The Brave New World

The arrival of Mission Architect open beta in the training room halted my Baldur's Gate 2 replay. (I had gotten further than I ever had and completed the Underdark, but it was getting boring.) After an agonizingly long patchtime, I got onto the training room and got my first taste of the Mission Architect.

First, I decided to try a story arc. I was not very impressed with the user interface for finding story arcs. There was no search capability, only filters based on a limited number of criteria such as ratings and length (calculated by unknown formula). When this goes online the main servers, I predict the volume of arcs will overwhelm the capabilities of this crude system. How can someone's creation get onto the hall of fame, if nobody can find it to start ranking it? On the other hand, the popular ones (by sheer molecular motion of somehow jostling to the front) will be more and more played, and ranked.

Hopefully, human creativity may see the appearance of a fan-run database or wiki site to organise the story arcs.

I finally selected "Phantom of the Abyss". The quality was good, on par with dev-supplied missions, although the storyline was bizarre. I forgave the storyline as a subjective consideration and gave it a 5 for its technical accomplishments.

Then I stood around and answered calls to playtest a few custom mobs/missions.

Ummm.

One mission was filled with two mobs called "Moo Cow of Doom", and "Chicken" of something. The map was one of those on fire outdoors maps. The AV (which took some time to find), was called "Billy Bob".

Another mission was another outdoors map filled with mobs called "Carer of Kindness" or "Giver of Friendship", or something... the villain was called "James".

Not quite flying penis or rooms full of electronic hookers, but not quite the type of mission I want to play in either. I think one common flaw is that people fall into the trap of fooling around so much with the custom critter creator to make their fantasy mobs, that they forget about the most important part of the story arc: the story. Unless the player is a hack and slash fan who desires nothing more than a map full of
amusingly named or amusingly dressed mobs, this will not satisfy them.

After some testplay, the creator of "Billy Bob" asked for feedback. Was it fun? How did I like the mobs?

I didn't find it very enjoyable, I said, because from what I am experiencing, people seem to be making all their mobs, even minions, hold-resistant.

All the mobs are controllers, the defender said, you can tell a scrapper made them. (My guess was that she didn't enjoy being constantly mezzed by every mob sneezing at her, yet unable to pre-emptively control them?)

An interesting thought. If it were up to me, what would I make? I would probably make mobs that can be easily controlled, but have high melee damage, and annoying debuffs. This would probably drive scrappers (tankers, brutes) nuts. They would... such mobs exist in the game, and they are called Vanguard. Witness the huge screaming about how Vanguard were overpowered (and I went, huh? because I just went in, held all of them and never got hit much).

I started up a story arc myself, and set myself the goal of creating a storyline without the use of custom mobs. If I need a custom boss or ally, I will create it after I've completed the story.

(One realisation I had was how the Infected were really powerful for low-levelled mobs, when I put a few battles between the Infected and the lowbie PPD into my mission. The Infected stomped the PPD so quickly it was funny to watch -- if you could catch the battle before the PPD got stomped, that is.)