One A Day

Thank you for the review.

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Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve - The were a few times when dialogue seemed just a bit stilted. The Paragon Protector's bit in mission 4, for example. My understanding of PPs has always been that even if they aren't, they tend to regard themselves as heroes and actual heroes as anarchistic vigilantes. His line was a bit too "I'm evil" for my tastes. Crushification's dialogue was similarly stilted in a different sort of way. I think you can clean these up and make it a stronger arc.

The PP is actually a random Crey boss. It has to be, because of the break in Crey mobs at 45, and I didn't want to throw a PP Elite at a level 40. I'll have a look at his dialogue, some euphemisms might be in order.

Teh Crushifier is actually a reference to Star Control 3, which so far one person has gotten. I've never been entirely happy with some of his lines though, so they might bear a look-over.

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- Played it with my widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. I can't remember if there was an EB or an AV reduced to an EB, but there are plenty of named bosses of various factions littered throughout. The factions are pretty much all that they claim to be. If you can handle the listed factions, you can handle the arc with no issues.

Nothing bigger than a boss. There is one custom boss but he's actually easier than some of the standard bosses. I wrote this arc before the Great Badge Yank of '09, when I was still working on badges with my Blaster...and I'd had my fill of AVs and EBs at that point.

Malta is one of those groups that doesn't need AVs. The real "villain" behind them is a philosophy, not a person. They are far scarier when their leaders are just a bunch of faceless shadowy figures in a conference room somewhere. AVs are so prevalent in this game that they've become somewhat of a joke; giant sacks of hit points that are immediately curbstomped by any half-decent team, go to the Zig, then escape again when they're needed for another arc. Malta's leaders don't try to kill you with super powers that you can counter with your own super powers. They kill you with a phone call. They smear your reputation, kill your loved ones or turn them against you, destroy your life and everything you hold dear, and finally show up in the middle of the night and "disappear" you. And even though you're a powerful hero who has saved the world countless times and beaten up all the other Big Bads, it won't matter. You will never win, because as long as that way of thinking exists, the Malta Group will exist. And that is why I love them as adversaries.

Tonight's arc was "The Golden Age Secret of the Paragon Society" by Wrong Number. I tried to cheat a little bit, because in general I don't really do comedy arcs because I tend to stare with blank-facedness at most gamer and/or internet-related humor. So anyway, this author won one of the player's choice awards, so I figured that she was probably one that I might want to play at some point. Unfortunately, all of her stuff seemed to be comedy.

So you see...

Then she published this arc and in her thread said that it was not comedy, so I dusted off my favorite communist guerilla leader fighting for the future of the people of the Rogue Isles and went to go see what The Firecracker Kid wanted me to do. My communist guerilla leader showed tremendous self-restraint in not immediately skewering him as soon as he started talking to her the way he did. ;p

The Firecracker Kid, it seems, is a grumpy old man...

My Thoughts:

- There are two things about this arc that reinforce themselves at every turn. First, the author seems to have an appreciation for the Golden Age of comic books... and manages to hearken back to those days, make them relevant in the present and do so in such a way as to make them not seem DUMB.

Almost every 'retro' Golden Age homage I have seen in comic books has made the way people behaved in the golden age seem absolutely asinine. This author manages to capture the innocence of the time period without simultaneously making the people seem mildly retarded.

- The second is that this storyline is... well... so old-school that it is charming. It's nice every once in awhile, when so many modern books are full of schools full of kids getting blown up, heroines getting *****, heroes acting like villains, established villains with very public identities getting seats on the U.S. National Security Council, etc... to stop a plot by 'Nutsis' to create an army of cloned supersoldiers.

- You are aware, I think, that the final boss' name translates to 'Overalls?' At least I think that's the literal translation of it. If not, then I cracked up over nothing.

- Played it with my Widow at 2/+3/Boss/No AV and she mowed the 5th Column down like wheat. One minor glitch slowed the pace of the 4th mission. The last clue spawned in an odd location and it took quite awhile to find it.

- The EBs were very easy because both of them were extremely vulnerable to the AI's tendency to make critters try to run away from the poison d.o.t. attacks that all widow attacks stack. So basically their tactics consisted not of swinging the ten-ton hammer at me and trying to one-punch me like most other AV/EB types, but to run around the room, stopping every few feet and gathering as many allies as I left still alive by that point to come attack me before starting to run away again.

Overall, it was a nice romp. My communist guerilla leader got to smack down more fascists tonight, (though these were fascists of the more obvious type), and to help out a grumpy old man and his adopted son... and to stop an army of supersoldiers from bringing about the rise of the 4th Reich.

Not bad for a night's work.

Thank you so much for the nice review. I am really pleased that you enjoyed my first stab at a drama/serious arc.

I know the fourth map has that one iffy spot on it, but it is so perfect otherwise I used it and just hope people do not have too much of a problem with it. In my testing an object spawned in that spot about 1 out of every 5 times. If I get a lot of complaints about it, I will see what other map I can find to replace it with.

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Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve - You are aware, I think, that the final boss' name translates to 'Overalls?' At least I think that's the literal translation of it. If not, then I cracked up over nothing.

Sorry to say you cracked up over nothing. Uber Alles means "above all" and it is a reference to Das Deutschlandlied, "The Song of Germany", which is the German national anthem. It starts "Deutschland über alles" which translates into "Germany above all". I always learn something new with every arc I write since I do research on whatever the subject of the arc will be. This is one of those things.

Again, thank you for playing the arc and for the review.


WN

Apologies for my lack of activity over the last week. I've been in a galactically bad mood about a variety of things and when you are in that state of mind, it's probably best not to take it out on some poor, unsuspecting MA author.

Tonight I played through "A Toast to Sweet Villainy."

I admit that I was baffled for a long time until I realized that I was playing the 7th part of an ongoing storyline. Without having played the first 6, the story doesn't make a lot of sense because there is no context for what my character is doing at this point in time. It was an interesting arc to play at this point in time considering the discussion going on in the stickied challenge thread about time travel and causality loops, because that's essentially what this particular arc is about.

In a nutshell, while engaging in a plot of your own, you encounter a group called the Chronologists, who seem to simultaneously want to stop you in a personal way and to collect the treasures of the timestream. You are thrown into the timestream and spend a good portion of the arc attempting to get back. Once you successfully acquire the means to do so, the Menders of Oro attempt to stop you. Then you decide the acquire the treasures of the time stream for yourself, thereby creating the enmity of the group that you encountered at the beginning of the arc.

On that level, the arc is all about causation because it assumes that this group would never have developed into what it became without encountering you, but if you'd never encountered them, you never would have made the decision to set them on the path to become what they become.

At face value, I am not sure how to take it, because again, I am walking into Part 7 of the ongoing storyline and I am not entirely certain what message the author is intending to send.

My Thoughts:

- The custom groups are a hodge podge of seemingly unrelated minions and lieutenants from various other factions. I think the point is that the Chronologists can acquire anyone from any point in the time stream. I am not entirely certain why there is such a concentration of Tuatha, but I encountered a lot of them along the way.

- The actual Chronologist custom faction hits very hard for the type of mob. The minions tend to hit as hard as lieutenants. One of the lieutenants managed to to 2-shot my Widow. I don't mind when a Boss or EB does it. A lieutenant doing it is a bit much.

- The last map is unnecessarily long for what you are getting. There are only about 4 encounters that provide any reward worth speaking of and the map is 5 levels with a glowie that has the potential to be located anywhere. Placing that glowie at the 'back' location may help with the propensity for this to become a pointless 1-hour map trudge. That being said, there is a clever plot device in use in this map that I appreciated. There is also an elite boss battle that occurs at the end that had me going ???

I suspect this is another result of me walking into part 7 of an ongoing storyline.

Overall, I think this arc suffers from sequel phenomenon. That is, there comes a time when sequels can no longer stand on their own. As a single part of an ongoing storyline, this particular narrative might hold up, but on its own, the end result is some scratching of the head and befuddlement as to what is actually going on here.

I will probably end up doing 2 arcs today because I have some free time while I listen to football games on my internet stream. I decided to play a couple of the ones that people are entering into the Challenge.

The one I decided to start with is "One Too Many Lines Crossed."

The basic premise of this arc is that your character is infiltrating Arachnos in order to gather information and/or stop an uprising. In the author's thread about this arc, he mentions that the uprising is being led by a rogue member of the 5th Column and that the reason you are doing this is to prevent an all-out war between Arachnos and the Fifth Column and/or the Council.

The initial problem is that there is no immediate evidence of this possibility occurring while playing the arc itself. For the first three missions, (the ones that immediately deal with the uprising), the uprising comes across as so weak that I could not imagine this group ever presenting a real problem for Arachnos. The highest number of enemies I defeated in any given mission was about 5 people. The uprising doesn't seem to have any connection with the Fifth Column unless the Fifth Column sent a truck down to Mercy Island and distributed a crate full of guns and told the citizens to rebel against Recluse. They don't seem to have any distinct plans or even to have lucked into a way of threatening to topple Recluse.

On that level, the player immediately begins to question the necessity of the character even being there. The goal of the contest, as I see it, is to show that sometimes a hero must do things that challenge his/her moral compass in order to preserve the greater good. What good does my character's presence serve here? What does my slapping around the armed citizens of Mercy accomplish? What does my torturing some poor schmoe in a casino accomplish?

Without either: a.) some threat that is so immediate that I have no other choice than to take the darker path or b.) something that occurs that has very personal implications that would drive my hero over the edge, I don't really see what would motivate my character to take these actions.

In short, Arachnos would squash these people in short order whether I am there or not. On that level, there is no reason for me to 'cross the line,' so to speak. And on that level, what my character does makes no sense.

My thoughts:

- Your briefing for the first mission assumes you already know what is going on. In other words, there is no exposition and exposition is necessary to establish some sort of threat level and create some sense of immediacy. Throwing a player into the middle of what's happening tends not to work.

- The 'Psycher' Boss gives no reward. Apparently you have taken an offensive power away from him. This isn't a huge issue for me, but there are reviewers who will find this repugnant.

- There are numerous typos littered throughout. Too many to really list. I would take the time to clean it up before the contest deadline.

- Your Arachnos contact comes across as sort of a dimwit. A thug I can deal with. A stupid thug in an arbiter position is another story. Arbiters in general have reached the position they've reached because they tend to be a cut above the rest. In fact, most of Arachnos comes across throughout the arc as being somewhat mentally deficient.

- There is a brief nod toward philosophical debate between the relative virtues of fascism versus the relative virtues of communism. (I suspect that the Kommisar is the communist under discussion here... though why a dedicated communist would have attached himself to the Fifth Column in the first place is... ummm... well... maybe that's why he left the Fifth Column... although if he's persona non grata with the Fifth, then why would the Fifth be arming his revolutionaries? So I'm now giving myself a headache.)

At any rate, I had a moment of brief amusement because the person the arbiter was telling all of this was Ariadne, my Rogue Islands Communist Guerrilla leader, so her response to his unformed political rantings was sort of a... "Uh huh."

In fact, at the beginning of it, the sentence was awkwardly constucted enough that I thought for a moment that you'd read about Ariadne on the boards and that this whole thing was sort of a shout-out to another player's character, which I briefly found neat and then realized that your arbiter was talking about someone else entirely.

- Played it on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No Av. No issues. The first three missions are extraordinarily short. Mission 1, I defeated 5-6 guys. Mission over. Mission 2, I defeated another 5-6 guys. Mission over. Mission 3, I defeated 1 guy, (though this was the point of the mission). Mission over. And unfortunately as I said, out of the 5-6 guys, since 3 in each mission were those Boss level Psychers, there was no reward. So for the first 3 missions, I basically received a total of about 20 Architect tokens.

If you really want to make this group seem like they have any potential for their revolution to succeed, maybe you could create some running street battles against Arachnos or have them wiping out the RIP or something. As it stands, the revolution consists of about three groups of guys standing there on the streets with either a gun or a bat in their hands.

Overall, I'd have to say this is one of the weaker arcs that I have played for a variety of reasons. There is still some time left before the contest is over. I would take the time to reconstruct some things and make the revolutionary group more of a threat.

The second arc I played today is "A Clockwork Romance."

I tend to like canon-related arcs more and more because authors can dispense with a lot of the exposition necessary when introducing a completely new concept altogether. We are all familiar with the Clockwork King. And the vast majority of us have had Penelope Yin as a contact and have played through Lady Grey's Task Force. So there is at least a passing familiarity with the narrative from which this arc is drawn.

The basic premise is that the Clockwork King still wants Penelope Yin. Since the Clockwork King is more or less a floating brain in a jar, we can assume that this is less a biological imperative and more a yearning of a higher order. The storyline has parallells in Greek mythology with Hades and Persepone. Authors of these types of stories generally conclude that the woman in the non-relationship will ultimately, when confronted with the lousy options offered to her, accede to the necessity of the lesser of two evils and gradually come to accept the day-to-day reality of her situation.

As Persepone accedes to becoming Hades' bride, (at least for 7 or 9 (?) months out of the year, I can never remember), are we to assume that Penelope Yin will similarly accede to remaining with the Clockwork King once the immediate threat to the various kidnapped women has passed? The resolution of the story certainly assumes so, though the nature of the comic book narrative will probably demand that this particular ongoing story be revisited again, if not by Fredrik, then by another writer, who might build on what he has written here or might ignore it altogether.

Another interesting point to note about this arc is that it doesn't really have much to do with your character. Your character serves mainly as a mechanism to facilitate Penelope's choice one way or the other. Yes, you are the one who ultimately frees her from the Lost, but that really isn't a choice per se. The only alternative to that choice is to do nothing at all, which basically guarantees both the loss of Penelope and the loss of the other women. I suppose your character could ignore Penelope's plight altogether and try to track down where the Clockwork have all of the other women trapped, but that seems like a fairly poor choice as well.

At any rate, as I said, this story isn't really about your character. It's about the ongoing relationship between Penelope and the Clockwork King... a relationship with which your character plays only a tangential role.

I will add some thoughts at the end regarding this story and the contest, but for the moment, I will concentrate on the narrative itself.

My Thoughts:

- It appears as though you used the Westin Phipps model for Penelope's father. For some players, since Phipps is such a loathed figure, this might create a negative association with the arc immediately. At any rate, Penelope's father certainly bears a resemblance to Phipps.

- The way you segregated the different mobs in the first mission is very well done. Every time I have tried to do that with two different types of factions on the same map, the mobs have always ended up mish-mashed with each other.

- The writing is simple and the arc is fairly short. This isn't a negative for me, but it did leave me thinking it could have been fleshed out a bit more, even with the player's foreknowledge of the backstory. Given that there is time before the deadline for the contest, you certainly have the option of adding more if you feel it necessary.

- Played on my Widow as 1/+2/Boss/No AV. No problems with any of the factions. The set-up for the fight to free Penelope is a bit tough, but that is mainly because there are a couple of different groups of Lost in her vicinity and they all aggro at once, (or at least did for me).

I would say that this is a strong arc and well worth playing, especially if you like the ongoing Yin/King dynamic. It doesn't re-create the wheel, but it doesn't need to and is certainly a well-constructed addition to that ongoing narrative arc.

As far as whether this story fits the bill for the contest, I would say that it probably really doesn't. It stands up well on its own, but the character really isn't asked to do anything other than be a hero. The chain of events is couched in such a way that ultimately the decision to go to the King or not remains Penelope's to make. The implication is that your character would back whichever choice she makes and ultimately even fight the King for her to remain free if necessary. On that level, I don't ever see the hero do anything evil... which is what the contest asks for.

Thank you for your review. I had not thought about that old myth at all when I created it, but now that you mention it, it sure does have its similarities.

I'll try to explain why I consider this arc suitable for the contest. All in my opinion, of course.

Not knowing what will happen is part of making moral choices. If we knew the results of an action with 100% certainty it would just be a matter of mathematics. We are dealing with a couple of uncertainties here: what are the Lost going to do with Penny if we don't save her? What will the King do to her? Is the King bluffing about the other captured women? What will happen to our reputation if we save Penny, and what will happen if we don't?

If the player knows his canon he can perhaps recall that Penny actually likes the King and doesn't believe he will cause her any harm. That might affect the choice. Others have argued that by giving her to the King she can always be rescued later once the kidnapped women have been freed. That might certainly be true unless the King has decided to put her brain in his jar to be with him forever - he's insane after all. We can't be sure he won't cause her harm or kill her by accident, even if he loves her.

What it all boils down to is this: giving the girl to the insane King is not good. It's actually evil. Saving the lives of many by doing so makes it the lesser of two evils. That the girl to be "sacrificed" just happens to accept this choice as the best course of action as well does not change these facts, because we did not know for certain that she would until it was too late.

My own personal morality shines through here of course; the correct choice is the one which doesn't cause the mission to fail.

I just checked and the Mr. Yin I used is the same as the Mr. Yin standing inside his shop. The Mr. Yin we rescue from the lost has a more ragged appearance but that's not the one I used.

Well, I am sorry if what I said annoyed you. Just remember, all I am really doing here is playing the role of the Beta Reader. My ideas are worth nothing more than anyone else's. If you are happy with your arc, that is what is most important.

But at the same time, my reaction to it is what it is. I could easily pat everyone on the back and tell them how wonderful their stuff is, but I don't think I'd be doing anyone any favors by doing that. I don't star anything I don't think is ready to be starred and I didn't star your arc for that very reason.

I don't like to be the reason that someone's work doesn't get played and low-starring an unplayed arc is the quickest way to consign it to the 'never-played' bin.

One person's reaction alone is probably never enough to worry about. If you get several plays and the consensus of opinion is similar, then I would consider what might be causing players to react that way and adapt.

So tonight, in keeping with what I wanted to do over the weekend, I ran another of the arcs for Dr. Aeon's challenge.

"When the Bough Breaks" by PsychoPez.


I haven't done as many of these as I wanted to, but real life is interfering. I am in the midst of preparing to move this weekend, working and working on my own entry for the challenge. There hasn't been a lot of time for spare plays with all of that going on. As I did with the others, I'll consider the arc on its own merits first and then discuss it in relationship to the challenge at the end.

The basic premise of the arc is that the Rikti war is finally grinding down and that humanity has all but won it. So much so that, like many powers that find themselves on the losing end of a conflict, the Rikti have been reduced to grasping at scientific straws at this point, hoping for a breakthrough that will swing it back into their favor. This concept certainly has precedence in humanity's wars in the past. Toward the end of WWII, the German high command was engaged in similar types of hail mary activity.

Now whether canon supports this notion... that humanity has beaten the Rikti so badly that the Rikti are forced into this sort of desperation... is debatable and I don't think the developers have indicated anything of the like. But it is a concept that I am willing to accept at face value for the duration of the mission arc.

So the Rikti's desperate ploy is essentially to use the children of an enclave of civilian Rikti who are stranded on Earth for the purposes of genetically engineering them to become the equivalent of Rikti super soldiers... and to make the threat immediate, the process they are using ages the infant Rikti in a week's time... a device used by the author to make the threat more immediate.

Again, I am willing to go along with this for the sake of the arc, but the question that immediately sprang to mind was, "Civilian Rikti? How did they manage to find themselves in the middle of an invading vanguard force to get stranded on Earth?"

The second question was, "The Rikti have babies? I thought Riktification was a process inflicted on other races..."

But I might be wrong about that.

So anyway, we soon reach the crux of the matter. Are you willing to destroy these nascent living weapons before they can reproduce and become the equivalent of the Rikti master race, thereby lengthening and chance losing a war that humanity has basically already won?

I wasn't particularly wild about the choice, nor how it was executed. The third question that sprang to mind was, "Okay, if the baby Rikti supersoldiers are guarded by only one Rikti Nanny apiece, why can't I just kill the 5 nannies and carry the Rikti babies off to the Vanguard base to be rehabilitated when they grow up in a week's time? Or return them to their parents for that matter?"

I think at the very least, there needs to be a compelling reason why such an obvious 'out' isn't possible. There might have been one. If there was, I just missed it and I'm sorry.

My Thoughts:

- The contact's voice is good, but you have a tendency to over-colloquialize. By this, I mean that when we are writing someone who doesn't speak 'basic English' in a narrative, the voice of that character is very clear in our own minds, but the reader doesn't hear that voice at the outset. Which means we have a tendency to write things that cause the reader to take a double take or a triple take before he/she finally figures out what the guy just said. That happened a couple of times throughout.

- The new Rikti bosses are pretty cool. They hit fairly hard, but they don't seem grossly overpowered.

- The objective in mission 4 spawned in an odd location. All of the map sizes are small, so the arc is short to run, but for some reason, the guy I was supposed to find was located off the beaten path and I had to traverse the map a few times before I found him.

- There are a few typos littered throughout.

- Played on Ariadne, (my Widow - as part of her ongoing contribution to the war effort in hopes of getting people to sympathize with the plight of the poor and oppressed of the Rogue Isles), at 2/+2/Boss/No Av. If you can handle Rikti, you can handle this arc. Basically that's all there is in it... which is a good thing. I think a lot of authors get hung up on putting 'variety' in, which occasionally detracts from otherwise conceptually clean arcs.


Overall, even with the moments where I was like, "hmmmm... I don't know," I think this is a strong arc. It has a clean, linear narrative and the core concept of it is compelling. I think the ending could probably be stronger, especially since, as I noted, I am not entirely sure it is necessary to either do a or b, when option c seems immediately available to the character.


As far as the contest goes, I think this arc seems to do a bit of an end-around on it. I'm seeing a few authors go this route. That is, to me, Dr. Aeon said, "write an arc where a hero MUST do something evil for the greater good." To me, that implied that the onus was on the author to write a situation that necessitated that action, not to write a situation where the character actually has a choice at the end to do it or not do it. It is relatively easy to write a moral quandary... all of us face those every day.

It is much more difficult to create a scenario where evil for the sake of good is absolutely necessary.

Thanks for the play and the review, I already submitted this arc to the wise Dr. Aeon a week ago, but I'm taking all of the constructive comments, including yours, and looking to polish out the rough edges. Just want to comment on one thing...

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Originally Posted by Sister_Twelve As far as the contest goes, I think this arc seems to do a bit of an end-around on it. I'm seeing a few authors go this route. That is, to me, Dr. Aeon said, "write an arc where a hero MUST do something evil for the greater good." To me, that implied that the onus was on the author to write a situation that necessitated that action, not to write a situation where the character actually has a choice at the end to do it or not do it. It is relatively easy to write a moral quandary... all of us face those every day. It is much more difficult to create a scenario where evil for the sake of good is absolutely necessary.

I've noticed that a lot of people have a different take on the quoted line. Some thought you had to be 'evil' the entire arc. Your take on it makes the possibility of choice in my last mission seem out of bounds for the contest.

The choice is there for a few reasons. One, the arc was written just before the contest, and there because I knew some characters wouldn't want to complete the objective, and there was an out for that. I kept it in because it hits the player, not the character, a bit more because even though there is an out, they still must do the deed. It's a bit of cheap psycho-scholck, I'll freely admit, but it's there. Third, if I were a stronger MA author, my intent that either choice has a plus (You've eliminated enemies / you've chosen the moral high ground) to go along with its negative (You're a friggin' monster / you've condemned future soldiers) would be visible. I know that doesn't come across, I can only apologize and admit my weakness as an MA author on this.

All this said, thanks for the play through and the comments, for a first time MA author hearing things are mostly solid as well as good honest criticism on the bits that aren't is really helpful and appreciated.

Tonight I ran "Task Force Mutternacht " by Twelfth.

There is a distinct possibility that I allowed my irritation with game mechanics of these missions interfere with an objective analysis of the narrative here, but I really did not enjoy this arc. This had a lot to do with spending upwards of an hour searching for an objective in a Council Cave and then realizing that after having wandered around the place for an hour, the objective then chained onto another objective, which meant more time in a place I did not enjoy, then another objective... so you see. I very nearly quit... which I almost never do, especially when I am evaluating someone else's work.

I did, however, finally complete the council cave mission and the arc itself.

Essentially, you are asked to conceal a secret in this arc. In the process, you destroy another hero and compromise your own ethics. On that level, it meets the challenge put forth by Dr. Aeon for his competition. It is highly debatable whether what you accomplish is worth this, but that really isn't for me to decide. I would say that outside the constraints of playing the mission to completion, I doubt if any of my characters, heroic or villainous, would view the secret that you protect as worth your integrity to do so. The scales just wouldn't balance for any of them.

My thoughts:

- I think you attempt to be a little too complex with the storytelling here. Every mission in the arc has chained objectives. Unless your maps are very small, (which these really weren't), or really linear, what happens when you chain objectives is this...

"Okay, I'm following the story so far..."

"Hmm... where is this one..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"-sigh-"

"Okay, finally found it... now what were we talking about 15 minutes ago before I started looking for that?"

"Another objective... okay, now where is this one?"

"Hmmm..."

"..."

And repeat.

In other words, the arc never really builds up a lot of narrative flow, because a lot of the play time is actually devoted to wandering an empty map looking for the next objective in the chain.

- Mr. Inquiry. -mutters-

Okay, this dude is a boss, right? Not an AV/EB. This is the way the fights went. I approach. He does 900 points of damage. I start chowing down on purple. He hits again. I wake up in the hospital. I go back. Treat him like an EB/AV and pop 3 purples. 900 points. I pop elude. He drops me again. I finally build some momentum against him. 900 points.

Repeat.

And since you fight him 3 out of the 4 missions, this guy quickly gets old. Especially when Statesman, supposedly the top gun of this shared world, drops like a stone within 20 seconds against Ariadne without the three npcs because I lost in the hunt for States.

In other words, whatever sympathy I might have otherwise had for Inquiry's plight or the denouement of the story were vastly outweighed by the fact that he is so grossly overpowered that it saps all feeling I might have had for him.

- There are some map types I hate multiple glowie hunts on. Council maps along with big wide outdoor maps tend to top the list. I literally spent an hour in the council map before I finally reached the point where Inquiry showed up to smack me for 900 again.

- Played it on my Widow at 2/+2/Boss/No AV. It was... ummmm... humbling, to say the least.

Sorry for the mostly negative reaction. I try not to let outside factors interfere in my evaluation of arcs and I hope I haven't done so in this case. This one was just... grinding to me.


I generally don't do this, because I think it's generally best for a creator to come up with his/her own solutions to the problems I see, (if the creator really agrees that they are problems), but my suggestions to streamline this arc and make it more playable:

- You have the heart of a good story, but you go much bigger than it needs to be. If the goal is to protect Maiden Justice's reputation, make the preservation of that reputation somehow personally important to the hero. The 'greater good' doesn't necessarily have to translate to... 'if everyone see this, the concept of heroism will be shaken to its very foundations.' The 'greater good' could translate to something as simple as... 'if this gets out, my family will suffer.' Not necessarily the hero's family... perhaps the contact's family, (which would probably assume the contact isn't Indigo), perhaps the contact could be Statesman himself asking you to do these things, which would add another level to this.

That's probably too specific a suggestion though. What I mean in general terms is that this is at heart an emotional story... but you have it lost in large plot trappings. Any way that you could reduce the scale and up the personal factor would strengthen this.

- One of two things here... either lose the chained objectives or choose linear maps to accomplish them on so there aren't a bunch of huge delays in the narrative. The smooth cave map would work just as well as the council map for mission three because this story isn't about where it's set. It's about what is happening. Anything that creates artificial delays in the player experiencing those things weakenes the narrative.

- Tone the man down. I don't really care if I get full experience for Inquiry. Probably most people who have experienced the massive burst damage he deals would agree with me. 900 points is way too much for a boss, especially when he deals it consistently and almost never misses with it. As I understand it, Inquiry is intended to be a detective type hero, right? Well, what you have right now is a guy with the detective skills of Batman and the power level of Superman.

I would care more about him and what happens to him if I wasn't on the receiving end of quite so much "ow" throughout the story.

- Don't overplot. The heart of the story is good. Just bring it home in as clear a way as you can.

Those are my best suggestions. I hope they helped a bit.

- S12

Thanks for the unsoliticted review, S12, I was sort of hoping you'd take a look at it.