Up Up and... More Away than Usual
This week the Orion Trail platoon deviated from their usual course of development as they tackled the daunting task of designing away missions. Players in away missions can gain or lose valuable resources apart from the main trail. Without absolutely burying Evan with an entirely new interface, the team came up with a great design for away missions, which mostly reuses the art, specifically the UI.
(Pictured: away mission popup)
In essence, these away missions will be multi-staged encounters that get progressively more difficult, yet offer more benefits the further you get. To get started, players choose an Away Team Leader and get randomly assigned up to eight brave crew members, referred to as Redshirts. These Redshirts (who you can still name here) act as a buffer between the treachery and dangers of the missions and your precious crew members. In the end, you’ll probably wind up mourning the loss of several crew members, but you can rest easy knowing that they fought the good fight by hopefully gaining assets that will help you finish the Orion Trail!
Additionally, players have the option to leave the away mission whenever they please, or they could opt out of the away mission entirely with no penalty (but also no reward). We think this feature has a lot of potential to add fun and variety to the game.
