OK, so you've made it to RA5 and now you have several options:
- Roll an Alt.
- Wait for more content.
- Take a break, or just leave the game.
- Work on alternate ships/crews for your RA5.
However, I think there is something Cryptic can do (with the help of Q, of course) that will bring us repeatable content that will enrich the gameplay experience for Admirals and solve some other issues as well.
What I propose is a system that will allow Cryptic to:
- Re-use existing content to introduce a spin on old missions.
- Offer slightly more challenging content without too much of a DP.
- Introduce a satisfying crafting system on top of the existing one.
- Allow most story-missions to automatically expand the end-game experience.
The plan is this:
- The system can be used only by Read Admirals V (RA5) players.
- Once a RA5 is introduced to the system, they can re-visit every story-based mission by simply approaching the planet/system that mission took place on.
- The RA5 player then re-visits the same old mission instances but with several changes to them.
- The mission instance will now include a main NPC that the RA5 player must protect from special enemies spawned at certain random points. These special enemies will naturally be RA5 level, and may include Borg, Undine and any other high-level threat the game already offers.
- The RA5 player must follow the lead-NPC and ensure it survives through the mission, ignoring normal enemy missions and engaging only the temporal threats presented by Borg cubes, Undine ships etc.
- Ground combat will feature temporal patrols of Borg/Undine soldiers etc.
- Each time the RA5 player defeats temporal threats, he/she will gain Insight Points (IP) and special futuristic Augmentation Designs (AD).
- The mission will fail if the lead-NPC dies at the hands of any of the temporal threats, at which time the mission will end and all IP and AD collected during the mission will be removed from the RA5 player's inventory!
- If the mission concluded successfully and the lead-NPC survived, the RA5 player gets to keep the IP and AD and leave the instance.
- IP and AD resources can be used by RA5 players to enhance regular equipment in different ways and even create new equipment altogether.
- Engineering Admirals enhance/create armors and shields for both personal and ship use.
- Tactical Admirals enhance/create weapons for both ground/space combat.
- Science Admirals enhance/create consoles and kits.
I leave it to Cryptic and the community to discuss, define and refine the intricate details of how many IP and what sort of AD each temporal threat will be worth, and propose the system be tied in to the story as Q attempting to help you prepare your civilization for the future.
Flame, discuss or ignore as you wish.
Comments
Q :: "Well, well, well. Aren't you something! My son told me you were slightly above average. Interesting indeed."
<Pause>
Q :: "OK, so... here's the deal mon-capitan. As you have you learned, your precious existence is at stake.
There are many threats, and most of them at least this time are not due to any Q involvement.
For reasons that shall remain a secret, Q have decided to change the playing field. Contrary to what
you may believe Q has no desire to see your petty collection of civilizations perish in the days to
come."
<Pause>
Q :: "Oh, you're still here. Ah, yes, I haven't explained things to you yet. I am so amused by how slow
your species is in perception and other faculties, but I digress!
So, here is what I propose to you. As you have probably learned, Knowledge is Power, so those without
knowledge will be quite powerless in the battlefield which your galaxy shall soon become. This brings
me to what I am about to offer you.
I offer you the power to go and learn all you can from the past engagements your civilization has lived
through. You will go and re-visit major battles, and conflicts, not as the lead combatant mon-capitan,
but instead as an agent of secrets! You will learn the weaknesses of your enemies and of your own forces.
Worry not, because this knowledge will eventually allow you to mold your future as one molds tools for
one's trade."
<Q coughs and pauses>
Q :: "Ah, yes... umm. There is a downside to this, of course. You see, I cannot allow you to change history.
Where your civilization naturally failed in the past, I must not allow you to succeed. Where it would be
possible, were I to allow it, for you to conquer more than you did, I must hold you back."
<Q grins>
Q :: "One more thing before you leave, mon-capitan. If you fail in your mission and let history be changed by the unknown assailants who came to re-write your civilizations' history, I am afraid I must directly fix what you have allowed to be spoiled. So, there shall be a severe price for failure.
Now... off you go, time's awasting..."
<Q winks and disappears>
I think people would have serious fun in having a heavy challenge, a significant death penalty, and on top of that a timer as well.
Perhaps we can just compromise with a difficulty slider where you yourself can decide how tough you want it to be and how much rewards will result from your effort
Seeing as if the lead-NPC dies in the mission, and since the temporal threats would be so much higher than its level and be able to one-shot it, losing a mission because you died just once to a Borg Cube and it one-shot the lead-NPC and you lost all your IP and AD, would actually be a bundle of challenge with a severe DP. Don't kid yourself.
Oh.. sorry, I'm still working on the TL;DR version of this proposal
I like this alot, looks really good I hope they take this into serious consideration
I was so happy when I got that mission and saw it xD
I hope Cryptic reads this and puts a team on it. We need more than 1 raidisode to keep us occupied for long.
I would like to emphasize that the idea is to first and foremost, allow Cryptic to re-cycle and re-use old episodic content, but adjust it to an RA5 play-field. The gameplay experience therefore will not be the same as it was when you originally played through the mission.
In essence, you will not be the one shutting off the Plasma leaks, or talking to annoyed miners or even collecting those special torpedoes to fight the Doomsday Machine. What you will be doing however, is shadowing the lead-NPC who will attempt to accomplish these goals while surviving constant attacks from temporal threats (i.e. Borg, Undine and Lv45 enemies).
Since these temporal threats will spawn at random points in the mission and attack the lead-NPC on-sight, the player(s) must quickly handle the spawns but put the priority on ensuring the survival of the lead-NPC. In other words, if the RA5 player dies, even once, the whole mission may instantly fail!
I'm talking about offering challenge worthy of an Admiral and if a team of 5 RA5 players enter the mission together, it may very well turn each old story-mission into a mini raid-episode.
The way STO is set up, anyone and everyone can reach RA5, even soloing. It's just a question of time, and in STO's case, not a lot of time even. This system however, aims to allow Cryptic to turn every episodic mission into a challenge that you haven't experienced the first time around playing through the mission.
I am still trying to think about ways to allow the RA5 player some interaction with the lead-NPC, since I was quite inspired by B'vat and his journey to the past (City of the edge of Never), but I can't talk about this just yet.
I'm hoping that the whole idea will be exciting enough on several levels and gain support, but even if all it did was get people excited about the game itself, as it is now, and realize the existing potential, I'd be pleased.
I'm hoping the feature is designed so that Q is our contact for replaying missions, and I really really would love it if Cryptic did things the way I laid them out in my original post, however, at least we're getting a way to repeat our favorite missions, and I'm hoping with our RA5 characters to boot!
Totally agree! I hope the Devs see this too.
LOVE the concept!!! HUGE fan of repeatable content to begin with...this is, on the surface, what I want as well, but with a huge twist on it...I love it!
As always, great idea LordOfPit!
Have some difficulty is fine, but at the end of the day I do this for fun, if I want difficulty and a sense of accomplishment I'll go work overtime, as this is only a virtual experience afterall.
Now for replayablilty and simply ramping up the level of the NPCs I'm all for that, I loved city on the edge of never... or whatever one had spock do his voice for... maybe making a replay daily that would award marks of something for purple weapons, or making a few missions the end of chain to get a token for one of the end level items.
The idea also isn't to attempt to "help" your previous-self to accomplish the mission, but rather defend your previous-self from temporal enemies that have invaded the time-line. This means that if you fail the mission, the worse that would happen, is Q will show up, get to scold you a little bit and reset the time-line so everything's OK again
Lastly, the idea is to allow Cryptic to artificially pad the game's PvE content, which they're already working on, but with a twist that will add some sense of both roleplay and worthy challenge. In essence, if I go through a mission I've done before, and see the mission is exactly as it were, only with Lv45+ enemies instead of the originals, well... it'd be more interesting to roll an Alt and go through the content again.
If however, every old mission I replay through has the chance to pit me against Borg, Undine, Mirror-Universe Terrans... that could actually be fun because I'll know what's happening in the mission, but I'll also have a slightly different challenge everytime I go through the same mission!
B: So, technically the show is run by Q. But since we're essentially going back in time, maybe in order to complete said mission, you hail Starfleet, (Specifically, the Department of Temporal Investigations. I think i got the name right.) ?
C: If it's a previous version of yourself, then would something have to record and remember the stats and the ship you flew at the time you did the original one? (Ex: You're RA5 and in a Tier 5 Star Cruiser, but replaying an old Commander mission where you flew a T3 Cruiser. would it have to remember such? or would it just make an image of your current ship and adjust the stats to accomodate someone who's a Commander?)
Just some ideas.