Archwing mission overhaul, new Archwing HUB and free roam outer space

[3mptylord]

^{Preface: This idea is a work-in-progress. I wanted to put my thoughts to paper and get some feedback, especially before I put more effort into concept art and such. I've attempted to organize it - but it's hard to structure what would probably be several wiki articles in a single post. I am using 'Omega' from Mass Effect as a placeholder for the name and visual representation of this node on the Star Chart.} 

Omega is a space station, mining facility, relay, or similar mega structure that functions as the player hub for the Omega Proxima. While historically a haven for criminals and malcontents, Omega's neutral status within the system has seen it become a home for defectors and refugees. Under the de facto leadership of The Kingpin, Omega has a largely stable society. The Kingpin directs Omega around the Star Chart in order to conduct deals and facilitate illicit activities. The position of Omega modifies the landscape and available resources, 

The Omega Proxima is a the sovereign space surrounding Omega. It is an outer space Landscape that requires an archwing to navigate. The features of the Omega Proxima changes as Omega moves around the Star Chart rather than having a single persistent map, which wouldn't be particularly interesting given the lack of persistent geography in open space. This is a more comprehensive iteration of the phases/cycles mechanic used by the other landscapes (e.g. Day/Night on the Plains of Eidolon and Vome/Foss on the Cambrion Drift). The current environment affects the available resources and enemies, which are based on the existing planetary distributions (i.e. you can farm "Earth Resources" while Omega is positioned near Earth). This is deliberate artificial scarcity to encourage players to play during specific times.

With the addition of Omega, all existing Archwing missions would be removed from the Star Chart. The intent of Omega and the Omega Proxima is to bring the archwing experience in line with the modern game, and to make the whole experience of being a "ninja in space" more contiguous. Omega should function as a natural stepping stone between Warframes and Railjacks - with a mission structure and pacing that should feel familiar to open world regions, but with an outer space theme and specifically designed for you to remain in your Archwing throughout. Analogies of the current Archwing missions would be available based on Omega's current location. 

Omega has Vaccuum-link, the same as Railjack missions.

Omega

I would like for Omega to be an Archwing hub - featuring a market place with verticality; walk and fast-walk options for the archwing; and both weapons holstered. However, I'm not sure how mechanically realistic this would be - and so a standard terrestrial hub might be necessary.

Players will dock on Omega using their Orbiter prior to unlocking the Railjack. The Railjack docks closer to the Kingpin - indicating your increased social status. Both options are equidistant from the bounty hub.

• The Kingpin
  You earn Kingpin reputation through Omega's variation of Fishing, Conservation and Mining, as well as completing Requisition Orders and Donating Resource. Improving your rank with the Kingpin improves your access to Omega's facilities.
  
  You can spend Kingpin reputation for cosmetics (including servile drones) for the Orbiter, Dojo and Railjack.

  I came up with the idea for the following Mod Set based on the idea of "crypto farming" or "providing labour": You gain a +25% Resource Booster per Sapped mod in your loadout, up to 100%. At 5 stacks, also gain +100% Resource Drop Chance. These mods have no polarity and drain 7. The reductions from Sapped mods do not stack with Dragon Keys.

  • Sapped Vitality — -75% Health (Warframe)
  • Sapped Redirection — -75% Shield (Warframe)
  • Sapping Aura — -15% Squad Damage (Warframe)
  • Sapping Archwing Exilus — -50% Speed
  • Sapping Warframe Exilus — -50% Speed
  • Sapped Robotics — Your minimap is jammed (Robotics Mod)

• The Houses - Lavan, Vidar and Zekti

  Each of the Houses have a distinct Standing. You gain Standing by completing Bounties for that House. As with Simaris, each House is capped at 125,000 Standing and your reputation is always Neutral. Gaining Standing with the Houses shares the same daily limit. There is no penalty for mixing.

  Houses sell Railjack parts among other collectibles, as well as new equipment and mods. The available wares is based on your rank with the Kingpin, e.g. Mk1, Mk2 and Mk3 Railjack components.

  Each House features a distinct NPC for beginning bounties but there's no distinction for matchmaking purposes. The choice is cosmetic from a gameplay perspective - it only affects the Standing you gain and the NPC who communicates with you during missions. At this time, I have not decided if each House should have its own NPCs for other Landscape features (i.e. Fishing, Mining and Conversation).

• Black Market
  • Archwing Mod Shop

    The A.R.M. (Archwing Relief Module) is an upgrade to your archwing that you can acquire from the Archwing Mod Shop. The NPCs would refer to them simply and unironically as ARMs or Archwing Arms (and yes, I would want at least one of the NPCs to be triggered by the fact people call it an archwing-archwing-relief-module - "THE A ALREADY STANDS FOR ARCHWING!"). It attaches to the upper back of the Warframe.

    I'm torn between (1) the A.R.M. being a Parazon-like extension that has its own Mod Loadout options or (2) allow you to equip an existing sentinel to your Archwing Loadout once you have unlocked the module. Option (1) could still support existing Sentinel/Robotic mods. The A.R.M. attachment does not support sentinel weapons - it only adds one extra piece of customization to your Archwing Loadout.

    The attachment would have extendable arms that appear when salvaging or interacting with objects in space. I am inspired by League of Legends' Heimerdinger's head-piece to insist that the arms be comically large for the amount of space they occupy when compacted into the attachment.

    For option (1), the attachment could use the existing MOA personality modules or even feature a unique, voiced personality. We could go full Warframe body-horror and have the A.R.M. module be your own personal head-in-a-box (Solaris U). For option (2), the sentinel would have a more compact appearance when socketed within the A.R.M. unit.

  • Acquisitions
    You gain Kingpin reputation in the open world when completing the vehicle acquisitions, as with Orb Vallis, or you gain Acquisition IDs that you trade with the Vendor (as with Deimos). There could be an additional option to scrap the vehicles for resources.
     
  • The Kennels

    You can donate Repair Drones and Scavenger Bots for Kingpin reputation using a donation screen.

    Either specimens are given static values based on their intended rarity in-universe; or specimens have a dynamic rarity based on the current environment and how long it's been since the last time the environment was available - indicating a market crash due to abundance. I decided to have the price crash occur with a delay so has to discourage players gambling - i.e. holding on to their resources for as long as possible. The price continues to increases based on the number of transitions that have occurred.
    • Current environment: Based on previous streak
    • 1 Transition: Common - 25 / 35 / 50
    • 2-3: Uncommon - 100 / 125 / 200
    • 4-7: Rare - 500 / 650 / 1000
    • 8+: Very rare - 1200 / 1500 / 2000

  • Salvage
    You can donate resources for Kingpin Standing. This could use the resource values and resource categories as Helminth, including having supplies deplete over time and some being more valuable than others. Omega's resource levels could be shared by all players to imply an active market, depending on how readily this can be balanced for newer players trying to make a quick buck and veterans dumping millions of resources.
    
    You can spend Kingpin Standing to buy Star Chart resources from the current Omega Proxima. These could be presented like Acquisition Orders: with you buying the spoils of specific illicit activities.

Environments

The duration of each environment would be on the scale of hours-to-days, such as 6 hours, 18 hours or 3 days. The exact period would require player feedback and testing, with the aim to have the time slots be good for multiple timezones while also not lasting so that the time between specific phases feels unreasonable to wait for. There is a possibility that the environment durations could be specific to the environments itself (e.g. Open Space could last longer than the periods that they're anchored or there's contested proxima). The duration could even be affected by player contribution (e.g. Omega anchors longer in popular locations, or moves on more quickly when thematically consumable environments are depleted).

• Open Space
  • Orokin Derelict
  • Corpus/Grineer debris
  • Asteroids
• Corpus Shipping Lane

The Corpus Shipping Lane environment is based on the Corpus Ship archwing tileset. The main feature is a multitude of Corpus freighters. Depending on what is possible within the system: these freighters will either stationary or would be slowly moving through the environment's bounds (with new ships entering and leaving for the duration).

With the release of Railjacks, the scale for ships within the system has been seemingly reduced. The current Corpus Ship tileset is a super-massive Corpus "ship" being bombarded from the skybox by a super-massive Grineer ship, with seemingly smaller corpus ships scattered around. For the Corpus Shipping Lane, I would prefer if the freighters were on a similar scale to the Corpus Pillars seen in Railjack missions. Grineer raids could be a random event that can occur, similar to the random events that occur in other landscapes, but they would be smaller.

• Corpus Space Station

The Corpus Space Station environment is based on the Corpus Ship archwing tileset. The focal point of this environment is a single, huge Corpus megastructure on a similar scale to the existing archwing tileset (although with the ability to flyout and around it, of course). The current environment seems to be hand sculpted with only the doors/route being randomized on playthroughs, so it would be efficient for the geometry to be re-used.

It would be neat if certain bounties in this environment were tied thematically to "a fellow tenno operative is raiding this ship for supplies" from traditional tilesets - you can now be that fellow tenno operative!

• Grineer Mining Facility
• Infested Ship (Jordas Golem)
• Sentient Anomaly

Features

• Conservation Commandeering
  You can now commandeer all manner of ships within the Omega Proxima and flag them for collection.

  This should be applicable to all crew ships to compliment/prepare players for the Railjack's existing hijack system.

  For lesser ships, only specific targets assigned by the Commandeering NPC(s) are applicable - similar to vehicle acquisition in Grand Theft Auto V. In the same fashion as pheromone samples: you need to buy vehicle-specific tracking modules in order to scan for applicable targets of that class on the map.

  Rather than a tranq rifle, there would be a variety of traps you can purchase (either consumable or a reusable blueprint) that can assist in disabling ships. These traps could be generally applicable to archwing and railjack missions. The reward is greater the less damage the ship has sustained prior to collection.

  Alternatively, all ships could be valid targets but instead of flagging them for collection - you would need to return them to a specific dock on Omega. Combined with the above pre-requisite of keeping them in pristine condition: adding a minigame of flying the commandeered ship to a collection point might be an enjoyable deviation from traditional conservation. The purchasable trackers and traps should still be applicable

• Fishing Repair Drones
  A variety of repair drones (dependant on environment) can be found attempting to fix external damage to ships and stations, as well as a handful of rare orokin-era robotic organisms that are scavenging parts to repair themselves. These would be thematically similar to the Domestik Drones and servofish of Orb Vallis, and function identically to fish from a gameplay standpoint.

  You require an A.R.M. in order to use equipment items with your Archwing. Any spear capable of catching servofish will function to catch these drones. You can also unlock a claw attachment for your A.R.M. that allows you to catch fish in melee.

  Baits are not required for repair drones

• Mining Salvage
  The equivalent to mining in other Landscapes, the environments would feature Salvage nodes that can be 'mined' to acquire resources respective to the current environment.

• Bounties
  Bounties have been formally separated into Heists (the multiple-objective format) and Defence Contracts (the endless format).
  • Heists
    Heists are available in Tier 1 (3 objectives), Tier 2 (4 objectives), Tier 3 (5 objectives) and Steel Path.
  • Defence Contracts
    You have the option of standard or Elite difficulty. The mission type varies based on the environment.

    Possible objectives
    • Escorting defector ships to Omega.
    • Defending extractors (e.g. asteroid field or comets).
    • Defending the entrance to a mining facility as it is a raided by fellow operatives

Railjack Onslaught

While within the proxima of another planet or other sovereign body, Omega will appear as a node on the Railjack Navigation. This will also be accessible from the Invasions panel. 

Players will have the option of standard or elite difficulty.

[3mptylord]

As a possible additional incentive to get veterans players to visit and interact with Omega (beyond unlocking any new Syndicate-locked equipment), as well as implementing a new system that has the potential to endure: a weapon transmogrification system. 

Stationed in Omega would be an NPC who specializes in the production of counterfeit goods. Perhaps the NPC would be called Kaan Ti'Feit (sorry, although I'm going to refer to them by this name going forward for clarity). By employing their services, you can now convert your equipment into "skins" that can be applied to other compatible equipment. These items could be referred as Gleams, Glamours, Screens or some other suitably 'fantasy' word for this (in-universe) product. Knowing "Syandana" comes from Sanskrit, I looked up the Sanskrit word for "disguise" - Kapataveza. I like it, and it sounds similar to the English word 'captivate'.

The process of turning an item into a skin should be destructive. As with Helminth, the intent of having this process be destructive is to create a secondary demand for items beyond mastery - i.e. it is intended that some players will feel compelled to farm duplicates of weapons they want to keep and convert. (I'm one of these people - I have invested in the slots to keep at least one variant from every weapon family, and I would farm duplicates of weapons I wanted to use as skins). That said, I also hope that players would consider this as an alternative to selling their unwanted items (in the context of limited inventory slots). 

For example, if you wanted to apply the appearance of Volnus Prime to other hammers - you could get Kaan to upcycle a copy of Volnus Prime into the "Volnus Prime Kapataveza". This would then appear under Skins when changing the appearance of a hammer-type weapon. Players could have a limited number of Kapataveza slots - as a potential platinum sink/source of revenue for DE (although this would go against the above point of this system potentially being useful to slot-restricted players). 

Inspired by the Nights of Naberus story*, I thought it might be interesting if the unique resource/currency required for this system was Blue Kuva (don't forget to make the icon distinctive for our colourblind players). This could be a rare resource that is unique to Omega: available from general drop tables; or the Archwing equivalent of stars/sculptures; or something you get for completing requisition orders with Kaan (kind of like the Grandmother-NPC of Omega); or something you can sink the other Omega standings into (i.e. you could farm and spend Vidar Standing on Blue Kuva). There could additionally or exclusively be a unique daily bounty that you can pick up from Kaan. The possibilities are endless - and it could be any or all of these options.

As an alternative to Blue Kuva, Kaan could be a second Void Trader and share a currency with Baro Ki'Teer (I confess this is what inspired their name). I'm sure there's some veteran players who would love somewhere else to spend ducats - as well as other players who aren't interested in Baro's wares. The major flaw with this implementation would be that players could readily obtain ducats from the star chart, which would go against the goal of "making this an incentive to engage with Omega".

^{*This is the first time I heard a reference to Blue Kuva, but I'm sure this isn't the first time it's been mentioned in the lore.}

[BaneOfOrion]

Seems like you've put alot of thought into this. Sounds interesting.

[3mptylord]

7 hours ago, BaneOfOrion said:

Seems like you've put alot of thought into this. Sounds interesting.

Thanks!

I'm currently in the process of making faux wiki articles for it, which might hopefully make it easier to follow.