Assault Defense

Assault Defense

            My first idea is a take on the classical tower defense genre, but much more action oriented.  For this mode, I have made a small map as an example.

Grey – Ramparts
Blue – Area to Protect
Brown – Destructible Barricades
Red – Bridge
Yellow – Cliff
Green – Underground Entrance
Arrows – Wave Spawn Points
White – Monster Paths

Goal

            Players will be attempting to stop a constant flow of monsters from reaching their revive crystal located at the end of the NPC pathways.  If this crystal is destroyed, the mode is over.  Players will protect this crystal by actively fighting against the stream of monsters and hiring squads to aide them in their defense.

Squads

            Rather than your traditional towers for defense, Squad Captains will be placed in various locations of the map (or a new system could be designed to allow them to be placed anywhere, but with the current mechanics, preplaced NPC’s would be easiest).  Players could then talk to these squad captains to hire various types of soldiers under their command.  These squads would then protect their area, attacking and/or distracting anything within range.  However, unlike traditional defenses, your squads will be attacked, causing the player to have to decide how to build them, based upon their location (some captains will be in places monsters never attack, others may be right along the paths).  The squads will the player’s main source of dealing with the constant stream of monsters, allowing the player’s to focus on the more dangerous threats.

Monsters and Events

            In each map, weak/normal monsters will constantly be attacking from the main spawn points.  At first, players will be handling this stream on their own. As they collect resources, they will begin to hire the squads to deal with them.  Over time, they constant streams will get stronger, forcing the player to keep an eye on them, and continue to upgrade and hire squad members.  The primary focus of the players however, will not be these streams of monsters, but rather the random events/spawns that will occur throughout the defense.

            Throughout the course of the mode, most of a player’s time will be dealing with Champion and Elite spawns.  Left unchecked, these spawns will take a heavy toll on your squads, putting the player far behind and causing the regular stream of minions to become a big threat.  So players will run to the various lanes and spawn points (aided by waypoints) to handle this larger threat.

            Aside from just champion spawns, players will have to turn their attention to events that transpire over the course of the fight.  These could include new paths opening up, a wave of flyers, or a group of mobs that climb your walls attempting to attack your squads from behind.  Events could also include protecting workers while they build a long range catapult, new training facility, or put up a wall.  Players could also be required to stop enemy events that would summon devastating creatures or debuff spells.

Player Characters

            There are two ways to use the classes of Diablo 3 and players characters in this mode.  The first is an extremely simple implementation.  Just use player’s actual characters.  For most situations this would work out well, basing difficulties off of the difficulty structure of the main game.  The only downside to this would be that players could out scale the challenge at extremely high levels of gear.

            The other option would be give players a starting set of gear at the beginning of the mode, and allow them to use resources or gold gather in the mode to upgrade their gear from shops (as well as potentially having enemies drop loot.  This would allow designers to create a stable level of challenge based on the map/difficulty of that mode, keeping it as something for players to overcome, not overpower.

            Of course, both methods could also be used with varying difficulties created for both.

End

            A mode like this would allow for designers to quickly create content that would be both enjoyable and challenging to players.  It would be different and fresh style of play while still remaining true to the feel of Diablo 3.  Current content could be recycled and used in a new way providing players with a change of pace without a lot of design time.  As the main Diablo 3 game progressed, any new content created there could be used in this mode as well.