MOTW #155 - Voting Restarts

[Huzaifa khan]

- Entries (2)

 

DroidX

Violent Road

 

Aymunz

Captive Redemption

 

Voting Deadline : 5 / March / 2020

Edited March 2, 2020 by Huzaifa khan

[Little Bear]

Here is my voting for mission of the week #155

 

DroidX - Violent Road - 8/10

Spoiler

Interesting set for a mission with a great story and bikers. there are lots of enemies. also nice work on using different actors. Gun fight was excellent. and the mission could had said more about the bad guys since bob was only mentioned at the end

Aymunz - Captive Redemption - 8/10

Spoiler

I had a nightmare trying to get out of that place. It was built pretty good, and enemies showed to be a challenge. sometimes I had trouble with all the vehicles pushing down and tipping over making the vehicle blow up. but was able to finish the twins

 

The voting is difficult. but I'm giving my vote to DroidX

Edited March 3, 2020 by Little Bear

[Aymunz]

6 hours ago, Little Bear said:

Here is my voting for mission of the week #155

 

DroidX - Violent Road - 8/10

  Reveal hidden contents

Interesting set for a mission with a great story and bikers. there are lots of enemies. also nice work on using different actors. Gun fight was excellent. and the mission could had said more about the bad guys since bob was only mentioned at the end

Aymunz - Captive Redemption - 8/10

  Reveal hidden contents

I had a nightmare trying to get out of that place. It was built pretty good, and enemies showed to be a challenge. sometimes I had trouble with all the vehicles pushing down and tipping over making the vehicle blow up. but was able to finish the twins

 

The voting is difficult. but I'm giving my vote to DroidX

Thanks for the rating and review. Would you say that the mission was more frustrating than challenging? 

[LordStarship]

2 hours ago, Aymunz said:

Thanks for the rating and review. Would you say that the mission was more frustrating than challenging? 

Your mission was more frustrating than challenging personally. The first part caught me way too many times, had to cheat to finish it, rather than always being sneaky and getting killed. It's a good difficulty, but what sucks is that i don't know where are the soldiers facing. DYOM has no markers for usual actors, so i used my camera angle a lot of time, but it was to no avail. Sorry for the cheats, but i don't want to rage over a single mission lol

 

The Twins' part was pretty good. Just it appears that one mau got shot many times that he's backing way too much until i can't shot him lol

 

Other than that, it's a fun and good mission. 7/10 for this.

 

 

Now for Violent Road.

 

It caught my attention when there's another biker gang. I thought it would be Biker VS Police or something, turns out it's more interesting.

 

A funny moment is that when you have to kill Jack and save your little brother, i accidentally aim to Rick's little brother (i forgot his name) and shot him quickly till dead. That sucks, but i honestly understand about that.

 

There could be more to the shootout and the story tbh. It's a 8/10.

 

Now to compare those two, Violent Road has more fun gameplay, but Captive Redemption has a cool plot. Well, DroidX got my vote since tbh i care more about gameplay than plot, so sorry if my vote is a little more subjective.

 

Waiting for another vote...

[Aymunz]

@LordStarship I totally understand . Thank you for taking time to finish the mission! Even if done with a cheat or two.

 

Regarding my mission:

 

 

I personally thought that the first sneaky part was frustrating too, as i was testing the mission alot, which led to it being delayed. After much testing it became easier for me to finish that part, so much so that i didn't consider making it easier.

I Also tried to make it realistic (escaping a highly secured area isn't exactly a piece of cake). But hey, guess that didn't work out did it?
 

 

Regarding DroidX's mission:

 

 

I really enjoyed the gameplay. The shootout was fun and engaging. Not hard, but certainly not easy.

Good choice of the location, as well.

The part when you change playable characters was a bit disorienting. But it didn't bother me. 

The plot is simple. Typical gang rivalry with a bit of kidnap/rescue theme. I do like its simplicity. But it could be handled better. One scene that i found irrelevant -imo- is when rick interacts with the girl at the store. It just didn't deliver any necessery info about the plot.

It would've helped if there was more info about the rival biker gang. The fact that we learn nothing about the other antagonist (bob) until moments before we kill him - is a bit dissapointing.

Overall, very simple and digestable. Good setting. Good gameplay. Could-be-better plot. Enjoyable.
I would give it 7.5/10

 

Final thoughts:

 

 

I think I learned a lesson. It's good to put effort into your mission, but you can only do so much without ruining the experience.

 

Edited March 3, 2020 by Aymunz

[RithRake24]

@Aymunz I haven't gotten the time to play the entries but I can tell from the reviews that you managed to nail a good story. Great work since making a good story is normally a challenging task, so I'd like to commend you on it. I hope to be able to give more specific feedback if I get around to playing the mission, but never compromise story, it can boost your mission's quality by a major deal. Keep it up.

 

As for the difficulty, always keep in mind that every mission will always be easier for the designer who designed it than for players who are playing it, since you know exactly how each enemy is placed and their behaviours, accuracy, etc. You know exactly what you designed, but the players can only guess. Always keep that in mind when designing. If you find your own mission of a 'passable' difficulty chances are it could be quite difficult for some players. This is the real 'lesson' you should learn from this MOTW. It's ALWAYS good to put in effort since that majorly boosts mission quality, but an intense difficulty may indeed ruin the experience.

 

@DroidX Congratulations on getting all the votes you've gotten so far. Imagine if the voting hadn't been extended, you would've lost! This is why voting should never be shortened to compensate for the extra designing time, it doesn't give the majority of designers enough time to play and make a decision on who to vote for.

 

I hope I'll get the time to give these missions a go and vote before the deadline.

[Aymunz]

1 hour ago, RithRake24 said:

As for the difficulty, always keep in mind that every mission will always be easier for the designer who designed it than for players who are playing it, since you know exactly how each enemy is placed and their behaviours, accuracy, etc. You know exactly what you designed, but the players can only guess. Always keep that in mind when designing. If you find your own mission of a 'passable' difficulty chances are it could be quite difficult for some players. This is the real 'lesson' you should learn from this MOTW. It's ALWAYS good to put in effort since that majorly boosts mission quality, but an intense difficulty may indeed ruin the experience.

Yes! This was the missing piece. Thanks for pointing that out!

1 hour ago, RithRake24 said:

@Aymunz I haven't gotten the time to play the entries but I can tell from the reviews that you managed to nail a good story. Great work since making a good story is normally a challenging task, so I'd like to commend you on it. I hope to be able to give more specific feedback if I get around to playing the mission, but never compromise story, it can boost your mission's quality by a major deal. Keep it up.

Thanks:)

If you don't want to bother yourself playing through the furstration (of my mission), I recorded a walkthrough ready to upload as soon as our electricity turns on. Though, there are rules against that, if I'm not mistaken?

1 hour ago, RithRake24 said:

 @DroidX Congratulations on getting all the votes you've gotten so far. Imagine if the voting hadn't been extended, you would've lost! This is why voting should never be shortened to compensate for the extra designing time, it doesn't give the majority of designers enough time to play and make a decision on who to vote for.

That's true. I appreciate all the votes I got. However, an unfair win is actually a loss. I'm glad this is how it turned out.  

[RithRake24]

19 minutes ago, Aymunz said:

I recorded a walkthrough ready to upload as soon as our electricity turns on. Though, there are rules against that, if I'm not mistaken?

You’re allowed to release the walkthrough after voting ends. But I won’t mind giving it a go anyway.

 

Also I’m extremely glad you got a valuable point out of what I said

Edited March 4, 2020 by RithRake24

[RithRake24]

I managed to play them. I won't give a very organised review like I usually do but I've got to say that @Aymunz's mission really blew my mind. I loved it a lot. You can see from this single mission that he has a lot of creativity on offer. The gameplay was very varied and not just simple cliche shootouts that we see in 9 out of 10 missions that we play. The escape plan felt very realistic. and the dialogues were actually good, with right choices of vocabulary that fit the character and his background. It came off as very natural. The scene that really impressed me was:

Spoiler

the part in the gameplay where you're required to dodge the bombs. We have seen the still camera technique used a few times ever since THBP introduced it in his legendary missionpack V for Vinegar, but this segment from this mission is honestly the most appropriate execution of this technique, even more appropriate than THBP's original execution of it I daresay. The dodge bombs objective was simply perfect to use along with the still camera technique, they went beautifully hand-in-hand. I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much if the still camera segment was instead used with an ordinary objective of 'kill the enemies', since it's honestly quite tiresome to run around shooting with the still camera on. But this was amazing and I loved it.

I agree with the others on the extreme difficulty of the escape section since it was, well... extremely difficult. I pushed myself to try and pass that section without any cheats but after failing 5 times I decided to use the occasional HESOYAM to help me. As creative as I found the escape segment, I found it extremely hard, just as many others did. I enjoyed the way it was designed nevertheless, it was fantastic. Also, the environments designed for this mission was flawless. It gets a 9/10 from me. The missing 1/10 is simply because of the extreme difficulty of the first part, otherwise I can say I'm in love with your storytelling and designing style, especially considering that this is your first mission. Well done and keep it up! Hope to see more from you in the near future.

 

As for @DroidX's mission, I can't point out many flaws to be honest. Mission design is neat and well-structured. Cutscenes were great and didn't break the illusion of continuity. But the playable character changes were very disorienting and abrupt. The one that threw me off the most was the character change from Jimmy to the the guy who beats up Jimmy. I agree that it creates an extra gameplay segment but I felt like it did more harm than good to the mission in terms of the 'smoothness' of the mission's progress. The rest of the mission was... good. But very much ordinary. Basic shootouts. Presentation and atmosphere was... suitable. I liked the language that the bikers used, it felt... suitable, once again. But even though the mission lacked flaws, it also lacked variety and simply didn't intrigue me much. It gets a 7.5/10 from me: a very well-made mission, neat designing and structured, but with a cliche story and little variety to hold players' interest especially when it is compared to Aymunz's mission.

 

My vote goes to @Aymunz. Well done to both designers. Hope to see more missions from you guys.

Edited March 5, 2020 by RithRake24

[Aymunz]

@RithRake24 Thank you so much for the detailed review! I'm glad it got your favouring. You'll certainly see more in the next MOTW!

@DroidX Congratulations! Give us a good theme.

[XzeuX]

Congrats @DroidX 

[Huzaifa khan]

- Congrats @DroidX for your second MOTW victory! 

[DroidX]

3 hours ago, Huzaifa khan said:

- Congrats @DroidX for your second MOTW victory! 

Thanks! Huzaifa. I have won a few more in the past that I don't even know how many they could be. I might check it out

 

Continuing with MOTW#156. I'll be adding the new theme tomorrow morning on Friday. Cheer's