Not your typical cold war mod idea Thread

Hiya. This is just an idea. I doubt I'll ever have the skill to actually do this, so enjoy it for what it is.

Ok, so the idea has been done before: a game set in an alternate reality where the Cold War turned hot. Well, my idea is a little different. Alot different actually.

For starters, it's set in space.

The story? The allies have a bunch of space stations and the soviets invade them. That's it. Why does a multiplayer mod need a detailed story?

Every player has a space suit. The suit serves as protection and as a place to mount your weapon. There wouldn't be any handheld weapons, they would all be attached to your suit. The suits would be big and bulky, think of suit designs inspired by starcraft.

Players would have an energy bar at the bottom of the screen. If you fire a weapon, you lose energy. If you take a hit, you lose some energy. Use your assistant (more on the later) and you lose energy.

When you run out of energy most of your suit functions will shut down. Take a hit in this state and your actual suit will start to take damage. There wouldn't be a health bar, but direct hits would damage pieces of your suit. The idea is to make locational damage a little more creative than "headshot kills instantly, legshot slows you down".

Aiming for different parts would produce different results. For example, destroying a players oxygen tank would leave them with 10 seconds of air left. Enough for a quick kill, but also enough for them to take you down with them. Don't like a weapon someone is using? If you're a good enough aim, destroy it! You can't jump if your legs are heavily damaged, and if the part of your suit that manages communications is destroyed, how are you going to hear your teammates?

Got where I'm going with this? Good, good.

Anyways, back to energy. Like I said, suit functions start to fail when you run out of it. That's not the end of you though. Energy constantly recharges, even when you run dry. When you get back to 20% power, you can move again. When you get back to 50%, all advanced functions go back online, such as artificial gravity (what would let players jump) and communications...as well as your assistant. When you're at 80%, weapons go back online. This is actually sounding more like a mixe between mechwarrior and Tribes.

A system like this punishes players who think they can rambo and take on three players at once and rewards groups of players that manage thier play carefully. While this is in no way a realism mod, it still wouldn't be a mindless deathmach. I like games where you have to use your head.

So you've got two teams: Allies and Soviets. You could have a team for each country instead, but it's better to keep things simple. Anyways, the two teams would be the same but different. The Allies would look very clean and high tech, while the Soviet tech would look very gritty and rushed. Other than that, they would be identical.

On to the weapons. For starters, you wouldn't switch between weapons like a normal FPS. All your weapons would be active at once, and there would be seperare keys to fire them. Instead of fire and alternate fire, you would have four keys for shooting.

This way you could spam alot of crap and then hightail it out of the area (remember all that stuff about energy), or mix up your offense quickly to confuse somebody that you're fighting.

I really don't know what all of the weapons would be.

Ok, on to assistants. An assistant is a robotic ally that follows you around. You and your assistant would share energy, if it takes a hit then so do you. Some of them walk, some of them float, and other would be attatched to your suit until you tell them to do otherwise. Every assistant gives the player a passive bonus and can also be deployed for another function.

When your assistant is destroyed, you would need to wait a bit for it to rebuild itself.

Ideas for assistants:

-Stabalizer Droid: Basically a tractor beam. Say a teammate is blown off balance by an explosion and is about to float off into space. You can tell your bot to drag him back down to solid ground, at the cost of energy of course.

-Freezer Droid: When deployed, this droid will make chunks of ice to block incoming enemy fire. When undeployed it would actually be a weapon capable of freezing enemies and creating makeshift cover.

-Power Droid: When undeployed, this assitant increases the recharge rate for you and all of your teammates near you, though only by a bit. When deployed, it's basically a power station and can even overcharge your energy.

-Sentry Droid: Imagine a TFC sentry gun that follows you. Of course the enemy will concentrate on this assistant the second they see it, so it would be a good idea to undeploy it once in a while.

I'll get back to you with gameplay modes and stuff later.

a nice idea(looks like mechwarrior for me), i was trying to make an "advanced" locational damage system with many effects in quake1 , but it is possible only for an ubercoder (not for me:P)