New Mission Complication: "Special Forces have been deployed"

[MJ12]

There's a lot of people who want PvP, and I've made my views on that known (put it somewhere between "Giving every Warframe a My Little Pony skin" and "having a party hat for Excalibur" on the priority list), but I've been thinking about it and a PvP-like enemy, with better-than-normal AI and unique abilities of its own, would be pretty exciting, especially if they chase you across the map.

This would also allow easier implementation of asymmetric adversarial multiplayer later.

So you go to the extraction and instead of extracting the extraction vehicle blows up and you hear Lotus go...

"It's an ambush. Grineer Special Forces have been deployed. Get to the alternate extraction point."

"The Infested hivemind has prioritized you as a threat. Elder Infested are coming to attack. Get out now."

"The Corpus have deployed their Knights to eliminate you. Beware."

And you have to make your way back through the level, while being chased by elite commando types with miniboss-level health (a bit more than heavy Grineer) and their own unique abilities and models. Bulky, angular power armor for Corpus guys, lightweight-looking armor (like Tyl Regor's) for the Grineer ones, and I don't know what you'd do with the Infested. Crib ruthlessly from DarkSector, I guess?

So you have guys who can do things like shield their allies, turn invisible, create regeneration fields, napalm grenades, fire homing missiles, whathaveyou, have better AI, and run their abilities on a cooldown, who give a bunch of XP and also may or may not have a small chance of dropping blueprints or other Cool Things the first few times you kill them per mission (because otherwise people would just farm their respawns and you don't want that). You want people to get really pumped fighting them, so they should be relatively rare and make a really nice impact whenever they do.

And if DE decides to implement adversarial asymmetric PvP, they can just let the opposition jump into the shoes of the special forces and rock.

[Kreddi]

Sounds pretty cool, would like something in the lines of elite units having a chance of appearing in missions and this certainly is a way.

[Tetsmeha]

I was thinking something similar like Grineer using Warframe Imitations, because you see some dead Tenno and some were captured. Maybe even Tenno traitors, but that's pushing the lore.

[Ingway]

Interesting concept, but please no more back tracking... it's bad enough when she goes "i can't open this door" in every single mission and you have to go back the way you came...

Instead, this could appear before you reach the escape pods, a shield barrier comes up and you hear enemy units aproaching and that's where your idea comes in, but it would be more of a "last stand" before you can escape.

[Tetsmeha]

Interesting concept, but please no more back tracking... it's bad enough when she goes "i can't open this door" in every single mission and you have to go back the way you came...

Instead, this could appear before you reach the escape pods, a shield barrier comes up and you hear enemy units aproaching and that's where your idea comes in, but it would be more of a "last stand" before you can escape.

That's actually a really good idea. It prevents pub matchmaking from going solo and just rushing through to the end, while encouraging actual cooperation between players to get everyone to the end.

But it should be dynamic, and scale with the number of players.

[Ronyn]

I like where this is going.

right on

[MJ12]

Interesting concept, but please no more back tracking... it's bad enough when she goes "i can't open this door" in every single mission and you have to go back the way you came...

Instead, this could appear before you reach the escape pods, a shield barrier comes up and you hear enemy units aproaching and that's where your idea comes in, but it would be more of a "last stand" before you can escape.

Well the backtracking thing is because the engine seems to only create rooms as you enter them, which means you can't have a chase through undiscovered portions of the room.

If I'm mistaken, you can take the backtracking out entirely and have a run to the extraction point with the objective of outrunning or shooting the special forces guys.

[astrobird]

Yes. DE pls do this.