*Edit: It seems that after over 2 months of consistent activity, continuous flow of votes and over 300 messages, a moderator has decided to manually close the post for unknown reasons. While I find stunting an active suggestion post for its size and age needlessly snuffing out community activity. There is not much I can do about it. Take it up with the moderation I guess. *
Guess we cant have too popular of ideas floating around.
Rifts that spawn in the fog of the Dark sea. Putting us in someone else’s place in events of the past or future.
You know what this is. I know what this is.
This is a huge excuse to get all the fights we lost when Arcane Adventures died.
Rifts
Basically, while going through the dark sea, fair chance you’ll find a pale tear in space. The tear will give a prompt of what you see, and allow you to teleport for a one off boss battle. Win or Lose your transported back.
For example when running into a tear for fighting Theos: “You see an old master of flame testing the potential of a young wizard Do you wish to enter?”
The rifts themselves are just complex semi-physical illusions rather than actual time travel
So no canon breaking. (wink wink)
How it works
Once you enter the rift, your teleported out of the sea entirely into a unique 1 person arena server. this is more so because I don’t think the main bronze sea map itself could handle it all at once. Plus it eliminates lag, and makes it a 1v1 affair, which I think is better for balance.
Your put in the place of the hero of AA and WoM, though win or lose its not time travel its just a simulacrum.
The arena is a recreation of the place you would fight the npc in the original game. Albiet it is surrounded by a wall of dark sea fog. This fog actually acts as a physical wall, to prevent you from going out of bounds.
This is because many of these boss fights in AA take place near water, plus it makes it easier to fabricate the arena without worrying about having to recreate swaths of land.
After defeating your target and obtaining your drops, or being defeated, the screen turns black and prompts:
“a path of infinite insanities, of finite exits, the one remains pure and bright. arching to the single point of time. find yourself starting back” (this is a reference to marathon, but its fitting)
your teleported back to the sea your in.
I don’t know if its feasible or even possible to teleport you back to the exact server you were on, but its not a big deal.
The Future
Not gonna sugar coat this one, these are just to salvage the bosses and items left behind from WoM.
About the lore of this, we already know from akursius keep that Insanity can grant people visions of the future. Arguably compared to akursius keep, the dark sea is pure concentrated insanity, so it grants a vision of the far future.
The bosses possible to fight are:
Minotaur
You see a hulking man wielding a monstrous axe standing confident against a challenger
Exiled
You see a stalwart knight with a shining sword approaching one more obstacle to redemption
King David Silver
You see a man on a throne. ready to teach a lesson he has taught many times before
The Past
These are small scale remakes of the fights from Arcane Adventures. Considering most fights are against characters with magics that already exist in AO, these should be extremely easy to implement. Arguably they would be almost no different from an npc.
Trigno
You see a man of magma, erupting with frustration and rage
Averill
You see a Pirate captain carrying on the shining legacy of his original crew
Theos
You see an old master of flame testing the potential of a young wizard
Verdies
You a pirate floating in the sky. Wracked with anger for the loss of his crew
Marua
You see a weak man, his psyche broken by simple magic
Ramses II
The sight of a dead man standing is visible between clouds of sand.
Sage
You see a twisted woman pilaging the homes of an entire town
Possible rifts for later
These were never bosses in the original, so they unlike the rest would have to be made from scratch.
Durza
your senses dull. You feel an incomprehensible level of evil from this rift
The Kraken (This fight would need to be redone to be more of a setpiece fight, maybe a ring of ships you can walk around with kraken in the middle.)
you see a vortex in the ocean, with a dark wizard at its core
Rewards
The rewards for completing a Rift will always award at the very least a relic that can be sold for a decent amount of galleons.
For Future fights, it awards a Magius relic, an item already present in the game
Past fights award a Peacekeeper Relic which can also be sold.
If your lucky, you can get an item that depends on the boss.
Trigno drops
Magma Arcanium Cannons
Magma Arcanium Ram
Mantle Pirates Flag
Averill drops
Light arcanium ram
Gold Ship Plating
Shining Pirates flag
Theos drops
Gauntlet of the Rising Phoenix
Rigel’s Apothesis (extremely rare) (maybe implement it at a later time)
Phoenix Mark (the eye burning with pheonix magic we see in his boss fight)
Verdies drops
Verdies’ Hat
Verdies’ Necklace
Scorched Sky skates (damaged by plasma, they don’t let you fly anymore, just for stats)
Marua drops
Dark Cloak
Doom Chief Helm
Doom Staff
Ramses II drops
Ramses’ War Helm
Ramses’ War Armor
Ramses’ War Leggings
Sage drops
Emerald Captain Cloak
Emerald Peg Leg
Sage’s Cannons (the unique green cannons she has on the emerald queen her ship in AA)
Reason to add/change
I love AO but there is an undeniable argument that the content is really running sparce. Yes underwater diving is cool, and searching the darksea is cool too, but its again just resource farming. Nothing conventional to fight.
We need something new to fight, and having to design a bossfight from the ground up is difficult. Why not cheat a bit and make old bosses using the systems we have now, which would simplify it
The assets for many of these bosses exist or could be easily recreated like Trigno, the many of these bosses use magic that is now standard, meaning implementing them would be much easier.
The item rewards yeah you could hold off especially the few weapons, but atleast there is something new to fight using our magic instead of harpoons or cannons.
I tried to basically make it so their drops got carried over from AA so models could be reused.
The WoM fights were to add more from fights that were already done in WoM, easy content to reuse in my eyes
The idea was formed as a way to make a ton of new boss content easily, using already existing ideas, existing models you may or may not still have, and existing magic already in the game.
Realistically bosses like trigno or Averill would be just fighting an npc with magma or light magic, albiet its on their ships the rumbling caldera as the arena, and the shining king, which would be indestructible structures rather than actual ships.
The fog walls are to make it easier to avoid water, and keep the boss fight contained, so you don’t need to remake alot of AA fight areas.
I don’t think anyone would be upset with more bosses to fight, and it would help keep everyone busy as the real new content is made. Especially if its a huge reference to AA.
I wanted to make a content idea as easy as possible to implement, so easy you don’t even need to come up with new ideas, You can reuse objects and system from the game, and it makes AA fans happy.