now this may sound a bit op and it might be but hear me out
so imagen that the onw hour rifleman has just stepped on a hugger trap but with this you could take your knife from your boot and cut it off
obviously that is not the end of story, it would deal burn damage to the guys face and your hands any where from from 30 - 50 for the hugged and 10 - 12 for your hands it would also take 10 - 12 seconds for anyone besides a medic or doc who could do it in 8. Also you couldn’t so this if either of your hands were broken (even if they were splinted)
So, the cost of the burns could be easily healed with one or 2 Kelotane pills or EZ autoinjector doses, and in trade, it could skip you having to return to the ship to get surgery?
Been posted but Hugger blood is acid. Cutting one shouldn’t just burn you, it should melt your skull into pink pulp. Which isn’t a fun mechanic.
Resisting via a command would be interesting for frontline marines. Its been shown that huggers can be physically fought off, it’s just a tremendous effort because they are physically strong and they suffocate their victims. If you get helped by marines, that would save you.
So how about we take a page from a different book but the same topic, the larva/hugger extraction tool from the most recent game.
Make it a research/req/medical item that removes a face hugger. It would be a one time item and obviously cant be used more than once (lets say the acid burns the tool beyond repair, after you removed the hugger, it also would kill the hugger so it would prevent them getting hugged again. Also would not work if the person is already impregnated)
In this essence, lacking the tool will be a simple ride shipside for surgery. Having to tool will prevent this but usually only once or twice, given how many you could have at one time.
This makes it more practical, and is essentially a one use tool making it lore + Mechanically + cool to have it.
If I recall Ripley was able to keep one from grabbing onto her in Aliens with just her bare hands in that lab that Burke sealed her and newt into. A full sized marine should have a chance to I’d say, but it shouldn’t be a get out of hugger free card.
The only way I can see something like this working is when a human gets facehugged that they enter a struggle phase for XX seconds, at the end of the timer they will successfully resist and throw off the facehugger. In order for a Marine to be facehugged another alien has to come up and disarm the human to make the hugger infect them.
I don’t know if this is a good mechanic but it is what it is and it has some in-universe lore support. Actually removing a facehugger post hug is practically impossible unless you are a super human.
I think this is a terrible idea for numerous reasons.
1: This basically invalidates player facehuggers getting funni facehugs in wacky places.
2: This basically invalidates carriers that spend time and effort making traps.
3: This rewards marines for not moving carefully or paying attention to their surroundings, in the case of traps AND playable huggers.
4: This throws out some of the current balance and the gameplay loop of disabling marines / sending them shipside for 5-10 minutes (which functionally makes the xeno’s fight easier)
Molecular acid is, canonically, supposed to be basically lethal if it gets on you. We already take liberties for gameplay reasons to have acid not be hyper lethal. While some games have established that, yes, you can ‘wrestle’ a facehugger off, these are protagonist-level characters and exigent circumstances… and this is catching them mid-air prior to them latching on. I could maybe see some very low level RNG (based on CQC?) chance to catch a facehugger and/or delay it from hugging you for say, a second or two, and require another marine to help you in that window or else you get hugged anyway, but ultimately… the idea that you have gets a big downvote from me for the reasons listed above. It’s a core xeno mechanic, and removing it for trivial burn damage treatment is simply awful.
I somewhat like this idea, but with current balance it’s just another indirect nerf to xenos. Also you already can manage to kill hugger if your fellow marine triggers a trap. Time window is like 1 second, as it should be to make it at least somewhat balanced.
Maybe if merged with some limited helmet? - I was thinking it’d be cool if SLs had an one time hugger immunity, considering how they have to lead squads (thus risk running into hugger traps) and how rounds can grind to a halt through lack of leadership - i.e less CAS, less OBs, less mortar and thus less pushes and less fun in general.
So in this case a helmet with some facial cover that’d let them struggle against the hugger or cut it off before it melts the helmet cover and latches properly in exchange for acid damage to head (+eye damage? maybe outright broken skull?) and the helmet being damaged. Could lock it to SLs somehow so they don’t give it away to prevent it affecting balance much.
Lore wise in the timeline you aren’t at the point where you know how to remove them from the face. At this point in the timeline you know what xenos are, but nothing else. You don’t even know the Queen Mother exists. How to remove a face hugger from the face is considerably later.
