Alternative Oxygen Penalty

Okay, so you know how there are these little critters that walk randomly throughout melee maps?

Well heres a thought? Why not make it so that when someone's oxygen runs out, they
spend 10 secs or so wandering aimlessly away from the group?

Sort of like your marine suddenly going 'Aw shit, I can't breathe' and panicking away from everyone?

It could work? Although I'd need to be more convinced of a reason for its implementation?

Yeah, kinda.

Honestly it was a thought I had.

Mechanically: It could be used to spread the group out again. Once people clump up and form a group, they tend to try to stay clumped up. While the new thing transformations allow the thing to deal with larger groups, and the thing has ways of luring others through doors and stuff, it doesn't address the core problem. The game is supposed to be playing up the paranoia... you lose that if everyone is in one big group all the time. This could add additional incentive for the marines to take the initiative and split up into smaller groups. It would also encourage deception for the thing, and paranoia among the marines.

Lorewise: If someone starts getting less and less oxygen, they could easily start hallucinating or going paranoid. Combine that with the need to breathe, and this would add to the intended atmosphere of the game. I dunno about you, but if I suddenly found it hard to breathe in a room, and I started hallucinating that all my fellows were things, I'd get the hell out of there.

Of course, if you implement this, you'll have to decide on a boon to throw the marines as a trade off. This would count as a nerf, I think.

Although I agree that seperating the groups is something that's needed, I'm not sure a passive function like this is necissarily the way to go. If the groups split, they still have no incentive to go that far away, and can potentially regroup near immediately.

The issue lies in the size of the maps, except for Ragnov, and lack of goals for marines short of survival.

That said, I do like the idea. If we made it so you have a much larger oxygen tank, but it replenishes more slowly, and when your oxygen gets low your screen gets shaky or red or something scary-ish, I could see it working.

That could work.

I'd like to see if anyone has any more thoughts on this discussion. Its been a while and I am curious to see if opinions have changed/if you guys are thinking of implementing something like this.

Not gonna lie, we're a little full on our plates right now. We're currently trying to:

Add vent pathing
UI overhaul
Add Class + Loadout + Perk or whatever system
Improve misc. things like having noobs start with enhanced visuals etc
and even bug fixing in general

Its a REALLY slow process because everyone is always busy/ lazy/ uncommunicating etc.
In fact, I've even been unable to access the source file for a while now because I was encountering a fatal error from a bug even in the test version.

Though in theory the oxygen tank being larger/ increasing more slowly sounds interesting. I'll think on it for when balance changes go out.