1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Running this on a low 40s ice/axe tanker, +0 x2 with bosses on.

   —

   My contact gives me a spiel about the Midnight Squad finding some kind of outward link from mutants when they were investigating why visors work on them.

   And she can’t get near anybody she’s linked to, so she’s sending me out with a sensor of some type.

   Well, the reason’s obvious. If you ever meet your doppleganger, both of you die within a day and then your combined karma goes to the secret cabal of people who used to have two dopplegangers.

   (might be nice to get whatever this artifact is as an opening clue.)

   I save a Kheldian the Council have captured. Might be nice to have her surrounded by Void Hunters or something.

   —

   Usually I expect a little more direction from a mission briefing. Like, where I’m going, what I can expect. Am I hunting down people in a specific order, or what, exactly?

   Anyway, apparently there’s this bizarre cult that’s also trying to do something with these links, and it’s a good thing I’ve dipped into my ancillary pool, as their melee lieutenant has Build Up.

   Aside from that, they seem pretty reasonable.

   —

   Yeah, this is the second one-line mission briefing in a row. The navbar gives me the name of whoever I’m going after, but the mission briefing is just my contact fuming that there’s a villain linked to her somewhere.

   And… the mission entry popup gives me some information about this guy? Wow.

   Okay. Usually I expect to know where I’m going and roughly what I’m doing there from the briefing. The mission popup gives me some personal observations and helps to set the scene more than it establishes any threats.

   This dude’s undead army is composed of Pantheon zombies with custom upper ranks. The Harpies have no description at all.

   Off in the distance I can hear battles between Unity and the undead, but they seem to be reading each other lines - the zombies talking about Unity, the cultists going “braaaaaains”.

   I confront the dude, who is a decent-looking skeletal necromancer with bone wings, and he wonders that I stopped the dead from walking the earth just to get him to take this litle existential survey.

   He drops some lines about predestination and oversouls - these are the sorts of things whose names are unpronouncable because they all start with @, right?

   —

   So last mission my contact was worrying about other bits of herself in the Rogue Isles, and this time out of nowhere somebody’s trying to drown us in a flood of ravagers.

   Er, create Rularuu.

   I see the mages of the custom group in this mission. Dual control, plant/earth, just in case you didn’t feel like getting held forever by ONE control set with defense debuffs on it.

   The boss dumps the last line of his death scream into the system text (”Becoming” only takes one M.) “Boss defeated text” goes into the system tab. “Boss is defeated dialog” goes into NPC dialogue, and they should get text appropriate for those channels. I know it’s not exactly clear which is which.

   —

   Storyline - **. The story shifts gears kind of abruptly, from the more light investigation into these odd links to this terrible threat to the world. I don’t find out about the cult’s ultimate plan until right when they become a threat, and there’s this kind of looming threat at the end.

   Everyone’s got an @ in front of their names. And there’s nothing to indicate we’ve even taken a fraction out of this cult. Rularuu has weird monsters, each serving facets of his personality — the cult members could be similar odd things with solid facemasks and weird protruding bits, summoned by the initial union they’re looking to move forward. Maybe whatever elements of the cult the Midnighters take to study vanish after the last mission.

   A little closure, rather than this threat of a new Rularuu at any time.

   Design - ****. The missions are all pretty straightforward - two hostage rescues, two boss fights. The occasional patrol or battle provides a bit of flavor. The customs are all reasonably easy to tell apart.from each other - my one caveat is that it’s not really possible to do good robes in the CoH engine yet. It would help the impression of robes a bit if the cultists were also hooded.

   Gameplay - ***. The cultist lieutenants have Aim and Build Up, and their boss has two control sets. The end boss is a high-potency storm defender, which in enemy hands is like a Tsoo sorceror, an Avalanche shaman, and a Mu striker all rolled into one ball of pain. I’d suggest dropping Hurricane and either Snow Storm or Freezing Rain - an area slow and the endurance drain from Lightning Storm are enough of a challenge without another area slow and -tohit.

   Detail - **. The first three missions are essentially surprises. The briefing doesn’t tell me anything about them - I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m doing there until I step inside. There’s a missing boss description on the corpse brides of the free undead. And most of the information about the cult and what they’re trying to do is packed into the third debrief and the briefing for mission 4, instead of spread out a bit more gradually.

   Overall - ***. An arc serving up serviceable light vignettes that hops the rails to set up its climactic boss fight.

   Posted on March 25th, 2010 at 10:26 pm