"Only you have the power!" Mission Personalization and Personalized Missions

In comics, stories are written around the main character and thus the problems they face more often than not revolve around proper application of their abilities.

In this game(which is based on comics) missions have to be open for everyone to do, so everyone can experience them freely. Which is great.

But this can take away from the feeling of being the hero of your own story.
When the hulk and Professor Xavier are both given the same missions, it can make you feel like just a nameless, faceless avatar and break immersion.

My idea was conceived in the hopes of mitigating this somewhat.

Personalized Missions and Mission Personalization
The core of this idea is creating a way for the game to recognize different primary and/or Secondary powers a character might have, and then implement changes based on various factors(Random Chance, unlockable content, e.t.c.) that would require your character to use those powers specifically within missions to achieve certain goals. This would be somewhat similar to Kheldians causing Void Hunters to spawn during missions
Mission Personalization:
This would be an option based on random chance. During any given mission a chance would exist to cause certain non-essential secondary objectives to occur that can only be solved by use of the primary and/or secondary powers, Such as a fire using character having something on the mission frozen in ice and having to use fire powers to melt it, an Electric powered character having to re-charge a drained electronic device, robot, or power a generator, an Ice character having to put out fires, e.t.c
completing these objectives would grant extra XP and inf, and would just be a nice distraction that would make mission feel more personal.

Personalized Missions:
This idea would be based on a combination of random chance and Unlocked content. It would function something like a cross between paper and Tip missions.

After completing a certain amount of MP-objectives in a mission, or maybe via a contact given at a certain level, your character will be "Known" for their powers and thus will have people approaching you to help solve problems "only you" can solve.

The mission name, primary objective, and enemy type would be based on what your character's powers are. So a mission to run into a burning building and stop a gang of hellions would pop up for an ice character, a mission to stop a swarm of clockwork from destroying a power plant would be given to an electric/psy character, things of this nature.

The information would be dropped in mad-libs style where needed, with certain "Types" of missions, similar to paper missions

"Stop Named boss" missions
"Prevent/cause Destruction" missions
"Save Hostage/capture hostage" missions
"use powers on glowy" missions

Ideally, these missions would be given by a random ambush NPC(An NPC runs up to you "OMG, It's $hero, just who I was looking for! and then you click them and receive the mission) contact while out in the city that would approach and let you talk to them, but the Tips system as it stands is just as good for this purpose.

I see a couple of potential problems in execution here. First of all, not all powersets are as monolithic as the elemental ones. For, say, Devices, you may well end up requiring an effect unique to a power that the character never intended to take to begin with. For instance, a Devices character may be expected to be able to lay down a smoke screen to see security lasers, perhaps, ignoring the fact that Smoke Grenade sucks terribly and I may not have wanted to waste a power pick on it.

Beyond that, I fear that this may end up feeling even more generic. I recall Yahtzee's description of Brink, which went something along the lines of "You spend the entire game pointing your use key at something, defending someone who's pointing their use key at something or dead because someone killed you while you were pointing your use key at something. Soldiers put bombs on explody things, engineers engineer engineerable things and medics medicate nearby team-mates."

When you reduce a supposedly personalised mission objective to a palette swap and text box swap of the same basic mechanic of "use inherent power on custom object," you undermine your own feeling of uniqueness. When I know that it doesn't matter whether I'll have fire powers, ice powers, electrical powers or a gun, that objective will always be there and the only thing that will change is which power I have to use to press the button, essentially, it just becomes another generic mission objective that just happens to have your name on it.

I'm not saying I disagree completely and this should never be done. Far from it - I want to see missions which feel more closely tailored to my own characters. It just seems like a very serious technological challenge to make something this complex truly procedurally-generated. Even Spore couldn't quite do that.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You bring up a good point, but that's kind of an inherent flaw of the engine where every thing we do in this game comes out as "Use the use key at x" Because every action is designed to either take place in a bubble of animation/effects(powers) or not at all(clicking anything), the only uniqueness available to players is what things look like, and what numbers they generate.There's no real difference in how the powers behave (outside of numbers and status effects), or interact with the environment or move through the air, because they don't do any of those things. With Aoe,drop powers and the difference between melee and ranged there's a little more, but that's still not very much, and there's not much to be done with that, anyway.

The third step of this idea would be missions particularly tailored to individual powersets, A Dual Pistols mission, a Fire melee mission, an Illusion controll mission but, again, go too far in that direction and you run the risk of Forcing the mission to only accept individual powers that players might not have taken, and thus be unwinnable. Furthermore it can weaken the "casual" nature of the game to start creating content that can ONLY be beat with the right combination of, not only archetype, but powerset as well.

A fourth step could be powerset- directed signature enemies. A Wandering samurai/Gunslinger who challenges gun/sword characters and can only be beaten by said characters and other similar ideas. Either within missions or as a random ambush(or both!).

Within this engine I feel like this is the best that can be accomplished without either a new engine or a massive overhaul.

You can often just do this by talking to your teammates (or yourself)

"Its ok, I've covered the bombs in ice."
"I've turned the explosives to hydrogen, they're harmless now"

or whatever's appropriate to your powerset.

well yes, and I loves me some RPeses and I do that exact thing all the time. But that's not an actual gameplay mechanic that has something to do with what you actually DO in the game, so much as what you're pretending to do(while you play a pretend game, of course :P) This is intended to sort of bridge the gap between those two things.

Further more It can help RP in-mission/fight, instead of typing out a thing, you can just DO said thing, like using an emote to faint instead of typing out "Premmy faints" or having X costume piece instead of having to describe it all the time

Powersets are often re-interpreted by players.

For example, my namesake is an Earth/Energy Dominator who has Firestorm-like transmutation powers, and thanks to the power customisation available turns the air into diamond around enemies, creates pools of chlorine gas and so on. Being told that only I can help because of my Earth powers would be immersion-breaking rather than helping. And I dont believe that I'm alone in doing this.

Also, a character's core traits may not be reflected in their powersets. A sword wielder may be a talented fighter with a sword, or some kid who wields an Excalibur-like magic weapon, without any change in game statistics. Its hard to think of a mission that would require both as the specialist, unless we take Origin (Natural vs Magic here) or some other clues like weapon customisation into account.

Its a nice idea, but I think would be a lot of work for the development team, and ultimately unsatisfying for many players or characters.

You can create any type of personalized mission you like in AE, with any dialog you like.

Just sayin'.

This is EXACTLY the kind of thing they created AE for in the first place (not to be a giant farm/PL-fest like a lot of people seem to think)

Slightly less ambitious, what about a recurring nemesis who is generated or chosen at character creation?

When you create your character, or when you hit a certain level, the system could automatically pick a nemesis from a pre-established rogues' gallery, or it might simply mirror your character and give it a new/evil name (and either reverse your costume colors or change them to gray-scale).

Every level or so, the nemesis might attack you in the street, or show up as a mission.

His minions could be a new generic thug group, or assigned by existing group with nearest power sets, or a random mix of villainous minions.

Players should have the option to set the nemesis difficulty/frequency. We should be able to not have a nemesis at all, make him an occasional nuisance, or make him a frequent red-con boss threat.

I'm going to suggest something like this as an event.