To Dream of Nothing (#374644) - Dr. Aeon's Second Challenge

"To Dream of Nothing"
Arc ID: 374644
Length: long-ish, 4 missions (small/medium maps, but lots of clues, and some linked objectives; no defeat-alls though)
Level range: 5-10
Enemy groups: Council, Family, custom group (stock Council / stock Nictus, with a custom boss)
Keywords: Solo Friendly, Canon Related, Mystery
Synopsis: A strange anomaly has nullified the powers of every powerful hero and villain in Paragon City; the only ones who can still use their powers are new heroes and petty villains. You are a new hero fresh after your first mission, and the FBSA sends you to Positron right away. He is desperately trying to find the cause of the anomaly, and asks you - as a hero who still has powers - to help him in his investigation.
Edit: There is an EB in the last mission, but you have two LT-level allies with you -- I soloed it with no trouble on a level 5 stalker at the lowest difficulty (no bosses makes it downgrade to a normal boss). My other test subjects were an exemped level 30 scrapper [with bosses on, so the EB was an EB; I also had to fight the EB and the ambush from the previous objective at the same time 'cos I screwed up, whoops!], an exemped level 43 brute and an exemped level 23 warshade. Lower-level characters should probably play with no bosses to be safe, but both powersets of the EB are standard/standard.

Notes: I have a hunch I got in over my head this time. I tried to make an epic-horror-mystery-action-drama with gameplay that works for new and old players, wall-of-text details that add to the story (but aren't necessary to enjoy the plot for players who don't want to spend a lot of time reading them all), lots of connections to 'serious business' COH lore (some of which I had to make up on the spot, other stuff extrapolated from The Origin of Power et al). Combine all this with the fact that I'm not a native speaker, and I'm almost 100% sure I messed up at some point. :P

I intend to enter this for the challenge, but I'll definitely have to refine it before that; feedback is very much appreciated!


-- Z.

I'm not expert on many of the canon tie-ins in this arc, I hope you'll get others trying it too. But I did have some comments, sent in PM. Good luck with the contest!

Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

Thanks for the feedback via PM!

I made a few changes to the arc, mostly fixing minor inconsistencies and making the "custom" group stand out a little bit more. I'm still iffy about some of the Nictus-related lore, but what can ya do.

(as a side note, even though I only have 3 custom characters in this arc, I am at 97% of the limit. I might have been a tiny bit too verbose. /cough)


-- Z.

Kinda-sorta-update. I tinkered around with objective chaining, but I'm still not entirely happy with how the allies work in the 3rd and 4th mission. Any input on that is welcome (along with comments about the story itself... or anything else, really. I don't bite, honest!) I also playtested it on some more characters and it's curious how my SO/IO'd level 43 brute had a harder time than my zero-enhancement level 5 stalker. Hmmm.

Another note -- it looks like there are some bugs with objective text at the moment. If I have two different objectives linked via the same plural objective text ('containers to find' in mission 2) and one of the objectives is finished, it won't always show the right objective text for the remaining objective. I've genericized them for now, but is there a better solution?


-- Z.

I think I hit that bug too. So if you've got:

1.Objective Lance: Plural: Corporals to rescue ; Singular: Rescue Corporal Lance
2. Objective Punnish: Plural: Corporals to rescue ; Singular: Rescue Corporal Punnish

Then saving the first person may result in the singular objective, "Rescue Corporal Lance", which you already did. Genericizing works okay, you just have to "Rescue last Corporal" for both of them.

Arc: 379017: Outbroken See all your old friends in the Outbreak Tutorial sequel!
Arc: Coming Soon: The Incarnate Shadow Shard of Fire and Ice Mender Rednem needs you!
Massively.com opinion poll: Please Help Save CoH!

Yeah, I had that happen in my previous arc as well... wasn't the case here, though. I went through every single objective and it looks like it was a combination of things mostly related to the custom group:
- having a 'battle' between the custom group and council in mission 3
- having the custom group as the surrounding enemy group for bosses not within the custom group (edit: it was necessary for me to do this, since you can't make "boss" encounters out of non-custom mobs within a custom group)
- attaching the custom group to an ambush

Now here's the weird thing, the custom group only has the following mobs:
* two Council minions (5-10)
* two Council lieutenants (5-19)
* two Nictus bosses (1-54)
* one custom EB (1-54) set to "don't auto-spawn"
The custom group also works fine if I set them to surround the custom EB, and setting them to be the enemy group in a mission works too. Any idea what might be causing this? (and other than the warning, it seems to have no effect; I have yet to see overleveled mobs during my tests)
Edit: I finally managed to resolve the warning, thanks to GibsonMcCoy's post here. Apparently mixed groups cause the level range detector to get all wonky -- good to know!

Another oddity about the "proto-shadow cyst" destructible I haven't seen with anything else: the ambush I tied to it doesn't seem to work right. Instead of firing off at the appropriate HP%, it goes off ~10-15 sec AFTER the cyst is already destroyed.


Yay for bugs!


Edit2: Alea iacta est. I marked the arc Final and submitted it to the contest.


-- Z.

Mini-bump... for a possible bug.

I've gotten two reports so far that the last objective (defeat [REDACTED]) doesn't show up properly after destroying [REDACTED]; both of them are marked to spawn in the 'back', and there are definitely enough spawn points on the map. This is really perplexing... are the 'back' spawnpoints on the "Small cargo ship 3" map bugged? I can move the [REDACTED] that needs to be destroyed to the middle, but I'd still need to keep the end boss at the end. :/ blerg.

Any insight?

Edit: I switched to the "small cargo ship 1" map for now as a quick-fix



thanks in advance,

-- Z.

Done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator Project.

@GlaziusF

Playing this on a single-digit willpower/dark melee tank, on old Heroic difficulty.

---

Alright, interesting setup. But I have to wonder how I'm going to get very far if most of the analysts are superpowered people.

Oh, right. Positron is just an ordinary scientist. His powers are just icing on the genius cake. Thanks, bug text!

Okay, let's read up.

A little bit of background here which is helpful, but I wonder how it's going to point my research into the anomaly.

Well, that's interesting. He was trying to give his class super-powers so they could understand researchers better.

Oh. A sniper. That's not really a good boss, since it's pretty much line-of-sight aggro.

And he's talking about blowing the place up? Dang. I smell chained objective.

He talks about some kind of alternative environment he's been living in. Was the Council keeping him in storage for just such an occasion?

...oh, or the super-soldier serum wore off. Yeah.

I guess I get lucky finding the boss. The second floor's a bit of a fork, and if I'd gone the other way I'd be running around an empty last floor.

Not sure what to make of the last clue I find - the Council were planning to attack their own base?

Anyway, I leave to report to Positron.

...instead of the "good kitty" animation, he's acquired the original PsychoChronoMetron destruction animation. That's a thing to see. In triplicate, yet.

---

Hey Positron's report, such a thing as the manipulation of the "power net" has been recorded in history. Just not ours. The Rikti cut off their access to Magic to boost their development in Science.

Also seems like there need to be a few more line-breaks in Positron's accept briefing. Other agents, huh? Okay, let's go say hi.

I rescue... well, I'd call him a Brutal Legend tribute except he's not a roadie. Ah well, metal is metal.

After taking out the Family I get the time to look over the documents on the Council mainframe. So there were Nictus in storage here but they've taken the chance to escape.

...without anybody to fight them off, they're going to take over the city! Diabolical.

---

Positron says that the Nictus deliberately influenced the agent to break it out of its containment, but I didn't see much in there to support that.

For some reason, Sunbeam and Heavy Metal are free right after the map starts. They talk about the amount of death in this place.

I hear a battle between some of Nihil's servants and unturned Council.

Also, I think Sunbeam might benefit from having Transfusion. I realize that'd make her even less Kheldian-seeming, but at this point utility's important too.

I find the Archon who's trying to resist Nihil. He barks out orders but is sufficiently convinced of his own power that he doesn't bother to fill us in on what's going on.

Well, that's fair.

The agent's at the back, feigning death. He does run off when he's freed, though. He should probably be some kind of stationary ally, even if that means he dies standing up.

Seems a bit forced for Positron to tell me what happened to him just in the System Text.

The Nothing is destroying our world. Quick, someone get to a window and shout "Moon Child"!

The last room is full of a number of suspicious items, none of which are activatable. I head back into the empty mission to look for clues.

Ah, that box of junk. Let's see.

Oh. Dang. I also see a corpse, which was the professor's... looks like Nihil jumped into his body to run the experiment.

Huh. And that spawned a Council escorting a destructible crate... with another log. And now the giant pile of glowies in the tiny end room are active. Time to read some logs.

This is all so easily missable, but it's pretty important. Apparently Nihil influenced this guy to build a power nullifier, and the weird anomalies Positron's been seeing are Nihil learning how to use it.

Any reason it can't just all be available from the start of the map?

---

And we're off.

My allies are free at the start of the map again.

The enemies are entirely composed of gunners at the minion level. That's unfortunate, since you can get into an eternal loop of debuffed defense. Maybe you could throw in some black-and-purple Nebel Fists or some Galaxys (dunno if they're this low).

Taking out a Dark Nova and a brainwashed Archon, popping a Shadow Cyst, and then taking out Nihil, who is an Energy Blast/Energy Aura custom.

His last words are rather ominous -- it seems to be letting his own device run out of control.

I look around the cargo ship for the barrel mentioned in Nihil's description, but no dice.

The souvenir mentions a couple of things that I don't remember happening - the Peacebringer keeping me sane, and other Nictus expecting Nihil to open a portal to their home galaxy instead of nullifying all power everywhere.

---

Storyline - *****. Makes use of little-seen parts of game canon in a way to justify the weird goings-on and set the player up quite reasonably to save the day. Kind of an interesting parallel between us and the Council guy who starts this - we're both less than notable people in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.

Solid, interesting, and I wanted to see how it ended.

Design - **. The enemy group in the final mission has the cascading defense debuffs as noted. More to the point, there are a couple of missions - the first one in the lab, and the third in the warehouse - where it's possible to completely miss the first link in a chain of objectives that stretches up to the final room. Consider either using a more linear map or reducing the amount of chaining -- especially in the third mission, there's nothing to prevent us from checking logs, narratively or otherwise.

Also the extremely tiny end room in the third mission meant that its walls were lined with a closely crammed-together mix of glowies, which is probably not the visual effect you wanted.

Glowies are also hard to pin down in the Council base, because they can be tucked into the tiny sub-rooms out of line of sight.

Finally, my allies are completely unescorted on the final two maps. That seems accidental.

Gameplay - ****. Because of the design I ended up doing a bit of mild backtracking now and again. The end boss was pretty reasonable, and the helpers were a decent amount of help, though again I'd suggest Transfusion on the Kheldikin, and maybe a different weapon set on the rock star, as he was nearly one-shotting many of the minions.

Detail - **. The problem is that the story as told to me by Positron doesn't really seem to match the story I discover in the mission. The big points of disagreement are the escape of the Nictus (the clue makes it sound like they were spooky but somehow managed to escape on their own with the power suppression field up) and the ultimate fate of the null device (the story suggests Nihil destroyed it but I interpreted his closing comments as leaving the device to run out of control). Maybe putting the null device in as a chained glowie on Nihil's defeat would work there.

Overall - ***. A good story, but confusingly told in places, and with some pretty big problems with events not chaining as they should.

Thanks for the review! I really appreciate getting some critique, it also confirmed some of the things I was iffy about.

A few explanations and notes (heavy spoilers ahoy!):
- Sniper in first mission: yeah, I agree it's a bit messy, but I really didn't want to unleash a full boss on the player without allies (snipers are LT-level). He also doesn't move (bug/feature?) so even on the squishiest chars I can just LOS him to kill his flunkies (same with the ambush). I should also probably switch to a map that doesn't have the "sidetrack" room on the 2nd level (there's a chance for the crate to spawn back in there), but I figured that'd be all sciencey and lab-y.
- The last clue is intended to be a bit cryptic; I think there's a comment about Zovir's squad trying to track down a spy turned rogue, and he was the one doing the planning to yoink stuff. The biggest problem here was trying to fit that into the 300-character clue, so I had to put it in the end-clue instead; you receive that after this one.
- I actually didn't know about the Rikti thing, will add that in (though the text refers more to a full-scale "screw with every power in the universe" sort of manipulation), thanks!
- Yeah, Posi is being too much of an omniscient dungeonmaster in the M3 briefing; the three things known at this point are 'there is a renegade Council spy on the loose who was involved with the Prof' [M1], 'one of the Nictus broke free in the N-vault' [M2], 'something was making the Council in the vault behave abnormally' [M2]. I should probably remove the allusion to straight mind-control (that won't be known until M3). The intended timeline is: "something goes wrong with big N's container's suppression field" -> "he is not fully in stasis and starts to exert a 'soft' mind control on the Council in the vault" -> "spy goes to spy on the prof" -> "breaks into the vault meeting little resistance" -> "retrieves big N" -> "experiments happen, etc, Council communication lines also go dead" -> "Council evacuates everything, including the N-vault, bringing the other Nictus elsewhere" -> "big N calls for his thralls, and they all come to the place he had determined ahead of time" -> "missions 3/4 happen". My idea about Nictus mind control was a lingering thing that would last even if the afflicted person left their 'area of effect', but also not direct control of actions, more like subtle impulses to "man, I should really be doing this". I agree some steps are not really told properly, I'll try to juggle some of the clues in M1/M2.
- Good point about the stationary ally, I'll change that. Regarding allies in the last 2 missions - I wanted them to be unescorted (ideally they'd spawn right at the start), since I don't really like the idea of having to "rescue" the allies that supposedly enter the mission at the same time. Still, I will give this a once-over.
- Wow, good point about the crate starting the "system shock tribute" audio-log chain (there are two Star Control 2 tributes in the arc too, have you found them? ) being a single point of failure. I wanted to make it optional to avoid clutter in the objective bar (and technically the character is only aware that something is amiss after finding the crushed voice recorder... that's a kludge though), but it's probably better to make it all available right off the bat. I put all of them to 'middle', but the spawner insists on putting them in the back room even though there are plenty of 'middle' spawn spots; maybe another map would work better?
- I would've *loved* to use Galaxy, but they're unfortunately 20+. Good point on co-opting some 5c though, I'll look into that.
- The barrel is the null device and it is attached to the end boss (check his description); his final act is to destroy it. I figure that there's a white-out and the credits roll after he dies. I'll change the death message to reflect this better.
- Edit re souvenir: the Nictus opening gate thing was just speculation (either on the character's part or Posi's part); the Kheldian shield is explained in the popup message of mission 4 (the falling-unconscious-if-not-for-Sunbeam bit).


Thanks again, and sorry for the wall-of-text explanations (another sign I probably messed up with translating the narrative to clues etc)!

-- Z.

Played this tonight, or, early this morning, as it were. Only have a few issues:

- Medium ambushes during boss fights usually don't make the fight more exciting.
- Allies won't follow. :/
- Not really a technical gripe, but I'm not sure why the main bad guy bothers to scratch his name in a place you can see it, possibly giving a hint as to his origin, or why he'd even care if anyone knew what his name was anyway since he's going to end them all. I'll take it that he's just more moonbatty than others of his kind as revealed in the arc.

Other than that, I 5-starred it. I grade easy.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, ambushes are more of a story addition than anything... I just went with middle-of-the-road to avoid overpowering lowbies. Ally AI makes me want to stab things occasionally -- sometimes they'll follow you through the entire map, other times they'll stop at random spots and you have to run far away from them to trigger the 'where are you?' message, then return and they'll follow again. It's a MA bug, sadly.

About big-N: yeah, he's pretty crazy (and probably the reason he was imprisoned in the first place). He actually didn't scribble his name there, one of his thralls did. Another thing I was trying to show with his brand of 'soft mind-control': if you have your thralls adore you, it can manifest in weird ways, ones you may not necessarily agree with (see also his comment about the recording device)... I toyed with the idea of turning the defunct machine into a shrine of sorts, but figured it wouldn't really make any sense to the players at that point in the arc.


Thanks again,

-- Z.

Sadly I'm all out of room... pushing 98% or so, I actually had to cut a few clues during an earlier iteration to make space for the last mission. That 200k cap increase needs to happen... by yesterday!

Actually I don't think putting the agent in the very first mission would be a good idea. According to the arc's [theoretical] timeline, the entire kidnapping business happened 3 days before the player takes the mission, and when M1 takes place, the agent's already Nictus'd up at the safehouse... not sure he'd want to go back to the lab. The Council that are at the lab are trying to find out just what the agent did before going AWOL (discovering that he was the one responsible for stealing Nihil's cyst surprised them too). It's just messy all around. I -could- add a battle between the turned / loyal Council, but not sure how much that'd help.

I did try to say that Nihil's containment device was broken (the clue from the collection in M2), but I'll add a note about the official Council evacuation of the base to the end-of-mission clue (referencing only 3 nicti instead of 4) to make it more clear. I can also put all 3+1 of them in the back room ('middle' in AEspeak... mumble mumble, thanks for the tip though, I was wondering what was going wrong) to avoid z-axis glowie hunts.

I removed most of the chaining in M1 and M3 (made Sigfrid optional too while I was at it, for stealthers); I also changed the allies up a bit (Metal dude was using a tanker powerset, which is apparently AE code for 'over 9000'). Sunbeam actually did have Transfusion, but she seems to almost-never use it (I saw her use it twice total during my many test runs), hmmm.


Thanks again,

-- Z.

The squad leader in the first mission was an agent in a sense, but 'just' an infiltration operative, not deep undercover... his code was ZO-079 while the 'badguy' agent was BR-008.

(random useless trivia: I kinda ripped off the scheme from Vonnegut's Player Piano, ie. smaller number makes you better... ish; "BR-008" was generated by using the professor's initials (AP) and '007', then incrementing all characters by 1. Creativity -- I don't have it. )



-- Z.

Well, I gave the M1/2/3 clues and briefings a mini-overhaul, hopefully the earlier events fit in a bit better now. I also moved the end boss in M4 to 'Middle' and changed the text to fit; we'll see if it helps with the reported bug (I haven't been able to reproduce it, but that doesn't mean it's gone). The other possibility is that the cyst destructible itself is bugged and doesn't trigger the chain properly, which would be... not a good thing, and I'd probably have to remove the cyst completely to fix it.

(as an aside, don't you love people who 1-star your arc without leaving feedback? Yeah, this is mostly venting, I'm 98% sure the person who 1-starred the arc doesn't read these forums)


-- Z.

I overhauled the arc rather severely after comments from several reviewers (especially PW).

Short-list of changes:
* Level range is now 20-29. This way those who play the arc will actually have access to significant / fun powers instead of being locked to level 15. Also, Galaxy-class enemies are in this level range, which is a Good Thing for obvious reasons.
* M4 custom group remade to fit the level range, hopefully with more variety. Also changed the 'normal' Council enemies into a custom group without Galaxy units.
* The entire power-null subplot was nuked from orbit. I made the mistake of using 'The Origin of Power' arc as canon, while it's... not really. The subplot also made things clunky and confusing, especially in M3.
* Contact changed to a PPD Detective (Martins from SC). Most of the scientist-y/Nictus-related flavor text was either scrapped or redirected to Sunbeam. The main premise was also updated to helping the PPD with an unsolved kidnapping case that somehow turns out to be much more serious than anticipated.
* A bit more characterization for the two allies. I could only do this in [de]briefings, so don't expect miracles! Still, it should help in reducing the number of "wtf are these two idiots doing in my mission" moments.
* M1: the Council now more explicitly say what it is they're looking for exactly. Also added some early foreshadowing.
* M2: One of the allies actually comments on the Nictus tubes. Also updated the end clue to be more immersive.
* M3: Audiologs removed (it just doesn't work without manual spawn control). Added some optional clues instead so the player can infer what really happened. Also changed the ending to be a bit more heroic.
* M4: Heroes are now able to approach the ship via MacGuffin (I'm not proud of this solution, but I really can't think of anything better -- please advise!). Some chaining removed - first boss spawns immediately along the two allies, second boss is guaranteed to spawn in middle, third boss is (hopefully!!) guaranteed to spawn in the back. Shadow cyst was removed due to being a general chaining PITA.
* Souvenir was also redone, and the arc was moved to "looking for feedback" from "final".


-- Z.