Time Rifts - Darksea Boss Fights

Time Rifts - Darksea Boss Fights
effort 4.74074074074074 54 quality 4.679245283018868 53 reasonability 4.183673469387755 49

*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.

50 Likes

this does not make any real sense and AA/WoM bosses would be quite mid to fight with the sheer mobility you can get in AO

1 Like

I’d say that each boss would need a bit of a revamp but it would be pog

21 Likes

a majority of them would just require being a tougher npc that has the magic, sand/plasma/magma/etc

Thats why it be easy to implement, 90% of the work already exists in the game in some form.

1 Like

ok out of curiocity, what doesn’t doesnt make any real sense.

The timerift itself? sure, its just meant to be a lore friendly excuse to be able to go back and refight them.

Its just meant to be an insanity induced vision of the past/future, just so time travel doesn’t become a literal concept and introduce the problems that come from that.

The bosses could be remade just as tougher npcs, the reason why I’m suggesting it is because 80% of the work is feasibly already done.

Decent Boss AI exists, the magics exist, the assets hopefully still exist, the rest of the work would be implementing the backend, and making the arena’s based off of the ones in AA plus fog walls to keep it contained.

7 Likes

it makes no sense lorewise in any manner

and again, the bosses from AA/WoM would be awful to fight against because they’re not intended to have been fought with the absurd mobility you have, and making them tougher won’t do anything

1 Like

I think they’d need at least a unique attack or two to stand out from a generic villain npc but yeah i guess

4 Likes

Lorewise, if you remember. The insanity of Akursius keep somehow granted an insane person a vision of the hellish calamity that would strike the keep in the future. As we see in reckhams journal you obtain in part of the Inside the nightmare quest.

While yes its stretching it, arguably if these fights are just similarly visions brought about via concentrated pockets of insanity in the dark sea, then its not unexcusable.

Not to mention it gives a good excuse for refights against iconic characters from AA, it be one of those things that aren’t mentioned directly and are more for gameplay than outright lore.

Its kinda like how some games give an excuse to why you can refight previous bosses, you know like how THIS GAME does that. The mirages of past bosses?

Nothing in the lore justifies mirages either, its more for the gameplay.
Its an excuse to justify content that would otherwise be wasted. Doesn’t mean its bad, just that you shouldn’t look into it.

16 Likes

This feels super fan-servicie but I kind of love it despite it being kind of stupid

19 Likes

and yeah it kinda is, but I see no problem with it if it makes everyone happy.

More combat based content, fan service for AA fans, and the update isnt just dedicated to another resource gathering mechanic.

2 Likes

Idgaf if it doesn’t make sense lore wise I wanna be able to fight durza and everyone else from aa/wom

13 Likes

Great idea! My only critique is the lore, as it doesn’t really make sense to me. Overall, great suggestion with (relatively) easy to implement features!

I would personally love these, but I’m not sure Vetex will.

1 Like

I think it should be on the server and not by teleporting to a arena because you might have loot on your ship or be really deep into the dark sea and it would be pretty annoying to either lose all the loot or go to a island, sell everything and come back.

5 Likes

Cool suggestion but will never be added
Also the gear would need a hard nerf because power is way stronger in wom/ao than it was in aa (gauntlet of the rising phoenix is an entire ao build on its own)

4 Likes

i like because i never played AA, but also because i want more cool fights and the drops for trade. But im no dev nor on the AO team i doubt this would get added

1 Like

One problem is that in lore its pretty much confirmed that curse users cant be damaged by anything other then magic. Poor warriors/Beserkers.

2 Likes

Awakened warriors and beserkers subconsciously uses magic despite forgetting how to use it or what it even was.

6 Likes

This suggestion sounds nice, my only problem is how we’re supposed to fight Verdies, since we don’t really have any sky skates.

Very cool, but I have an issue with gatekeeping gear to a random boss fight. You can’t seek them out like normal bosses, you’d have to randomly come across them. This means if any of them are good they immediately become absurdly expensive. Personally, I’d either place them somewhere static in the dark sea or allow you to fight them infinitely after discovering the time rift.