This comes from something that Mike said during one of his Q&A livestreams and I loved the idea and I want to contribute to it. Whoever sends this to the devs, Mike should also take a look (I hope).
For those who didn’t watch this on the livestream: the basic idea is to expand the Monolith gameplay by adding Orobyss as an active opponent on the map. Orobyss will be making strategic moves against the players and the players will have to counter them. I love the idea and I invite everyone and anyone who read this to post their ideas (including the devs, whatever).
So, here’s my thoughts on this:
The idea is that Orobyss is trying to stop you from stabilizing the Monolith. This can either be active on every Monolith after a certain Corruption has been built (in order to avoid adding too much difficulty in the game overall) or we can get an entire new Monolith dedicated to this gameplay. Of course difficulty will scale with Corruption, as logically the higher the Corruption the higher the influence of Orobyss will be. We are all scientists here, we get this.
Now, Orobyss should have a goal of his own instead of just trying to stop the player. His goal should be to reach the center of the Monolith, the starting point. Should his vile plan come to fruition, the player will have to face a challenge in order to stop him from collapsing the Monolith.
So, there will be a total of 2 types of challenges:
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Overthrowing the obstacles that Orobyss places to hinder your advancement, and
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Stopping or slowing down Orobyss’s advancement towards the center of the Monolith.
So, let’s break down what those challenges can include:
Overthrowing Orobyss’s obstacles
The most obvious obstacle is going to be an ambush that the player will have to defeat. This can be done either unexpectedly or by entering an echo in which we will know that Orobyss has laid a trap for us.
Now, what kind of an ambush is it going to be?
The most obvious answer is going to be a mob. An idea here is to utilize the concept behind the Undead Hordes event but using Void monsters for it.
When the ambush begins, all other echo objectives are rescinded. The mob appears at a location on the map and an exit appears at the same location. The player will have to use that specific exit if he decides to escape the echo; if the player teleports out of the map then it counts as a defeat (this means pressing “T” to open a portal - escaping from the designated location counts as successfully escaping and the encounter counts as a draw).
As stated above, there will be 3 possible outcomes of this. Either a) defeat the mob and win, b) escape and draw, or c) teleport out or die and lose.
Depending on the outcome, there should be a bonus, a penalty or nothing.
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Bonus is you gain points to use in defence.
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Penalty is that Orobyss’s armies gain a move against you or an extra army appears.
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Nothing means you successfully escaped and there is no outcome. Should you choose to repeat the challenge, there will be less monsters on the next mob equal to half of your successful kills against the mob but you gain less points for successfully defeating the same mob.
Obviously here the mob needs to be a real challenge. I’m thinking 2 ways of doing that:
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It will have double corruption modifiers from the Monolith corruption, and
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Be a little faster than the player. The could have for example +15% of the player’s move speed and use a teleportation skill towards the player every time that the player does before engaging with them. Or just the mob has 150% move speed when moving towards us and teleport in between us and the designated portal every time we move closer to it. This way we know that the mob WILL catch up to us and it’s going to be a challenge to escape.
The second type of ambush can be similar to the first one but the only objective is to escape. Orobyss causes the echo to collapse from outward towards the starting location. In order to not penalize characters with lower movement speed, the ambush will also spawn new monsters and the rate of collapse will become slower every time you kill any of them. The goal here is to hurry back to the starting location of the map. If the collapse catches up with you, you die.
The third type of ambush will be the most rare and dangerous one. A shade of Orobyss will appear on the map without the player knowing. There is no escape from this map, you simply need to kill the shade which can jump you at any moment.
Stopping or slowing down Orobyss’s advancement
Next, we have Orobyss’s armies appearing on a map and move towards the center. The player cannot engage these maps, but he can set up defences on the next map that the armies will move in.
This will now become a type of base defence kind of fight. You start with a base which has a number of gates through which the armies can breach. The enemy army’s goal is going to be to get to the center of the base and destroy a Beacon within 3 minutes. Your job is to prevent that from happening.
Your base will be standard for every map that you use it on and you can beef up the defences by successfully defeating Orobyss’s traps (see previous section). Using said points you will be able to hire more mercenaries, build towers, reinforce gates and even reduce the number of gates that enemies can storm through. This can be fun because you get a free pass in attacking as the monsters will ignore you and head straight for the Beacon. Of course it won’t be easy to stop them and it will be a bad idea to try and stop enemies at the Beacon because even the presence of enemies close to the Beacon will cause it to lose health.
If the armies of Orobyss are successful in clearing a way to the middle then Orobyss will attack the center himself.
If you are successful in defeating the attack you get a chance to earn a Raid coin. Using the raid coin you can perform a raid against a Fortress of Orobyss.
What is a Fortress of Orobyss? The Fortress is what you need to defeat in order to raise the corruption in this game mode. It is going to be an epic battle in a freaking awesome location with dangerous mobs, cunning traps and a shade of Orobyss fight that people in Eterra will write songs about for many Eras to come.
I know that this is all very easy and simple to do, so I’m expecting it to be greenlight, funded and implemented by 1.2 (just joking, probably will take up to 1.3).
That’s all, thanks for reading!