1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Taking a look at this with a level 50 spine/regen scrapper, all bosses no AVs 2 heroes at +0.

   Also, this arc ID seems to have changed to 287046.

   —

   Hmm. Starts off pretty standard - the Council take some parts to make a portal to Reichsman’s world. I think they’ve actually been there a couple times already, but it’s not like old plans suddenly become useless.

   So I drop the boss, who tells me the parts are in another castle, and go running through the base to find some clues as apparently I picked one of the three routes without any glowies on it. I find several decoy crates and a terminal with a shipping destination, which has a nice ambush attached to it that would have meant something if the mission didn’t just complete.

   Yeah, I know it’s almost impossible to do anything linear or guaranteed in a Council base. Not like it’s a giant slog to go running around, though.

   —

   Okay, so the Council… bought black-market portal tech from someone else? I’m not sure what the comment about the shipping codes is supposed to mean, here.

   Hmm. After I empty one crate I get a clue about all of them. I realize this is a limitation of the way clues for collection objectives work, but could you maybe fold that in with an end-of-the-mission clue? It’s like being told in advance “okay, you’re not going to accomplish anything, but here’s some busywork”.

   It especially rankles since the map is huge and the crates take a while to examine.

   On inspecting them all I fight a Vampyr who believes I’ve ninjaed his parts. He tries to flee at 25% (I believe) which is credible but doesn’t really have much of a chance at success. He should probably bolt around the same time his support comes in if catching him is supposed to be a challenge.

   The end clues for this mission and the last one have been redundant with things I’ve found in the missions themselves. I have two clues from this mission describing the scrap metal, and nothing else.

   We actually possess text formatting tools in the Architect. You don’t have to use underscores for emphasis. And “jacked” seems rather informal given the rather straightfaced tone the doc has been using to date.

   —

   And now, to a remote world to try and stop the Council from finding the Council Empire.

   Good job on the technicians’ part. Nemesis shows up trying to take down the Archon too, but the ambush gets caught up in a side group I didn’t clear. No love lost there.

   Though given how many Nemesises are out there in the multiverse I can’t draw any conclusions about this being interference from Nemesis on the mainland.

   Outdoor maps are a tricky thing to populate. Too few objectives and somebody can be running around through a giant mass of spawns to find the one thing that matters. Too many and you up the odds that one of them’s going to end up in a blind corner or otherwise overlooked.

   I think with, what is it, 7 destructibles, 4 hostages, and a boss fight? This map has just a few too many. It helps a bit for recognition if the objectives are “noisy” — the beacons themselves are just fine but the techs, boss, and computer could do with some poses with extra geometry or particle effects.

   Again, I get an end-mission clue pretty much replicating the boss defeat clue - the Archon told me where he came from, so I’m going there. …so was that internecine fighting that led to the scrap shipment, then?

   —

   Ah, a Nemesis Rex world. I can’t think that the techies would be too keen on random dimensions given how many of them there are that are full of things that try to kill us, but I guess under time pressure you do what you can.

   So, while I’ll see as soon as I click the light column, I’d still kind of like the technician to tell me whether I’m going into a Council base or the alternate world to wreck these things.

   Oh. It’s a tech lab. …a Council tech lab, or? Anyway, there are lots of talky fights and patrols. My standard spiel: you only need one talky, unless the others say something different. One loud, N-1 quiet. My other standard spiel: battles can and do start when heroes are just getting off the elevator.

   I finally find one of the things I’m looking for on the top floor, and the system text and clue text act like I’ve just wrecked all of them.

   Anyway, once they’re all down, mission’s over. That easily? With how the scientist was talking, about the need to get a team since Nemesis would reinforce his forces, I was expecting… at least an ambush. Or a surprise boss objective. But nope, neither.

   Ah, okay. So I was going to another dimension to do this mission, and they found out where the base was when I shut the portal.

   …but didn’t I already get the base’s location from that Archon I dropped in the ruined world?

   —

   Anyway, burning question: why the scrap metal? Why the diversion?

   Oh. My contact found out… somehow, that it was just a head fake for the heroes.

   That’s a little disappointing. I was expecting shenanigans.

   Anyway, in addition to some vital devices to destroy, there’s some equipment here to recover. Still crated up, too. What was it, spare parts? Put in the particle impellers and say they fold up for easy carrying or something?

   Huh. And after some explosions and glowie clicks… that’s it. Mission over. Arc over.

   …aw phooey. And logged out before this mission, forgot to check my clue window when I logged back in, and thereby overwrite all my souvenirs. Happy happy joy joy.

   —

   Storyline - ***. My main problem here is the pacing. This arc has three missions with boss fights and two missions where I just have to destroy something - and the “destroy” missions are the last two. That feels more than a little anticlimactic. And the fourth mission I fend off an attack from Nemesis Rex… and then mission five is playing repo man for Portal Corp. I mean, sure, I set out to get the portal tech back from the Council but preventing Nemesis Rex from getting a beachhead in our dimension is probably a little more important than that, right?

   So here’s something. Mission three is set up to give me the base location anyway, per the clues I get. So in mission 4 I go in there, there’s Nemesis in the base for whatever reason, and I get the parts back — and in mission 5 Nemesis Rex, who was keeping the portal open from his end, busts out in Portal Corp and I have to take out his troops and either some fakes or the man himself there. That wraps up the earlier plotline just in time for the new pressure to hit.

   Also I’m really not sure about the whole “distracted by scrap” thing. I mean, on the one hand, it’s a reasonable thing for the Council to do. On the other hand, the question of why it happened is hanging in the air through the Nemesis Rex mission, implying that this was some new wrinkle that’s gonna be even better than Nemesis — and then it gets resolved in the briefing of the last mission.

   Design - ***. Man. I coulda taken ANYBODY through this arc. But I saw the big orange archvillain text and figured, “welp, somebody has high frustration tolerance”. I’m guessing Nemesis himself was supposed to show up in mission 4? I never even saw him. I realize this arc was probably made in the days before they put auto-warnings on, but would help a lot if it were billed as “no required EB/AVs” or something similar. Or tagged “easy”. The overabundance of objectives in mission 3 was a bit of a problem. The several occasions where a clue and/or system message pop up on a single objective that make more sense coming from completing all of them were momentarily disorienting as well.

   Gameplay - ****. Most of the tear-my-hair-out moments were pretty minor and just involved covering large Council/outdoor maps looking for objectives. Not in themselves a pain, but as I said earlier some kind of visual noise around an overworld objective is always helpful, especially since hostages don’t flee on outdoor maps.

   Detail - ****. Some duplicate mission end clues and a lot of duplicate dialogue from battles and patrols that didn’t really need to be there. But aside from the need for a little pruning, everything looked pretty reasonable.

   Overall - ***. The arc needs to be relabeled so that it’s clear that it’s solo friendly, but more importantly the missions need to be restructured so that the last mission is the big confrontation with the Nemesis forces from another dimension, rather than just cleanup of all the plot points the actual climactic mission couldn’t resolve.

   Posted on November 25th, 2009 at 9:44 pm