To Aid the Future
Apr
20
Story Description: Ever wonder what’s going to come after you’ve moved on? Who will take your place? Wouldn’t you like to have a chance to shape part of it?
Story Arc ID: 59436
Author’s Global Chat Handle: @Niteflier
Length: Long (3 missions)
Alignment: Neutral
Designer Notes: The intent of this arc is more for lowbies to complete, since there have been a dearth of ones pointed to them. Each of the three missions have allies to help you, with a nice little Shivan boss fight at the end of the arc.
Similar Missions:
- Tale of the Creatures From Another Forbidden Planet
- My Will
- Temporal Anomalies
- The Double-Edged Sword
- All Consuming
Glazius
Says:
@GlaziusF
Running this on a sub-20 broadsword/shield scrapper, +0/x2 with bosses on.
—
My contact is very… blue. Makes me wonder why. Why not give her a description?
Especially since she’s talking like somebody’s cool grandma.
Anyway, goin’ to bail the next generation out of an Outcast-related mess at her insistence.
The popup message wonders where the Coolers are. I… uh, press tab and highlight one. Were they supposed to be missing from this mix?
Anyway, hero sprung, Outcast dropped.
—
Now apparently the Watchers want me to reassert the cosmic balance by setting up a villain to score some cash.
Spring the ninja/TA right at the entrance. This should be fun.
Heh. Just a compulsively-hoarding Coralax of very little brain guarding an ancient jar full of hunny. Them’s the low-level villain breaks.
—
And now for the future.
Okay, while red plus blue does equal purple, the royal purple autocolor is pretty terrible, because it’s rather low-contrast with the black text outline, making the whole look rather muddled.
Anyway. Shivans! With my previous allies to help.
I don’t know why, but this shield scrapper likes to stare down his defeated foes for way too long. I must leave him behind half a dozen times.
Unfortunately the end boss Shivan has a lot of area attacks and completely wipes my allies out, leaving me to go it alone for the last sliver of health. Oh well.
—
Storyline - ***. So I did a bunch of stuff for some of the vaguest reasons possible, but my contact assures me everything’s turned out alright in the end.
Now, there are several scenarios in-game where heroes and villains have to work together - to drive back the Rikti, or protect the integrity of the timestream - but it’s not out of some desire for “neutrality” but to confront an external threat that doesn’t discriminate between hero and villain. The Coming Storm is certainly such a threat, but the storyline doesn’t seem to take the obvious tack: in the future these two people will survive to fight the aftermath of the storm, and it doesn’t matter what they are now, we need to see they survive. Saving a hero and a villain are set up as some sort of… karmic necessity, which really doesn’t have a lot of weight behind it.
It’s not really clear to what degree we’re boogieing through time, either. The final mission obviously takes place in the future beyond the Coming Storm, but do the other two take place in the present-day? The recent past? The imminent future? And why exactly is the apparently arbitrary throw-down with the Shivans at the end so all-fired important?
Design - ***. Not that the allies aren’t sensibly powered, as they are, or the maps don’t make sense, as they do.
But this arc is, on the surface, about helping the next generation. Except it caps me at an average level of 20. At that point in my development I AM the next generation, and the allies I spring in the first couple missions are eminently capable of holding their own, so it feels more like helping out a couple of my peers.
Also, the missions are very sparse, which would be fine if I had a clearer picture of when and why they were happening, but I don’t, so it’s not.
Gameplay - ****. The only real hangups are probably engine bugs - the shield defense ally’s propensity to stare down an already-defeated enemy, and the by-now familiar overspawn problem on the Eleusis final map, which spawns in normal enemies behind you after you’ve defeated another set of enemies that are already there.
It doesn’t help my allies’ general fragility that they get hung up in a couple of these overspawns and batted around for a bit before I realize what’s up and head back for them.
Detail - **. There isn’t really much in the way of meaningful clues. Mostly they just say that you rescued the people you just rescued, which should generally be kind of obvious. Clues would be an excellent way of keeping events and rationales straight, but they’re just wasted here.
Overall - ***. Some decent low-level combat with modestly useful helpers. It doesn’t really make any sense but the missions are simple enough that that’s no impediment to getting them done.
Posted on April 20th, 2011 at 9:30 pm