GlaziusF

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Re-reviewing this on the same spine/regen scrapper, now max-level. +0 x2 with bosses on.

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So, into the sewers to aid some heroes.

Once again there's some odd extended character mash. I've already voiced my objections to this not looking sci-fi enough.

There's a boss I have to defeat here. For some reason, he's in the first room, and his name is displaying. I'm not sure how that's supposed to work.

Okay, the translator's introduced a little better now. Couple things with the fight, though. The boss objectives includes Tro'Naht's spawn, which is problematic because it's got teleporters which can wind up down adjacent tunnels - also, his ambushes can stack a large portion of their arrivals up front for the same reason, so maybe tone them down to just one or two.

Captain Superior's rescue clue doesn't seem to indicate he'll follow me around, but this s what he does, at least until I turn on super-speed and lose him. Billy's in the bottom chamber along with like three bombs.

This map is actually a bit cramped. It's only got two actual rooms, and a lot of objectives spawn in striking distance of each other.

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Alright, now off to do something about this jamming.

Huh. Never saw these two next to each other before. This kind of black and mustard-gold is supposed to be supergroup colors, I guess? It's certainly not for looks. Yecch.

I pick up the relevant computer in the tunnels under the office. There actually aren't any to be found in the actual "boss room" of this map, but there were four clustered together right at the beginning of the map.

This is just kinda weird placement again. A whole bunch of distractions glowies right at the beginning, and then just one meaningful one down in the tunnels before the actual Rikti bunker?

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More sensible background for this mission - translator from the doc in addition to the jammer.

The Vanguard seem to have employed about four separate guys named Kent, judging from the battle text. (may I suggest 1 talky, N-1 silent?) They get all over the place, including into Dr. Brinell's spawn, tripping her dialogue early.

Not really a lot of real estate in this map, either.

Wait, the jammer file was a diversion?

So the whole base in mission 2 was a diversion and they just gave us some Vanguard codes translated into their language (is that what I'm seeing?) to...

Keep exactly one hero busy?

The exit text for the mission doesn't seem to think the jammer was a diversion, however.

Was Lazon just looking for an explanation, or what?

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Anyway, savin' the younglings.

Translucent Girl is no longer a pile of polygons. I disapprove.

She seems to be the only one who's escaped. I find several bodybags but only get the clues for one.

Aw geez. And the second hostage I find about two feet away from the boss door, but he just gets led through the whole complex.

It'd make a lot more sense if their positions were swapped.

The boss calls in one ambush, and as he goes down, he's gloating about yet another diversion.

This is just turning into a joke. If this was a diversion, why even bother to kill anyone? Wouldn't live but injured people take more time to care for?

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What? Arachnos Dining Room Of Evil? I didn't think we even had that-

Oh. Demon lab. I guess the loading screen's gone all crazy on me.

Wow. The field captains are just...

Okay, so one of the particular properties of this character mash you're using to represent garbled speech is that it line-breaks very, very easily. So the field captains are spitting out dialogue bubbles that are three lines tall and two characters wide.

Man, the thing with this map and burning bodies is that half of them are consumed by the flames already.

Anyway, the boss seems to be more of a pushover than the heavy battle drone, though that may just be the downscaling talking.

I saved a lot of people today, says Cap in the exit clue? I count my total at two rookie heroes, one scientist, one maintenance worker, and maybe Commissioner G.

And Commissioner G is the only one who wasn't ultimately just a damn distraction.

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Storyline - **. Diversion, diversion, diversion, diversion, you're too late. I mean, okay, the Rikti War as a whole is itself an exercise in pointless, nay, futile death. The original invasion is going to be futile for heroes to resist. But this is just a third layer of futility on top of those two, where I spend the first four missions getting juked out of my spandex by some 12-dimensional alien chess masterminds and then show up to the last mission too late to do anything but punch a big Rikti in a battlesuit repeatedly to make myself feel better.

If I'm supposed to be doing anything productive as regards the Rikti translator or lifting the citywide jamming network the Rikti are using, it doesn't really come through, as Lazon makes it sound like they were just red herrings to spread the heroes out.

You know who actually saved some lives here? Cap and Billy, who went to break people out of Rikti prison camps.

Unless those were more freakin' diversions too.

Design - ***. The customs are generally reasonable as far as powers go, though the black-and-yellow color scheme doesn't quite look right, especially on the heroes in mission 2.

But the missions - the first four missions at least - all seem to be on maps a bit too small for the number of objectives they contain. Objectives cluster up in missions 1, 3, and 4 -- the battles in 3 tripping some fights early -- and I guess because of the way the map's done there's no way to put the important glowie actually in the Rikti bunker in mission 2.

Gameplay - ****. The occasional spikes in difficulty when objectives all clustered together notwithstanding (including the patrols in the last mission that all seemed to get caught up on geometry three at a time), this was a reasonable run against stock Rikti.

One thing you might want to look into is the placement of the escort and captive in mission 4, though -- it seems like it'd be better if they switched places.

Detail - **. I encounter a couple of clues detailing two different heroes' "ultimate sacrifices". But there's the thing about a sacrifice -- you actually GET something in return. Some newbie hero cut down by overwhelming plasma fire -- what'd he get? Couldn't even be a shield for someone else behind him. Lazon burning out in space -- what'd he get? Sure, he doesn't take out me or Commissioner G, but he doesn't take anything else out, either. If he goes off in a Rikti flotilla at least there was some use to it.

And why all this talk of diversions? The Rikti are attacking in giant waves. They have the run of the city. They can teleport in anywhere in nigh-unlimited numbers because the channel to the homeworld is still open. Why bother wasting time on feints and bizarre ripostes when you can just swarm heroes down with the weight of numbers? I mean, the last boss makes the quite reasonable statement that there are hundreds more just like him up in a ship somewhere. Even if I legitimately accomplished everything I set out to do in this mission, rather than apparently fell for a bunch of Rikti feints, there's still the giant overwhelming numbers and technology all over the globe.

This is pretty authentic to how a comic would write this whole affair, but that's because a comic has to be written as though editorial could sack the entire staff and replace them with total feebs at the drop of a hat. You can't have heroes just being casually cut down or enemies that are legitimately overpowering, that don't win through trickery or deception, because when the feebs take over they'll interpret it as a license to slaughter everyone left and right. You know who's going to write the next installment of this whole affair - that being you - so you don't need to write defensively.

Also there was that whole abundance of line-breaks thing with the Rikti gibberish. Got a bit annoying. They seemed to happen most often after that "ae" gestalt character.

Overall - ***. A story that is a bit too bleak and meaningless for my tastes, which plays out for the most parts in maps a bit too small for everything it tries to do.

They're medieval guys in the service of some kind of ancient evil flame god thing. I don't think fire melee is unreasonable.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a single-digit FF/energy defender, +0 x1 with bosses off, for the genuine lowbie experience.

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I have to say, I really appreciate this nod to the canon. It's a wonderful way to work in the contest theme.

Let's see how it plays out.

Mission 1: museum robbery. The detective warns me I may be batting above my level.

Well, well. Nods to the canon heroes and some cops at the entrance providing backup and cheering me on.

I jib the like of this arc's cut already. Or words to that effect.

Man. The problem with these higher-level enemies brought down to a lower level is that they really do bat above their weight. I've been taken down three times already, the last time taking No Mind down with me. (It was the room that's a clone of the entrance. Two captives and two normal spawns all within shooting distance of each other.)

Worse yet, No Mind is telling me that his partner seems to have been held up at the hospital.

Man, if I actually have to protect any of these exhibits I am going to fail this arc SO HARD.

Ah, good. They're all glowies. And after a couple deaths to three +1 minions (including a parasite. For some reason Gloom is like my kryptonite) the end room is clear and the artifacts are... safe, I hope. Let's see.

Priceless art: secure.
Ancient dagger: MIA.
Portal device: cannibalized.

Prognosis: oh god we're all gonna die.

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Oh man. Everything is going wrong that can go wrong, and I'm gonna go fight... Crey. Oh man I hope there aren't any volt tanks, the damn things could oneshot me.

And the experiments are loose! This just keeps getting better!

The Stricken work pretty well, but they could use custom descriptions. I mean, unless these guys were all flown in from Mercy Island. The boss's rant is wonderfully megalomaniacal.

The previously unmentioned hero is... a horrid punster. Much as could be expected.

Whoa. An emp/psi protector? Custom work, or actual relic of some Crey experiment? Colors looked alright, at least.

Ah. This place was a lab for testing Infected and they needed supers for control subjects.

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And now the Banished Pantheon are summoning a demon. I get a little dossier which seems to be similar to Akarist's collected notes on the process.

Anyway, the captives go free, and I find the dagger... but the demon is already here.

Hoo boy. What am I gonna find down in the cave?

Oh! A herald of Bat'zul! That's a good prize. Goes down pretty easily and he never even sees the dagger coming.

---

For some reason, the natterlings in this group of scaled-down Rularuu aren't giving XP.

The soldiers are pretty nice, though. Both the mastermind summons who help me out and the recolored Malta who are already fighting.

Well, time to pit this code into this console and save the friggin' world.

Aw. I know it's the key to the city, but the souvenir's pretty short. I wanna luxuriate in my accomplishments!

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Storyline - *****. Little hero, you've had a busy day. The contact briefings keep up the sense of external pressure, and many of the missions seem to get worse after you've entered them. There's definitely a frantic feeling, working to put out brushfires, but because of the first mission's framing it doesn't feel arbitrary.

Design - *****. Great use of recoloring and downward enemy scaling. (How does that really work, anyway? It only shows up at the player level if all of the mission boundary levels are out of range?) It helps to get the sense that I'm batting above my weight when in a sense I really am.

Gameplay - ****. Maybe it was just my bad luck, but I died about half a dozen times to groups of +1 Council minions in the first mission. Maybe it's the extra power of their original range? Probably just bad luck to lose No Mind to a room with two hostages and two close-together enemy spawns, too. Still a little frustrating, though. And the actual portal room in the final mission is very tiny - the boss and a destructible spawned right on top of each other, though by then I had a large entourage.

Detail - *****. Pretty much worth my while to check everything. The only thing I'd suggest is to customize the description of the Stricken slightly, but that wasn't a real immersion-killer or anything.

Overall - *****. Even with that rating, it's not a typical lowbie arc, and because of the slightly higher damage scales on the downranged enemies, it might might not be appropriate for certain builds that really don't get a lot of stuff between 5 and 10. Still, if you've got a decent lowbie build, this one is definitely worth your while to play.

Angst? What?

Oh, wait, this is a release arc from when they were still doing vote badges.

Yeah. That wasn't a good scene.

There's an unfortunate amount of "rot", where previously sound arcs break (catastrophically or no) because of changes down the line. You can take it as consolation or not, but any given arc is much, much easier to test now that you can just godmode through it.

Yeah. The potentiality to have -tohit attacks coming from seven sources at once (when most of the people who don't play total lockdown can only control a single source) plus the unavoidable toggle -tohit, put them far, far over the top of an average Death Mage.

Heck, you can force a Death Mage to stop spamming dark blasts by getting in close so he'll pull out his switchblade.

Hmm.

"When Sunstorm got up after you put the Rosario on, he moved oddly, lashing out as if by instinct. Protecting the bank in his sleep? You wouldn't put it past him.

"Even if you just leave him to run down on his own, whoever finds him will think something terrible has happened."

Well, Giana doesn't know you're working with Malta -- she thinks Carver's the important person here and you're just a weird anomaly. But I can probably work the report summary clue to end something like:

"Was he just a defector, there by coincidence? Or is this Daos covering his tracks? Either way, you've dealt with him already."

EDITED: Reworking done. New ID's down in the sig.

Well, on one hand, the arc is hard. An EB will die in every mission, as it were. But I gather from some impromptu data mining that people don't often play "challenge" arcs, since that's a code-word for EXTREME POWERSETS.

I'll see what I can do punch up the plot, but I consider warning about intentional difficulty to be only sporting.

He's now introduced as "Longbow's spymaster, Crimson". Or rather, he will be. A surprising twist awaits in the comments on mission 4!

Crimson's in a bit of a tough spot, here, and so am I. The only reason the blue text narrates the mission is questionable is because of what he's asking you to do, and because the video could still be "public knowledge" he's very leery of going into specifics.

Would something like this help, as a partial rewrite of the first briefing?

"This is a sensitive operation. I can't risk putting too many details out there.

"You know that heroes do things on my say-so all the time. Good things. The crooks get collared, and my sources stay safe.

"But this time, I need you to get your hands dirty. Break the law. Fight the law. I will do all I can to make sure no one stays hurt. I expect you'll do the same.

"The world is in grave danger. I wouldn't ask you to ruin your own reputation if it wasn't necessary. If you don't believe that -- if you can't trust me -- walk away now."

Will clarify: Crimson knows you can take them, and more importantly, that they can take you. At this level you'd perforate the average, say, Midnighter.

The original Fr. Henri was a French Jesuit priest. "Rosario" is the translation in most of the Romance languages... except French, where it's "chapelet". (This is the kind of thing that surfaces when your language is decided by committee.)

I am taking a bit of liberty with the translation, mostly because I still want people to have a cognate for "rosary", and the original word doesn't invoke "ancient powerful artifact" very well, at least not for me.

To everyone but Crimson? Yeah.

They are, actually. ...partially. (Entirely, in the case of the Thorn Wielders.) I wanted to leave the main colors in so that the various types of Caster/Mage could still easily be told apart, which can be a bit of a nuisance for regular Longbow, save the Spec Ops.

Well, at the start of the mission, security is something you can't (easily) destroy. The next step up is generally more capable of handling intruders but also more vulnerable. I'll try and make that a little clearer in the briefing.

They are actually from the "Infernal Demon" enemy group. I guess all of those actually display as "Praetorians" -- I'll see what I can do to address that. Mainline Infernal's demons working as security detail seems reasonable for MAGI.

Clarified in the briefing: it's not a way to escape the vault, but to elude the cordon described in the exit popup and go to ground.

Going to try and clarify this a little: you're actually stepping into a cover identity Crimson and his agents have already established.

Oh, it will. Put you on the most wanted list, that is. But there are a lot of places for villains to hide in Paragon City -- that's why the briefings (after the first) are all plotted to show up in various ruined/neglected areas.

I'll try and work in one piece of "deniable" information: this is to stop Malta from upgrading the Kronos Titans, which have nearly taken down the War Walls once already.

Crimson's still not going to let on exactly how it'll do that, but I'm hoping it'll lend a little credibility.

Yeah, Sunstorm will pretty much always rez, and say his "death scream" quote both times he goes down. I've tried to make it seem through system text that his rez is one last desperate attempt to throw off the Rosario, but the clue is always going to drop before he's really down. Any ideas?

Tried to make that a bit clearer in the briefing that this is all a cover story.

Also clarifying that the Malta aren't sneaking into this base. This is a daring daylight raid, and Crimson wants your help to make sure their approach vector doesn't take out too many Longbow.

Ambushes are ambushes, but I think this is one of the cases where the unusual spawn density of tech rooms like the front one works in my favor.

If your supergroup base has a tech-model rez ring, this is what it's called. It also looks exactly like what you pop out of in a hospital, so I figured it was a standard name. (Crimson will wonder if the Longbow have found your base's, if he takes you down.)

I'll pop this into the briefing: Carver is an unknown quantity in Crimson's current shoestring plan to save the world. If he's around the Malta may use him instead of you, which would make it even more of an Impossible Mission for you to sabotage their operation.

I could only put one thing in the "middle" here, otherwise you might be playing elevator tag to try and find it. Unfortunately I have to use a single chain, since for plot purposes you should both find the weapon and hear Giana's warning before you take on Carver.

I'll try to start this off better, mentioning in the entry popup that this place is chaos and you should probably start by finding someone who knows where the Drone gun might be, and justify Giana's place in the chain a little better by having her put up some kind of base-wide psychic interference.

Unfortunately, this objective chaining is TOO EXTREME for the Mission Architect. Or the mission architect's editor, anyway. It will let me specify that WR-23 chains off Giana and activates the lockers, but it thinks there's a circular reference problem with it betraying off the lockers. (I'm guessing it's just something wrong with the check, as the mission runs fine and the editor doesn't throw the error if WR-23 is there from the beginning.)

What this means is I can't republish the live arc from the editor, but I can unpublish it and publish the new version just fine from test.

Well, up until now there's always been some explanation, at least if you take Crimson's words at face value. But now you have, shall we say, an alternate viewpoint?

And just in time for Crimson to actually drop some information on you, too. How unfortunate!

And now you know where the arc title comes from!

Carver is supposed to be a bit of a "dark mirror" of you. He's a genuine Arachnos defector to Malta, but he planted information within Arachnos to make it look like his defection was an infiltration attempt gone awry. He intended to set up some kind of double cross later, though that didn't exactly work out well for him.

He offers up various contradictory stories as you beat him down, in a fairly transparent attempt to get you to drop your guard. I wanted to give that plotline a little resolution, but it's not exactly easy to do it in 300 characters.

Keen costume. What's that on your back?

Also, "Scorpinoid" is the name of the armor design Crey copied from Black Scorpion. He has since put his researchers into those suits in an attempt to give himself a staff of researchers with valuable first-hand experience in using the armor they're researching.

Unfortunately I can't make this an ambush since ambushes have to trigger exclusively - that trigger includes betrayals, which means calling in some patrols is all the Sisters can do.

Also, copied and pasted typos are the best typos.

I should leave the wastebaskets on from the beginning, yeah. No reason why you can't check them a little without blowing your cover.

I want the last mission to take place in fairly unique surroundings, but I know Arachnos bases can be murder on the processor. I was going to use some Arachnoid labs, but honestly objective placement on those is even more wonky, and rather anemic overall.

I'm open to ideas on the last mission, since the precise surroundings can be a little malleable (where does a 5-ton armored juggernaut set up a secret lab? ANYWHERE HE WANTS) but the Rikti caves seemed like a good first attempt.

Well, Crimson's actual missions often involve you acting without a perfectly clear big picture. Admittedly he also offers general assurances that you're doing the right thing, but in this case, well, it isn't the case. Would the text up there in the first mission work as a prelude?

Overall the story is meant to make you feel at least a little uneasy about what's going on. Since you can't actually communicate with Crimson, Carver is in there, in a metaplot sense, to keep up the pressure even when Crimson thinks he's taking some of it off you.

In a sense this is something that can only happen in the Mission Architect - a story where you sacrifice your reputation, and your place in Paragon City, in order to save not only Paragon City but the whole world. Is the (proposed) initial briefing enough, or do I need to talk it up in the mission description as well?