>>2744
- second act: fighting mercs and scuttling their ships. acquiring new weapons and techniques.
- When Cade returns with the final material, the merc leader and his second-in-command have arrived at the ancient structure. A great fight ensues with the mercs sustaining injuries and leaving no ship intact except for the merc leader's.
- Merc leader, having found another structure elsewhere, has learned of the planet's true capabilities. He wounds Amethyst to distract Cade and descends into the structure, sealing it behind him.
[The planet's true nature has been hidden from the player until this point, though Paxton has speculated the abundance of metal and the odd life forms on the surface indicate life has not evolved entirely naturally.]
FINAL ACT:
- Amethyst is not worried about her fate, comforting Cade and Paxton before falling comatose. The two examine her injuries and find that her body is only partially organic, with much of her fur, skin, muscle tissue, and skeleton being synthetic fibers.
- Cade and Paxton determine that the only way they can help Amethyst is by descending into the sunless depths to find a rare material. Cade vows to do it, by this point more for personal reasons than practical.
- The sunless depths are finally explored, which is the highlight of the game. Featuring:
- - blind shark-man cave dwellers with hypersensitive ears. they are by far the most threatening enemies underwater, moving slowly and silently towards Cade and inflicting great chunks of damage with each tearing bite.
- - there are pockets of stale air within the sunless depths, and the shark-men can follow Cade there as well. they fight in a feral, uncanny manner and do not follow the same tells as other enemies. they are immune to any visual tricks (if that's relevant).
- - extended combat encounters against hordes of shark-men that crawl out of darkness towards the light of Cade's flares and the sound of his footsteps.
- The sunless depths also contain ancient writing near the material Cade seeks, describing the history of the planet.
- It is not a truly organic planet, but a great cache of raw materials surrounding a titanic forge. In ages past, some unknowable precursor race used it to manufacture legions of invincible war machines. For reasons lost to time, this race was unable to maintain their pedestal in the stars and the forge fell silent. Its inner workings slowed to idleness, and its more mundane subroutines began to experiment with forging organic life (the animals and plants on the surface, which seem as though they were placed into their environment rather than evolving from it).
- Over eons, with no master to awaken it, the forge took on a mind of its own (Amethyst). It has lingered in a purposeless state until our heroes happened upon it thanks to an emergency wormhole jump. Now the merc captain seeks to awaken the planet forge and use it to become a galactic tyrant.
Cade returns to the surface, being helped by a single shark-man who is capable of speech.
- "you... light..."
- "me... go... light..."
- etc.
Cade, Paxton, and Amethyst must find another way downward to stop the merc leader from harnessing the planet's power. The mercs' second-in-command, who was left to die by the leader, gives the heroes a [technobabble] that lets them track the merc ship to its final point of ingress into the planet. While they can't follow it directly, Amethyst knows of another much closer entry point that will get them to the same destination in a fraction of the time.
Cade descends [the other two can't come with him, but they can maintain radio contact] through the planet's crust in a very different biome, more like a series of steamworks full of searing airways and boiling coolant pipes.
[final area full of vast lakes of molten metal and plasma, constructs emerging fully formed, orange-hot and invincible]
[final boss fight against merc leader who is attempting to fabricate weapons and servants, but does not know how to control them]