[New Mission Type Suggestion]: Strike Force

[nokturnihs]

Brief Description:

Players enter a capital ship and slowly wear down it's functionality from 100% to 0% completing objectives from all other mission types with rewards intervals like an endless mission and chances to extract every 10-25% of the ships functionality or extracting at "mission completion" when the ship reaches 0 and will be destroyed

Detailed Description:

Similar to PoE missions the players enter the mission area and are presented with objectives - however using icons the squad can move to different objective areas as a group or invidividually and complete objectives from the mission types like: Spy (hacking a secure vault), Mobile Defense, Disruption, Survival (map-wide for limited duration where oxygen depletes), Kuva Survival(?), Exterminate, Sabotage, Capture, etc. Squad members can divide and conquer, with each completed objective reducing ship integrity by a certain amount or work as a time on a single objective. The longer the mission goes, the more the enemies scale (just like endless missions).

Field Bosses (like Jackal, Vor, Stalker, etc) can appear to inhibit the players progress as well as other enemies can appear based on completed objectives (Example, hacking a spy objective could send a message to the corpus to come to the ship and try and take advantage of the strike underway - working to kill the grineer but stop players because they want to capture the ship).

If an objective fails (don't hack in time, capture target escapes, not enough kills in X time) the ship integrity is restored by a certain amount and upon reaching 100% functionality once more, the strike is a failure and the mission fails. Other forms of failure could include the squad dying and reaching zero oxygen in a "survival segment".  Also if the squad fails to escape the ship at the end of the mission or fails to enter the ship in the alloted time during mission start they can fail either individually or as a whole.

The mission start could be a brief archwing segment where they breach the ship (similar to what we've been seeing with Rail-Jack previews). When the ship reaches 0% integrity then the squad needs to find the exit and escape minimum safe distance before the ship explodes.

If the squad completely reduces the ship to 0% and extracts successfully they can be presented with larger rewards, while extracting early at X% integrity remaining could work similar to most endless modes in regards to rewards.

Optional Modifiers:

Either chosen automatically after an objective is completed or failed or as an optional mechanic that the squad can activate to "increase risk for increased reward (increase integrity loss)" new short or long term modifiers to the mission can be added into the mix. Examples would be in a spy objective if the player activates a secondary console before hacking the main objective, the ship could suddenly dump it's coolant system into the ship (adding the cold modifier from sorties) for a short period of time (player-chosen) or when a capture target escapes they activate a shield disruption system (adding the nightmare no-shield modifier) until the players can complete an objective that negates it (consequence of failure or system chosen). These types of modifiers can be both system assigned as a price of failure, a player optioned risk/reward gambit or a system-response to completion as a reaction to the completion of an objective. 

The Missing Mission Type: K-Drive Races (added mission type).

I really enjoy k-drives and feel like this "buffet" of mission types could benefit from them so as a way of including them I propose a multi-stage objective similar to a K-Drive race where k-drives could be encouraged to be used in a mission like this. The player collects an "unstable isotope" from a mobile defense or sabotage objective and has a chance to take that isotope to a [Insert big machine that's important] and insert the isotope into it to destroy it. The catch is this - it's radioactive and so holding it is gonna hurt a little, causing radiation procs and a little damage. It's also going to explode after a short period of time - and it'll kill anything/everything in the room it explodes in. The Machine is at the end of a series of large pipes (think the big corpus ice tunnels but bigger and metal with junk and enemies inside.) - so one of the team mates needs to take it through those tunnels before it explodes and insert it into the system then GTFO of the area or not pick it up and start the objective then run away from the room it's in or get blown up when it's timer expires. Could be done just with your warframe/operator too but the k-drive could also be used to skate it in too. being effected by radiation while holding it does discourage shooting though (friendly fire) - and regardless of whether you allow k-drives or not this could be a nice tweak to sabotage that could also be used as an option to increase difficulty or setup "traps" - hacking a console could cause one of the isotopes to eject nearby or in a nearby room and if the players don't notice it...

Conclusion:

Why you might ask? Because this is something that doesn't require re-inventing the wheel, adds variety, allows squads to work together separately or in a group and gives players new choices and challenges at each new objective completion or failure. It offers veterans a high-level challenge if they want to stay the whole way and is a nice showcase of all that Warframe has to offer. It's diverse enough that it won't get old and stale quite as quickly, fills (some) of the hole left by raids, and offers a (not quite) endless mission type that isn't one of the usual suspects. It can easily be adapted to provide a wide range of rewards commonly only found in specific mission types (cryotic, kuva, relics, spy rewards, cache rewards, etc) and is easy enough to setup in tiers similar to ESO to accomodate both low-level players and veterans. It's a different kind of sandbox with a lot of things we've done for years, just mixed up into a jambalaya that offers a different experience each time and encourages the use of whatever warframe and weapons loadout you want because ultimately the variety of objectives will encourage variety in play style. No "min-maxed" groups required (like Kuva survival or ESO). It's friendly to all types and stays fresh longer.

 

Hope you like the idea. It's just a suggestion and I know it'd take some work but hopefully not as much as another open world. Should be able to reuse existing tile-sets (on a larger scale) and a lot of scripts snatched from the other game types. 

 

-Thanks for reading it (those who do)-

Nokturnihs

[Gullim92]

This sounds awesome honestly, I don't know if I'd use it as a normal mission however, this seems far better suited for a raid-like activity, given that trials are being reworked. After all, the trials were slightly modified versions of other mission types, but by and large they were just that, normal missions on a bigger scale.

I second this idea, it seems great and it could take advantage of both archwing and railjack when it releases, adding objectives that take place outside the ship itself or using railjack as a means to enter the ship from outer space and begin the raid.

[Koldraxon-732]

Long rambling that may go on a bit of a tangent or something:

Spoiler

 

I can imagine this being a Railjack-enabled mission type where you can invade the same enemy ship frequently, but each subsequent invasion becomes increasingly risky until Ordis simply states that Landing Craft and Archwings cannot be used in the area until the [security feature: Grineer deathzone (see Kuva Fort supply delivery route explanation by Ordis) or Corpus sensor grid (lots of detection lasers that trigger death from ship guns upon contact) ] is disabled via a Spy/Sabotage/Mobile Defense/Interception/Capture mission, or a Clan Railjack lays siege to it.

The Railjack's involvement only really occurs when the ship improves it's defenses due to frequent Tenno attacks. These upgrades may vary wildly, and can just vary from 'lethal security escort' (Eximus everywhere, Bursas everywhere, Raptors everywhere, and mecha-driving-Crewmembers with dual Supra, a hex-Angstrum shoulder-mounted turret, and a Snipetron over the other - except they're split up like minibosses, and all the rest of the ship is crammed full of proxies) in Corpus terms to the external anti-Tenno security features.

Another scenario is that if the ship reveals to be carrying something important - like a massive cache of (stolen?) Distilled Kuva - then the Sentients launch a strike force at it, meaning you are forced to do the mission very quickly and have to race against the Sentients, who would be doing your usual objectives, while you are trying to make the ship give up the access code to the Kuva stash so you can make it eject the stash to your Landing Craft (or Railjack) to keep it out of Sentient limbs.

Or Infested. Or a rival faction invasion.

However, with so many possibilities, I would imagine this would be like an experimental 'open-interior' zone, with a fixed ship layout (windowed corridors only face out at certain areas, and so on; everything tries to be accurate to the ship's design, and the hull is visible from some areas) with limited space for randomization (again, limited to interior spaces that would make sense and make it look like there's more that isn't shown, unlike the current system which has doors which almost line up from opposite sides of the map, but no connection).

 

It would be crazy to pull off, but it would be great if it worked - would allow for all those different mission nodes on ships to be given additional missions to pick from, so you could spawn into one, then go to another and then be instanced into a present squad (via a lift or large doorway - borrowing from Fortuna and Cetus) and help them finish the mission to benefit you both.

 

This could actually start off as a recurring event, under the name 'Operation: Capital Catastrophe', with a simple description of 'Wreck the ship.'

[HIGHDAMAGE]

if the only purpose of team play is to hold down enemy lv by reducing the mission time then no ty 

but i like it as raid concept if coop is key (in order to progress not to avoid harder enemies)

[Kaggelos]

Yes! This! Great idea! I'd really like to see this implemented in the game proper. Kudos to you good sir ^^

[nokturnihs]

57 minutes ago, HIGHDAMAGE said:

if the only purpose of team play is to hold down enemy lv by reducing the mission time then no ty 

but i like it as raid concept if coop is key (in order to progress not to avoid harder enemies)

Maybe I explained it badly - in my head enemies would progress automatically like endless missions. Team play would be versatile - working separately earlier and (likely) working together as the ship gets closer to zero. The more objectives that failed, the longer the mission takes, the tougher the enemies. I'd say having a high and low starting point would be good as it would allow for lower MR players to participate. Likely newer players will need to work together for most the mission while "vets" may opt to work separately to complete the mission faster. I imagine it being a long mission to actually get the ship to zero, especially if DE did something like 1-2% for a normal completed objective and maybe 2-3% for a "hard" objective. If you figure a good group clearing say 3-4 objectives every five minutes you're still looking at only 5-10% per five minutes so maybe hour+ long missions to the ship destruction. If enemies also got scaled per objective complete it would make them even tougher and encourage co-operative team play.