Player hunters and bounties

[Omnires]

This idea is partly based on the idea of death squads in FireFall and the hunters in games like Warframe. Where there are special NPCs or special groups of NPCs that are designed to track down and try to kill a specific player or group of players. But I want to take this idea to next level by having the hunter units slowly become more specialized the more you fight them as they learn more about you. So over time they will start to use different weapons, armor, and tactics to try and counter your playing style.

One example of this comes from games like Armor Core where there was a self learning enemy A.I. in the game. The more you fights you had the A.I. the more it learned about how you liked to fight. Forcing you change your tactics or even your fighting style as the game neared to the end because it learned so much about your habits and idiosyncrasies that at times felt like you was fighting a real person who was stalking and studying you or that you was fighting evil version of yourself.

So I would like to have the idea of player hunters in the game that slowly learn each player's fighting style and tries to counter them. You can have it so that the enemy NPCs have a bounty system in them where as the more missions you do against them and the more of them you kill the more their hate of you grows. To the point where one of the units personally makes your their main target and unless you kill them and/or stop them from passing on combat data, the next time they come after you they will but a little bit more prepared.

This also means that people who play a lot could get the point where hearing the warning that a hunter or death squad is after them could put a bit of fear in them if they are out solo. You might find high level plays running around looking for backup because the know the odds are low that they can win solo. And if you let it so that A.I. can team up that would put the fear into a group of players who always team up, because it would mean that their hunters would also learn to work as a group against them.

And if those hunter units could just exist in the world itself even if they are not actively hunting the play they was assigned to or even if that player is not online. It means even other people can run across these hunter units at random just out in the world or inside enemy bases where they are going about their normal job of say protecting the base or something.

What are your ideas on hunters and death squads? Would you like to see them in Em-8er? Would you like to have them just be more powerful units maybe with a slightly different A.i. than normal units? Or would you like to units that learn to specialize themselves to the person or group of people they are after?

 

[Mahdi]

One of the generated events I hope comes back from firefall were the death squads and the announcements it made for the player targeted. Have the sinister A.I. gauge the group strength of the targeted player (if in a group) or adjust on the fly if the player coordinates a group and let the havoc commence. Or if solo, the challenge is still there but toned down.

 

[Pandagnome]

When imagining hunter squads or solo hunter

It first reminded me about warframes stalker and eximus squad, then wondered

- Hunter/hunter squads could use their own sinister tracker minions especially if your damaged like sniffer hounds but for mechs the counter measure for this is to get out of the mech and hide until you can fix it or get a new one!

- Give you a second chance for example lets say a hunter defeats you and vanishes there is a chance the hunter could return to complete the job later, lets say it was a hunter in training hmm

- if you or a team defeat the hunter/hunter group could we salvage unique parts to create certain items that hunters use?

Hunter types:

- A hunter of silent assassination lets call them this the night hunters these hunters are the most stealthiest reduced sound, and using weapons that compliment its style. Lets say you notice your health or shields going down for no reason after the signal/sound of the hunters had occured.

They would use the environment and weather to their advantage such as the night cycle and shadows etc

To me i imagine like a predator from the movie moving into high elevated points to ambush and use its ranged weapon/abilities. Some might like to get close and personal with traps and decoys hmm

This hunter is a sneaky punk but a small group is even menacing would there be ways to detect them sure but they could be smart enough to stay still random times in stealth. Even use none energy weapons and switch to spears/bows/discs. Maybe if they move can detect their heat signature using some scanner with a switch of a button perhaps the recon could help?

Perhaps when they fire a weapon it gives you an indication of where the energy shots are coming from and you all WAAAAAAAAAA and fire at that direction ooh bhoy just like in the movie!!! it would need epic music too maybe there could be a jungle who knows hmmmm

- The Annihilator hunters these do not care of such stealth they will fire aoe damage and cause the most destruction possible they like to stomp on your mechs and turn you all into pancake!
They are the heaviest and tankiest hunters but slowest too.

- The Death hunter these hunters are melee types they attack with fast short burst and use fallen dead hunters to resurrect but with slightly lower health however it cannot be repeated more than 2 times. Think of them like a necros of warframe but against you :O

- The Micro hunters this has to be one it must...the smallest hunter and lightest of them all attempts to eat your armor this hunter is hard to track and very good at hiding you may sometimes find them on the ceiling.

Micro hunters related to the micro kaiju also like to eat your limbs and your face because that is what they do so you have to watch out you and get them before they get you! Since they are light they can fly unlike the micro kaiju also making them very mobile and a pain.

- Storm hunters these come out using elemental abilities of the storm such as fire, ice, tornadoes and so on. Think of them as harrassing hunters that deal alot of dot. They can switch their elemental depending on their opponent(s)

- Giblet hunters - these hunters explode and scattering parts that regenerate back after a short time the only way to stop these hunters is to contain it and take them to a storage facility. All they do is explode regenerate and explode.

Damage feeds its energy requirements making it even more explosive and regen better

- Impact hunters these just run into you they want to say hello \o. heavily armored too
by hitting you sending you else where they are also a pain and if your unlucky and near an edge or somewhere with danger they could send you flying to your demise.

The good thing is they are not so smart and time it right and they could end up in a pit of lava or sea etc. They however excel in confined areas think of them as raging chargers from left 4 dead 2 but more faster in a corridor!

 

[zdoofop]

It's definitely an interesting idea, but how would you have enemies return after they are dead?

 

[EvilKitten]

This idea seems pretty similar to Hunters in AC: Black Flag? It could be interesting if players had a "infamy" rating which would affect how the Tsi-hu relate to them, lower Tsi-hu running away from a notorious Reaper while stronger ones cause higher tier Tsi-hu to instead focus on them. Perhaps have infamy have an effect on aggro generation? I could possibly see having a special hunter unit dispatched to take out a person, but my biggest complaint with how AC:BF did it was that the hunter units always knew where you were, even when you were out of sight and they always simply made a beeline towards you.

This might work well for single engagements, but one problem I have is...would the Tsi-hu be able to identify individual humans? We aren't really communicating with them and all someone has to do is change their loadout and the look of their omni-frame and the Tsi-hu would have no real way of identifying that person. What identifiers would the Tsi-hu be using to tell humans apart.

My other concern is, how much dev time would this take to develop and how much of an impact would it have on the servers. Also what would happen if other people/groups run into these hunters. This would need to actually involve hunting and not just be a mob spawn next to you on a timer.

 

[Omnires]

It's definitely an interesting idea, but how would you have enemies return after they are dead?

My idea for that is something like a black box system within the enemy's body that if the others recover the body they can read the combat data stored in it and learn from it. It can also be wireless so that the last thoughts of the enemy are sent out over an energy channel only known to them. Like a failsafe dead-man switch. And only easy way around such a system would be to kill them before they have enough time to think about what is happening. So killing in one hit or using stealth can limit how much data they can collect on you at any given time.

And unless you want to go into the cloning rout, you can it do that their friends and family come after you in a vendetta. Imagine a Tsi-hu yelling out to you something like "You killed by brother. Now you pay for what you have done!"

This idea seems pretty similar to Hunters in AC: Black Flag? It could be interesting if players had a "infamy" rating which would affect how the Tsi-hu relate to them, lower Tsi-hu running away from a notorious Reaper while stronger ones cause higher tier Tsi-hu to instead focus on them. Perhaps have infamy have an effect on aggro generation? I could possibly see having a special hunter unit dispatched to take out a person, but my biggest complaint with how AC:BF did it was that the hunter units always knew where you were, even when you were out of sight and they always simply made a beeline towards you.

This might work well for single engagements, but one problem I have is...would the Tsi-hu be able to identify individual humans? We aren't really communicating with them and all someone has to do is change their loadout and the look of their omni-frame and the Tsi-hu would have no real way of identifying that person. What identifiers would the Tsi-hu be using to tell humans apart.

My other concern is, how much dev time would this take to develop and how much of an impact would it have on the servers. Also what would happen if other people/groups run into these hunters. This would need to actually involve hunting and not just be a mob spawn next to you on a timer.

That way some sci-fi get around that problem is by giving every ship and mecha an unique energy signature. These unique energy signatures often come about do to small natural and/or man-made built-in differences in each reactor, power core, engine, energy signal, or echo. And so you can use those to ID different ships and mecha even if they never say a word to you. You just make a note of it and give it a code name for the next time you see it. Until the day comes when someone can give a positive identification to it.

The Tsi-hu could be trying to do the same thing to us. Learning to pick out the unique energy signature each person gives off. Making notes of the ones that pop up a lot or do the most damage to them. Even if they never know the player's name nor talk to us, they would still give us an unique code name so when pop up on the battlefield again they can give an alert to focus their attack on us or tell the weaker enemies to stay away while they send in the special units to try and deal with us.

For example, like how in real life we give code names to UFO's until the day comes when someone can give a positive identification of them. After all, UFO doesn't mean aliens, it just means any flying thing you can't positive identify. Be a new type of aircraft from a different government or at super top secret aircraft from your own government. For example, no one still can't positive identify the UFOs code named Black Knight and Aurora, despite the fact that we have some images of the Black Knight and radar has tracked Aurora flying at about mach 10 at least.

 

[EvilKitten]

It is a bit of a hand wave but I suppose it could work in theory. Again though all it takes is to change your frame a bit and the "saved signature" would be rendered invalid. Perhaps that would be a good way to reset/wipe your notoriety. So the longer you are in the field the more of a profile the enemy would get on you. Yeah I could easily see that working short term, but not long term.

Perhaps a bit more fleshing out is in order. How do you see notoriety being gained, or avoided.

It would really suck if you were playing a sniper hiding in the back only to have NPC's suddenly spawn on top of you or something. That would mean any hunter units would have to be able to penetrate the warfront in order to reach you, how reliable would you expect something like that to be.

Would this be something you could disable/opt into? Some people might not like having hunters showing up in the middle of a T.H.M.P.R. session for example.

 

[Pandagnome]

how would you have enemies return after they are dead?

to go into the cloning rout, you can it do that their friends and family come after you in a vendetta. Imagine a Tsi-hu yelling out to you something like "You killed by brother. Now you pay for what you have done!"

would of thought they had some special tech that could clone them but doing it more than 2 times could cause a strange mutation twisting their mind and the change of its colour and shape it would attack everything even its own kind randomly!

Could we extract the mutated cell from this mutated clone and could the medic use it against certain kaiju's to attack its own?

Could it only affect certain kaiju's meaning that other kaiju's are more resistant to the mutated cells hmm

I like this imagine strange eggs/pods the could appear on the corners of structures and dark regions like spider eggs, even surface from the ground after the drilling disturbance.

Then a bunch of specialized kaiju's would pop out of these eggs analyze/scanning and find the closest big kaiju to feed its intel if given time.

Example you are happily drilling away an egg hatches one of these kaiju's they either attack you by shooting a marker dye think of it like the boomer bile from l4d2 it lets the others know there is nice food here :O

Then it scatters away to get reinforcements

or

Example if it scans you and finds weak points it will highlight those to the other kaiju's for a short time!
But can be halted if the specialised kaiju's are eliminated fast!

 

[Sturgeon General]

I love the idea of hunter squads. I think it would be easy to take a page from warframe since that system works pretty well. Whenever you help repel an invasion or assist in taking down a kaiju you would be marked for assassination. While marked you would have a small random chance to be attacked by a unique hunter or hunter group. These encounters would start with some sort of warning giving you plenty of time to flee the area if you don't want to fight, find allies if you need some help, or just prepare for a fun fight. These hunters and hunter groups should be unique enemies with special gear and tactics (AI) with special drops and/or rewards. When Defeated these hunters wouldn't die but would retreat back into the time rifts to heal and prepare for the next encounter. After an encounter, no matter how you deal with it, the mark would be removed and you would be safe until you did something that marked you again. I think implementation of a system like this would be another great way to help make the game's events and gameplay feel organic and unpredictable.

 

[Wyntyr]

 

[zdoofop]

from the vision book:

The Tsi-Hu are NPCs controlled by the server AI. They wage war not by script, but by AI and simulation like in an RTS. The Tsi-Hu are driven by goals to capture territory and destroy human bases and disrupt human mining activity. They choose targets based on threat and strategic value.

 

[Pandagnome]

Could enemies have alien transportation of their own hmm or do they just spawn out of nowhere?

That mgv is great fun with a buddy to be spotter and shoot things while exploring

 

[EvilKitten]

@Pandagnome

I would love to see Tsi-hu riding a Kaiju designed similar to the Seige Crawler in ES:Oblivion. Imagine something like that slowly marching its way towards a base...*shiver*

(@25s)

 

[Pandagnome]

@Pandagnome

I would love to see Tsi-hu riding a Kaiju designed similar to the Seige Crawler in ES:Oblivion. Imagine something like that slowly marching its way towards a base...*shiver*

(@25s)

yess and the epic music to go with it, also would the area of the sky change in colour that really adds to the danger just like in the video?

Could the rider be overthrown, and if so can we take control of it or does it go wild and unleashed to venture of and play like a curious dog that just wants to roll on things and eat stuff hmm

Perhaps it could just go back into a gate and return another time.. shrugs

 

[Wyntyr]

Just past the 40 second mark.

 

[Omnires]

Hmm... one of the ways other realistic ways the hunters can i.d. and track people by things like smell. Then you smell something, anything, it is because bets of that stuff is in your nose. So if you smell burning metal it is only being you are breathing in bits of burning metal. If you small an animal it is because you are breathing in bits of that animal. So the aliens can use something like smell or long range chemical sensors to i.d. different players.

Most people my filter the air coming into their cockpit, but odds are no one filters air leaving the cockpit after they breath out. Plus everything you touch leaves traces of things like your skin cells on it as will as your body oils and any other things on your skin. Things animals like dogs can use to track you. So what if the aliens are using something like a long range spectrophotometer to pick up traces of things like your breath and fingerprints pick up the unique chemical signature of your body? Because not even twins have the exact same chemical signature.