The Fractured Dreamer (Arc ID498588)

Arc Name: The Fractured Dreamer
Arc ID: 498588
Faction: Heroic
Keywords: Save the World, Drama, Canon-Related
Creator Global/Forum Name: @theHedoren
Difficulty Level: Medium
Length: Long (5 missions)
Other Notes: Story-intensive, 2 AVs, solo-able (tested with Lvl50 Blaster at +0 Difficulty)
Synopsis: "It began as a standard hostage situation. But as the investigation unfolds, you become the only one who can save Paragon City from losing its mind!"

Background (because I like to metaphorically hear myself talk :P )
A long time ago (when AE was still only on Test Server) I wrote an arc that I absolutely fell in love with. It wasn't until after my next arc that I realized how little I knew about MArcs at the time. At any rate, the illusion was completely broken as soon as I started getting feedback. Sure, people in general liked "The Double-Edged Sword", especially some of the little details I threw in at the last minute. But more and more obvious were the problems: tedious pacing, unclear motives, inconsistent characters, and missed opportunities. And so TDES fell out of the way in favor of my other "better" arc.

I recently came back from a two-year break from CoH, and I'm falling in love with the game again. What with Ultra-Mode graphics, Power Customization, and the swarms of former-villain ATs prancing around Paragon, it's like a completely different game than I remember. And yet somehow, that one arc that I never got right was still stuck in my brain.

Rather than go back and re-edit TDES into something I was happy with again, I took a leap and unpublished/deleted without another thought. (Okay, maybe I regretted not re-reading parts of it first before deleting it, but that's neither here nor there....)

So the arc was rewritten from the ground up. Sure, the basics are still there: the overall story is similar, most of the old characters appear, and the tone is about the same. What changed are mostly refinements from the original formula. I added more character motivations. I made the arc contact more personally involved. I upgraded some of the story's internal logic. And I (hopefully) improved what even then was a bittersweet finale.

Is this arc the best one ever written? Probably not. Am I going to look back at this later and decide to scrap the whole thing again? Knowing me, probably yes. But do I feel that the past several days writing and testing my new arc were worthwhile? Absolutely I do.

In conclusion, I'm temporarily satisfied, and I hope you enjoy "The Fractured Dreamer" as much as I do.

"The Fractured Dreamer" now has a mission page at City of Heroes Mission Review. Feel free to rate it for their system.

Review as part of the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

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

---

CBP. I don’t know that acronym. Coast... Border Patrol?

Anyway, something’s bad at sea, and Mynx is going to cut support while I go out on the water.

Ship’s full of Malta. Hoo boy.

Malta who were abducting a single kid. Well, you have to get the metas young, I suppose. But the op leader had some awfully high numbers in his name. I’m suspecting there are more of these snatch-and-grabs going on.

---

Off to investigate the warehouse that was receiving these kids.

Crey. Well, alright. I pop an experimental subject, who... comes with me to help fight? He’s only a lieutenant. A stray patrol almost wrecks him. ...and there’s another helper lieutenant just a ways in.

I get them to the top floor when something terrible happens. I pull off part of a spawn on the lower half of a split-level room, and once it’s down they go after the upper half. Before I can do much they knock back one of the tanks into the boss room and bring down the wrath of the boss and about fifteen tanks on them.

And then on me.

Oh, I survive it just fine, but they don’t.

I saw something in a previous mission that I thought was kind of nice -- an optional “escort to door” objective that let you drop an ally out of the line of fire. You can’t do it without making the whole ally optional, which would ruin the chaining you have set up, but you could probably get Mynx to radio in at the start of the mission with some basic parameters and hope people will free the “optional” kids so the mission doesn’t look like it completes weirdly.

Anyway, the lab was apparently trying to enhance existing mutant powers. I rescue a few test subjects, including a mentalist who’s rather out of it.

---

And now she’s having nightmares. Well, at least nothing worse is happening right THE CLINIC OF CHARLESTON IS UNDER ATTACK!

By... Carnies after the mentalist. Maybe they just want a psychic for the sideshow? ...yeah, probably now.

They apparently tunneled in to this place. ...either that or there’s some weird therapy sessions going on here.

Mynx is... unescorted, but her objective was present to kick off the map. That’s a change! Usually allies come free right away if they’re not escorted. I guess not all changes were for the worse.

Looks like she got out, but to where is the question. Also looks like Vanessa has been sensing a giant psychic potential, which I suppose was our mentalist. You’d think the people at the clinic would have picked up on that.

---

Anyway, now she’s broadcasting psychic waves that control the easily-led and incapacitate everyone else.

I don’t feel like fighting several entire city blocks of Carnies, so I spring around looking for something notable.

Pink flames around something holding carnies in energy rings. Yeah, that’ll do. Mind/psy dominator who calls ambushes of Carnies that she also seems to be speaking through... but no clues to be had.

...oh. And... that’s it.

So much for leading her out of anything. I was figuring that’d actually happen. Always up for a little Psychonaut action.

---

Storyline - **. So let’s see. Of the five mutant children augmented by Crey, the two with the survival instincts of mayflies are going to be heroes, one dissolves everything he touches, one has senses so enhanced she gets claustrophobia in anything less roomy than a sports arena, and despite my saving the last one twice she’s in a permanent comatose state and will drag the world into a solipsistic vortex if she ever wakes up.

The end! No moral.

Especially since the last two missions are exclusively about the mentalist child and there’s some foreshadowing you’ll be carrying her out of a bunch of monsters, having the arc just end on that depressing note feels like those missions were a waste.

Design - ***. The fourth mission lends itself a lot better to being a lead-in to a capper than being a capper itself. It’s a massive outdoor map with exactly one salient objective. And, yeah, a couple ambushes to make for an interesting boss fight, but it’s just one boss fight.

Also I have to wonder about the Malta. It’d make sense at this level range if they were working with one of the many post-Countess splinters of Crey, but it seems like the Crey are the drivers here, using the Malta as hired thugs -- instead of the Malta using the Crey as hired brains.

I mean, I understand that at this level band you’re fighting high-global or cosmic-level villains. Hired thugs went away a long time ago. You might consider ratcheting this down to 30-40 and using the lower-level redside Carnies; that’d at least give you more potential groups to be on the boat.

Also I didn’t really notice any armor on the experimental subjects. Given Crey’s propensity for AOE at the high band, it was hard enough to keep them alive when they weren’t running off where I couldn’t see them.

Gameplay - ****. The panic trying to keep the kids from getting themselves killed in mission 2 is entirely my own devising so I can’t really ding you for that, but mission 4 really doesn’t feel like a finale.

Outdoor maps are really hard to work with, especially outdoor maps as big as the Steel Canyon Carnival is. I’m sure you’ve been on a team running missions, getting a little momentum going, and then you hit an outdoor mission that sucks it all out. It’s tough finding a balance between enough details to make slugging it out a rewarding proposition and few enough details that one doesn’t wind up in some corner of nowhere, but one boss fight is a little too little to do on that map.

Detail - ****. I may not have liked where the plot ended up, but it was pretty clear how it got there. I do find it a little odd that the clinic staff don’t really have an idea about the mentalist’s capabilities -- and we never really get an indication of exactly how bad things were with the kids who just ran off in mission 2, to boot.

Overall - ***. The ending’s unsatisfying and comes too early. Watching Mynx de-rez into the hologram, and reading the final briefing, felt a lot like hitting a brick wall.

Firstly, thank you for the review, GlaziusF! I'm naturally disappointed at the number of issues you had with it, but I'm glad I have some concrete feedback to work from.

It sounds like some of the plot wasn't clear. And that's totally on me as the author. Most of the crucial points are stuck in the text, but there's a lot of reading in some places and important words get buried under the rest of it.

Quote:

...it seems like the Crey are the drivers here, using the Malta as hired thugs -- instead of the Malta using the Crey as hired brains.

The Crey/Malta relationship was meant to seem mutually beneficial: Malta runs covert ops to spirit away low-key mutant children, and Crey researches how to push these powers to critical level. Crey gets the benefit of these scientific advances, and Malta is rewarded with expendable mutant suicide bombers. I felt this was an important dynamic, and I'll have to do some rewrites to make it more explicit.

Quote:

(assorted sidekick-related madness)

The two pre-hero sidekicks in the Crey mission were originally set to Defensive, but it felt weird how often they just sat back and watched the player do all the work. So I made them Aggressive. After the chaos you experienced, those two are going right back on the sidelines.

Quote:

...one boss fight is a little too little to do on that map.

You're the second person to bring this up, and I'm actively thinking of alternatives for the last mission map. The outdoor map was chosen to create the illusion of a chaotic free-for-all, with Carnies-fighting-Carnies and all that jazz. But I suppose it could just as easily be some kind of fortified warehouse with the battle raging outside. In fact, that might improve the atmosphere somewhat.

Quote:

...having the arc just end on that depressing note feels like those missions were a waste.

Again, you're the second person to mention this. And I'm at a loss as to how to improve this. If the story was in a different medium (like a film), I could throw in a tender epilogue about the girl waking up as a regular person, but that wouldn't translate at all to a MArc mission. My scrapped ideas for a wrap-up include the player enlisting another powerful psychic to reverse the damage, or the player traveling back to the Crey lab for a cure, or even having the condition reverse itself. But none of these seem right. So for now, I'm using the tragic ending.

And last of all: CBP stands for "Customs and Border Patrol". I thought I was being clever, but it's probably not a good idea to keep throwing around an acronym without anyone knowing what it means.

In closing, I mention elsewhere that this whole arc is a floor-to-ceiling rewrite of an older arc. I'm still confident that the new arc is an improvement, but that's not saying much -- the old arc had plenty of issues, too.

Thanks again for the useful feedback!

------

*EDIT: I think just had an apostrophe... er, epiphany... about a potential fifth mission. It sounds really good in my head, so I'll see if it works!

As you know, I played the arc (twice) and I feel it has a ton of potential to be a top tier arc. I'm personally not ready at this time to give great "break-down" reviews such as GlaziusF... but I wanted to chime in and say keep up the good work! We need more authors in A/E who are passionate about creating fun/memorable arcs!

Meh, they have their place too. I do believe that. (Although, if they're the ones 1 starring story arcs, they're not really helping.) But it's story arcs that have mass amounts of time and effort put into them that inspire further creativity and display what Architect Entertainment's (and maybe the developer's) potential truly is.

In between bouts of upgrades to my arc, I've also been spending lots of time writing some theme music.

• Fractured Suite

Okay, time to finally show what I've been doing with this arc recently!

• Mission 2:
  Upgraded two allies from aggressive Lts to defensive Bosses
  Added a Malta patrol (for story reasons)
• Mission 4:
  Changed map from Carnie Steel Canyon to Carnie warehouse
• Added Mission 5:
  Includes custom enemy group, a new AV, and a (hopefully) conclusive finale to the story
• plus various minor text rewrites and mechanical tweaks

I'm allowing myself this poorly-veiled bump because I finally decided to switch the arc's status to "Final". It's been worked on enough, and I can't imagine being prouder than I already am.

I'm even toying with the idea of adapting the arc into a novella, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that. :P

Rereview for the CoHMR Aggregator project.

@GlaziusF

Rerunning this one on the same high-40s ice/axe tanker, still at +0/x2 with bosses on. Most of my comments are going to be fairly perfunctory, limited to the changes I've noticed.

---

Mission 1: maybe some text clarifications here but I couldn't really say. On a completely unrelated note I had to drop the mission and go get some dinner, and when I came back Architect seemed to have lifted the usual Sapper moratorium for solo heroes, but only in the areas I'd already cleared out. Just something I thought was worth passing along to anybody doing Malta missions.

Mission 2: the kids inclined to sidekicking are more survivable, the relationship between Crey and Malta has gotten clearer (there are some Malta on site running oversight) and on a happier note the kids have their research file descriptions, so the two kids who run off are no longer explicitly doomed to lives of pain and suffering.

Mission 3: maybe there's a little more text about the clinic staff, but again I couldn't really say.

Mission 4: hey, it's an actual Carnie base. I don't know what it is but I always find it easier to fight through a warehouse than through a city block. Nothing else about the mission seems to have changed much, though, aside from a bit of a Longbow presence after I've secured the area.

Mission 5! Alright, something new. Psychonauts time, baby.

The mobs in here are throwing out psyblast and lesser mind controls, and they're posed around the objectives in such a way that they're almost shambling awake to fight. Very nice effect. The echo of the mad doctor from mission 2 is a nice fusion of his original powers and his nature as a mental construct, and after he goes down it's just one more fight against the psyche fragments before Josephine gets back to daylight.

The only real problem I have with the goings-on here is that the map here is one of the tiny crumbly labs and there isn't even a single normal spawn crawling the halls. I barely have time to appreciate the atmosphere before it's all over.

---

Storyline - ****. I do a much better job of living up to my own foreshadowing in this arc, so that's a big improvement over last time out.

I have a very slight problem with the setup of the last mission, though. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are heroes who punch things and heroes who work out what things to punch, and Mynx has always struck me as squarely in the former camp. So having her come out with a plan to free a mutant mentalist from her own mind feels a bit pulled out of nowhere - it's not even like she might have some mutant perspective on the thing, because she's a product of Science like Synapse is.

Having her relay a plan that the clinic staff have come up with would go over much better and also actually give them a positive contribution to the story.

Design - ****. The Malta/Crey relationship is a little clearer now, the escorts are more durable, and there's some very nice visual and animation work to make the enemies in the last mission very atmospheric.

I just wish it didn't take place on a postage-sized map so they had some more time to shine. Would that one Faultline skyscraper with the secret base in it work for your objectives? You wouldn't even have to lead Josie "out" necessarily, maybe just to an inside glowie that represents an exit point.

Gameplay - *****. The Carnie warehouse is pretty big, but it seems a lot less like it goes on forever than the Carnie office park. Most of the opposition is stock and the handful of customs seem pretty reasonable.

Detail - *****. Whatever issues I might have with the story, there's always a good clear picture of what's going on.

Overall - ****. The former last mission is much more reasonable now, and the story actually gets a proper ending instead of spiraling off into narrative oblivion.

The ending could stand to be a bit better set up and perhaps a bit more busy if that's possible, but this mission is a definite step up from its previous version.

Thanks for another helpful review! I only have two responses to your comments:

• The plan to travel into Josephine's mind was meant to sound like a collaboration between Mynx and Sister Psyche.
  
  I pictured Mynx saying something like, "Can't we just go into her head and... fix her?"
  
  And then Sister Psyche goes like, "Well, now that you mention it...."
  
  Mynx was hard to write for, because I had no idea what she's supposed to sound like. I settled somewhere near "no-nonsense detective", but I don't think I had a good reason. <_<
  
• The final mission map was very specifically chosen to tie in with the mission where you first rescue Josephine et. al. from Crey. I wanted the finale to take place in an identical (albeit broken) room to the one from which she was rescued. And I also wanted the first lab map to have as few obnoxious rooms as possible (e.g. I hate looking for hostages in the room with the four destructible generator-thingies). A balance between those two factors was hard to find, but I feel the tradeoffs are worth it. Somehow

if you want the first map and second map to be similar for effect - call that out.

mission entry text, or a comment when you rescue her or something.

players are very bad at noticing what you want unless you spell it out for them - just do it with flavor.