Mission Idea (Blackout) (potential replacement for trials)

[frostyhobo]

So what is Blackout?

Blackout is a special mission type in which a team of four goes into a highly secured area of either the corpus or the grineer (not the infested for thematic reasons), These highly secured areas are where the most well trained soldiers reside (minimum level for the mission would be 100). Your team doesn't know what they have to do before they get there as scans are not yielding any results, once in the secured area your team will need to complete multiple tasks as it is very rare to gain access to these areas. self revives would not be available in this mission type, so an entire team wipe would result in a failed mission.

Every mission would start with having to hack a special console somewhere in the map, once hacked the entire map becomes available to view and your first task will be assigned. There would be 3-4 tasks required with the fourth being an optional exterminate for bonus rewards. The other missions would be as follows, defending an area for a certain amount of time/rescuing a hostage (which would need to be protected for the rest of the match)/breaching vaults (like a spy mission)/sabotaging an important component to the area.

Wow that sounds difficult, how would we complete a blackout mission?

The best way to complete a blackout mission would be to organize your team prior to the engagement, you would most likely want to bring a support play style along with a crow control play style, there are so many possibilities within warframe.

What does a blackout mission provide for me, why should I play it?
 

Blackout missions would be for the most elite of the elite tenno, the players that have little to no difficulty completing other activities in Warframe. These missions would allow for a different type of play style to the common Warframe run and gun techniques, which would be to stick as a group and make sure you revive your fallen allies.

It would be irrelevant to mention any rewards specifically as this is simply a suggestion only that for such a difficult mission only the highest of reward tiers should drop from this. 

The suggested assignment types in the second paragraph would not be in stone as to say they could very easily be any mission type. 

Edit 2: downward 
After some feedback from many people, the common idea is that the level of enemies is not something that will force groups to stay together, so I would like to add some commentary to this. This is true albeit lvl 100 is high players are still going to be able to run through this super fast so the thing that would needed to be changed would be the assignment requirements. 

This addition would be that at random times the soldiers that reside here would basically come on over the intercoms (the little dialog box where factions and the stalker talk to you) and basically choose at random a player to "capture", if that player is indeed captured, they would be stripped of their weapons and taken to a secure location which would result in the rest of the team having to free them and collect their weapons which have been scattered around the map before being able to resume the current assignment as well as once that player is captured the captures will target another player until all players have been captured which would result in a mission failure.

How would they capture players? I mean people can just run past them....

Well to answer that question the way that these captures would work is first they would lock down the specific room that the target player is in and then using Orokin technologies would create a portal from there command station to the room, waves of enemies would poor out until either all enemies are killed or the target player has been captured. This portal that opens would allow two way travel once all the enemies have been dealt with so that players could hack a terminal in order to release the lock down.

What kind of enemies would be that difficult?

It wouldn't simply be just shear numbers of enemies, it would be more about targeting the players that are farther away from their teammates, so for example if there is a team consisting of volt,Trinity,Ivara, and Frost and the volt decides "hey im going to just run to this objective" and in 4 seconds the volt is at the objective while the other 3 are still about 4 rooms behind, then the enemies would do their alert tidbit and shortly lock down the room. Secondly the types of enemies would be a challenge, these are the most elite units of the Grineer/Corpus they don't reside with the normal grunts, they would have devices that once 2 are on either your feet or arms would render you unable to move. (similar to electronic handcuffs that nullify you once two are on your hands or feet) So for the same team as above once the volt knows that they are locking down the room and coming for her the rest of the team would still be scurrying to get there and help but alas they didn't make it in time so the volt either has to kill all the  enemies which their design would make that very difficult or will be captured and taken to their holding cell as well as hide volt's weapons throughout the ship. 

Once captured the team would have three desirable options. 

1) Go rescue volt then find volt's weapons and then take down the squad that captured volt.

2) Go collect volt's weapons and then go get volt and take down the squad together.

3) simply kill the squad but with only 3 players then  go get vault+ weapons 

4) all become captured and mission failed 
 

Then and only then if 1-3 are complete the team could continue their assignments.

Also all of the listed above could still happen to an entire group but would primarily target players by themselves.

 

Edited February 9, 2018 by frostyhobo
Edit 1: Raised level to 100 from 80 and added the team wipe mechanic. Edit 2: Added in the part following "after some feedback"

[CryoSpecter]

6 minutes ago, frostyhobo said:

So what is Blackout?

Blackout is a special mission type in which a team of four goes into a highly secured area of either the corpus or the grineer (not the infested for thematic reasons), These highly secured areas are where the most well trained soldiers reside (minimum level for the mission would be 80). Your team doesn't know what they have to do before they get there as scans are not yielding any results, once in the secured area your team will need to complete multiple tasks as it is very rare to gain access to these areas.

Every mission would start with having to hack a special console somewhere in the map, once hacked the entire map becomes available to view and your first task will be assigned. There would be 3-4 tasks required with the fourth being an optional exterminate for bonus rewards. The other missions would be as follows, defending an area for a certain amount of time/rescuing a hostage (which would need to be protected for the rest of the match)/breaching vaults (like a spy mission)/sabotaging an important component to the area.

Wow that sounds difficult, how would we complete a blackout mission?

The best way to complete a blackout mission would be to organize your team prior to the engagement, you would most likely want to bring a support play style along with a crow control play style, there are so many possibilities within warframe.

What does a blackout mission provide for me, why should I play it?
 

Blackout missions would be for the most elite of the elite tenno, the players that have little to no difficulty completing other activities in Warframe. These missions would allow for a different type of play style to the common Warframe run and gun techniques, which would be to stick as a group and make sure you revive your fallen allies.

It would be irrelevant to mention any rewards specifically as this is simply a suggestion only that for such a difficult mission only the highest of reward tiers should drop from this. 

 

Let me know what ya'll think, I could potentially see this type of mission replace trials since blackout missions would be focused primarily on teamwork and team play. (If there is anything i have missed in this presentation of my mission idea please let me know so i can clarify/ add it)

I like the concept, but I'm gonna play Devil's advocate for a second. What's to stop player's from finding ways to cheese this as we have other content?

Also, as far as variety goes, I might actually suggest more varied tasks to include. Maybe have the hostage play a role in hacking a console to an area, maybe they have to hack a terminal for data. Maybe force the team to split up for different parts of the mission to complete dual objectives (say, half of them distract guards while the other half infiltrates a vault or prison). I guess, what would you do to make this mission stand out tactically from sorties and other current content in the game, so that it's not going to turn into people going through the motions for rewards.

While I know Defection wasn't the most popular mission, I do think they forced players to split up and think as a tactical unit rather than mindless killing machines in order to achieve the goal, and if this were implemented in the game, that's what I would like to see from this. I don't want this to be me going in and killing everything mindlessly; I want it to make the players step back and analyze how they go about completing the objectives, so that there is no one "solution" to cheese it (that's me being optimistic of course lol).

[frostyhobo]

1 minute ago, Cryoguard said:

I like the concept, but I'm gonna play Devil's advocate for a second. What's to stop player's from finding ways to cheese this as we have other content?

Also, as far as variety goes, I might actually suggest more varied tasks to include. Maybe have the hostage play a role in hacking a console to an area, maybe they have to hack a terminal for data. Maybe force the team to split up for different parts of the mission to complete dual objectives (say, half of them distract guards while the other half infiltrates a vault or prison). I guess, what would you do to make this mission stand out tactically from sorties and other current content in the game, so that it's not going to turn into people going through the motions for rewards.

While I know Defection wasn't the most popular mission, I do think they forced players to split up and think as a tactical unit rather than mindless killing machines in order to achieve the goal, and if this were implemented in the game, that's what I would like to see from this. I don't want this to be me going in and killing everything mindlessly; I want it to make the players step back and analyze how they go about completing the objectives, so that there is no one "solution" to cheese it (that's me being optimistic of course lol).

I'm glad you asked that. As I stated above the minimum level should be 80, typically these are very difficult missions on sortie. I was wanting to say minimum 100 but that seemed a little bit too high, I felt that the raw difficulty of the mission enemies would keep players from running through. Another thing that would make it difficult would for example having your first assignment being a rescue and then a spy, which would leave the subject very open to attack.

Those assignment types I listed were simply some suggestions, so basically any mission could be incorporated into these.   

[EligosMk2]

I'm actually a big fan of multi tier missions. This is a very interesting concept that I'd enjoy along with the sorties. the implementation of these kinds of missions could help really breathe some new life into our standard missions.

[frostyhobo]

Just now, EligosMk2 said:

I'm actually a big fan of multi tier missions. This is a very interesting concept that I'd enjoy along with the sorties. the implementation of these kinds of missions could help really breathe some new life into our standard missions.

That is the exact idea I was going for, I would love for DE to make more complex missions with very high difficulty, cause lets face it sorties aren't that hard and people just run through them, the only thing currently is getting a lvl 100 assassinate sortie that just makes the boss a bullet sponge.

[TaurusDeRoma]

13 minutes ago, Cryoguard said:

While I know Defection wasn't the most popular mission, I do think they forced players to split up and think as a tactical unit rather than mindless killing machines in order to achieve the goal, and if this were implemented in the game, that's what I would like to see from this. I don't want this to be me going in and killing everything mindlessly; I want it to make the players step back and analyze how they go about completing the objectives, so that there is no one "solution" to cheese it (that's me being optimistic of course lol).

Defection was a nice addition, every player needed to be able hold their own so players would be able to use a simple cheese, and trivialize the entire mission, unlike the rest of the missions. We need a lot more variety for the game, and running the same defense, excavation survival, etc. gets incredibly boring and monotonous. This sounds like it could gives a mix of open-world, with a standard set of missions, and allow players to have actual roles to play, instead of all a bunch of offensive frames killing en mass. My favorite mission type is Assault, due the stages of the mission, giving it the feel of a campaign rather than just room to kill enemies in.

[Pie_craft]

The only hard part about sorties were peoples internet connections and team work. if you want to make it extra tough, give an enemy a pick up to carry to the hacking terminal (as seen in LOR) and why not put a timer on the special consoles after they're hacked? like one minute from the end of the first finish of one hack sets off the rest. 

[Kyoresh]

If it's really desinged for the "Best of the best", the players that dont really have any challenge in the game, then 100is a bit too low. Aside from that, why not sounds great :)

[Snorvyn]

I like your idea a lot. This seem similar to assault mission on kuva fortess but somewhat harder.
Still there is 1 Downside to it...
most of experienced players would just cheese this (even solo sometimes)...

Enemy level isnt a problem for many players. having a proper loadout you can easily do missions up to level 150-200. the thing is the objective itself should be harder and more concentrated on teamplay not the enemy level. so we need to get something similar to raid objectives where players need to sync their actions n order to be successfull. Not just be able to do regular mission objectives on higher levels

:) Anyway. good idea. hope you can develop it more

[IceFire909]

If I can solo level 100 enemies in sorties or extended survivals, I don't see how that's gonna slow me down in blackout missions.

that being said it sounds like a fun challenge at least