PVE is clearly a flawed creation. Call me a hater all you want, but I simply offer a superior concept.
Suppose, that you, the player, play as the Commander of the ship and have vastly more power over your forces than before.
On the planet, there would be various mineral and material nodes that your henchmen would be able to harvest and use to build constructions, such as Barracks, to recruit Marines from. These Marines would be organised into squads, which may be controlled as a group of units and directed, or controlled separate through something we call “microing”. There would be a variety of units you could build, and mini-objectives to be completed as you end the hive.
The natural conclusion of PvE is that one day they let players actually play as the Xenomorphs. Imagine that, I don’t think it would be popular though.
Few people remember, but circa late 2019 we had a playtest of the first version of objective-based gameplay for marines and in it they had to harvest gas in the key locations of the colony.
It is clearly describing RTS gameplay, most likely a nod to AvP:Extintion.
I was always for CIC in PvP to have RTS commander tools. That would be a unique take on RTS genre where your troops mostly disobey your orders, don’t go to a meatgrinder if they know it is a meatgrinder and won’t stand guard duty when they get bored.
I’ve actually played as a xeno in one of the first few test sessions for the PvE server. I still have some images from it, actually.
In any case, it actually wasn’t all that fun to play xeno, in my opinion. Me being bad at runner probably contributed to the lack of enjoyment, but I was also specifically told NOT to punish marines too hard as xeno because then it would just become XvH again and not a unique wave survival game. Which makes sense, but also kinda restricted what I was able to do.
Perhaps, for the sake of argument, there could also be a commander for the xenos independent of the GM. Hypothetically, they could also desire said minerals, and construct biological buildings and manufacture items like eggs for reproduction. And, if one were to consider the implications, then the units controlled by both the xeno and the marines could fight one another over control of these resources until one vanquished the other.
a