Suggestion - Skull Merchant Rework (serious)
Yesterday, I took a trip down memory lane and watched gameplay footage from a very popular first person shooter from the early 2000's. In the game, the adversaries deploy drones with blades on them. This had me thinking — why doesn't the Skull Merchant's drones have any lethality to them? If Skull Merchant kept her drones as they are, but gained the ability for the drones to target and injure survivors that enter their range through passive slowdown, her power would become inherently engaging. The radar could be kept, but reworked to show the location of the drones chasing survivors instead of tracking survivors directly. Survivor counterplay could include strategically hiding while the drone continues forward in a predictable path, or crouching to avoid moving while the drone moves past.
If you wanted to truly elevate the concept of Skull Merchant's power to the next level, I would take the concept of Pinhead's anti-loop chain ability and Singularity's biopods and give the Skull Merchant the ability to hunt survivors … through using the drones! The Skull Merchant would check the radar, press the action button, and then the footage from the drones could truly embody the "Eyes in the Sky" label. If this would require too much animation work to get right, imagine if the Skull Merchant could remotely detonate drones to injure survivors. She could also press a button and engage "Hunt" mode instead of rotating the drones which seems to have no effect. I am just throwing ideas out on how it could possibly be implemented, but I hope the core idea is communicated.
Thank you again for reading and giving consideration to my thoughts.
Comments
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Isn't that just huntress with extra steps?
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I really like the core concept of drones tracking specific survivors, but with them specifically chasing/hunting survivors to take a health state or damaging on proximity she might end up a little oversimilar to the Knight or trap killers like the Hag and the Trapper. Building on that core concept, it would be cool if drones had scan lines similar to what they have now, but instead of building towards lock on and scanning people, they initiate hunt mode and closely follow the first survivor they scan, keeping them on radar for the rest of their limited battery life (two minutes or so, maybe?) or until a teammate can disarm the drone for them. Then keep a watered down version of her current haste/hinder effect that hinders survivors by 5% or so when within her terror radius and gives her the same stacking haste per tracked survivor. I feel like this could keep the more active gameplay that her more recent iteration allowed her and play into the core fantasy of outsmarting and predicting survivors without being as irritating to play against and heavy on slowdown.
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Now that killer design has evolved into two stages (before the body hits the ground/putting the body on the hook), I see controlling a drone to attack survivors, or having survivors chased by drones, still thematically within her area control killer background. I would liken then idea closer to Nemeses'' zombies where one survivor has to lead the zombie (drone) away from the generator or disable it with the existing minigame. There would need to be balancing considerations for placing drones near hooks to promote healthy gameplay. Even the concept of claw traps could be retained to minimize changes. Instead of using blades, the drones could plant claw traps when it "hits" the survivor which would not begin to regress until the trap is fully active to make the survivor broken.
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