Broken April (#350577) -- Dr. Aeon's Challenge

Arc Name: Out of Place (formerly "Broken April")
Arc ID: # 350577
Alignment: Hero
Author: @minimalist
Level: 40-54
Length: 4 missions
Enemies: Custom Groups, Arachnos
Synopsis: A city of heroes can be home to a lot of strange phenomena. The annual "Ghostmarch" festival is harmless paranormal fun for Paragon's arts community... so why has it attracted the attention of Dr. Aeon? Somehow, this is a sure sign that something is about to go wrong. Terribly wrong.

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So here it is, my entry for Dr. Aeon's challenge. It's an idea I'd been kicking around ever since the Architect was conceived, though modified quite a bit from the original conception.

Dr. Aeon himself is the contact, which I hope will not be construed as brown-nosing! He was, however, the best foil for the main character. Vernon von Grun was a close second, but lacked the appropriate backstory to have some of his actions make sense.

Problems with the arc so far:

1.) The first mission. Yes, it's an outdoor map, and wonkiness with spawn points is to be expected. I don't care; my workaround (as implied by the popup and a start-of-mission clue) is to recommend that the player find Aeon and wander around the fair first, before clicking on anything. Yeah, it's OOC, ruins your immersion, or whatever. Constructive suggestions are more than welcomed! These things always give me trouble.

2.) The order of the objectives in the third mission. Is there too much running around? I tried to change things as much as possible to minimize that, but you never know.

3.) The last mission: Grandville beach, no minimap. Are the objectives too difficult to find? I tried to give the hostages guards and animations that could be spotted from a distance, and easily distinguished from the normal spawns.

Of course, any other comments and criticisms are more than welcome. Thanks!

Just gave it a play, here are my comments for what I managed to get through:

Great humor, loved the parade, and I spent my time just examining everything. I really wish Steel was really depicted how it is shown here, rather than the gang-ridden hellhole it actually is.

Your sightseer bios look a bit off, and your Crackpot an Sane Alvin NPCs are using the standard bio.

Anyway, I couldn't get past beyond the glowie objective, whatever was supposed to spawn after that, never spawned, and I restarted this arc four times.

I've left it unrated, but you seriously need to look into that.

Nuts! Unfortunately, I think something broke horribly when I changed maps temporarily (the the Carnival Commercial map). After that, I noticed that some objectives were left off the map entirely, even though it gave no errors and I was below the "total objectives" limit (23). I thought I had it fixes, but I might have accidentally reverted to an earlier version.

Sorry about wasting your time like that. I'll look into it within the hour.

Okay, the mission is now fixed.

Apparently, somewhere between all the map-changings, the City 02 map got REALLY finicky about how many objectives I could really assign. I always had under 25 total objectives, and well under the maximum number of individual objectives (boss, ally, etc.), and I don't see any irregularities in the text file, so I'm not sure why the map suddenly got all grumpy over it.

It was a long and painful process to figure out how much to remove, and I think I was too cautious this time around; I'm experimenting with adding things back in stepwise, because unfortunately the fair seems a little more sparse now.

But for now, the mission is fixed! Thanks for playing, and for letting me know!

Filled in some missing text, clarified some points and added in some new clues, and most importantly, changed the arc title to "Out of Place."

The original title was ripped from a novel I love, and I just couldn't think of anything better or more evocative. I'm terrible with titles.

The new title's a bit blah on the surface, but it's a decent enough play on words, considering the plot. I'll probably change it again soon. Feh.

Got around to replaying it again, here are my comments below (with spoilers):

Funnily enough, one of the interlopers needed for the objective had already been defeated by the patrolling ghosts before I reached it.

I think you've done a good job in giving the hero some characterization, but not so explicit that it felt jarring.

Nice use of the busy dialogue too.

Interesting use of mechanics in mish 3 to meet up with Neutrina several times. Related to your second question, I only ended up finding Aeon right after I completed every other objective, so the points where he chimes in didn't really work in that case. Maybe you should consider placing Aeon at the very front of the arc, unless you have and the map is just really weird in what it considers as the front, in which case maybe put him at the start of the objective chain. I got the mission complete after collecting the scanner data while still needing to lead Ray to the door, I'm not sure if that was intentional or not.

I think the final briefing could add a bit more explanation on why Aeon will be fighting you, currently I read it to be a rather off-hand remark by Aeon. Being able to save civilians was a nice touch to the overarching story. Related to your third question, I didn't really have any problems locating the objectives, though I had a pretty good idea where they would probably show up. I felt Aeon's transition from maniacal eccentricity to waxing poetic was a bit sudden, I would try to ease it in gently more.

Overall, I thought it was a fun and cool arc. There were some really pretty side attractions, and the secondary plot about the art people helped to reinforce what you wanted to tell. Ultimately the main draw of this arc is on Aeon's characterization, which I did find to be very entertaining. This is probably the most lighthearted (or perhaps, maniacal) entry that still has a hero committing an 'act of evil'.

Thanks for the feedback!

The objectives in mission 3 are troublesome, yeah. There's only one "front" ally spawn, and assigning the first two versions of Neutrina to the "middles" resulted in annoying backtracking 7 out of the 10 times I tried it.

Man, spawn-selection can't come too soon.

You're 100% right about the EB warning in mission 4 being shoehorned in -- previously I didn't give any warning, but the devs are very particular about giving explicit EB warnings, so I thought it best to follow their pattern if I wanted to win, heh. The Still Busy Dialog had some room, so I slipped a little more of an explanation of why you have to fight in there.

I do view Aeon as more bipolar than anything, and he ought to be capable of some introspection -- after all, he eventually becomes Professor Echo. I didn't think the transition was that abrupt (in the final debriefing, his tone should be read as contemptuous, and he's coming down from his mad-science high), but the souvenir was maybe a little too poetic/thoughtful to be Aeon's authentic voice. I'll try to find ways to tone it down while still saying what I want to say.

Thanks again for the comments!