Let's talk about what's on the other side of those gates

[Thwap]

And how we get there, and why we would want to go there. I feel like this game could use some sort of endgame meta-objective, and opening up a gate to Hellworld just to go on a one-man rampage to avenge your dead civilization by kicking Cthulhu in the balls sounds like a good one to me.

It’s my understanding of the lore that our world and the dimension the blob comes from are very different and not hospitable to the same forms of life. That’s why the blob had to infect hosts and give us zombies in the first place. Thus one might expect players to need to make a substantial investment in protective gear in order to survive even the basic environment on the other side of the gates.

Maybe everything is poisonous and radioactive, maybe the temperature changes from boiling to freezing each day, maybe just being in Hellworld causes a schizophrenic effect that can’t be canceled by drugs and which carries over back into the normal world for an equal period of time. It’s pretty much power armor or go home.

But what should it be like there? What sorts of things should there be? What the heck goes on over there?

[Noctifer]

How about crossing a specific mutation threshold that allows for multiple plane survival?

[kevin.granade]

Space suit or power armor, plus O2 tanks and such, either that or a sealed and pressurized vehicle.
“Doesn’t have to breathe” is a pretty OP mutation, even for dda.

[Noctifer]

I mean something like the mycus but for the blob, let the blob influence you somewhat and let “nether walk” be easier.

[kevin.granade]

The nether isn’t “kind of hot” or something, it’s “lacking in oxygen”. No amount of blob affinity is going to help with that.

[Noctifer]

So an anaerobic mutation would be to much to ask, even at the cost of pain? (lactic acid) Past a pain threshold the player would die since the body can’t handle it.

[TheKobold]

Sealed vehicles would be cool. That could lead to amphibious vehicles for quick trips across rivers, less worry about spores(are spores a problem when in a vehicle?), im sure there’s some other things that it could be useful for…

[i2amroy]

I’m all for being able to go to some worlds to wage a (rather pointless) war against the creatures that live there. The Mycus worlds or the Triffid ones would both be livable with the right preparation, for example, as could some potential other Nether worlds. That said it’s kinda a pointless endeavor; imagine if you established a goal of “killing all the people on the earth”. Even not counting reproduction it would take lifetimes to accomplish; once reproduction is factored in it literally becomes an impossible task for one person. Even if you had a machine gun with infinite ammo, firing 50 bullets a second, and every single bullet hit a different person and killed them, it would still take you almost 5 years to kill everyone. And that’s one world. For the Big 3 (Blob, Mycus, Triffids) the size of their empires is measured in the range of the thousands to tens of thousands of worlds. You’re not going to be “killing the enemy at the source”, anytime soon.

[Tawarochir]

Yeah, waging an all-out genocidal war against the Mycus/nether creatures/etc. seems kind of pointless. I could get down for some Half-Life-1-esque shenanigans, though.

Maybe some sort of high-level crafting chain could lead you to the ability to open/use a portal to the netherworld? Instead of getting to a full-on alternate dimension, though, I think it would be more interesting to have a sort of randomly-generated dungeon; not sure how it would look, but I’d imagine something that’s as close as you can get to non-Euclidean geometry as far as roguelikes go.

Ideally there would be some kind of superboss at the end, presumably some monster that could survive a mininuke to the face or something like that. I’m not quite sure where it would go from there, though.

(are spores a problem when in a vehicle?)

Not in my experience, but then again I might’ve been wearing a cleansuit when I drove my death-van to that bloom and burned it down. Not sure.

[kevin.granade]

It’s easy to come up with reasons it would be rewarding, various missions could reduce nether incursions in an area, we could stick various unique items and material in the nether, people could have been kidnapped, etc

[Noctifer]

Would the the mycus threshold allow for easier exploration of the mycus “world”? If so, would other thresholds for the other factions be a thing as well?

[Chezzo]

I think it is going to be so much fun drawing the tiles for the nether.

[Random_dragon]

An interesting concept. Though personally, I’m flat-out disappointed at the idea of the only major hazard being lack of breathable atmosphere.

By all means, incorporate as much warped non-euclidean physics and geometry as the game is capable of. o3o

[kevin.granade]

Only hah, that’s funny. The spacesuit would be the minimum you’d need to not die instantly, not enought to keep you safe indefinitely.
When I’m thinking nether I’m thinking of blob and flaming eye nether, there’s plenty of room for others to be different, though the likelihood that they’re within human survivability range is low, maybe you can get away with just an air supply or something.

[Random_dragon]

Now I’m pondering what ways it could be…spiced up.

Aside from a good reason to use the dozen or so hidden traps that only show up around artifacts.

[i2amroy]

Would the the mycus threshold allow for easier exploration of the mycus “world”? If so, would other thresholds for the other factions be a thing as well?

Mycus is supposedly a bit of a different mechanism for mutation (which is why you can get messages about rejecting it depending on how much your are mutated). The reason why it does this is because of the particular mechanism through which the Mycus deals with the natives of plants that it finds; it assimilates them and warps them into more of itself. This is different from say, the triffids, who rather subjugate what they find and bend it to their will rather than changing it physically, and as such don’t have a mutation path. That said I do hope to eventually get in various quest lines/etc. that will allow you to essentially “join” several different factions similar to how the Mycus threshold does, just most of them will carry other benefits rather than simply mutating you into an inhuman monster. Ideally it would be nice to be able to eventually go “home” under some quest lines and live out the remainder of your life as a pampered pet or somesuch, but it currently an idea that is very far away, and would depend on a lot of other pieces of the game to get done first (such as the different faction questlines, working portals, different planets, and so forth).

And indeed, a large portion of the Nether is rather inimical to human life, heck, quite a lot of the time I doubt you are even going to be making it through the portal since just what’s leaking out the edges is going to be too dangerous to get through. (How do you feel about swimming through lava? How about walking through a cloud of superconcentrated acid vapor? Approaching temperatures just a hair above absolute zero?) Though this fact also does works in the other direction, in that a majority of the Nether creatures find the human world just as inimical, and can’t survive well once they get too far away from their portal (and what is leaking through the edges to make the area more like their home). There are probably at least a handful of worlds you could get to and live just fine, though it might be a little strange and they would almost certainly contain quite a few creatures that would love nothing more to make a snack out of you, though maybe some that would be just as interested in accepting the dead bodies of things that would make a snack out of them too "waggles eyebrows*, not everything in the Nether has to be intrinsically hostile, after all, some of them might even be quite nice (honestly in most cases wiping out humans is more of just a side-effect of the more intelligent creatures coming to take the earth than any sort of deliberate malice. I mean did Cortez come to intentionally wipe out the Aztecs in some sort of genocide war? No, he simply wanted the land (conquering everybody who already lived there was just a necessary step).

[ZoneWizard]

Why not do a similar aspect ala Doom3?

Simple enough. Messed up critters that we already kinda have. Not that I’m inclined to believe the world has a “Hell” beyond the world being a mess as is lol

It would make more sense to me to not presume such creatures come from the biblical hell, but rather a realm where humans would assume such and just misinterpreted everything when a few people glimpsed it and thought all sorts of messed up stuff, filling in the blanks and POOF! RELIGION!

[Random_dragon]

Hmm. I can see that being prime flame bait unless we took pains to make things very intentionally reference all sort of religions, mythologies, etc.

Then again, given some of the Fun monsters that would allow us to add in…I do recall the idea of a Jotun mod being discussed, so taking that and massively broadening its scoop would tie in well with that. o3o

[ZoneWizard]

Not sure what you mean?

We have pretty much every monster in Doom series already. My idea merely bridges the gap by saying humans in our realm would be able to occasionally glimpse the other realm and see how messed up it is compared to ours. Those people would then fill in the gaps and created a religion based upon each glimpse.

Religious tomes are already in game. Heck the devs could even have a few places where NPC’s talk about this using just what I wrote describing it…minus the Doom reference of course lol

Survivalist Diary:
Those things man! I swear its like…something out of(fill it the religion flavor of hell).

Scientist Computer Log:
When we broke down the barriers from our world to “Theirs”, we could not have expected how different…and how dangerous it would be.

A great example would be the film The Mist(2007). Assuming the Doom idea was not to every ones liking. The mist describes a story similar to how the demons and gates work rather nicely. Not being able to breathe though…not an unrealistic idea, but instantly dying walking through would be rather bad. I mean think of it this way, play the game without any for knowledge as you would be a normal person coming upon a gate. As a player you would die once and know the next time. But it would be unrealistic, because we have to assuming you would be like “HMmmm…try walking through it…sure, why not?” dead!

So it it would make a lot of sense to have an atmosphere similar to what a human could survive, seeing as monsters can already enter the human realm. Can you stay alive for long? Sure maybe. But could it be poisonous and slowly kill you? Would make for better game play. Forcing everyone to fight in a certain area to cleanse a rush of monsters from a gate you would drop dead instantly…well…seems a rather bad idea.

I’m thinking about it. If I"m a janitor, why would I know how to use a power suit. Even if I came upon a gate, would this person really think…tons of monster pouring out…check! Rambo mode initiated, check! Spear made out of a broom stick and a butchers knife held with duct tape, check! Hold my breathe, pucker my sphintor, I’m going in baby!!! YEAH!!! Dead… >_>

[i2amroy]

Forcing everyone to fight in a certain area to cleanse a rush of monsters from a gate you would drop dead instantly…well…seems a rather bad idea.

It’s why part of the idea involves gates “leaking” through to this side. A gate with no atmosphere might have very little present in the rooms on our side, for example, while a gate for lava would radiate heat (and maybe lava). Ice labs are supposedly supposed to have ice portals in their depths, as yet another example. Portals aren’t just these one way things, stuff from the other side can work it’s way back too!