No new information here. I'm just linking to developer posts from the past few days on the official forums. I'm doing this 'cause it's come up in chat a couple times, and it seems not everyone's seen 'em yet.
Horatio on TF/SF
Horatio on why the TF/SF uses 5th Column instead of Axis Amerika enemies
Horatio on TF/SF
Quote:Hi, I’m Bruce Harlick, aka Horatio, the guy who was in charge of the Reichsman Task Force and Strike Force. Thank you for the comments and feedback on the TF & SF. I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to some of them and let you know our some of our intended responses.Please note the bolded section of text up there - my emphasis. There was some debate on the channel about this...most folks are insisting that the rays need to be reapplied every so often. I'm not disputing this - all I'm saying is the developers say it isn't necessary. Make of that what you will.
To start, there is a difference in the challenge of the final fight in the SF and TF. The TF fight is much trickier and takes longer. We didn’t address that when assigning the initial merit values for the SF. We will be increasing the merit award for the Strike Force to 30 merits later this week. As time goes by and we collect more data on how long it takes groups to complete these arcs, we’ll likely be adjusting the merit rewards further.
There seems to be some confusion as to the use of the dimensional ground ray in the final fight of the Task Force. Before Reichsman’s hit by the ray, he is in a phased state and is running a rather nasty debuffing aura. When he is hit by the ray, it “grounds out” some of his power and he returns to a normal state and his aura is shut down. This will persist for the duration of the fight. The dimensional grounding ray isn’t intended to be used at specific points in the fight; it should be used early on, and one hit will do.
On the villain side of things, our intent was to try to do something a bit different for the end fight. As has been previously stated, we wanted to do a “gadget” fight; something that was more than just hit the bad guy until he fell over. And we wanted to encourage teams to include different ATs, to help shake up some standard team compositions. Certainly, the end fight is more difficult without having each of the appropriate ATs on the team, but it is still doable. Each of the temp powers is intended to make stages of the fight easier. There is no one “golden solution” to solving the fight; by including some or all of the ATs that can take advantage of the various temp powers, you can approach this battle using different tactics.
The Mastermind temp power is not working at this time; Castle has fixed that, but his fix did not go out with the release due to some build issues. This power should be working in a patch this week.
Switching voices, I am aware of the canon issues with the story. The problems are purely my fault; when I came up with the original flow for the story I was under some mistaken impressions on some events in the game’s history. While I did make some adjustments to the story due to the feedback from the training room, I didn’t get all the details nailed down as best I could. Due to a tight translation deadline, I was unable to get final text passes into the build that was going to the Live servers, but rest assured I’ll be doing my best to address them over the next week or so to bring the story of Reichsman’s return in line with the existing history of the 5th Column.
I’ll certainly be reading this (and the other) threads for any other comments you have on the issue. Please feel free to PM me with your comments and concerns if you’d like. I’ll do my best to respond to them in a timely fashion.
Horatio on why the TF/SF uses 5th Column instead of Axis Amerika enemies
Quote:The original Axis America mobs don’t have a lot of variety to them – there’s basically four minions (the rifle, rocket, grenade, and flamethrower), one lieutenant, and one boss in the group. That’s not enough variety to provide interesting encounters for an entire story arc. While it would have been very cool to use them, we didn’t have the resources available to expand the group in a way that would let us use them for the missions.Castle on the broken MM temp power in the Strike Force
I’d like to see the original Axis America troops available in Mission Architect, and I’ll look into that. No promises, but if we can make it happen, I’ll try to see that it does.
Quote:The Power of Black Scorpion Click power given to Masterminds *is* broken. A fix is in the pipeline; not sure when it will reach live.-- Acyl
How it broke:
Basically, just before the deadline, I completely rebuilt the power to do something different from what it had done before. The previous version had always been problematic and it just wasn't working out, so I replaced it with something more reliable at the 11th hour. Unfortunately, there was an error in my testing process and I failed to detect that, unless you had Dev Tools enabled, the power simply wouldn't actually trigger on Reichsman. So, you can use the power on him all day...and the attributes simply don't process.
This was caught just before launch, and I fixed it, but the fix had not gotten through the production process in time.
