A idea of different gameplay

WaffleSpoon

<div class="IPBDescription">Well..</div>All that will come to play NS, or at least the major part, assumingly will like or DO like AvP2, and as such, why not use ideas from it?

I like this whole "destroy hives" thing, but one thing that appeals more to me, is to let the marines arrive at a ship or sumthin, then let them do missions, say three per map(turn power on, locate main exit route, open it at any cost)
or
("defuse" self destruct sequence, locate main hive and kill it, clear the ship of any remainers)
or
(enter heavily infested base, locate a small group of survivors, bring them to safety by taking them to an exit).

I posted one similair post loong ago, with the idea to let one of the players (marines) be stuck behind a goo wall, (let him be the commander) and not have any possible way to get out, except guiding his friends through a long map, havin control over all doors, vents, shafts etc, then when they come to free him, they abandone the commander post and all try to go for safety at a dropship, with a timer slowly counting down that will blow everything up =).

The main thing is, if u summon all this, some sort of "evac" mode, that does not concentrate so heavily on building a base up, bcuz u get more freedom when doing evac maps, u can create more traps, more events(door jamming, one of them need to crawl through vent and open from other side) etc etc.

just a thought, mebbe for second release for NS?.. <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->

Yolmer

The mission thing could be partly done without any codechanges. Maybe the marines have to do a couple of things to open the doors to the hives, like turning on power, turn off security or something like that.

Shuvit_Viper

In version 2 there will be things like this. For the coming release, there will be only aliens vs. marines. Then there will also be marine/marine and aliens/aliens scenarios

Flayra

These type of alternate gameplay modes (or completely free-form gameplay modes) sound really interesting.  Lots of people have asked for them and I think they would really add a lot of diverse gameplay.

However, the big shortcoming I see with supporting these alternate gameplay modes is complexity.  Having completely different gameplay in many maps means some players won't get it and they'll quit playing before instead of playing a few games in total confusion.  I know Existence has had this problem, and I think some other mods with open-ended gamerules will too.

I'd love to think about how to support open gameplay modes without confusing players, but it will have to wait for the future so we have time to do it right.

Biomechanoid

Well, you could pull a CS and make the beginning of each map name indicate what kind of map it is:


NS: seek and destroy the hive

SD: Self destruct map where the marines have to set the ship to self destruct then get the hell outta there.

RS: Rescue squad. half the marines are but off from the commander and have to be rescued by the other half; or be like CS and have civilians trapped in the hive area, that need to be rescued. Hrm... to prevent this from turning into being played like a NS sytle map, perhaps the hive CAN'T be killed, so that it "encourages" the marines to rescue the civs instead of killing aliens until they run out of resource points to respawn.

AS: Alien escape. the alien team have been captured, and have to escape the labratory. no respawning, but since the human side would be mostly scientists, (who else would want a slimy alien in their room?)their arsenal is greatly reduced.

MM: Marine vs Marine- don't know how this could occur (perhaps space pirates?......), but it's pretty much be a RTS style game play.

AA: Alien vs Alien- two rival  hives I'd assume, play like Q3 teamdeathmatch I'd assume: run around and kill anything that moves and isn't your color.

OO: Open objective. this woudl be determined by the mapper. there'd be a victory entitiy for each team, and it'd have a checklist of things that each team would need to complete. the first team to complete all these objectives would win. for the marines, it could be a case of:
1) entering the control room
2) shutting down a nuclear power plant (need to physically go to the reactor to turn it off), and
3) destroy at least one hive, all within a certain time limit.

the aliens would have to
1) destroy the drop ship,
2) destroy the mainframe in the control room, and
3) escape into the sewers

but these objective would be different for each map, depending on the mapper.

then again, having 7 different types of gameplay could get confusing (even though there are two deathmatch and two escape scenarios)

Cremator

i like the idea of a few different types of gameplay, especailly something totally open to the mapper.  one has to keep in mind that things are currently the way they are due to many specifics.  the alien vs marine+commander is not only a very exciting type of gameplay, but it is completely balanced.

many people have talked about removing the commander in some types of gameplay.  unfortunately, this is what makes up the whole game.  without the commander, NS would be no different from any other human vs. alien game, like AvP or Gloom.  also, without a commander, the marines would be slaughtered.

WaffleSpoon

Well, I dont wanna remove the commander mode, let the trapped marine be it, or whatever, my point is, we need more difference, bcuz I say a n00b to FPS/RTS games overall, that joins, cannot be commander, gets a crappy gun, then gets to be a reinforcement all the time, just bcuz he dies in an instant, wont really like the game either.

In CS there STILL is players that dont know what the shait a DE map is, "scuse me, where and how do I plant the bomb???" or "why are there civilians on this map??"