SSA #7 Story Discussion ** SPOILERS **

I wish Malta could have done all the killing of supers in this arc. It would have been much more appropriate than out-of-nowhere Darrin Wade. Malta would have achieved a major goal and suddenly seemed a bit more dangerous if they wiped out Statesman and Psyche. Director 11 even says in the Apex TF that they are trying to prevent Primal Earth from turning into Praetoria, so it would be perfect if they decided that the only way to do that was to kill Primal Earth's versions of Tyrant and Mother Mayhem, to make sure they never turn bad. Too late now of course. Maybe an AE rewrite of the arc...

I was very pleased with how epic that final battlefield was. Also the floating ships mission was VERY cool and unique. We need more missions like that to make future SSA's seem more important.

My BIGGEST beef with all the SSA's though, and please let me know if I'm the only one who has trouble with this: The dialogue moves TOO FREAKING FAST. I literally stood through half the Rularuu ambush in the floating ship mission trying to catch up on the dialogue and didn't really get caught up until halfway through the third wave, so I missed all the action. If you're going to cram that much dialogue into a mission you need to pace it better, or make the ambush waves/enemey spawns/crazy events wait until all the dialogue has popped. In the past I've been forced to endure a fight that I had no idea why it was happening, then had to read back up the chatlog to find out what the hell just happened. Please work on this devs?

Also, I find it incredibly lazy/sloppy that the unique items/creatures in the final battle had no info attached to them, because yes, I'm one of those people who actually reads the info on new entities. I looked at Rula-Wade's bio and it read "INSERT BIO HERE". I will admit I found it utterly hilarious when I looked at the info for The One Book of Rularuu and it's bio read "TEXT". The other two items were not as amusing though.

Soon the scion of the Mu shall rise with the blood of the wind of the west on him to take his place as a Patron.

I ran the entire WWD storyline for the first time over the last two days and greatly enjoyed the adventure. Darrien Wade made a great villain and bringing him down was very satisfying.

The mission with the floating fleet was awesome (and the music I had playing in the background, http://youtu.be/3yLk7sE6ZfQ , fit perfectly with it).

I was greatly concerned, prior to the warburg malta mission, by the contact's mention of tanks equipped with sapper technology. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or disappointed that the tanks weren't manned...

The final mission (by which I mean the one in space, not the epilogue press conference) was, of course, quite epic and a fitting conclusion to the adventure.

Are you guys even trying? Rofl.



Also: the log in prompt is blank, and the mission 1 contact busy dialogue is bugged.

My offer of helping you guys with this still stands.

The scenery in this chapter salvaged a great deal of what was otherwise a lot of "blahbity-blah". No, really, I was saying that to myself as I read the dialog for the first few missions. It may be that I was just feeling cynical or it may be that it really was as pointless as it felt. I ghosted through the first two missions asking myself why I was even being faced with these minions.

Faathim's dialog had me shaking my head and saying "Well, it looks like Darren will be hoist by his own petard after all." I'm glad the story didn't end that way (though they hinted at it at the end). It would have been the ultimate anti-climax if it had.

I suppose that it established that Wade was sort of possessing Rularu rather than literally merging with it.

The outdoor scenery in mission three was when I sat up and took notice. I have to give some cool points for that one. It was pretty neat. It goes to show that sometimes epic writing is best conveyed with epic visuals.

It also established Wade as a mass murderer. After it was all said and done, I googled "How large a crew does a USA battleship hold?" and I learned that 1500 was a reasonably round number. There were five ships out there as I recall, which means that Wade "melted" around 4500 able seamen.

If I wasn't already snorting at his pathetic mewling about how unfair it was that he should be defeated, the thought of those sailors deaths would have been more than ample justification for killing Wade outright.

In fact, I sort of thought that's what Infernia was hinting at when she was briefing me about the press conference. I expected to have the opportunity to destroy Wade in front of a global audience. No such luck, though.

Penelope Yin was useless and I mentally told her so. In fact, my hero was uncharacteristically hard and cold throughout this chapter. I think he might be turning to the dark side for awhile as a result of all of this. I guess we'll see.

I would have liked to see the press conference questions have a more obvious answer-based result. It appears that only "attack the press" really had any noticable results.

Overall, the high points outweighed the negatives. A tentative thumbs-up, though that doesn't change anything I felt about the previous chapters.

I was really hoping for a reward for completing all of the episodes on one character. An extra reward table or something, maybe a choice of Very Rare Incarnate Component? From a gameplay perspective the whole thing felt rather unrewarding.

As for the plot, it really bugged me the gushy way they dealt with Wade. "All I wanted was freedom and knowledge! Come on! Waaaaah!" Note that it wasn't his motives that bothered me, just the way he whined about it at the end.

I was also hoping for more backlash from Recluse for excluding him from the space mission. He was so adamant about dealing the final blow that not hearing from him later was lame.