COSAS 2 Mission X - Available Now ... 8-15-08 - by Digital Nightfall
Samantha1 on 26/7/2020 at 14:36
To be honest I never managed to get into the ventilation system cause I never found the ventilation key. Can you spoiler me where it was supposed to be? :angel:
Now that I know that I can turn off a light with 2 water arrows I might give it a try again someday after all. But yeah, there were so much readables and new added stuff to the usual thief experience that it was just too much all at once to remember everything.
Anarchic Fox on 27/7/2020 at 06:07
Quote Posted by Samantha1
To be honest I never managed to get into the ventilation system cause I never found the ventilation key. Can you spoiler me where it was supposed to be? :angel:
Yikes. Playing MX without using the ventilation system raises its difficulty quite a bit. The ventilation system is safe, fast and spans every floor of the hotel. It goes in a big loop, so you can get disoriented but not lost. In contrast, pleasant areas like the central foyer are (by design) the most dangerous locations, even with their alluring shadows and wooden floors.
The ventilation key appears in the second floor utility room, right next to the northeastern staircase. It appears after taking the first objective if you choose to disable the cameras; otherwise, it appears after Steel finishes disabling the camera. There may have been spare ventilation keys too, but if so I don't remember where they were.
For better or for worse, we decided not to go for the usual Thief experience. However, this thread did just make it to a thousand replies, so at least our experiment did not go unnoticed. :joke:
Samantha1 on 27/7/2020 at 09:49
No wonder I thought it was so hard to get by all those guards:joke:
Maybe when I replay it my positive thievy experience for mission X will rise quite abit :p
Unnoticed for sure not, it´s a well done project so far so there´s no way it could go without that big of attention:D
michael a on 27/7/2020 at 14:50
Quote Posted by Anarchic Fox
There are actually very few rooms that require keys! However, the back entrances are sometimes very difficult to notice. The two vent systems give many back entrances, as do the outside balconies and the rafters in the central foyer.
At one point, it was possible to complete a "challenge run" of the level that required you to take no keys except for the ventilation key and Cloud's key, but I think that became impossible once the two clubhouse areas were added.
Well, it's interesting, but if you want to cover all the casino, it's inevitable (especially with the that
key from Stormclouds - maybe it just me - I always stuck in some fairly simple situations). But I think it is connected wih another issue - MX hugely overwhelmed me. It was so big and full of stuff that it was sometimes hard to manage with (team factor also contribute to this - it was hard to predict whether I will fail this mission in some circumstances, situations or not - for example, if I KO some guard and place his body somewhere - where other guard sometimes patrols - will he notice, and if he notice would it be the end of our spy infiltration...). I surely will replay this mission since it was unique and fun though.
Anarchic Fox on 28/7/2020 at 14:51
Yeah, that was a design flaw from the start, and there's no fixing it.
As for hiding the bodies, though... think about the places you put them; there are places guards won't go at all. Namely the storage room in the basement, the theater prop room, the janitor's closet on the top floor, and the bathroom stalls. And if worse comes to worse, stick them in the ventilation system. :joke:
Another tiny fact: the ventilation system (the main one, not the secret one, which is busted) is an evaporative cooling system. Water's steadily fed into pools on its lowest levels. It evaporates, thus cooling the remaining water. The water vapor circulates up through the vent system, while the cooled water is fed back into the plumbing. In the summer, the vents are kept open; in the winter, they're closed and locked. The system does have the teensy downside of leaving remote fixtures, like electric lights, dripping with water. Raputo wasn't lying when he said the place costs a fortune to maintain, and the ventilation system is the reason. :cool:
michael a on 14/8/2020 at 16:30
Thanks, Anarchic Fox! Sorry for not answering for a long time! I'm now replaying it and maybe MX is kind of mission which may hugely overwhelm you at first, but are still very interesting while revisiting (when you already know basics and layout).
Anarchic Fox on 19/8/2020 at 02:21
Have fun with it!
officer on 10/9/2021 at 19:55
Hi, so I got pretty far (explored everywhere that I was able to) up until a point. It wasn't entirely clear what I was supposed to do next, and I had spent two hours figuring it out, so I consulted a walkthrough. Apparently you can use the mask but when I select it and right click, nothing happens? Also, the dagger when I pick up my gear is missing too. Changing difficulty didn't help. Is this download bugged?
If it helps, I installed it using FMSel.
Galaer on 10/9/2021 at 20:44
Quote Posted by officer
Hi, so I got pretty far (explored everywhere that I was able to) up until a point. It wasn't entirely clear what I was supposed to do next, and I had spent two hours figuring it out, so I consulted a walkthrough. Apparently you can use the mask but when I select it and right click, nothing happens? Also, the dagger when I pick up my gear is missing too. Changing difficulty didn't help. Is this download bugged?
If it helps, I installed it using FMSel.
Check 1st post for Newdark version of this mission.
vfig on 15/12/2021 at 04:25
my thoughts (too disorganised to count as a review):
so i just played CoSaS: Mission X for the first time, and now i am writing up the lp episode summaries, and i just realised i couldnt remember what the goal of the whole mission was. we broke in to… turn off elevator power and some cameras?? then do some chores and leave???
(i looked it up. something about raputo storing bonds in the vault that we need to grab. why are they in the vault, this isnt raputos casino (yet), and the negotiations havent concluded yet! oh well.)
ambitious concept and very technically accomplished generally, scripting in particular. i dont think it really came together in the end, and it has a lot of big flaws for sure. the end result is a decent mission, but clearly short of what it could have been.
i thought the radio communication was done really well. despite others saying they wished you could see your teammates around, i didnt feel that was needed. a voice on the other side of a radio can feel much more alive than a poorly animated puppet. although many games have a character on the other end of the radio who magically knows exactly where you are at all times and spoonfeeds you tasks, MX did not fall into that trap/trope, thankfully. the rest of the team was communicating what they were doing, and throwing around a little banter. that was great (although a little less nagging about how slow i was doing wouldve been nice, steel!)
the general layout of the mission was mostly pretty bland. the ground floor was the strongest, yet the least time was spent there. i have yet to play a _great_ mission set in a hotel. i think fundamentally any place with numerous near-identical, impersonal purposeless rooms—except for sleeping—tends toward blandness.
and ventilation ducts: just say no, kids!
having the alarm being an instafail was a terrible idea. at one point i got in a situation where i quicksaved while someone somewhere was still searching for me, and 15 seconds later someone set off the alarm. and my previous hard save was an hour earlier.
ending the mission with a bunch of menial tasks was a dud. if you want the player to do silly menial tasks, get them to do that _first_, while theyre undercover (as a hotel worker obviously, not a guest), both so they can case the place a little, and so you can ramp up to more exciting objectives later.
in the end, i think MX does a very good job of showing that a mission: impossible style team infiltration mission _can_ be a great fit with thiefs systems—even though it doesnt itself manage to pull that off effectively.