Dr. Graves hurts my brain...

My big issues with Graves are,

One:
If you're going to write a voice for my character, make options (aggressive/passive/quip) or stick to the Accept/Dowhatevercontactjustsaid type response.

Two:
Don't impose talent/limitations/behaviors

Submissivness rating of 5

Recognizing an attack and avioding it vs. just taking the hit and shruging it off

Not to mention the record entry on your character.

And while I've ranted about my characters ending up as stupid cowardly henchmen, it also seems to toss in curveballs for players whose characters are supposed to be oblivious, meek, or don't care who they work for as the characte voice isn't consistant through the arcs.

The arc had potential, it just didn't reach it, and the game doesn't have to account for every possiblility to reach the potential these stories have.

The thing I didn't like about the Graves arc was

1) It didn't make sense.

2) The writing tried too hard to be funny

3) Every 'spoken' word ending with '!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!!??!'

4) See #1

I don't care all that much that the only dialog options given to my character were 'stupid' and 'stupid, but with !?!? on the end,' but the entire thing made no sense.

So I'm in a contest to... do something, and to win I have to find a terminal... I think? Oh, but the other contestants are cool with just following me around. Hell, Graves even forces one of them to. And then Crosscut teaches me a secret ability that.... I think it involves the intercom or something. So I use that, and I magically become the winner. Yay! What did I win? Oh, nothing.


edit: Actually, I do care that my dialog choices were stupid. It's a bad arc. Sorry, guy who wrote it. I appreciate the hard work you did but it's a bad arc and not really the kind of first impression I'd want to give people.

Here is what I think the point is:

Which is preferable?

1: You break his arm.
2: You break his leg.
3: You describe in horrifying detail what you could do to him.

-OR-

You break his arm.

Ran Graves today and thought I'd pitch in my two cents.

Yes, I ran Graves so that I never would have to again. I'll do the Sewer Trial and just skip right to level 12-15. I gotta agree that Graves was awful, but not quite for the same reasons I've seen here (admittedly I skipped some of the middle pages). Yes, the dialogue trees are a problem, as is the very vague premise of the whole arc, as is having five characters all talk at once so it's impossible to know what the heck is going on. What I have the biggest problem with, though, is that I didn't learn squat. To clarify, I know the tutorial stuff, I'm a 7-year vet. But doing Twinshot's arc, I felt a great sense of learning the game inside of a story. It was done great. But with Graves, it was like they saw what Twinshot was doing and tossed that stuff in afterwards. It was just kind of "here, this is what this is, I guess." Not only did it fail on the character level, but it failed as a tutorial.

I know it's hard to write a helpful mission arc teaching you things when you're darkity dark villains who don't play nice or help. I'm having trouble coming up with a suitable alternative. But you Paragon people are smart and you've made a great game and I know you can do better than this if you really sit down and work on villains.

There is only one fun thing about Graves;

Getting to punch his face in during Twinshots arc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

All of which annoys both the people who don't want to read any of that text, and those who desperately do.

So that's what was going on. Part three of Dr. Graves arc suddenly makes part two make a lot more sense. Yes, Dollface makes you think she planted a mental time bomb in your head, and yes, she IS that powerful. I may have said some words I cannot type here out loud when I saw what she conned as. She's an Archvillain?! SOLO? A bit of a disappointment in how easy that fight actually was, but that was fun none-the-less. It did end up as a messy pile up of plans, but hey, I was the one with the trump card. It has an Arachnos logo on the back and Scirocco on the front.

So in the end, Scirocco was using my character to capture Dollface. Which is a win for Arachnos, and no one else. Except that through your actions, you get Scirocco's nod of respect, which is worth quite a bit on the Rogue Isles. All in all, not a bad ending, but part two is the weaker part.

I think that's me you are paraphrasing. Thanks, if so.

All I want as a dialog option for every one of Graves' missions is "You're a self-important imbecile, Doc. I'm just going along with all of this because you're amusing, too..."

I don't get people who go all "Doooom!" because "Oh no! Dollface mind-controlled me! Bad writing! My character doesn't have a brain/Is too powerful/Is a god so this shouldn't have happened!".

Well, if you roleplay a god, then your roleplaying is weaker that the "bad" writing. How would you react to someone who wants an option to cancel incoming damage, because their character is immortal/invulnerable or to remove all mentions of colour because their character is colour-blind?

I liked the Dr. Graves' arcs a lot and it was a nice options for the not-so-serious/paranoid/comic-relief/low-profile/clumsy/decieving kind of villain. For my part, I assumed my character was just acting along and pretending to the dullest tool in the shed, just to trick everyone else into revealing more info that they would otherwise. I enjoyed the outcome a lot and it fitted my toon like a glove.