In The Darkness Creeping (ArcID: 347647)

The_Killbot_5000 · 11-22-2009 09:48 PM

Mission Title: In The Darkness Creeping
ArcID: 347709
Keywords: Custom Characters, Magic, Horror
Length: Long (4 missions)
First Published: 11/23/2009
Morality: Heroic
Level Range: 20 - 25
Enemy Groups: Custom
Story Status: Looking For Feedback

Description:
You've been contacted by the renowned Helen Bach, hero of Paragon City. She has reports of supernatural activity at a cemetery in King's Row. Citizens say a permeating sense of evil pervades the neighbourhood and that unnatural moans can be heard from within. Time to investigate!

Rotting flesh and charred bones, sure signs of evil!

Plaid skirts and undead minions, another tell-tale giveaway that something ain't right!

Skeletal guardians and ritualistic symbols in blood, now you're certain someone is up to no good!

I trust you will enjoy this arc ... if you survive!
Please leave constructive criticism. Reviews welcome.

K5K - The Killbot 5000
A Spanner In The Works Part One, ArcID: 336662, A Spanner In The Works Part Two, ArcID: 336665, Enter Japes, ArcID: 96001
In The Darkness Creeping, ArcID: 347709, When Dimensions Collide, ArcID: 412416.

GlaziusF · 02-24-2010 11:35 AM

Getting back into the review groove, and testing this thing's lowbie chops with my sub-20s Peacebringer. I realize he's a bit under, but he's all I've got.

Running this on standard difficulty with bosses on.

---

For real supernatural adventure it looks like I'll have to go to Helen Bach!

...yeah, sorry.

Hmm. Generic investigation. Alright. This is going to be the big outdoor blocks, which aren't generally good for placement of clues. We'll see.

Oh! No, it's the mausoleum. I'm surprised. The city block graveyard is pretty obviously taken from KR.

Taking the measure of these customs. Pretty reasonable undead powers, though the heal is a bit overpowered on minions. They get almost all their HP back!

Seems to be a number of identical distracto-tablets, all called "Tablet of Power" with the same message. Eventually one of them pops up an altar, with a single minion kneeling by it. It seems to summon several waves as it's destroyed, but as the waves show up in the ring canyon and the altar was on the lip, they don't do very much.

Overall I have no idea who this consonant salad of a god is or why he's important, but the minions seem pretty standard undeadly stuff. Helen, fill me in?

Okay, she doesn't know either. Fair enough.

---

My contact informs me that X-guy is an ancient supernatural entity associated with corruption and rebirth! Perhaps part of some group of... exiled deities?

I kid, I kid. Time to go to an abandoned warehouse and see what's up!

Hey! This is clearly an abandoned office! False advertising!

Also it's really dang tiny.

Wh- whoa! Surprise EB! Dang. I realize Helen has no idea about what's up here, but Surprise EB isn't good for anybody. Warnings, warnings.

Seriously, a warning would have been nice. Dude comes out of nowhere, and apparently he's going to fight me to the bitter end. The mission briefing gives me no idea I should even be worried about him.

He's Zombies/regen, so he's not too unreasonable a fight, but even so. Elite boss out of nowhere is a bit unreasonable for characters not even necessarily in SOs yet.

Per his description, the dude's a famous betrayer of the occult forces of good. News to me.

---

Okay, so now I get to tear the book up and put it into magic Ziploc bags. Interesting angle.

Wh- whoa! The leader, entry message? Another unheralded EB? Well, I'll see when I get there.

One of the battles breaks down into the X-guy's minions beating on each other, though I realize this is how battles work.

10 is a large number of things to find, but I manage. ...and yep, the Wraith is an EB. Still no warning about her, though apparently she's another corrupted good guy.

I guess I need to take her out to stop her from breaking the yellow-and-blue-make-JUSTICE seal on the magic Ziplocs, so here we go again.

DBlast/Pain Dom. Not too hard to take down... though the death message is worrying. Are both of these people going to return in the next/last mission?

---

Helen informs me that the dude from mission 2 has been resurrected and is trying another ritual, but that he'll be a pushover.

Of course, she's read the black manuscript and probably come down with a case of the Ia's, but let's take this at face value.

Huh. There's Soul Destroyer. He's... an elite boss. That's not much of a pushover.

And the Wraith and Helen show up as he rants about them joining him. (though Helen's a bit ahead of schedule, she shows at 3/4 health but he rants about her at 1/2.)

Helen's a DMias/Zombies EB, so I say screw it and pull out my Shivan. He takes the Wraith redux and Helen while I kite around and blast them with space squid rays.

Everybody has read from the same script so far, about the glories of their consonant salad, and Helen's no different. Your classic case of the Ia's. Kind of a shame, really.

The story ends with a simple summation of what's happened, as Helen is off to that great cult meeting in the sky.

---

Storyline - ***. This story isn't bad, flawed, or inconsistent, but it is rather generic, and there are a couple reasons that just doesn't work.

First, City of Heroes takes many ideas that have been popular in comic books and changes the names associated with them. The Family is a crime syndicate, Nemesis is a technological autocrat, Crey is an evil corporation, and all these are generic types. Similarly, the Banished Pantheon is a cult of the elder gods. (The Coralax are an elder race, which is a bit different.) So an ancient forgotten god who creates zombies would fit right in, and it's rather odd that they're not even mentioned, let alone not even used. The arc doesn't really do much to establish the consonant salad of a god these people are supposed to be worshipping, so I don't get much of an impression of him by the end, and overall it feels like a pale imitation of the Banished Pantheon rather than a legitimate threat in its own right.

Second, one of the things that really makes horror work is a perversion of the ordinary. That's why an abandoned house is way more creepy when there's a music box playing somewhere. Two of X-guy's minions I never get to meet in their non-cultist form, and I don't get much sense of Helen as a person before she turns into a cultist so the sense of horror isn't there.

Design - ***. The undead are visually nice, though generic, but I had some quibbles with the choice of maps. The opening cemetary was more Dark Astoria than Kings Row, the second mission was an abandoned office but described as a warehouse, and the third mission was supposed to be some MAGI vault, but it was actually a covert Longbow base.

Gameplay - **. Surprise elite bosses aren't a lot of fun, and there are more of them than there are missions. The Zombie/Regen can greatly heal himself, and the Zombie/DMias can tank your accuracy and damage, which are still somewhat problematic at the low 20s. And again, none of them are even announced.

Detail - **. The minions just bill themselves as generic skeletons, zombies, and ghouls, which really don't do much to distinguish X-guy from the Banished Pantheon. If they had gimmicks of some sort - claws or elemental attacks or demon weapons - they'd help to establish the personality of the god or his servitors.

Overall - **. Slightly off map choices and surprise EBs aside, the big problem here is that both the new group and most of its named bosses are encountered pretty much in isolation. I never got a feel for what they wanted to do or who they were.

Now, generic invocations of various horror elements can work, but mostly if you're using them in comedic setups or as some kind of contrast, and as far as I can tell, this story is trying to play everything straight-faced. If you want to keep the customs, this story needs more to establish their place in the city than a namedrop of MAGI and some Midnighter redshirts. Even with the radio missions' shallow story, we get to see most of the featured groups out in the city doing various things and get a bit of background in their descriptions. This arc doesn't really get a chance to do either.