Starfire Revo
Inner.Hell
296
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Posted - 2014.05.29 03:56:00 -
[1] - Quote
Was planning on doing a larger write up of this with pictures and such, but I'll do my best with a text summary. Note that this is just how I envision salvage operations.
Salvage Regions
So when you go to look for loot on planets, I picture something like a much better version of planet exploring from Mass Effect 1. You and your friends start at a staging point, possibly a landing craft. This would be much smaller than an MCC, but carries a limited number of clones and vehicles. It's also the primary point of respawn if you're all killed and allows you to refit.
The maps would be large and feature multiple salvage areas of different sizes. The smallest can be done solo by anyone vaguely competent, with the largest requiring multiple squads to handle. In order to find these, you need to traverse the map looking for them or using long range variants of scanners that are designed to track the large signatures of drones.
With your limited amount of clones and vehicles, you must salvage as much as you can before you run out.
Salvage Sites
So once you've found a site, you'll have to take care of the drones. Due to their nature, the drones have locked the salvage into different size containers. These can be your standard person sized crates or a full on vault with multiple chambers. Once the initial guard drones are dead, you can begin to collect your rewards.
For the small sites, you simply hack open the crate(s) and drive home with your riches. But for the larger sites, you've only just begun. The hacking process is much harder for these and you'll need to fight off drone waves while you're doing it. Sometimes it might be best to just grab what you can and run before you get overwhelmed.
Hacking
The hacking minigame from EVE is a good place to start. If you're doing a small site, it's pretty much the same. Maybe you bring a friend with better hacking skills so you can clear them faster together. For the smallest sites, you can have as many tries as you want. For the slightly harder sites, you get a few tries and then have to break the crate open. This causes some damage to the loot, so you get a slightly worse income for failing.
When you get to the larger sites however, that's when it gets real interesting. Instead of the hacking game being a small grid with a single hacker, you have progressively larger grids with multiple people hacking. The medium sites could have up to 3 hackers and use a life system so once someone's virus is dead, they're out of the hack and lose a life. If all the lives are lost, a self destruct sequence starts and you have to grab what you can and run. While you're hacking, drones are constantly attacking in waves, with bonus waves appearing depending on what is happening with the hack. It's also possible that you could unlock self defence turrets and other benefits during the hack to aid you.
With the larger sites, the entire vault is a giant hacking maze that requires you to unlock each vault section individually. It might even be that groups hacking an entire vault would be extremely difficult to pull off.
Drone Types
The key to making something like this interesting over a long period of time is to have each experience be challenging and unique, so the drones you fight should be heavily varied to match this ideal. Below are a few ideas for drones.
- A standard drone that hovers and fires different heavy weapon types. Is basically the equivalent of a player.
- A heavy drone that counts as a vehicle. Is extremely tough and takes some form of AV to take down it's HAV level health pool. Uses weaponry similar to large turrets.
- A tiny airborn drone that fires sidearm level shots. Fast and and hard to hit, but goes down fast.
- A small drone that skitters around on 4 legs. Aims to jump on players and explode. Makes a distinct noise when approaching players to allow them to react and shoot before it gets too close.
That's all I have for now. I feel like this style of randomized encounters that require different roles would make for fun, repeatable content.
I make videos of EVE and Dust http://www.youtube.com/mrgimbleb
I write about EVE and Dust http://mrgimbleb.blogspot.com
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