Killer concept: The Mad Titan (Thanos)

polymyr

This is my first post here, I hope I am doing this right! Here are some other tidbits of information that didn’t really fit anywhere on the graphic but are somewhat important to understanding the big purple man.

• I know he's not the perfect fit thematically for the feel of the game. I just thought the idea of a killer that brings in strong goodies that both they and the survivors get to use would be fun. (That said, I think there could be a horror version that would work well!)
• The stones make a noise when you get close to them in the environment, to help the killer and survivors locate them.
• BIG ONE: I imagine that Thanos essentially suffers a stun when he picks up a stone. He stops and goes through a little animation of him slowly putting it in the gauntlet and getting all power surge-y. This essentially makes him even more vulnerable to stuns and makes him potentially more likely to respect pallets. He would need to give more distance to pick up the stone or risk a survivor coming and picking it up if he doesn’t grab it right away again.
• Thanos using any of the stones causes a proximity-based sound cue.
• As written, you tap the active ability button to switch stones, similar to clown bottles. If implemented that way, because there are 6 stones, the switch would need to be super responsive (unlike clown IMO). A better solution would be to hold the button and bring up a selection wheel of some kind, but there is no precedent for that in DbD yet, so ya.
• I didn't go into detail about cooldown lengths and stuff, but they would probably be rather lengthy because they are separate, many, and they are all pretty impactful. They ultimately have separate cooldowns to make each separately tweakable/balancable.
• Channeling the Mind Stone causes you to stand still.
• You can move at full speed while channeling the Soul Stone. It acts as, I don’t know, a base purple flashlight. Survivors are blinded super fast if they look at it, allowing you to maybe use it in a loop to confuse someone.
• The bit about using the Space Stone in tandem with the Mind or Soul stone is because those read auras, and I wanted there to be a way in the control scheme to read an aura and then use the Space Stone to teleport to it. Using the Space Stone causes you to move a little slower, but you can still move. It completes its animation and you teleport rather quickly, such that you could use it in chase if you get a blind off with the soul stone.
• You move a little slower while channeling the Reality Stone, but its cooldown only starts when you finish walking through a pallet/window. While you use it, pallets and windows in a certain perimeter to you become translucent then disappear allowing you to move through them. Survivors can see this effect. Not sure if they can also walk through if they are close enough, or if it's just for Thanos. I imagine funny bugs abound if you stop channeling while you are in the middle of a vault or pallet.
• I dunno, I like Nemesis, so I imagine the beam working similar to the tentacle, but only because I don’t have a better alternative. I imagine it could hit through survivors though.
• The perks were either designed with the current meta in mind or with an eye towards the future for future synergies.
• I think of Focused Purpose as killer’s Open Handed. It doesn’t do anything by itself, but combos really well with some perks/abilities. Of course, it extends time, and not distance.
• Inevitability definitely scales to a silly degree eventually, but it starts off arguably worse than enduring, so I think it’s probably fine. The other part of that one is I wanted a different anti-tunneling perk in addition to BBQ that also awards more BP. The dream is to have 4 perks that all do little-medium things and also boost BP gains.
• Hex: Strongest Will is made with Boons in mind. It will take survivors more time to get boons up and running. Additionally, I wanted one of the perks to give you strength in the early game. I also just like the idea of balancing out the RNG of a hex totem by splitting its effect over multiple totems. Oh, and cooldown is doing extra duty here; I intended for the effect to cut the actual cooldown on abilities AND their animations (similar to Save the Best for Last). Cooldown is sort of an overloaded term in this game, so I didn’t know how to word it any differently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This has the most potential to be busted I think, but it makes you slower, so probably worth it?
• I could not think of good add-on items for everything, hence to dumb item names for some lol.
• The effect of the Stone Specs add-on was originally base-kit to allow you to know what stones the survivor has (due to the glimmer) and play around it if need be, but I figured I’d make it an add-on instead. The glimmer only shows if you have a direct line of sight. (As a survivor, is hiding stones on the outskirts of the map behind cover a viable strategy? Maybe!)
• I imagine the Broken Shield add-on as cap’s busted shield. The flavor really fits the effect, but I don’t really like the add-on. Oh well.
• I wanted to put the effects that start you with a stone in purple, but I learned that DbD is strangely strict about how many of each color add-on there is per killer, so I adhered to that instead.
• The Balance add-on’s icon would be of the double-bladed pocket knight. An alternate name would have been Daughter’s Blade/Switchblade.
• I didn’t do too much work thinking about animations, but I would hope things like the time stone activation gets a special animation, both in using it and the regression (think green sorcery circles).

Okay, whew, I think that’s everything that didn’t really make sense to put in the document. If you stuck through all that, thanks for reading! Also, shout out any questions you have and I’ll try to answer them. This was a fun project to think about and design.

Oh, and the only things I made were the perk icons. I adapted an image of the gauntlet for the power icon from here: https://drawittoo.com/index.php/2020/04/29/how-to-draw-the-infinity-gauntlet-avengers-infinity-war-drawing-tutorial/

slendermansmoom

we already have thanos in the game

dugman

I doubt they'll ever put Thanos in the game, but the idea of a killer that collects things from around the map and becomes more powerful over time as they do it is pretty interesting. I could imagine them making a killer who's a cultist, for instance, collecting relics that make them faster or that inflict curses on the survivors, etc.