Samuel_Tow

I have a friend of mine whom I really can't get into the game since he likes grinding apparently. I've tried to play slower and run his missions, but he pretty much doesn't care about the story and would rather run mine since he levels up faster.

A lot of the time when I complain about something, it's pointed out to me that this is hardly a new thing and, upon reflection, that's usually the case. For instance, when I started badmouthing the writers about redundancy in their word choice for I23, I ran Dark Astoria and realised the problem was front and centre there and I never really noticed it until it became rampant... Or at least until I saw it enough times.

Why I'm saying this is because the problem of how women are drawn and designed in this game is not a current issue per se, it's the culmination of probably two years of built-up frustration that I finally realised has its roots a LOT farther back. What reminded me? Desdemona, as seen in Belladonna Vetrano's arc. I recall describing my first impressions of her to a friend of mine as "She's wearing a Carnival mask for some reason, she has one garter belt but no garters and her boyshorts are riding so high up her *** it's a wonder she can even walk." Subsequently, I was forced to interrupt my own sentence about something completely different to muse how it's even possible for that woman to walk in those heels at all, much less on soft soil and grass. "It's magic!" my friend responded, and it... Kind of made sense. To cut you off at the curb, I'm aware of Vanessa's fate, and Belladonna mentions it, which got us into thinking about Giovanna Scaldi, and whether there were now three people inside Desdemona's head. This prompted me to comment that if her head became too cramped, Vanessa and Giovanna could easily migrate into her breasts. "They're as big as hear head, after all." was I believe my exact phrasing. And indeed they are, with the artist feeling the need to draw fold lines where Desdemona's skimpy push-up corset had lifted her breasts up over her chest.

What I'm getting at is Desdemona is not a new character, and what I'm saying is not new information. And if it were JUST her, not much of anyone would have complained. I... Guess it makes sense for her character to wear tiny camel toe hotpants and a skimpy corset? Either way, she wasn't that bad on her own. But it's NOT just her, and that's the problem. Pretty much since that woman showed up in the game, we've seen both new characters and old characters remade drawn up in this much more sexualised style, and then literally drawn to be titillating. Even characters who weren't. Diabolique going from wearing pants and a trenchcoat to wearing a bikini and a flaming brazier on her head was pretty dang bad, but at least we mostly saw still of her in-game model. Then Penny, whom Jim Temblor, the "disgruntled young man" referred to as "a good kid" started wearing a belly tee with panties painted on her pants. And then we start seeing her posed sexy and people started seeing the pattern.

I ask you this - when is the last time that an issue has focused around a female character who was not skimpy? Hell, even Emperor Marcus Cole is starting to notice this. When he looks at his remaining allies in his personal story mission, he realises that he's down to a wounded man, a beast and an evil woman who dresses like a harlot. In pretty much those exact words, no less. We had penny, we had Diabolique, we had Tillman, we had Desdemona... I guess you can quote Nightstar, but at least to my eyes that robot is more fetishised than all the others combined, and she can get away with being NAKED. Not that I dislike what I see, mind you, far from it, but... I just have to wonder when we're going to focus on a female character defined by strength of character and competence in the field WITHOUT also focusing on her "assets."

When people talk about this particular problem of character design and artwork priorities, you have to understand that they're not being whiny crybabies who got hung up on a single mediocre piece of artwork. This is a problem that, for many of us, has simmered for damn near two years now, through the various "harlots" as Cole calls them, to the the various costume sets, to the various game art. Getting over it is simply not an option any more, because it simply keeps happening, and you'll find many people get more and more determined to make a stand with every iteration.

And the real kicker is no-one wants to "remove a part of comic books" by removing skimpy sexualised women from the game. But that can't be the only representation women get in this game unless they pre-date the current art team.

Speaking of Belladonna, she finally convinced me to end pretty much all my ambitions of fiddling with difficulty in Incarnate content. In the pre-50 game, I liked playing on +0x2, because I like enemies my level in spawns of about 5 and six. Forget "five and six," half the spawns in any average Incarnate mission are set to "large," which at x2 puts them at a size equal to about x5, so there's really no reason for me to play at anything over x1, and even then I'll probably be playing an effective x3.

In addition to this, I recall arguing with Zombra, way back when, over whether every fight should be a boss fight. In that old argument, we were speaking figuratively, since he liked playing on high difficulty settings and fighting a life or death fight every spawn. I disagreed with him so vehemently that we basically never played together - all I wanted was a bunch of easy fights with a tough boss fight AT THE END. Funny that Incarnate content made the argument literal, with over half the spawns I've fought in Incarnate content having bosses in them. As a result of this, I'm considering disabling bosses, as well.

What's funny is I'm already trying to play Incarnate content as -1 to me, be it through having level shifts or by relying on DA not spawning lower than 50 so 50-1 effectively removes level 51 spawns. Putting this all together, it looks like I'll be playing at -1x1 with no bosses and no AVs. And I have a feeling the game will not be "comfortable" even then.

Are we accepting "alright" as an actual word now, by the way? It's all over the place in I23 text almost as though the same one person wrote them all, an you use it a few times in your original post, but my spell checker still refuses to accept it.

That said, minor text errors I can deal with. They're not that irritating, just embarrassing. What I've found to be REALLY lacking in I23's writing is actual human proof-reading, which is to say proof-reading by a thinking person with an eye towards cleaning up grammar and sentence structure and enforcing at least some kind of good writing practice. What I'm noticing A LOT of recently is redundancies. Speak with a Tunnel representative and you'll see it. Speak with that new contact who shows you how to get to Night Ward and you'll see it. Run practically anything from the last couple of Issues and you'll run into it. I'll try to get an example at some point.

*edit*
The mission texts are not on ParagonWiki yet, but if anyone runs Wavelength's SSA, try to take a screencap of the Skyway City mission briefing. Specifically, look for "it appears."

I post this partly because I want to take every opportunity I can to praise this game's storytelling, but more so because I hope that what I'm seeing in recent content is a trend of putting more care into storytelling than just an excuse to go places and kill things. For as jaded as I am about storytelling in City of Heroes of late, if this is where it's going... Well, let's just say that it's improving, and greatly. And that's saying something, considering I've been bashing the game's wiring as getting worse and worse for pretty much the last two years.

I want to take the time to explore what I feel works in this SSA and what I feel doesn't, just because I want to try and figure out WHY it works so well when SSAs 1.1 to 1.6 really, REALLY don't in my eyes.

1. The ending works. As I said, I won't give any spoilers, but to say that the ending in SSA2.1 is neither a downer ending nor a cliffhanger. In fact, I wouldn't even call it an "ending" since the story doesn't really end. It just sort of cuts off mid-sentence, clearly intending to feed into SSA2.2. And I like that, personally. Unlike SSA1, SSA2 doesn't seem to try to pretend it's seven separate stories forming one larger narrative and fully admits that it's one large story that we're just not getting all at once. And it seems to have given the story a LOT of breathing room.

2. The pacing works. SSA2.1 may claim it's five missions long, but two of those are non-combat "talking" missions, so in practice it's about the length of your average SSA1 arc. However, this one seems to have been freed from the need to be a self-contained, three-act story within all of three missions, and this this allows the story to flow much more naturally. It doesn't really end... In fact it barely manages to begin, but that's OK. That's just part of the larger story. Once we have all or most of SSA2 out, this won't feel like a problem and the story will then be able to act like one large cohesive whole, as opposed to seven rushed, botched stories strung together on a single line.

3. The characters, believe it or not, work. After SSA1, I grew to utterly hate everyone in the Freedom Phalanx because of how they were presented. SSA2 starts off with giving them much better characterisation in a scant few lines of dialogue and a simple talking mission. It doesn't quite make up for the horror of SSA1 so it can't make them likeable in just three missions (why the hell is Manticore not in jail yet?), but it manages to make them feel more like real people with their own separate personalities and quirks. This has to do with the two "talking" missions, which manage to condense all the talky parts in controlled conditions where characterisation is easier and frees up the fighting missions to be mostly about fighting with minimal conversation interference. This, to me, is the perfect balance of story and gameplay, done in such a way that neither intrudes on the other, and this helps make the characters work. It also helps that they're not completely useless, inept, horrible people in this.

4. The mood works very well. My chief beef with SSA1 was that it felt like whoever was writing it was one step away from taking a razor blade to his wrists, such was the bluntness of the depressing, intentionally revolting atmosphere. Well, I can safely say that there's none of that here. The situation is no less grim, the people are under no less pressure and the end really doesn't try to lighten the mood, yet because of how the story is told, the "weight" of events feels much more balanced and the player much more in control. The story no longer goes out of its way to depress me, choosing instead to make the severity of the situation abundantly clear, but leave me to react to it with whatever emotions I find are appropriate.

5. The idea inspires. I said I won't spoil it and I won't, even though we all know what SSA2 will be all about from its very name. However, suffice it to say that the story takes on an angle that's a bit more creative than just the most direct interpretation of the premise one might come up with. The major plot elements are largely predictable to the genre-savvy among us, but how the story is executed is where SSA2 really shines. Can't say any more than that without getting into spoilers.

6. The technical side of the writing fails. Oh, boy does it fail! Viking said it best, that it's been bad since Ouroboros' meddling removed Paragon Studio's editor from the timestream, and it REALLY feels like SSA2's text was never proof-read, or indeed never even read before it was submitted. It's not quite as bad as SSA1.7 in this regard, since at least there aren't as many spelling errors (yay for spell check?), but the actual sentence structure, word choice and style is all over the place. Redundancies abound and are very obvious ("it appears" shows up three times in two sentences, for instance) and the whole thing feels like it was uploaded into the final build within 60 seconds of the last period being set down. I've written horrible fiction so I know how easy it is to write text of questionable quality, but I also know how easy it is to spot said questionable quality at even a cursory pass. This studio REALLY needs someone whose job it is to read every bit of text before it makes it into the game, and that someone needs to be paid based on how many corrections he can make. I respect our writers trying to do better, I really do, but they NEED an editor. Bad!

7. BABs rocks. OK, slight spoiler here. At one point you are allowed to pick one member of the Phalanx to go with you on a mission, and since BABs seems to be in his "member of the Phalanx" phase right now, I picked him. His dialogue is awesome, his powers are awesome, he's awesome to have around. I'm not sure how much that has to do with the story. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Overall, SSA2.1 is not perfect, but its heart is in the right place, I think. Sure, technically it's left wanting, especially in terms of writing editing, but it is a chunk of a decent story, well told and not shoved into the mould of a three-act structure. It aspires to be exactly what it is - one excerpt of a longer story, and judging by it, that's a longer story I would like to experience in full.

Having finally run into them in-game, I want to lend my voice to asking that we get access to the various Black Knight pieces. I don't know if they've been made for the female and huge models, but if they aren't, they should be. In the meantime, weapon models don't have model restrictions, and I'd like to see the various Black Knight swords and shields put in the editor. I can see why Excalibur might be held back (I can't, but let's say I can for the sake of argument), but the others don't really have this excuse.

Please, let me have those pieces. I'd be willing to pay for them.

Normally I'd be all for it because what you say makes sense. However, having seen the writing in the game, I worry what the "updates" might do to the character descriptions. Seriously, I touched two NPCs from I23 and ran into two redundancies back to back. Check out the Tunnel tech and that magician woman who sends you to Night Ward and read it word for word. You'll run into the department of redundancy department type stuff pretty soon.

And I honestly don't know if that's just the writers dropping the ball or the company's chronic editor deficiency talking, but I get cold chills every time old text is touched.

Oi...

I'm back to an old standby of mine - more custom weapons. I'll break this down into two parts.

More custom weapons in general. Broadsword has a zillion, but pretty much anything that's not Broadsword has a handful of decent ones and a handful of weird ones and that's it. We have scarcely any bows and over half of War Mace looks like joke weapons. We need more custom weapons for all sets to cover a variety of visual themes. We need larger weapons, smaller weapons, more realistic weapons, more unrealistic weapons and so forth. In fact, we need so many I'd like to see that "Weapon Pack" we keep bringing up made, eventually. Just make a single pack that has, say, two or three new weapons for EVERY set. I'm sure that'll add up to 30 or 40 new models total, but it'll sell like hot cakes, definitely. Besides, I have to assume making new weapons needs less fine-fitting than making new clothing costume details.

More real weapons for Titan Weapons. I know the point of that set was to be ridiculous and absurd, and I don't want the weapons to become any smaller, but come on, now. Can we get a sword that looks like an actual sword got supersized? The Buster Sword and the Fusion Swords look good, but they're bizarre and they both come from Final Fantasy. Pendragon's Exaclibur is cool, but I'll never be able to have it, and it's missing the point - I don't want a signature character's weapon, I want a Titan Sword that actually looks like a sword as opposed to a giant boat paddle.

I'd like to see, at the very least, a giant sword-looking sword, a giant two-handed hammer that doesn't have a jet engine on the back and probably a more traditional morning star mace supersized. Yes, even if I have to pay for them like the Titan Weapons extra weapon pack.

Please?

I don't disagree with adding more customization options to Staph Fighting (still waiting for that Weapon Pack), but I think this is best put in the new All Things Art thread.

I see no reason to remove the Statesman and Sister Psyche from history. The developers tried this with the 5th Column way back when and it backfired on them. Take 'em out of the here and now, sure. They're dead. But leave their history, backstory and impact alone.

Well, great. I had a long post written up, I accidentally hit the "back" button on my mouse and lost it all. Thanks, City of Heroes forums, for not remembering text I've put in your text fields.

Sorry, Ultimus, I'd love to help you but I can't reconstruct what I'd written.

I don't know, I much prefer Eunuch Statesman. Crotch notwithstanding, this is probably the first pic I've seen of him where his glued-on helmet doesn't look goofy.

And, yeah, I think City of Heroes SHOULD do better. That pic which was suggested for the forum background and then scrapped looked considerably better. Slinky spine or not, I just don't like the artwork on Penny there. Too much scowl, too much weird ankle, and I'm getting mighty tired of people leaping at each other. Can we see a fight take place on the GROUND, please?

Or, you know, a loading screen that's NOT a battle? How about that memorial pick of Stats' coffin that got thrown around a while ago?