Lab Group 1
Apr
16
Story Description: Re-live life through the eyes of a super team that you get to interact with periodically during their careers — experience familiar situations and foes as you help them ‘level up’. Their story is capped off with a battle to face their own inner demon.
Story Arc ID: 65610
Author’s Global Chat Handle: @Chyll
Length: Long (4 missions)
Alignment: Heroic
Designer Notes: Each mission is in a different level range as you work with the story’s characters who are leveling up over time. With frequent allies, should be straightforward solo, and fine on team at higher difficulty. One custom EB. Story should tell itself, tried to sneak in little tidbits here and there to layer the info.
Similar Missions:
- The Fall of Dieselpunk
- Shades of Betrayal, Acts of Salvation
- The Audition
- The Long Road Back
- To Aid the Future
Glazius
Says:
@GlaziusF
Working this one over with a strong team-support character, my high 20s mind/kin controller, +0 x0 with bosses on.
—
Quick warning - purple text isn’t very high-contrast against the standard fade.
But okay, let’s go save some heroes.
I get clues for their ice leader and the dead guy, but not for the dark rebel or the electric fanboy.
Or for picking up the weapons, for that matter.
Anyway, time to report back.
—
Something about missions - I often expect to see something like a rough overview of the mission in the pre-mission accept screen. Where I’m going, who I’m fighting, and what I can hope to accomplish.
Lament is completely silent when I go to rescue him. No clue either.
(The clue for Frozen Moment misspells Shin Faultline’s name - it’s actually “Temblor”.)
I do like these clues as kind of “capsule updates” on the team.
Once again, though, I don’t get a clue for the thing I’m supposed to be picking up.
—
Hmm. Looks like Crey’s doing a little opposition research. Okay, time to raid somebody.
Frozen Moment doesn’t have guards around her. (I’m level 35.) Is she just distraught here, or what?
More updates on the team’s story as I make my way to the top.
Yep. Crey was trying to steal the research and probably replicate it.
—
And now, the person who’s been trying to defect in every mission goes villain all on her own, and I and a Hero Corps strike team (who get filleted before I even see what they look like) are going to try to stop her.
I pick up the team again.
I think these little capsule summaries of their stories to date should all be prefaced with the heroes name, as for example “Lament: Focused and Faithful”.
Oddly enough, I get the clue about Misery before Lament. You can drag and drop objectives to reorder them and the order the clues appear in.
And… lethal force, huh? She wanted freedom, got it, and used it… poorly.
—
Storyline - *. I felt a bit like I was watching a recap episode of a show I’d never seen before. Misery talks about defecting all the time, but she never actually follows through until the last mission. Until then, it’s just her quirk, like Frozen Moment’s self-deprecation, Lament’s stoicism, or Positive Field’s comic books. Not until the last mission does it seem like she wants to be free enough to die for it.
I thought, entering the third mission, that something might have happened to someone from LG1. It might help here to have Misery gone from this mission and insert a fourth about her “defection” to Crey, which might not quite work out the way she intended.
I didn’t really get a sense of progression out of anybody, despite the clues trying to point me that way. It wouldn’t hurt to change the descriptions of LG1 from mission to mission - they all seemed the same for the first two missions, and after that I stopped looking.
Design - ***. The core group of customs, LG1, was pretty well-realized and looked generally distinct, at least until the ice and sonics went up. A lot of missions suffered from the same “glowie designated ‘back’ shows up in the middle” that plagues pretty much every MA mission, so that whatever important thing we were supposed to pick up was actually in some side chamber somewhere.
Some problems also with the many ally rescues - Lament’s missing text in the second mission, Positive Field’s damaging aura taking out his guards early in the fourth, Frozen Moment having no guards in the third.
Gameplay - ****. The allies weren’t too overpowered on their own, but as I buffed them and they buffed each other, well. Not that I didn’t expect it, though. Though it did make the final boss, such as she was, a bit of a pushover.
Detail - **. The vignettes on each character aren’t labeled consistently, and I don’t think there was a mission where everyone got one. With the fairly consistent patter from my allies, that didn’t help the impression I got that LG1 wasn’t really developing much.
Overall - **. An arc that tries to excerpt a much larger story to fit the MA limitations. Ultimately, it doesn’t show enough of how LG1 changed from mission to mission, and that makes it difficult to accept the big change at the end.
Posted on March 27th, 2010 at 6:18 pm