bunch because HeadsHoKer’s reply is vague and his actual gameplay goals can change rapidly, even though I know he does not have a chaotic alignment in both real life and roleplay.

It can be tempting to just ignore him and stick to my own and the other two members’ goals, but as the Team Mom, I simply don’t want to do that. Not only do I want all the support I could get (which is natural for almost all human beings), but I don’t want to be the contributing factor to why someone has a bad day (even though I’ve done that many, many times, both intentionally and unintentionally). So I’m determined to ensure everyone has fun…even if I harm myself in the process. It’s The Power of Friendship with a bit of I Was Just Passing Through.

Unlike BoltOLightnin who is quiet but willing to follow orders, HeadsHoKer is quiet and mysterious, preferring to keep things to himself. He gives no firetrucks about almost anyone, both “regular” people like his classmates and authorities like his parents and teachers (just look at his blog’s rants against some of his teachers) Prodding him for his thoughts for the current gameplay session may pull his Hair-Trigger Temper, I think.

I don’t want to put too much drama in this blog post, so for simplicity, I’ll just avoid starting a conversation with him unless absolutely necessary and only for real-life situations (i.e. Mom wants me to call HeadsHoKer or HeadsHoKer has mail; “we’re under attack” doesn’t count). If I can, I’ll watch him stealthily when he’s alone and weaken, if not destroy, high-level threats before HeadsHoKer sees them—I can’t afford to have him rage over a cheating bastard computer.

On the bright side, HeadsHoKer said he will research on Hytale once the game comes out, including the weapons and their movesets. It's not guaranteed that he'll be a sword cavalry paladin since he may discover a "better" character build, but let's see how things go.
I like to strike a balance between roleplaying and metagaming, which is why I'm a spear infantry rogue.