In objective mode, there's a new objective where players have to defend an area until a timer expires, and I think the fact alone that the game can have a feature like this now gives me an idea on how to essentially make endless truly endless, instead of merely survival except with 255 waves and some special waves/weeklies sprinkled in.
The main thing here is that each wave is a "timer" instead of a separate thing. Players would have 5 minutes or so to "clear a wave" before the next one arrives. If you're still fighting things when the 5-minute timer expires, the next wave spawns whether you're ready or not. Waves would still increase in difficulty like normal as the time goes on, so it's like current endless in that sense in which whatever "wave" you're on is what spawns, but it'll spawn after 5 minutes no matter what.
In addition to such a change, here are a few other features that would go nicely with it:
The main thing here is that each wave is a "timer" instead of a separate thing. Players would have 5 minutes or so to "clear a wave" before the next one arrives. If you're still fighting things when the 5-minute timer expires, the next wave spawns whether you're ready or not. Waves would still increase in difficulty like normal as the time goes on, so it's like current endless in that sense in which whatever "wave" you're on is what spawns, but it'll spawn after 5 minutes no matter what.
In addition to such a change, here are a few other features that would go nicely with it:
- All trader pods are always open. I think this adds a neat and different dynamic to where players have to strategically cover each other while they take turns making purchases, or use whatever downtime they can scrounge to buy stuff quick.
- Ammo regeneration. Players would regenerate by 1 ammo box, and the rate at which they are granted this ammo box gets shorter and shorter as the time goes on. It could probably start at 1 ammo box every 5 minutes, then eventually every 30 seconds (by this point the difficulty would be insane).
- Bosses would still spawn every 5 waves, though their normal health multiplier per player would be halved, and it wouldn't increase each "boss wave" like in current endless. The idea here is to still have bosses spawn, but not have them as hard considering players might still be fighting a ton of stuff by the time they spawn, and bosses are normally their own wave, so I think reducing their health multiplier by half what it would be normally for whatever amount of players are alive would be a good balance.
- Despite ammo regeneration, Trader pods would still have a purpose beyond buying your loadout or all your ammo at once: for an amount of dosh that increases based on how long you've survived and how many players are dead, you can bring back the dead at any trader pod. I'd hate for there to be a game of pick & choose, and it'd suck for other players to have to wait longer to come back if whoever is alive chose not to revive them, so choosing the revive option at a trader pod revives all dead players. Upon revival, the game will give you the "auto-buy" loadout for whatever perk you're playing, just to make sure there's not this scenario where, when players are revived, they need to buy their loadout in .5 seconds or they die or get cornered if the person who revived the team did it on a pass by the trader while running away from stuff. This way, the players that are revived can just start running immediately as well. When revived you would also spawn at the trader pod that you got revived at.
- Special waves and weeklies would still happen at random after wave 5, but I do believe there should be an option to disable either or both for people who want to narrow down their experience to their liking.
- Your syringe would heal you for 50HP and recharge in 7.5 seconds like it does in Solo. With how hectic things might get, I believe it's important to slightly increase a single player's survivability by restoring their syringe's solo power, in addition to alleviating some pressure off of the medic if there is one. To this end, I think it's better like this instead of having global health regeneration.
- No stand your ground objectives. Unfortunately there'd come a point where the team always needs to be on the move, so SYG objectives wouldn't be worth it (or even possible, for that matter) at some point if they were still there.
- The zed counter would still show how many zeds are currently on the field, instead of the "infinity" symbol in objective mode. The infinity symbol would still appear next to the wave counter where the "max waves" number would be like normal endless, though.
- When each "wave" starts, the notification will still appear (and change if a special wave spawns if it's enabled), but I believe for this mode it should be moved to the top of the screen as not to intrude on your vision in any way.
- There'd be no "wave #", and the reason for that is in #11
- Unlike current endless, the game would actually go until you die, instead of until wave 255 (which is a hard programming cap). I'm not sure how to subvert a cap that has to do with programming, but the idea here is that on the very late "waves", the game will just keep spawning high-level squads, rather than ending the game at some point.
