Bubbawheat

(entire quote continues below, just snipped so the whole thing's not in the box)

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Haven’t run the official clone stuff for a while but it doesn’t seem like this is referencing it. Good enough.

Not sure if my contact should be saying he stole from me as one of the first things.

Also the mission seems to be to retrieve Dr. Vazhilok’s research, rather than my contact’s, as the briefing indicates. At least I think that’s what it’s indicating. It’s a bit unclear. Have you considered colors?

The Freaks have been experimenting with cloning technology, and turned out three clones with random powers and slightly off appearances, though I’d focus more on how they’re made of some weird substances.

They’re supposed to be the product of Freakshow beerslam experimentation, right? Somehow they’ve gotten a hold of Dr. Vahzilok’s notes, and...

Hang on. Is my contact unstuck in time or something? It seems like in his briefing the mission he described me as doing long ago is the one he just sent me on.

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So now I’m going to go enforce the copyright on myself.

I find some master Freak doctor, apparently the man behind everything. He has a self-rez so he says his death line twice, but he doesn’t seem like a stock mob. You should probably peel off the rez.

The lab station and maybe the clone pod (couldn’t check before my friendly clones blew it away) have a standard description, which could stand to be customized for the situation at hand.

Apparently I’m not interested in keeping any of this research for myself...

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Or suffering it to exist, as the next mission is going off-script to backstab my contact.

Hmm. The variant naming of the Banished Pantheon seems a bit off. Are you already using the lowercase-l for uppercase-I trick? You might want to use variant adjectives: decrepit, rotting, decayed, ossified, etc.

Also checking Dr. Mephit’s description, it seems like character-specific variables such as $name don’t actually get replaced when they’re in names.

I am apparently holding his notes for ransom from himself. Little worried about how this map looks pretty much empty. I expect shenanigans.

Oh! The Freaks are making another play at this place. The boss’s description should probably reflect this, rather than being a replay of his earlier one.

Ah. That’s why this place looks so different from a normal sewer level, it’s the Vahz lab. The last room doesn’t show up on the automap.

For kicks I decide not to wreck the doc’s notes and see what happens. I loop around to a perfect clone, though unlike me he’s vulnerable to my knockaround. Also the Crey show up and try to wreck both of us. (there’s a linebreak in the middle of their $hisher line, just for reference)

Welp, looks like this mission’s not over until I destroy the file cabinet and see what happens next.

What happens is that Freaks run in for an ambush when it’s halfway down... but the doc just stands there. Mission completes and he doesn’t even go ballistic. Aw.

And then it ends... talking like this is the end of clones, somehow.

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Storyline - ***. There are a couple things dragging this down. First is the introduction of my contact as someone I’ve worked with before, even though he doesn’t appear in-game anywhere. I can appreciate wanting to create an excuse for the clones, but honestly, the Rogue Isles is lousy with crazy mad scientists pursuing their own inventions. It’d probably make more sense to leave the doc alive at the end if he was just some random dude instead of someone I worked with in the past and who betrayed whatever little trust I had in him.

Second, though I don’t want to make too strict of a comparison with the official clone arc (as it uses tools we don’t have access to), my character’s immediate EXTERMINATUS stance on the clones seems a little too extreme. Clones have uses, including being distractions or perhaps test subjects. It’s never really explained well why we’re so bent on wiping them out, other than perhaps extreme paranoia or vindictiveness.

Design - ***. Sewers, sewers, sewers. Actually I’m only mentioning this to note it, I don’t believe it registered let alone bothered me while I was playing the arc. I can’t think of many other times I’ve actually seen a sewer map in the Mission Architect, and they may be a little annoying, but they’ve just got chokepoints rather than the crampathons of the blue/crystal caves. If you wanted you could probably have the master Freak hole up in an abandoned warehouse, or move him to the Vahz lab and put my contact in a more conventional one.

But the last mission disappoints for a couple of reasons. First, though you can’t help it, is that I was running this on a character with no build up and an armor set, which made my clone less of a challenge than the random-power types earlier, which popped Aim, Build Up, or both, and often had two damage sets aimed at me. Second, it’s mostly empty. There don’t seem to have been any actual random spawns. Usually I take this as a hint that something crazy’s going to happen down the line, but nope. The arc just came to an end on a large, empty map with plenty of dead space. I didn’t even get to throw down with my contact, which I was sure would somehow happen.

Not that I’d necessarily want it to happen? But he cons as elite boss, so I was expecting something to happen that would get him into combat. I forget if civilians just work that way automatically.

Gameplay - ****. One thing about the sewers: they’re pretty straightforward. No way to miss very much. The single custom boss was a decent rumble, and some of the random doppelgangs were a little challenging but that’s what you get with randoms.

Detail - ***. The destructibles I remembered to check had generic descriptions - no big deal, but look into it - and the custom Freak should probably have a different description the second time around since I’ve seen him once already.

You definitely need to retool the initial briefing. My contact talks about the work we did in the long past, and then describes what the Freaks just did to him in the immediate past. There’s no linebreak or anything between the two, and since English doesn’t really have different past tenses they melt and run together into a single event, which probably isn’t what you wanted.

Overall - ***. A story that forces my hand a bit much, introduces a pretty superfluous connection, and ends on a special but largely empty map.

Aeon Challenge Special Comment - Judging by the alignment I’m guessing this arc was supposed to be about a villain turning rogue. It doesn’t really work in that sense.

Rogues are kind of an oddball alignment, I admit. Your big comic-book example of the alignment is, say, Catwoman, but she doesn’t really fit the in-game idea of someone “dreaming of riches and fame” who does good things for bad reasons. Comic-book rogues are villains who aren’t twisted enough they they won’t work with the heroes, or vice-versa, on occasion. That “dreaming of riches and fame” type of fictional character is more along the lines of Han Solo, who is what you’d call a rogue by affiliation: he was hired by the Rebellion but in the end came back to save Luke less because he wanted to fight the Empire than because he’d befriended Luke during the journey.

Rogue alignment choices on the tip missions aren’t really clear most of the time. But the commonality between Catwoman (when she acted like a rogue) and Han Solo isn’t just that they occasionally did good things, but they they did them in public, or at least in front of heroes.

The supposed good action in this arc is executing all the clones, but for reasons I’ve explained it doesn’t exactly come off as anything more than a practical consideration: this is somebody who’s going to have the power to mess with my plans, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen. But even if this was actually a good thing to do, it’s done pretty much in secret.

The story of a villain getting redeemed is, at least in game terms, the story of someone who decided to do good things for a payoff in cash or acclaim, and then kept doing them without getting paid. This arc doesn’t seem to have a payoff, and it doesn’t even work as an internal transformation because wiping out the clones isn’t presented as a moral choice.