• 326 plays
• 4.27 stars
• New Mission ranking high on the top rated currently
• Debut mission for the author making this a “Hello World” mission of sorts.

Story Murphy Story: 8.43 (5th)

• Your ship is sent out to investigate an anomaly in the Badlands.
• Upon discovering this anomaly, you learn it is a temporal anomaly, and low and behold a Cardie freighter is passing through the area, and despite your warnings to them, they continue to fly to it, until they stop right on top of it.
• The Cardie ship then strangely explodes, and the crew with their captain Duvar launch their escape pods, and are pulled into this anomaly, and as they enter it, the timeline is immediately effected.
• Being close to the anomaly however, you are unaffected, in the same way the Defiant was in the episode Past Tense, and it’s up to you to travel back in time and fix the timeline. Also, the Enterprise E during First Contact was protected from the changes in the timeline because of them being inside the temporal wake.
• Upon passing through this temporal vortex into the past, you will engage Dominion ships, and you will shortly find out you are now smack dab in the middle of the Dominion War, specifically when the Federation was losing.
• After a bunch of space combat against the Dominion, you are rescued by part of the 7th Fleet. The time in history you have come back to is also just before the destruction of the 7th fleet. In a Deep Space 9 episode, this event is only just mentioned by Bashir to Sisko, when he reports only 14 ships out of the 112 ships made it back from the fight. This author is now going to have you experience this event.
• The main character that you will be hunting down in this mission is Duvar, the Cardassian Freighter captain who is the reason why you’ve traveled back in time. Now that he is in the past during the Dominion War, he sees this as a chance to change events, and prevent the Cardassian and Dominion’s defeat in this war. Duvar just has dialogue that flows nicely, and when talking to this character, he feels like the villain. There is one line that he uses after he tells you he plans on changing the timeline, where he replies saying that what he’s doing is justice. The way he says that makes you feel that he believes what he is doing is right, from his perspective, and that it’s up to him to bring the Cardassian Union back, by making sure they win this war.

Technical Murphy   Tech: 6.93 (7th)

• Maps – very heavy customisation makes me believe that this new author spent a huge amount of development time crafting the environments. The fleet amassed around the starbase has almost every ship individually named and skinned.
• Transitions – I found some of the maps to be very underutilised leading to unwarranted zoning when the author could have placed more to do within each map and avoid that zoning.

Ooiue

• Creativity – the space groups are well chosen and will give a strong fight for most players while better equipped players can breeze through the mission while enjoying the story.

Gameplay Ooiue Gameplay: 7.46 (3rd)

• Heavy Space Combat
• Especially when teamed up in a group (to the point where players can actually lag out because there is so much going on with the combat).
• Battles range from a few ships in a minor skirmish to full fledged fleet action combatants
• Due to story purposes, the fleet battles are split up into at least 3 zones (flank, rear and centre) where the player has to assist the 7th in engaging the extremely large Dominion force
• A zoning issue that can be annoying but shows the overall scale of the battle
• Space Gameplay was all in all straight forward
• Largly dictated by the Space Combat
• Standard Reach markers and interactable objects present
• Some interactions used as triggers for dialogue boxes
• Nothing really that special
• Ground Combat was very involved and had its own specialised twists
• Lots of cover using crates and barriers for the player and NPC’s to take cover behind
• Makes Ground combat as a whole very strategic and needing the player to adapt tactics around where the NPC groups are placed
• Because the Dominion forces are using Polaron weapons, healing abilities will suffer majorly, don’t go blundering into the fight expecting to win
• Ground Gameplay was also straight forward
• Normal reach markers
• Interactable objects
• NPC’s to speak to
• Nothing special
• Minor Puzzle during the mission whereupon the player must remember the assigned cargo manifests to the assigned ships
• Dialogue Based Puzzle
• Two seperate consoles for the puzzle
• One for Assigned Manifests
• The other for the actual dialogue puzzle
• If an option is selected incorrectly, then the entire puzzle starts again

Summary Murphy Overall:  7.63 (5th)

• All things considered, this is an excellent debut mission.
• The author shows amazing attention to detail which can only produce better missions in the future once their technical proficiency is at the same level.
• Interesting use of a cliffhanger as it stops the player in their tracks just as they are about to get to grips with the bad guy. Some folks will complain about the execution of this technique.
• New Author Tips – avoid pointless maps, the warp in animation loops and is immersion breaking, beware using customisation to make up for not adding more gameplay to your maps and keep up the level of detail used in the plot as it can sometimes be the difference maker for a mission.

• FoundryFiles@JupiterForce.net

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