The Rogue Raider - ID 346852 - Dr. Aeon's Challenge

Arc Name: The Rogue Raider
Arc ID: # 346852
Faction: Hero
Creator: @Darkfang
Difficulty Level: Balanced and written to be a thrilling challenge for the 20-29 range. You won't be asked to fight an EB without some help available to you, but if you want to play it safe, bring a friend. And fair warning: You can fail the last mission.
Faction: Arachnos, Longbow, Paragon Police, and a few surprises along the way
Synopsis: Paragon City will become ground zero for an international war unless a hero is willing to defy their ideology and help an infamous criminal that is defying his.
Estimated Time To Play: 1-2 hours, 5 missions.

Known issues:
* A few times, you will be expected to search a large outdoor map for a specific objective. I apologize for this, and while I realize it may be a turn-off to some players, conceptually there is nothing I can change. I made every attempt to keep it to a minimum.

* In the outdoor maps, rescued hostages just stand around after being rescued instead of fleeing to a nearby door, which in at least one case may cause a tiny bit of confusion. This seems to be a bug specific to the maps used, and I'm hoping they fix it in the future. In the meantime, if you have an objective that references a character, and you find a non-responsive version of that character, it is because that is the previous version you interacted with.

Looking for feedback - though I probably won't make any non-critical fixes until after the challenge has ended.

I played the arc and here are some thoughts about it.

The contact is very flamboyant, one time a charming individual, the next moment a murderous maniac. Well written dialogue that I liked a lot. I must admit though that if it had been possible then I would have tried to kill (read definitely not arrest) him in one of those briefings, if only in self defense and no judge would hold it against me!

I didn't finish the arc though as the first issue became problematic. My objective (a longbow commander) was nowhere to be found. After spending an hour searching I gave up. Search the objective is a very big issue in this arc. It has been done in 3 of the 5 maps with multiple searches in the last two. Problem is that the objectives are linked and you can search the whole map again after finding one objective. This get annoying fast.

About EB's and help. Providing help is a nice thing, but if you must fight AV's (EB's for solo) then one or two lt's won't be much of a help. Especially when these LT's manage to kill themselves earlier.

Then the story itself. This is what some people would call the idiot ball. The contact is a braggard, a liar, a murderous lunatic and you believe that a hero would trust him on his word? The thing to do when somebody like him claims such thing is to arrest him and then let the proper authorities deal with it. Helping him and becoming a criminal myself is not the correct thing, no matter how well written the dialogue is.

Grinning, that is some exellent feedback - some of the points I agreed with even before you said them. In almost every case, they are things I either wish I could have done differently, but the architect limitations forbade it, or things that, looking back, maybe I should have done differently, but was focused on using every element of the arc to tell the story. In those cases, I weighed the potential frustrations of gameplay against the emotional impact and plot development of the moment, and went for the latter. Next time, I am going to try harder to find the happy middle ground.

As for the idiot box and logical player character reaction to dialogue - yeah, you got me on that one. For the sake of telling the story I wanted to tell, and knowing that there is just no way to come up with a universally plausible story where the protagonist is any of a billion different character concepts, I came up with this mission statement: Tell my story, and rely on the player's suspension of disbelief if they are interested in seeing how the arc plays out. Because remember, ultimately (though this is not the reaction a designer would ideally want), the hero always has the option of saying "@#$% this, I'm going to the cops." - by quitting the arc. Again, not ideal, but in a program that allows no player dialogue options or mission branching, the choice is always "Choose to do this or go home."

Thanks for playing, and I'm sorry that game mechanics stood between you and the end of the story. If you ever feel like giving it another go just to see how it ends, you can even look me up, and if I'm available I will join you as a 'search party' assistant. But for now, just know that you're feedback will be directly responsible for some of my choices in the next arc I make.

P.S. - and this might get put in some dev suggestion box at some point, but I would LOVE it if there was a way to set a boss encounter to act as an ambush. There would have been multiple situations I would have rather handled this way.