Repeatable Portal Missions in Peregrine/Grandville

[Zumberge]

There's no want for contacts that give you randomized missions to run: Borea hands them out in the Rikti War Zone, there's newspapers and the radio, Marcus Valerius in Cimemora, people in the Shadow Shard (though why you'd want to do that is beyond me), those two guys in Dark Astoria... there's a couple, I'll admit, and nobody really needs more options that might not be used.  But consider the following: There are interdimensional portals in Peregrine Island and Grandville.  Infinite alternate dimensions to explore are right there but they're only used in mission arcs and task forces.

 

For this, I am suggesting a mission giver of some sort who assigns you to do things like "collect samples," "set up resonance beacons," or "rescue our employees that we sent into this dimension." This determines what your objectives are - kill all, glowies, hostages, that sort of thing.  Then you get sent to a portal, which sends you to an outdoor map.

 

Any outdoor map.  Populated by any possible enemy group.

 

Now at this point you might be thinking, "isn't this really rolling the dice?"  Yes, that's the idea: You don't know what you're going to fight until you get there.  Could be psychic clockwork in the forest.  Could be a ruined city full of Trolls.  It could be an Oranbegan temple outdoors but covered in Neuron's Clockwork in a fit of cosmic irony.  50+4 Council radio missions in office buildings and warehouses are consistent (mostly S/L damage and they don't herd weirdly), but also kind of same-y.  This isn't, by design.  Plus it serves as a way to test your build out against different groups of enemies, or maybe a way to work on badge progress if you get lucky and end up visiting Outcast Earth multiple times.  It's not really any stranger than that one mission from Unai Kemen that sent you into a world run by the Family and they were somehow armed with Praetorian Resistance weapons.

 

Now I've been trying to unpack how missions "work"; if enemy factions have specific tilesets assigned to them (e.g. X has warehouse and blue cave, Y has warehouse and underground base) and these tilesets determine which types of doors in the world can be used to reach the mission, or if it's tilesets that limit what factions are used (e.g. warehouse has X and Y, blue cave has X, base has Y), or some other beast entirely.  Regardless, this is a matter of coding which doesn't necessitate the creation of new visual or audio assets, though I can't speak for how much coding it's gonna take.

 

Certain limits may have to be imposed, however: No Longbow for heroes, no Vanguard period, and power and enemy level scaling is entirely possible but if people think a level 54 Hellion is too weird then maybe that should be cut down.  Or not.  Plus the Grandville portal doesn't see much use in an exploratory sense, but that's easily fixed by simply reframing the missions, using the giant viewscreens as the mission entrances and having the redside mission giver be the Internet.  Like, the actual Internet, as a continuation of what was established with Radio and Television.

 

tl;dr, roll d200 on the encounter table.

[justicebeliever]

i’m a +1 for this.

[nihilii]

This sounds super cool. Save for the "no Vanguard / no Longbow" part. :P The less restrictions the better!

[Zumberge]

This sounds super cool. Save for the "no Vanguard / no Longbow" part. :P The less restrictions the better!

 

"No Vanguard" is there because Vanguard is Not Fun To Fight, owing to how bosses can halve your max endurance for several minutes and every melee minion has a -30% lethal/energy resist debuff on every attack that stacks.  This is the only line I'm gonna draw, mind; I'm fine with Carnies and Malta and basically everyone else, but Vanguard?  Hell no.

[Sura]

I love the idea of rolling the dice and seeing what comes up at high levels.  +1

[DSorrow]

Sounds fun. I'm all for repeatable any enemy group in any map missions if it isn't a pain to implement. I'd change the original suggestion slightly, though

 

• Absolutely no enemy group restrictions. If you get Vanguard, you can just abandon it and pick a new mission. Longbow should also be available for heroes, they gotta be evil in some dimension.
  
• Restrict some mission type and map combinations: for example many of the Shadow Shard maps probably won't work with hostage rescues.
  

[ZemyaSoldat]

I'm all in favor of dimension-hopping shenanigans if they can be implemented!

[Steampunkette]

Sounds fun. I'm all for repeatable any enemy group in any map missions if it isn't a pain to implement. I'd change the original suggestion slightly, though

 

• Absolutely no enemy group restrictions. If you get Vanguard, you can just abandon it and pick a new mission. Longbow should also be available for heroes, they gotta be evil in some dimension.
  
• Restrict some mission type and map combinations: for example many of the Shadow Shard maps probably won't work with hostage rescues.
  

 

Are you kidding me? They're evil in this dimension! It's a private army invading a sovereign Nation arms with flamethrowers which are banned by the Geneva convention and they're not terribly discriminant at who they're shooting at while in a civilian area. These guys are probably setting fire to Mercy island every 30 minutes.

 

They're terrorists.

[DSorrow]

Are you kidding me? They're evil in this dimension! It's a private army invading a sovereign Nation arms with flamethrowers which are banned by the Geneva convention and they're not terribly discriminant at who they're shooting at while in a civilian area. These guys are probably setting fire to Mercy island every 30 minutes.

 

They're terrorists.

 

Ahem, they (I'm not referring to our dimension Longbow) might be listening to our forum conversation. I'd only ever beat up evil Longbow (not the ones in our dimension).

[BlastLord]

I like your idea and you got my vote.

[Xaeon]

Longbow exists because NATO is too cowardly to fight Arachnos itself so it props up Ms.Liberty's private army of crazed international terrorists instead. (You can't) change my view.

[Clave Dark 5]

 

Are you kidding me? They're evil in this dimension! It's a private army invading a sovereign Nation arms with flamethrowers which are banned by the Geneva convention and they're not terribly discriminant at who they're shooting at while in a civilian area. These guys are probably setting fire to Mercy island every 30 minutes.

 

They're terrorists.

 

THANK YOU.

 

Ahem.  Anyways, AE already works something like this, so it shouldn't be too hard to set up, really.  That thing about level-shifted foes could work out too because their level range is already noted in the AE system.  Heck, we could even set up something like this for all levels of characters and let the system pick out who you might fight based on your levels.  They could be nice and short radio/paper-like missions.