Yet another review thread

I'll add it to the queue, but I'm in the middle of moving into a new apartment, hence the slow (understatement) pace of reviews lately.

I got a new one that I'd like some feedback on.

Arc ID: 347029
Arc Title: Breaking The Barrier (And Putting It Back Together)
Factions: Soldiers of Rularuu, Malta Operatives, Nagans
Morality: Heroic
Length: 5 Missions
Level Range: 40-54
Description: A group of aliens may have bit off more than they can chew when an experiment with stolen portal technology threatens the stability of the Universe itself, allowing the soldiers of Rularuu free access to our dimension. (Sequel to arc# 3326 "The Portal Bandits")

Mistaken Identity
ID: 349473
Author: @PW

I'm going to dispense from my usual format for this one, since I forgot to make notes as I went along, and the missions are pretty short so there would be like, one note per mission anyway.

I gave the arc thread a quick read through before writing this thread to get an idea of any notes you had on the arc before I ran it (Sometimes people say things in their MA thread that they don't mention in the MA description), so think of this review as both a review and a kind of reply to your own feelings on the arc.

Mechanically there's really nothing wrong with the arc so I'm not going to say much about that, since I get the feeling it was the story you really wanted feedback on anyway, but a few quick notes:
-In the first mission, the ally spawned so close to the EB that the EB aggroed when I was fighting to free the ally - I ran it on my brute so it wasn't really a problem but that is one weakness of using such a tiny map.
-In the... 4th mission I think? The one in the office, I'm not sure what the deal with "Electric Barberella" is supposed to be. Maybe it's a joke I don't get, or she's just meant to add some flavour to the mission - if it's the latter, she spawned behind the actual boss of the mission, so if I wasn't being thorough I probably would have just skipped her entirely - check your spawn locations for that one.
-Mission 2 is extremely empty - maybe add a patrol or two to liven it up a bit (They don't even have to say anything, just something so that the nurse isn't the only NPC in the entire map)

Anyway, storywise I've got a lot more to say.

The first thing I felt right off the bat is that the story is extremely similar to "Blight". Now, I liked Blight, but it's not a perfect arc, and if you wanted to take that premise and run with it in a different direction I probably wouldn't mind, but I think the trouble here is that you take the premise and run in the SAME direction. I already did Blight so doing such a similar arc kind of clarified to me what exactly I felt was wrong with both Blight and this one - which is kind of a good thing for me I guess, but it means I was focusing on the flaws of your arc rather than being swept up in the story, and that's never a good thing.

I think my first complaint, and this is similar to Blight, is that the player character is almost too quick to reject the doctor's explanation - I know the idea is to avoid railroading the player along and have them think "Well this is stupid, I'd never believe that story", but having the PC go "This is all wrong!" straight from the mission 1 intro is sort of the same problem in the opposite direction - in Blight, it starts out as a fairly normal arc and throws you the curveball in mission 3, so it's reasonable to be suspicious. But in this story, we've got absolutely no background information to go on, so it seems like we're just being paranoid to IMMEDIATELY distrust the contact the first time we've ever spoken to them.

Second complaint (I'm not going to just complain for the whole review and go "YOU FAIL" at the end - I'm just starting off by getting my thoughts in order and the 2nd half of the review will be suggestions). Is that it doesn't really feel like a "horror" story. Now, I'm going to go on a tangent a bit here and point out that all the horror stories I've written so far have been supernatural horror - monsters and such. That's not the only kind of horror that can be written though, and I'm assuming what you're going for here is "natural" horror - the idea that terrible things can happen without dark gods or demons or whatever influencing people to do evil. That's fine, but I think the trouble is you've confused a horrific idea (The idea that you've mistakenly killed a bunch of innocent people) with a horror story - horror isn't just about the story, it's about the atmosphere, which is what I feel like this arc is lacking.

Third complaint is that you mentioned the Ship of Theseus paradox as an inspiration - which is a really nifty idea but I just don't think you really did much with it. Admittedly, this is a minor complaint - the arc never claimed to be ABOUT the paradox; it was just a jumping off point. But I think the idea that "Am I still the same person if every piece of my body has been replaced?" is one worth exploring. Note that one part you also stumbled on that idea here is the mention that 50% of your brain was left intact - for the paradox to really work, EVERYTHING needs to be replaced, including your entire brain.

Last complaint, before I get to the part of the review that you might actually find HELPFUL, is that I don't really think the story you've written meets the parameter of "Doing evil for the greater good", because in the two possible scenarios of the arc (Either you're insane or you aren't), you've only done one of those two things; if you're insane, you've done evil for no real reason, and though YOU might have believed it, that doesn't really make it "The greater good". If you aren't insane, then you haven't done anything evil at all, because all you've done is beat up a bunch of Nemesis drones.

Okay, so, suggestions? This is tricky really, because to be honest, I could kind of feel while running the arc that you didn't like it while writing it - my best suggestion would be "If you don't love the story you've written, don't publish it." You mentioned that you had the idea stuck in your head but didn't actually LIKE the idea that much, and I kind of felt by the end of the arc that you just threw up your hands and said "There, done, now I can move on."

But "Unpublish the arc" is a bad suggestion since it doesn't really help you IMPROVE any. So here are some thoughts in no particular order about what you might want to do with this arc - note that some of these might contradict each other; I see this arc as a kind of "Primordial" idea so it could still go in a lot of different directions. The intention is that you'll pick out the ideas you like and ignore the ones you don't.

-First, horror. As I said earlier, horror is about atmosphere, and even with natural horror, the player needs to feel constant stress or they'll lose the mood. The only time someone should relax in a horror story is if you want them to let their guard down so you can hit them with something even more horrible.

-My biggest suggestion here is to rewrite the contact to sound much more sinister and remove the "Interview" format - keep the "Transcript" idea because that could work, but change it into the doctor recording a personal log about a patient rather than an interview log with the patient.

-I can't really give you any specific suggestions as to what the doctor should sound like, but the image I have in my head is something dark but ambiguous - maybe he is trying to help the player, maybe he isn't. But even if he is being helpful, he should mention antiquated treatment techniques like the old favorite electroshock, or other things that at the time people THOUGHT were helpful but are nowadays considered cruel - give the idea that he's extremely out of touch with modern medicine so that even if he's totally benevolent, you still wouldn't want him as your doctor.

-A random brainstorm I just had would be to maybe structure the mission briefing as a retrospective recording with the doctor describing something you did, then when you play out the mission it maybe doesn't go exactly as he describes it, giving the idea of a disconnect between your view of events and his view of them (Or, alternatively have the mission ending dialogue structured like that).

-I think a good way to differentiate this arc from Blight would be to have the PC be a bit more accepting of the "Maybe I AM a patient in a hospital" scenario. In Blight, maybe the player might have started to think that, but the PC never did. Insanity is kind of a hard topic to tackle in the mission architect because real insanity is so much more horrifying than the popular perception of it, and it's kind of hard to understand crazy without actually being crazy. If you really want the player to feel like a mental patient though, a good idea would be to push the idea of a correlation between how violent they are and how violent the world is - maybe once the PC starts accepting the treatment the missions get a lot less combat oriented? Like I said, it's a hard thing to represent in the AE because you can really only write a linear story (Though with creative use of failed objectives you can put different interpretations on each mission depending on how the player acts).

-Related to the Ship of Theseus paradox is another interesting question "How is a full-scale, functional model different from the object it represents?" They're both fundamentally about identity, and while your arc is also about identity, it's not really the same thing as what the paradox asks. In your story, you assume a RADICALLY different identity - at least if the doctor is to be believed, or you haven't changed at all. The question of the paradox is "Even though I don't feel any different, am I still the same person?" It's a very introspective dilemma, and another one that's hard to deal with in the AE. A good example of an arc that deals with that sort of topic is the redside arc "Automatic Villainy" from Technician Naylor. Now, for obvious reasons they end the arc with "It was all just a lie as part of a Nemesis plot", but it does raise interesting questions halfway through - if I really AM a robotic duplicate, programmed to look, feel, and act exactly like the person whom I'm designed to copy, and am in fact indistinguishable to any sort of test - then am I really different from them at all? I could probably go on about this for pages and get involved in cloning and all sorts of other similar "Self-identity" problems, but you get the idea.

-I understand that you don't want to write a "The ends justify the means" story, and that's fine. I don't think the way you wrote it is the way to go about "Doing evil for the greater good" story, though, because the ideas of "Good" and "Evil" require consciousness of your actions. If someone is literally unaware that they're doing something evil, then they really aren't doing evil because there's no malicious intent - in their own mind they're doing something heroic. A good "I had to do evil to do good" story should really draw attention to the cognitive dissonance that comes up from making a choice like that. The best way I think to go about it is, instead of just creating a "Gray morality, ends justify the means" scenario, give an up and up heroic character an impossible choice - the kind of choice where something horrible happens in EITHER case, and they have to weigh the consequences of each.

-An alternative to that is to give the heroic character a relatively easy choice, but that still involves making a sacrifice of some kind - e.g. the classic "kill one to save a thousand" scenario. It's an easy choice from a utilitarian perspective but still pretty difficult morally.

-In both the above suggestions, you don't actually have to give the player the choice to make - you can write it so that the PC makes the choice for them. You could also use the "Multiple ending" trick to let the player make the choice. In either case, however, the PC and the player should really feel the consequences of whatever choice is made. I think the best kind of story to fit Dr. Aeon's criteria would be the kind of story where the hero saves the day, but still feels guilty about it.

Anyway, this is getting really really long. I jumped PW's arc ahead in the queue a bit since it was actually quite quick to run and she was nice enough to review a couple of my arcs, plus the subject matter interested me. I think I'm going to do Lazarus' arc next because he's also written quick reviews of quite a few of mine (I won't be able to get to it for a few days, though).

Thanks for the very detailed review!

Quote:

The first thing I felt right off the bat is that the story is extremely similar to "Blight".

I actually have not played Blight. I had vaguely thought it had something to do with a plague or zombie apocalypse though. If this story is substantially identical to it, though, that definitely would be a major problem with its concept (not much sense making a copy of an existing arc...).

Quote:

it doesn't really feel like a "horror" story .... you've confused a horrific idea (The idea that you've mistakenly killed a bunch of innocent people) with a horror story - horror isn't just about the story, it's about the atmosphere, which is what I feel like this arc is lacking. .... horror is about atmosphere, and even with natural horror, the player needs to feel constant stress or they'll lose the mood. The only time someone should relax in a horror story is if you want them to let their guard down so you can hit them with something even more horrible.

Hmmm, this is an important point and does sound like something I need to work on. I think I see what you mean, though. The tone of the arc is rather uneven and maybe too much on the clinical side. Perhaps I need to build up more of a sense of dread.

Quote:

I could kind of feel while running the arc that you didn't like it while writing it - my best suggestion would be "If you don't love the story you've written, don't publish it." You mentioned that you had the idea stuck in your head but didn't actually LIKE the idea that much, and I kind of felt by the end of the arc that you just threw up your hands and said "There, done, now I can move on."

I'm afraid there is some truth to this.

Quote:

-I think a good way to differentiate this arc from Blight would be to have the PC be a bit more accepting of the "Maybe I AM a patient in a hospital" scenario. In Blight, maybe the player might have started to think that, but the PC never did.

I kind of wanted the starting point to be, "Okay, I got defeated and hit 'go to hospital'.... whoa, they aren't letting me leave. That's never happened before. What's going on?" Possibly I need to rework this to communicate this idea more effectively; along with your suggestion to rewrite the doctor's actions and lines to seem more sinister. Going to have to give this some thought.

Quote:

The question of the paradox is "Even though I don't feel any different, am I still the same person?" It's a very introspective dilemma, and another one that's hard to deal with in the AE. ... if I really AM a robotic duplicate, programmed to look, feel, and act exactly like the person whom I'm designed to copy, and am in fact indistinguishable to any sort of test - then am I really different from them at all? I could probably go on about this for pages and get involved in cloning and all sorts of other similar "Self-identity" problems, but you get the idea.

The idea of "Who are you, really?" and "How do you know for sure that you're really you?" and so on, are questions that I had in my mind when trying to develop this arc. I tried to touch on this in the actual story, but it is hard to portray this in much depth in AE, as you mentioned.


Thanks immensely for the detailed feedback. You've given me a lot to think about.

CC - would you mind taking a look at my Aeon Challenge Arc?

Arc Name: Task Force Mutternacht
Arc ID: # 349522
Morality: Hero
Creator: @twelfth
Difficulty Level: 30-54 (with some level caps due to allies)
Enemies: Paragon Police, Longbow, small custom group, Paragon City Heroes
Synopsis: Indigo is looking for the best, most trustworthy heroes in the city to help her find evidence of a horrific crime. A trial that will test your resolve, your ethics, and your heart.
Length: 4 missions, small to medium maps. LOTS of reading.

Breaking The Barrier (And Putting It Back Together)
ID: 347029
Author: @Lazarus

Skipping around in the queue again, since I said I'd review this one next. Also, I'm going to stick with the same format as my last review, as I felt like the "As I go along" notes aren't really as useful as a more detailed "final" analysis. Generally if I've forgotten about a point by the end of an arc it probably wasn't important anyway.

Also, I ran the prequel to this arc for background but that won't be included in the review (I didn't run it in a "review" capacity, i.e. taking notes and making sure to be thorough about hidden details, I just did a quick run to get the background story).

(Unrelated: This was my soundtrack for the arc, which gave it an... interesting mood to say the least)

It's kind of hard to sum up my feelings about this arc. I didn't hate it, but I didn't really like it either. It kind of... washed over me without leaving a particularly distinct impression. I think that mostly stems from the fact that it seems to be very similar to how a standard CoH arc plays out, which could be what you were going for, but I've always found those sorts of arcs rather dull. There aren't really any characters you get to know very well, and the contact seems to exist mainly to provide exposition. I also got the impression that you planned a follow up to this one, as suggested by the souvenir - which kind of causes it to suffer from "Middle child" syndrome that affects a lot of trilogies - it doesn't really have a real beginning or ending so it kind of just wanders around a bit until it stops. It's actually a bit better than most trilogies in that regard, because while the beginning is a bit forced, the ending does at least seem to provide some sort of conclusion to the storyline of the arc.

Design-wise there were a few issues, but I do want to point out that the custom enemy group is extremely well done. They use a wide variety of powersets but don't stack in such a way to become frustrating, and the different enemy types are visually distinct which makes it easy to pick out "High threat" targets at a glance without having to tab through them all (Though radiologists and brawlers are a bit similar looking with the green). It's almost a shame that you only fight them in the first and second mission, malta and Rularuu are WAY more of a pain than they are. This is a good arc to look at for anyone wondering how to design a good custom enemy group.

One thing I felt was that the story feels like it's JUST SLIGHTLY shorter than the number of missions. This is mostly evident in the 2nd mission, which has an extremely long map and no important details until the very end. My suggestion here, rather than tossing in a bunch of unnecessary details into mission 2, would be to roll mission 1 into mission 2 - you could set up the objectives to chain such that the first teleporter is in the front of the map, and when you find that it activates the rest of the stuff you have to find in the back (The intro could be the same as mission 1, then when you find the teleporter it gives you a clue leading you to dig through to the Rikti base to find the others). It would help a lot since I found the pacing of the arc tended to drag a bit.

The allies also didn't seem particularly helpful - though that might have been a consequence of the difficulty I ran the arc at (+0/x3/bosses/no AV), which meant they tended to get creamed by Rularuu and Malta spawns - especially Suziku who was only a LT. Iron Samurai had better survivability but he didn't really seem to do a whole lot other than not die. I guess that's tricky to balance though, since if you boosted their effectiveness they'd be overpowered on a lower difficulty.

Storywise, my main complaint is that stuff just kind of happened without much rhyme or reason to it. I'm not sure what Malta's motivations were during the whole thing (To steal Portal Corp tech was my guess? They seem kind of tacked on though), and ultimately it just felt like I was running around doing stuff just because my contact told me to.

I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here and talk about theme. Now, I know Venture always rags on people for "Just a bunch of stuff that happens", but he actually does have a point most of the time even if he's unnecessarily snarky about it. Essentially, theme is what separates a "Story" from an "Anecdote". A theme can be any number of things, but in general it's the thing that unifies the entire story arc aside from the basic plotline. It can be a particularly interesting character, a general tone to the arc (Comedy falls under this one), or even just a message that the author is trying to convey. The trouble is, without a theme, story arcs tend to be really boring. A challenge arc can make up for it by using interesting gameplay mechanics, but usually those are only one or two missions long since the point is the trick gameplay, and once that's been mastered there's nothing else there (Unless each mission has its own unique challenge and the arc is meant as a sort of gauntlet/marathon). A good rule of thumb: If none of the characters in the arc develop in any significant way (Character development can include the PC for this), if each of the missions could be replaced with a piece of static exposition and have the same effect, or if each of the missions could be completed individually and not lose anything, there's no theme to the arc. Ultimately, the player needs to FEEL something for it to be an interesting story, and lacking a strong theme usually means the arc is lacking emotional content.

Anyway, to bring this back to the main point, theme is what this arc is lacking. It's kind of tricky for me to recommend what to do about this since there are so many things you COULD choose as a theme, but here are some quick ones off the top of my head that would fit the story as written:

-The danger inherent to portal technology (It's implied by the missions but never really examined by the story)
-The relationship between humanity and the Nagans: They seem pretty darn friendly compared to how they talked about humans in the end of the previous arc - it would be more interesting if the alliance was a lot more tense and very clearly one of convenience because of the greater Rularuu threat.
-Maybe something to do with Malta or Rularuu's motivations. Both are interesting groups but they're just kind of "The bad guys" in this arc.
-Perhaps make Iron Samurai a more interesting character - he feels like "Mr. Exposition" right now. The contact could be a police scanner and it would be more or less the same.
-Ditto for Suziku, though she feels more like a secondary character in the whole of the arc, so making her the focus might not be a good idea.

Those are not the only possibilities you could do, just some quick things I thought of that could be added without fundamentally altering the design of the missions but making the arc much more interesting from a story perspective.