Red Eclipse plot

[V-ktor]

So here is my idea for potential Red Eclipse plot/lore. I'll start with the setting first.
What is establish is that the characters are some kind of bio-mechanical cyborg thingy that are either being remote controlled or their minds are being transferred to another body on their death. Thus, they keep all their experience and even can further improve upon death.

Setting

Sci-fi setting, humanity has colonised a few solar systems. Huge mega corporations have formed, grasping for more and more power. In the time the game takes place they hold all economical/political/military power. Furthermore, two of them - let's call them the Alpha Corporation and the Omega Syndicate - began to absorb the smaller mega corporations so that only those two play a significant role nowadays. Traditionally, there was a though rivalry between those two which eventually ended in occasional skirmishes between their military forces in some less important border systems.

Player character

The actors in the game are some kind of cyborgs. Once they die, the mind of the "pilot" is being transferred to a new body and they continue their fighting business. They might even learn something from their death. Thus, those "pilots" are incredibly valuable due to their vast experience.
Initially, those cyborgs (we need a better term I think) were designed for some kind of blood sport but both of the two mega corporations saw their value as front line soldiers. Thus they picked up that concept and further developed it to better suit military needs. (As both corporations used the same initial concept we can probably get away with using the same model for both btw.)

Current situation

Eventually, the rivalry turned into an open war. The mega corporations prefer using the above mentioned soldiers over bombardment from spaceships or whatever because they are interested in capturing facilities for making profit or something like that.
Thus they always try to increase the production of those "bodies". It turned out that partially using organic components makes the production cheaper compared to fully mechanical android bodies. At some point they started using death sentenced criminals as "resource" for the production which further reduced costs (just cut out some pieces we don't need and replace them with mechanical parts, done).
Meanwhile, there was no progress at all during the war. Both sides have comparable losses with almost no successful operations. It's a stalemate. So there was the consideration that this could be overcome by drastically increasing the number of produced cyborg bodies - by using a part of the human population as resource! The idea how the people responsible would justify this is that sacrificing just a few millions of people would end the war.
Unfortunately, both sides had the same idea which just made everything worse in the end. By now, they don't really care about the costs any more as winning the war has priority. They do everything to increase their production rates.
So, this is the starting point of the plot: a stalemate between two mega corporations that conduct civilians to turn them into bio-mechanical cyborg shells which are wasted by (almost) immortal pilots in a pointless war.

The rebels

They are another faction consisting of people that somehow learned the truth about the cruel practices of the two mega corporations. Rebel cells exist on both sides and they probably cooperate with each others while not being a homogeneous group. They only share the same goal of ending the war.
However, they are rather weak compared to the two corporations and their fighters don't have any superhuman abilities. Therefore they will rather try to sabotage the corporations, hack their systems or even directly the cyborgs, manipulate them to wipe out each others. They would not stand a chance in direct combat.

Plot

Now, the actual plot for a possible campaign.
We need to keep in mind that we have limited resources and all campaign levels should be easy enough to implement. Furthermore, I'd try to make all levels work in coop multiplayer mode.

Level 0: tutorial

I guess it makes sense for the first level to be a tutorial. The player will get instructions over radio by his (supposed) commander (voice acting would be great). They will be told that there were some implications during their last death, resulting in some temporary neural damage, also involving temporary memory loss. This will also be an excuse to let the player do some very basic movement stuff for something like diagnostic purposes, maybe also introduce the weapons. Then, there will be a hint about the parkour challenges in case the player feels the need for more training.

Requirements

• A command to send radio messages by certain NPCs. Other than that, it should be possible to do this with scripts.
• (optional) trigger a script by picking up a weapon. It would be used to show some information about the weapon's usage, e.g. shotguns are melee weapons and the secondary applies a bleed status effect etc..