Makeb Quest Design (pro's and cons)

[wishihadaname]

Makeb had some nice new tweaks added to the usual tedium of "go here, kill that, click on this, talk to them". I know that I for one greatly enjoyed the variety, though I would really like to see more of it. I think it would be worthwhile to start a discussion on the more interesting missions on makeb, why they were good, and how we could see more of them. Here are a few examples that come to mind for me.

 

1) Republic Mission #2, holding barricades at an LZ. That was a REALLY cool idea, and I like the implementation. However it was dissapointingly short. It would be cool if the mercs had kept coming in waves and we had had a few friendly npc's (turrets maybe?) and a nearby npc healer to help with this. The mechanic of holding ground is a very good one though and I would love to see it implemented some more. Also, the two civilian fighters introduced in the mission were quite interesting as characters, I wish they had both survived/been used later in the story.

 

2) Burning Skies (rep 4 man heroic) platforming and courtyard firefight. The approach to this instance was just awesome, a bit of light platforming never hurts and is simple to implement. Would be nice to see more of this, maybe even tie in some special equipment like jump packs or ropes. The courtyard firefight soon after reaching the mission is very nice too. You have to use LoS crates to avoid fire from shielded turrets while fighting of waves of relatively weak adds in large numbers, every time a wave goes down a turret becomes exposed for a bit. It was a very fun fight and a breath of fresh air to the usual "beat on a giant monster while dodging circles on the ground".

 

3) Imperial Mission #1. Securing a landing zone. I'm not sure what it was, but the mission seemed very believable and fun. The companion commentary was nice (I had the agent with Dr. Lokin), and the overall pace was good too.

 

4) Imperial Mission #? (raid on the Isotope-5 Stockpile). The mission where a certain sith gets injured/dies was a very well made one as well. It was not too heavy on actual fighting, but the last boss fight was just plain epic, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE lets have more of those. It mixes mechanics, with dodging, with platforming, with add management, all while not being overly difficult. The first time I had to fight an isotope-5 droid on my rep it was just another gold star mob for me to spam grav rounds at until it died. This fight though, I felt like I out maneuvered and out smarted a far more powerful opponent. I was actually afraid of the isotope droids after that, whereas every time they were mentioned in the rep story I found myself thinking "so what? I'll just kill em all myself".

 

5) Not technically a Makeb mission but had to be mentioned. Trooper act II final mission. Can we PLEASE get more missions where we see our entire crew fight toghether? That was easily the most epic fight I ever did in any of the class stories.

 

6) Imperial mission to start a civillian uprising. Very fun, very varies gameplay. I like how they gave us plenty of conversation choices with the resistance as well. Only it would be nice if fighting the tanks involved some sort of secondary mechanic, like using a turret, or flanking some sort of weak spot, or something like that.

 

Then, there were a few missions that were just plain out painful to play through.

 

1) Rescuing Dr. Oggorob (or whoever you spell his name). For the love of all that is holy why do I have to blow through 150 mindless mercs 4 at a time for an hour and a half just to get a 2 option convo that goes the same way no matter what I do? The enemies in the mission were boring, the mission was long, and there were ALOT more enemies then there should have been. Weak mercs are fun to fight when they come in large waves to be mowed down by my minnigun. Tough mercs are fun to fight when there isn't one in every group. Overall, it was just too much of too simple combat, why couldn't we be allowed to set the rancor trapped on that mesa for a rampage? That would be cool. Or get an airdrop of republic extraction forces to help in a large firefight? Or implement the hold position mechanic to have us defend oggorobs lab while he pulled toghether some research or something?

 

2) Imperial mission to secure the drilling platforms. Lots and lots and lots of clueless mercs and boring Isotope-5 droids that just stand there and get shot to shreds. The actual location is cool, but its really immersion breaking how you can pull them out one group at a time from their defensive positions while their buddies 15 meters away just stand there and stare at you. This would be a really cool place for an airstrike mechanic to wipe out large groups at once, or maybe make it an instance and give us a bunch of imperial black ops to assault the platforms with. Generally speaking, any mission that tries to sell itself as an assault and then has you and your companion grinding through group after 4 man group for the next hour it generally not much fun.

 

These are the ones that come to mind off the top of my head, what missions did you guys like and why? Maybe if we get this thread going we can get Bioware to take a look, i'll be very happy if I never have to grind mindless mobs for an hour+ again.

[ekimmak]

5) Not technically a Makeb mission but had to be mentioned. Trooper act II final mission. Can we PLEASE get more missions where we see our entire crew fight toghether? That was easily the most epic fight I ever did in any of the class stories.

 

Bounty hunters are the only other class with a mission like that. Beginning of act 3. And I agree, there should be more missions like that. Heck, the Knight mission on Belsavis should finish with this, instead of the aggravatingly badly timed champion + mob timed fight.

 

One other mission that stood out for me was the imperial one before the new imperial base.

 

Where you go into the core to use a giant drill to research ways to stop the planet from exploding. Apart from the aggravating presence of those knockback immune enemies, was a pretty cool mission.