I know similar enhancements have been considered before but I'm still curious about this after the addition of the six random caves and ice queen domain.
I'd like another town in the game, a high DL one.
I mean, we have HMV which arguably has very few things to do besides the shop and ultra stuff.
We have Bandit Town and Terrinyo, which similarly offer only limited range of "services" - food shop that I virtually never use, except for when I wish to store a blink dog corpse in case my dfg pool-sipping session goes south.
Barnabas' store for all I care could have in front of it a huge sign with "everything's bloody expensive, bring potion of invis instead of gold" written on it.
The quests that can be done are all early game type.
After this we have dwarftown for mid-game quests. The shop is nice but there's little else to do there. Altars can be found anywhere else, some NPCs offer one-time gifts for chatting to them and that's it.
What about late game? With the advent of new caves and IQD that I mentioned, as well as somewhat more balanced exp curve that makes it easier to create chars that are lvl ~30 and still have a significant portion of the game ahead of them, there could be some place in the wilderness to cater to that group of PCs.
It could be a city located between gremlin cave and dfg, in the mountains/hills, with some partial derelict road that leads to the tower of eternal flames.
Some back story could be involved with how the tower used to be the greatest building in a once glorious city, now overran by chaos forces. I suppose TB would know best.
The city would only be available starting with lvl 25, much like the pyramid is opened at lvl 13.
Instead of a scroll generated somewhere, there could be an NPC showing up next to the PC, speaking about our famous hero and how he/she's needed in the city because of chaos forces invading it or any other threat that only our brave PC can deal with.
After slaying a bunch of chaos servants and greater chaos servants, led by a chaos warlord, the PC gains access to the Last City.
Something akin to remnants of the High Kings' kingdom, a final refuge for the few remaining noblemen, craftsmen, mages, common people and anything else.
- one mixed shop, one random thematic shop (potions/scrolls/wands/rings etc.)
- a smithy, a healer, a library
- an alchemist, who'd accept the ACW corpse for some interesting rewards other than a PoCC and offer to create potions after that
- training dummies to gain some weapon marks up to lvl 3
- some quest givers with rewards ranging from useful skills to items, all of them class-dependent
- a quartermaster that would buy eternium items from the PC for a higher price (they need the equipment to fight chaos) and sell some as well
- a lord of the land that would reward the PC for bringing corpses of powerful chaotic monsters (trophies and stuff)
- some tie-in to the ring of the high kings, where the PC could fulfill a quest of bringing it to the ruler of the city (preferably after passing the EG)
- maybe AKW could relocate here after the PC has completed his quest, and would offer some remarks about chaos, ultra endings and related things, in a manner similar to the minstrel
- magicians guild? fighters guild? lots of options here
I certainly think the wilderness map could use some filling-in and the game lacks quests and non-combat locations for a high level PC.
Everything could be easily tied with already existing items/artifacts/npcs/locations.
Maybe other players see something entirely different, in which case - post your ideas.