The Sinister Song - #454892 (Dr. Aeon's 3rd Challenge)

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M1 sendoff-
This paragraph here:

This thing I've been chasing, he finally made a mistake. He just stole some equipment from an Arachnos lab and escaped via the tunnel systems adjacent to those beneath Mercy Isle.

That first sentence seems a bit awkward to me. First calling it a thing then a he. Seems like it could use some elaboration. Maybe sprinkle some tidbits of clues.

Like instead of some equipment- maybe a teaser as to what type of equipment.

M1 still busy dialogue seems like a placeholder.

M1 when you first rescue Psi the grammar seems to be missing a period. The sentence scrolled away before I could take proper note. Think it was something like 'One something' Needed a period after the One.

M1 allow player to exit without finding the exit.

M1 return- I'd elaborate more. Elaborate a bit more and have it tie in with the M2 intro.

M2 intro- Looks awesome- Here you have elaborated very nicely.

M2 Navigation-
I was lost to be honest. Search for clues is a bit too vague for dummies like me, lol. Relay that they need to search for 3 clues or clarify the objective.

M2- I think it'd be perfect to have all the clues up front then the final objective at the end. That way it flows and you don't have to back track.

M2 return-
I think it's a missed opprotunity to not use as much of the 1000 characters as possible =)

M3 intro- EXCELLENT. Although I would replace some of the He's with the actual character's name. Just to add some variety since you have several sentences starting with He.

M3 sendoff- perfect

M3- great mission.

M3 return- think another place you could flesh out more. But it works in the situation.

M4 intro- there's a typo and when I tried to copy and paste it closed the dialogue rofl. Anyway it's the Close to mind sentence. Think you meant close to my mind.

M4 sendoff- Your best writing.

M4 Navigation- Generator singular should read something like Destroy last generator. It currectly just says Generator.

M4 return looks really good.

M5- everything about it is perfect to me! Very good conclusion.

Only thing which may be a bug is Psi didn't help me fight the last boss at all. Probably set on defensive and if they take 0 damage they just stand around.

Overall very good story! I really loved your custom characters. Very good choice of colors. The creature in mission 1 was my favorite!

Hope my feedback helps!

Woot! Thanks a bunch for the feedback! I'll definitely make some changes soon.

No problem man! Really appreciate the feedback you gave me on my ARC too! Already made a few changes on the things you mentioned.

Just let me know after you update Sinister Song. Be happy to run through it again. I was also very tired last night and hope I did a decent job of giving you a second pair of eyes.

Ok! Made a lot of updates! The only thing you mentioned that I haven't changed the the exit-by-door in mission 1. I'm still having troubles getting the mechanics there to work right and for the moment, that is the only setup that actually fits the story. :-/

@GlaziusF

Running this on a mid-40s ice/axe tanker, +0/x2 with bosses on.

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“Hierachy” is misspelled in the contact’s description. Second sentence ends with “I didn’t you’d be the first to answer”, which I is missing a word.

So some hero’s gone off-radar tracking a personal monster and now they want help. And they seem a little unhinged.

This isn’t going to end well.

Snakes. Why did it have to be Snakes? They’re talking about some kind of sky world elder who was going to kill us all.

...okay, some weird things happen after I free Psyclipse. Not weird unusual, weird glitchy. I get a key objective to examine some equipment and find a creature, and I look at the equipment to see some cables filched from the PTS, which seem to be wired to another dimension. I then move on to free a supposed evil doctor from his metallic snake henchmen (who look pretty nice and alien), and then get an objective to lead him to his research. But it only stays in the objective bar for maybe half a second before he betrays, talking about how we’re going to steal his stuff, and then I get jumped by another wave of his minions.

Apparently I’m supposed to kill him and see the body teleport away? I dunno. It seems like you might be trying to do a little bit too much here.

He was talking about eliminating all evil. This generally also entails eliminating all free will so I’m not necessarily in his corner.

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My contact calls Psymon Omega a Pychic. He may be Pyrrhic, but that’s beside the point.

Apparently the doc is running toward a secret stash of ancient psychic enhancers.

The box of crystals is just titled “crys”, probably a leftover from the draft. All the collectible objects seem to have tiny names; I can see doing that for things that don’t show up like ambushes and the like, but all the names of collectible objects are visible to the player.

The doc’s monsters are taking down some kind of mentally dominated creatures. At least I assume so, as I never see what the “Controlled” and “Dominated” that are biting it in the combat-results text are.

You should probably drag and drop the distraction glowies around a bit, as the clues for what they are come after the clues for the important thing that was taken, which is supposedly the focus of this mission.

Speaking of the doc’s monsters, you should be aware that Infrigidate in the hands of a boss does a really significant defense debuff. We’re talking near-double enemy hit rates, whether or not your armor is defense-based or not.

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Next mission briefing, “Hans made hbig ruckus over it and Aeon had Aarachnos lock him up for a year.”. Couple typos there.

Basically from what I understand the doc is out for revenge, but vengeance so often does splash damage, and he’s going to be taking very dangerous measures.

Oof. Fortunatas mean lots and lots of psychic damage. The doc’s creatures don’t seem to be taking this any better than I am, though, and they get pretty well wiped out.

The psychic accumulator seems to have its default Rikti stasis pod description. Shame. I wanted to see what this really was.

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Okay, uh, first, you’ve got some more “pychic” in the briefing.

Second, I’m not entirely sure why the WSPDR building needs to go up in flames. Can’t I just take my plasma axe to the main antenna?

Third... huh, Longbow shows up to try to stop me? Unfortunately as Cap au Diable is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, they don’t actually make it very far before being set upon and routed.

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Anyway, the giant overdramatic explosion has left things looking rather terrible for my PR. So now I do the only thing I can - kill the doctor once and for all. He has AR/Elec and Bots/Devices lieutenants, and a lot of AR/SR security. You may want to fold in some mace (nightstick) there, to keep non-defense sets from being bursted into -100 defense.

Oh, ElecMelee/something cyborg boss guards too.

Anyway, the doc’s still just an ordinary boss, so he goes down in a few salvos. I didn’t really even need the ally along. Was he spouting off a run message at low health? He wasn’t labeled as a danger to escape so I just figured it was just multiple health warnings due to how drastically he was being shredded.

And... my contact decides the guilt is all my fault. Because unbeknownst to me, this entire time I was supposed to be keeping her sane.

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Storyline - *. I’ll admit it, it seems a lot like I have a double standard here. On the one hand, when a contact congratulates me for seeing an arc through to the end and not turning away, I feel good. On the other, when a contact castigates me for seeing an arc through to the end and not turning away, I feel resentful. It’s just a plot railroad either way, right?

Well, not really. I’ve said this before -- there’s a separation between player and character that’s really kind of unavoidable. Even when playing a character who should be out to get the villain at any cost, I’ll still take a break to read descriptions if it seems like they might be interesting, or head down side passages to look for glowies so I won’t have to backtrack later. These might not be sensible character actions, but they make sense to me as a player. It’s the same with completing a storyarc -- as a player I want to see how the story ends, even if as a character I might not approve of what’s going on, or consider other options.

It’s particularly grating in this arc, where I’m the superheroic equivalent of a warm body, with my contact providing the expertise and myself providing the plasma axe. While this isn’t bad in and of itself -- certainly it would hardly make sense to expect me to be up-to-date on the latest in transdimensional psychic technology -- it does require a certain level of trust. The reality could lie somewhere between exactly what my contact’s told me and a far darker scenario, where the mad doctor was mad in the sense that he built a device that didn’t actually work, and we took the WSPDR building out specifically to scramble the Rogue Isles medicom and kill him. When it’s revealed at the end that my contact has reservations about this whole thing I’m more inclined to wonder exactly how truthful she’s been with me.

It’s particularly particularly grating when the justification and planning for the big mass-murder are conveyed in a cross between charades and shadow-puppets. I’m still not sure exactly why screaming pyrophoric doom was the order of the day. Somehow the doomsday device got into WSPDR and they went into full-on emergency lockdown after the fact? For something that’s probably supposed to be a big moral turning point it wasn’t very well developed.

I think I would feel a bit better about how this all ended if, in addition to my contact not getting postmortem cold feet, I had an independent view on what the mad doctor was planning. Maybe find some blueprints or something when we raid his lair.

As it is, well. I can buy my contact lashing out as kind of an innocent reaction, or rather an overreaction, out of regret. But it serves to accentuate that I haven’t exactly had a very good idea of what’s been going on this whole time, and have been relying on my contact to explain what’s happened.

Design - ****. The customs are pretty great, actually. Especially the mad doctor’s custom creations. They look very... well, alien without being incomprehensible.

But I have absolutely no idea what was supposed to go on at the end of the first mission. You should really take a look at that.

Gameplay - ****. Lots of people like to give custom security mobs assault rifle. The problem is that unlike the actual security-with-guns enemy groups, assault rifle doesn’t come with a rifle butt, so it turns into all cascading defense debuffs, all the time. I’d recommend cutting them with “nightstick”-model mace guards.

Finding the destructibles to commit mass murder is actually pretty smooth; they have vocal guards and are quite large and contrasting. The doc’s mad creations can be a bit punishing if a boss lands Infrigidate, which may be a bit more swingy than you want.

Detail - ***. Even if all the collectibles had their proper names and the destructibles all had non-standard descriptions, I’d still be stuck with the same sort of minimalist detail about everything that’s going on.

Which on the one hand is fine as actually knowing would require me to have an advanced degree in psychoengineering. But on the other hand, if this is supposed to be an arc where I’m not intended to be comfortable with what’s going on, it would help a lot if I actually knew what was going on.

Overall - **. Not intended as an average.

So the thing about evil is that it’s nigh-on impossible to do accidental evil. Careless evil, sure, but not accidental. But the big dramatic explosion in this arc takes place without an actual clear explanation of why it’s necessary or even how big it’s going to be ahead of time. I understand that part of it is that my contact can’t explain what’s going on, but that doesn’t make it any clearer what’s happening.

Up until the last briefing, I could ignore that, as my contact was shaping up to be the sort of vigilante willing to kill a city to keep a country alive, which is a rare sort but one that still exists. But then the train switches tracks (killing ten children, one of whom would grow up to be Hitler) and my contact’s suddenly unsure of what’s just gone on and demanding answers from me, answers the events of the arc don’t exactly equip me to give. To the extent that I was resolved to do anything, apart from the metafictional determination to read to the end of the story, I trusted that my contact knew what was going on, because it became clear that I wouldn’t be able to find out for myself. With that gone, everything just collapsed.

Thanks for the feedback! Making changes now! The arc was kinda rushed, so there are a lot of mistakes in it as you found. Eventually it will be up to par with my other arcs. ^^