Samuel_Tow

I know, that's what I Googled to get the result But I can only read "Mecha Armour" so many times before I start hearing that in my head.

I don't know what she's lacking, but I do know that whatever it is, Penny makes it up in dat chin.

There's almost no mystery in Dark Astoria beyond the first couple of arcs, and the couple of big reveals don't really matter in such a way that's dependent on the nature of the reveal. I can even put this in the form of a list of questions.

1. Who are the Knives of Vengeance? That's obvious, and it's in their descriptions - they're Knives of Artemis mercenaries who have been transformed by the Talons of Vengeance to be pretty much the Talons of Vengeance by another name.

2. Who are the Talons of Vengeance? Murdering monsters. That's just about the extent of them. This isn't really addressed in Dark Astoria proper, but I know about them because they showed up in First Ward which, chronologically, takes place before the DA arcs. They're evil, they want to kill, we need to stop them.

3. Who is the letter writer? That's a big reveal so I won't mention it even despite the spoiler tag, but here's my question - what of it? The only resources he employs are Ajax, Protean and Heather Townsfield. He doesn't even travel through time but on one occasion. It could have been pretty much everybody else that people have guessed he might be and the story would have worked just as well. He doesn't even hold any real trump cards, and serves to essentially be wrong.

4. What of Tielekku? She could have been a big reveal if we didn't know about her from the Scroll of Tielekku arc, but involving her is a good idea. But she doesn't DO anything. She shows up, acts pompous, gets omnomnommed, then does nothing for the rest of the arc bar a few words of encouragement. Oh, yes, she helps put up a barrier... That David Hazen made all the preparations for. In essence, Tielekku is a plot device, and she has something like 5 lines of dialogue, which is about on par with the VERY brief cameo Hequat makes in Scirocco's Patron arc. She's a surprise, but it doesn't amount to anything.

5. Who is David Hazen? I honestly don't know, and it honestly doesn't matter. He found Mot, he set up some wards, he went insane, the end. But WHO was he? Nobleman? Mystic? Librarian? Intellectual? We don't know. For all the story reveals, he had no past, he only existed to set up some wards and go mad. When he first showed up in the Peregrine Island mission, I thought he'd be important, a recurring mystery man who held a dark secret that would eventually be revealed, but no. He shows up, he disappears from the story and he's only mentioned once more to explain the wards that we never see. For all I know, it could have been Father Henri who fought Mot. As a point of fact, that would have been kind of cool. It would have been a bigger reveal at any rate.

6. What about the Banished Pantheon? Meh, they're faceless goons now. Not like they were ever much more, but at least back in the pre-DA content they show some initiative of their own. Here, they're essentially puppets. They have no personality, they have no initiative, they exist only to serve. Which works, I guess, but it would have worked better if they were the only flat, predictable faction. And I STILL would have wanted to see at least a dissenting shaman or two, even if it's just an NPC I rescue from a ritual who's convinced he doesn't want to worship a god who wants him dead.

7. What do we do about Mot? We fight it, we beat it, the end. It's pretty much what one would expect. Oh, sure, the exact nature of how we fight Mot is kind of creative, but we know there's an unleashed dark god as soon as we set foot in Dark Astoria, it's safe to assume we'll fight and, sure enough, we fight it and win at the end. Everything in-between is essentially sidequests that have to be done to prepare for that final encounter. It's mostly padding, especially destroying the X of Vengeance twice in two whole story arcs.

I will give the story some credit for surprising me, however. The nature of the Sentinel surprised me, genuinely. It would have surprised me more if Sister Solaris' persona mission hadn't spoiled it first, but it still works. The true nature of Max was a surprise, as well. I suspected it was something like that, but I didn't expect the writers would go through with it. Sadly, Malta isn't actually involved, even with their standard 50+ NPCs, which I consider to be a major missed opportunity.

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My point is this - we go to Dark Astoria to fight an evil god, we wrestle with some one-dimensional no-backstory monsters, and we defeat an evil god. And that's it. That's why I say the story is predictable - it unfolds exactly like how you'd assume it would unfold just from the basic zone description with no real surprises of any actual merit. The zone features maybe three or four factions total. The Knives of Vengeance had no depth, the Talons of Vengeance have no depth, the Tsoo have much potential but end up having no depth and the Banished Pantheon have no depth, aside from being minions of Mot. Yes, there's the story of Scirocco, which I must admit was good, but again - it amounts to nothing but having a combat NPC to clutter my screen with sand tornados.

What would have been unpredictable to me? Let me list a few ideas:

1. The Knives of Vengeance aren't being forcefully recruited. The loser-tier Sisters are, but the Knives leadership has chosen this intentionally. Remember that cult one of Crimson's mission mentions? Well, that's real, but only a select few know about it. By summoning the power of Artemis, the leaders hope to be able to resist the madness of the Talons and so elevate themselves and their sisters into godhood, then eventually break away. They have an actual goddess on their side, right? Then at the end when their goddess has abandoned them, they offer to surrender and help, and we have a chance to accept.

2. The Tsoo in Dark Astoria are genuinely good and reformed, having seen the error of their ways through Mot's guilt trip. They still serve Tub Chi, but more and more realise he is not the honourable and just leader he claims to be. He doesn't want to stop Mot, he wants to take his power. After numerous battles, Hua Tov finally admits that what he's doing is wrong and helps the player take the god-killer sword from Tub Chi. In so doing, he redeems himself and is freed from the influence of Mot, serving as a valuable ally in the final battle.

3. Tielekku arrives, but she is not the kind, benevolent goddess we expected her to be. Myths about her say that she never believed people were worthy of wielding magic and indeed cast out Ermeeth for teaching magic to humans. This suggests that she is an arrogant, unforgiving goddess who believes humanity had no business engaging in the many magical wars that it has that got them here in the first place. As Mot is not part of the pantheon she banished and does not threaten war against other gods, Tielekku sees no reason to help people, and must therefore be convinced, and perhaps even fought against for a time. She undergoes and epiphany and realise humans have elevated themselves to where they are now worthy of the gods' good grace and understanding.

4. The Circle of Thorns aren't dead, and are in fact desperate to strike any alliance they can to stop mot, going as far as to offer the Prince of Demons entry into our world. The Prince of Demons himself cares nothing for Mot's antics, worried that if Mot destroys the Circle, the Prince is robbed of his main cadre of loyal followers. He sends a new breed of Behemoths as a token of his good graces, and we have to bargain with him, finding a way to get his help without letting him into this world. Or not getting his help and fighting harder missions, as an option.

5. Mot has an actual story of his ancient past, how he came to become the god of death, what his dealings were with the pantheon of banished gods and what he ultimately wants. Yes, he wants to be free, but then what? Kill everybody? And then what? Perhaps he wants to create a dark and horrible future like that one Portal mission. But does Mot really want to help the pantheon of banished gods return from the spirit world, or does he, like Requiem, fear he will have no place once his stronger brethren return? Perhaps he wants to rule over Earth alone?

6. How does Lughebu feel about this? From what I understand, the Banished Pantheon cultists are more or less his cultists, as I believe he is the leader of the pantheon of banished gods. Does he trust Mot to free him once he has achieved full power? Does he trust Mot to not want to summon the pantheon into a trap and consume their essence now that he has all this power? Would Lughebu not have his own splinter cell within the cultists who are secretly working on a backup plan to undermine Mot's ascension and use the power he has amassed in order to shatter the bounds of his own prison?

There are stories and angles that could have been put in which work contrary to expected and most direct path, but I just didn't really find any that had a meaningful effect.

This would pretty much end the Architect once and for all. Back in I16 when there was interest, players created hundreds of thousand of arcs in a matter of a few days, and there was a huge pool of things to try. Now, that makes it unwieldy and it pollutes it with broken or abandoned arcs. However, wiping EVERYTHING is a mistake, as I honestly don't believe the Architect has enough popularity to make what was lost back.

Forgive me for not having much sympathy for your campaign to rob me of the costume I chose to create, but this isn't about screen pollution. People can already use pretty much all the aura pieces I discussed above, they're just all from the same aura set. What I'm suggesting is that we be able to pick pieces individually and choose which are always on and which turn on in combat only. If we're given this choice, we might actually spare your delicate sensibilities a tad more, too. If I can have an eye aura going constantly and a body aura that only turns on in combat, I usually will. Since I can't, my only option is to pick an eye aura and a body aura that both display constantly.

Somehow, she reminds me of Transformers Animated.

Perhaps not in latitudinal twist, but the curve of the spine is rather more extreme.

That's my take on it, as well. I like the buckles, I like the backpack, I even like the face junk, heaven help me, and hell - who do I have to kill to get a belly button for my own characters? They're all neat pieces, but I just don't think they work on the same character.

Actually, do you know what Penny reminds me of? The Sinister set. I don't mean to say she looks sinister, but her costume looks like a costume set created for the broadest range of options but never really designed to go together. Some of the Sinister pieces are better than others and they make for pretty good combinations, but the WHOLE SET just looks goofy. To me, it looks like Penny just got "the whole set" of something just released with no regard for what actually works best, which pieces might be best left off and which might be best replaced with pieces from existing sets. She looks like a tech demo for new costuming technology much more so than she looks like someone with a solid single costume.

And that really shows in the wide shots. If her colour scheme were gold and brown, she could pass for a Merit Vendor.

Since when? They're Moderate and above, and they have some of the best overall DPS of many Blasters. It's just that their endurance cost is vastly disproportionate with their damage, so they end up costing A LOT to get that kind of damage out. And I don't mean just Ring of Fire. Electric Fence is pretty much on the same level. The only ranged immobilize Blasters have that doesn't do damage is Web Greande, and only because it has a recharge debuff, instead.

I agree. Ranged weapons for melee characters and melee weapons for ranged characters is a the realm of Epic pools. The only problem is that Epics have kind of a set "formula" for how they're built. Scrapper Epics, for instance, have one or two attacks and the rest are utility powers like Web Grenade or Targeting Drone or Caltrops. This is actually the most relevant to Blasters, since their Epic shields are actually some of the best protection they're likely to get from conventional powers, meaning their sets need to somehow include that in them, as well.

Nevertheless, I stand by my position - Melee characters need at least a token access to rifles, pistols and bows WITH CUSTOMIZATION, and I can't disagree that ranged ATs need access to at least the more basic melee weapons like swords, axes and maces.

Yeah, we're kind of in a no-win situation right now. What's not very shallow and obvious is instead a "twist" that hurts my brain because it both makes no sense and seems like trying WAAAY too hard. It's like our writers are bipolar - either they can't be bothered to think too hard about those stories, or otherwise their heads explode with such violent force that my brain gets mood whiplash. Moderation, people. Your stories don't have to be made up of boring predictable plots punctuated by ZOMGREVEALZOMG every now and then. Drop hints, ask questions, imply depth and just see where that leads you. It's not all lows and reveals.

Ironically enough, Dark Astoria is probably the perfect storm of positive circumstances and pretty much the BEST that could ever come out of this writing method. Yeah, we know about Mot pretty much from the moment we set foot in Dark Astoria, the Knives and Talons have no real backstory and it's more or less obvious this will come down to a confrontation with the dark god. The identity of the Letter Writer is... Yeah, it's "It was random person A who was behind it all along" as Tami Baker says, mostly because nothing is ever made of the guy's identity. Still, it's not an offensive reveal and he's written pretty well. There's also Max, who I thought was a very cool idea, but unfortunately, this doesn't involve Malta proper, which is a disappointment.

What I'm saying is that aside from Max and the Letter Writer, the story is pretty much straightforward and predictable. Tielekky threw me for a loop just because bringing her in was ambitious, but like the others, she does pretty much nothing, so even with her the story was predictable. But it was the good kind of predictable, shallow fun. My own Kim got to be a badass, she got to save the world and she didn't have to take lip from anyone while doing it. Mot is built up as a credible threat quite nicely and the conclusion is satisfying. It's about as good as a predictable, shallow story can get.

Sadly, what this means is unless new stories gain a touch of depth, it's going to be downhill from here. They've already told the best direct story they could without expending even more of their banked cards. Bringing in Tielekku and revealing the Letter Writer really pushed the Dark Astoria story to great heights, but those are already expended. You can't use them again, and there isn't that much left. There's pretty much just the Rikti Homeworld left and possibly the Circle of Thorns baddies like Hequat and the Prince of Demons, but that's it. There's a finite amount banked trump cards the writers can use because, frankly, the new plots they've been making in recent years don't really carry the same kind of weight in a story.

I actually liken this to Mass Effect 3, ending notwithstanding. The story was actually quite mediocre by BioWare standards, but it subsisted almost entirely on culminations of exciting plotlines that previous games set up. Almost nothing the game brings in as a new plot element works. Most of the strongest moments are based on plots from the prequels or romances from the prequels. Ending notwithstanding, it made for a good game, but it was very obvious that this would be the LAST good game in the series just because it blew its entire load and there was nothing left to use as a hook by the end. I hope they don't plan to make an MMO out of it because Mass Effect has literally NOTHING left to offer unless some genius writer pulls a rabbit out of a hat and creates an equally exciting new universe to follow-up after essentially wrapping up all of the existing one.

City of Heroes writers: You did a GREAT job with Dark Astoria, but you also made many mistakes. Just remember that you're not going to have the trump cards you did there forever.

That's kind of what I'm saying, yes. Shadowhunter (I assume that's him from comments in this thread) is just much more memorable than Penny, because his costume is both simpler AND has more stuff that's memorable. He's blue-skinned which is memorable on its own, he has contrasting yet simple tattoos which may well be the FIRST NPC in this game to have them (the Tsoo tattoos are far more complex and don't count), he has a bear hood which REALLY stands out, and if you look carefully, he has digitigrade legs. Yeah, the finer detail is still there, like the spiked gloves, the skulls on the belt, the wraps on the digitigrade legs (******* finally! "Clothes" on digitigrade legs was a long time coming!) and those do add to the overall look, but you don't need to remember them in order to spot the character at a distance.

Penny really does look like a black-haired girl with face junk and a busy costume.

Yeah, this is something I brought up the first time we discussed it - the white on the pants just seems out of place. It makes her bottom look like it has a red base with a white secondary while her top looks like it has a black base with a red secondary. There's no symmetry in there, and this lack of symmetry is what prevents my brain from remembering it. I literally CANNOT even remember which of her colours were where, and I've looked at that wallpaper like 10 times writing this post.

David explained this as Penny being both rebellious and going for fashion, thus combining elements from Vanguard, Longbow and her own personal touch. The problem is that A) this would never have been obvious if David hadn't said it since her costume looks like neither group and B) making the costume a mess intentionally as an ironic statement is all well and good, but it doesn't keep it from being a mess. If she had LITERAL Vanguard Gear with Longbow pieces on top, kind of like how Fusionette starts getting progressively more Vanguard pieces every time she shows up, then I could buy it, but that's not what it is.

That, and the first time I saw Penny, I thought she was running around in a bare butt

It's the chin, isn't it?

I really don't like it, myself. However, there are still more options between Leifeld and Superman. What bugs me is that her costume doesn't make "sense" on an instinctive level. I've heard David's explanation of why he went with it and I can respect it, but what I mean is I look at this thing... And I just see shapes and colours. And when I look away, all I remember is shapes and colours. You could show me pretty much any of the other concept costumes for her and I probably couldn't tell the difference at a glance, because the difference is in the finer details that I have to really look to see.

Maybe it's just a sense of design aesthetic, but I've always preferred costumes that have something iconic and memorable about them, even when they're otherwise busy. Black Scorpion, for instance, has one of the busiest costumes in the game with all his little scientific doodads stuck all over his armour and the blinking lights and such, but do you know what I remember when I see him? Large black armour, head suspended inside it, claw and blaster hands, scorpion tail. The busyness of it adds to the costume's fidelity, but it is not part of the costume's identity, is what I'm saying.

The trouble with Penny's costume is that the sum total of its identity is held within its fidelity, and this makes it unmemorable. It's like trying to get me to remember the arrangement of pebbles on a river-side. Yes, I'm sure I could identify each separate one, track its position and orientation and later identify that same pebble beach through a single photo of it... But to my brain, it's still just a pebble beach. Having to examine the costume is a mental step that I don't make instinctively, hence why her costume isn't memorable. To my eyes, it's a mish-mash of colours and patters and pretty much the only thing that's memorable about her is that hair, which so far is unique to her among NPCs.

While I wouldn't go quite this far, I simply find her costume chaotic and vastly over-done. Zippers, buckles, belts, padding, midriff, multiple colours, face plates AND face paint, and none of it really feels like it follows any rhyme or reason, at least not such that are easy to determine at a glance. I've seen worse costumes (the statesman's face plate always looked ridiculous to me from anything but a dead straight angle from where it looks like a whole helmet), but Penny's is definitely up there. It just feels too random to me.

I still wouldn't.

As well as being very creepy.

You make a good point. I'm not sure if I can use Dark/Dark on Tirin Praxis, but that doesn't mean I don't have a goddess of death and shadows who can't use a similar setup

I realised earlier today that it makes no sense for me to keep throwing away the good ideas you guys keep giving me, when I can actually just use all of them, or at least most of them. From the looks of things, here's what I'll make:

Tiring Praxis: Electric/Will/Soul Scrapper
Loctar: Titan/Regen Brute
Nee'Laa: Dark/Dark Stalker
???: Demons/Time Mastermind

That's one "outer goddess" decided, two "conventional gods" decided, one "conventional god" with powersets decided but still no costume or story, and one more "conventional god" up in the air. Not counting Praxis since I want her to be above this, I've so far explored the themes of physical violence, death and destruction with Loctar, treachery, lies, soul-draining and corruption with Nee'Laa and... I'm drawing a blank. I'm sure there are more negative aspects out there, at least enough for two more gods, but I think I may be able to use all of at least the more popular suggestions here

We will have to disagree, yes, because I am incapable of being convinced to approve of this. I like guaranteed success. Sure, I can handle losing, so long as the mission doesn't fail and I can either keep retrying it or just return and pick up where I left off. If find no joy in losing. Ever for any reason. In much the same way, I find no joy in the threat of loss. That's why I play games - because they're not like real life and they can let me win. You can't do that against other people.