S.T.M.P.D
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Posts posted by S.T.M.P.D
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Oh man, remember Dark Sectors? I don’t mean as designated farming spots with no price, I mean as nodes clans competed over. I played the mode in U13 where it was just PVE with a few Specters, but I never played Dark Sectors as they were supposed to be, namely fancy-ass PVP battles with extrinsic rewards, for the ability to fight not just to get loot, but to get a sense of competing against others for something that mattered. It was a really cool idea, I think. It was also packed to the brim with bullS#&$.
Oh, I remember. I remember trawling the forums and seeing just how pissed off people got about that gamemode. I remember how by the end, five Alliances controlled every sector on a rotating basis. I remember how some POS set out to get a 99% tax from his rails, and got away with it, bragged about it like it was a good thing that he was milking players for every red cent he could get. I remember the salt, my god the salt when DE gave up on the gamemode, how pissed people were. It was like when they cut out Trials, but slightly worse, if you can imagine that.
And yet... it still was a cool idea, wasn’t it? Like Conclave, it was an idea that could have kept some chunk of the playerbase coming back to the game for reasons other than new loot, even in the driest of content droughts - something which, given how DE seems to have switched from making a few medium-sized updates every year to one bigass mega-expansion annually, I think Warframe will need in the near future. I mean, Empyrean looks dope as hell and all, and they actually seem to have plans to develop it in tandem with regular content (in contrast to the open worlds), but will it actually satisfy endgame players, those gods among men who can kill level 150+ enemies just by thinking aggressively in their direction? Will it keep people coming back the way a good competitive system can? I don’t think so.
So I’ve been kicking around the idea of bringing back Dark Sectors for a few months, but I only really put the concept to paper when I saw that one thread in General Discussion about whether or not Conclave should just be scrapped. Most people here think Warframe can only work as a PVE game, but then all these people came out of the woodwork to say that Conclave and Lunaro can be fun, once you have enough players and some proper balance. It dawned on me that a lot of the things DE has turned their back on never worked not because they were outside the core gameplay loop, but because they never had a dedicated team working on them over many years, willing to fix the issues that were there and add content in parallel with the main game to boot. So I thought, what the hell, I’ll write down all the problems I remember that Dark Sectors had and try to fix them.
And, well, here’s what I’ve got:
1) Basic problems with the Dark Sector system outside of the actual gameplay and possible fixes for them:
SpoilerPeople only went to the Dark Sectors for loot - if there was a better farming spot elsewhere in the starchart, they’d just go there. Remember Vivergate? Dark Sectors were supposed to be Viver, and they weren’t.
See, I think what the devs could do is tie Dark Sectors, which sound uncharted and mysterious but were really just the same missions with Affinity incentives, to The New War. In terms of lore, it falls on the clans of the Tenno to build new Solar Rails to launch offensives against the Sentients way out in the Oort cloud or the Tau System or wherever they are. So you fight Sentients in various endless missions for a whole bunch of Sentient-oriented endgame after The New War, to make sure all the Tenno invested in the Dark Sector System are endgame-y people, the kind with Riven Mods for every weapon in the game, Primed Serration maxed out, that sort of thing. (While we’re at it, could we get a way to farm Primed Mods that isn’t Baro McSaltyTears? You’ve got the most desireable mods in the game, and you lock them behind that betrousered nerd. Come on.)
Also, Dark Sectors should all have the same level of enemies, regardless of whether they are from Earth or Sedna. That makes all sectors equally valuable, equally worth fighting over.
Clans run out of funds to incentivize players too quickly, and those incentives (credits) just aren’t cool enough.
Allow groups to go into debt with the game itself, not with the players, to put up their initial store of resources / mods / credits, then give them a month or two to work the debt off by farming. If the group fails to put up, they get locked out of DS conflicts for an amount of time proportional to the hole they dug themselves into. Hell, if a pre-ordained amount of debt still leads to players not being motivated enough, it might be interesting if a contesting group just puts up a reward bounty and then just takes on the debt after the conflict is over - even more interesting would be if groups could set a pre-ordained amount of the tax they get from a Rail to pay off their debts automatically.
Successful clans can set ridiculously high taxes and just drive players away from Dark Sectors, instead of having players unite to drive out their oppressors.
Hard caps at 50 percent of credits / resources. Rare Mods and weapon parts are simply duplicated, given to both the player and the group who holds the rail. Moreover, the more players run the Dark Sector, the more Defenses and Specters can be naturally accumulated, independent of the player’s actual earnings. This encourages clans to hold a Dark Sector, to run it well, essentially.
Conflicts are only for hardened PvP clans who enjoy PvPing.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. I mean, one of the core ideas of Dark Sector Conflicts is that you have access to all your mods at full power by the end of the game. Sort of like Iron Banner in Destiny. But I won’t deny that control of these very important endgame grinding spots shouldn’t only be determined by a tight cabal of the handful of players who enjoy PvP. To that end, I’ve tried to go with Dark Sectors having two different gamemodes, one which is only PvE and one which is only PvP, and each has different loot but deals the same amount of damage to the rail per session. See the next big spoiler box for what those might look like.
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I’ve also been kicking around an idea wherein clans can opt to have a patron Syndicate, like Steel Meridian or the Arbiters, and that Syndicate will boost them during conflicts with enemy Syndicates.
It was nearly impossible for smaller clans/alliances to have their shot at glory. Not simply because of overwhelming resources on the side of the big guys, but because they were able to consistently put forward the click to attack the rail first thanks to having more people to stay up in the wee hours of the morning.
The craziest idea I had was to give an hour for any group to challenge the rail’s dominance, and for all the groups - champions and challengers alike - to be engaged in a multi-sided Conflict. In such a case, each group would have a common pool of stuff to give to mercenary Tenno, but have varying bounties on the enemy groups. Oh, and a group should be able to put forth a contesting rail from the Warframe Nexus app, without having to rush home to their console whenever the armistice lifts.
Also - and this may piss some people off - what if freelancing Tenno, who just jump into PUG matches for a given clan without belonging to the aforementioned clan, had to pick a side before the conflict began, and they were tied to that side, instead of being able to switch alignments at will? Mercenaries generally didn’t defect en masse in the middle of conflicts IRL, why should they be allowed to here?
Also a few QoL fixes:
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Spectres should have more hardwired programming for their AI. For example, it would be neat if you could prioritize which weapons the Specter likes to use, which abilities they prefer to use (do they spam their 1, or wait for their 4 to go up?), that sort of thing.
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Specters should have drop tables made up of the Mods actually installed in their builds.
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Let people still play the Dark Sector while it’s under conflict, with the taxes of the defender in place.
Now, that’s all well and good. But I don’t think just implementing the changes I described above, without changing the modes which resolve the conflicts, will be of any use if we just go back to the same PVP system. To that end, I’ve outlined a PvE Dark Sector Conflict gamemode below, one which allows randoms to play while still being possible to lose (and that’s important, the players have to have a chance of losing even with high-level gear).
2) Dark Sector Conflict PvE mode: Attrition
SpoilerLevels - and their hazards - are pre-constructed by the clan without in-game resources, but rather a fixed pool of Energy and Resources. Which is to say, they are not randomly generated like most levels. Here’s how it works:
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The inside of the ship begins with a Breach tile and a Core tile, and you must always have these tiles in place. The Breach tile is where a team of four players enters the level, and the Core is their final objective. You can have any number of tiles strung between the Breach and the Core, and there are multiple variants on the basic design of those tiles, but you must have them, and you can only have one of each.
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Between the Breach tile and the Core tile, you can place any number of big, spunky tiles you want, connected by cheap hallways and smaller tiles within your Resources limit. However, you may not want to spend all your Resources on tiles to delay intruders, because you’ll need to spend them on…
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Defenses. Each tile that isn’t just a connecting hallway has a variety of Defense hardpoints, where you can put various traps and tricks to inconvenience and kill your enemies. I’m not talking lightly armored Death Orbs like in the Void, mind you, I’m talking minigun turrets, Ramparts, status-effect-inducing zones, enemy spawners, which cost both Resources and Energy. Hell, maybe you could even spend some on Nightmare Mode-style permanent debuffs!
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Enemies. A steady current of cheap enemies - MOA’s, Ospreys, and other automated enemies, is constantly pouring out of monster closets or being teleported in at random locations. Spawning anything other than low-level mobs costs Energy, and spawning specific Specters - Tenno and Liches and the like - requires you to have said Specters in your Clan or Alliance Vault, expended only for this single conflict.
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Objectives. Each large room will lock the players in and will not let them leave until an objective has been accomplished - will it be hacking a console and defending it for a set amount of time, or killing a certain amount of enemies, or killing a few minibosses, or defending multiple points at once? Hell, the objectives could work like stages of a Raid if need be, fiddling around with puzzles and button pressing or whatever. Expend energy to make the objective take longer.
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Timing. Each objective, depending on its difficulty, adds a set number of minutes to a clock that starts at, oh, let’s say ten minutes. If the players run out of time, the squad is wiped.
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Once the Core tile is reached, a massive tile containing just one part of a massive energy generator, players must summon a custom boss mob called an Injin, along with an 8-man squad of Tenno/Lich Specters. Kill the boss, mission’s over, congrats.
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Building the Injin: I haven’t worked this out entirely, but I think it would be interesting if we could design a modular boss using a UI similar to Kitguns and Zaws. I don’t know if they should just have a big pool of health, though, or if they have specific weaknesses like raid bosses in Destiny but are otherwise invincible.
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You’re done! Now you’ve got a series of challenges and a custom-built Raid Boss for opposing players to fight!
3) The PVP Mode: Attack.
Spoiler1. 8V8. Like the old Dark Sector, there are Attackers and Defenders. However, unlike the old Dark Sector, the Attackers don’t have a limited amount of respawns. Instead, they are constrained by time.
2. The gamemode is pretty bog-standard stuff. The Attackers have to capture a point and hold it, then push onto the next one until they reach the Defenders’ reactor, which, again, is guarded by an Injin. There’s no diversity of objectives, just diversity of enemies and defenses.
3. Both Defenders AND Attackers can back themselves up with spawning currents of mobs, most of which will be level 80 at least.
4) Where do Railjacks fit into this?
SpoilerThey don’t! Not in the first two gamemodes, anyway.
So I’m just gonna be blunt: PvP with Railjacks would be pretty damn awesome. They could be the basis for entire Tenno fleets, destroyers and battleships and carriers all manned with more and more Tenno, locked in interplanetary combat over the fate of entire worlds. Call it Rail War. 52v52 Symmetric PvP, your goal is to breach and board the enemy Rail and screw things up there, you get a bunch of clan-made Railjacks and other ships, each side can summon allied ships from their patron Syndicates (eg. Perrin summons a Corpus flotilla).
The only reason I don’t dedicate more space to this is because it’s such an obvious idea that I’m sure DE has plans to do something PVP-y with Railjacks, at most a few years down the road.
So that’s it. That’s what I’ve got. If you ever played the Dark Sectors, feel free to reply and point out all the problems/solutions I missed and what you think would be better. I might update this later with actual content, like different Tenno-made boss designs, and I might not. We’ll see.
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Huh. I guess it'd be like crossing over from Dark Souls to, say, RUINER - kind of a permanent decision to say that Warframe is fast-paced and you need little quick dashes to move around, forever casting away the last fragments of a more tactical Warframe...
I love it. Let's make this happen.
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Update! I've added some cool enemy types and a handful of Bounties, which are less like strung-together regular missions and more like Public Events in Destiny, with specific goals that makes each mission type genuinely unique.
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23 hours ago, SeriouslySinister said:
Of course, it's perfect! You've got your action packed space adventure, teamwork, friendship.quirky teen protagonists with a code of honor, body horror and kids being ripped apart and possibly eaten by their own parents. What more could you want from a Saturday morning cartoon?
23 hours ago, sasyquatch said:a villain of the week plot structure would work well until like season 2 where it starts to get weirdly super serious with the introduction of hunhow
Literally Evangelion amirite?
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I always thought Primed Mods ought to be moved off of Baro and into the loot tables for some mode or another, something really endgame-y, but that's just me.
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...I'm not entirely sure I get it. This is some sort of vague political criticism of the South African government, but what exactly is it saying? I can't parse OP's political stance, so it's not funny either way.
Also, why are there no jokes about Cape Town's Day Zero?
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35 minutes ago, Corvid said:
Well, which ones still need updating?
I main Vauban and I SWEAR he doesn't have one. I used a lot of black on his grey parts but it gets all weird and pixellated, a graphics glitch that's been there for several years at least. Don't know who else.
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7 hours ago, aligatorno said:
I highly doubt this is low req enough for low-mid end computers to be able to run it. Hek, maybe not even the basic consoles won't be able to.
What's the point of heavily investing[I doubt it would be cheap] in implementing a feature that only like 10% will use?
Have you seen how excited Steve was last Devstream for building new particle effects? The man loves his computer graphics. I think they'll probably give it a shot.
Which reminds me, when was the last time we got a Warframe in PBR?
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Gonna make this quick.
Okay, so there's been a lot of complaints that PoE's loot is no good, that the rewards for running bounties - like a couple hundred Endo, for example, or a credit cache - are extremely undesireable. Like this:
And they're not wrong: this is a complaint which has been levelled against new systems since time immemorial, especially since Prime Parts are now acquired in early and midgame not the endgame. The Acolytes drop mandatory mods for endgame, but you can't hunt them regularly, you wait for a big dev vacation, certain frames can bypass limits on energy and health and all of that with a few clicks of a button, Sorties reward Ayatan sculptures, yada yada yada. We do have a lack of sort of 'Exotics', things which are true signifiers of prestige which catapult the player into the endgame. What's the solution?
Then it hit me: Primed Mods.
There are a lot of mods which are sort of 'mandatory' for certain weapons, for all weapons in the case of stuff like Serration. In that case, ranking up mods serves as a universal signifier of progress, the thing you work on while your weapons are all maxed out. Higher-level builds require more forma to minimize drain, but you need high-drain mods in the first place. Primed mods, especially the ones which we've had Primed, offer this. I mean, we've got Primed Pressure point and Primed Point Blank, which are simply linear hikes in damage for two very broad classes of weapon. Once you have a Primed Pressure Point, why have a regular Pressure Point at all?
And yet, Primed Mods are so easily obtainible. Ducats just require a whole bunch of bad rolls on Void Relics, and credits can be raked in on the Index, and you don't need a lot of either to get Primed Mods when the Void Trader rolls around. It doesn't make sense; Primed Mods should be ENDGAME REWARDS!
What kind of endgame rewards? I dunno. But I think of them as like Exotic Gear in Destiny, flat upgrades which are highly desireable for the high-powered player to squeeze just a little more damage out of his Vaykor Hek or whatever. They should be rare as hell, maybe even buffed a bit (165% damage compared to 120% damage ain't a lot but it's still there), and that will be the 'meaningful loot' every burned out player wants so badly.
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Say, have you heard about what those wacky Brits have been up to lately? It's a real whacker, I tell you what!
That's right, folks, you can basically unchain computing power through the ethereal magic of tha cloud. Already, a whole bunch of games have decided to use this tech to create presistent MMO worlds several times larger than what could fit on a single server: besides the ones on that page, there's a Battle Royale game, Mavericks: Proving Grounds, which promises 1000-man battles. That's impressive stuff.
Admittedly, it only takes Unity and Unreal, but what do you think DE could do with this tech if they worked with Improbable to bootstrap Evolution onto SpatialOS? What possibilities could it hold for the Landscapes of the future? Perhaps a very large presistent world, with occasional meetings with other 4-man squads like Destiny? Dark Sector PvP battling for a whole bunch of rails worldwide? I feel like they could do cool stuff - I just don't know if the cost would be worth it.
So: Community! What do you see DE doing with tech like this - and would it be worth several months of bootstrapping to get there?
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17 minutes ago, grigorije said:
Still, they really ought to look at games such as the Witcher series and Elder Scrolls.
...And draw what conclusions from them?
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In terms of gameplay, Warframe's tone can change a lot as well. You've got cinematic stuff like Second Dream and War Within where all the serious lore is, and then you've got running your umpteenth Plague Star Bounty, where sometimes you just want a little bit of humor while you grind, so you can mutter to yourself: FOOLS! YOU TRIED TO POP ITS GLISTENING MAGNIFICENCE, BUT YOU JUST MADE IT AAAAANNNNGGGRRRYY!!!!!!!!
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So this is the idea I had for an alternative to Kuva Siphons within the Fortress, since it makes no sense to have Siphons within the fortress itself, and the system desperately needs a rework anyway, and everyone wants an endless mode too - so this does all three.
I might repost this to the levels feedback section in hopes of getting the devs to really take a look at it, but I kinda want to know what y’all think first: does this sound like endgame “fun” and endgame “challenge” with good “rewards?” Gimme some feedback, yo.Anyway you enter the mission and you start with basic Survival mechanics; this whole part of the Fortress is rapidly being drained of life support due to your presence triggering some highly advanced Void Detectors, and so Lotus will periodically drop in Life Support as always, but you have to get at it before the Grineer destroy it themselves. Then, you have to work your way into the fortress, battling extremely high level, starting at like 100, Kuva Grineer, but there are no Guardians quite just yet.
Then, you’ll reach a Kuva Reservoir, massive tanks of the red goop which stretch through vast multi-layered tiles with elevators and security and all sorts of stuff around them. There is a small room at the conversion points for all the tanks, where multiple tubes coagulate around a single point; this is where the Queens offload excess Kuva to create Oro for their nobility. You must acquire some for your own.
But the process of draining Kuva will attract Eximi and named minibosses to your location, and the vacuum to pump the Kuva in can only be maintained by a sort of Void Energy hack. What this means is that the Squad will have to deposit their Warframes in special niches, and then switch to their operators to defend the process; otherwise, it has to be restarted if the pumps take too much damage. All four means extraction goes extra fast; having only one or two slows it down significantly, but may be necessary to protect the console.
Finally, the players have to remove the tank and escort it out of the mission boundaries to an extraction point. The more damage the tank takes - and it does decay slightly over time, like a Hijack target - the more Kuva will leak out from the tank, which you do not want, since it lowers your overall reward. Shields accelerate the tank, but giving up Warframe energy will heal it, slowing the loss of Kuva. It is at this point, however, that Kuva Guardians will appear - and if four of them at once can melee the tank, they’ll flip it over and destroy it entirely. So you’ll have to put your Warframes in choice niches where they can’t be shot at so easily, which line the tank, while you break out your Operator.
Once you reach the extraction point, disconnect your Warframes and watch the Kuva go up. You start with +750, but this doubles every round you extract, even as the levels of enemies go up ridiculously fast; so at round 3, enemies will be about level 120, and you’ll have extracted up to 3k Kuva, and then past Round 3 the levelling of enemies increases: Round 4 is level 135 enemies, Round 5 level 160, all the while the amount of Kuva you get has doubled up to 12k and the entire area is saturated with crazy S#&$.
Oh, but it gets worse. Every 3rd round, you have to switch to another pump and reservoir since the pressure is too much for the tanks you’ve been using, so you run off, go to another reservoir, and drag a hardier tank down a longer track The third reservoir you use and upwards requires you to run pumps separately from one another, like an Interception mission, slightly upping the difficulty. And on and on you go, potentially being rewarded with stuff the way you are every wave or so like in Excavation, potentially not (Kuva is its own reward), but if you get wiped, you lose all of your Kuva, so, you know, don’t do that. It’s good clean wholesome endgame, if you ask me - what do you think?
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2 hours ago, AuroraSonicBoom said:
Or I should say "had", really, because way back when DE first introduced invasions, node faction changes were permanent, and while that lead to a whole new slew of problems that forced the dev to eventually neuter its mechanic to what you see today, the agency players had on the state of the game world at that point was unprecedented. At one point players - through continually supporting the Grineer - helped them take almost the entirety of all Pluto. THAT is the closest to PvE endgame Warframe has ever gotten IMO.
You could argue that allowing players to affect the game world like that would be more trouble than its worth, but I think that balanced correctly and with a complex enough web of actions and consequences allowing us to become what we've been told by the game lore from day one - the force that keeps the balance in the origin system - players could use their powerful gear to actually influence the state of the world(within reason) and really, actually make a difference. Whether that difference lasts for a an hour, a day or a week can be easily adjusted and even included in the game play loop, challenging players that pushed for a specific outcome to complete missions with rapidly rising enemy levels to "defend" their achievement for as long as possible. All of that could naturally also be tied to some sort of PvE scoreboard and cosmetic rewards for the top "influencing" players, clans or what have you, trophies that are taken away the moment the players lose their place.
The problem with this system from a business standpoint is that it doesn't prey on the player's conditioned need to acquire more power, and is difficult if not impossible to generate plat sales out of, so I doubt we'll ever see actually meaningful endgame akin to what I just described be developed. That doesn't mean there's no hope at all, though.
... I get the sense you were a major Dark Sector guy.
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2 hours ago, .Fire_Fly. said:
Lmao
DE new Valve confirmed?
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Uh, okay? I guess?
I main Vauban, and I like him a lot, but I'm not super sure about compressing Bastille and Vortex into two abilities being necessary. The gun's not really doing it for me, either. And I dunno, but I don't particularly enjoy swapping endlessly between grenades for his 2, and then having to hold the key down to throw out the trap I actually want, it's just one more action for my brain to process. Making that be the case for every single ability could be kind of frustrating.
It's not a bad start, though. If you could make a more compelling 'trap' ult that isn't a gun I'd be pretty much down with this.
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So after seeing Devstream 107 where DE promised us a planetary landscape where the marks of somewhat hard sci-fi's terraforming would be visible, I started thinking about what other potential cool things could come from half-finished, aborted terraforming projects. Then, after reading a thread wherein the OP said that he just wanted a Corpus hell world like Mustafar or something, I started thinking about an alternate hellish planet which could be used, and then I came up with this whole wacky idea for a landscape for Io, one of the four Galiliean moons of Jupiter and a hell planet through and through.
GEOLOGICAL EXPOSITION DUMP
SpoilerThe Predecessor Civilizations. The Orokin. The Grineer. The Corpus.
Throughout the history of man as a solar system-faring species, humanity and its offshoot peoples have colonized planet after planet, asteroid after asteroid, turning desolate rocks into beautiful wildernesses, then turning those beautiful wildernesses into overgrown, polluted worlds. Every inch of these worlds has been explored, and colonized, left to flourish or suffer and build their own eight hundred years of history, and not once has a place been left truly pristine, free from terraforming or cracking or anything, really. As wild as it may seem at times, this was once, and will become once again in time, man’s solar system through and through.
Except for Io. Io is a no-go.
And can you blame the Orokin and everyone after them for not taking the planet seriously? Io’s #*!%ed, man. It’s a Late Heavy Bombardment leftover trapped in a tug-of-war between giant Jupiter and its sister Galilean satellites, the surface constantly being ripped apart by volcanism and tectonic upheaval then sewn together again with seams of crystallized sulfur frost and fresh magma, then jammed right in the middle of the plasma belt of the strongest magnetosphere in the system. So: frequent earthquakes, violent volcanism, toxic gases of all kinds, and radiation surges? And to top it all off, a distinct lack of mineral wealth, not even a whole lot of rare-earth metals, or even prime real estate for spaceships to stop off when the Jovian hydrogen mines are just hours away?
Of course the Corpus barely bothered. Of course the Grineer wouldn’t push so far into Corpus space to claim such a useless rock, especially since it’s too far away from its Galilean brethren even for an invaders’ beachhead. When you think about it, it’s a miracle the Orokin even bothered to terraform it at all.
But terraform it they did, albeit barely. The core and mantle were already moving pretty damn quick, too quick if anything, Io’s mantle is quite literally liquid magma where our mantle is just goopy solid rock, so they couldn’t just send a whole bunch of nukes into the crust and wait for the heat to kick in. They had to put two big baryonic fusion reactors on the poles, massive things which, linked up to Orokin magnetic beacons, generated a highly energetic magnetosphere which could block out even the harshest of Jupiter’s whimsies. From there, an atmosphere was seeded, a comet or two smashed into the Colchis Regio, and crude life began to grow on splotches of black basaltic lava even though the volcanoes and the quakes and the fragile soil hadn’t improved any.
But Io had little which other worlds could not provide, and was still too harsh even with terraforming measures taken. There was no desire to knock the world out of orbit, there was really no point to knocking Io into a higher orbit (especially since that tech had only been tested with asteroids that wouldn’t trigger some sort of cascade effect with other moons - what, the Orokin wondered, could Io do to Europa if knocked the wrong way?).
So Io became a prison planet. It was where criminals who could not, or would not, be reformed were taken - since the Grineer filled the few roles for manual labor which were needed elsewhere- and condemned to eke out miserable existences maintaining terraforming tech the rest of their lives. Unable to leave, denied high technology, Io’s prisoners didn’t even need wardens. They lived out their lives there, expanded settlements beyond their initial boundaries, had children under radiation shielding, were denied care of those children in favor of a sort of collective-raising system, began staging raids with limited military technology against other settlements to garner favors with their distant wardens. The hardiest ones, in the nastiest parts of the planet, became something like monsters, as selective genetic mutilation rendered their skin jet-black and plastic-like to keep the radiation out. Perhaps there was more to it - perhaps the Orokin did other things there - but nothing is remembered of them.
When the fall came, the Iotians’ situation rapidly worsened as supplies were cut off for good. As terraforming deteriorated, the Iotian settlements soon militarized (with what few scraps of stuff they had), and sold some of those who knew Orokin terraforming tech into slavery for the Corpus in exchange for technology. They engaged in war with one another for the rights for this crater or that lava plain even as that land became poisoned by an upsurge in suppressed volcanism.
Now, Io is a nasty, nasty place, inhabited only by the last straggling tribes of settlers, Corpus researchers loyal to Alad V, the Red Veil’s elite operatives… and the Infested.
Visually, Io is a hell planet through and through, with a sky dominated by the sheer vastness of Jupiter filtered through a dark red atmosphere with green and blue clouds periodically belching up from the ground on the skyline The ground is a mix of the sickly yellow of sulfurous soil, with some orange here and there, and the black of basaltic lava flows in certain choice locations. Terrain is uneven, alternating between flat plains, mesas, sudden upheavals, volcanic vents, lava fields, and their cooled remains.
The world is dying, twisted back to its natural state by the very terraforming techniques which were supposed to claim it. Life is still present, in the forms of hardy plants and fungi, but so much of it seems to be bleached and dead already. Entire fossilized forests are not uncommon finds on the top of hills where mass wasting hasn’t ripped away soil.
Radiation now comes in massive flux surges, when a naturally occurring event whereby Io’s magnetosphere links up with Jupiter’s upper atmosphere via a flux tube of charged particles; due to a more persistent atmosphere, and the malfunctioning magnetosphere generator polarizing along the current of particles, the entire sky is lit up in a psychedelic, multi colored aurora like something out of an 80’s sci-fi poster.
This regularly occurring event, known as a ‘flux surge’, occurs as the area’s level-gating event. Shields are draining constantly, especially in the brightest portions of the map, although health and armor are not affected, except by the usual toxic hazards, which are now doubly potent and last twice as long, and new patches of particularly bright landscape, vast open plains without shade, which will start to zap your health away with Radiation procs. With the whole ground almost bathed in white from the aurora, with lightning accelerating in a gyre of energy around Orokin structures, the Infested now come out in force. From nondescript holes, strange black branch-like structures, like fossilized tentacles, sprout straight up into the air, and Ancients and their swarms begin to cover the landscape. These Infested are faster, stronger, hardier than their early-stage Mutalist counterparts, which cannot take this radiation, and it is against these radiation empowered Infested which you will be battling against as you attempt to root out their black nests - here in the pits of Sheol.
REGIONS OF SOME IMPORTANCE
SpoilerPOE is about 3 x 3 kilometers or less, and Venus promises a 6 x 6 open world. Thus, Sheol is about that same size, since I think that’s around the size of Velen from the Witcher 3 - more than room enough to pack high-density crazy stuff into the same area. Let’s say that this is the Sheol Caldera, a millennia-old volcanic formation in the Colchis Regio (remember, Io’s geology moves fast.)
Base Hub Zone: Kaltras
Black Foothills
Kaltras Lava Flow
Loess Flats
Pandelirium Base
The Warrens
The Cracks
The Boils
Katurga Territory
Dis
Mount Medea
The Forest/The Pit
ENEMIES
SpoilerInfested
SpoilerLet’s be honest here, what is up with the infested aesthetic? It seems like it oscillates between the more fleshy, grey-with-orange-goop kinda thing which designates younger Mutalist tissue, and the more crooked, aged Ancients, which are strange and interesting unto themselves.
So the Infested here are in two different Strains: Ancient and Conventional.
Conventional Infested are mostly around the Corpus fortress in conventional Infested growths, but even they must shrink into the ground when the flux surge smites the landscape.
Ancient Infested are basically reskinned, more deadly, like Elite Infested, which resemble the twisted matter of regular Ancients, formed of twister black biomatter, no carapaces or colorful growths here, only clean, horrifying purpose. They're vomited out of the ground dozens at a time, and immediately lock on to Tenno, swarming across the Pits to wipe out foolish intruders.
Also worth noting is that, during the Flux Surge, and within the underground parts of Io, Ancients can spawn, then break apart into slithering masses of vines, which reform into double or even triple Ancients!-Ancient Chargers have glowing red mandible-like mouthparts in place of the teeth they once had, lack the distinctive front upper body armor of the Grineer, and move fast, soundlessly, like Xenomorphs, really. They can climb up walls but can’t cling to them, slinking in and out of choice hiding holes until they swarm the surface of Io in a Flux Surge. Their claws deal slash damage as well as a random base element.
-Elite Ancient Chargers don’t have tentacles in their mouth, but rather two rasping plates of glowing spines which they use to shred Tenno into pieces. They can also rear up to about the height of an ancient, and spit swarms of spines like a machinegun.
-Ancient Leapers have roughly the same model as their regular predecessors, but obviously heavily reskinned to look, y’know, black and grimy, and with newly modeled, thin spindly legs. They crawl aggressively, desperately, when not in assault mode, whereupon they get up on those funky legs of theirs and move only by jumping, like a murderous kangaroo.
-Volatile Ancient Leapers explode in a cloud of hazardous, element-proccing gas when they successfully impact a Tenno, and they only proc the combo elements like Viral or Magnetic.
-Ancient Threshers are Ancients with a prominent giant ring over their head, and strange bony armor plating, making them look like the kind of thing you’d extract the Mios from. And, indeed, they do perform a function kind of like that, as their tentacle-arms have mutated into Mios-size claws which slash and bash and basically turn any battle into Dark Souls, since the only way to kill these suckers is non-ranged melee, striking at weakspots on their back where their armor is weak, They’re very fast attackers, but move slowly.
-Ancient Flayers are gangly ancients based off of the Phage’s general aesthetic, with two pink mandible mouthparts that are used for brief lunge attacks, and tentacle-arms refined into two Viral laser blasters which are autofocused. Attacks are often sweeping, or striking, but rarely just firing a beam at a Tenno; thus, Flayers serve the role a Tech or Heavy Gunner would in Grineer or Corpus battles, except with Phage lasers. Do not underestimate them.
-Ancient Crushers are long-range units which usually carry other Infested units in their arms, then sling them at incredible speeds to smash into Tenno like stones in a trebuchet. If it has no allies available, another Tenno will do just fine.
-Juggernaut Behemoths occasionally spawn during a Flux Surge.
-Artillery Boilers don’t fire spawn pods, but rather just launch Infested Spore and Tar bombs until the entire area is covered in the things.
-Maws are conventional Infested which occupy innocuous spots in the landscape, like pitcher plants or flytraps grown into crevasses and patches of weak land, that will disguise themselves then trap a Tenno in their spiky mouths for rapid disintegration and processing. A Tenno will have to desperately bullet-jump just to stay visible above the surface, but will require the aid of well-targeted melee to actually break free of the thing’s tentacles.
-Mylenoid Bushes are conventional Infested, small tendrils like sea anemones no larger than a Tenno which continuously grow a vast network of electric tripwires that stun a player and alert nearby Infested to their presence. During a flux surge, they ‘bloom’ and cover the entire area nearby them - usually an Infested growth site or hotspot of some sort - with the things.
Corpus
SpoilerLothar Private Equity Extractions is an older Corpus group, a loose conglomerate of industrial producers and security contractors nebulously strung together by failed financial sharks. They are essentially nothing in terms of the nobility expected from places like, say, Ganymede, and they certainly don’t have any major holdings within spiritual organizations, and yet now here they are, on Io, in full force, with enough proxies and heavy weaponry to make even Nef Anyo take pause. In fact, Lothar was where Alad V moved most of his assets regarding the Zanuka project after all his run-ins with the Infestation forced him out of the proper Corpus circles. Now, Lothar is considered a Rogue Board operating without permission in the Jovian system, an insurgency in Alad’s name but with him utterly absent.
Why Io, though? What secrets does Alad V have that he ordered a looming, monolithic research tower and a fortress around it to be built just a few kilometers from the giant pit that is Sheol? And who is leading this rogue faction in his absence?
-Crewmen carry their usual weapons, but usually sit distant from the action, with proxies doing most of the actual patrolling.
-There are no Scrambus or Comba - no Corpus elite wants to sit around here for any time at all.
-But there are more Techs than usual, and they’re wearing different types of Corpus armor to boot: Porta, Arca, Dendra, Quaro, all reflecting roles as different breeds of Combat Engineers.
-Regular Techs use their Supras, and throw up different kinds of Osprey from their backpacks.
-Dendra Techs use reflective energy shields dual-wielded with an Angstrum, a Cycron, or a Serro while occasionally firing Nullifier Grenades. The shield can be placed down to create protective cover like a Blunt, but it is only done at specific choke points, and it’s a proto shield which regenerates over time. Serro wielders use the weapons like spears, thrusting to keep the Tenno at bay.
-Arca Techs use Arca Plasmors, and rush the enemy with their Arca Titrons occasionally to keep the Tenno off balance. They increase the likeliness of a Bursa spawning, and will occasionally heal them, and upgrade them with specific Bursa-appropriate upgrades. If a Bursa is downed, Arca techs can not only ‘revive’ it once via the hacking animation, but double its armor and shielding on top of that!
-Quaro Techs behave much like Corpus Snipers, but are armed with a Ferrox instead, and are not unafraid to throw said Ferrox right into the middle of a crowd of enemies - they switch to a Spectra when disarmed in such a manner. They can also deploy the portable Corpus equivalent of unprotected Ramparts, which fire arcs of energy like an oversized Amprex.
-Porta Techs put down teleporters, obviously, can even throw them like glaives, and use a Penta when they don’t have a teleporter to throw.
-MOAs and Ospreys come in the same variants as always.THINGS TO DO WHICH ARE BOUNTIES AND ALSO OTHER THINGS
SpoilerBounties
SpoilerThese bounties, if you ask me, ought to have a drastically altered structure. Right now they’re chopped up into stages based off of regular mission concepts, but there’s no difference from one to the other save the final stage. Let’s make each bounty be a unique mission, like a Destiny 2 Public Event, and we’ll play them over and over again, but the missions will still be fun as the inherent nature of the Pits will create randomness, since the path out will be random but the threats which the path could wind through won’t - you’ll just be going a different way.
Steal Water: Raid Pandelirium, breach the lowest level of their storage Section, siphon off a chunk of ice (which has to be pre-frozen, since the Corpus find it cheaper - less space-intensive - to just store liquid water), then Hijack that to ride the iceball all the way back to the big lava flow where Orokin robots can pick it up for the Kaltras.
Repel Corpus Incursion: Blow up Corpus incursion vehicles, wipe out local camps, do random S#&$, and then finally kill a couple hundred Corpus until you make sand bounce.
Defoliate Germinating Infested: Track down several Infested growths and their source, building up a metallic Botuloid toxin in choice volcanic vents by killing Infested there, then running a distiller, then injecting it into an Infestation site, then killing choice Antigens - mostly reskinned and scaled up heavy Infested with ridiculous amounts of armor and twenty levels above the expected level - to kill any new growth for good.
Investigate Abandoned Site:
Restock Automatic Defenses:
Defend Katurga Settlements
Redirect Boeni Invasion: You need to provide a decoy for the Boeni’s Warden transports - Orokin levitators cut into and turned into gunship-pillars, basically - by getting an entire small settlement somewhere in the middle of the map up and running. You restock the reactor with power cells, you re-establish life support by venting toxic gas buildup out from certain rooms (like Survival), you drive the Infested out from some rooms (like the capture-and-hold Stages). Then, the Boeni will come, and you must use the settlements limited defenses to prevent their Wardens from reaching a point where they can attack a Kaltras or Katurga outpost which is actually active. This involves using turrets to down Wardens, then killing their troops on foot.
Infested Harvesting
THE ENDGAME: THE FOREST OF CORPSES, AND THE DESCENT INTO THE PIT
SpoilerComing Soon
OKAY BUT WHAT'S THE LOOT LIKE
SpoilerNew Amp Bits:
Tantra Prism: Fires a shotgun array of six pellets which start out in a broad spread and home into a single point, then weave back out, in and out and in.
Senjou Prism: Fires machine-gun spray of projectiles which twitch forward in short bursts but deal good damage - essentially creating a minefield of moving bullets.
Pistyx Prism: Fires rounds which deal arcing damage as they travel before exploding on some poor sap.
Vulpe Scaffold: Emits broad, short-ranged “flamethrower”of Void Energy.
Yalcol Scaffold: Fires small, mouse-guided ‘rockets’.
Xaquat Scaffold: Discharges laser spray similar to the Phage.
New Weapons:
Ubitzi: A Tenno Mac-10 or Uzi, a fast-firing, S#&$ty-range submachine gun.
Sunu: Kaltras Staff with impact and blast damage, effectively a way of placing explosive charges on rocks one doesn’t want to get close to weaponized.
Gilial: Infested machine gun, a BP dropped from Elite Ancient Chargers which is basically their spine and mouth twisted into a large, bulky gun. It fires fast Viral flechettes, and furthermore becomes more accurate over time instead of less accurate, penalizing burstfire and demanding sustained support.
Obviously I'm gonna add some more stuff later - consider this a work in progress along the lines of Unus's landscape concept, Rising Tides I think it's called? Let me know what you think - feedback boosts my flimsy ego and keeps me wasting my time on this.
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17 hours ago, Teljaxx said:
Apparently the Venus plains will be a out three times as large as the Plains of Eidolon. So I am hoping that will give enough room for more variation in the terrain. With the areas around the cooling towers being mostly frozen, while the further out areas are still hot. There could also be both ice caves and lava caves underneath the plains, depending on where you are.
I also hope that DE gets the sun right. First, Venus rotates backwards compared to Earth, so the sun would rise in the west and set in the east. And second, since Venus is closer to the sun, it should look bigger and brighter in the sky (discounting cloud cover, of course). They have already gotten this wrong with the space skyboxes, where, whether you are near Meurcury or Pluto, the sun is always the same size.
Here is a nifty chart I found:
So, unless the Orokin somehow moved all the planets of the origin System into very close orbits to the Earth, there should be way more variation than there currently is.
Pretty sure they said that there isn't going to be a day-night cycle, since Venus's day-night cycle is about 100 earth days - then again, if what the geologist above said about it being caused by Venus's heat-trapping, super-thick atmosphere, then terraforming might alter that. Hard to say.
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From Wikipedia:
More recent research has however shown that the current slow rotation rate of Venus is not detrimental to the planet's capability to support an Earth-like climate. Rather, the slow rotation rate enables the formation of thick cloud layers on the side of the planet facing the sun, which raises planetary albedo and acts to cool the global temperature to Earth-like levels, despite the greater proximity to the sun. According to calculations, maximum temperatures would be just around 35 °C, given an Earth-like atmosphere.[28][29] Speeding up the rotation rate would therefore be both impractical and detrimental to the terraforming effort. A terraformed Venus with the current slow rotation but a more Earth-like atmosphere would result in a global climate similar to warmer versions of Alaska or Siberia with "day" and "night" periods each about 58 days long. The "day" would resemble a short summer with warm humid climate, a heavy overcast sky and ample rainfall. The "night" would resemble a short winter with quite cold temperature and snowfall. There might be periods with more temperate climate and clear weather at sunrise and sunset.[28]
So DE actually has this one on the ball. The day-night cycle doesn't need to be altered, and furthermore Venus's ideal endstate would actually probably be something like the Corpus ice world tileset - we're just in the middle of getting it there.
Plus:
Below that temperature, freezing of atmospheric carbon dioxide into dry ice will cause it to deposit onto the surface. He then proposed that the frozen CO2 could be buried and maintained in that condition by pressure, or even shipped off-world (perhaps to provide greenhouse gas needed for terraforming of Mars or the moons of Jupiter)
So the whole condensation orbs making dry-ice glaciers isn't out of the question, I just don't get where the liquid coolant comes in. This is all very interesting - seems like DE thought this out more than I thought they would!
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On 2/24/2018 at 9:11 AM, A-p-o-l-l-y-o-n said:
Ganymede should be the Jupiter landscape, and it should be a cityscape, imo, in the heart of Corpus territory. It should essentially be their capital, imo. And it definitely shouldn't be hellish. Maybe a massively-terraformed Mercury could be hellish. As for Venus, I think that since DE has committed much lore to Venus being frozen over and cold, they should've just made it a cold, snowy, icy landscape instead of trying to keep that and be realistic with its environment (which makes the ice make no sense at all).
A. We don't need only a single Jupiter landscape; what's stopping us from slapping one on each of the Galilean satellites? Calliso could be a megacity, Ganymede could be some sort of mega-farm planet, Europa could have a Sharkwing landscape for the oceanic colonies that must inevitably be down there and so on and so forth.
B. At any rate, I thought Neptune was the heart of Corpus operations, I had this *@##$in' vision of a Neptune city-ship, bigger than even an Obelisk screaming through hypersonic wind currents with bizarre overcrowded towers inside, the kind of thing that makes just a big city on one planet seem kinda tame by comparision.
C. And have they really committed that much lore? The idea they're going for now is a mix of superheated plains and icy wastes, a sort of precarious balance, which is actually cooler than leaning one way or the other.
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Ehh... there are better hell-worlds under Corpus jurisdiction for a landscape in the future.
Io, now that's where my money's on. Between the sulfur crust which encourages mass wasting, the accelerated volcanism, the giant Jupiter in the sky, the fact that its orbit goes through Jupiter's magnetosphere's plasma torus and periodically goes through its magnetic fields bands of radioactive charged particles, it's a perfect place for a hellish endgame Landscape.
That being said, I share your concern, and hope they don't go too overboard with the iciness, make those winter storms feel like a true change in the landscape instead of its normal state.
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Okay, serious question time: Why all the bitterness about having new content on the Plains? People are up in arms about having to get the new-old prime parts from Bounties, which is basically the only thing one does on the Plains, but it was probably one of the biggest content drops the game's ever recieved - why's it hated so much?
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1 hour ago, thewhitepanda1205 said:
The reason people are distressed is because the same thing was said about Dark Sectors, and here we are two years later. :P
They did say that they do have some ideas for Dark Sectors, which sounded to me like they were around the same place as the Clan-nemesis thingymahooge, so...
I guess we wait for the devstream, see if they're ready to reveal anything major besides the 2 new Eidolons they've been hyping to death?
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On 2/4/2018 at 4:23 AM, Rociel said:
Line of sight, I assume?
Is that a Vivergate joke?
Is the armistice ever going to end?
in General Discussion
Posted
I wrote a thread on this, actually: Here.
I don’t buy the ‘PvP doesn’t work in warframe’ argument for an instant: if that were true, Destiny 2 would have no Crucible. And yet - it exists. Now, it’s true that the system we had sucked a big fat one. I still remember the d-bags who bragged on the forums about how they got away with 99% taxes. So, that being the case, I tried to address lots of those issues - lack of incentive to play the rails or hold them, lack of ability for smaller clans to participate, etc. The only thing I forgot was that we need more DS nodes per server, instead of just 26 - parallel instances, perhaps, for each size of clan or Alliance.
But, yeah, every time this sort of thread pops up people rag on PvP as inherently not able to function in Warframe instead of getting down into the weeds of why it doesn’t work. Let’s try to do better, yeah?