The Entity's Altars: A Secondary Objective proposal/balancing strategy

starpilotsix

I had an idea for a secondary objective for survivors, one which helps a little the balance disparity between skilled survivors and killers, but only comes into play in situations where the survivors are too good. The Hatch serves as a brake if the killer over-dominates a team of survivors, to prevent them from automatically killing all four just because not all the gens are completed, they need to plan ahead and do some extra gameplay to catch the last one, but we have nothing on the opposite side that prevents the survivors from getting too easy a victory in which all four escape.

Basically, at two points on the map (if you wanted to make it simplistic from a map design standpoint, you could make them attached to the exit gates, but I prefer the idea of them being at various locations, one map-specific and one random), the Entity has an altar. The survivors can perform a set of actions to engage in acts of worship to the Entity using the altars, to quiet the Entity's hunger for pain and torture. It the Entity is not appeased by the end of the match, it makes things rougher on the survivors, a little like NOED except it's not a killer perk and it doesn't directly impact the killer's gameplay, it's the environment itself reacting, being less forgiving.

The Entity's hungers can also be sated by sacrifice, of course. The idea here is that if the Entity doesn't get at least two sacrifices by the time the last generator is completed, and the survivors don't pay it the appropriate deference by completing the altar tasks, additional conditions kick in for the end game. Now if survivors think they're good enough to make it to the end game as a full team, they have an objective to slow things down, or an additional challenge to cope with. If the team is struggling just to get by, this doesn't unfairly impact them (except the time lost in trying to do it before they realize they're struggling).

I view the entity's Altars, from the survivor's perspective, working as follows, although individual steps can be dropped or added (really any of these ideas are free for anyone else to take or modify in any way):

1) Find the altar
2) Deposit an item on the altar. This consumes the item and unlocks a candle item that the survivor carries (optional, rules can be in place to make sure the item has at least 50% charge).
3) Find a fire (burning barrel, other map-specific locations like an indoor fireplace, actually given a use for once) to light the candle.
4) Carry the candle safely back to the altar. Getting downed or running for too long extinguishes the candle (think of it like Hillbilly's charge when you run, if it fills up, the candles go out). This eats up time and makes it more dangerous for the survivor, as they're more visible.
5) Set the altar alight (expends the candle).
6) Gift of Blood... a survivor must thrust their hand in fire, causes a wound state and a short-distance yelp of pain (and unidentified sound alert map-wide) if you're uninjured, causes a map-wide scream and lights your aura for 10 seconds if injured.
7) Bow in prayer (20 seconds, must be restarted if interrupted)

The same survivor doesn't have to complete all steps, it can be a group effort.

Once you've accomplished all the steps, that Altar is completed, and it stands in for one sacrifice at the end game. If you carried in a candle from another map (they don't spawn in bloodwebs but you can escape with them... maybe optional achievements like 'escape with a lit candle'), you can deposit a lit candle and skip step 2.

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Now the end game. Once the gates are powered, what happens depends on the Entity's Satisfaction. This is a number calculated simply by adding the number of dead survivors, plus the number of completed altars (pre-game offerings could conceivably raise or lower the number as well).

If Satisfaction is equal or greater than two (or becomes so at any point after the endgame) we have the Default Endgame. That's the one we all know and love.

If Satisfaction = 1, we get a condition called Entity Craves Blood. In this situation, it's a little tougher on survivors, but not too much.

• *Exit gates take 25% longer, and regress slowly when not being worked.
• Pallets have a 25% chance to break immediately upon dropping (they can still stun a killer if it hits though).

If Satisfaction = 0 (all survivors are alive, no Altars completed) we get a condition called Entity Starving. In this situation, in addition to all of the conditions from above:

• Pallets chance to break upon dropping is raised to 50%.
• Open exit gates close again if nobody is within the exit zone for more than 30 seconds... now at least one survivor has to consider whether they want to stay inside to 'hold the door' and not participate in a rescue (this maybe a buff to Blood Warden in that it can work multiple times if both doors close and one is reopened), or join the rescue and potentially mess up everybody's escape.
• All windows are temporarily closed by the entity after a single vault (for the survivor that made the vault only).
• All totems respawn, including Hex Totems, with whatever tokens were accumulated (NOED of course, kicks in like usual). This is a significant buff to totems, in that even if they're destroyed in the first seconds of gameplay, as they often are in experienced teams, they can still cause serious trouble in the end game if Altars aren't completed. Ruin is a special case because it's generator-only, and in the end game there are no generators, so I envision, in the event a killer has Ruin and the Hex Totems respawn, it also causes, once per game, this causes three random widely separated generators to fail, reset to zero (or if you want it less onerous, maybe to 50% and falling as though kicked). One needs to be completed again, with Ruin in place, to power the gates... the window closure and pallet breaks may or may not kick in until the gates are powered, but the hex totems are already spawned. The return of totems is the only direct killer buff the Entity provides, and it rewards the killer's own devotion by taking totem perks in the first place... the survivors didn't pay the Entity its proper respect, so it grants the killer, who did, greater powers.
• The killer can kill a downed survivor, regardless of hook state, by taking them to an Altar, or inside the exit gates (This can be a Mori, but if you want to keep them rarer, make it so there's a single hook attached to each altar, and using that particular hook leads to insta-death).

If you want to buff these more difficult endgames even more, you could add things like the Red Stain or Terror Radius disappearing, though that violates the 'no direct killer enhancements without perks' idea.

At any point, the death of a survivor or the completion of an altar will increase the Entity's Satisfaction level and change the rules closer to the default endgame. However, completion of an altar after the gens are powered requires a much longer prayer-phase, and once totems have respawned they must be manually cleansed again, even if the Entity's satisfaction level rises.

Like with the hatch, the killer should require some basic level of competence in order to deserve the Entity's benevolence, say at least two successful hooks or a certain number of hits/downs. Emblem progress could also be a measure here, a killer who defends their gens very well but is bullied out of hooks because of a flashlight squad, for example might have earned enough emblem progress to improve their endgame, but someone who just guards the altars until the end of the game and expects NOED and a bunch of hex perks to kick in along with Entity Starving, does not. Completing Altars could likewise grant survivors Emblem progress (Lightbringer being the obvious category, as you're literally bringing light to the altar).

Once you have the basic mechanics in place, you can extend it with perks or offerings to change the rules (say, one that makes carrying a candle for the entity gives the exposed status effect, or reveals their auras within a certain radius, or a survivor one that extends the run time before a candle goes out), or additional embellishments: holding a lit candle perhaps increasing speed of altruistic actions meaning it might be worth doing even if you aren't going for the altar.

I know there's practically no hope of any of this coming into play, I just wanted to share the idea.