Add in the alien containment machines from the AVP 2010 game, where once a host is impregnanted, the bursting larva will be collected into a tube, The tube then can be hooked up into a harness, where the xeno is suspended, and grow into the harness. This will allow researchers to perform more tests on xenos, and in the case of greeno’s keep them well contained until they are confident that they are on the marine side, or to be extracted by W-Y goons. Also the machines for keeping the host secured while the larva grows inside.
If power goes out, (ship power, or the research breaker goes out) the harness locks will disengage freeing the xenos. This gives xenos a chance to break free, in the case of power loss, sabotage, or even a xeno bursting on the ship, a chance to free them.
You could either make ghosting as a containment xeno have no penalty or the contained xenos could be completely braindead/ have carp ai and when the harness locks are disengaged then they can be player controlled.
Could make it have pop up that you are “captured xeno XX” rather than a hive larva. So they can choose to be that role. Think of the researchers, they spent 1:30 maybe two hours grinding all the components required to unlock greenos, only for the CO to say “nah killem” or for the greenos to say “Nah, kill talls”. This would at least add some prior RP, security, and a reason for the xenos to behave. Once they are sentient, there is nothing stopping researchers from letting them out of the binds.
Yes, spending an hour thirty, doing chem scans, waiting for xeno bodies, hoping the have the right stuff to even make greenos. Both parties do have the right to say killem, sure. But also make sense for xenos to be properly secured. rather in a free range farm. The reason why research gameplay is like that, is because they have nothing to do, nobody is making researcher gameplay better. All they can research is greenos, boom boom for mister OT, and Unga mk2. For a shipside role, researchers lack meaningful rp, besides with admin event spawned stuff.
There are tubes that exist in some maps that have suspended facehuggers and larva inside them. If we could take or otherwise transport a few of those cells to Research post landing and hook them up to some kind of machine, that might fulfill a portion of what you’re proposing. The issue is that, as someone said before, you don’t want to be the poor sucker stuck on a single cell for a 90+ minute game.
The ideal situation in my mind is growing a brain dead Xenos tier and then taking it to autopsy to extract certain glands for chemicals or chitin for effects to armor or weapons. Over the process of growing that Xenos, it has some miniscule percent of becoming sentient, letting it break out (or not) and go from there.
About the “you don’t wanna be that poor beno sitting in some bizarre thing whichs sprite was clearly not stolen from the cryotubes”, what’s about having the tube xeno be not player controlled for the time they spend inside these tubes, and if they break out, they enter the next vent similar to burrowing larvae and exit it when someone takes control?
That is a solid work around to the potential problem. Now the kicker is this is all talk. How would it be coded and who would do so. That is the real question.
i am working on a PR to make use of the xeno cryo tube on solaris to allow research to build them.
and allow them to fill them with dead hugger or dead embryo…
i mean if it worked like an ert where the researchers get to grow a certain amount and then they start fully ready to evo into shit that be pretty cool. i personally feel tho that even that would lose the charm of seeing some benos in containment and the rp that can come with that. I feel personally like COs shouldnt be allowed to order them dead unless theres actual reason to. (researcher commits crime, containment breach or otherwise). i dont know how but also some way to control better when greenos can betray would be better. Id argue some version of how mutinies work but lesser could maybe work.