I just thought of an idea after reading Str8ghFlush's thread. Give it a look and send him some of your ideas! Anyway, it got me thinking so I thought I'd share this little idea I had. This would have to be done very well to actually work, but it's up to you when it comes to the specifics. Here are the basics for a "Chopper Gunner" effect: After a certain amount of time into the game (ie 120 seconds), a teleporter appears. It leads to an area which is out side of the map and contains a falcon Any player which enters that area will gain access to the vehicle. They will then fly over to the main area, pick up their friends and have loads of fun. After another amount of time (say, 150 seconds giving a maximum potential of about 30 seconds in the falcon) a teleporter will appear which teleports the falcon off of the map. This teleporter's boundaries encompass the entire map but only target vehicles. Players in the vehicle are relocated to an area bathed in a soft kill boundary and a player-only teleporter. They are forced to get out, which sends them back to the main map. To reduce predictability, there should be several receivers. You could probably disguise some receiver nodes into something which wouldn't look out of the place in the map (so they would feature in aesthetics). Like I said, that would be tricky but I think it would also be pretty neat and unique. Here are some restrictions. To be more like the CoD Chopper Gunner, you would have to create a custom gametype which allows indestructible vehicles. As a result, the falcon would have to be the only vehicle to keep it balanced. All of those Teleporters would be kind of expensive along with the extra pieces for creating a Falcon-specific area. Let me know what you think, because I just thought I'd put this out there for the general public to throw around. If you haven't already, check out Str8ghFlush's thread if you have any good ideas for a city-type map.
CoD chopper gunner sin't invincible. To make the same effect put the falcon to spawn MIDGAME at the CENTER of the map. You still need some effort to get to it.
I think a map could easily revolve around an idea like that. I'd suggest combining this idea and Str8ghFlush's and make the teleporter encompass a particular rooftop, that way there is a constant battle over the roof top. Even better is multiple team members could get in it before it takes off, as opposed to the driver having to use some of the 30 seconds picking up players. On the other side (receiver node) you could create a switch using a landmine button that forces a crate to fall over the node, so that once you have 3 team member at the falcon, you can block the teleporter so an enemy can't follow you and hijack the vehicle.
That would work very well in objective gameplay because one team would have to decide between the chopper or being on the ground which would support helping the objective w/ the falcon
Why not have a large soft kill barrier over the entire map (where the falcon would move around) that would spawn later? That way, it gives the feel that you're about to be shot down by an AA gun? And then for the parts where you could not put a soft kill barrier (nearer the ground), you could use the teleporter. That way it at seems a little more realistic?