Natural Selection: DNA (A Possible Alternative)
SparkOfLife
Join Date: 2013-04-05 Member: 184655Members
Join Date: 2013-04-05 Member: 184655Members
I have watched the latest work of the talented and well known director, Ridley Scott. In his latest movie, Prometheus, a prequel of the film 'ALIEN', scientists travel to a distant solar system to find the origins of humanity. But all they find is a 2000 year old mystery.
As they go on, more and more creepy extraterrestrials pop up, with features both familiar and alien. And this is what I am all about right now. Designing creepier and more 'alien' aliens, along with more badass marines, following the ideas of the 'Colonial Marines', or rather, create an entirely new, class based set of human soldiers.
ALIENS:
-Introduction: Now, I don't want to make this game exactly like an ALIENS movie, just to replace the horrible 'ALIENS: Colonial Marines', but rather make a more mature, scarier and darker experience. Due to my designs (which I will upload at a later date), some of the gameplay in NS2 will have to change, and therefore new maps, with new artwork needs to be done, and I will look into that another time. But here are my first few ideas for the alien race.
-All Big Things have Small Beginnings: The Serpent
This will probably work as a skulk replacement. Just like the skulk, the Serpent has a powerful bite. But also, it has a special 'Launch' ability, which will launch the Serpent towards a human target, and if it is in range, the human will catch it mid air and cause a quicktime event. Either sine will have to mash spacebar to win. Whoever manages to press 'space' the most in a time span of 15 seconds. If the human wins, he will throw the Serpent away and pull up his rifle, while the Serpent will suffer from slowed down movement. If the Serpent wins it will slip out of the humans hands and thrust itself down the victims throat. This is an instant kill. The Serpent will then use the body as a host to cocoon itself. As a result, the upper chest will burst and the cocoon will be sticking out of the dead body. This is to show human players which dead allies pose a threat and which don't. After the cocoon the next stage of alien starts becoming a problem.
-A Species Evolved: The Hugger
Much a work in progress. I am missing an idea for a simple attack, but I know it's special attack: By pressing 'E' it's large, slightly transparent 'wings', open up and reveal a mouth, type thing. This is an extremely vulnerable spot, but if the Hugger is close enough it can 'embrace' the human with its wings and subsequently kill the victim. The Hugger lays an egg in the human and dies, but stays wrapped around the dead body, for the other human players to spot the threat. This is the dawn of the final stage of the alien life cycle.
-The Beginning of the End: The Devourer
Work in progress. Basically the most powerful alien evolution. Big, deals a ton of damage and has a big health pool.
-There are a couple of other evolutions, including a suicidal, acid spewing slug and a crab like creature, possessing skills similar to the Gorge. These Designs are coming soon.
MARINES:
-Introduction: I love the Colonial marines, although I think that they are a little too tough and some of their equipment seems outdated, considering this is quite far into the future. I have thought of a 4 class system of marines, each having their own set of weapons and skills. In effect, I had to design new character models and new weapons.
-Classes:
-Guns For Hire:The Mercenary
The Mercenary is the powerful backbone of the advancing human forces. He carries the powerful assault rifles along with a slow-firing, high damage secondary revolver. He has a reasonable health pool, with the most armor out of all the classes. As a special ability, he can pull down his helmet visor (a lot like the one in MoH: Warfighter, when you play as the Demolition class) and a sort of blue glowing HUD comes up. The visor paints a circle around an enemy inside 10 m and in the players vision. The visor also shows the ammo count. To balance the automated spotting of the enemies, the field of vision will be affected/reduced, creating blind spots and making the player slightly vulnerable.
-Decontamination through Fire: The Biochemist
The Biochemist should never go missing when you want to storm an alien position. Being equipped with the deadliest close range, large area of effect weaponry you can get: a flamethrower as a primary weapon and an electrically alien-frying shock weapon as a secondary. The Biochemist has about the same amount of health as the Mercenary, but is missing any kind of armor, because he is wearing a decontamination suit. This is also his special ability, because he can pull down his gas mask by pressing 'E', which slightly reduces the FOV, but makes him immune to any kinds of noxious gases. That can be extremely useful when trying to punch through strong alien defense systems.
-Building Better Worlds: The Engineer
The Engineer is essential to any base, defense plan and power/resource supply. The Engineer carries a punchy, but slow firing pump-action shotgun as a primary weapon and a weak, rapid firing secondary pistol. He has the same amount of health as the Biochemist, but also has some armor, although not as much as the Mercenary. His special ability is (of course) building and repairing human structures. By pressing 'E' he pulls down facial protective gear, a simple piece of thickened glass, which covers the whole face, similar to what regular welders use nowadays. This does not affect the FOV. It is automatically pulled down when the welder is used and put back up when you switch to another weapon. This protective gear can also absorb some of the corrosion damage some of the acid spewing aliens can cause. To balance that, the gear creates some reflections which can cause distraction. The Engineer can build turrets and manned MG's himself, but for other structures he needs instructions from his commander.
-Hippocratic Oath: The Medic
Very much a work in progress. I still couldn't find the right design and special ability and how he heals people.
-Weapons
-I will add this section later.
Please tell me what you think. Criticism and ideas are most welcome.
Also, I am sorry for the re-post, I originally posted this on Fan-Fiction, but then I realised that it fits better into the ideas and suggestions section.
As they go on, more and more creepy extraterrestrials pop up, with features both familiar and alien. And this is what I am all about right now. Designing creepier and more 'alien' aliens, along with more badass marines, following the ideas of the 'Colonial Marines', or rather, create an entirely new, class based set of human soldiers.
ALIENS:
-Introduction: Now, I don't want to make this game exactly like an ALIENS movie, just to replace the horrible 'ALIENS: Colonial Marines', but rather make a more mature, scarier and darker experience. Due to my designs (which I will upload at a later date), some of the gameplay in NS2 will have to change, and therefore new maps, with new artwork needs to be done, and I will look into that another time. But here are my first few ideas for the alien race.
-All Big Things have Small Beginnings: The Serpent
This will probably work as a skulk replacement. Just like the skulk, the Serpent has a powerful bite. But also, it has a special 'Launch' ability, which will launch the Serpent towards a human target, and if it is in range, the human will catch it mid air and cause a quicktime event. Either sine will have to mash spacebar to win. Whoever manages to press 'space' the most in a time span of 15 seconds. If the human wins, he will throw the Serpent away and pull up his rifle, while the Serpent will suffer from slowed down movement. If the Serpent wins it will slip out of the humans hands and thrust itself down the victims throat. This is an instant kill. The Serpent will then use the body as a host to cocoon itself. As a result, the upper chest will burst and the cocoon will be sticking out of the dead body. This is to show human players which dead allies pose a threat and which don't. After the cocoon the next stage of alien starts becoming a problem.
-A Species Evolved: The Hugger
Much a work in progress. I am missing an idea for a simple attack, but I know it's special attack: By pressing 'E' it's large, slightly transparent 'wings', open up and reveal a mouth, type thing. This is an extremely vulnerable spot, but if the Hugger is close enough it can 'embrace' the human with its wings and subsequently kill the victim. The Hugger lays an egg in the human and dies, but stays wrapped around the dead body, for the other human players to spot the threat. This is the dawn of the final stage of the alien life cycle.
-The Beginning of the End: The Devourer
Work in progress. Basically the most powerful alien evolution. Big, deals a ton of damage and has a big health pool.
-There are a couple of other evolutions, including a suicidal, acid spewing slug and a crab like creature, possessing skills similar to the Gorge. These Designs are coming soon.
MARINES:
-Introduction: I love the Colonial marines, although I think that they are a little too tough and some of their equipment seems outdated, considering this is quite far into the future. I have thought of a 4 class system of marines, each having their own set of weapons and skills. In effect, I had to design new character models and new weapons.
-Classes:
-Guns For Hire:The Mercenary
The Mercenary is the powerful backbone of the advancing human forces. He carries the powerful assault rifles along with a slow-firing, high damage secondary revolver. He has a reasonable health pool, with the most armor out of all the classes. As a special ability, he can pull down his helmet visor (a lot like the one in MoH: Warfighter, when you play as the Demolition class) and a sort of blue glowing HUD comes up. The visor paints a circle around an enemy inside 10 m and in the players vision. The visor also shows the ammo count. To balance the automated spotting of the enemies, the field of vision will be affected/reduced, creating blind spots and making the player slightly vulnerable.
-Decontamination through Fire: The Biochemist
The Biochemist should never go missing when you want to storm an alien position. Being equipped with the deadliest close range, large area of effect weaponry you can get: a flamethrower as a primary weapon and an electrically alien-frying shock weapon as a secondary. The Biochemist has about the same amount of health as the Mercenary, but is missing any kind of armor, because he is wearing a decontamination suit. This is also his special ability, because he can pull down his gas mask by pressing 'E', which slightly reduces the FOV, but makes him immune to any kinds of noxious gases. That can be extremely useful when trying to punch through strong alien defense systems.
-Building Better Worlds: The Engineer
The Engineer is essential to any base, defense plan and power/resource supply. The Engineer carries a punchy, but slow firing pump-action shotgun as a primary weapon and a weak, rapid firing secondary pistol. He has the same amount of health as the Biochemist, but also has some armor, although not as much as the Mercenary. His special ability is (of course) building and repairing human structures. By pressing 'E' he pulls down facial protective gear, a simple piece of thickened glass, which covers the whole face, similar to what regular welders use nowadays. This does not affect the FOV. It is automatically pulled down when the welder is used and put back up when you switch to another weapon. This protective gear can also absorb some of the corrosion damage some of the acid spewing aliens can cause. To balance that, the gear creates some reflections which can cause distraction. The Engineer can build turrets and manned MG's himself, but for other structures he needs instructions from his commander.
-Hippocratic Oath: The Medic
Very much a work in progress. I still couldn't find the right design and special ability and how he heals people.
-Weapons
-I will add this section later.
Please tell me what you think. Criticism and ideas are most welcome.
Also, I am sorry for the re-post, I originally posted this on Fan-Fiction, but then I realised that it fits better into the ideas and suggestions section.
Comments
Who cares if it's a copy of Aliens? Natural Selection 2 is pretty much the official game (unlike A:CM).
I didn't know how to balance a one hit kill, special ability. The only thing that came into my mind was a quicktime event, even though I'm not the greatest fan of them either.
As for the idea, there is no way this will be done by UWe, it has a chance as a mod but it's a very VERY ambitious idea so only a highly organised (or highly paid hah) modding team would be able to create it in a reasonable amount of time (less than 8 years).
I guess you have a point. The mod probably is a little too ambitious, but even if I have a team of modders I won't need up to 8 years to complete this task. Most of the textures and the tools are already given to me by the developer.
I'm sorry you didn't like the movie, but I enjoyed it and you don't have to subscribe to the mod, which won't even have anything to do with the movie anyway. Thank you, but no thank you.
Now, I admit I've never watched any of the Aliens movies, nor have I ever played any of the games. So I'm kind of shooting in the dark here. But here's a few suggestions for a better balance. Instead of the marine having a chance to defend after being hit, how about better detection beforehand. Louder movement noises is one possibility (though I don't know how loud you can make a snake). Having the alien scream loudly before/during the attack could work as well. Possibly add a charge time. Maybe have a small animation of the struggle, though the alien would win after the animation, where a team mate can shoot the alien off similar to the way several special infected work in L4D(2).
Another note is that the alien ends up cocooning in marine corpses after killing them. The biggest problem here is that if marines travel together (like they should in NS2), they would simply destroy the cocoons easily. If this is intentional, it could be an effective, though very punishing, way of limiting alien advancement early on. One or two cocoons would eventually survive, and more following those. But every lone wolf on the marine side is another potential alien upgrade in the early game.
Thanks for the constructive criticism. There are some very good ideas in this and I like it. Coming back on the 'very punishing' bit. Yes, you are right, and it is intentional, but I didn't want to make the whole alien advancement rely on some alien cocooning in a human body. There will be structures, offering other alien evolution trees. They will be more effective in their first stage than the Serpent, but less effective in their final stages compared to the Devourer. Another tree I have worked on is the acid tree: the Serpent will enter a certain structure, which then mutates it to a slug, with a big, unstable sack of acid on its back. When it does a regular attack it needs to shoot out a long, snake like fang, which is quite vulnerable. The human player should try to shoot that instead of the big sack of acid, to avoid the sack to explode and spray acid every where. The slug can enter the structure again to evolve to a crab like creature, with similar traits to the Gorge, spraying a fog of acid to heal wounded allies and create area denial for human soldiers and spraying a normal acid jet for a direct impact on a marine.
I'm still thinking about a third, more long range alien evolution tree.