Arc ID 431270: Until the End of the World

Title: Until the End of the World
Arc ID: 431270
Faction: Villainous
Level Range: 40-50
Difficulty: Average. One custom EB, and a custom group that is designed to be of reasonable difficulty for the level range.
Enemy Groups: Arachnos, Council, Freakshow, Customs.

Synopsis: A contact points you to an unexpected opportunity. Someone else takes the fall. An Arbiter demands justice, and he'll pay to get it. And an obsessed thief learns that sometimes it's not better to have loved and lost; not when someone like you has so much to gain.

Feedback: Please.

This was my attempt to write an arc with the "Romance" flag. The result...er, well, it's a very loose interpretation of the "Romance" flag. It does assume a certain amount of greed on your character's part, as well as a pre-existing association with your contact. Also, there are robots.

Just played this: a pretty fun adventure, with a lot of interesting tidbits. Would recommend, though not sure how this is a "romance"

@GlaziusF

Running this on my DB/Fire brute, +1/x2 with bosses on.

—

Hmm. The status messages are a nice touch, but because they’re the mission title they pop up in every briefing window. Do you only want them to appear once?

Anyway, time to go thank some sap for breaking Arachnos security by making sure he doesn’t have any big heavy packages to take home.

Some henchbots are saying they’re done stealing things. I find a hostage who may be their master, a bots/kin mastermind, who expresses his thanks for freedom by offering to take my consciousness off my shoulders. Unfortunately I’m rather attached to it.

Seems like this was R&D for new armor and other interesting materials. Nice incidentals overall, painting a picture of the usual backstabbing (the ambush refuses to show up) and self-interest (a tester flees with his amazing new toy rather than risk it).

My volunteer henchman decides to follow the random guy Arachnos had captured. And print out naked pictures of him. So I get a better view of his weak points, of course.

---

Apparently this guy is a freelance Council operative? Well, everybody gets paid by someb-

Great, now I've got visions of the Master Runtime doing the robot in my head. Well, I'll see where this goes.

Huh. Little robots with wolf spider heads, doing the combat/heal/bubble thing. In addition to our by-now-recurring villain, in the first room yet!

But I guess that's more time to investigate this place.

...and wreck random scenery, just because I can.

And find a... level 32 test subject? Uh? I know there are robots in the higher level range.

Anyway, I grab a technician, expecting him to activate the consoles, but nope, I just do it myself.

Hey, it IS the Master Runtime!

But let's be fair, there are only so many things the Council can do with robotics and it's entirely the wrong place for a MegaMech.

---

Okay, a little more background: this guy wanted to build human-level intelligence into mass-production robots but Crey was worried about the bad PR from machine slavery.

Also my lackey's wondering what kind of idiot could change the world but get put away for armed robbery.

My guess? The kind of idiot who wants a cover story to get into the Rogue Isles.

A couple of Arachnos bosses are in the entryway wondering who the idiot is who blew the door in. Luckily enough, they think I'm with him.

Even more luckily, the actual AR/Traps custom (with no escorts?) also thinks I'm a rival. Mmm, cover story that makes its own jump-to-conclusions gravy.

I break up some more machinery, and then find a robot doing her best Enigma karaoke: "I love you, I'll kill you".Well, she's just going to have to settle for me.

Apparently my target has flown the coop. I wonder why. Could it have been the several metric tons of explosive force used to knock on the door?

I find a bunch of incomplete robots. None of them seem to count for being clues.

Ah, now here are some clues, all in the last room, which is empty until a prototype android arrives to prevent me from running off with the family photo album.

Same old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy attempts to recreate girl's consciousness in a hideous mockery of science.

I wonder what got her, in the end. Aside from Arachnos. Arachnos gets everybody.

Ah, there it is in the debrief. Apparent user error in the teleporter. Which generally means anything but.

---

So the working theory on her escape is that she messed with her teleporter in an attempt to get out of some crucial bad trouble.

Anyway, TV goes down again, I get a better look at the enemy group composition, and I find a champion saying how Hammer rules the roost now. His dialogue suggests he's running off, but he wails on me anyhow.

And there's Detonation. Alright, let's see what he has to say.

Oh. I infer from context (and filing systems and looted crates) that Valkyr 4.7 is looking to avenge the death of her original at the hands of Arachnos by blowing up Grandville.

I'm pretty sure there's a reason I don't want that to happen, though I'm not entirely sure what that is.

---

Well, the clarion call of keeping my stuff is as good a reason as any. Seems like we're heading into some kind of mysterious lab.

Oh, Archdemon lab. Nice choice.

Okay. Malleus drops, a prototype Valkyr goes down, and what is that I espy? Why, it's everybody's favorite new world order, the Malta Group.

Looks like Arachnos wasn't her primary target after all.

Deeper in I encounter Detonation, who has apparently brought along some Iludium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulators.

Time to backtrack and take care of these bombs. Maybe you should park Detonation up front indulging in his OCBD, with Malleus deeper in.

"disarm the last bomb" needs to be capitalized.

I take out the Tac Ops, and prying up some more Progenitor remains triggers the end boss.

What the hell. It's late night, she doesn't have rage, I’ve seen what I need to see. I pop my Shivan and down she goes, a sudden end to her creator’s unfinished symphony of destruction.

Hmm. Was she after Malta? Or were they just in the way? I don't really get results either way, as the Malta seem more concerned with Warburg's NBC arsenal.

Oh, says the debrief, it was actually about the Warburg rockets all along.

Even though nobody's really mentioned them up until the final half of the final mission.

Well, the truth is the truth.

I have no idea where the last bomb was in all these flames but apparently they were all optional anyway and my careful backtracking was for naught.

---

Storyline - ****. You had me. Seriously, you had me. There was drama, there was intrigue, there was wanton destruction, there was destructive wantons.

And then it turns out they did it all for the rockets. Which, again, don't show up until the last half of the last mission.

It would actually have been better if I didn't really know, if this was just some final destructive impulse to take down Arachnos by way of Malta or vice versa. The question of what Iron Valkyr was after isn’t quite as important as who she met and why she had to risk her life getting away, and neither of those really get a definite answer. Could be Malta, could be Arachnos, might be neither and she’s just looking to go out with a big enough boom to satisfy her own personal master runtime. “Super special Warburg rockets” just seems like kind of an anticlimactic answer, in no small part because I’ve gotten Warburg rockets in ‘real life’ and they were not that hard.

Design - *****. Special maps used in fitting ways, custom enemies with reasonable difficulty and making interesting special selections from common powersets. The only problem I have with them is that there really isn't a map where the customs get a chance to shine - they show up as patrols and guards for various features, but I hardly ever see standard spawns of them. I would have liked that to happen at least once.

Maybe it does in the final mission? But there's so many special spawns in there that anything normal hardly shows up at all.

Oh yeah, also: there’s a lot of special spawns and clickables for flavor, and they’re used well.

Gameplay - ****. You know what this is down to? I mean, really down to? Disarming the bombs in the last mission. All it would have taken is to mark them optional in the navbar and I wouldn't have bothered, but the glowies can spawn in locations obscured by flame and smoke in the map and I kept hearing the pulse and flailing around blindly with the mouse to find something I could click on. Real buzzkill.

Detail - *****. Big clues. Sensible descriptions. Informative dossiers. All this and a faithful lackey, too.

Overall - ****. It’s all in the ending, really. The revelation about Iron Valkyr’s original motives is anticlimactic and comes out of pretty much nowhere. And defeating Detonation kicks off a bomb hunt that isn’t really marked as optional and puts glowies in places where they’re difficult, if not impossible, to see. Up until that point the story was engaging and the missions didn’t put me through a lot of frustration.

The combined impact of those two little flaws knocked me out of the excellently enjoyable little groove I’d been in, leaving me with a last impression that was a lot more muddled than I thought it would be after the first four missions.

Thank you for the play and the feedback. Cue the obligatory wall o' responses:

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Originally Posted by GlaziusF Some henchbots are saying they’re done stealing things. I find a hostage who may be their master, a bots/kin mastermind, who expresses his thanks for freedom by offering to take my consciousness off my shoulders. Unfortunately I’m rather attached to it.

Well he was SUPPOSED to run off and not fight unless you started it, but you can't do that anymore.

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Great, now I've got visions of the Master Runtime doing the robot in my head. Well, I'll see where this goes.

Oh, how I wish the Warcry robots could emote.

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And find a... level 32 test subject? Uh? I know there are robots in the higher level range.

Only Lieutenants, which can't be used as boss objectives, and you can only have one ally in that back room. The Rogue Robots were lower level anyway.

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Even more luckily, the actual AR/Traps custom (with no escorts?) also thinks I'm a rival. Mmm, cover story that makes its own jump-to-conclusions gravy.

He's not a custom, it's a repaint of Comrade from the Khan TF. Giving a bounty hunter an escort didn't really make sense.

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Same old story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy attempts to recreate girl's consciousness in a hideous mockery of science.

See, and that is why I used the "romance" flag. I knew somebody would understand.

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Anyway, TV goes down again, I get a better look at the enemy group composition, and I find a champion saying how Hammer rules the roost now. His dialogue suggests he's running off, but he wails on me anyhow.

His dialogue may predate i17, and he may have originally been set to run off....although I don't think he was, cause you know, Freaks. I might have to take another look at it.

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What the hell. It's late night, she doesn't have rage, I’ve seen what I need to see. I pop my Shivan and down she goes, a sudden end to her creator’s unfinished symphony of destruction.

So...what you're saying is, I should give her Rage?

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“Super special Warburg rockets” just seems like kind of an anticlimactic answer, in no small part because I’ve gotten Warburg rockets in ‘real life’ and they were not that hard.

It is implied in game that what we get isn't all there is to the venom rockets. Because seriously, who cares about those piddly things? Just get a Rad defender and call it a day. Then again it's also implied that the Rogue Arachnos aren't actually Rogue....hmmm, that might be a way to tweak it.

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The only problem I have with them is that there really isn't a map where the customs get a chance to shine - they show up as patrols and guards for various features, but I hardly ever see standard spawns of them. I would have liked that to happen at least once.

This is deliberate. I didn't want to overuse them; they're a Mastermind's personal henchmen, not an actual enemy group per se. I didn't want to give him his own personal robotic army, just a couple of robots he built to do his evil bidding.

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Gameplay - ****. You know what this is down to? I mean, really down to? Disarming the bombs in the last mission. All it would have taken is to mark them optional in the navbar and I wouldn't have bothered, but the glowies can spawn in locations obscured by flame and smoke in the map and I kept hearing the pulse and flailing around blindly with the mouse to find something I could click on. Real buzzkill.

That's why they're optional. But I guess people who play a lot of AE will go around backtracking and carefully hunting down every last objective to cut down on further backtracking huh?

Honestly I find marking stuff as optional in the navbar to be immersion breaking. I guess I could just make them spawn at the start of the mission and place them in the front, that'll make them easier to find.

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Overall - ****. It’s all in the ending, really. The revelation about Iron Valkyr’s original motives is anticlimactic and comes out of pretty much nowhere. And defeating Detonation kicks off a bomb hunt that isn’t really marked as optional and puts glowies in places where they’re difficult, if not impossible, to see. Up until that point the story was engaging and the missions didn’t put me through a lot of frustration.

I think I might have to rethink how the Warburg connection is worded. It obviously didn't come across the way it was intended. The bomb thing should be a lot easier to tweak.

I've finally gotten around to doing a real update on this arc (as opposed to quick "fix what the patch broke" updates).

Fixed some typos and spelling errors, thanks PW for pointing them out.
Slightly tweaked some enemy costumes.
Added optional non-combatant "ally" details to mission 1 and 2.
Added a required captive detail to mission 1, to better show what happened to the stolen items.
Tweaked some text for mission 5, to give the player character more incentive to continue.

Update, tweaked the ending.

Removed Malta entirely. A different enemy group now occupies the mission 5 map. Added official kudos for kicking them out to the list of stuff you gained from this adventure.
Removed the Warburg rocket connection from mission 5. It was a bit too coincidental and not really necessary. A new "stuff you're not supposed to know" optional clue will be added once the editor decides to stop mapserving me.