Base raid, not boss raid (Warfront/Invasion)

[Sy]

TL;DR - Warfront/Invasion Kickstarter

I don't know that success can be found by mimicking what's been out there for years. From that perspective, the kaiju boss is not niche enough.

Remember that Firefall video with the player clearing out the base then hopping into a cannon to shoot at the giant spider? That's what I want to see. A base being wrecked and us coming in to help. I want to see the base raiding mechanic, not a kaiju raid boss encounter.

See https://forums.em8er.com/threads/another-game-when-focus-change-feedback-thread.2317/

 

[Pandagnome]

I want to see the base raiding mechanic, not a kaiju raid boss encounter.

What would be good is have the kaiju appear at times to pop its head and try and bite us while some are trapped within the base.

Imagine trying to hold on to a base while a certain kaiju is blocking your exit to try and eat you :O and others from outside using devices or specialized thumpers to drill and create some tunnel for your escape, while others distract the kaiju etc

Re-watching prison break got me thinking of escape routes because that was one good show.

 

[Dam13n]

The Amazon warzone in Firefall did a pretty good job at creating the feeling of an invasion without dealing with the limitations of the engine at the time.

For one, it wasn't really an invasion as much as just a lot of incursions and towers put close together both in location and spawn cycles. This then created the experience of a constant stream of enemies without too many enemies being on screen at once.

You were constantly running from one POI to the next, non stop action.

People loved it, the zone simply didn't reward you and even punished you due to the Crystite expense from repairing gear, so people stopped playing but that wasn't the fault of the gameplay loop.

 

[Pandagnome]

I'd image you could have bikes with your passenger shooting or using a melee while riding across great landscapes to various territory to help stop the invasion.

 

[Dam13n]

What would be good is have the kaiju appear at times to pop its head and try and bite us while some are trapped within the base.

Imagine trying to hold on to a base while a certain kaiju is blocking your exit to try and eat you :O and others from outside using devices or specialized thumpers to drill and create some tunnel for your escape, while others distract the kaiju

A basic kajiu is already in the game, at least partially realized. The THMPR mech is also already in the game, so having it help in battle, would probably not be far down the pipeline.

At least in terms of combat assistance.

Scaling up the Kaiju in size (at least a bit) or adding a couple of them during a stage of the horde, also not unreasonable.

There's the beast mode humanoids, another potential wave during an incursion/warfront.

I'd image you could have bikes with your passenger shooting or using a melee while riding across great landscapes to various territory to help stop the invasion.

View attachment 5801

I've been pretty partial to gliding/flying myself. "FIRECAT MASTER RACE!!!"

 

[liandri]

An invasion-style demo would really be the best; just a main base, a handful of FOBs you can go and capture with others, and a full-scale overwhelming invasion that pushes everyone back to main base periodically. Terrain large enough you can go thumping, where you can be ambushed by Tsi-hu portals. Some rudimentary crafting for some basic equipment and weapons. A nice vertical slice of the game that keeps players engaged so there's always something going on.

Seeing the base concepts in the demo would be awesome. I don't know how you'd go with base destruction. They might need a separate plugin for that, and getting a building to be destructible and look good while doing it would be a lot of work I'd wager.

The Amazon warzone in Firefall did a pretty good job at creating the feeling of an invasion without dealing with the limitations of the engine at the time.

I spent so much time there grinding the Shimmercore, and the "The Good Samaritan" achievement for helping up 100 civilians. It's my rarest Steam achievement to this day (though I later heard you could just input a code to get all achievements, such bs).

 

[farias]

An invasion-style demo would really be the best; just a main base, a handful of FOBs you can go and capture with others, and a full-scale overwhelming invasion that pushes everyone back to main base periodically. Terrain large enough you can go thumping, where you can be ambushed by Tsi-hu portals. Some rudimentary crafting for some basic equipment and weapons. A nice vertical slice of the game that keeps players engaged so there's always something going on.

I agree with you, that could be enough to show what the game is about and how it feels.
But I think it would be better if they add at least one kaiju encounter too, because Kickstarter campaigns are different, you need to impress the player, and in this case the impact of an encounter with a Kaiju can be an epic and memorable moment that helps convince someone to invest in the game.
It is certainly a difficult topic because when the project it was meant to please Firefall fans, but to be able to grow it also needs to bring in new players who may have other preferences.

 

[liandri]

I agree with you, that could be enough to show what the game is about and how it feels.
But I think it would be better if they add at least one kaiju encounter too, because Kickstarter campaigns are different, you need to impress the player, and in this case the impact of an encounter with a Kaiju can be an epic and memorable moment that helps convince someone to invest in the game.
It is certainly a difficult topic because when the project it was meant to please Firefall fans, but to be able to grow it also needs to bring in new players who may have other preferences.

There was meant to be a kaiju as part of the thumping encounter. If they were to do an invasion-style demo, it would 100% be better in the invasion rather than during thumping, provided the invasions were constant enough for someone completely new to encounter it within 20-30 minutes.

 

[Pandagnome]

There was meant to be a kaiju as part of the thumping encounter. If they were to do an invasion-style demo, it would 100% be better in the invasion rather than during thumping, provided the invasions were constant enough for someone completely new to encounter it within 20-30 minutes.

What Category kaiju could it be i mean its going to be quite high but not the biggest and baddest right?

 

[liandri]

What Category kaiju could it be i mean its going to be quite high but not the biggest and baddest right?

Ha, it'd have to be a pretty low one for the demo, lower than Crodus, but higher than the Kaiju in the Art demo. They say this new demo they're working on is 4 or 5v1. That might be sufficient with all the Tsi-hu and kneebiters about (since we don't have vehicles). Presumably it would be twice to 2.5x the height of a heavy frame.

 

[Pandagnome]

Presumably it would be twice to 2.5x the height of a heavy frame.

That won't matter so much our Mech tower celebration is going to be higher as long as we survive!!!

since we don't have vehicles

Was hoping oneday to launch into some kaiju feet on the bike then running off or attempt to fly off a cliff, land on a kaiju poke its eye with my wheel etc etc ride off in style while the kaiju gets quite mad.

Although i am not sure if the bike will go in flames during that great plan hmm

 

[Omnires]

One of the thoughts I had awhile go but I don't think I ever posted was, "What if the kaiju was the level?". I mean this is not uncommon in some games where the monster and/or boss is so large and massive that in terms in of size scaling it would be like a small mouse trying to fight a fully grown adult human male. And in some game the size scale of some bosses is like ants fighting an adult human. And so playing wound with that size scale in some games the monster/boss is part of the level itself as you fight on them and/or inside of them.

I bring this up because of the size scale of the Cat 4s and Cat 5s that said to be about the size of mountains. So part of the challenge in fighting them could just getting high enough to even aim at weak points in the first place. And if the move around a lot and fast you might need to grab on and hold to them while trying to attack them.

Everyone knows Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of this.

But other games, even MMOs have some massive bosses. Like from PSO2 Elder the gargantuan.

 

[Pandagnome]

n some game the size scale of some bosses is like ants fighting an adult human. And so playing wound with that size scale in some games the monster/boss is part of the level itself as you fight on them and/or inside of them.

Surviving the inner chaos of the kaiju inside would be very smelly perhaps there are some treasures too?

 

[farias]

Surviving the inner chaos of the kaiju inside would be very smelly perhaps there are some treasures too?

I was thinking something like exploring and looting the dead corpse of the Kaiju for materials.
Like getting some fluids and tissue from its blood and guts, some rare minerals from its bones, horns ans scales.
We could even use our thumpers for that.

 

[Pandagnome]

I was thinking something like exploring and looting the dead corpse of the Kaiju for materials.
Like getting some fluids and tissue from its blood and guts, some rare minerals from its bones, horns ans scales.
We could even use our thumpers for that.

Lots of things can be made with all that, I'd still also like to find some treasures inside have no idea what a kaiju would gobble on a hungry day!

 

[Dam13n]

Something that made the world of Firefall feel really alive was the way that the different NPC "factions" interacted with each other, without player input. We saw this for example with the bandits and Chosen. It created these moments where you logged into a tower and there was stuff going on outside, you went to look and it was two NPC groups just fighting each other.

It often created these "what the hell???" moments.

A way that this could be implemented into the current demo and with the work currently being done would be with deathsquads and feral knee-biter nests for example. A feral faction that is not under control of the Tsi-hu and attacks anything.

(I think i remember reading something similar in a lore drop or something)

You could smoke and mirror it a bit by making 1 in 3 deathsquads seek out the nests. To make this experience more common.

 

[Omnires]

One of the things I loved about the early days of FireFall was having truly dark nights where you had to use your flashlight to see or use Recons SIN abilities to mark enemies for everyone. And the fact that there was an ecosystem effect in the game. Where all the wild animals would fight and hunt each other like real animals would. And the Earth animals both hated and feared the ones that came out of the mist. One of my fav things to do in the game in those early days just hang out with my Nighthawk watching the animals through my sniper scope and pretending that I was a nature documentary narrator like Sir David Frederick Attenborough as I watched the animals hunt each other or even fight the NPC factions. As remember the wild animals being wild animals would fight anything they seen as a threat. So they would attack Bandits and the Chosen even if there was no players around.

One of my fav memories of those old days was of 2 nados spawning while trying to take back an outpost and because someone was thumping nearby a boss also spawned. And at the lest moment when It looked like the thumper was going be destroyed another player came racing by on a bike being chased by while elephants who then started to fight the Chosen and mist animals over fighting the players. It is was little chaos moments like that which made me love FireFall in the early days. When the ecosystem stuff was removed from the game I felt that it lost a lot of charm and the sense of realism without chaos of wild factions coming in an racking house because they are on no ones sild and just want to eat / survive.

 

[Dam13n]

It is kinda strange that you don't see this more in online persistent open world games. It adds so much content for relatively litte work. MMOs have factions, thematically there is more then enough reason for them to fight each other. They even often spawn pretty close to each other.

Instead we get this "mobs grazing in the field" experience more often than anything. Maybe a stark difference between classic MMO players and Firefall fans is that MMO players prefer predictability while Firefall fans crave chaos.

Might be a little window into our soul there...

 

[Omnires]

True, like I told a friend of mine years ago. "A true master of chaos is also a master of order. As one can't exist without the other. After a point you view them as being the same." lol

P.s.
In a few games I've played they like give players a kind of personality test to see which faction / class best suits them. Funny how in most them I'm ether put into the true neutral faction or I'm put into the faction that views chaos and order as the same thing, so can use both order and chaos as a weapon. The last MMO that I played that give me a personality put as a member of the Dragon faction. lol.