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Kallethen's impression of Steel Crusade
kallethen
Posts: 1,576 Arc User
I thought I'd give my feedback on the new mission arc. Before I get into this, I would like to say up front that I did NOT play any of this on the PTS. I did read PTS threads a bit, but tried to skip over posts that talked in depth of the missions. I wanted to be mostly spoiler free. Personally, I'm glad I did so. That said....
SPOILERS AHEAD!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FORWARNED!!
Anyhow, here I go:
Visual design: The new environments look great, especially when you go inside the citizens to fight the nanobots. All the new enemies look great too. The nanobots, the junkbots, Mechanon's bots, Mechanon himself... All get a thumbs up from me.
Audio design: Voice overs are good. Not much else new with this, so that's that.
Story writing: Overall, it's decent. It's campy comic science, but that's what I expect from CO.
Difficulty: I do think this mission arc has some good challenge to it, as a player who has toons that do not have top tier gear. The nanobots especially will catch you off guard by swarming you when they start replicating. A number of the foes also seem to hit pretty hard. Mechanon and his minions are not pulling punches. I do have one big complaint though. WAAAAAAAAAAAY too much knockback spam. It's obscene. The knockback spam gets especially bothersome in the final mission. It's easy to get smacked into just the right corner of the wall and ceiling to lose line of sight to your target thanks to the zero gravity, yet they have perfect line of sight to you. Even if you are right next to your target. I wish the devs would rely on other effects to keep you off balance than knockback. I did enjoy the zero G. I thought that it added nice difficulty to the fights, by having you re-think how you move. Mastering the stability belt helps a LOT.
Rewards: I applaud having another option to earn Questionite. The whole mission arc together offer a decent amount too. I'm also happy with the recognition vendor. He's got quite a number of costume pieces to earn, at reasonable costs.
Extras: It's wonderful to have another RP area (the bar on the space station). I'm also hopeful of the idea of there being future space missions (according to the news blog). I also like how the space pressure suits work (just equip to the device slot for the appearance change). Best of all, the suits are optional! So if my toon is say, a hero that for RP sake could survive in space due to wearing power armor, I don't need a space suit to do the mission. You have my applause on that!
Final thoughts: I had fun with this, both solo and with a team. Do keep up the good work, Cryptic.
But please... less knock spam next time.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!! YOU HAVE BEEN FORWARNED!!
Anyhow, here I go:
Visual design: The new environments look great, especially when you go inside the citizens to fight the nanobots. All the new enemies look great too. The nanobots, the junkbots, Mechanon's bots, Mechanon himself... All get a thumbs up from me.
Audio design: Voice overs are good. Not much else new with this, so that's that.
Story writing: Overall, it's decent. It's campy comic science, but that's what I expect from CO.
Difficulty: I do think this mission arc has some good challenge to it, as a player who has toons that do not have top tier gear. The nanobots especially will catch you off guard by swarming you when they start replicating. A number of the foes also seem to hit pretty hard. Mechanon and his minions are not pulling punches. I do have one big complaint though. WAAAAAAAAAAAY too much knockback spam. It's obscene. The knockback spam gets especially bothersome in the final mission. It's easy to get smacked into just the right corner of the wall and ceiling to lose line of sight to your target thanks to the zero gravity, yet they have perfect line of sight to you. Even if you are right next to your target. I wish the devs would rely on other effects to keep you off balance than knockback. I did enjoy the zero G. I thought that it added nice difficulty to the fights, by having you re-think how you move. Mastering the stability belt helps a LOT.
Rewards: I applaud having another option to earn Questionite. The whole mission arc together offer a decent amount too. I'm also happy with the recognition vendor. He's got quite a number of costume pieces to earn, at reasonable costs.
Extras: It's wonderful to have another RP area (the bar on the space station). I'm also hopeful of the idea of there being future space missions (according to the news blog). I also like how the space pressure suits work (just equip to the device slot for the appearance change). Best of all, the suits are optional! So if my toon is say, a hero that for RP sake could survive in space due to wearing power armor, I don't need a space suit to do the mission. You have my applause on that!
Final thoughts: I had fun with this, both solo and with a team. Do keep up the good work, Cryptic.
But please... less knock spam next time.
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
This.
Missions are great, but abuse of knokbacks is a pure fail, especially in zero gravity missions.
In the cislunar missions knockback can't hurt anyway and the only thing it does is turning encounters into annoyance.
That's the same mistake as was the Whiteout final mission.
It's like CO devs don't have imagination to use any other control effects on mobs...
But that's a one minor nitpick (ok, two, cislunar Mechanon coud use more music) in the last part of the Steel crusade.
I do not recommend this mission solo on an AT or a squishy build with low healing, but it is marked as a recommended team size 3 , so...
It ate my face, I tells ya!
Yup, finally, they mean it. Get a team. For the first time ever, don't complain about content being too hard to solo when it's not meant for soloing. These missions are tough! Let's do a team!!!
As for all the knockbacks, tap and kite. Don't stand around waiting for these fools to give you the roomsweeper. Wait, real talk, once again the content heavily favors ranged characters. This is nothing new in Champions Online. I faced zero knockback in all these missions on my ranged dudes. How about next time the robots are cool with melee dudes but will be devastating with tractorbeam-haymakers for all ranged dudes? Honestly ranged and melee will never be on even ground unless they introduce some new AI that will deal with this.
As for ranged vs melee disparity, I think these and other enemies could have a new class of powers that has a minimum range of lets say, 20ft. Some kind of mortar attack that has a knockdown.
"Good can be found in heights, even in the deepest pits of evil" but "The valleys of evil always exist in the mountains of good."
~me
Savage can do it solo just fine.
Just be prepared it will take some time because no really great AoEs in your setup.
I'm not sure like other ATs, but I suppose the Master and the Invincible could be soloing it if played carefully.
The Void, maybe. At 35+ level with a lot of Dran Life and blocking.
In an accurately-modeled zero-g environment, "floor" and "ceiling" are arbitrary designations, but Cislunar is difficult enough without going full Descent 6-DOF and introducing a roll control. Still, I think loading up on brawlers on top of the unfamiliarity of zero-g is a bit of Fake Difficulty.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
It looks redinculous having half of your torso thru the ceiling...
And a sidenote: If you're using Lightning Reflexes, you're in for a treat in zero-g...
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
First person camera makes me want to hurl. I can't play games with first person view for very long especially not with how hot it's been here. I would prefer Cryptic be more creative with their difficulty instead of "HP Sack with knock spam and high, no warning damage."
I doubt I'll run part 2 much. If someone needs a group, then yes. But for me? No thanks. I can get my one rec with 100% less annoying knock spam elsewhere.
[at]riviania Member since Aug 2009
On the contrary, I find that that mission is good practice for using LOS in zero-g. Could be good practice and a possible mechanic in later fights (hide behind this force field if you don't want to get wiped out by the AOE, or such). I'm all for gameplay mechanics other than tank and spank.
Kiting works if you have open areas to move in. Tight corridors (like in between the brain rooms in the part 1 missions) make it harder to effectively kite. The zero G movement of the final mission also makes it harder to kite as nicely. I'm not saying it's impossible, just harder.
I wouldn't mind the knockbacks if they weren't spammed so much. It's ridiculous when you have 5 or 6 knockbacks in a row. Like I said in my review, mixing in some alternate crowd control attacks would have been nice.
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