Laying down a way to code skipping hijack. The idea itself isn’t new, but was toying with the implementation ways in my head.
After queen locks the dropship, the next interaction with the console chooses the place you want to land. Right before that, have a message that says something akin to: “Do you wish to skip hijack and instead crash into Almayer’s engines and have a xeno minor victory?” (yes, no)
On accepting the prompt skip the other prompt on location, and do the same launch as all the other locations. The crash site will be on top of the reactors in lower engineering. You cannot AA it away. All the same rules apply, no need to make modifications for larva surge, removing xenos from ground, etc. Same as other hijacks, if all xenos on the dropship die, it safely lands on ship or groundside LZ.
Same type of crash that happens in other locations happens in lower engineering on top of the reactors. 5 seconds after crash, do the same thing that happens when gens are overloaded. Full ship wipe of marines/xenos and give a xeno minor victory.
Almost everything is in place for all 3 steps. It is just another UI prompt, another crash site, and a nuke trigger after crash triggering xeno minor (currently does draw for engine overload I think). If the idea gets the green light maybe some time months later I will sign up for maintainer and do it myself.
The real part of feeling bad imo is not what the end score is. It is the fact that a xeno minor does not feel like xenos truely even achieved a victory at all. You go up for hijack with a slightly boosted xeno army, and the marines just slaughter you up there. They stim the queen, snipe the ravs, and hunt down and kill that boiler trapped by a pipe fire. The living marines all get to RP over the dead xenos. They talk about getting WJ to fix the medbay, or how to stop Almayer from falling, or just talk about their hunts versus xenos. That’s why when I recorded win/loss, I just said whoever is alive in the current battlefield is the winner, and gave the win to the marines.
I know overloading the reactors is technically the same end state, but it doesn’t feel that way. I cannot quite explain why, but I think it is because marines have set an objective to fuel the ship and overload the reactors, and the xenos were incapapble of stopping it. Kinda like a TFC attack/defend the capture point, the marines were able to defend the capture point long enough that the attackers lose.
In this case though, the queen made a conscious decision that everyone should die. Almayer, the marines, the xenos, everything will die and there’s nothing the marines can do about it. There won’t even be time to evac so unlike overloaded engines when marines sometimes escape off the ERT ship before Almayer blows up, they all get to die on the ship now. It would feel even more like a xeno victory if you sent up an empty dropship so the xenos can gloat groundside, but that would take extra coding.
I think a lot of people ignore the fact the Almayer is actively crashing during a xeno minor. Its a Xeno Minor because no matter what happens to the Xenos on the ship, the Almayer is going down.
“It is a core CM experience"
After Z levels were added and Cades were removed Hijack doesn’t even play the same anymore, its objectively a different experience then it used to be.
Hijack will forever be a mess that I love and hate, 900 balance changes and zero chances of removal
this would take some spritework but I think it’d really help to sell the fact that the ship is crashing if the AO was in the background, like how you can see planets you’re in orbit of on Baystation, and slowly getting closer.
That, or ARES yelling from time to time about an ETA to impacting the planet.
I also feel like some sections of the ship not losing power during hijack is…weird. I’d argue that’s what caused hijack to be so much less winable for marines more than anything else was the lack of vision.
This would absolutely never happen but it would be sick as fuck for the Almayer to actually crash planetside at the very end of the hijack timer to kill everyone still on board.
