Sounds cool. A.H.
Story Idea:
TR -80 Years (Tux Revival)
Tux seals himself in stasis in protest to actions by Monopoly Systems related to the war on the Linarians. His identity is slowly, but not completely, lost to time. He sends requests to twelve families across the galaxy for him to be reawakened if the galaxy faces a true crisis.
TR -10 Years - the freedroid incident
An unknown force takes control of the robots of a large battleship for unknown reasons, slaying the entire crew within hours. A prototype 001 Influence Droid with a human controller is sent to the site, and is forced to destroy the ship's droids, one by one. Upon finishing off the droids, the pilot sent the droid to the ship's core to figure out what went wrong, but finds no conclusive evidence. After retaking of the ship by human crews, log analysis reveals that the robots had been receiving orders from the control servers, but can't figure out what went wrong with said servers. Monopoly Systems figures out that somehow, their backdoor work into the server was exploited - however, what they can't figure out, is who or what figured out how to use it, when even the best hackers in the galaxy didn't even know for sure it existed.
TR -6 Months
The effect begins again, this time, occuring throughout the entire galaxy within hours. Monopoly Systems resorts to using the backdoor to switch individual robots to manual control for a while, only to find that there are too many robots, even after they resort to 'hiring' more controllers by picking up hobos and others off of the streets. They then attempt the desperate measure of using their backdoor to shut down each control server, one by one - only to find that the commands are mysteriously rejected with every 'corrupted' server they try to control. As the galaxy degenrates into chaos as robots attack more and more humans, Monopoly Systems is wiped off the map by their own systems turning on them.
The Free Coders preach against Monopoly Systems even as it dies, but don't do anything to help the galaxy, taking an 'I told you so' position and mostly working to fend for themselves - an easy task since THEIR robots weren't taken over.
TR 0
Tux is taken out of stasis by Francis, the last of the survivors of the twelve families. Figuring out what's going on, Tux figures out that his best chance is to return to his homeworld - except that there are no teleport systems that can go off-world (They bounce off the atmosphere) and no ships (since most if not all are held by the robots).
OVERALL OBJECTIVE ONE: Acquire a ship.
ROUTES:
- Join the Red Guard to get access to the teleport systems, from which he can access the old spaceport, which is hundreds of miles from town. It's here that Tux learns of the freedroid incident, and starts to develop suspicions as to what is going on. Finally, he manages to reach the pot and destroy a high-power, hack-proofed robot (700-level minimum, but should NOT be a 999) which guards a control system which allows Tux to get a ship. Right before he can board, however, a mysterious entity wearing a black hat appears, sending an armada of robots at Tux. Tux can either fight off the robots and force the entity to flee, or hack the control server nearby and shut the robots down, destroying the entity. Attacking the Entity directly gives you a message: "The sword goes right through the entity, as if the entity weren't really there." Server hacking should be especially difficult, requireing that Tux go through three levels of security; if he loses even once, he has to restart from the beginning - AFTER twenty seconds of lockout.
- Get Kevin and Julie's help to modify the teleport systems so Tux can get out of the atmosphere and warp to his homeworld directly. Kevin insists on getting an influencer from the one Droid 999 in the Hell Fortress to create some critical parts of the system (see ThroughMeadows?). If Tux gets the influencer and gives it to Kevin, he completes the teleporter and Tux can leave to Objective two that way. If he gives it to Spencer, he's immediately added to the Red Guard and goes through that plot. If Tux uses the teleporter, then he will NOT encounter the Black Hat Entity.
OVERALL OBJECTIVE TWO: Eliminate the Black Hat Entities on Tux's Homeworld.
ROUTES:
- One. There are some arbitary number of Black Hat Entities who have taken over various facilities around the large city which is Tux's homeworld. Each is destroyed in the same way as the first, with the difference that they won't flee and will try to summon robots from the rest of the city as reinforcements until Tux hacks the control servers. Eventually, Tux will start regularly facing 'unhackable' droids. Usually high-level, unhackables are powerful droids who have to be destroyed directly. Elemental droids (who have to be destroyed using specific-property weapons) could be introduced in this chapter as well.
- Note that if Tux hasn't faced the first Black Hat Entity during part one, the first one he faces will be of comparable difficulty to that one, the idea being to get the players to think to hack the server.
- Once all the Black Hat Entities on the planet are removed, the Linarians quickly figure out that Monopoly Systems' works are the reason they've had the Black Hat Entities. In the resulting riot, a particularly massive Black Hat Entity appears, creating a massive assault force. The Linarians, however, still have their weapons caches from wars 80 years old, and quickly begin to take on the robots with incredible fervor. Tux has to fight his way to the Entity; this time, as the anti-M$ thoughts are palpable in the immediate area, the Entity is solid and killable the normal way, though the robots have also brought in four servers to reinforce it - destroying one deals massive damage to the Entity.
- It's at this point that it's made clear (as in, someone flat-out TELLS Tux) that dark thoughts related to M$ are the cause of the Entities' existence, and that the Entities, in turn, abuse the backdoors in the systems to take control of control servers, and thus the robots. While, in theory, good thoughts about the company could weaken or destroy the Entitites, it's pretty clear that shutting down the servers is the easier way to end the threat.
- If the teleporter was used, Kevin appears, having convienently set up another interplanetary teleporter which allows Tux to go back to the starting planet or to some number of new planets which appear. If Tux used the ship, he can use that to head to the planets.
OVERALL OBJECTIVE THREE: Attempt to use the Monopoly Systems Central Servers to disable the control servers across the galaxy and elimiate the Black Hat Entities.
- This part's more open, but Tux should have to disable some number of security control servers to get into the Central Tower of Monopoly System's complex. The control servers could be on some of the other planets, or simply be near the complex itself. The Free Coders, RMS, remnants of M$, and other groups who have been mentioned throughout the story should becoome direct characters during this part of the chapter in an array of sidequests - completing these sidequests could be a way to unlock extra functionality (I'm thinking Beastie and Konqui can be unlocked as playable characters by helping the M$ remnants and Free Coders respectively, though I don't know anything about Beastie so that may not be appropriate. You can only unlock one or the other on any one playthrough of the game. Other unlocks could include extra dungeons along the lines of Sphere 211 in Star Ocean: Till The End of Time.)
- Upon entering the final area, Tux finds out something weird - he's literally INSIDE the central control server, which is the entire tower. He could be facing 'digitized' enemies in addition to normal droids, and Black Hat Entities (with rolling control servers and LOTS of droids) are regular enemies here. Throughout the tower there are 'control points' - each control point hacked reduces the hack resistance of robots by some percentage.
- The final enemy (whatever it is - it may or may not be a Black Hat Entity) guards the central control point on the SECOND from the top floor of the tower - the center only being accessible from stairs leading down from the top floor, of course. At this point, Tux's choice in chapter 1 can pay off. If Tux joined the Red Guard, then the now much larger Red Guard appears outside of the complex, reducing the size of the sawrms of robots that continuously spawn in the area. If Tux helped Kevin, then hacked robots begin to be teleported into the room to help Tux out. The final enemy should be seemingly immune to direct attack, and be large enough to get in the way of accessing the central server - the trick being that it has two hit point bars (or a script equivalent of this). Each enemy robot destroyed reduces a 'secondary' bar - the first bar can't fall below the level of the secondary, and is the one that takes any direct damage from Tux or hacked robots. Hacking a robot (if you can pull it off against the highly-hackproofed final area robots - taking out lesser control servers is the only way to have a chance to do this) counts as destroying it for this fight's purposes.
- Finally,Tux gets to the server and begins to try and hack it. This one's truly insane, with eight levels of security - however, losing only sends you back a level. However, there's also a time limit to dsiable the server - if you can't get all the way into the system within 10000 ticks ('announcement' time where the results are shown doesn't count), the boss regenerates 50% of both lifebars and you're forced out of the system to take it down again.
- When Tux finally hacks the central server, he manages to successfully force a shutdown command to thousands of servers, disabling the robot hordes and allowing humanity to begin to rebuild - this time, with the help of the Linarians and Free Coders.