Arc #404893 Sparkly Vampires? Seriously?

I have just finished my send up of the Twilight Saga. I think it will be fun/funny to people even if they aren't familiar with the whole Twilight phenomena. It's 4 missions (1 for each book), and while they seem like they'll be the same, I did try to make them a bit different). I really wanted to call it "Sparkly Vampires? WTF?", but alas, it was not meant to be. Would love feedback. Thanks!

Cersei =)

Well, having read all the Twilight books (note I did not say they were good) and being a fan of parodies I just had to give this arc a play!

The good:
Costumes, bios, dialogue, & snark. There's a lot of good humor and fun-poking at the expense of insecure teenagers and the Twilight books. The first mission is especially good at providing not only humor, but a biting comentary on the derivitive work, as well.

The bad:
Mission Objective overload, tedious & repetitive missions, lack of player motivation, lack of real plot, unexplained story elements, inconsistent enemy difficulty, final mission is a defeat all on an outdoor map.

Suggestions:

• Combine mission objectives. Instead of listing each person to rescue, have the multiple objective names be "teens to rescue." So it will list in the nav bar as "4 teens to rescue." Also, shorten the other objectives to prevent the nav bar from getting so big.
  
• Reduce the number of movie references. Almost all of mission 2 is the same gag about abs in the movie. Not only does it get old fast, but the movie hasn't been introduced to the player via the contact yet. Add to that, it conflicts with what the contact says in the Busy text in mission 4, where the contact mentions that they're planning to make movies.
  
• Mix up the maps. Outdoor maps are already a pain and 3 of the 4 are outdoors. Then you use the same one twice...and 1's a defeat all. UGH. If you HAVE to use an outdoor map on M4, is there a Dark Astoria one you could use? It would at least make more sense for the Count, as the map you have now turns to daylight.
  
• Give the player an heroic motivation. As it is, I'm sent on a mission to destroy shipments of legit books and manuscripts. It's a criminal act. The author and publisher of these books have done nothing wrong. The motivation of teaching these girls better taste in literature is too flimsy to make me commit a crime. Now, if these books were somehow tied to some evil magic that's been brainwashing kids, that's different. As it is, I'm doing this because I have a different opinion on the book and that's not a heroic thing to do.
  
• Explain why these girls are in the warehouse. The player is originally sent to destroy the manuscript, but, upon entering, has to also save the girls. Huh?!? How did they get there? How do they keep getting back? I like their dialogue, backgrounds and my attempts to wean them off the book, but they need to have a reason to be there aside from "they're missing."
  
• Flesh out the books' power. It's never explained how these characters come to life. How am I not surprised that character from a book have come to life and investigate their origins further? And what's the book/author/publisher's motivation for brainwashing these teens? There's a good opportunity to tie it into canon by making it all a mystic plot for souls or lonely mystics looking for cute chicks (which would give you a good excuse to swap an outdoor map for Oranbega) or introduce your own evil mastermind/group. Without some overarching plot it's just too tedious.
  
• Less shipments of books to destroy. It just gets too tedious mission after mission. There were what, 9 shipments in the final mish?!? Ugh.
  
• Remove Build Up or Aim from bosses. I soloed the whole arc on my lvl 50 blaster and noticed the minions & lts were a breeze, but the Bosses could pretty much 2 shot me. There needs to be a happier balance.
  
• Where's the middle-aged housewife? Believe it or not, there's probably more rabid middle-aged Twihard moms out there than tweens. They really should show up somewhere.
  
• Change the Souvenir to an object. Usually the souvenir gives a short summary of the arc and is an object kept to remember it by. A ripped out page of the original manuscript would be a good reminder of the awful story that should never see print again. Or a bracelet with wolf & diamond heart, or a Team Jack shirt, or anything that relates to the story.
  
• Remove the defeat all. Seriously.

Wow. THANK YOU.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that you took the time to write all that out. That is a lot to ponder, and I'll definitely try to make some of these changes.

As to your first suggestion:

Quote:

Combine mission objectives. Instead of listing each person to rescue, have the multiple objective names be "teens to rescue." So it will list in the nav bar as "4 teens to rescue." Also, shorten the other objectives to prevent the nav bar from getting so big.

I originally wanted to do that, but I couldn't find a way to do that and have 4 different teen girls. When I tried to make the rescue mission have 4 teens, it was the same teen 4 times. I will have to explore what I was missing.

Thank you again for all the other suggestions. I've only been playing the game since mid-March, so I still don't have a full grasp of all the powers and such, and the one friend I had that could help explain it all to me isn't speaking to me, so that made this a bit more difficult to develop.

You reminded me that I did actually mean to put middle-aged women in one of the missions (I did read the books, and I'm a 34 year old woman ).

Thank you again. You have really given me a ton to think about. I really, really appreciate that you took the time to play it, and then give me such constructive criticism. Thank you!

V. =)

Glad I could help I never would have guessed you've only been playing since March! That's impressive!

Anyway, to combine multiple objectives go to the Captive Text & Dialog section of the objective. It's one of the optional tabs, just below Settings.

Fill in the field for Navigation Text (Plural) with the exact same text for each captive ie. "teens to rescue."

Fill in the field for Navigation Text (Singular) with what you'd like it to say when there's only 1 left ie. "Rescue the last teen."

The MA automatically adds a number for each of the Plurals that are the same to the front of whatever you put in the Plural field. So, with 4 captives that all have the same Plural text the Nav bar would show: "4 teens to rescue." And when it got down to the last one it would say "Rescue the last teen."

ta-da!

Good luck and happy MArcing!

Ah, thanks again! I will try that!