Crosspost: Guide for Erin West's Arc Truth Seeker and Uncomfortable Truths bonus badges

[twozerofoxtrot]

Folks, if you're having a heck of a time getting those Erin West badges, and don't want to blow literally an entire day off like I did trying to freehand it, @Petrograd put together an outstanding guide for it.

It just may not be where you expected. I wasn't for me.
 

Kudos to @Velvet Violet for writing a great arc but this badge implementation is the worst I've seen since HC stood up. Personal opinion. YMMV.

[Velvet Violet]

Curious to know what it was about the badge implementation you dislike so strongly.

[Zhym]

Not to speak for @twozerofoxtrot, and I didn't hate the badge implementation, but Truth Seeker is a very fiddly, narrow-path badge to get.  Without the guide I would have had no idea how to get it.  I think there are three main issues:

1. You need to pick a specific set of options at the press conference (or at least it seems that way).
2. There's no clue (that I saw, anyway) about which of your contacts you should talk to.  There seems to be an expectation that the player will think about which contacts are the right ones to talk to, but without the guide it would basically be a matter of trying to contact everyone.  There's no reason that the arc couldn't suggest talking to specific contacts.
3. When you talk to the correct contacts, you need to get specific clues, and go back and forth between contacts to get all of them.  It sounds like not all of the clues are needed, but there's a threshold that's not obvious.

Note: I liked this arc.  I want to replay it to get the different results.  I liked the writing and the deep branching dialogue trees.  But if I hadn't known that there was a Truth Seeker badge and had a guide on how to get it, there was no possible way I would have stumbled across it (mostly because of issue #2).

Edited yesterday at 04:24 AM by Zhym

[JKCarrier]

Agreed, the arc doesn't really play fair when it comes to the badge criteria. The choices you need to make at the press conference are pretty counter-intuitive (logic would indicate that the best way to please West would be to play it straight, but the opposite is true). Tavish Bell's and Kelly Uqua's connection to Crey is fairly obvious (they're both literally parked in front of Crey facilities, and their story arcs involve Crey), but Number Six's is much less so (you'd have to have read, and remember, a minor detail in his bio). There's nothing wrong with making a badge difficult to get, but this seems obscure for the sake of being obscure.

[twozerofoxtrot]

Hi @Velvet Violet, thank you for taking the time to ask and solicit our feedback. I think @Zhym and @JKCarrier very succinctly summed up my feelings on the matter so if you just want the topline, that will do it.

But if you want my detailed, organized thoughts, then I'll provide them here.

---------------

 

Context: I did this arc with my main, who starts every page or issue fully "content complete" since about mid-2020. This means my character has every badge, has run every arc, task force, or trial available.

Why I bring it up is that my running assumption going into a fresh page is that if there is prerequisite content that needs to be done for a badge unlock, that won't be an issue. This was a faulty assumption in the case of Erin West.

 

—-----------

 

Specifically with regards to the badge implementation versus the rest of the bonus badges offered on HC, again I think it’s more or less been identified but the method of implementation for Erin West deviates from what we’ve seen before. Obviously arcs like Bobby Curtin or Shauna Bruan are a bit of a throwaway, since all you need to do is run the arc and make choices, one or the other. The patch notes more or less dial you into what you needed to do but even absent that, getting the one badge for Shauna Bruan for example might lead you to wonder what might happen if you made a different choice? There are a few other cases like this and it’s not quite a challenge but it does set a baseline for expectation.

Moving up the chain, you have something like Dr. Stribbling’s, which force repeats through the Ouro arc system but the mission progression and very nature of the characters you are dealing with may entice the player in that direction, anyways. Again, absent any context clues from the patch notes a player might reasonably assume there was something special if they ran through all of the possible ways to handle the final confrontation. Or at the least, their curiosity would be satisfied. But the way you can shortcut options in the first Ouro run certainly provides enough of a signal that there’s something special going on. There’s no wrong answer to the test other than to give up.

 

Possibly the closest example to how challenging this badge could be to get would be Tarnished Star, but as I said up top, in my specific case it was a non-issue because I was already “content complete” when the badge came to Open Beta and Live. However, for players who were just looking for the badge and don’t have a near-psychotic desire to 100% the game, it was probably a frustrating slog. I can now empathize. But the fact remains that if you know that you need to put some bad guys away, you can knuckle-down and do all those pre-level 30 Ouro missions. Eventually you’ll get there.

 

—------------

 

I’m going to put a pin in that and move onto an observation I’ve made about your arcs: you want to push the limit of what the game allows for player agency through the choice and dialog system. It’s the case in a lot of your more recent arcs but specifically with Erin West, I’ve noticed a trend more towards something like single-player CRPG dialog choices.

Generally speaking, I’m a fan of this idea and your implementation (if this is indeed your intent), but there’s a glaring issue with it: we’re not playing a single-player CRPG. If you bolo a choice, you own that choice until the arc is done. There’s no save-scumming. You can quit the TF if you're doing it via Ouro, but by then you might be 30 minutes in, for nothing.

Who wants to do that? Forget if it’s even fun or not (it’s not), is that even acceptable design for this type of game? If you were trying to find the envelope for what CoX can offer as far as narrative choice with consequences, I think we found it here in Erin West’s arc. Gating rewards behind certain choices when there are this many choices is a dubious call in my opinion. This is markedly different from, say, getting the achievement for learning the Necron language or wearing the Halo Device in Rogue Trader, where a quick reload gets you the achievement and you can move on playing how you wish for the rest of the experience. Forgive the specificity of the examples, but IYKYK.

 

So my takeaway here is that having a lot of choices that provide roleplay agency: good. Having achievements or other prestige rewards gated behind them: bad. It effectively eliminates that agency for players wanting to collect badges.

 

—------------

 

A few other thoughts on this arc which may help provide more context to how it’s challenging to pick up these badges:

 

There’s absolutely a massive clue that says “hey if you have a contact that’s worked with Crey, hit them up for some extra detail.” And that’s great. It’s frankly necessary and rewards people who are engaged with the content. I love that. What I don’t love is that Crey is quite ubiquitous throughout the game and this is max-level content, meaning it takes into account the full breadth of the game. Not just the pre-level 29 blue side arcs, all of it.

 

Case in point, I went to Tavish Bell on my first playthrough because of course I did. I thought getting clues got me what I needed for the badge unlock, but by the end of the arc nothing had materialized. Later playthroughs I tried Kelly Uqua. Then I tried both. Then I tried, in no particular order: Timothy Raymond, Black Scorpion, Protector Z-958, Doc Buzzsaw, Synapse, and Mynx. Obviously all of those would be fast flops, but it didn’t narrow down my frustration. Despite knowing Dr. Orts was affiliated with Crey, he didn’t come to mind. Maybe because I associated him with Incarnate content that’s outside the span of the “normal” game? I honestly couldn’t say. But he wasn’t the only one I didn’t think about, because another player who shared frustrations with me on the badge said they considered Fusionette and Manticore and those options for contacts flew right by me.

I’m sure you see what I’m getting at here. It’s not immediately obvious who you need to talk to, much less how many clues you need to gather up, and in what sequence. These criteria in combination are very problematic.

 

This was outlined by others but I wanted to really excavate the context here so you understand I didn't just run this once or three times and sit down with my arms crossed and pout. I ran this arc for roughly 8 hours, scooping out every little hint or clue I could find or think of. If I hadn't picked up Uncomfortable Truths on naturally on my second run, I would have thought the arc was legitimately bugged.

 

—------------

I close with this: I feel Petrograd thanking help received from the arc writer and a GM on advice and feedback for picking up the badge should have been a red flag during the Open Beta when they posted it. I’m not casting any shade at all on Petrograd, (to whom I’m deeply thankful), but if players couldn’t figure the Truth Seeker badge out short of getting input from the actual game staff who had the answers, then that should have been seriously evaluated and corrected during the Focused Feedback phase.

[Rikmach]

The fact that you can't get Kelly's number if you didn't get her as a contact leveling up makes the clue-gathering sequence a bit annoying, since you have to take a detour to Nerva.  Not a huge deal on it's own, but with all the existing complications, it's another irritation piled on a big heap of irritations.

Edited yesterday at 11:36 AM by Rikmach

[Ukase]

Here's my thoughts: 

I'd heard something in broadcast from another player saying something like, "Good luck with West. I couldn't figure out how to get that one badge". So, I was really trying to pay attention. I even switched alignments after the first mission, ran Alexander's arc, and spoke with Frostfire about some missing mutants, thinking that maybe those were the team I was leading that disappeared. 

Some of this below may not be helpful but if you want to know where my brain was, feel free to read about it. 
 

Spoiler

I read the highlighted text about a contact that might know something about Crey. 
Number Six? Sorry - but Number Sixes arc didn't involve fighting ANY Crey. Mostly Infected DE. And Kelly Uqua? I had never even heard of her. Never once have I seen or heard that name. And even her mission had me fighting longbow, not Crey. There was no evidence in my experience to ever consider going to see those contacts. And many players these days level a character in AE, then bring them out to play them. I would venture that more than half of the players probably never did Number Six or Kelly Uqua's content. Now, maybe that's a user problem, not a design problem. But it's kind of like that same deal with Honorary Bro/Sis with Dean MacArthur. Despite the strong suggestions you had West provide, if the player got their incarnate stuff via BAF and other iTrials, never once doing DA arcs, how would they ever obtain this badge? How would they know to contact that specific contact? They wouldn't. 

Tavish Bell? The name is familiar...maybe I smoked him in one of Buzzsaw's arcs? Can't recall. Very grateful I didn't have to do his arc, too. 

It makes me think of Tarnished Star, where you had to have certain clues (a tab that before Tarnished Star I had never, ever looked at, or even considered looking at. I don't think I even knew the clues tab existed.) 

Now that I've done the content, getting the badge again will be simple - but damned tedious. All that damn clicking and going back and forth? That's neither fun, not interesting. Mainly because each dialogue tree gets repetitive. And that's probably more my fault, because I had to go through it more times than what was really necessary. It never occurred to me to count the number of clues I was getting. I don't know how it would occur to anyone else. It blows my mind that someone figured it out, and I believe they must have gotten a fair number of tips or hints during Beta. (just conjecture on my part) 

So yeah, a lot of the problems I had were thinking the badge was some strategy I would employ while fighting - not while doing dialogue. Most of us don't even read dialogue after running through the content once or twice. I read it all a couple of times just trying to find a hint. And I found a hint or two, but my brain had me go somewhere else. Fusionette, Frostfire. Certainly not Number Six or that nobody Kelly Uqua. I even went to Manticore, and had to switch alignments just in case he'd tell me more if I were Vig, then switched back when I saw it didn't make any difference. I even ran Dap-Dap's arc thinking maybe there was some information in there I needed, that maybe I was supposed to run them in a different order. 

Despite the frustration, there was a lot of good stuff in the arc itself. Zarbon? That was great! And I used that line of dialogue not knowing any better, figuring the option to have dinner for two with West suggested I should try to make her laugh. I had no idea I was on the right track. And that was the only reason I wasn't pissy with the reporter, because I thought she'd want my character to downplay the evil Crey's done. I read too much into it. That's on me. 

But anyway - it's just my opinion that if you want to implement a badge like this, you'd want it to be done using contacts that are far more intuitive to refer to. Those contacts? Never would have ever occurred to me. 



 

[lemming]

The arc is interesting, but based on feedback, it is an example of something that may be obvious to the designer, but not to the players.

 

A friend of mine described making puzzles for players in game mastering.  Try not to make anything more complicated than a Scooby Do mystery.  A generalization, but not I find it worked well for convention games.

 

I would have never thought of Number 6 either and since I ran the mission arc via Ouro, I had to visit everyone in person which without the guide, wouldn't have been feasible for me to remember.

Edited 23 hours ago by lemming

[Rikmach]

14 hours ago, lemming said:

The arc is interesting, but based on feedback, it is an example of something that may be obvious to the designer, but not to the players.

 

A friend of mine described making puzzles for players in game mastering.  Try not to make anything more complicated than a Scooby Do mystery.  A generalization, but not I find it worked well for convention games.

 

I would have never thought of Number 6 either and since I ran the mission arc via Ouro, I had to visit everyone in person which without the guide, wouldn't have been feasible for me to remember.

 

Yeah, Number Six is super not-obvious, because the missions he gives aren't about Crey- you have to do an entirely different mission chain to find out his origin and backstory- which one I can't be bothered to look up.  Yeah, it makes sense, his brain was inside a Crey supercomputer, and his profile does mention this, but very few people would have done the earlier arc or read his profile, so more clues to tip you off would have been nice.    Like, Kelly and Tavish were pretty easy to figure out, since they explicitly work for Crey and send you on missions on their behalf.  Six?  Not so much.