Story Based Ns?
voulge
Join Date: 2005-07-20 Member: 56337Members
Join Date: 2005-07-20 Member: 56337Members
<div class="IPBDescription">would and could it work?</div> Hello all,
As Natural Selection is a Sci-Fi tactical FPS genre game, do you think that NS would benefeit from story based/objective (from story) based play?
My vision of such gameplay mainly came from Unreal Tournament 2004's gamemode called "assault?" where a scenario was given, and one team had to defend parts of the scenario whilst the other needed to attack.
In plain speak, do you think that if NS gameplay were given a scenario of where for example: the aliens had taken over a ship.
Where the objective of regular NS is simply to 'exterminate' either the alien species or the human species, would it benefeit the game if the alien 'biomass' had taken controll of the ship/station and had access to all doors/facilities. This kind of fits in with the story line, where the biomass has taken controll, and it's minions are the Kharaa. In such a circumstance, the commander would need to take controll of the ship step by agonising step. In such a case, welding for example would be much more important, and the possibility of an 'alien commander' could be credible, as the 'AComm" could take shut off certain parts/abilities of the ship, for example: flood a room with water/create a vaccum in the room, suffocating all marines inside.
The comm would need to send out more welding parties, to open up parts of the ship for the comms controll. I think this would be quite cool, and could add a greater teamwork play, whilst slowing down the gameplay, prolonging your experience.
Another possible example is much like regular NS, that the Kharaa have been detected in a part of the ship, and the Frontiersmen have been sent in to 'deal with it'. What they did not anticipate however, is that the biomass has found a way to 'comandeer the ship' and has altered the course. The ship is now headed for a place that the Frontiersmen would preferr not to go (perhaps the sun, lol) or some other inhospitable place, and the Frontiersmen must work quickly to correct this problem. (include timelimit before crash/core meltdown/etc). The problem however lies in that there are three locations, each are required to re-comandeer the ship/station. The biomass has already set up in one position, and has easy access to another (vents/cracks). The hive is no-where near these points.
If the Frontiersmen are to effectively stop the ship/station from imminent destruction, they must weld/activate all three points, hten move on to exterminate the hive.
This mode could either be integrated with NS, or become a complete different mode (like CO, but bigger).
I think it would be more practical (for the scenario) that at the start, if the Kharaa for example are on the defence, they start as low level life-forms with low level-upgrades. As the marines advance through the station/ship, the kharaa develop the need for more abilites/lifeforms, and advance throgh the motions, making it harder for the marines to reach each successive point.
Coments would be good ty <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
As Natural Selection is a Sci-Fi tactical FPS genre game, do you think that NS would benefeit from story based/objective (from story) based play?
My vision of such gameplay mainly came from Unreal Tournament 2004's gamemode called "assault?" where a scenario was given, and one team had to defend parts of the scenario whilst the other needed to attack.
In plain speak, do you think that if NS gameplay were given a scenario of where for example: the aliens had taken over a ship.
Where the objective of regular NS is simply to 'exterminate' either the alien species or the human species, would it benefeit the game if the alien 'biomass' had taken controll of the ship/station and had access to all doors/facilities. This kind of fits in with the story line, where the biomass has taken controll, and it's minions are the Kharaa. In such a circumstance, the commander would need to take controll of the ship step by agonising step. In such a case, welding for example would be much more important, and the possibility of an 'alien commander' could be credible, as the 'AComm" could take shut off certain parts/abilities of the ship, for example: flood a room with water/create a vaccum in the room, suffocating all marines inside.
The comm would need to send out more welding parties, to open up parts of the ship for the comms controll. I think this would be quite cool, and could add a greater teamwork play, whilst slowing down the gameplay, prolonging your experience.
Another possible example is much like regular NS, that the Kharaa have been detected in a part of the ship, and the Frontiersmen have been sent in to 'deal with it'. What they did not anticipate however, is that the biomass has found a way to 'comandeer the ship' and has altered the course. The ship is now headed for a place that the Frontiersmen would preferr not to go (perhaps the sun, lol) or some other inhospitable place, and the Frontiersmen must work quickly to correct this problem. (include timelimit before crash/core meltdown/etc). The problem however lies in that there are three locations, each are required to re-comandeer the ship/station. The biomass has already set up in one position, and has easy access to another (vents/cracks). The hive is no-where near these points.
If the Frontiersmen are to effectively stop the ship/station from imminent destruction, they must weld/activate all three points, hten move on to exterminate the hive.
This mode could either be integrated with NS, or become a complete different mode (like CO, but bigger).
I think it would be more practical (for the scenario) that at the start, if the Kharaa for example are on the defence, they start as low level life-forms with low level-upgrades. As the marines advance through the station/ship, the kharaa develop the need for more abilites/lifeforms, and advance throgh the motions, making it harder for the marines to reach each successive point.
Coments would be good ty <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Comments
But I would like to see some sort of singleplayer NS with a good story (somethng close to halo2?).
But what I would like for NS:S is to see some extra mapping entities to set up <i>Dustbowl</i> type scenarios, that is to say defence maps (Marine defence and Alien defence). For this I guess you'd also need placeable buildings with built and unbuild toggles (possibly with an HP value -either points or percentage) and a toggle for the Hive entity: 'Starting_Hive 1' (for the mappers, not the players!). You could have a spawncounter, i.e. each team has a limited amount of spawns. Or you could even have custom entities that unlock higher lifeforms. Native in-built turrets that must be welded for use (either to fix them or to initiate their power supply from another location in the map).
- You could really go far with a mixture of some of these changes -
The original idea for NS was Marines boarding an infested ship (and rescuing 'cocooned' hostages). In Source you could take this a step further, both in terms of teamplay and immersion. Imagine gameplay where half of your team have to hold the turret room while your more offensive players are sent out to reach the generator where they must weld the power supply to the turrets which has been intelligently sabotaged by the Aliens.
<i>It looks like your squad is on the brink of being overrun by the Aliens when out of nowhere the in-built turrets raise from their housings and turn the room into a deathtrap for Aliens. Now your team can regroup, redistribute weaponry and move up to the next chokepoint. But the veteran standing next to you is looking a bit apprehensive, because he knows that the Aliens now have access to Lerks, Gorges and their first chamber...
But this time you're on the offense, as welding that generator back on just opened a door. The door to a second Hive! Now you have to get past the chokepoint and into the Alien Hive before it gets built. When you get there there are already two Lerks on the scene. One's in the shadows sporing from the somewhere up in the rafters, and the other is divebombing to finish of you teammates. But you chose an Armour upgrade so you'll be OK, for now.</i>
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<i>I'd see it as an improved combat version, though you could do area capping like the res hold in NS:Territories. The Marines upgrades could be done a number of ways:</i>
<b>Res pool</b>
Before the start of the round the Marines all agree on what combination of weapons and items they're going to have on the field. Maybe at the first checkpoint they could afford a shotgun, a mine pack and two welders. Maybe it would be better to buy an Armoury for the turret room. As a player you'll put yourself up as a candidate for randomly receiving items once the round has begun. You'll see a list of choices:<ul><li>No preference (press the Enter key)</li><li>Welder</li><li>Minepack</li><li>Shotgun</li></ul>You put yourself down for welder because you like luring in skulkbait by holding out the welder and then switching to pistol when they're close enough to pwn them H4RDC0R3, so you pick Welder. The next menu shows that you and another player are the only two who joined the welder queue, so it'll either be him or you that starts with it.
The round begins, and you've got the welder, so you know that you'll need to the Generator room. Either that, or you can drop the welder for someone else to pick up, because you're better in defence than attack. But you choose to keep it and you're wondering what you do next when:
<span style='color:white'>"SG BSQ"</span> flashes up on your screen and you ask what it means. Someone tells you it means that guy started with the Shotgun and he's gonna be with the Base defence SQuad. You remember reading this in the tutorial or something, and you decide to follow suit, typing:
<span style='color:white'>"asq. I have the welder"</span>, and you head down the corridor to your right to join the rest of the assault squad.
Unfortunately your teammates don't guard you very well and get drawn in to an ambush leaving you at the back of your squad. You got taken out from seemingly nowhere and now the welder will lie on the floor for the next 5 seconds and then be assigned to the next respawning player queued up to receive it. Your guys are all typing: "WTH?" as they realised the welder is gonna have to be brought back to where they are. They're asking themselves:
Is it best to stay there in force to take down skulks from an advanced position and hope that the welder guy doesn't get intercepted?
Or is it best to send back a runner to escort the Welder safely back up?
<b>RFK</b>
Similar to Combat but with a few modifications. As you do damage you build up your res bar to gain a res point. When you get a res point you can either hang on to it or pool it for your team so that it can be used for medpacks or saved for team spending on upgrades at the next checkpoint. If you hang on to your points you can buy a shotgun or mines when you have enough, but when you die the shotgun will be added to the shotguns given out to those in the shotgun queue.
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I think it'd be good, anyway <!--emo&::marine::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/marine.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='marine.gif' /><!--endemo-->
possibly that as you kill lifeforms, you acquire 'res' and 'points'. The res is for indivual use (buying shotguns/ammoresup/medresup/hmg/armourups/wpnsupsetc) and the points are to be used ONLY for the team's use. The team must pool a certain amount to 'unlock' the ability to use your 'res' points for indiviual use. Although this means that some people will be without a Grenade Launcher/silence upgrade, as the team did not have a consensus on that, it means that the team takes responsibility for their movements, and the mode of play is also down to the team.
Pros:
- Develops team cohesion (as team must select upgrades)
- team follows pre-planned/'as it comes tactics', as you 'unlock' your upgrades
- Individual purchase of upgrades
- Quicker CO like gameplay (good for a quikki)
Negs:
- When team decides to 'unlock' cloak... (use imagination)...
- Team must work quickly to effectivly 'unlock' traits. Arguing may incurr, resulting in mic spamming/txtspam. / if team does not act quickly, team looses badly. Although this may be bad, it will force people to converse more effectivly, and for people who WANT to win, will make you work harder for your goal, however, if people DONT want to win, but just WHINGE, you just get more mic/txtspam.
- Restrictive 'unlocking' (refer to point 1 NEG).
- upgrade/res point can not be spent before a certain key point is reached (eg an armory - not the normal ingame one but a room full of weapons/resupplies)
- players do not respawn untill similar rooms mit ips are reached. if the marines made it to such a room the whole team will respawn ... then the ip is deactivated and can not be used anymore. (i think this would add a lot of tension because a players life would really be worth something)