It's quite common to discover the same POI multiple times, sometimes even on the same planet. Now, this is perfectly understandable. There are a lot of planets and only a limited number of POIs, and each POI means quite a lot of development and design work. You can't really make them in the numbers that would guarantee non-repeatability. But how about doing something simpler: Add variants for each POI. No, not complete overhauls or re-designs. Much simpler. Just some subtle changes. Start with the existing POI, and move the enemy spawners a bit. Place the interior turrets on slightly different locations. Block a corridor in some places while opening a wall somewhere else, thus changing the path the player takes through the dungeon. Otherwise, keep it exactly the same including the name of the POI! Because the changes would be very small you also keep the design work needed small. When the player discovers this kind of POI, he can't be sure which variant he's facing. That throws him a bit off balance and makes him more wary, adding to the replayability. Even if the player is familiar with all the variants he still needs to discover which variant this particular one is, and even then his memory might play some tricks and things get mixed up because everything else would look and feel the same except those few subtle differences that all may kill him. The necessary game support for this would be to adjust the random spawning so that it's aware of variants. That is, you could set a group of POI blueprints to all be a specific POI. When the game spawns such a POI it would then additionally pick one of the variants randomly and put it there. E.g. they'd all be called "Abandoned Mine" but you could get "Abandoned Mine A", "Abandoned Mine B", etc. When the player sees it the HUD would show naturally just "Abandoned Mine" as it's essential that the player must not be able to differentiate between the variants in any other way except by exploring the place. I'm pretty sure Mr. Vermillion would be evil enough to make great use of this possibility to increase fun...
That's one of the things where the only real answer is: be the change you wanna see. Nothing is stopping you from doing exactly that right now. And making clever use of the blueprint group names what you're asking for is already implemented and semi-easily doable. Its just that someone would actually need to slightly overhaul the POIs and that takes a lot of time, we're talking potentially a few hundred "new" POIs. Best idea would be to grab the first batch of a few dozen POIs, adapt them and them provide them here, maybe other people will jump on the bandwaggon.
Thanks! I didn't know there already was support for this... Uhm... I have no idea how POIs are added to the game... I assume that will be a mod. Any pointers to a How-To or other info?
