FredrikSvanberg

The Blue Devils (ID#468738)

Pros: This is a great example of a well crafted arc with attention to every detail. I especially liked how the chained objectives made each mission feel like two or three missions without necessarily making the mission take much longer to play through.

Cons: The only problem I noticed was that sometimes a missed objective made things a little confusing until it was found. I also think the arc could benefit from a more interesting title.

Maybe they want Tin Man and Apex to provide some challenge even for characters level-shifted many times over. It's geared towards future Incarnates as well as the present ones. I do agree on one thing though: Praetorians aren't that tough. Malta isn't that tough. Those things makes no sense. But I'll roll with it. I enjoyed playing both TFs even though we didn't even complete them. One time some complete morons quit on us as we were about to fight Meuron/Boobcat and the other we just couldn't damage Battle Maiden fast enough. I still thought the new challenges were fun - not the purple enemies but the tactical stuff. I think it's ridiculous to try to make us believe that the completely incompetent idiots that populate Praetoria are able to build war-machines of such power, in those numbers, however. I'm just going to imagine that they come from another Praetoria where the Praetors aren't all bumbling buffoons.

Smurphy, come back!

Your deaths-per-minute doesn't even come close to what Smurphy could achieve on a regular +2 ITF. I believe we had 178 deaths in less than 2 hours. Maybe more.

Naturally I wouldn't go through all that trouble to just explain away one mission from 6 years ago. It would go along with expanding it, of course. Since we knew nothing about the Carnival of Light before, I would be free to make up all kinds of interesting stuff. And frankly all of the things you seem to have a problem with already apply to the regular Resistance - their rag-tag uniforms aren't exactly inconspicous, even if they aren't colorful. Hiding in plain sight seems to be the standard method for ALL enemies of Cole's Praetoria, the Resistance and the Syndicate alike. Heck, one of its greatest enemies "hides" in plain sight as a crazy and highly excentric seer imprisoned in the BAF. Either they are all very good at this or Cole and the Praetors are very bad at figuring it out. My personal theory is that all the Praetors are incompetent idiots or otherwise impaired and Cole is denied vital information which would let him rule his dimension efficiently.

It's not just "too obvious to be a trick". The carnies are actively fooling everyone they come in contact with through psychic trickery. The PPD who are sent to stomp them? Charmed, enjoying the show thank you very much. So Clockwork would be the best weapon, being robots and hard to influence with psychic powers, but they can be tricked in other ways and they aren't all that smart to begin with.

What I'm talking about is the general direction I would take the Carnival of Light if I was the dev in charge of making them work. I could always make up some reason for why they aren't instantly crushed and why their hiding-in-plain-sight tactic works, for now, and how they can travel between settlements without getting eaten by the DE.

Personally I can see the Carnival of Light as a travelling circus moving between settlements carrying news and information and boosting morale. Perhaps they decide to dress and act flamboyant as a camouflage. After all, they are psychically protected by Vanessa so nobody will detect any wrongdoing from them. The "Real" Resistance wouldn't act and dress like that, so clearly they are just a harmless bunch of buffoons. No need to stomp on them for putting on shows.

People keep saying that Praetoria is rigidly controlled but except for the "neatness" of Nova Praetoria I don't see it. Corporations still exist and aren't directly controlled by the government as far as I can tell, people have ordinary jobs to go to and aren't forced to work on farms or in factories churning out warmachines. Heck, even in Nova Praetoria the government can't keep the Destroyers off the street or the Resistance out of the sewers. That's in the very heart of the nation! And yes, I know about the conspiracy which allows the Destroyers to exist, but that's not the point. Such a conspiracy proves my point even clearer, since it means that Cole can't even control or trust his Praetors to do what he wants.

Praetoria is still a chaotic jumble of opportunities for the Resistance and others to take advantage of. If it wasn't we wouldn't have a game. So the Carnival of Light would be perfect for hiding in plain sight. Act and look outrageous, nobody is going to think that you are really the secretive and mysterious Resistance, especially after going to a show and getting subtly brainwashed to dislike the government while watching the jugglers and fire-breathers, etc.

If I was in charge I would put up impromptu Carnie shows in the streets and parks in Imperial City. Just performers juggling or performing acrobatics or whatever, with a small crowd watching. After a while the cops would show up and the Carnies would move on. I would also introduce a new global event: a Carnie parade! Have Carnies walk en masse through the streets and gather at a circus tent where they are protected by lots of brainwashed "protesters". The government decide to disperse the unsanctioned gathering and so players must decide on whether to fight the Carnies or help them.

Follow and Info pops up when you right-click someone. To talk to someone you have to left-click them. Did you do that?

/demorecord doesn't look like anything.

I have no idea what that is. Maybe you are The Chosen One?

Absolutely. It could work if you pick up more stuff too but only if everything you pick up adds to the story somehow. In my opinion. That is if you need more clues to tell everything you want to tell.

The real reason seems to be that if you have a certain story arc open, even if you're not full on missions, you won't be able to talk to Ramiel and he will act as if you have too many missions. The story arc in question is the one where you join the Midnighters. If you don't complete it all the way by talking to Imperious it will somehow block Ramiel.

You could work on the other trees. (I think)

Or on another character.

A Vague Notion
For Real This Time

Pro: Interesting contact with entertaining conspiracy theory blathering. Nice design on the customs. The core of the story is solid.

Con: Gameplay still suffers in mission 4 and 5 because of large maps and too many seemingly unnecessary glowies. Why did you add two more psychic dampeners to both missions? You removed some of the glowies in mission 4 but you added two more dampeners, which meant that you had to add two more dampeners in mission 5 as well. Net result: more glowies, most of which don't even provide a clue to anything interesting. I don't see why we need more than ONE of these things, for story reasons. In mission 5 the semi-transparent orange glowies are very hard to find in the orange-brown Oranbega map, making it even more annoying.

After I finally reached the end of the arc I was wondering why the things the contact reveal to us in the debriefing weren't touched upon earlier. One NPC (Vagues) from mission 3 had apparently an interesting background involving her home dimension being destroyed by a magical superweapon - why didn't we find this out in mission 3, and why didn't we try to recover the weapon and use it against the villain in mission 5?

When we are told about it after mission 5 we can't really use that information for anything except nod and go "ok, that's nice". It seems like a piece of foreshadowing which never got used but still hangs around.

I recommend that you reduce the number of Psychic Dampeners in both mission 4 and 5 to at most three, preferably one. That is by far the most glaring problem with this arc right now. So, on the whole, not a big problem.

Huh. Ok, that makes so much more sense. Not knowing your usual style I didn't consider that it might have been a mistake. Sorry about that.

Yes, your enemy groups are stored in local files so if you republish from another computer it could probably not find all of the enemies. I'll replay it today and will probably have a much better time.

I apologize for not checking with the author before writing this, to find out if there was something wrong with the arc before I started dumping all over it. Turns out that the arc I played was missing a bunch of custom enemies, which caused most of the problems I was having with it. I'll play the corrected version today.

A Vague Notion

Overall: Why are the mission level ranges all over the place? Set them to 45-54 if that's the range the arc is balanced for. After playing this I'm now convinced that it's not a challenge arc or even intended for teams. Instead this arc was created to punish people who want XP and enjoyable gameplay. The enemies give lousy rewards and one of the missions is nothing but a glowie-hunt on a far too large map.

Contact: He seems to be rambling a lot. The intro for the first mission was very odd. I actually end up liking him around mission 4. If he hasn't actually said that word he doesn't want to say in any of the mission briefings so far (I can't remember and I'm not playing this again to check), it's awesome.

Mission 1: Vagary Keller doesn't have a bio. The clue about the altar shows up twice, slightly different. Some of the clues simply repeat what the mission introduction already told us and don't add any new information. I suggest you get rid of the unnecessary clues, e.g. the ones named "GPS coordinates" and "The Altar". The information about the altars that were used to summon her is also repeated in the exit popup AND in the mission debriefing. The contact says that he's "traced this altar back to its source" but we never actually found an altar, it was just something Vagary talked about. The altar wasn't there. Perhaps he should say it differently or just not talk about the altar at all. He could say that he's tracked the trace energies of the summoning spell left on Vagary or something like that.

Mission 2: "Protein" is spelled "protien" in the busy text for mission 2. "Tuatha de Dannan" is spelled "Dannon" in the intro popup. An ambush spawned with nothing but bosses (downgraded EB willpower/demon summoning whips?). Since their group consists of nothing but bosses they only give a fraction of their reward, about 25% more than a minion of the same level. I decided to not stop to defeat them all since they could barely hurt me. I suggest you add lieutenants and minions and maybe regular bosses to the custom group, perhaps with some real attacks.

Mission 3: In the mission send-off text the blue text indicating the contact's action is on the same line as his speech. ... Three hostages, all guarded by the same all-boss custom group as in the previous mission. So this means I can't just ignore them this time around. If I wasn't playing my practically unkillable tanker (they managed to kill me anyway once when I got bored and sloppy) I would have quit by now. I don't think any of my other characters could survive these witches. Sadly the fights aren't fun on the tanker either, just long and tedious. The abductees are actually called "1st Abductee", "2nd Abductee", etc. It would be better if they had real names, or simply were called "Abductee", in my opinion.

Ok, the second hostage turns out to be an ally with enough buffs to make the rest of the fights tolerable, but not more fun than fighting regular minion-lieutenant-boss groups. The trick of having a tough boss-only ambush is ok, once or twice. Using the same boss-only group everywhere is just going to make your arc crossed over into "deliberately pissing off your audience"-territory. Since the ally is turning these fights into something rather trivial it would seem to make more sense to me to remove the ally or make her less powerful, and add minions and lieutenants to your custom group, so players of all ATs can enjoy the arc. Unless you only want Brutes and Tankers and perhaps Masterminds to play it.

The "3rd Abductee" doesn't have a bio. Escorting the hostages to the exit seems extra pointless when nothing tries to stop me. Not that I want to fight anymore of these annoying witches. Scratch that, a spawn of +1 Elite Bosses showed up in the path to the exit. Going to try to just walk past them and hope that my stupid allies don't decide to stick around and fight. Which they did. I tried to pull everyone, enemies and allies alike, to the exit, but the allies decided to stop 20 feet away from the door and fight so I couldn't complete the mission. Have to do this the boring way...

You have to be kidding me; an ambush of six more elite bosses appear when I kill one of the first three EBs. They are supposed to be unique individuals but sadly several copies of each show up in the ambush. Another reason why it's a good idea to have some generic mobs in the custom group.

Oh yeah, these level 51 EBs give 50% of the xp of a level 50 minion, because they are Elite Bosses in a group with no minions or lieutenants. One of them actually rewarded 21,000-ish xp, but that's because she was the Boss in the fight boss objective spawn. The rest were basically worthless for the time it took to kill them.

They are all using Psychic attacks (correction: one of them used dual blades and mental manipulation) which makes my Invuln tanker a sad panda. Now you've turned off the majority of Brute and Tanker players, and the MMs are unlikely to survive all the area attacks these guys spam. Now NO AT can solo your arc with any pleasure. I suppose this is intended for teams or as some kind of challenge?

The exit popup and the debriefing says that the third girl betrayed me, but she didn't. Was she supposed to? The contact does some magic scrying here and says "This is not good". I'm inclined to agree, and disinclined to keep playing but I wonder if it can possibly get worse, so here I go.

Mission 4: The mission objective text in the navbar have periods in them, which makes them look weird when separated by commas. Remove the periods. The interaction text with the "looking for the file" file cabinet spells "rifling" as "rilfing".

I liked this mission, at least at first. By the time I had clicked four file cabinets and found nothing, then searched the entire base looking for another kind of file cabinet which triggered three other glowies... I was wondering why the hell I had to click so much stuff. I've clicked 10 things and only got two clues. Four, no wait, five of them were completely pointless "you found nothing" red herrings. This mission could be set on a much smaller map and with much less running around. The all- boss ambush bosses don't have a bio. Cool name and costume though, and they aren't all using psychic damage so my tanker can just stand there and laugh at them while I type this.

Mission 5: The mission intro text is a blatant lie! I can see a spawn of elite bosses (same group as the ambush in mission 3, all psychic damage - HATE!) from the entrance, and the popup says "This looks like it might be fun" or something like that (I closed it before I could copy the text exactly). Fully stocked with purple inspirations I can possibly avoid most of them. Let's see. The navbar objective text has a period on it again, by the way.

I trudged through most of that mission using purple inspirations to avoid as much combat as possible, managed to find an ally and four glowies which spawned a destructible item and a boss. I actually knew where they had to be, since I had been moving all over the place looking for the first five objectives. I destroyed the destructible, but I couldn't be bothered finishing the boss. She was using World of Confusion and so did her two or three clones, which meant that I would be perma-confused fighting all-psychic enemies on my invuln tanker. It's 3:19 AM here so I'm not going to spend the next hour trying to do that.

As usual this mission was ridiculous because all the spawns consisted of the same four or five unique individuals, copied dozens of times through the mission. Again I must recommend creating minions, lieutenants and regular bosses for this group, and not all Elite Bosses.

In Conclusion: In its current state I can't recommend this arc to anyone except the most powerful and masochistic Dark Armor or Willpower Tankers, or a team that doesn't care about getting rewards.

The contact is actually funny and well written, and maybe there's some kind of revelation in the last mission debriefing that makes it worth your while but I just spent 3 hours on this that I could have spent playing Players' Choice nominees instead. I wish I had quit in mission 3.

I know we're supposed to give something positive in our reviews in this club so I'll say that if the custom groups are fixed, the elite bosses toned down and everything rebalanced, it's probably a good arc. I didn't rate this arc in-game.

I was away as well.

I guess it couldn't please everyone.