The Big Meridianum Dissection

This was originally posted on 10 April 2023

In an effort to make the early Castra MSQs (Meridianum & Praetorium) less of a slog, they received a lot of rework. The former got hit really hard.
The mission at Meridianum involved taking down three forcefield emitters. One of the means of doing this was to sabotage a Ceruleum reclamation plant nearby.

While you have absolutely no reason to be here, the visual and collision geometry for the bombing run still exists.
It involved stealing composition explosive from fallen Vanguards and blowing pipes up. (An earlier edition of this post suggested that the collision geometry was removed as there was no need to go there. This was incorrect when I found a noclip plugin.)

Then the player would fight up this parade (to the right), past the freight station…

And come to a fight in front of this gunship…

…while Cid pummelled this emitter tower. Nothing remains of the tower other than the base preventing the player from approaching it.

I feel it decent to point out that there is no reason to retain any of this geometry. The player can’t get near it and has zero sightline. The closest they will be able to see is from here.

Splatoon (the waymark plugin I use) helpfully demonstrates that this entire area still has collision - if a player could get here, they would have no difficulty in navigating.
(This red mark is a “place waypoint in the world where I click” feature. It relies on there being something solid. The bright circle is just a mouse-aura to help me keep track of the cursor when the scene gets visually-chaotic.)

The team emerges into this courtyard, where they have to survive being bombarded by a gunship. Turn off the searchlights, and then commandeer a mortar launcher to pound the gunship. It crashes into the final emitter tower, taking it out, and Livia says something witty about “if you are resolved to die here, could you at least not make such a mess of it?”.
It’s gone now. In its place is a standard, vapid boss fight.

However. Beneath her arena, the trappings of that old arena still exist. The mortar hatch is on the right.

And that is the story of how what people referred to as “an 8-player NASCAR Race” (keep running, crash into things every now and then, skip every cutscene) became a four-player slog.