Failure Options and Phasing.

The new Atlas Park is great. As you progress, enemies appear and disappear, entire neighborhoods come under attack and are saved, it's a lot of fun and feels much more epic heroic, without making things tougher.

So I got to thinking of ways to use this that would enrich the player experience provide options, and make things a little more realistic than they are now.

Right now the game is pretty much in a 'No Harm No Foul' state when it comes to success or failure. Mess up a mission accidentally or on purpose, and the worst that happens is your contact chides you a bit before handing you the next mission. Timed missions for the most part have a completely unfailable limit on them, making it a non issue. I think though a lot of the new tech they've come up with could be applied to make some or all of these unrealistic hiccups a thing of the past.

Here's an example:

Let's say your contact sends you to a building to prevent a bombing. When you enter and begin to fight, they are alerted to your presence, set the bombs to a short timer and try to escape. You have to fight your way past feeling bad guys (ambushes) and disarm the bombs in time. If you succeed, you exit the mission and report to your contact to continue the story. Possibly, there could even be multiple ways to win. Invisible characters might never be detected, and disarm the bombs without triggering the timer. They'd get less xp but be done sooner, or maybe with a slightly different badge name. Reward different playstyles instead of forcing everyone to do the same thing.

If you fail, the bombs go off and you exit the mission into a different phase. Your contact won't talk to you until you help clean up the consequences of your failure. The building is on fire and the PFD is there to put it out. From there, you're in a kind of personal zone event, working to put out the fire (or possibly going back inside to pull out civilians who had been held prisoner by the criminals). It's not a long event, but it is time taken from your normal progress. There's still the potential for experience, but not as much as if you'd been in a true mission. Once it's over things go back to normal and you continue on with the arc.

There's a lot they could do with this kind of thing. In some cases your success or failure could even lead to true Zone events, similar to how Babbage is spawned or an LGTF win leads to a Rikti counter attack. I think that should be limited, so people aren't inconvenienced, but that's a benefit of phasing things. Someone doesn't have to be bothered by a zone wide Troll rampage if they are in a different stage. Or zone events could be more like Neighborhood events. Letting people go on their way if they dont want to get involved.

As a player, I'd like my actions to have consequences. I don't want my failures to be irrevocable and catastrophic, but if failing means I have to devote some extra time to clean up my mess, I'd say that's fair dues.

Well to be fair Sam, the failures you hate are ones that are A poorly designed or bugged, and B so annoying because there's no chance to atone. You've kind of hit on the other downside to failable missions in this game thus far; the fact that so many times those conditions are bugged.

I tend to think people find those missions annoying not because of the failure, but because the test itself is stacked. No one (even me) likes to feel like the game cheated.

Would you agree or oppose failure consequences, if we accept the premise that the tests involved work correctly and are fair?

And to note, in my head I was going to say that all missions like this would be clearly marked and noted, so that people had the option of getting help, changing settings, or putting it off for when they have more time. I didn't put that in my original post, but it's important. I'm of the opinion that no ingame mechanism should come as a shock to players paying a reasonable amount of attention.

Actually, turning this over in my head, I think I can see this differently. It's not so much that you've failed and now have to suffer the consequences, as even if you fail, you still get a chance to make things right. Right now, if I accidentally let Lady Grey fall, Gaussian is gravely disappointed and the Dark Watcher is probably sighing to himself, and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it. If you system lets me fail and yet somehow still recover from this with extra effort... That would be a step UP, rather than the step down that I saw it as.

I think when you present it as a consequence for failure, it comes off like punishment, but when you present it as a chance for redemption, it becomes an opportunity.

And, yes, I agree that most of our failable missions usually fail because the game cheats or is bugged. Good luck stopping Agent Crimson from running away with Elude going.

Quote:

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.

Nah. Failure being an option in real life is sufficient coverage for my needs. I'm OK without it spreading into City of Heroes too.

Hey, I just thought of something, though: It could be another difficulty option. "Our records indicate that you: - Wish to fight enemies +0 to your level. - Consider yourself equivalent to 1 hero. - Are with Gene Kranz on the whole failure optionality thing."

It'd be no more ridiculously fourth-wall-breaching than the rest of the difficulty NPC dialogue.

It would also tend to cut down on deliberately failing for the sake of expedience, which while I understand it, I still find annoying. Basically the root of my suggestion is:

On conditional missions, make every option viable in it's own way. Success through stealth or speed, success through straightforward play, or meaningful failure after a fair test.