An Uncivil War: Preclude (ID: 415877)

Drakmarth · 07-02-2010 04:43 PM

An Uncivil War: Preclude (Click for Poster)
Arc ID: 415877
Alignment: Heroic
Faction: The Black Guard (Custom), Arachnos, Council, Crey and a spoiler-if-I-say-it-here finale group (Custom)
Creator Global/Forum Name: @Drakmarth
Difficulty Level: Level range set to 35+. Designed with teams in mind, can be soloed with the right ATs.
Estimated Time to Play: Very Long (5 Missions, 1-2 hours)
Synopsis: When a splinter faction of the Black Guard takes over a section of Warburg and threatens to detonate a nuclear warhead, their enigmatic leader Drakmarth asks aid from the unlikeliest of allies; Paragon's Heroes. [SF/HL/TFMA]

WARNING: Contains Elite Bosses and an Archvillain

ADDITIONAL WARNING: Contains Lots and Lots of Text

Author comments:
This arc is a re-creation my first and only beta-born arc that was published Live a year ago. Changes to mission maps and other such things in MA caused it to be unplayable. The fixes were made over time, but I never had the heart to dive back in as the real issue I had was with the limited memory for arcs that had forced me to be contain and rush the arc in terms of pacing and story.

Cut to 2010 and new changes to the arc system. I began re-working the arc to make it playable, I then re-wrote the story, changing the groups involved and making both cosmetic and balance changes to the custom groups. In my eyes it looks and feels like a different arc thanks to the creative freedoms added with something as small as a memory increase.

This arc is the first in 'An Uncivil War' series, a series I aim to do three things with:

1. Write a Task/Strike Force using both Established and Unestablished Factions. (As a friend mentioned it is for those that 'like to see what happens between the cracks' of the status quo in Paragon and the Rogue Isles.)
2. Have the player learn what is going on as their character does through the slow build of information and exposition through using means other than just clues and mission dialog after the fact. (hence the previous memory limit gripe)
3. Make each arc as fun and engaging as possible.

Feedback is appreciated.

@Drakmarth & @Drakmarth2

Avatar by S. Wall

#415877 - An Uncivil War: Preclude - Looking for Feedback

GlaziusF · 07-13-2011 07:23 PM

Review done as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Running this on a level 50 fire/energy tanker, +1/x2 with bosses on.

I can't help but see "preclude" as a typo, though it's certainly a distinctive search term.

---

So I'm being used as a patsy in an intravillaingroup power struggle because one faction's brought out the NBC. I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover warheads in Warburg.

There's a time limit clearly called out in the briefing, which is nice. ...it's actually 45 minutes rather than the hour the briefing suggests, which is less nice.

So let's see this enemy group. AR/ninja bosses, AR/dev and AR/SR lieuts, AR/dev and pain/energy and mace/shield minons.

Judging from the chatter the minions outside don't actually think they're part of an internicene feud. I wonder if this is one of those practical shakedown ops. ...for some reason even the man in charge of the op doesn't think he's part of a feud? Yes, I would say something is up, though at least he fesses up as things start looking desperate.

Seems like everybody's actually been crawling all over this place trying to find and disarm the warhead? ...which has actually been de-NBCed into a normal bomb.

Yeah, seems like a regular ol' paramilitary fire drill.

...wait, what's that in the debrief? "My death"? Am I speaking to a dude from beyond the grave? Or is he being, like, metaphorical about this, that this was intended to kill him? Because it doesn't seem like he would have gone to the site himself if he couldn't find a hero.

---

Now time to punch up some Rogue Arachnos and steal surveillance data.

Standard arachnowarehouse, got a bunch of distracto-glowies from the main objective. Sensible.

Oh, interesting. Some of these are wired for alarms. Nice touch.

Surveillance footage seems to indicate the Council as co-conspirators. They don't seem to be the mind-control type exactly, but this is a complex scenario.

---

In pursuit of the warhead I storm Burkholder's base. Patrols are talking about hunting down traitors there, too, so it looks like there's some other power pulling a bunch of high-test strings.

Hmm. Sounds like the Ascendant in charge has worked out Crey's behind it all. Mind control and cloning are in their auspices.

Oh. Wait. Someone stole Vampyri information and nipped off to Crey? That... seems unrelated.

Not unrelated: the again return of stealth warheads!

---

It is apparently Kovacs who stole the Vampyri information, having worked with the Council for an unspecified length of time. Off to Crey!

'nother warhead in this building. Kovacs is part of some kind of cloning project which has all gone a bit loopy, as SCIENCE! tends to do, and he's trying to fix it with fire. And by "fix" I mean "kill" and by "it" I mean "everyone involved" and I think we're good here.

Ah. I get some files. Crey was just gonna kill all the clones on account of they turned out faulty but he set them free and maybe gave them pick of the random piles of superpowers? I fight an elec/energy assaulter at the end here and he certainly wasn't throwing down that kind of mojo in round 1.

---

Kovacs has taken over the main lab. Have to hand it to the dude, he double-crossed his way through like three major players in the pursuit of not dying ten thousand times. But I wonder what I'm going to be fighting in here.

If it's Nemesis I shall be very cross with you.

Ah. Nope, one-per-rank Kovacs. Kovacses? Kovaci? AR/elec armor minions, elec/energy lieuts, elec/elec blaster bosses, and an elec blast/elec armor EB who I get lucky enough not to get a sentinel from until near the end of the fight.

Word to the wise: from a boss on up, a voltaic sentinel is a Malta Sapper you can't destroy or crowd-control.

Some pretty quality chatter from the last remnants of the Crey, but I have never in all my months of Architect seen a battle that waited for a hero to get close to kick off. Especially for maps where proximity can be on the other side of a wall, keep this in mind when choosing dialogue.

The true Kovacs is elec melee. He calls an ambush, my ally ambush distracts them by dying nobly, and that's all the time I need to take him down.

---

Storyline - *****. Boy, superhero comics have a lot of outs, don't they? Robot doubles, mind control, projected images, alien clones, Nemesis plots, in addition to the writer's usual grab bag of genuinely hidden motivations. I'm almost entirely positive that in every mission in this arc except for the last one you go in with a premise that is functional but, in some important way, wrong.

And that's pretty great. Both parts of that. Because of the "wrong", every mission is some new revelation, but because of the "functional" there's never really a time when I figure I'd be better off just going home and watching The Rogue Isles Have Talent Or Else. The general structure drives me to the end, with good excuses for butting heads with a variety of opposition.

Design - ****. Couple little things. The initial enemies, basically Mercs Plus, commit the common sin in enemy groups of not really being distinctive at range. They're all black and white armor in similar shapes with the occasional targeting drone. Distinctive color highlights help, especially in groups that can't plausibly do a lot of size variations.

Second, if I picked up something like a remote control to turn the stealth off the nuclear warheads in the first mission I completely glossed over it. In subsequent missions they pop up in the objective bar as soon as I know about them, which is sensible, but that doesn't quite jibe with how I had to manually disable the cloak in the first mission but never worry about that again.

Gameplay - *****. The terrible temptation of Mercs Plus is to put AR/Dev on the minions and call it good. This gives minions a spammable defense debuff and a spammable control power which also seals the space bar and saps recharge.

This has been deliberately avoided, and the missions play better for it. There's still the matter of Voltaic Sentinel being a holy terror at high enemy ranks, but that's a one-off concern.

Detail - ***. My contact doesn't really care much about Kovacs' motivations. He just wants Kovacs brought to ground. And in a certain sense that's fine. The guy has already progressed to the point where he's toying with the flip-top cover on the big red button.

At the same time. I am kind of curious how the timeline shook out on this. Crey doesn't seem the type to drag their heels on life support for faulty experiments, so Kovacs can't have been operating on a very tight timeline. But was he a triple agent from the start who pulled out all the stops to get his own clone army, or just an above-average mook that Crey sampled without his knowledge who thrashed around in search of a solution when he found out that thousands of people were going to die because he had bad genes? (Or, more likely, somewhere in between?)

Maybe finding bits of Kovacs's diary scattered around the last mission would help with that?

Also, watch the comma splices. Generally there's not enough text lying around for it to really matter, but you should be careful when you're trying to pull a whole pile of clauses together into a sentence. Commas should only be used to group together things that are already closely related, not to try to establish causal relationships. Otherwise it's a bit of a jigsaw trying to work out what's actually related to what.

Overall - *****. Ultimately this is an arc with distinctive but not overpowering custom enemies and a story that suggests worthwhile actions but keeps me guessing all the way to the end. It could benefit from a pass for refinement, but there's very little in the game that couldn't.

PoliceWoman · 07-14-2011 10:25 PM

My thoughts:

* Really liked the first few missions. Good use of extra details in each mission. Liked the way the bombs had a "countdown" that felt like they added drama.
* Last mission kinda lost me; felt rather tedious slogging through the army looking for the right guy. Quite possibly some of this feeling was because I could never find the main boss on my first try (despite exploring the whole map several times), and had to reset the mission in order to find him. I like the map choice on the final mission (very apropos to the situation) but the map IS really huge; it could use more details on it to make it more interesting. It did have some set piece battles and some fake bosses that I saw, but with the size of the map being larger than the previous missions, I felt like it needed more.
* Along these lines, I feel like the big bad guy needed more of an evil plan in the last mission. The way the plot is written, as of mission 4 I've stopped the bomb threat, and consequently I feel much less motivation to go after the bad guy in mission 5. The story text does try to sell you on "He's really dangerous because he tried to use the bomb before, you gotta get him!" but I don't fully buy it. If the big bad guy is in the middle of his next plot which is even worse than the bomb plot, then I would be much more convinced that he must be stopped.

Some loose ends: [SPOILERS AHOY]
* The story has me deliberately choosing not to kill Kovacs despite the contact encouraging me to do so. Why, then, do I turn Kovacs over to the contact at the end? It seems like that would be very bad for his health.
* The clues make a Big Deal of how the nuclear material is missing from each of the bombs I discover. But the story never says what happened to it. (Unless I missed a clue along those lines somewhere.) It seems like it would be pretty important to recover that (perhaps in the final mission?). As it stands, I half-wonder if the villainous contact somehow stole it while I wasn't looking.

I liked the writing style and the arc overall. Hope some of this feedback helps. Best of luck!

@PW - Police Woman (50 AR/dev blaster on Liberty)
TALOS - PW war journal - alternate contact tree using MA story arcs
=VICE= "Give me Liberty, or give me debt!"