Survivors who die before everyone has two hook states should remain as "ghosts"
Some may disagree, but I feel most of the time the frustration of being camped (rarely happens these days anyways) or tunneled, isn't even the fact that you lose. More so, it's from the fact you can no longer play the game. Especially when playing with friends this can suck, as it means you must look on as your friends have to continue playing without you.
So, what if you could keep playing if killed off early, just in a slightly different way? I call this the "Hope Remains" feature. Narratively, this would represent a survivor's hope for their team still remaining, even once they have been sacrificed or killed.
Functionally, this would let you continue playing as an invisible player to everyone else, but on your screen you could look like a translucent version of your survivor, or just a simple wisp (maybe even cosmetic options could be given to make your wisp appear as you want). In this form, you would be much faster, wouldn't have to worry about vaulting to get past windows or pallets. However, you also cannot do generators, cleanse or bless hex totems, or heal other survivors (and any other actions that would essentially make it feel like there's still 4 survivors). Instead, you could do simple things, such as stocking chests with specific items, picking up pallets, or causing locker doors to swing open. Maybe even some perks could be marked as being able to be continued to be used even as a ghost, like select boons or chemical trap.
The specifics of cans and cannots would probably have to be hashed out with more critical design and playtesting, but the general idea I think could benefit the health of the game, by letting players still play in some regard, even if they're taken out too early.
And, once every survivor has been hooked twice, or every generator is completed, the entity washes all the remaining ghosts from the trial, and prevents survivors from becoming ghosts.
I feel this could be a fun/cute/funny feature that would still let you play and have some fun, even once you've died, but hopefully wouldn't have too big of an impact on the game's balance.
This could also open up a fun new avenue for perk design— perks that let you do things once you've become a ghost.
Some possible downsides of this feature and how I'd address them:
>What if people intentionally die on hook just to play as a ghost? - As stated, the narrative for this feature would be your survivor's hope remaining. With that, I'd say that intentionally dying on hook would count as your survivor "giving up hope", and as such, they would not be able to continue playing as a ghost.
>What if some people don't want to play as a ghost. - There would be an option to leave the game if you're already dead, and maybe even becoming a ghost would be an opt-in feature (like a "Remain as Hope" button next to the spectate button on the death screen).
>Isn't this a buff to survivors? Should killers get something to compensate? - I guess, yes it is. I would argue that if the Ghost form is argued to be too strong by some people there'd be simple counterplay to it— don't tunnel. But, by the same token I understand that some people would say you have to tunnel somebody to win the game as killer. That's a discussion for another time. The short answer is "maybe"… but suggesting what such a change could be would essentially be suggesting a totally different feature. I feel like it's one of those things that would have to be tested extensively before going live.
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I dont think that this would be really popular and therefore not really worth implementing. It sounds really boring and I would rather be in the next game, even after being camped and/or tunneled, instead of being in the same game, just without anything meaningful to do.
And thats the thing - even if this would be a feature with different ideas than the ones you provided, it would have to be something which does not help at all with game progression. And this does not really leave anything left, since you cannot be chased and you cannot progress the game, all that is left is doing meaningless stuff.
At worst people can also just be ghosts to constantly open and close lockers or something like this. So it can also be potentially annoying… For both sides btw, you can troll the Killer by opening lockers to trigger noise notifications or you troll Survivors by opening lockers next to them to rat them out to the Killer.
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that's a very fair assessment. again, I had this idea in mind mostly for SWF folks just to give them something to do as their friends continue playing, but I definitely think you're totally right in the regard that such a niche feature like this probably wouldn't warrant the development time it would take to implement. thanks for the feedback!
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You just want to punish killers for playing well.
It would be like making it so that while the killer doesn't have enough hooks survivors do ghost progress on gens where they get points for repairing the gen, but the gen doesn't actually progress until the killer hits the proper hook threshold for the gens remaining. Sure it would solve the issue of killers feeling like gens go too fast, but it wouldn't be fun to play as survivor getting punished for making it difficult for killers to catch you.
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What if survivors got sent to the void (like the Halloween event area) and have their own objectives but has to evade ai enemies in the process . It could help the surviving survivors out in some way, but killers would need to be compensated in some way, as well.
Either that, or when someone gets to second hook stage, they get sent to the void and have to perform objectives to get sent back to the normal match again back to zero hook stages. The killer wins if they sacrifice a certain number of survivors.
Essentially, survivors aren't permanently out of the match until the whole survivor team runs out of shared survivor lives. Once survivors are out of lives, either the match ends, or death is permanent and the match ends once there are no more survivors left alive in the match (whether by death or escaping).
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