Aliens vs. Predator round: This is a standard gamemode already, the dev team surely knows more about this than me, so I won't discuss this one further.
Alien Isolation round:
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UnKuT wrote:Now this one, despite not respecting the Colonial Marines title, I think would be an awesome type of round. You all already guessed it and probably know it better than me, it just consists of, instead of players spawning as Marines, they spawn as Scientists/Researchers/etc on the base map, and instead of multiple aliens, there is only one. To make it balanced the human players would have weaker weapons compared to marines but ofc could still overpower the alien in numbers, forcing him to be cunning and stealthy. Add a few objectives like sending a distress beacon/finding a spaceship/any way off the planet for the survivors, in a manner that eventually forces them to scatter so the Alien doesn't have a hard time picking them off, and we got a spectacular type of round. Also since the planet map is already bloody and desolate and looking like a disaster already happened then this round could also, RPly speaking, begin after the creature already broke loose and killed the majority of the facility, so mappers don't have to work around this issue. EDIT: Also to make sure the Alien isn't controlled by somebody who has no idea of what they're doing, ruining the round, maybe player statistics as xenomorphs could be tracked, and whoever has more kills/surviving time/overall best play ability would be suited and chosen for this. Or maybe being the Alien in these types of round are not a player choice but an admin choice? AKA one can choose to be the Alien themselves or choose a player specifically for the task. Finally if the player was to have to leave midround and go braindead, then the Alien spot should be possible to be transferred to another player already on the round on the fly.
Basically everything that is in the quote, however with one other feature that escaped me: malf synthetics, or basically any other type of minor antag faction, simply because in a server with 110+ players it would be almost impossible to make the alien capable of taking on all these, no matter how buffed he was. Personally I think that said antag faction shouldn't pose as much of a threat as the alien but still enough to make the players distract themselves from the xenomorph by trying to avoid or survive said antag faction. I think the only problem I see about this is the ranks; would all players automatically be random scientists and researchers, and would just make up their own character stories and jobs themselves? Maybe only add a few specific ranks, like the director of the colony, head researcher, etc. If this can't be possible then one can just go with my original idea of having the round start after the creature already broke loose and everything is disorganized and chaotic, and whereas ranks are no longer cared about. EDIT: I think there should be no such thing such as a radio frequency that broadcasts to everybody except the alien. Besides making no sense (you wouldn't see that even in the lore), it would basically be a way to say "alien/synthetic/bad guy is over here! Quick! Everybody rush here and let's overpower him!". Other than that, it would add to the horror value.
Predator (Isolation?) round/Predator round: Since both of these were very vague and confusing, I think we should adopt steelpoint and Mr. Penguin's idea. Their ideas and mine are in this post (WALL OF TEXT INSIDE):
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UnKuT wrote:
To be honest I find that to be an excellent take on the Marines vs. Predators round. All I think would be further needed would be a buff to the Predators, or some other kind of minor antag, depending on the amount of Predators and Marines in the game. If there's like 100 marines on the planet, then how many Predators would there be? 10? 15? If there's too many the planet will turn into a battlezone, every corner there's a cloaked Predator. So I think it would be better to just keep the number of Predators decent, however they would have at least a slight buff and maybe use the solution for the Alien: Isolation round and have some synthetics running around? Or some type of rebel faction; just another faction of human players that are hostile to the marines, but serve more of a distraction to each other while the big boys (Predators) don't find them.
EDIT: However a problem I find is what will happen to the late marine players that don't catch the dropship and get left stranded on the Sulaco? Are they given another method of transportation down to the planet, as reinforcement units?
So keep in mind that this idea is VERY recent, literally days ago recent, so I personally only have the bare essentials of the idea, while Steelpoint probably has a very good grip on everything. But in my opinion we could take Penguin's idea of starting the round normally, much like the normal gamemode we have right now, gearing up, briefing, etc, and then when all the marines are on the shuttles being sent to the planet it shakes, a text pops up saying the drop ship/ drop pod is being hit. Now what would be really good is making it so that all the marine players on said dropship or drop pod land at random parts of the planet on parachutes or any other similar manner, so they all scatter and become disorganized, and in the meantime a group of invisible Predators are also scattered around the planet and could be hunting anybody at any given time. The tension and entertainment would be high.
After that I guess it could be like the normal gamemode, but with one catch: given that the shuttles were destroyed, new marine players who had missed the first trip to the planet would have another method of heading down there, but it would have to force them to, again, land on a random part of the planet; maybe some kind of shuttle that heads into the planet atmosphere but still forces the marines to jump in parachutes? This way it would prevent metagaming and players camping in one place knowing reinforcements would eventually arrive there, plus it would be extremely fun to lose the organization factor that marines have, all of the squads going scattered and in the meantime starting to be hunted by Predators, and having to eventually find each other and work out a solution off the planet. Maybe their comms could malfunction too, seeing as how constantly being in contact with one another would take out the tension considerably, while losing it would add to the isolation and hopelessness feel.
Speaking of a way off the planet, with the drop ships out of the equation, I think their way off the planet should be based off random objectives, much like the Alien: Isolation round. Something like setting up a LZ and lighting up the area for an emergency drop ship to land, etc in one around, while in another the marines need to find an abandoned spaceship, or the Predator's spaceship, while in another it is about straight up heading to their temple and retrieve an item of theirs? Then a timer would begin and the marines would need to survive until evac. It should be something difficult to do, and require multiple trips across the planet. If this is too much trouble to do, however, then there is always a much simpler solution: either the marines kill the predators, or the predators kill the marines.
Finally there is the issue of too many marine players and too few predator players, so again the Synthetic idea from Alien: Isolation could be done, or if that doesn't make much sense, then in these types of rounds there could be mobs on the planet, you know like spiders or even those animals from the Predators film. However so that they could not be OP or even more threatening than the Predators, they could only incapacitate a marine and not exactly kill or even hurt them too much. Just a random thought, however I think adding a suitable minor enemy faction is not too difficult and only requires some thought. EDIT: An idea I had was to make the hound animals that the Predators used in the 2010 Predators film a thing, as it could be a practical solution to the minor antag faction problem. Maybe even make dead players able to spawn as them once or twice if the marine numbers were too high, as long as they aren't too OP.
Syndicate/Rebels/Pirates/Mutiny/etc round:
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UnKuT wrote:I'm not particularly fond of these types of rounds, but a lot of other players are so I'll mention it. Basically when marines head down to the planet, instead of the usual, horrifying monster creatures they usually find, they simply find out that the facility was just invaded by "normal" terrorists, such as Syndicate, or that a mutiny happened, etc. Basically it makes the armed players fight other armed players. I guess it's good for a change, but it's not really my thing mainly because it's unusual for the CM server. But again a lot of you love these types of rounds, they used to be requested as events often so this should still be up to debate. EDIT: Combat Synthetics?
This has been done a million times as events, and imo is extremely easy to do, and there are literally DOZENS of ways to do this. The round begins as normal, the players gear up, get briefed, get on the drop ship/pod, head down to the planet. Then instead of aliens or predators or monsters, they find terrorists, rebels, or my favorite combat synthetics. In fact probably my idea would be Combat Synthetics that were sent there by Weyland Yutani to silence the facility after they found out too much, or to retrieve something. If combat synthetics are not an option, then a team of mercenaries would do as well.
Necromorph round:
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UnKuT wrote:I'm glad you said that because you made me do some research, and I found out that in the only Aliens franchise movie that I am yet to see, Prometheus, there was apparently some kind of virus that mutated the hosts that got it into overly aggressive mutant freaks. The virus in question is this one
http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Chemical_A0-3 ... 2%80%93_15 , and here is a video of the virus in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJOv6a_uzNo
So with that I think we just have a perfect idea for another type of gamemode, even if it's just a variation of the Necromorph type of round, it would still be an action packed, Marines vs Monsters round with endless opportunities and possibilities. And to top it all off, it is canon. Unless you are a Prometheus hater which I understand <.< but still it is an official Alien prequel. Buuut let's not turn this into a film review thread.
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Again another seemingly "normal" type of round, the marines gear up, get briefed, head down to the planet. However this time they don't find aliens or predators, they find the mutants with said virus. I don't know exactly how this virus is transmitted, again I haven't seen Prometheus, but it would be cool if after killing a human they would soon revive with said virus and have to kill the remaining humans.
If that's too non-canon, however, a different approach would have to be taken. I still think the virus would have to be transmittable somehow. My idea stands, however.
Synthetic idea Steelpoint wrote:One random idea I thought off was that there is a small chance a random person, a marine or support personal, is a weyland--yutani synthetic. This synthetic would have secret orders to accomplish such as bringing a live alien facehugger back or taking several pictures of facehugged humans.
I thought I should add this one because of how great it looked to me. In fact this could happen in any round at all imo, and have a random chance to occur. It would essentially be a classic take on the "Traitor" gamemode from other servers, except it would be canon and much more interesting.
I think this is all, if I haven't missed something; however seeing as how ideas for gamemodes are always being created by players this list is bound to grow in the future.
EDIT: Also I forgot to mention that most of these rounds (with the exception of Isolation), imo should begin with the current approach of "gearing up, getting briefed, heading down to the planet" because this way the players would never know what to expect in their mission. They would never know what they were going to find and this way it would both prevent metagaming and keep players interested and on suspense.