Here's an idea: a mission archive simulation.

First off ... I'm the kind of person who, after playing a regular console RPG for an extended period of time, tends to forget some of the things that were said and done earlier in the game. When this happens I usually find a transcript of the game's dialogue online to refresh my memory.

Also, a friend of mine wasn't very happy with the fact that, in MxO, the older critical missions are removed and replaced with newer ones. He understood why it had to be done, but he also wished he could play the older ones that he'll miss out on.

So I thought about it and came up with an idea. A mission archive simulation. I guess the closest thing to this idea would be the Zion Archive as it was depicted in "The Second Renaissance", but interactive. Basically, you can choose to redo any previous critical mission.

From my point of view, this would be helpful in a number of ways. For starters, anyone who wanted to refresh their memory about what happened in previous missions can do so with the mission archive (these days when I want to refresh my memory I go to the journal section of http://www.mxoarchive.com, which has several lines from a number of previous critical Zion missions, but it's not a complete recording of them).

Also, any new person who wanted to do older critical missions for whatever reason (maybe as a kind of "history lesson", or if they just wanted to see the content they've missed) can do so using the mission archive. Most threads and websites that list what's happened so far only list what has happened in the live events, and rarely what's happened in missions (this includes the parts of the story that have been posted on Data Node One).

Now, I'm not sure how people will react to this next idea, but here it is ... I would also like the mission archive to have more than just one organization's critical missions in it.

There rarely seems to be any inter-organizational discussions about what happened in their respective critical missions. I know very little about what happened in most of the critical missions for the Machines and the Merovingian. But the fact is that there are times when each organization gets information that the others don't get.

For example, Morpheus' past was split up amongst the three organizations' critical missions. Zionists learned about his early days. The Machine missions had information about one person that Morpheus thought was the One. And the Merovingian missions had information about Morpheus' time in a relaxation construct recovering from post traumatic stress disorder brought on mostly by the torture he received at the hands of the Agents towards the end of the first movie.

I only knew this information because I focused on Machine and Merovingian missions on the QA server. I know some of you don't mind having multiple characters, but I prefer to have one on the live servers because it's easier to manage, in my opinion. Sorry. SMILEY

Another good example of organizations getting information that the others don't get is Sabus' thread about what happened in the recent Machine missions, which you can read here. http://mxoboards.station.sony.com/matrix/board/message?board.id=mission&message.id=436

There are even some documents found in critical missions that are exclusive to an organization's missions. There are documents that were found in Machine and Merovingian critical missions that were available ages ago that I've only recently found out about.

If the mission archive gave players access to the older missions of all organizations, then it would help bring people up to speed and on the right page. And information wouldn't be limited to an organization's missions, so people wouldn't feel like they're only getting part of the story.

Message Edited by Othinn1 on 09-23-2005 05:49 PM