Mr_Squid

Okay, I'm cheating a bit here. I actually have a character named Webmaster Eberlein whose bio just states he is me (from real life) who decided on a whim to join Arachnos. "Thank the Lord" is a phrase I say a lot in real life, so I decided to have in-game me say it too. I came from a Christan upbringing after all, even though I am no longer Christian.

I also think I will have the mission auto complete upon his release on second thought, nobody really likes escorts anyways.

This is a weird problem. When I first published the arc the Virtea won every battle they were in, but ever since I republished it, the Arachnos seem to win. Must be something brought on by the new difficulty settings. Either way, i'll have to tweak the end mission dialouge.

This is something I waffled about when I was first writing the arc. On the one hand, I didn't just want to come out and say "HAY U ARE THE DESCENDER K THNX BYE", and rather have the player make the logical connection. On the other hand, if players couldn't figure that out then they would be baffled about the next mission. Any suggestions as to how I could make this work better?

This is a complaint I get about every single one of my arcs. I almost always start with one contact, then veer off at some point and describe the player's actions, or have some other party step in to give the briefing. This doesen't bug me personally, since I can always imagine the player or a third party stepping in, but a lot of other people have been bugged by it.

Thing is, I have no idea how to fix this problem. It would be really nice if I could just swap contacts mid arc, but unfortunatley we can't do that yet. I have considered half making the contact be a journal or a laptop or something and have the entire arc just be you remeniscing on past events, but since I do have a lot of contact types in my arcs, I'm not sure how well that would work.

Short answer: I really wanted to find a good use for that map.

Longer answer: My justification for using that map was the fact that the entire island had just been essentially eaten by a giant shark (granted, you pointed out that it isn't necessarily a shark in-canon, but there are enough anatomical similarities and in-canon hints that that is indeed the case), and as such the city would likely be both destroyed and flooded.

You might not be too familiar with the Coralax then, since there are no Coralax Black hybrids, only blue, green, and reds. They're a custom mob.

Well it's never overtly stated, but there is this bit from the Coralax bio on the CoH site that sounds pretty definitive to me:

That's where I got both the "From another planet" and "60 million years" things.

Ooooh, that's a good idea!

The whole Abyss Wells thingy came about because I really wanted to use that Arachnos Submarine map, since it has a connection to the sea, and thus allows the Virtea to get in. I was kind of worried since all the AV's would end up spawning in the last room that players would end up aggroing more then one at once, so I came up with the Abyss wells as a way to spawn them one at a time. In retrospect they are a bit of a pain though.

HOLY CRAP, I just realized I could use the Grandville beach map! That would be perfect! It would have a great setting and allow players plenty of room to maneuver!

So thanks for the review once again!

One more thing I would like to touch on. I am HORRIBLE about capitalization. Utterly, utterly horrible. It's not uncommon for me to just randomly capitalize words mid sentance and half to fix it later. I have no idea why I do this. In fact, I seem to get a new grammatical quirk every few years. Like three years ago it was not uncommon for me to drop commas every three words or so.

But otherwise, great review, thanks for the input, and I will definetley be making some changes!

That would be the best damn movie ever.

OUCH. One shotted.
-Round two! Popped four purples and twelve reds and dropped him like a bad habit...

...and then he rezzed...

...does anyone actually like when elite bosses rez?
-The clue you get when you defeat him is also baffling. It says:
Wait, is "they" referring to the people compelling him to infect others, or the people he is infecting?
-Nedro is a man of few words apparently. Upon exiting he just says:
Dagnabit! Thought I had gotten all the evil around here! Bet the rest of the evil rolled under the couch.

Mission 2:
So Nedro says:
Wait, why do they want to kill a bunch of people again? He then follows up with:
So...they came by boat? Huh. You think the legions of hell would travel in something more flashy than a cargo ship. I do like "Leprous Legion" though. Perhaps they will be leaping like lusty llamas?
-Oh good, were on the warburg map from the LRSF. Glad were not in that crappy cargo ship map.
-So our foes are indeed a bunch of dudes with leprosy, who belong to the villaingroup "Leper Colony". They must throw some awesome parties!
-Ran into a custom boss named "Marcus Cadaver MD". Wow, geez, if I had that last name I would change it in a heartbeat. Hes a necro/poison MM. Thing is, our two objectives are "defeat the horde" and "defeat the leader", and defeating him accomplished neither of those two. So once again, a completely pointless boss.
-So apparently the real leader is a guy named "The Leper King". Huh. Appropriate name. But I can't take him seriously, as he's using that horrible "tin crown" hairstyle that makes him look like he either came back from a birthday party or a halloween party where he dressed up like Jughead. Didn't catch his powers because he quickly killed me.
-Okay, one of the best lines of dialogue from the ENTIRE MA:
effing classic.
-Aww phooey. Turns out defeating the Leper King wasnt enough to complete the mission. Looks like a defeat all...*grumblemumble*
-Turns out a defeat all on the Warburg Malta map isn't too bad. There are certainly far worse maps to get a defeat all on, like that big towering factory map (THAT MEANS YOU UNAI KEMEN!!!).
-So the clue for mission completion is:
Um, remind me what this has to do with the four horsemen of the apocalypse again? I mean we have pestilence certainly, but thats only one out of four.

Mission 3:
-So my send off text is:
Is it just me, or does the idea of a demon with a doctorate strike anyone as really wierd? I mean can you imagine this guy in medical school? He must have been a FREAKIN' PARTY ANIMAL WOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
-Were on the Mother Mayhem asylum map, as expected. I'm kind of getting sick of this map though. Seems like nearly every MA arc has it.
-So my objectives are:
Wait, didnt I already defeat 3 of those guys? What are they doing back here again? And who the hell are they anyway?
-So the enemies here are the imaginitively titled "Hospital" villaingroup. And as you would expect, they are just dudes in hospital uniforms. This makes it all the stranger when the very first foe I ran into was an Anesthesiologist who was a spines/poison.

Let me reiterate that. A perfectly normal looking woman in a hospital outfit just grew spines and spat poison out her mouth.
-Oh boy. Pox of despair again. He's doing the groundpunchreact emote, so it looks like he is having a siezure. Which on second thought, may have been the point.
-Remember how I said Thyphoid Lily wasn't too bad the first time? Well this time she killed me FIVE TIMES, due to the anesthesiologists spamming poison debuffs at me.
-So when Thyphoid Lily finally died she said:
my soup?
-So here's Dr. Contagion's bio:
Conrad t. Johns...Con...T...Johns...oh wow, that's a bad pun. And wasn't this guy supposed to be a demon?
-When encountered Dr. Contagion said:
Wait...do you mean Lord Recluse? And the four patrons? When did Arachnos work their way into this?
-And we're done. Upon my return Nedro says:
Wasn't it just called the Omega Flu? Ugh...

Well the best I can say about this arc is that it has some cute dialogue. But otherwise the story is incomprehensible, the mobs are overpowered, and the overall presentation is horribly shoddy. I'm sorry, but I can't give this any higher than one star.

Lord of the Rings is essentially one big book split into three parts, Star Wars is essentially one big movie split into six parts, and the Belgariad-Mallorean, which I consider to be one of the most enjoyable, well-written fantasy stories ever is essentially one big book split into a whopping ten parts.

Just because an arc doesn't come packaged into one neat portion doesn't mean it's not a viable story. There are quite a few advantages to having arcs in multiple parts. For example, they allow players to catch a breath and decide if they want to continue. If a player does not like the first part, then they don't have to continue on to the next few parts, and if they do like it, then they don't have to play the entire thing in one sitting.

Of course the obvious reason why players make multi-part arcs is because they feel that their story is far too big to fit into one arc. When I was making The Lost Choir for instance, I started with the intention of making it one five mission arc. But the more I planned it out on paper, the more I saw I had to go to a second arc. And even then, two arcs were not enough, and I had to make another, third arc to wrap the whole thing up. I guess if I tried really hard I could have crammed it all into one, but then I would have lost the massive scope I was aiming for.

Besides, it has never been said that one arc is one story. The dev's have never said that multi-part arcs are forbidden. Hell, there are even a few official arcs that really only work as one big story (the Faultline arcs immediatley come to mind, and the other post I-3 hazard zone arcs are also like this to a lesser degree.)

But that's all just my opinion. I just like my stories to be BIG.

Now THAT is something I can work off of! Thanks a bunch!

2 3 4

No problem, I was just very confused by the whole thing. I kept expecting some big revelation to pop up at the end to connect the whole thing, but instead it came across as a series of unconnected vignettes. In retrospect it wasn't nearly as confusing as I found it right after I played it, and you still did a very good job.

I guess I just needed a night to sleep on it and wrap my head around it.

Agreed. Unfortunately you're still whomping on a mountain of hp, but you need to have some actual tactics going into the fight if you want to stand a chance.

Plus if you are a stalker you can insta-kill every foe that isn't Reichsman in the room. And that's awesome.

0_o

Damn...and I was THIS close to buying FFXI instead of CoH. Seriously, I was holding both boxes in my hands while my Mom tapped her foot behind me.