Since Toumaz wanted each idea or concept to have it's own thread, I took the liberty of collecting a bunch of activist-related ideas into this thread. Activists have, as we know from the original game:
-Fastest base speed of all "weak" enemies
-Greatest tendency to move in Y-direction of ANY enemy
-Highest HP of all the standard "weak" enemies
-Two distinct weak spots: the head of the activist itself, and his Achilles heal - the head of the seal pup
In fact, the activist himself is just a transport for the real danger (the pup)
This of course makes them fairly formidable, especially compared to the basic brown seals and they contribute to a lot of losses. The fact that they are human also makes it possible to come up with lots of ideas on how else they could act, so without further babbling on my part, let's gather it here:
Idea #1 (Luskan/Axidial/NP/etc) -
A mammoth/a ship/orange inflatable boats that spawns activists:The idea being, a vessel of some sort that releases a horde of activists at once. A real threat, since it takes alot of fire to bring down activists in great numbers, and they tend to spread out. Of these, the one that seems to make most sense is the orange boats:
-It is closest to how greenpeace operate in reality
-It's easiest to draw
-It opens for a lots of different skill-based attacks (i.e, you could be able to chuck grenades into the boat if you hit it perfectly, and doing so would of course gib everything inside, you could be able to shoot the activists in the head (one by one!) while in the boat, so that you don't have that many to deal with once the boat releases the rest etc. etc.)
Idea #2 (funkyhunter) -
Activists on snowmobilesThis, I assume, would be a "upgrade" to the activists, i.e. starting on level X, every Y activist arrives on a snowmobile that travels at a higher speed than ordinary activists. You could of course destroy the snowmobile by shooting it, forcing the activist to run instead, or you could hit the activist with a nice headshot (but doing so would keep the snowmobile running with the seal pup still alive!). This could be a nice boost to the activists on higher levels (i.e. on the current level 5), where they aren't that big a threat.
This idea is pretty close in concept to the activists themselves: the snowmobiles are just a carrying vessel for the activists, which in turn just carry the seal pup, which is the real threat. It would indeed be pretty neat if the seal pups kept upgrading their transportation device over the course of the levels
Idea #3 (funkyhunter) -
Berserking activistsWhen you shoot the seal pup from the activist, instead of just screaming and running with the seal head, some of them would whip out a baseball bat and charge at one of the eskimoes. On making contact, I'd assume that he would hit the eskimo over the head, stunning him for X time, and then run off. It could of course be cool if he'd continue to hit until something stops him (i.e. another eskimo killing him), but that would make it pretty much instant death in single player.
The biggest problem with this is probably that the event that triggers it all (just killing the pup) is pretty rare, but other than that it could be pretty cool.
I know you are probably sick of my "back in pre-release-version X"-stories, but we did have a busload (literally!) of activists as the boss on level 4 for a while, and dropped it mostly due to the fact that we disliked mechanical devices (it isn't as much fun to blow up a bus as it is to gib something made of flesh and blood, or at least that was our opinion).
