First, Thanks for reviewing the arc. A few comments though:
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Real Afterlife
Arc ID: 361155
Author: @Tiger Knight
Rating: 1 star (No rating given in game, see below)
Short Version
An arc with a story that has some good things going for it, and could be really good with some more work and polish, but some really, REALLY rough playability problems that seem to stem more from lack of testing and feedback than anything. (The arc had not been rated yet, and the author has only had 5 total rates over all of their arcs. Noting that, I opted not to make the arc's first in game rating a 1, because, as you will see below, the problems that put it down to 1 are pretty easily fixed.)
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Not true. It's been rated before however because I constantly pull down and test the arc, it resets the ratings. Hence why there is no ratings.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Story
The story has some solid potential, and the author obviously put a lot of thought into it. The formatting done to differentiate between "stage directions" and dialogue works, and the author uses different colored text to differentiate between different people talking, an idea that I've also used in an arc that I haven't finished yet. The story makes sense for the most part, and though it can border on powerposing (some might say it does powerpose) usually it does it for incidental things, like your character really wanting a cup of coffee because it's becoming a long night. At the end it goes a bit far with the player comforting War Witch while she's crying. That problem is further compounded by the fact that War Witch being upset with being a ghost seems pretty out of character for her. She came back as a ghost of her own free will to help heroes in any way she can. (A side note, Akarist's in mission dialogue seemed a bit off for him. I can't ever imagine him saying "Can't we just talk this out?")
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Thanks for the positive comment on the use of color text. In so far as power posing, it has been brought up before but I haven't raced to fix it. Fact of the matter is, CoH has it in various arcs already established in game yet these are still decent arcs. For example, let's say I'm playing a heroic Vampire.... no, wait.. not A "Twilight" kind.. no, um... make that a heroic zombie. Anyway, If I do the arc and get the Vahzilok wasting disease, should it really be hurting me? Well, what if I was a robot? Can I even be diseased? For that matter, can robots be hurt by "Toxic" damage? What is my alien life form get stronger by poisonous materials? (As a side note: If I was a non-twilight vampire, then I should not be allowed to play my characters in daylight so that also goes to waste.)
Thing is not every story is so abstract that it appeals to every type of sci fi class out there. Does this make them bad arcs? No. So why is it a factor for reviewing?
As for the "out of character for War Witch" comment, she has always seemed the emotional type in the comics to me. Hell she risked her entire teams life by heading in headlong into Vanessa's (Carnie's) headquarters where they almost got killed. As such, I don't feel it's that hard to picture that after being a ghost for awhile, she misses all the things she had in real life.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Continuing on the problems with War Witch, though this might not actually be a problem because it's really not documented anywhere, but I always assumed that the War Witch in Pocket D was the same War Witch that was in Croatoa and that being in Pocket D somehow gave her physical form. She no longer says anything now, just the standard trainer stuff, but over time when she did say stuff, it would change from time to time. One of the earlier ones was something along the lines of "Surprised to see me here? This place can even make miracles happen." More recently she specifically mentioned hovering in Croatoa all the time. This implies to me that she is the same person, and Pocket D is just a really weird place and she's somehow able to be alive there. I mean, a floating ski chalet does pop up every winter.
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Quick search and copy paste from paragonwiki: "With the opening of Pocket D, another incarnation of War Witch was discovered. Unlike the spectral presence she has in Croatoa, this one is alive and well, since it is in an alternate dimension."
Not the same person.... well, not from the same dimension anyway.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
While we're on the subject of canon, there is a problem with the story and it's regard to canon that is definitely real, and I have evidence this time thanks to the magic of the Internet Wayback Machine! The battle between the Cabal and the Circle of Thorns could not have happened during the Rikti War in Croatoa, as Salamanca does not go all Halloween until well after the war. Pretty easy fix, though. Just remove the reference to the Rikti War and everything is golden. |
Oh, that's a good argument. May I point out though that it only says Salamanca finds out about the invaders at that time. Thing is, they existed before Salamanca was even built. Confusing, I know. But if you read that page you posted it says, and I quote:
"Skipper LeGrange has an even more troubling view of the situation. Back during the whole Malleus Mundi event, not all of the damage was contained. Barriers were left weakened. Inter-dimensional doors left ajarso to speak. The Banished Pantheon, in their clumsy attempt to awaken certain forces, allowed others to benefit from their efforts."
So they come from another dimension due to weakened inter-dimensional doors. So the only question left is when was the Malleus Mundi event?
Another Paragonwiki search tells us: The tome was rumored to belong to various occult teachers and mystics throughout the centuries, but the last individual owner of the Malleus Mundi was thought to have been none other than Baron Zoria's supposed mentor, the infamous Russian mystic Rasputin.
So this book has existed for quite some time but there is no clear defination of when this event happened exactly. They even talk about the book being used in WW2 which was WAAAAAAAY before the ritki war. So is history a little fuzzy at this point? Hell yes. Is it inconceivable that the circle and the Cabal faced off BEFORE the cabal was discovered by anyone in the outside world. I don't think so. The battle wasn't on an epic scale, it was a small group vs. another small group in an area that is for the most part, unpopulated. So it could have happened.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Aside from things that are out of line with canon, or possibly so, the story does take some liberties with the canon, by writing characters and events into the backstory of the game. None of those really clash, however, and the backstory isn't completely laid out in stone for us. There's a lot of room for interpretation, and it helps add a couple wrinkles to the plot.
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Agreed. I think I even mentioned that I tried to add onto it a bit in the description.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The story does need a lot of polish, and a solid proofreading. Unfortunately, I try to keep my critique more on general story stuff and not so much on proofing, because I find taking tons of notes as I go through to really burn me out, so I'm only going to throw out some examples that stuck out to me or things that appeared repeatedly.
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You should have seen it before police woman proof read it for me. It only helps to have others play test your arc if they can spell/read better than you :P
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
I noticed a lot of missing or incorrect punctuation, like periods where there should be question marks, and hardly any commas. There were also many misspellings, which a spell checker can get the majority of. The custom faction in missions 4 and 5 (more on that in the Mechanics section) had Oranbegan spelled wrong as Oranbangan. I didn't notice that particular misspelling throughout the rest of the arc, but like I said, I don't take many notes on spelling and grammar and I hardly even caught that one. The still busy text for mission 4 said "Did you find her? What did she say?" even though neither the navigation text nor the mission briefing mention anything about me looking for someone, I was just told that a group of Circle of Thorns have moved into a cave in Founder's Falls and are planning something.
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Looking into the still busy text. I think I fixed all the Oranbagan mispellings. Will have to look again.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
There's quite a few instances of awkward phrasing as well. My general advice on how to fix this, is to read something aloud and see if it sounds natural to say it. I did save an example of this to show what I'm talking about, though:
This text starts and stops a lot, and reads pretty clunkily. Since it's descriptive text and not a quickly written list that my character is reading, some smooth flow to the phrasing would really help. You could do something like this with it:
I can just see people critiquing my re-writing of that sentence, but there you go anyway. Obviously, I'm not saying "change it to that", I'm just trying to illustrate how you can take a bunch of short statements and make it have a little more vibrancy.
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Noted and will change that as yours does sound a bit better. However, it's not a critical problem as either way still works.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
From the end of mission 3 and forward, coming back and talking to Azuria will more often than not have you actually talking to someone else instead. Sometimes this isn't explicitly stated, but the author does color code the dialogue, so I was able to figure out who was talking with little work. Still, it couldn't hurt to put a little "stage direction" along the lines of "Akarist speaks to you in a weary voice" at the beginning or something. Even with that, I'm sure some people will be annoyed at the fact that they're looking at Azuria and talking to Akarist, but with the limitations of the system, you sometimes just have to deal with people being upset at your workarounds. (Editor's Note: See review of The Echo by @MrCaptainMan)
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Yeah, I hate the fact we can't change the contact from mish to mish. Was hoping for that to be in Issue 17... now I'm holding my breath for Going Rogue to sneak it in.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The level "range" is 39-39 for all missions. Bravo on the consistent level range, but why only level 39? This is pretty minor, really, just a very weird thing about the arc that I need to ask.
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Honestly, there were two reasons. One involved the baddies as some of the earth/ death mages only went up as far as lvl 39. Second, I wanted to allow those exempting not to lose any critical powers which at level 39, you would keep up to level 44 powers.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The first mission is a defeat all, though it's not really an annoying one. It's a relatively small "wide" cave map, that seems to be set to empty as its villain group, and is completely straightforward. One tunnel with no branching paths. Only enemies seem to be spawns that were placed by the author.
However, there's a problem with the Circle of Thorns groups that goes throughout the whole arc. For some reason the author decided to make a few custom groups of CoT instead of just using the standard ones. The problem with this, are the Earth Thorn Casters. Now, I *may* be wrong, but my understanding is that all of the thorn casters are split up into multiple instances, some with control powers, and some without, and the ones with the control powers can only show up once in a group. When you make a custom group, this limitation no longer exists, so you can run into groups where you're getting hit with a few quicksands, which have a pretty hefty hit to defense as well as the slows. (For future reference to anyone reading this, that happens with Malta Sappers as well. Please, do not put Malta Sappers into custom groups.)
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Rather intentional from a story point of view. However, the whole quicksand thing I never did receive a complaint about before. Which could be your difficulty affecting it. Not sure what it was on but this arc was squishie tested twice and they completed it without complaining it was too tough so I'm not sure what the problem is.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
My suggestion would be to just use the standard Circle of Thorns group and set the level range so players won't be fighting any enemies you don't want them to run into in the arc. Either that, or remove the specific Earth Thorn Caster that has quicksand. You can see the powers that the enemies have in the custom group editor when you select them.
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Hmmmmm...good idea. Writing it down.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The second mission involves 2 glowies and a captive, with a ton of false glowies. Fortunately all the false ones were the same, so after I found the first one and saw two more of the same kind in the same room I knew not to click on those anymore. However, this could easily get frustrating for a lot of players. Oranbega is definitely not a good place to go glowie hunting.
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Map's small. It's like 3 rooms. The fake glowies are pretty much the only challenge there otherwise it would be too easy to stealth. Which was brought up twice by two players so the fakes went in.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The third mission though, is when stuff gets total bananas. I keep thinking I know the MA pretty much in and out, but I continually get proven wrong. The custom group for this mission is comprised of various Circle of Thorns demons. Unfortunately, there's definitely some problems here. First, the only minions are Nerva Spectral Demons, with their resistances, tendency to run and stealth, and -tohit and -recharge. The bosses are Succubi, which aren't too bad considering they're bosses and I only saw so many because of my difficulty setting. (Though I would suggest turning down the difficulty on all of the captive spawns except for the one with Akarist, considering all of them but him are option allies and there's a few of them. Captives/Allies/Escorts set to hard almost always have a boss in there.)
But there's more: Blade Princes were spawning like bosses. I'm kicking myself for not taking a screenshot, but I was too worried about whether I'd be able to finish this review or not. Blade Princes, for those who don't know, are Elite Bosses that show up in late game CoV in a few missions. They have some wicked dangerous powers, like a power that summons about 8 floating ice swords that attack you, and terrify. As an SR scrapper, there wasn't crap I could do about the Terrify, and I had so many attacks coming at me from all directions from the spawn difficulty being set so high on the allies that without elude up I was pretty much guaranteed to die. I in fact got halfway to the debt cap before finishing this mission, considering this is also a defeat all. It wouldn't even be a huge problem, since it does make sense for the story and it was on a really small map, but with the problems with the custom group and my difficulty setting, it was like pulling teeth.
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Blade princes spawning as bosses you say? I didn't think they would size down to bosses as they were only allowed as epic bosses. As for the group difficulties... not sure on that. I'll have to check on it. Again, this could be a difficulty issue though as the last reviewer (Policewoman) said this mission was too easy. However, she had her bosses turned off.
This is part of the problem for me. One reviewer reviews the arc "Oh, this is too easy. Make it harder" The next one comes along with their diff on "Godlike... bring it on!" and tells me it's too hard. So balance is still an issue. As you noticed.
I was happy to read I'm not the only SR who takes elude. Heh.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Looking at the custom group editor to try and figure out how such a thing could happen (elite bosses should never spawn as an enemy in a regular spawn unless they're the only rank in a group) I saw that the Blade Prince was listed as a boss. The logical conclusion is that the author didn't realize that Blade Princes were in fact ridiculous EBs and just wanted a demon boss of proper level other than Succubi, and then this horrible bug happened. Just goes to show that proper testing is really important. Even without the Blade Princes though, this custom group is just asking for frustration. It might be worth it just to bump up the level range to a 40-45 arc and use Infernal Demons with edited descriptions instead.
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They are elites. You mentioned yourself you saw succubi. Without the EB's, you get slapped with the whole XP reduction (Which is in my view ridiculous) and with them, they are a chance spawn as bosses apparently. Again, diff affects the arc.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
Akarist is the omni-mage AV class, but he's a captive instead of an ally. He's also 45-54, which is outside of the level range of the arc. This causes warnings to appear in the description, despite the fact that you don't fight any AVs or higher level enemies spawned at a lower level. Since Akarist's model is just that of a Madness Mage, he could easily just be replaced with one and be renamed Akarist and have its description changed.
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Didn't look right. Didn't think it mattered.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
In the next two missions, the main enemy group is a faction of recolored CoT enemies. The minions are Earth Thorn Casters, so it has the same quicksand issue. Another weird thing is that the group was giving out reduced experience, and I was constantly running into groups of all recolored thorn casters, and groups of all renamed nerva spectral demon lords. I have no idea what could be causing this, since they all had the same group name. The fourth mission is also a defeat all. There's really no good story reason for this mission to be one and this being the third one in the arc is going to make a lot of people angry, or not even play the arc once they see all the Defeat All Enemies in the mission description. You'd do a lot better if you just restricted it to the third mission, if you fix the custom group. It's a really small map and it's the only mission where I can see it being vital to take out all the enemies from a story perspective.
In this mission and the next, War Witch shows up as a custom boss level ally. The author did a pretty good job at capturing her look with the character creator, and her powersets are correct as well, but set to such a high level as to be overpowered. If it weren't for the all lieutenant spawns wrecking her pretty quickly, she would have made the entire mission pretty trivial due to her high damage output.
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HAH... To take a quote from the South Park Movie "Here is the biggest beyotch of them all" IF I turn her into a Lieutenant then anyone playing a higher difficulty would find her killed instantly. As a Boss, she kills everything and the mission is trivial. So I am open to suggestion for this one from anyone.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
The final boss is a custom enemy with Necromancy set to a middling range of powers (I never saw a Lich) and Dark Armor with what seems to be every power but the self-rez. Personally, I suggest taking away the status protection and oppressive gloom. Those powers are pretty annoying. Cloak of Darkness also causes some people to inexplicably not be able to see the character model, even with +perception. Probably has something to do with graphics settings, I dunno, but the small amount of defense isn't worth some people not seeing your custom character. He was also spawning as a normal boss in the mission, or there was a duplicate boss spawn, since I ran into him twice, once with no dialogue.
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Thought I already removed cloak but not certain. The rest... well, most players who are going in as squishies revoke his boss status and he becomes a lieutenant. Another "War Witch problem" due to her either completely dominating him or getting smacked down in nanoseconds.
Really, the difficulty really hits the way this arc is being reviewed.
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Originally Posted by LaserJesus
So yeah, a lot of mechanical problems. Not too surprising though, learning the ins and outs of the architect system and figuring out what will piss people off or not is a really trial and error thing that takes some time. Hopefully this will help you get it all sorted out.
Final Thoughts
I want to stress again that I did not rate it in game. This is a pretty rare exception, though. The things that made the arc incredibly frustrating were either bug related, or indicative of not knowing the ropes of the system yet. The arc also didn't have any ratings yet, and presumably hadn't received any feedback. So this one gets a pass in game. The 1 star rating in this post though stands for how I feel about it currently. I really can not recommend that anyone play this until the mechanical issues are worked out.
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See now, I don't see how there were that many mechanical issues that I can really fix when difficulty dominates what you were fighting. Like in Policewoman's review, she felt the third mission was too easy. You feel it was way too hard. Do you know what I changed in that mission between the two reviews? I added some dialog to Akarist's mob. THAT WAS IT! The only difference between your opinion of the mission and hers is your difficulty. Maybe I should put a "Play at this difficulty" in the header? Any other suggestions out there?
