Replacing Extractors: An Alternative Passive Resource Mechanic

[(PSN)CrysJaL]

Extractors are a fairly dull mechanic. They provide a handful of resources at a time. There is no real gameplay element to them and they are just a reason to login every so many hours. Could we make it more engaging though? Turn the otherwise straightforward mechanic into something with actual gameplay?

Games like Fallout Shelter have a mechanic where you send out your characters to fight and gather resources etc before returning. I propose something similar so here’s my concept.

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The Story/Lore

Spoiler

We discover a portal to an alternate universe where Ballas and Margulis did not exist. With no Margulis and no Ballas to propose the use of Sentient technology as part of his plot to destroy the Orokin the Orokin Empire instead collapsed on its own because no solution to their expansion problem was identified. As a result there were no Warframes. However due to an outbreak of war among the Orokin, the Corpus, Grineer and Infested factions still came to be.

Now, Ordis has been carrying out some experiments with this Universe and it seems that our void abilities aren’t compatible with this alternate universe. Going there ourselves would be fatal and transference won’t work across the portal we have been researching.

So Ordis proposes that we send specialised independent Spectres to go over to this universe, to provide balance to the system and gather resources for our own use here.

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Mechanics and Gameplay

Spoiler

We start with a special reuseable Excalibur spectre blueprint which can be used to craft an Alt-Excalibur spectre which is adapted to power itself off of void energy of that universe, not ours, and act independently like Umbra.

This spectre gets sent through the portal to carry out missions via a “transmission” to a selected planets and will periodically return and deposit resource rewards from the planet they are sent to to the player.

Each planet has three tiers of difficulty. Missions are selected events from a group of available missions on a given planet based on difficulty, defence, assassination etc. Different missions will have different amount of rewards of different types (e.g experience, resources or chance of special resources). Missions fail if all spectres on a mission die. Spectres will continue to repeat the same mission unless instructed to move during a transmission. Spectres will heal by a fixed amount of health between missions. Can recall spectres collectively however the cooldown timer will start immediately and you will have to wait 1hr before they will be sent out again.

In addition to regular rewards there is a chance of specialised rewards by planet including unique mods, Kuva or blueprints for new spectres and weapons for them to use and equip.

Spectres have different stats which affect their abilities in the field. They have health, damage, speed and resource gathering stats. Damage affects the amount of damage dealt per second to enemies encountered on a mission. It's as much of a survivability stat as Health is. Health affects how long they can survive as they gradually lose more hp and gathering affects the amount of resources gathered per mission. Speed affects the time taken to complete a mission, a higher speed results in more missions completed per transmission. Spectres level up from lvl 1-30 and gain experience from missions. The level affects the four base stats.

Damage is also affected by weapon equipped, some weapons have special effects e.g the Lenz which grants high damage but results in additional damage received to the equipped Spectre over time, or Bows which allow the spectres to remain stealthy and so reduces damage taken during Rescue missions.

A team of four Spectres can be sent out on a mission with their collective stats affecting resource rewards. Spectres are healed over time while not in transmission.

Each Spectre also has one special buff they bring to a mission. Nekros increases resources gathered by 20%. Frost grants buffs for defence missions. Trinity heals Warframes by additional Hp between missions etc.

Can send a team on a mission for 2-4-6 hours at a time. There is a 1hr cooldown between transmissions making longer journeys slightly more efficient. However, due to the random nature of taking damage there is a greater chance Spectres will die on longer transmissions if you don’t pay attention to them!

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Thoughts? This was just me messing around with ideas, it could be fleshed out a bit more. I thought it’d be a cool idea though. Could be a decent standalone App game too tbh.

Edited November 17, 2019 by (PS4)CrysJaL
tidying it up