Concept DLC: The Trade Routes* Update

[conceptsguy]

Hey guys, I made a forums account just to share this concept I’ve been bubbling up for a year now, hope I can convey my ideas properly here. This is my first ever forum post and write up of this kind, and English is not my native language, although I can boast fluency, I think

“With the mysterious death of billionaire philanthropist Ben Brooks, several professional investors have been in debate on what happens to his portfolio. Due to the absence of an inheritor, millions of dollars’ worth of property and assets have entered the foreclosure market.”*

*Not sure on name or lore yet

So, before I share with you a concept many have likely suggested before, let me waste your time discussing the GTA:O content pipeline. The most recurring phenomenon in updates in GTA:O is recycling content. Reusing interiors and assets like the USS Luxington (Aircraft Carrier) and the Superyacht(s), is common for updates. Every time we get a new property, you can be rest assured that the interior is guaranteed to be featured somewhere. What I’m more fixated on is the reverse, when we’re introduced to a new interior or asset and then, in a future update, get to own it in some capacity.

 

(Superyachts, and just to sell this point: Submarines)

 

Alright, so now my focus is on one little asset we were introduced to fairly recently: Cayo Perico. The reason the Superyachts are so unique is because they provide you with an outdoor-inclusive property, one that is not only entirely your own, but is controlled by you (Yacht Defences). So I believe it’s only natural that the next property that we should be allowed to own is a private island.

“…foreclosed properties include an archipelago scattered in the pacific.”

Like most people, I’m not optimistic when it comes to Rockstar, but this update could be a stone to kill many birds.

As Rockstar likes to make properties “modular” (allowing for excuses to obscene pricing) the island should be purchasable in modules as well. This island can be marketed as a means to purchase a mansion, with full ownership of the exterior as well as the interior. This will satisfy all the players disappointed by the ‘stilt homes’ added in 2016. As the mansion cannot reasonable be larger than a small village, (broke) players can opt in to buying a ‘smaller module’ island. 

This tiny isle can be yours at the low, low cost of….err...$8,000,000? None of the pricing is going to be based off anything apart from my own experience of the game. GTA:O is not known for pricing consistency, but if a superyacht ranges from $6M to roughly $10M, I do not know how to price an island tenfold its size. For now, I’ll stick with $8M.

The mansion compound, included in the base price, is a classic architectural masterpiece. It comes with an outdoor pool, 10 (outdoor) parking spaces for vehicles to use on the island, housing for staff, a nice cliff edge view with a gazebo to enjoy it, AA systems and finally, A helipad, which will be one of your main access points to the island. (Now comes the part that R* will love, optionals). With a little more cash, you can get:

·        5 Extra parking spaces for Personal Helicopters

·        Personal office to tend to businesses off shore*

·        Guest Houses

·        Posts for a security personnel, with an armoury (fends off raids so you don’t have to)

·        2 Extra (Indoor) Garages, 10 spaces each

         o   Which can also get an on-site mechanic

·        Outdoor Shooting range (new sniper added?)

·        Additional AA systems to cover the entire island

·        Personal dock built into the side of a cliff (20 spaces indoor, with one space outdoors)

         o   Which can also get an on-site mechanic

·        Personal zoo, with exotic animals of your liking (I suspect E&E might add in animals)

Don’t like “classic” (Neo-Victorian)? Your mansion can also be built in “contemporary”, “Latin” (like Cayo Perico), and “Persian” (with domed roofs) styles. Roads too bumpy? You can upgrade you backwater infrastructure to brick or asphalt for a better driving experience. Outside the compound is fairly barebones, with your network tower and a private beach. In my perfect vision, the website where you buy this will allow you to select the terrain you want in a grid selector fashion, so you can pay more to have more landmass in each grid.

 

Now, for the wealthy: the array of islands contains less modest properties. You can choose from medium (4-grid) or large (6-grid) islands. With a larger island, you can also purchase:

·        A runway strip for more luxurious travels

        o   Dirt field and shack hangar, includes 5 (outdoor) personal aircraft parking spaces. Can be upgraded to a tarmac runway with REILs, with 20 Extra (indoor) personal aircraft parking spaces

·        A dock (or two, limited to large islands) for public access via sea

         o   Upgradeable – 5 extra (outdoor) boat spaces per dock

·        A party beach, for when the regular beach doesn’t cut it.

·        POIs like a lighthouse, coastal boat racing circuit, a public access auto-shop, a car racing circuit, bowling alley, etc.

(Everything listed so far has been within the bounds of recyclable assets)

For oligarchs with businesses scrutinised by smallminded local authorities, larger islands can also transport entire operations onto the island. (I personally feel that this should be limited to MC Businesses, as they’re the only ‘passive’ businesses in need of a refresh. Going into international waters can also justify increasing the cost of goods produced).

 

Now for the nitty gritty (less organised thoughts):

I was thinking of including guesstimate pricing, but I think that’s better left at the hands of you all, and ultimately, the devs.

This update could add the endgame that it does not currently have that could keep old players like me playing. And personal boats are a highly requested feature, and so are additional hangar spaces. With the mansion, this could cover 3 separate community requests in one swoop and improve other old features like the biker business. Moving the businesses offshore would however involve a paywall of acquiring the club and then the business, and then setting it up and then moving it, but perhaps moving them onto your island with access to farmland could negate the need for resupplying? Seems fair, at least for narcotics. I’m sure paper grows on trees for whatever weirdo still manages a forgery office.  R* could bypass the paywall by allowing newer players to buy the businesses directly, but this would somehow have to tie in with the MC unless the fundamentally change its framework. At least including more paywalls would increase the chances of this concept becoming a reality, right?

The sell missions from the island to mainland could spawn a host of new missions delving into piracy like never before, although using boats and planes are highly uncharacteristic of bikers. Maybe owning corresponding MC businesses could instead cut prices for set up or allow for an easier set up mission. Copying the Tuners update, we could also be allowed to sell to smugglers with a commission, who’ll travel to the island. Paying a commission is better than hiring them like Auto-shop staff, who are instead nerfed by being terrible drivers.

Every 5 minutes, you can initiate a cutscene from within the compound where you drag a selected player to a predatory animal enclosure (lions, tigers, bears, snake pits, crocodiles, piranhas, or sharks) and lock them in. once they respawn (as normal), they are allowed to use weapons even if the island is set to [peaceful/defensive/whatever word they use]

The story side of this update which will provide actually new content is up to R* as well, I just want to own an island. The update could also add a host of new planes and boats, I really want more civilian planes.

Gen9 consoles can easily handle several people in (likely larger) session sitting around in their own islands.

There could be an option to buy and upgrade ambient boats that spawn around the island. Sea Sharks/Blazer Aquas and Squalos+Suntraps/Jetmaxes+Speeders/Toros+Longfins (Price goes up depending on which ones you get, either/or of the ‘+’ spawns depending on location). There could also be ambient land vehicles, but the choices are too vast so you guys can decide.

Calling in land vehicles from mainland or calling land vehicles stored on the island to mainland could be accompanied by a cheeky Cargobob flying off as your vehicle spawns off-screen. No, I don’t know how tunnel spawns would work. Yes, you can shoot it down.

We should be allowed to drive our yachts, (likely gonna be a thing with E&E, along with more yacht spaces if/when sessions get larger), co-anchor them with other superyachts (a superyacht party), and host yacht/island beach parties to promote our nightclub popularity (and include the penthouse party too).

Personal Vehicles on the island that are parked outdoors are indestructible until driven. If you drive out a vehicle from an outdoor spot, your previously active vehicle is returned as normal. No funny business here.

If you call Mors Mutual regarding a car stored on the island and you’re also on the island, it’ll be delivered to one of your docks or the airfield. Whichever is nearest.

A funky feature with the security personnel upgrade could be calling in your personal 3-person security detail to accompany you like Headhunter Bodyguards (with similar accuracy and health). You can also choose to instead request a 4-person air support, where they’ll follow you around in….err…one of the weaponised helicopters. Maybe that’s upgradeable too, more cashgrabs for R*.

Travelling to your island will have two methods. One copies the Cayo Perico method via LSIA. The other will be an option in the interaction menu (or hopefully an improved UI that replaces it) which initiates a “travel to [island name]”, where you have to travel off the shore to the boundaries of the map where engines usually die off, and you’ll get teleported. If you do not manage this in 15 minutes (enough for roleplay, hopefully), you (and your air/sea vehicle and its passengers, if any) are teleported to the island with a cutscene landing (stops people from abusing this too much). If you do manage this, you arrive off coast with your passengers in your vehicle of choice, with a button prompt to land or dock for you. You can ignore the prompt to land or dock yourself, for the sake of roleplayers. If members of your organisation do not make it before you, you are given a ‘waiting’ message until the timer runs out. During this timer, no random missions can interrupt your travels (NPCs asking for aid, business raids).

Whether or not small islands can have docks and airports is up for discussion, they’re most probably not too small for them. Probably better to allow it. Perhaps there could be grid options for smaller landmasses positioned so that you can own an archipelago of smaller islands and have shallow walkable+boatable waters in between. Could allow for cool off roading or optional bridges, and locations like the airport could be on separate islands from the compound. (at least one dock has to be connected to the compound by land).

Island climates can also be optional, like arid or swampy islands instead of the tropical Cayo. Cold climate islands would be weird for your narcotics, although greenhouse strips can work too. Would be funny if they were destructible and easily drive-through-able, with no consequences.

If you own an active bunker, 10 units of stock (out of 100, maximum) can be supplied to your island security instead of paying for gear restocking after raids. If they are out of gear stock, they are unable to defend it alone and will ask for help. A big timer here will allow you to travel at your own pace. As the island is offshore, maybe in place of police raids you can have militarised DEA raids.

Maybe island can has more land?

 

 

This should be a thread of its own, but a future update can be coupled with this DLC where players raid your base in a complete rip-off of Cayo Perico. Player names are hidden unless both parties begin beforehand. Value of loot depends on security investments and size of island, and how successful you are at raiding (another arbitrary levelling system, anyone?). You can only be raided once per offline period. You lose a portion of business stocks and security gear. If your business(operation?) stocks meet the criteria for NPC raids, there is an arbitrarily low chance that a player raids you while you are online (this can be toggled to ‘always possible’ if you’re looking for a fight). You can intervene when this happens, but there should be some balancing to make it fair to both sides (i.e., if you’re blasting the island with a hydra, you can also kill your own security or damage your own operational farms. Maybe the players will not render if you’re airborne and they’re still undetected). To differentiate from Cayo, this could be a completely different style of heist with minimum prep-work (less than 5) where you compete with another group of raider(s) (could be a 1v4 if you’re unlucky AND don’t have friends) to rob the island first and escape. Successfully killing each raider will reward you with money proportional to how successful of a raider they are (or something reasonable). You can also do practice runs on friend’s islands with no reward. I really should make another thread. This would make for even better endgame content if we get dedicated anticheat and an actually functional stealth mechanic (see also: any modern-ish Ubisoft game). Give us crouching dammit. Prone/crawl too, while you’re at it. I’ve seen Ron crawl out from under Trevor’s truck, I know it’s possible.

 

Thanks for reading to any that have, whether or not you read all of it. There really is a lot of jargon up there, but hopefully good ideas too. If R* implements this after reading this, I only ask that going forward, you are more transparent and communicative with development. Even if only for immediate updates, even if only a little bit.  That will be enough for me.

[pictures have been fixed]

Edited January 10, 2022 by conceptsguy
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[Jammsbro]

 

There is literally a stickied topic for this.

[Malibu Club]

Before this gets locked, I'd like to say that it'd be awesome to have my own drug island that's twice the size of Cayo Perico. I'd go to literal war with El Rubio and send him to El Hellio with my armada.

[Robin1996ify]

TLDR 

 

No thanks, we want buyable beachside house in Chumash. 

 

 

or better yet...

 

 

Anything new and massive for Red Dead Online

[conceptsguy]

21 hours ago, Jammsbro said:

 

There is literally a stickied topic for this.

ah sh*t thanks, I'm new here evidently

19 hours ago, Robin1996ify said:

TLDR 

 

No thanks, we want buyable beachside house in Chumash. 

 

 

or better yet...

 

 

Anything new and massive for Red Dead Online

with no tangible ownership of the exterior. Houses along the pacific bluffs should definitely be purchaseable and high end, but it has nothing to do with mansions. funnily enough, i have an RDO concept I'm organising at the moment

[RyuNova]

No offence but this is better written than most posts on here, is detailed and well-thought-out. How about instead of rushing to treat stuff like this as a mod position audition people let the actual Mods do their jobs instead?

 

I would suggest some formatting, better paragraphs and some pictures and I don't see why the Mods would close it.

Edited January 13, 2022 by RyuNova

[conceptsguy]

5 hours ago, RyuNova said:

No offence but this is better written than most posts on here, is detailed and well-thought-out. How about instead of rushing to treat stuff like this as a mod position audition people let the actual Mods do their jobs instead?

 

I would suggest some formatting, better paragraphs and some pictures and I don't see why the Mods would close it.

thanks man. I'm in the process of organising everything I jotted down at the bottom half, and also making a cover art for it. stumped for the art because the name isn't sitting write with me. I want the finished piece to read like half a newswire post and half a behind-the-scenes post explaining the thought process.

[WrothJet6063]

I'd love for something like this, I'm just worried it would be a massive introduction to the world, and not sure how much it would decrease performance. 

Not the exact same, but sticking to the idea of a water based dlc, adding another open property.