Endless Mission Suggestion

[Shyft9]

A lot of the endless mission types are starting to show their age at a gameplay and UI level, like Survival, Defense and so on. I'm tossing this out as a likely not-unique idea, but I think it might improve the perception of how these missions flow.

Let's look at Defense, for example. You go in, you defend the objective, and then you have the reward screen and vote-to-leave choice. That takes forever (really only 10-15 seconds). And then there are people who leave at the last second and suddenly you're down a person- but that's a somewhat separate problem.

So my suggestion is to crib a bit more from Sanctuary's mechanics and/or baseline Survival. Instead of a voting screen, endless missions have a 'quit' room that lets a player exit the mission with-reward mid-wave as well as during post-wave break. While we're at it, an in-game mechanic/interface to advance the waves faster might be fun?

As for rewards, a popup that comes up every wave like Survival or the other more recent modes seems perfectly acceptable. You could even (as a UI option?) let players see those toasts as stacks on their screen so they know what they've gotten at wave 1, 2 3 and 4. (They'd likely fade out just like regular toasts, mind!)

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While I was writing this I also think 'Defense' missions are kind of poorly named, now that I take a second to assess why. You defend an objective for an ascending number of waves... and then you leave. There's no conclusion saying that you pulled the cryopod out with you in mechanics or fluff. Nothing that says the attackers aren't going to get into the reactor after you leave, etc.

I guess what I'm saying is, even at a fluff level, the end-mission dialogue from the Lotus or whatnot could say 'you've broken their morale, they won't be coming after this again any time soon'. Maybe she already does and I haven't heard it recently.

 

 

 

 

 

[peterc3]

11 minutes ago, Shyft9 said:

exit the mission with-reward mid-wave

Then there is no point to the mechanic.

Take what you have and then leave before facing stronger foes, or continue on for more rewards but you have a higher risk of losing it all. This is removed with your proposal. There is no point to Defense with this proposal.

[Shyft9]

1 minute ago, peterc3 said:

Then there is no point to the mechanic.

Take what you have and then leave before facing stronger foes, or continue on for more rewards but you have a higher risk of losing it all. This is removed with your proposal. There is no point to Defense with this proposal. 

Perhaps- I'm having trouble parsing your comment.

Let's see... My first pass here is basically focusing on the 'flow' of the mission. And how the voting screen is slow, somewhat subject to abuse and interrupts play. I think that's more important than specific implementation.

Now, an advantage to my proposal is that you can start focusing more on the idea of what 'Defense' actually means for gameplay. Right now it's 'Enemies shoot a thing that has a lot of health', but once you step away from the hard-delination of waves, you can maybe include more elaborate mechanics and 'setpiece' style concepts.

Like as an idea, what if a defense mission is played on a giant space elevator or something like on Jupiter, and as the level progresses, the platform you start on breaks apart into floating ones that you jump between. The spawns also start changing as you get higher or lower into the atmosphere.

This is all just tossout concepts at this point.