Feedback: "Who Will Die?" Part 1

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My understanding of what he says is that at this point he knows he's beyond getting the obelisk's power what with being dead and all, but he still wants to see his life's work come to fruition and so he's picked you to be the one that gets its power. You get the power, and he gets the satisfaction of seeing all his work pay off. Kinda living vicariously through you.

And of course, I'd fully expect him to change his tune and try to backstab you at the last moment.

8-10 minutes per run, tops.

There are only three groups you absolutely have to fight - the ones at the end of each mission. Everything else you can get past with no stealth, just ninja or beast run and sprint. I've managed to click all three glowies in the ambush mission very quickly, on a squishy (most of my characters are defender/corruptor/controllers [let me add how painful soloing the level 20 controllers were!]) without taking significant damage or having stealth.

When I first read about the new loading screen tech, my impression was that we WOULD see a few pages of introductory comic book pages before monthly story arcs. And I was overjoyed. I'm a comic book reader. Call me crazy, I know this is a comic book themed game and all, but I would enjoy having a few comic book pages to read. While I enjoy the occasional fiction that appears on the front page of the website (and I do), I'd be happier if they made those stories into comic book panels. Every time I read them, I wonder, "Why isn't this in comic book format?"

Yes, some people will complain about waiting for a team to flip through comic book pages. I understand! I don't mean to be argumentative Feycat, but fans of the genre may feel much differently. Fortunately, this is nothing new. Players have had to face the choice (to read, or not to read) for years now, in the form of walls of mission dialogue text which take MUCH longer to read than a few pages of comic book panels and speech bubbles would. That is why my global friend list is carefully crafted for like-minded players who enjoy reading mission text, and don't mind waiting either. I can only presume other players (such as yourself) have global friend lists or SG rosters chock-full of the opposite.

Room for both around here, I'm pretty sure. You could tell your friends they better not stop to read the comic book panels on your time, and I could tell my friends to feel free and take their time.

Beg pardon? I've been reading comic books since middle school. I AM a fan of the genre. But I'm also a gamer and waiting for other people to read through the book WHILE on a team while other people wait for them is just bad gaming.

I would love to see pages linked here on the main website, or even an option to go to those pages when you finish the arc. I'd love to see that. But the "enter game" screens are jarring and don't seem to be much use.

Well you certainly have my apologies for suggesting otherwise, but I hope it didn't keep you from thinking about the rest of what I had to say. If everyone who played felt like you do, we wouldn't have big epic walls of text in various mission arcs. There is a group of players who enjoy reading it, and the writers indulge them. Never mind the fact that most players probably aren't in that group. As always, they can skip past it.

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Oh, and that is the only path I've done, so far, in the villain arc, hehe.
I didn't get around to running it a second time redside yet, like I had planned to.

The character I was playing will often make use of others and leave it to the last moment to figure out if he's really going to double-cross or triple-cross or whatever. Seemed like the right choice!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

I've only done heroside, but...

It does affect Fly, it's just that it's suppresion, not a detoggle. While you're IN the lava, you stop flying and are on the ground walking/running. When you jump, you exit the lava, get out of the -fly effect, and your suppresed Fly kicks back in.

Really? I ran it with my 50+ Thugs/Dark, and had no problems at all, except finding the exit in mission 1. I had a lot of fun knocking enemies into the lava with Synapse's whirlwind attack, and you've got Hurricane all the time.

On the other hand, I've got Twilight Grasp for keeping pets alive, you've only got O2 Boost.

Duh. Teller is a guy.

The fact that Penn Jillette is in the final cutscene is also the biggest hint at who will die: Penn & Teller Get Killed

Yes, but IN the Lava counts as a FOOT in the lava. I know, because I was hovering over it, as I would, but I accidentally dipped into it slightly, dropped out of the air and fell in. Because I NEVER jump, I have Hover on always, I was just holding the spacebar and really panicking about what was going on before I gathered the fact that I had to jump. And then it was difficult. Because my character is white.

There seems to be a running problem with the new villain content, and it comes down to writing. The narrative treats villains like Pavlov dogs, in the sense that a lot of contacts just say the word "power" (in quotes, even) and our villains are instantly compelled to work with them, because just the word "power" turns off our brains. Dr. Graves does it, Alistor does it, and I fear more will do it in newer content as it comes along.

"Power" is too general a concept to offer. I get that the idea is for it to be generic so it fits every concept, and this I appreciate, but the MEANS of obtaining this power still need to be set in stone. Sure, I want out-of-context power as much as the next guy, but I need to know what has to be done and I need to be sure I'll actually get it. I don't want my contacts sitting on my back, dangling a carrot on the end of a fishing line in front of my face, having me do their bidding blind to any knowledge or understanding.

Put it this way - if a stranger sends me a tell out of nowhere asking me to team with him for "mad XP" or some such, my initial reaction is to be suspicious. I want to know what he intends to do, what level he intends to have me fight at and how he plans to go about acquiring this "mad XP." I would assume that a career criminal and card-carrying villain would be even more suspicious than I am as a real person who's lived a fairly easy life.

Comic book content doesn't matter. To this day, I've read neither the Blue King nor Top Cow comic books that the site offers to me for free. I just don't like comic books. I don't like them as a general format. They're a melding of visuals and text in a way I really just don't enjoy. Also - and I mean no offence by this - but I really don't like the artwork on the recent comic book covers and the actual tutorial comic strip. I'm sure that artist was trying very hard, but the whole thing comes off as unintentionally goofy, and that just undermines the gravity of events.

For what it's worth, the Who Will Die poster very good, even if Numina has a very stout, manly jaw. One pinup like that is good enough. Expanding it into a full comic just wouldn't improve things for me.

The Feycat has a point here. There seems to be a trend in recent content to fill much of our playtime with filler. Largely unnecessary constant dialogues, objectives you can't click because you have to speak with them, complex convulted mechanics, tons of Caption text and so forth. A little of this is great to shake the game up a bit, but after a certain point it begins to detract from the experience.

Having a comic book available out of the game for free download to people who purchased the arc is one thing. I'd support that, even if I don't actually want one. But having a mini-comic inside the actual game just isn't a good idea, I don't think. The game is not the right place to put in a proper comic, so whatever it ends up being put in will be an unfortunate compromise, and no matter how cut down to size it is, it'll still be extraneous once you've read it.

Adding cool new things to the game is never bad, but it should always be done with the notion that this is, at the end of the day, a game. It is not a comic book, it is not an interactive story, it is a game. It needs to look like a game, feel like a game and play like a game.

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.

Ditto.

A thousand times this. It's such a glaring violation of the established UI of the game. Please either just convert this to a typical loading splash screen or let everyone win by making these new kinds of screens a configurable option (disable/enable).

Also, for those of us on older systems, these new Aberrant Loading Screens cause a massive lag spike after they clear, so we get the privilege of waiting twice.

With Super Reflexes, I did just that.

I can only speak for myself, but I am far from min/maxer. I can run 30 to 35 through oro easily enough.

But at 20, I'm missing, what, 40% of my powers and nothing is slotted.

Again, this isn't being SOLD as a new low level arc for lvl 20. This is PREMIUM content. This should be worth paying for. This should not be less technically sophisticated than an AE arc.

I'm so glad I didn't have to buy this, but I can't imagine how someone would feel if they did. It isn't like I've seen any mention of this being a level 20 only until I was actually on the map.

It is fine, it got my dander up to quit playing COH for the day and pop in my new Jean Vigo blu rays. So that is worth it, I guess, since I didn't have to pay for it.