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Little bit different of a post with this one.  As always, the standard game dev disclaimer applies but in this case a bit more so as almost none of this exists so far.  Instead I want to offer my thinking on treasure chests, something we'll be adding soonTM.  The purpose of this log will be to get out there some ideas and work through their strengths and weaknesses in a more publicly available way.

To start, let's get out of the way what a treasure chest is for us.  Well, as expected, there isn't too much to it in basic concept.  Somewhere in the dungeon a chest is spawned, the player finds it, opens it and gets rewarded.  Simple, which alone, might be an adequate but there are plenty of little deviations from the standard implementation that are worth exploring.  So let's do so.

First, as already somewhat documented, I love me some Diablo (DII:R hype!!) and of course in that game rarity is a big part of items.  Rarity is also important to us in Not Actually A DOS Game so I find that it rolls over to chests somewhat nicely.  To explore how that would look here, the idea would be that each chest that spawns rolls a weighted random rarity which gets reflected in its color, as the items already do, and presumably effects their rewards and such.  This too is pretty straight forward and I do like the idea of being able to have different loot pools attached to each rarity.  This gives us a bit finer control over the way particular items are disseminated - which can be helpful in the long run.  Perhaps something like Scrolls (assuming we add them) could be dropped with more frequency in higher tiers of chest but not at all in lower ones.  We could also bias higher rarity chests to drop higher rarity items and more gold, naturally making them more valuable.  Again, this approach seems quite helpful in the control it gives us.

All in all, I don't see the chest rarity portion as too controversial design wise.  The utility we get for cost is really low.  I don't see much lost by adding rarities to the chests and hopefully if we can structure the rewards properly, coming across a Legendary or Ultimate chest should be a rather exciting affair.  By the same token, we need a way to make Common chests, the baseline, rewarding enough that it isn't a let down when you get one of those instead of a higher one.

On to what needs more debate.  I'm not content to just have treasure chests fountain loot, as nice as that can be in some games.  On a philosophical level, why do many ARPG chests make any sense?  Often in Diablo 3/Wolcen/Torchlight you stumble across one in your monster killing journey, click it, and get rewarded.  However, I'd ask rewarded for what?  Defeating an enemy, even a simple one, has the slightest bit of challenge, while clicking a chest has essentially zero.  In my estimation, this makes the chests seem uneventful or at least less significant as they aren't actually rewarding anything and are just free stuff.  There is more that can be done with this feature so we should, as always, try and wring everything we can out of it.

As I think about it, the problem I described in ARPGs is in no way present in Sea of Thieves.  What I like from that game is that there is serious weight to the whole way chests are dealt with.  It isn't see chest, get reward.  The more you collect, the higher the stakes become.  It just so turns out this is already one of our key values in designing our dungeon.  We want the player to be faced with the question of do they go deeper for better rewards or do they back out with what they have already collected.  Amplifying this question is the issue that dungeon exits are not on every floor.  The player then has to repeatedly choose to go further or take the exits that they do find.  Thus, the majority of the choice environment in Sea of Thieves is present in our situation.  Do you keep on adventuring and risk getting raided by others or do you make a break for home to cash in your rewards?  Adopting some form of Sea of Thieves chest system would fit excellently with our existing thinking.

That in mind, the pitch is that most of the chests you collect in the dungeon are not opened but instead added to the inventory to be unlocked only upon leaving the dungeon and returning to base.  I as a programmer/designer/artist/whatever I actually am, am totally fine with "borrowing" an existing idea.  However, my current philosophy is that if we are going to take what already exists we should at least try and do something more than it does in its previous state.  That is no different here.  As such let's consider Sea of Thieves general chest turn in system as a starting point with some changes to the chest "economy."  Common chests could be exempt from the requirement of bringing them back to the base, allowing them to be opened immediately.  This could let them directly contribute to the longevity of the run by yielding Food and other restoratives.  Uncommon chests and up would be subject to the turn in system and would have to be unlocked with a key.  These keys would be the same as the ones found in the dungeon to unlock doors or other important functions.

This presents the player with another choice.  Do they assist their run by using the keys in the dungeon, or save them to claim their rewards once back in base?  What I like here is that it provides another method of playing the game.  The majority of your time will be spent trying to get deeper into the dungeon but if you've built up a glut of chests it may be necessary to do "key runs."  This gives the same game content a different shade as you focus on other aspects of it.  I'd hope this would increase the variety of the main meat of the game at the same time serving as a slight improvement over the Sea of Thieves formula.

At this moment I don't have many questions about the key dynamic that can't be solved with proper tuning.  We would need to ensure that keys are sufficiently rare that a choice between use types is created but not impossibly rare that you'd forgo using them in the dungeon because the chest rewards are more desired.  I'm not totally sure how to speculate on the right balance without it being simply that, speculation.  But at the moment it seems to be purely a numbers game and those are quite easy to tune.

My main worry is that, as it is described above, we've introduced a special rule that has to be known about and kept in mind for the player.  This is because not all chests are treated equally.  The understanding that Common chests, and any rarity above that, despite looking exactly the same, are handled differently adds another layer of obfuscation, a sort of thing I am keen on trying to limit as much as possible.  All in all though, it is nothing for us to add another bullet point in the help screen or otherwise inform the player of the behavior.

So in closing, I'd like to say one more time that almost no work has been done on chests at all.  A sprite exists for them but only because we needed one for the player stash.  It is also possible for us to add different sorts of items to the inventory so a new tab for chests is quite simple but beyond that there has been no steps taken towards anything we've talked about.  Everything said is out thinking, and nothing else.  That said, this thinking will guide our steps forward but it is entirely possible we discover that the whole shebang is nonsense and pivot away.

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