So I’ve run in the Atlas Safeguard mission with a variety of toons and players in the last week. I’m pleasantly … well, pleased by how they turned out.
The earlier “Protect the Widget from the Bad Guys” missions in CoX were, generally, annoying — an unknown number of enemies, too many targets or too fragile a target or whatever. My fear about stopping the robbers from escaping the bank can be summed up in three words “Fir Bolg” and “Dolmen.”
Instead, the crooks here act pretty much like bad guys. I’m sure that, given the chance, they’ll really try to get away (though the truck is stashed across the zone), but faced with heroes blocking the way, the bad guys, naturally, choose to fight their way through.
Similarly, the vandalism events in the city come in series over time, and so are somewhat manageable, and also are trigged by villains seeing heroes, which makes life a bit dicier. Again, it makes the game experience more enjoyable, even if it’s not 100% realistic.
The related side missions — foiling other robberies, plantings of bombs, etc. — are also well structured (and pretty to behold), and provide a decent challenge.
By “decent challenge,” I mean, “Capable of being won, but not without a few tense moments or even deaths.”
Indeed, I’ll go a step further — I think the Safeguard missions are as good as, if not better, than the Mayhem missions. Ideally, I’d love to see a combination of both — I can imagine a “Mayhem” mission for heroes (a smash-and-run raid on an Arachnos base, for example), as well as a “Safeguard” mission on the Villain side (“Longbow is raiding the Arachnos archives!” or even “Other bandits are robbing the bank — the one you’ve got your money laundered into!”).
It’s early in the day, and I haven’t tried any of the Safeguards at higher levels (need to try something with Hildy/Torchy sometime), but I’m pretty pleased by this addition, as well as the Police Band stuff, to the CoH world.
My girlfriend and I duo’d the Safeguard that takes place in Bricks within 48 hours of I8’s release. I’m not entirely thrilled with the pace and execution, though I can see they’ve gone to some trouble to make it somewhat manageable. If you don’t know to stick together, your team could end up setting off multiple side-quest events (and, thus, probably failing at least one of them). Also, one of the doors in Bricks is located underneath the bank’s entrance, which confused the hell out of us until we (later, too much later) discovered the underground parking ramp.
It just isn’t as much fun when you can’t blow up random stuff. (Watching Nemmies get away with it made me jealous. *wry grin*) In the Mayhems, once you’ve taken care of the bank (and you have all of the 15-or-so minutes in which to do so, to start with!) you can putter around or look for the side mission or what-have-you. Not so with the Safeguards, where you’re basically being run ragged hither and yon, chasing spawns and clearing those side missions as fast as you can. Mind you, without the “blow stuff up” option, there isn’t much else to do, I suppose.
Eh. I don’t mind doing ’em, but I won’t look forward to ’em like I do the Mayhems.
Sticking together is good. The problems I’ve seen folks have usually center on scattering.
And, yeah, there’s some fun in kicking the snot out of cars and fire hydrants and the like. But the “being run ragged hither and yon” is kind of fun, too.
So far, a lot less frustration with the Safeguard than Mayhem mishes, albeit with limited experience on my part.
Soap!
Brilliant!
Scrubbing the dirt out of Paragon City — and keeping the city smelling fresh for hours!
I’m curious about the “Atlas” safeguards — I don’t even get a cop contact until I get to KR, so I’m not sure how I’d go about getting the Atlas contact (and, one would assume, that Safeguard.)
The KR contact is the one that gives you the Atlas Safeguard mish (it’s set in Atlas, south of AP). I don’t think there are police contacts in Atlas or Galaxy.