It *is* about the journey

This ain't your grandmother's MMO! I'm really spazzing out on Dark Astoria.

The schizophrenic devs have struck again, and this time Dark Astoria is hitting the bullseye on what the traditional non-raid crowd wants over and over, insofar as I am counted as the traditional non-Itrial crowd. I'm a mix of both actually.

I-Trials will still be there. They have their place.  If I actually want to incarnate someone, I would just do a bunch of Itrials, which I find quite fun if I'm in the mood for it. Dark Astoria is just content, with incarnating as a side effect. It is how to level beyond 50, which is what the whole incarnate idea should have been in the first place until the whole raid-devs content started appearing.

What Dark Astoria sends a strong message that it is about the journey. And because it is about the journey, the replayability instantly skyrockets.

Let's take the Dominator I started out with. Go into Dark Astoria...and a new villain group appears. They have some similarity to another villain group in First Ward. From the metagaming perspective, I as a player know the story of First Ward, but my Dominator PC doesn't. The contacts starts wondering about the villain group and the PC is just as clueless.

Then I am sent to chase after two NPCs. A a player, I recognise them as some having appeared now and then in some Midnight Club related arcs. I see the first NPC, and I started up a conversation. NPC is really hostile and pissed at me...because she remembers that my ex-villain PC beat her up (a few times) and stole stuff from the Midnight Club, some 20 levels ago! Yikes. I have the option to respond in a hostile or placating manner. I pick the placating manner. I don't know will happen if I respond in a hostile manner. So I will want to do the Oroboros thing later and try the hostile manner.

Same thing happened again when I met Ajax. That's the invulnerable guy or something right? From my metagaming mind I know he's the Mysterious Letter Writer's servant. Whatever. Play through, and at the end, he suddenly makes a reference to me and the idiotic shit I pulled off with Dean MacArthur.

What? Dean who? Is it another villain arc I did? I opened my contacts list, went to the inactive villain contacts, and sure enough, there was Dean MacArthur, with his contact bar full. Suddenly I remembered. I had set up a bunch of psionic resonators to cancel Ajax's invulnerability and then beat him up. Another nameless body that was a minor speedbump on my road to glory. Errr, no hard feelings dude. That was some 20 levels ago, surely you don't hold a grudge that long! :P

Then I started play with my Scrapper, who was a Praetorian and had gone through the First Ward arcs. Same scenario...but this time, when the contact starts speculating about the new villain group, my PC who has an in-game knowledge of the First Ward story tells the contact about what happened and who these new villains are! Neat.

Scrapper is sent after the two NPCs again, but when I talk to the NPC, she was friendly and overjoyed I had turned up since my scrapper had never beaten her up.

Then I went off, talked to another NPC where I had previously chosen a friendly interaction with the Dominator, and tried the challenge them choice...and they attacked me. Of course they got spanked.


Still, it's awesome. What you did matters. They must have used some kind of tracking method on the newer arcs, and my technical mind thinks it is the badges. All of the new missions and story arcs give up some kind of badge. Different ones depending on what you did. This then makes me wonder -- if I did Oroboros and chose alternative outcomes, would that mess up the whole badge-checking thing?

Hmmm....