I’ve been woefully remiss in keeping up on CoX board reading. So … a quick update!
- Official announcements and media mentions.
- You can include AVs in MA missions, but they’ll follow the normal difficulty level spawn rules (dropping to down to Elite Bosses when appropriate). There’s other mission scaling logic involved as well.
- You’re limited to three published arcs, but if an arc gets a “Dev’s Choice” or “Hall of Fame,” it becomes a “permanent”
part of the MA missions and no longer counts against that limit. Villains defeated don’t count against Defeat badges, alas. - I don’t want to go on this mission. Or a mission where warwolves shoot energy beams out of their shoulders. Fortunately you can drop MA missions without harm, and rate things without finishing them.
- Some fun custom dialog options. As well as enemy power set combos. And these missions sound fun.
- The metaphysics (and metagame) aspects of how this is implemented are a bit odd, since MA missions aren’t (as framed) “real.”
- Future ideas: story forks and temp powers, and lighting effects. And giant monsters?
- Aw, we get souvenirs but not citizenry gossip? Rats.
- No, this is not a sneaky way to fire all the Devs.
- How tickets work.
More red name info for you to read and muse upon as you await I14 coming out not very long from now.
My thoughts?
- Okay, yeah, I’ll have to do some of that thing. If nothing else, it will engender an understanding of the powers and limits of the overall COX system.
- The virtual reality of it bothers me, too. From a story-telling standpoint, it feels kind of cheesy. Unless there’s more to this than we know.
- Brilliant way to create more generic (though quirky) content (as in the police band / newspaper missions) while the Devs work on (one hopes) some new whiz-bang content.
I’ve heard and read bits and pieces of this, but man is there ever a lot of stuff about MA, isn’t there? Oy.
Thanks for collating all of these links, man. Good to know.
Glad to have been of service. I was concerned, when all was said and done, that I was late enough in doing this to make it not worthwhile to anyone to read.
I did leave out a couple of redundant Red/Orange Name posts, and there was the Massively article that was largely a restatement of the FAQ.
VERy excited about this! The RO folks are looking at a lot of create potential mishes and I know I plan to use at least one arc to tell a back story for my Iconic characters.
Do you have concerns (on a meta level) about it not being “real”? In terms of you access these missions through a Paragon company effectively offering virtual activities, as opposed to accessing them off a guy on the street.
Well, for my purposes I’m envisioing a ‘History of Artillery MKV’ which means taking the PCs back to important events in the creation of the battlesuit program and pivot events in it’s development, so, outside an Ouroboros environment (equally unreal) that’s just not possible.
So, going back to the Rikti Invasion to help Artillery MKI defend a group of school kids just before he was lost in the Boomtown Event (Armor and body later recovered and memorialized, original armor slightly reworked and rechristened by the pilot as Barrage MKI).
I envision this miss working like so:
‘Rescue Artillery MKI’ gain MKI as an NPC Pet.
‘Locate the kids’ beat up Rikti until you find the location key.
‘defend the kids’ Ambush waves with destructable NPCs
‘lead the kids to safety’ Hostage rescue.
Once the kids are safe (Mission complete), Arty MKI says something like: “Great Job, while you get those kids out of here I’ll scout to see if there’s anyone else to save.”
Mission Complete text talks about the Boomtown event.
Good stuff!
The RO folks are talking about setting up ‘training missions’ for new SG members to run through and learn tactics for the various SGs. There’s also talk about making missions that are specifically harder than standard misssions by selecting the power sets that are hardest to deal with.
I see the whole concept working more like a virtual ‘danger room’ simulator. I fully expect some of the very best arcs will eventually leak into the ‘real’ world of the game. And having such a broad array of player build content available can only be good for the game. Taking it outside continuity also opens up a lot of creativity.
MA is LIVE on the Test server. I took a quick look last night and it’s a VERY complex mechanism. I hope to get into it more in the next few nights.
Cool. And it sounds like, the way you plan to use it, the metareality issue is addressed just fine.