[IMG] # 41565 - Astoria in D Minor

Don't you even dare touch that Beating Heart souvenir though.

This arc was incredible! I recommend it to anyone who is playing COH. Hands down the best mission in the MA.

Question though - in the foggy caves why were there level 25 Coralax running around? My level 20 brute had a hard time beating them down.

-Xan

Huh, it's supposed to scale them down. I guess I'll just set the minimum for that mission back to 25.

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Event Horizon's text was quite cutting, but the real and genuine kicker was as I zoning out, and suddenly connected the dots between the "don't let them break the barricades" text and the custom critters in the first mission.

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The small zombies were children weren't they.

That's messed up!

The Beating Heart of Astoria got a mention from Venture in the City Scoop Interview. He says he didn't much care for it but it must have made an impression considering he only mentioned one other arc by name.

He did mention the arc he didn't like by name, but I edited it out. Though the author still knew which arc he was talking about anyway, at least others reading didn't.

That said, I've been meaning to play your arcs, I think I probably will sometime in the next week or two as I think I'm taking a break from review requests.

Bump for a new forum!

A note for anyone leaving feedback in-game: I'm currently away from home for about a month so I won't be able to read any comments left on my global until I get back. Just in case someone asks a question or something, I'm not ignoring you.

And I'm now back. And nobody posted or noticed I was gone. I suppose I would probably have had to have actually DONE something recently to warrant attention... but c'mooooon!

That said, rather than making this a COMPLETELY pointless post, some random thoughts:

-How would people feel about an arc where you're intended NOT to fight the mobs? i.e. not that the mobs are all tagged as friendly, but where they're meant to be easy to evade/outrun and too much of a pain in the *** to bother trying to kill?

-Also considering doing an "Infected run amok" arc. Pathologic and Prototype have had me thinking about the whole disease outbreak angle. I think I could make an interesting story out of that (Though it's probably been done a bunch of times already, will need to check).

Anyone have any interesting NON horror ideas they feel like tossing me? I like horror/bizarre but I don't want to get stuck on a single track as a writer.

Not really related to my Astoria arcs, but for anyone who's tracking this thread, I've got a new arc up, with its own thread here.

Quick update: I had to change the last map in Beating Heart of Astoria because apparently the one I was using no longer accepts escorts or collections or anything else because the map doesn't even show up when I pick it.

It should still be functionally the same, but the new map is a bit... noisier.

Well since I imagine everyone else is doing it, I submitted Astoria in D Minor for the "Best in-canon arc" (I consider it to be an in-canon arc, since Astoria has so little canon anyway and everything I reference in the arc is based on what little there is).

I also made a few minor edits to the arc to fix up some patch problems and added in some extra dialogue that occurred to me while I was running through it to gather screenshots.

*Edit*, oh I also threw in some bosses from PPD to fill out the custom group in the last mission for exp purposes. I'm not 100% sure if it worked right or not since obviously I never get boss spawns when I do solo tests (And I can't survive that far with the dif cranked up to the point where I do get them). If anyone runs through as a team, let me know if the SWAT Grenadiers are spawning in mission 5 or not.

PoliceWoman posted a review of Astoria in D Minor in her thread. Spoiler Alert: She gave it 4 stars.

Also, for those of you who might be interested, in my reply to her review I gave a big interpretation of a lot of the plot elements that I've never discussed before. So like, if you REALLY love this arc for some reason, it might be an interesting read.

Update to Astoria in D minor:

Radically changed the "Still busy" text for each mission for extra creepiness.

*Edit for clarity*

Before each "Still Busy" dialogue was mostly pretty filler "The Radio emits nothing but static" or "Have you found her yet?" Now each mission has a unique still busy dialogue (That I don't want to spoil but it's pretty easy to figure out the pattern).

It looks like Astoria in D Minor has made it into the finalists for the "Best Canon Arc" for the official AE awards. Now I'll have to play the other two arcs in the category to see what my competition is like :P

Congratulations! Good luck in the finals (tonight)?

I don't have a whole lot to add to the thread, but I agree that this arc achieved its goals really, really well. The Banished Pantheon always had a lot of potential, what with its meddling with elder gods. But in-game, it never seemed to get much further than summoning giant zombies, and the arcs only seemed to skirt the edges of the real horror. This arc gets a lot more into the psychological consequences, and major props for that.

What really elevated this arc (for me) is the penultimate mission, and while it bears more than a passing resemblance to @Muu's "Uncreation" (which has existed since Architect beta), I'm sure it's a coincidence. Your mission has enough of its own unique character, and at the very end of the mission it pulls off an absolutely phenomenal moment that really stuck with me.

Best wishes!

I'd actually never heard of "Uncreation" before now :P I just gave it a run and I can see what you mean about them being stylistically similar, I think it's context that sets them apart though. Astoria in D Minor is (Ostensibly) grounded in reality, so having it all crumble in mission 4 has more of an impact than in Uncreation where reality falling apart is the starting point. D Minor also has reality come back together in mission 5 but... wrong. It's all essentially a mindscrew much like Uncreation, but it's meant to tie into the story rather than just being weird for the sake of weird.

Fun story, mission 4 didn't actually exist when I first wrote the arc. I helped someone else test their arc and they used the Ruladak caves, and I pretty much went "What map is this? I have to steal it." Mission 5 was meant to be the original "WTF?" level, but the caves were just too perfect for Dark Astoria to pass up so I consolidated two missions (Originally meeting Schism and rescuing Haley were two separate missions - but they really didn't have to be) and wrote the "Mausoleum" mission to make use of that map. It seems to have pretty well overshadowed mission 5 which was meant to be the original point of the arc (that being how a shift in context can change everything - how all of a sudden doing the same thing you've been doing the entire arc now feels "Wrong"), but hey, so long as people still like the arc I'm happy.

I ran this again tonight because I never really took many notes the first time around. I think that overall it's a superior arc and manages to do something that not many others would be able to do in this particular milieu... ie generate a sense of rising dread.

That being said, though, I doubt that I will ever run it again. I hate the map on the fourth mission that much. Don't take it as an indictment of the arc or the writing. It's just the map.

General stream of consciousness observations:

- I think perhaps you try to do a little too much within the confines of a 5 mission arc. I could easily see any one of the three main throughlines being able to sustain its own arc. They are tied together nicely though, but each one individually feels a bit unfinished, if that makes any sense.
- Schism's denouement feels more powerful than Event Horizon's, which is unfortunate because it occurs first. That means the climax of the story really occurs a full mission before the arc ends. This is sort of what I meant by 'unfinished.' Though Event Horizon is met first and is referenced throughout, he doesn't appear again until the end... which means that after the very dramatic events that preceded his reappearance, I am uncertain if the emotional impact is there with him.
- There are times throughout when I am pausing because I am not entirely sure what to do next. I'm not sure if this is indicative of me being a slave to compass commands or whether the vague directives that appear could provide a bit more direction without detracting from the style you are utilizing.
- I am not entirely sure if the little zombies add enough to this particular arc to warrant the space within AE that a custom group invariably uses. I'm not indicating they are a bad custom group... just that perhaps the 10% or so they are using could be used for additional content for the arc.


Overall, as I said before, I believe this to be a superior arc and the critiques above did not detract from my overall rating of the arc. The one true criticism I would levy is the use of the map for mission 4. I understand why you are using that map, but there is a difference between darkness as atmosphere in a medium like television or film... and actively having to spend 30-45 minutes trying to traverse your way through it in the context of a game.

I've never been a fan of dark settings for that reason.

A quick bump to mention that Astoria in D Minor was made the latest dev's choice arc.

I guess it's kind of silly for me to keep bumping this thread now.

Saw this mission via a recommendation from a friend and gave it a whirl....my graveyard shift hours and weird sleep schedule meant I was playing it in the dead of the night.

This was, perhaps, a fortuitous result, as this arc would be atmospheric enough in broad daylight.

Mission 1: This one's rather straightforward. Interestingly, was the Council a planned rather subtle indication of things to come? The fact they're attacking anything nearby in order to get out of Astoria (though this doesn't become obvious until hindsight becomes 20/20). I note that the smaller zombies we encounter here don't seem to recur anywhere else, though.

Mission 2: I both loved and loathed this one. Mother Meyai's asylum is just....required for this arc, and Schism was both creepy to look at, but also I had to wonder what Event Horizon was getting at. The fact I've run a few characters that're rather casual about body counts myself made Schism seem...mostly normal. The fact I've, IC, made the "the wonderful thing about zombies is no one cares how many you kill" line or variants thereof only lured me into more of a false sense of security. The use of Tsoo as civilians made me do a double take, but less so than the rather irritating tendency of the map to put the dead bodies in hard to find locations. I ended up ramping up my speakers and /walk ing through the map so I wouldn't miss the tell tale SFX that indicated them. They blend in a little too well, but there's nothing much you can do about it. Interestingly, this mission works really, really well for melee types from a thematic standpoint. My first runthrough was on a Claws/Invul scrapper who's in standard power armor with the Talsorian energy blades. Comparing her side by side with Schism, who's stripped to the waist and using metal blades....it's an interesting dynamic. The dualism isn't always there, but when it is, it adds to it.

Mission 3: This one was interesting due to my experience more than anything else. It could be either really fast or really long, and due to random clue placement, I got the latter. I ended up literally purging the cemetery to the ground of every BP mob I could find (after headhunting the masks initially and ignoring the LTs and minions), and eventually found the body...after a half hour of searching an empty cemetery *twitch*. Schism's seeming "mostly normal" facade from the previous mission really kept the surprise...surprising. And the "I'm saving them from fate!" line ties into the overall theme, if I've got it right, which I'll address a bit lower on.

Mission 4: Into The Mouth of Madness Go I.

^)#(%_#(!@#_@$(@_))_)

This mission I mostly skimmed through because the plot was compelling me onwards and with my 50 exemped down, the mobs were more distraction than challenge. I didn't really have trouble navigating the place and the fog was an excellent choice. The phone booth clue was kind of hilarious....I'm attacking a phone booth. I'm attacking a phone booth. From a purely IC standpoint, this makes no sense at all, yet given the visions of the Heralds(who worked out better in the fog, as the vague outlines and their glowy bits made them more distinctive than they would be in full light) and the ongoing, seemingly endless traverse into the depths....somehow attacking a phone booth made sense. The fact that it made sense was worrying....

Mission 5: Hello Me, Meet The Real Me.

This one threw me for a loop. Between the normal looking enemies(who nonetheless attack you on sight) and the damn freaking brilliant use of NPC dialogue, my sense of what was going on was completely blown by this point. We hear the...BP zombies? Telling each other to get the children behind barricades. The normal people are attacking and making groaning noises. Is the hotel messing with my head? Is this time travel? There's not enough people in Astoria to justify this any more. Did I go back to when the zombies first invaded. Am I reliving the perspective of one of the zombies? Is time twisted so that I am or was one of the zombies, with my mind controlling its actions? Are my actions my own, or am I trapped into what the framework of Astoria is forcing me into? Is this the fate that Schism was freeing the others from through death? To be free of this encroaching insanity and Mot's grip on them? Or was Schism seeing what I am now, and his insanity his brain trying to come to grips with what he's seeing? Am I killing innocents wandering Astoria right now? What the hell is going on?

By comparison, dropping Event Horizon was almost a relief. Stepping out of that brought me back to the real world. But...well, this arc is part of that alt's personal canon, as Silicon is very much a sci-fi/hard tech personality, and the mind-warp that this arc induces(and canonically is very much viable in Astoria) would leave her very shaken and unsure of her actions there.

Oh, and that bumper text at the end was just damn creepy after everything else.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville You're right: this whole issue is a money grab. We're going to be grabbing money from impatient people with money to burn and completionist complexes, and using it to make a better game for everyone, including the 99.9% of the rest of the playerbase that isn't going to be buying everything, multiple times, immediately upon release, and spending hundreds of dollars in the process.