Samuel_Tow

I don't think this is a good idea. The scrap iron statue near Temblor actually has a symbollic meaning to Overbrook. I forget exactly what that is now since it's been years since I last read the plaque, but I believe it has something to do with rebuilding people's lives and raising up to recover from disaster, as opposed to shrinking from it and running away.

If we're looking to get rid of a monument, I'd say getting rid of the giant M1 statue is a better call, since I never knew the guy even had a name until this thread.

That's also not a bad idea. I'd say swap out an existing building, say one of the remaining few old ones in Atlas Park and put in either a commemorative garden as someone suggested, or an indoor museum type thing. I'd even be OK with it looking like the University library, but with display cases of various super hero items over the years, with a States statue in the atrium. You don't have to make it complicated, either, and you don't have to make it from existing content. Like, have States' actual came hanging behind glass, have "sword of so and so" and "the glove of so and so." Oh, and Hero 1's letter maybe.

I'm sure we can come up with enough stuff to fill in a museum, and it'd be cool to have some more culture in Paragon City.

The Retro Sci-Fi top isn't as bulky as the others, but that's not the problem. It still can't take most of the chest details that the Tights chest can, and for the character I want those glow lines on, this is important. She's using the IDF chest (I think) and NEEDS to have that, lest her design look just out of place.

Ring the bell! We have a winner!

"Putting villains in control of the situation" is very much the sum total of the solution to all the "lackey" problems condensed neatly in a single sentence. I love how you put it, because it puts a specific wording to essentially ALL of the problems I've had with the way villains are written in this game. It's not about how vile we can be or how often we fight villains vs. fighting heroes or how often we cause disasters and how often we fight for the greater good... It really comes down to writing stories that put our villains in control of the situation.

Consider the basic hero vs. villain dynamic that our very own developer team have have cited in the past - heroes are reactive and thus react to disasters as they occur, and villains are proactive thus they create those disasters. You don't need the Mission Architect in order for a villain to be proactive. All you need is a story arc in which the narrative acts as though your player villain is in control of the situation, even if the game still makes the major decisions for you. Trust me, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief in the face of decisions made for me when the narrative at least pretends I'm making them, than it is when I'm being ordered around like a misbegotten serf.

I honestly would have liked to see them go farther, or at the very least have "upgraded" factions with more than one minion model, one lieutenant model and one boss model, but I do appreciate what you mean. There are few better examples of how to power-up an enemy inappropriately than Director 11's infinite mine filed and the level 54 Malta goons that punch Tankers to death if they don't have an Alpha slotted. I get that the upgraded factions are kinda' sorta' using the same powers they always were, but doing more damage with them, but like you said - the appearance changes do make a difference.

What I want to point out, though, is a bit of inspired writing that really sold the arc to me. "Even ghost lady get punched!" This right there genius writing. It's easy to say "Oh, so and so now has more power so he hits harder." It's cheesy and it's kind of a cop out. But to say that "So and so can now PUNCH GHOSTS!" is a very different proposition. Now, granted, we punch ghosts all the time as players, but in our case it's gameplay and story segregation, mostly because having enemies immune to physical attacks sucks, as Diablo 2 is shows clear evidence for. But for certain characters, being able to become intangible and thus avoid the brute strength of supercharged thugs is a key character aspect. Powering up said thugs in a way that allows them to bypass phasing entirely speaks not just of "more power," but rather of a power upgrade of a fundamentally different nature.

Why I say SSA2.1 is "inspiring" is it raises a lot of interesting questions that end up applying to my own characters and my own storytelling, and ultimately inspire me to try and come up with interesting answers. As you may or may not have noticed, trying to pick a Judgement power for what is an otherwise physical fighter character of mine has made me question just how far I can take a "physical" character without introducing some kind of technological or supernatural element. How does Xanta cut ghosts, how does her gear not break, how can she resist psychic attacks, how can she hack at gods? Well, if the Trolls can punch ghosts, then why can't I find an answer to my problems? They go along the same lines.

What I'm saying is the writers didn't take the easy way out. They didn't just give us low-level factions with a high level number and higher stats, they actually considered how these people's powers could expand laterally as well as increase upwards. It's not just stronger punches, but rather punches that hit in ways you don't expect them to. And it's not just punches, either. The power we're talking about affects them in other ways beyond more power and a costume aura. It affects them on a psychological and ideological level, and to me, THAT is inspired.

Honestly, if SSA2.1 is a sign of things to come, I might be inclined to change my disposition back to the puppy-eyed fan I was back a few years ago. This and the Incarnate changes with Dark Astoria really seem to be turning the game around from an EA title back to what Paragon Studios used to stand for when they were still called NCNC and, hell, what they stood for when they still worked under Cryptic and were down to 15 people. It's a sign of good things, and I can easily recommend this story arc to anyone who's looking for a good story.

Yeah, as soon as I saw Alex's completed pics of his own characters here, I knew he was the perfect guy to bring out Xanta's true self. And I couldn't be happier with the result. Considering I pestered the guy with minor corrections for... God, a week and a half? Considering that, I have to say that not only is Alexa a great artist, but he's an incredibly patient man, as well

This pic is my favourite thing in the world right about now, and I imagine it'll stay that way for some time.

No, not really. I mean, I remember the assassin being mentioned at the end credits, but I don't remember Aurora being mentioned. I might have blinked, I guess. Seriously, though - what is it with all the hanging plot threads to future content? Our writing team have proven that they don't like to be consistent with their own storyline as letting writers tell their own story is seen as much more important. How smart is it, then, to put in story hooks that might not be resolved for years and eventually dropped entirely when a writer changes his mind?

I see no real point in doing this. Like I said, level shift Incarnate powers are all Uncommon, which requires either 4x60 Threads (which isn't gonna' happen), a really lucky component drop or otherwise 8 Empyrean Merits. Well, or running Trianls, which is actually a lot more likely to happen than running the WTF these days given how often they run. I got a good 40% of my Judgement from just one BAF the other day, though I got a common component drop table from it so I can't imagine I helped much.

My point is that component drop tables are not hard to come by. I can get two a day if I put my mind to it. And I can bet that most of those will be Common, so I'll end up with a glut of common components that I would have no use for in making a Rare, but would be very useful in putting SOMETHING in those other slots I'm unlocking even if these powers don't give a level shift. Right now, I'm about 10 Threads away from unlocking Interface, and I can get two thirds of a common power for it the day I unlock it, provided I'm not still collecting components for this confounded Void Judgement that y'all have convinced me I should have

Basically what I'm saying is it turns out Threads and Common Components aren't that hard to come by.

I'm the next person after that and I don't like tough fights forced on me. Isn't that what the difficulty slider is for?

Yes, but they don't fire when you jump, only when you fly. If I want to have, say, a giant robot on the calibre of Front Mission: Evolved who uses jet boosts to jump where the mech would be completely unable to do so unassisted... You can't do that, because jets don't fire when you jump, only when you fly.

That sounds more like simple grinding than "pling" though. And for some reason, the word "pling" always reads like a sound effect to me.

That's not exactly what I meant, though. Praetoria could have been something great, and indeed still could. But what's required to make that happen is to expand Praetorian Earth to include more than just the one-trick pony of the Praetorian War. Look at legacy Paragon City and you'll see a place that comes together from decades of Rick Dakan's history and which constitutes a rich tapestry of different motifs, stories, factions and themes. Now look at Praetoria and you'll see essentially a single story with a single theme and... What, two factions? Three if you count the Syndicate? For as much as we chide them for running away from the "Resistance vs. Loyalist" duality and this breaking continuity, that's exactly what Praetoria needs - more stories that break from the central paradigm and give the world breadth.

Even for as small as it is, speaking in terms of land area, the Rogue Isles still have quite a bit of diversity to them, with each island having a different theme, different rulers and its own subset of stories and larger canon elements to deliver. At the end of the day, City of Heroes really doesn't work as a linear-story RPG in the vein of Diablo or Dungeon Siege because that's not how it was made. Neither the contacts structure nor the geography really lend themselves to this. It needs to be treated more like a sandbox and thus given more content NOT related to the same one central story.

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For the genre-savvy among you, it's probably pretty clear that treating Praetoria like a separate, fully-fledged, self-contained world where a character can level up 1-50 independently sounds like a MASSIVE increase of workload, essentially by 50%. Adding a third side ups the "paths" the content team need to worry about from two to three, and you can probably already see how the Resistance vs. Loyalist duality would have bloated this to four. If you thought this would cause a problem, you'd be right, because this - along with the Incarnate system - are exactly what Matt Miller was afraid of when he dismissed suggestions of a level cap increase all those many years ago. He feared it would create a new level range which would take a LOT of content to fill up that people would blow through in a week. I ran Dark Astoria in three days and First Ward in two. I ran Belladonna Vetrano's arc in a couple of hours, and that's with a lot of chatting. And I don't exactly play fast.

If Praetoria is to be expanded into a legitimate progression path, then it's going to need to break from the war... And it's going to need a LOT of content to do it.

Wait, what?

I'd express it more in the reverse order - negative energy attacks typically come with terrorize and demoralize effects. I once ran through the "elements of CoH" and noticed that this is overwhelmingly what Dark powers tend to have - accuracy debuff, often fear.

I don't disagree with you. I actually agree completely. Just arguing semantics

I get the feeling the developers are starting to realise that people WANT a 1-50 path in Praetoria same as heroes can get from 1 to 50 without leaving Paragon City (aside from instanced missions). This mandates that the zones be accessible to Praetorian characters and be situated in Praetoria, hence First Ward and Night Ward. The trouble here is Praetoria itself.

Let's review how our "scripts" have evolved over the years. City of Heroes back in 2004 launched without having an overall overarching storyline. It didn't have a "point," as it were, thus nothing that took place in the game was expected to need to be justified. What's that? We can now visit a new place called Peregrine Island? OK, let's go do that. Why? Phht! Why not? City of Heroes was much more of a sandbox open world (well, semi-open) where storylines happened and called back to each other, but there was no one single story everything had to follow.

Enter City of Villains. The basic story and mission structure is the same, but now instead of calling to each other in a complex web of obscure references, all stories instead called back to a central "setting" - Project: Destiny, and the broader desire villains were expected to have towards kissing up to Arachnos. It wasn't a specific storyline with specific world-changing events, and it didn't really present us with things we HAD to do or else, but it still presented the world within the framework of an overarching story.

Enter Praetorian Earth. All of a sudden, this is no longer a world, it's a main quest with side missions. The world exists to feed the plot line, events happen and change the status quo and there's a constant pressure for characters to go somewhere or do something. A war is happening, and everything that happens is expected to either be a result of this war or contribute towards this war. Praetorian Earth is, in effect, a never-ending event much more so than it is a "world" or even a "setting." Back in 2004, just plopping down a new zone into the game that's some backwater village on the butt end of nowhere and just buying everyone train cards to it was enough justification for that zone to exist. More places to explore. But today's game has all but abandoned exploration, to the point where it's conditioned us to demand reasons for why we're going to the places we are and doing the things we do.

To my mind, it's better to not treat Praetorian Earth as the setting for the rather horrid Praetorian War storyline, but rather as a world that's broader, wider and deeper than just that one storyline. Consider that a player can do more in the world of Praetoria than necessarily deal with the war and not everything that happens has to have something to do with it. Consider, for instance, a movie like Kelly's Heroes. Yes, it's set during WW2 and it takes place entirely post D-Day war-torn Europe, and it does feature American and German soldiers. But it's really not a movie "about" WW2, and indeed most of the plot has very little to do with the war's outcome or strategy. It's just a bunch of soldiers fed up with being used as cannon fodder going to war for themselves. Why NOT have a Praetorian zone that's like that?

That wouldn't have worked, because Katie's out-of-character behaviour isn't restricted to just the first meeting, or to reactions specific to not knowing the player character. If it were simply mistrust, I could forgive it, especially since I DID play a Primal Earth character through the zone. No, Katie's entire personality is different, such that her reactions are consistent with how she'd treat anyone who isn't a balding psychic woman who came out of a jar. A person can act like a jerk in extreme situations and still be ultimately nice and reasonable - stress does things to our judgement. However, a person who acts like a jerk ALL the time is a jerk, plain and simple. Even if you give him a non-jerkish moment or two.

You can't excuse Dr. Cox's behaviour by saying it's the fault of the person he's speaking with, because he acts like that with everybody.

That's been on my mind, as well. I always thought that a "might" type power will pretty much always correspond to an "earth" type power, as the two would share effects. For reference, I refer you to the Ground Spike Graveyard.

You make a strong point, actually. Someone already gave me by far the most convincing sell for Void, in that the animation combined with the right kind of colouring could make this look a lot like the typical strong man attack, only magic. What I mean by this is you see the character rise up and throw her hands in the air, a lot like what you'd see in your typical dogpile breakup. That just about made me hop out and start making Void.

That is, until I sat down and looked at my options, and until I looked at the power stats. Void with knockback sounds like it's not a bad choice, but that's until I remember I don't really like PBAoE knockback. In terms of stats, Void and Ion have almost the same numbers, considering how I plan to go about them - damage and more damage. It's what Xanta does.

In terms of visuals... This is tough to call, but I just can't... I can't get myself to like Void, not as anything but a black hole. I know it can be made to not look like that, I went through a lot of colour combinations. A yellow Void looks pretty good, as a point of fact, and it IS kind of cool to have this "Graaarh!" moment where Xanta rears up and explodes everyone around her... But for some reason, I still prefer the look of Ionic for her. Void looks like smoke no matter what I do. It looks like gas. It's cool if that's the point, and I have characters for whom this will DEFINITELY work, but for Xanta, lightning from the sky just works better. Even if it's not Zeus' Lightning, it still works the best of them all. I've tried it by this point, and it works. It looks divine and it looks brutal, which is all I really want.

Mind you, there are no real right and wrong decisions here. It all comes down to preference and "feel," and to me me Ionic feels more direct.

It's not just the "killer" thing. Katie generally acts bratty, she complains all the time and comes off like she has a chip on her shoulder a lot bigger than just losing her "sisters." Like I said, Katie in pretty much all of her appearances acts a lot like Megan aka Dominatrox does in Dark Astoria. You take a character who was painted to be pretty much entirely good-natured and turn her into a whining, ******** jerk, and for what? Why did she need to go through losing all of her "sisters?" How did it enhance the story, but to give the writers an excuse to present her as they did?

Let's look at an example. Let's take, say, Doc Delilah and return her in the new Incarnate content, only she's not cheerful and upbeat, she's dark and brooding and likes to lash out at people for no reason. As soon as I yell "Betrayaaal! Be-traya!" a writer comes up and says "No, no, no. It makes sense. See, between appearances, Doc Delilah lost her loved ones to Arachnos and now she's angry at the world." OK... It makes sense, but... How is that a better story than having Doc Delilah show up as Doc Delilah, as opposed to Squall Lionheart playing Doc Delilah?

If you're going to change a character completely, why bother keep the name and the look. If you're going to make X-Com a Rainbow Six style FPS set in the 1960s, why even keep the name? Just start over, make a brand new character give him or her a brand new name and storyline and simply leave the old characters who ended on a positive note well enough alone. What, really, did First Ward gain by dragging Katie Douglass into everything, other than name recognition, when it's a different character posing as her?

Yeah, I'd really suggest you try the arc. More than anything else, DO NOT get discouraged from the first mission. Play it through to the end and try to keep an open mind as to what might be happening and what effects it might be having. It's a very clever idea delivered with a degree of subtlety we've not seen in a while. As I said before, SSA2.1 manages to communicate a situation that's probably a lot more dangerous than all of SSA1 combined, and yet it manages to do this without insulting your intelligence or trying to kill your spirits. As far as content goes... That one's actually pretty good.

Hah, thank you! I don't want to sound like I'm calling our writers illiterate, though. As I said before, bad grammar, awkward spelling and poor sentence structure and word selection happen to every writer. I dare say they're unavoidable, just because you can't think about all aspects of a text simultaneously with actually writing it, so it's natural that the first draft will always be... Questionable. It's how that goes. However, that's also why proof-reading is so crucial - because you can pretty much count on the first draft being awkward, stilted and rife with technical errors. You can count on it, and you need to fix it.

It's at the "fix it" part that Paragon Studios QA seems to fumble, because a lot of these texts honestly feel like they were never checked for errors and style. I used to think that the writers just weren't very good, but I've seen a lot of this "not very good" text by now to recognise that our writers aren't actually bad at all, it's just that we're reading right off their first, coffee-stained, crumpled-up manuscript since that never went through an editor to be cleaned up and printed up neat and pretty. Mistakes a child would spot at a cursory reading are really not something I can attribute to a writer just being poor, because they're not mistakes of skill, they're mistakes of technicality that this writer would have cleaned up himself were he given the time to read what he wrote before submitting it, or were an editor to give the text a careful pass.

In short, it seems to me that our writers are getting a very bad name not because they're bad writers but because the studio tolerates the practice of publishing their work before it's cleaned up. Nobody that I'm aware of can write a masterpiece down on the first try.

This seems like cascade flanderization to me. The Katie Douglass of Imperial City was confused and tortured, but ultimately cheerful and very nice individual, bringing some positive emotions to the otherwise negative world of Praetoria City and leaving the player with a good feeling at the end of the day. The Katie Douglass of First Ward was, if you'll pardon my language, a right *****. The "confused and tortured" parts were left in even though she should realistically have gotten over it, yet the cheerful and positive sides of her were gone, leaving this whining, ungrateful, sarcastic brat worthy of standing in for Dominatrix as seen in Dark Astoria.

Now, I would have expected that First Ward would be a shock to Katie's system, so starting Night Ward by freeing her and responding to player request would see her revert to the Katie Douglass of Imperial City - a nicer, more positive character. You know, like what happened to the Prince of Persia from Sands of Time to Warrior Within to the Two Thrones. I don't actually know how that was resolved, but it seems to me that instead of fixing her character, that rotten version of her from First Ward has been taken as the base and made more unfriendly and unpleasant than even that. Thus, flanderization.

I'll have to run this for myself when I have more time and a character of the appropriate level, but this does not sound good.