I would love to see Legends Viewer in game!!
I've been in discord, reddit and steam forums and not the only person to say this. Exporting the world as a xml file to then import into Legends Viewer was a big part of the gameplay we miss.
It helped connect the dots of events, to tell a story, to give the world itself more meaning. It gave goals for me, one I remember was to build a bridge to connect two islands to allow goblins on one side invade these jerk elves on a tiny island that had killed off the small amount of dwarves that were on their island. Without knowing that story, I wouldn't have cared todo that. Without knowing these stories and easily connecting the dots across a map through time, I can't make sense of the worlds history and it doesn't matter to me.
A few, myself included, say that keeping a persistent world isn't as important or fun, without Legends Viewer.
I hope that part is understandable as I'm sure it's been said a lot before. What I doubt has been said much is incorporating Legends View In game.
What's wrong with Legends Viewer and what should it become? Legends Viewer is this blinding white app that is basically a non-modern web page housed in one of those ancient Microsoft Help CHM applications that doesn't respect the users dark mode preferences. It should be just a web page at this point. I would absolutely love if it was dynamic and accessed my save game whenever the trader arrived to tell me news, so I could see this news on the map and link the information in my brain to my previous stories learned from Legends, all while still remaining in Fortress Mode. I don't know if something like that was planned, is planned or even possible.
So why not incorporate it into the game. The game renders the map. It links the events beautifully. It shows a chronological timeline top to bottom. What's needed is to
- scrub the timeline, ala some horizontal slider, similar to the bottom of a youtube video.
- show a map that's able to be enhanced & resized
- render these events on the map highlighting each one for a bit if it's not clear where the event occurred
- allow easy filtering all events for any event category and make it easy to go back to the previous view
Of course there's more that Legends Viewer does. I feel just the MVP to get the end result of telling a story and bettering the players connection to the world could be done.
One MASSIVE benefit of this is Legends mode can be incorporated into world gen. See world gen sort of does a bit of those bullets above. It has a scrolling text box of events on one side and you see things happen on the right. The issue is not being able to interact with the map or the stories being told during world gen. Players could find themselves lost in this Legends Viewer that's built into the game which they play with the moment world gen starts and not even realize that world gen is finished.
