A while back, I stood up my own local FFXI server, mostly to revisit all the old-school quests and missions, actually watch the cutscenes instead of skipping through them while a party rushes ahead, and enjoy a little nostalgia. I've been documenting the journey along the way and have over 200 videos so far. Surprisingly, there is still a lot to do in-game that I havent done, and LandSandBoat (server code im using) still has tons of stuff that isnt implemented yet. But, I just want to take a break from missions and quests and do something a bit different.
Lately I have been working on a hunt system, kinda similar to VW but involving all our favorite NMs from back in the day.
So far basically I have a Hunt coordinator in the 3 starter cities to start the "hunt" - For example in Bastok you start the hunt, zone into South Gustaberg and it will immediately spawn Leaping Lizzy, Tococo, and Carnero in their normal locations (dont mind the screenshot is right at the entrance, its all a work in progress). I decided to avoid making this TOO big of an undertaking I stuck to lottery/timed pops and left out quest/vw/anything else. But anyway, they spawn at lv 119, have the same model but larger, same moves, 5x health (to be honest its still a bit easy so that could use some tweaking also), right now they have no drops as I really dont need low level drops (more on that later).
Once you kill all 3, you talk to the hunt coordinator who advances you to Tier 2, which will start the hunt in N. Gusta, then Tier 3 in Konschtat Highlands, and so on. Same deal with the other starter cities, then when you beat everything you can move onto a hunt coordinator in Jeuno and work from there. Eventually I want to implement fights against all classic lottery/timed/camp-able NMs around Vanadiel.
TL;DR; Im really looking for ideas on what could make it more interesting. Honestly romping through all the zones and having a fight against all the classic NMs was the original goal when I started this project, but one-shotting them got boring pretty quick. So harder fights, goals, rewards are the direction I am leaning. Really this is just for me, as a coding exercise and something fun to do in game, so rewards can be more fun/interesting rather than progression.
Restrictions: "Implement the VW system" is a bit of a bigger undertaking than I am ready for at the moment. This hunt system is actually pretty easy to implement, and though i'm a software dev, deciphering packets and coding all this stuff in lua (aside from gearswap files) are still pretty new to me, so I work with what LandSandBoat already provides for the most part. Also I want to stick to server side only for now. I cant create new items, new models, new monsters etc. I mean I can call Lizzy "Lizzy Prime" but as far as the game code goes she is still the same old Lizzy so I just kept the names as/is. But creating completely new things would require client side dat updates also and I'm not ready for that yet.
