They aren’t in the game yet, so they don’t necessarily need to be clearly defined. Especially since as you say, it presents a big of a game design challenge the way they are currently described.
I agree with Ingvar that they don’t necessary have to be mobile. Make them tethered to a certain point that doesn’t have a beacon area. Come up with reasons for why they would appear on the planet. Maybe they’re alien visitors that appear and will siphon the energy from the planet, create a literal vacuum of magma that they consume. If not killed in a certain amount of time, they eventually fly back up into space and disappear.
This, to me, sounds like it could be an incredibly fun aspect to the battle. If it were easy, it wouldn’t really be epic. The thought of getting flung off of a titan is exciting to me. You have to have some risk and sense of danger in a game, otherwise it’ll just be a cake walk.
I don’t think so. They advertise the game to feature titans, so doing otherwise would be costly imo. Granted, I was more excited about PvE aspects to this game than I was building, although I do like the building already. From what I’ve seen, they should really be fleshing out the PvE in this game more as the building is already really good.
Pretty sure they’ve been fleshing out pve… that includes the custom item system (centraforge) the skill revamp, wearables, mob balance, planet difficulty, etc. It’s way more than just Titans. And it’s not as if they can’t work on several things at once, various devs specialize in various skills and areas of the game after all.
I’d be okay with just large monsters that are difficult to kill as well. Even if titans don’t make it in the game, if we have some difficult monsters I’d be cool with it.
There are art assets for 3 (?) Large creatures with Ai presumably being developed for them as well. These should be a sort of progression boss or challenge mob. There is the stone thrower, the ground basher, and the Giant Worm. I’ll have to dig up their concept art around here somewhere…
This would be a good place to bring up the idea of event planets or planetoids that pass by the boundless universe for a limited time - they can be short lived worlds that could allow PvE, disallow beacons or have a low vertical plot limit (so you could set up a temp gate) as well as house titans for their brief run through the galaxy…
if you type in protectors in the search it will come up with a concept art page, and that has more art. otherwise however we don’t have a whole lot about them, other then the fact that they are possibly related to the Titans.