Relay rework, a Flying City

[(PSN)puritan643]

The relays need to feel more like a lived in bastion housing the last safe places for civilization and humanity. Instead they are near empty hallways. I would propose a rework that opens them up into an encased oriental china town inside the relay hull with massive windows opening the streets up to space scapes among hull walls and supports. The city streets and buildings themselves would be very compact, full of signs, lanterns, neon lights, and symbols to bring color, with trees and plant life that permeate heavily throughout. Streets could also be multi leveled and have variance in height, staircases and the light lifts in current relays would transport between levels. NPCs would then be able to fill these streets and bring life to a previously empty relay, and dead civilization. A portion of the population could also be corpus and grineer whom have citizenship, kids would also be active in the streets.        

This would only represent one small portion or the city/relay. The boundaries of the map would have massive gates feeding into other districts of the relay used for and lived in by the population. For the purpose of player use, the player will only be allowed in the “market district” and the market district’s hangar so to speak, as it is the only place to serve a real function to players. The gates on the market borders are open, allowing NPCs to pass through and venture in the foreground but the player would be blocked by a force field for non canon reasons. To improve the scope of the new relays, missions that require the player to visit the relay could take place in a different section of the city/relay. Example, the head of security wants to discuss city fortifications against sieges, the player then meets them in a super massive military complex, or some farmers house a secret complex under their farm community that intercepts messages, player would meet them at their farm located on the relay. This would help to improve the scope of the relays, in addition to added variety + dialog. The Mission Control and Conclave wings would still be accessible from the relay.

Syndicates could also have a stronger presence in a city space. No longer would they be a one hallway clubhouse, but be a proper guild hall or stronghold in their respective corners of what I will be labeling as the “market district”. This would allow for more NPC and vendor interaction within the syndicate itself. The vague descriptions of these syndicates could have some proper dialog interaction and space to flesh them out. The head of each syndicate could provide extra incentive for visiting, such as nightmare syndicate missions or eventually a quest centered around the syndicate itself.

Many vendors and dealers would line city streets, offering mods, blueprints, items, etc and would have their stock refresh daily. Darvo would still have a platinum only vendor and Baro would have his Dr Strange vendor in ducats, but other vendors would deal in credits. These vendors would be able to sell existing mods, as well to be a great way to introduce new mods into the game without overloading loot tables. New mods could be for specific weapons, shield augments, triggered mods, etc.. Vendor stock would vary for players but not between different relays, this would give an added incentive to visit not just every two weeks for the void trader without the added loading time of visiting every relay. This would also be a great time to introduce more characters that the player can interact with and utilize the dialog system further. Possibly a gunsmith would have weapon specific mods for sale, a modified corpus MOA drone would have shield specific augments, etc.. New characters could also be centered around a quest or simply be able to have a chat with, not necessarily vendor specific.

These types of changes would make relays more essential, and make the fomorian attacks more threatening.  

[Lucernam]

Some of these ideas sound awesome, but would require a lot of work. The idea behind making the Fomorian attacks more threatening though, that's something I would be all for.

[Genitive]

So much yes I can't even. At least one of those.

[AlphaPHENIX]

If this is to ever come (and it better if you ask me) it definitely won't be soon. My guess is that depending on when DE decides to start working on in, we will have the Relay Rework in update 22-26, maybe even as late as 30. Well who knows, we just have to wait and be patiant like always :)

PS: As for with the Syndicates I do like the idea, but you know how DE does things when it comes to lore.