The Long Road Back (#338026)

This is my first attempting at writing in this particular format.

The story is intended for villain players, though I've noticed that the Architect allows you to play any arc with any character you wish and most players probably have both heroes and villains in their stables of characters at this point.

The level range is 10-20. The arc is 5 missions long. When I test it, I generally complete it in less than an hour, but I know the maps very well by this point, having tested the missions as many times as I have.

It is not intended as a comedy and if it is taken as such, then I have seriously lost my sense of humor and my ability to tell a story.

The arc is intended to be the first in a series that feature the OSI branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. It also presumes that the villain in question has some compelling reason to 'go straight' or is at least willing to take advantage of being given the opportunity to do so.

I am not sure how difficult it really is. For some players, it will probably be very easy. For others, it might be quite challenging. It all depends on playstyle and the composition of your team, (if you choose to team of course), and what settings you've chosen for your characters. When I called myself a team of three and asked for +2 villians and indicated that I wanted bosses, the maps were quite challenging and tedious for me to try to solo.

It also tends to be not much fun to take on massive groups of Vahzilok at lower levels, but if you can handle them, then go to it and have fun.

I hope that some of you enjoy it and offer me some feedback on it. It is my first arc, as I said, so the craft of doing it will undoubtedly take some refining on my part.

Hey Sis, I'd recommend submitting your arc to one of the reviewers on this forum if you haven't done so already. It's usually the quickest way to get feedback, and there's some control for you on the level and quality of the feedback received if you look at their past reviews.

A villain lowbie arc? Right, one more om my to do list. I will be back on this.

I'd certainly appreciate it if you would review it, Tangler. I've read your review thread and I like how you put your reviews together... sort of like the old Siskel/Ebert review show where they'd give a brief synopsis of the film along with a taste of what's there (with snippets of the movie for them and your screenshots for you). Spoilers get sort of a bad rap, I think. Most of the time, it's what I see of a movie beforehnad that's often the driving factor on whether I'll pay the money to go see it.

Or in this case, plunk down the time and effort it would take to finish the arc.

At any rate, if you have the time, I'd like to see what you have to say about it and how you'll present what you see there.

I missed the launch of mission architect this year, as I stopped playing around last December. So predictably, when I finally started up again, there were literally thousands of arcs for me to try to wade through, the vast majority of them unfinished or only half-finished, and the majority of the rest seeming to be private farms to build characters and so-forth. That makes threads like yours especially helpful to someone like me who wants to experience what the community has to offer from a storytelling point of view.

Thanks, Spade. The more people who play it, the more idea I'll have of the types of things I need to work on to make my arcs better.

Changes I have made thus far based on the one person who has critiqued it. I sort of like the idea of an ongoing log of what I am doing and my thought processes behind doing it. This will contain some spoilers for those who have yet to play the arc:

Mission 1: Neither am I. Unfortunately, there are very few maps available that fit the description of an abandoned hospital, which is what the mission called for.

*(This was a reply to the player saying that he did not like glowie hunts on this particular map)*

I made no significant changes at this time, though I may tone down the Symons encounter if I receive feedback that too many players feel that it is too difficult.

Mission 2: I disagree that it is too much for a low level character to do. I generally complete this mission within a 5 minute window in testing. Granted, I know exactly where Patrick is, but this particular map is not exactly an intricate maze.

Changes at this time:

- I toned down Luis Escobar, since I can see solo characters having significant problems with him as the mission stood. He is now a boss and not an elite boss. He was always intended to be tough, but he was having a tendency of 1-shotting my ss/inv brute and that was unacceptably tough.
- I changed Patrick McManus to a 15-20 lieutenant, instead of an 11-15 boss. If the player exemped down to level 20, Patrick was appearing at level 15, which meant he could be 1-shot in the final encounter. The only Outcast characters available for the full level range of the arc were minions. And the minion was taking too much damage during the last encounter of the mission. Doing it this way will mean that if players pick up the arc at level 10-12, Patrick will be purple, but I'd rather Patrick be overpowered than have players lose the arc because he can't deal with the Escobar encounter.

Mission 3: Your contact explains why Longbow is guarding the ambassador. The ambassador requested it. But I am not married to the idea of Longbow being part of this arc, so I went ahead and made the change. The only reason I went with Loingbow instead of Arachnos to begin with is that I think that Longbow would be kinder to the player than Arachnos at this level range.

Change:

- Changed the opposition faction from Longbow to Arachnos. Altered the mission texts to reflect this change.
- Removed Commander Everheart and replaced her with Huntsman Arroyo as the initial encounter of the mission.
- Increase the time limit from 30 minutes to 45 minutes. I generally complete this mission in about 10m, so I don't think this change will alter much one way or the other.

The time limit is in place to simulate to the player that once Aeon arrives to begin the negotiations, OSI's window of opportunity to complete this objective is gone.

Mission 4:

The critique makes sense.

*(The critique in essence was that there were too many glowies for the player to have to find. I had no problem with reducing the number.)*

Changes:

- Reduced the number of glowies of each type to 1. Left in the ambushes. If a player chooses to truly stealth the mission, he/she will not have to contend with them anyway. They are there to simulate the idea that the target is a United States senator and it makes sense that he would have things like silent alarms to alert his security forces attached to his safe and his private computer in the event that someone tried to mess with it. If it seems later like this goes against the nature of the mission, the ambushes will ve easy enough to remove when I publish the final version.

Mission 5:

This mission is not intended to be difficult at all. If it is, then it's a failure of design. The only thing that was intended to be difficult about it are the moral implications of what the player is doing.

- Toned down all the residents of Heatherford Home substantially. At this point, all of them have the lowest attack in their powerset and resist physical damage. The staff members have 1 martial art attack and 1 willpower defense. If it still doesn't seem as though the player is running over them at will, I will go back to the drawing board with them.
- Tried a variety of maps for Heatherford Home. None of them really seemed to fit, so I went with one that was linear and only has 2 floors, so it would not turn an annoying, long glowie hunt.

The new id number for this arc is 338602. When I tried to edit it and republish, it put 2 arcs of the same name up. When I tried to unpublish one of them, I unpublished both and had to republish the arc from scratch.

Hence the new arc id.

I am not entirely sure. It's probably my unfamiliarity with the MA system more than anything else. I think just because of the nature of the system that it would have had to have been 2 arcs with different id's. And I didn't lose that much really. Only 1 person had rated it thus far and most of the changes I was making were necessary ones anyway. It's in much better condition now after having made the changes than before.

Changes for the day:

Not many. I was playing other people's arcs today, so I didn't do much work on my own. Until I can get some others to play test it, all I'll be doing is essentially arguing with myself.

Mission 5

Managed to create what are essentially 'non-powered,' attackable minions, which was the effect I was looking for with this mission to start with. Reverted to the original text of the storyline which gave no mention of the Heatherford Home residents having any powers.

(They do have powers... it's impossible, as far as I've seen for them not to, but they have no attack powers and their defense powers are essentially weak and have no special effects, rendering them invisible.)

@GlaziusF

Review written as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

Playing this on a merc/TA mastermind, level >25. All bosses no AVs 1 villain at +0.

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Hmm. Should that be "Louise" Symons? Her name in the briefing is "Lousie".

And there are plenty of people in the Rogue Isles who know how to do what Vazhilok does, including the Freakshow "meat doctors" and the various Facemakers. I'm not sure why this one person is special.

Alright, time to become a dog of the government.

Man. The asylum has just lost all mystique at this point and become straight-up annoying. i would not look down on a sewer map or abandoned office.

Hmm. So I find all the doc's files in the first room, on some weirdly clean-looking computers.

But I still have to drop the doctor? I mean, I'm pretty sure she didn't see me. Unless I'm supposed to be "going off-script" and taking her out anyway.

Whoof. That's got to be a hard ambush of zombies gnawing on the back of my head. Bit much for a 20 to handle - a mort, a reaper, 2 aboms, 2 boomin' aboms. Vahz double-dip with the zombies, so even reasonable-seeming sizes of ambushes will be quite large.

So the doc was an eidolon looking to go back, huh?

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15 minutes means these comments come from memory.

It was kind of Patrick to leave his stuff in the one interactable unmarked box in the warehouse. But it seems kind of odd that Escobar spawns when I grab the personal effects rather than when I spring Pat. ("rescue is completed" is the trigger for when you free an escort.)

Also interestingly, Pat says "Jesus, man, I'm sorry. I don't wanna do this, but you ain't givin' me any choice." when fighting Escobar - I guess this is his 75% health line.

Little typo in Escobar's description: "Leonard Clahoun".

Also it seems odd that I get the clue about Pat, and for that matter the doc in the first mission, before the clue about the glowies, given that I found the glowies first. You can drag-n-drop them to swap them around.

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Wait wait wait. Let me get this straight.

The ambassador has to consider Arachnos too risky to work with.

And he's meeting with Dr. Aeon. By all appearances willingly.

I'm not sure if there's anything I could do that'd be worse than springing Dr. Aeon.on somebody. But I'll do my best.

The system text for Arroyo going down is just "Arroyo defeated". And how 'bout that? He comes with another hard ambush. At least this one's from the same direction so my debuff patches work.

And an easy ambush for Sandoval, after some hot merc-on-merc action. He should at least be a lieutenant, otherwise he'd barely have time to say anything before the ambush hits.

The system text says I need to return to Savage, but there are still Arachnos left in the base. It should probably say something different.

The start and end clues are kinda weird. The start gives me 30 minutes to take out Sandoval, even though the mission's on a 45-minute timer, and the end tells me I've taken out Sandoval and should return to Savage. Which... uh, duh. That's what the Mission Complete means.

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I'm getting the sneaking suspicion I'm actually working for Malta. I mean, I blow up Arachnos negotiations, now I'm going to smear someone stateside -- I'm doing terrible things to anybody who i might take sides with later on.

I stealth upstairs in the office. Normal ambush of security guards on planting the fake files, hard ambush of cops on the safe - I guess I'm supposed to leave 'em behind as they put me on the floor when I tried to stand up to 'em.

The start clue just says "Senator Brackett", and the end is a summary of what I just did. My memory's not so bad as all that.

Savage says I can keep whatever else I took from the safe - you mean the old paper financial records? The clue doesn't say anything about helping myself to a little folding money.

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"What I'm going to ask you to do isn't pretty. In or out?" Yeah, uh, before I go clicking accept I'd rather actually know what I'm agreeing to.

Freakin' bureaucrats. Can't get clearance to find out about the mission before I accept the mission.

Hmm. The custom minions in here have no description on them. Well, the staff member does but the rest are blank.

You know removing a standard power, including the "melee set ranged attack", makes something worthless in terms of XP and other rewards, right?

Wait. These guys don't even have any attacks, do they?

...you know, it'd probably be less hassle on any modest-damage archetype if you either got rid of the "defeat all enemies" part of this or only put down a few special spawns and left the rest of the map empty.

Man, I figured this was some kind of training place for metapowered youth, but it's civvies all the way down. As it is, I just spent several minutes watching my mercs reload for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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Storyline - *. It'd be easier to buy this going the other way. A hero gets too much heat on them or finds their family in danger, so the shady government agency offers to give 'em a "clean" out in exchange for springing an Outcast, bringing in a rogue doctor, smearing a Senator, assassinating an ambassador, and mowing down orphans with a machine gun and setting them on fire. As it is the arc seems to operate under the principle that villains are that way because they contain entirely too many puppies and rainbows (while true of some, it rapidly becomes untrue after a few visits to the Zig latrine) and regard their progress toward the wholesale slaughter of innocents as a bad and regrettable thing.

Design - ***. Might be a bit higher if I hadn't played so many arcs already, but the asylum is just getting a bit old. The handful of customs are pretty reasonable, but anything you want to stick around to say words really needs to be at least a lieutenant. And that last mission either needs less whittling down little piles of hit points or none at all.

Gameplay - **. Way too many enemies in most of those ambushes for a lowbie to handle, and the entire last mission was a boring waste of time. Just watching the little orange numbers tick off, again and again and again.

Detail - ***. It's fairly solidly presented, but the missing descriptions on most of the minions in the last mission and the empty clue to start the first mission just shouldn't be there, and I really didn't get the point of the opening/closing clues to each mission that recap the mission briefing or the mission itself.

Overall - **. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. It you wanted to get ennui out of me, congratulations, you succeeded. But for an arc that's supposed to be about turning my back on my old ways, there's an awful lot of slaughter and destruction just on my boss's say-so. Really it's no different from working for Arachnos, except I can't go do extracurricular mayhem anymore.

Ah, well, sorry you didn't enjoy it.

Thanks for pointing out the typos anyway.

That's a model reaction from an arc author.
All reviews are subjective. Different people appreciate different things.

Well, to be honest, I did unpublish it after the 2 star review in game. Having an arc stuck with a 2 star average is basically a guarantee that it will never be played by anyone again. I'll work out some things and republish it when I think it's a bit stronger.

I'll post the new arc id at that point.

Probably too many changes to list here at the moment. Most of them would be irrelevent to most since not too many have played it yet anyway. Everything I did was done with the purpose of streamlining the arc and increasing the playing speed.

Have generally been playtesting it with a SS/INV brute at 2/+2/Boss/No AV's. At those settings, for me, the arc has been fairly tough but finishable in about 45-55m.

Republished... the new arc id is #340454.

Currently unplayable while I overhaul mission 4.

Well, we learn as we go. Things I've discovered over the past week:

1.) AE is a great mechanism for doing what I've always wanted to do, but the tool itself is clumsy.

When I started the revamp of mission 4, I went in with a pretty linear concept for what I wanted to happen... ie, 'give the player an actual choice about the outcome of the mission.' Now obviously either way the mission would have played out would have led to mission 5, so it would have been the illusion of choice rather than the reality of choice, but even offering that much led to a bunch of issues that I had to get my way through.

Some of them for people who might attempt to do this in the future, so that hopefully they won't have to repeat my entire trial and error process. Many of you probably already know these things, but I didn't and I am certain that other people new to the tool don't know them either:

a.) You cannot use an optional mission goal to trigger another a goal necessary for mission completion. MA gives you an error message when you try to do so. So if you are attempting two branching storylines within the same mission, you must somehow trigger the end event prior to the branches starting and hope the player does not complete the end event.

Sadly the only way that I've seen to plausibly accomplish this is goal placement, which definitely is not a perfect method. It is still entirely possible for the player to run through the entire map and finish the end goal at the back, complete the mission and miss the middle (optional) parts of the mission entirely.

2.) Once published, making changes to your arc while keeping it published becomes sort of a pain.

I don't know why it gives you the option to go local with your story, because going local does not help you at all. If you go local, what probably happened is that you attempt to make wholesale changes in the mistaken belief that when you 'publish' those changes, it will simply overwrite the existing published arc. It doesn't. It creates a new published arc with the same name.

Additionally, I don't know if anyone else has had this issue, but when using the 'republish' function, I've found that I have to repeat this sequence of actions before any changes in the publish arc will appear:

a.) Republish after making changes -> Click Edit -> Observe that the changes I made are NOT there -> Exit out of MA -> Go back into MA -> Click Edit and Wait for a bit -> Observe that now the changes are there.

For some reason, the first time I try to edit my published arc again after using the 'Republish' function, the edits I just made are not there and it reverts to the form it was in prior to starting work for the session. It's only after I exit and go back in that those changes will appear. Since it exits you out of your arc when you click 'Republish' anyway, (I've yet to figure out what the difference between 'Republish' and 'Republish and Exit' actually is), you would think the changes would already be there.

There have been instances where I lost a couple of hours of work because of this, especially on those occasions where, say, I did lots of editing to mission 2, 'republished', then went back in and didn't look at mission 2 and started my edits for mission 3.

This is pretty aggravating.

3.) I cannot figure out why the text tool sometimes refuses to allow me to write.

It only happens when I edit text that is already there, but sometimes after I delete a sentence and start typing a new sentence, the text I am writing will suddenly stop and the cursor will go all the way down to the end of the field. The only thing I can do at this point is to highlight over the entire sentence I've started to write and start over again. If it was an isolated thing, it would not be a big deal, but it happens often enough that it is a pain in the ***.

At any rate, those are some of the things I've noticed:

Mission 4 is revamped. It isn't as good as what I saw in my mind, because the tool is limited in what it allows me to do in that regard. Originally, there were going to be 2 ally contacts, each was going to offer a path for the player to take, then depending on which the player chose, 1 contact or the other would have betrayed the player, and that's the ally the player would have had for the final fight.

Obviously, because you cannot have an optional mission goal trigger one necessary for completion, that plan went out the window, along with one of the allies because the whole reason for his presence was now moribund.

I understand that it would be incredibly difficult to offer a wide array of predictable behaviors for allies to take once the rescue ally portion off the mission is completed, but I think 'fade out' needs to be one of them. Yes, seeing your in-mission contact vanish before your eyes would be unsettling at first, but I think after awhile, it would become just sort of a 'conceit,' ie something the players would be used to seeing in missions where you have to find the same contact several times in a row.

Right now, there actually is a 'fade out' choice, but it involves the character running to the nearest door, which is an actual action they take. Fading is not an action. Running away is and sort of invites the character to follow if the next step in the mission is to find the same contact again. Unfortunately, having the ally run out of the mission is the only way to get them to disappear right now and not have 3-4 versions of the same person on the map.

There were also some changes done to missions 2 and 3. Primarily the addition of a new boss level character who saved me some space because I was able to remove the custom boss-level characters I'd created and make do with already-existing templates that I could make some changes to.

I have not started editing mission 5 to reflect the wholesale changes made to earlier points in the arc yet.

-sigh-

And now, for some reason, we're back to all 4 of the sequential ally goals in mission four simultaenously popping when the player first enters the map. Fine, I'm tired of arguing with MA about doing what it's supposed to do and starting them after the last one is finished.

I didn't do a mass overhaul of the mission, but I reordered it and changed it mechanically so that the ally goals are divided by collection goals. This will probably slow the flow of the mission, but it's better than the massive information dump the player was getting as soon as he walked onto the map.

Alrighty, the fix on mission 4 seems to have worked. All of the chained goals are no longer springing upon entry into the map.

- Added tags to all of the in-mission clues to make it easier for the player to keep them in order.
- Fixed some issues with the 'captive animations' in mission 4 that were creating a disconnect.
- Hopefully fixed an ongoing issue with mission 3 where the goal that is supposed to occur before you start leading the ambassador to the exit door was not triggering until you arrived at the exit door.
- Fixed a problem where one of the bosses in mission 3 was constantly spawning behind the ambassador on the map when the player is supposed to defeat him first.
- Edited for typos.

The arc should be in decent enough shape to be played now with some degree of enjoyment.

Still on 2 plays after about a month after publication. It seems that either the early mediocre reviews while the arc was largely unfinished did more damage than even I envisioned or that the subject matter appears disinteresting at face value.

Ah, well. Can't win them all, I suppose.

Arc 340454 (latest number): The Long Road Back... stabbin'.

I'll just quickly say, this arc is planets apart from what anyone might expect from the earlier review. Maps are changed, dialogue has changed. I didn't play the earlier version, but it's possible your motivation and the contact's motivation has changed too.

I'm enjoying playing this, particularly the contact. I got through mission 3 so far before my NaNoWriMo guilt got me. Not sure when I'll get to continue this, but when I do I'll post a review.

This arc tries to remain consistent with canon, which isn't my strength, so I'll let others comment on that. But what I did like was how it puts you in the grey area between good and evil, without having to create a whole 'nother dimension to do it. Your own motives are still assumed to be villainous, it is a villainous arc.

Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
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