Samuel_Tow

Overall, I agree with your general point, but this passage is what I want to address specifically. You're right that the whole game really is a patchwork of stories that weave into a broader narrative, but I'd still call that broader narrative more of a setting than a plot. More specifically, though, this really IS an argument of presentation. What I dislike the most about the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa is how they choose to present their "story." Where something like Faultline will give you a direct story to follow, where each event is related to the one immediately before it and the one immediately after it, the Hollows will give you unconnected events from which to garner broad zone backstory and context.

Where presentation comes into play is that I don't think this works on such a micro scale, and I don't think it works for the same reason I don't believe three-mission story arcs work very well. On the micro scale of a story bit being contained within just one single mission, there just isn't enough there to engage me, because every story element has to be cut down for size. Having standalone mission try to tell a broader story, at least in my eyes, works far less reliably than having standalone actual stories come together to tell a broader setting, just because the standalone stories have enough screen time to make me care and to tell a compelling story that I'm going to remember.

That's not to say I want ONLY stories, mind you. I find one of the biggest disappointments in content since Faultline to be the complete and utter lack of one-off missions for contacts. I really enjoyed the fact that Launch content provided us with a balance of the different types of content. We had story arcs, we had standalone missions and we even had hunt missions. Obviously, the method of choosing which kind of mission we were picking was... Uninformative, but I still like the variety presented.

I find the Hollows to fail for not offering a proper story arc and overfocusing on one-off missions, and ironically enough, I find Faultline to fail for offering ONLY proper story arcs and no standalone missions at all. Either extreme is hurtful to the experience, in my opinion, and a mixture of both is the superior choice. For all the crap I've given City of Villains' writing because of the fetish with Arachnos, the I6 writing has just about the perfect balance of this. Each contact comes with a few standalone missions that help establish the setting, as well as several short story arcs that snap together to form a longer story. I may disagree with the plot from a story perspective, but on a technical level, that's EXACTLY what I want to see.

Actually, I'd say Crimson is a good example, but that man has an entire level range's worth of content just to himself. He has a HUGE story arc that can easily be split into at least three episodes, and he then has at least a dozen "mini-arcs," stories comprised of three or four consecutive missions that tell of one Malta plot or another. I can only assume that creating all of Crimson's content was a mammoth task, but he still remains easily my favourite contact in the game just because he has a very good balance of long stories to short stories and because he has SO MUCH content that actually has some thought behind it.

Of course, newer zones like First Ward seem to treat this kind of story arc and standalone mission segregation literally. You have a main plot of characters who offer only a very linear sequence of missions following a specific plot, as well as a few repeatable-mission contacts who supposedly help establish the broader setting of the zone. I've not run the repeatables in First Ward, but the repeatables from Borea in the Rikti War Zone didn't leave me impressed as they feel more like "work" than like story bits, but at least I can appreciate the idea. I'd still like to see one-off missions show up for storyline contacts, though.

Once upon a time, the way stories were told assumed that much time has passed between when you handed in the previous mission in the arc and when you asked for the next one. Contacts would say things like "I'll have that checked out in a lab" and if you spoke to them immediately thereafter, they'd say it's been checked out, like sending something out for chemical analysis takes 10 seconds. That, I assume, is where one-off missions were supposed to take place, in the sense that you'd hand in a story arc mission, run a one-off, then pick the story back up. This really isn't how newer storylines are being written these days, because everything always seems to be urgent and each mission's debriefing assumes you'll pick the next mission's briefing immediately thereafter. I'm not convinced this is a good thing, but I can't really argue it's a bad thing, either.

Actually, I have to take that back. The WINGED sandals aren't, and that's one reason I've never used them... The other being I don't own them. However, just the sandals without the wings, like what essentially every civilian in Cimerora wears, really are less specific.

Besides, the point was about the quality of the graphics, I think. Sandals really do look like sandals, and there are many more implementation for them than just Romans.

That's an interesting point to make, and I'd like to hear your argument for it. And yes, I mean that. I find it genuinely interesting.

I suppose that does come down to what we consider to be a sandbox. For instance, there's no question that Gary's Mod is a sandbox, literally and figuratively, from what I've seen. But I'm not sure I'd call it a "game" per se. But what do you envision a sandbox game constituting? Are we talking ye olde EQ where most of the game doesn't actually have a plot and missions but is instead just an environment with enemies to kill? That might fit the bill, but does it imply that having focused plots to pursue if you should choose to make the game less of a sandbox?

It's widely held that the various GTA games are sandboxes, though these usually do have a central plot and a main story. Nevertheless, much of their fun is to be found in vaulting cars over buses, throwing random grannies off of rooftops and finding new ways to get run over by speeding traffic. As Yahtzee describes another game, "It was most fun when I stopped playing," by which he means when he stopped playing by the game's rules and just went to goof off. That should, I think, count as a sandbox, and it kind of is a lot like City of Heroes.

The question, then, becomes where we actually pin the flag, so to speak, and claim that "THIS is what a sandbox game is." I will grant you that City of Heroes is not a true sandbox, but I would still argue that it has many sandbox elements. More importantly, I feel that sandbox elements would and do add a LOT to City of Heroes. Street Hunting is obviously not very popular, but I'd wager that's because of the inconvenience of an uncontrolled environment. With that said, does a sandbox have to necessarily feature an open world?

To me, a game like The Incredible Machine is a sandbox just as much as Gary's Mod is, even though it really has no open world. It's split down into individual puzzles with no overarching connection between them. I've not played Little Big Planet, but I have to assume it's much the same way. These are games that constitute sandboxes not because they are literally one box full of sand and toy to play with, but rather because they're designed for players to make their own fun in.

City of Heroes, I think, is a more structured game which enacts its sandbox nature less in letting players loose upon an open world, but rather by giving people a wide selection of fairly predetermined experiences. Sure, there's little point in throwing ourselves off high places or beating up everybody in a neighbourhood (and people do it anyway), but that's because the game is trying to provide us with a selection of thrills as opposed to just letting us loose on our own. I suppose that's less of a sandbox and more of a toy box, but the idea is roughly the same - we are given the tools, but these are tools with which we can make our own murder time fun time, to quote Professor Genki.

The reason I say this is because the content really is set in stone, content is only one part of the experience. The whole experience also involves who we are, what we bring and how we interact with it. City of Heroes is a game that gives us the opportunity to express ourselves, and this can alter the experience quite a bit. For instance, many people hate Twinshot's arc because she treats us like low-brow rookies, and to be fair, I see where they're coming from. At the same time, my experience with her was excellent because I really WAS playing a character who's supposed to be a low-brow rookie - an energetic but dense your girl who'd just gotten her license at the time. If I'd brought a different character, however - say my scientist who owns his own corporation but whose gear started off terrible - I too would have resented the arc.

Of course, Twinshot's arc is a choice, and it's a choice I really haven't made since I originally ran it. Didn't have the characters for it. However, it's that choice in which path to pick for my character and the almost compulsive need for me to explain why this character chose that path that makes the game a sandbox to me. Or at least makes it into a game with that one, very strong sandbox element.

But like I said - this is an interesting argument, and I'd really like to hear it.

It doesn't really have to be hints that precisely THIS has happened, though, so much as hints that something like this might happen. I know Wade has been elevated into some kind of evil Batman status where he could kill the Statesman and absorb his powers if only he had 10 years to plan. However, there's forward planning and then there's reverse-planning where you take an action that has to happen and work back to figure out what had to be planned for that action to happen.

We know Wade has a spare Obelisk. We know it takes that Obelisk to syphon power. So why not have the altar show up half-way through the mission, then we're asked to go forward to deal with the woman in the skirt, then in the room where she is... BAM! There's the obelisk! Uh, oh! If this is here, then this could only mean Wade planned ahead! I mean, yeah, it's still a big surprise, but at least it's a cool surprise and I'm much less likely to question those. The way it happens, I was all like "The hell?!?" and then I come out and I'm told that, well, a wizard did it.

Or how about this? We know that since Wade killed the Statesman, strange things have been happening. The contact says so, and I can buy that. We're talking about the power of the gods. So why not have Akharist explain that this ritual has to be conducted over an energy nexus, but with the Statesman's death, most of those have been disrupted, but a few are still usable. One is even nearby, and we need to hurry because Psyche is getting worse. So we go there, we find the Obelisk, and only THEN does it become apparent why this particular nexus is still active - Wade made sure it would be, so that he knew where to lay his ambush.

I don't have to see it coming for a trap to make sense. It's enough that, when it's over and I have time to think about it, I can see how that really would have happened that way. But for this to happen, you need more explanation than just one throwaway sentence.

I get that brand new art assets are at a premium, though I'd still have liked to see that huge pit of a CoT room drawn without the central pillar with just the Obelisk in there. We got three custom maps for SSA1, right? But even without new art assets, more could have been done to set up Wade's trap so that it doesn't feel so much like retroactive continuity. So it doesn't feel so much like someone came up with hand-wave solution on the fly.

Isn't that exactly what I said? You have a setting, but no actual story. What you call an "overarching story" isn't actually a story, because it has no beginning or end, it has no act structure, it has no plot. It is a setting - the backstory of how the zone became what it is, as well as a general explanation of why we're there to begin with. But what it lacks is a story for the events we're actually doing. It has no structure, no sequence of events, no logical progression from one event to the next. Which is to be expected - most of that zone's content can be played out of order, so there's no way for it to have order of any kind.

Saying the Hollows has an overarching story is like saying City of Heroes has an overarching story - there are many specific, isolated plot threads, but there is no consistent "main story" or main narrative to follow. However, at least the broader game is comprised of complete, ordered stories, whereas the Hollows is a place that can support only a scant few stories, maybe two or three, and yet it's broken up into two dozen unconnected individual missions.

In the very simplest of terms, the Hollows offers no real connection between missions. They all just trace back to the setting - devastated crime-ridden zone. That's not a story, and that's what keeps me out of the zone. No mission appears to achieve anything because no missions reference it after the fact.

You seem to have paired up a "bad" story with a "tight" story as if to infer they're opposites of each other, but I don't necessarily agree. Personally, I've almost always found "tight" stories to be the worst of the lot exactly because they do and say so much there's bound to be a LOT I will disagree with. In fact, whether I leave liking or disliking a tight story is based entirely around how many things impressed me vs. how many things pissed me off. And there are always things that piss me off because my tastes are so specific.

It is, however, a widely-known fact of life that a person's fantasy is ALWAYS better than any kind of entertainment other people can provide, exactly because our fantasies are so personal and so geared to what we like. To me, a tight story misses on the opportunity to let my brain fill in a few blanks, because when that happens, my brain will invariably fill them in with stuff that appeals to me in a personal way. Just as an idle point of comparison, I enjoyed the prospect of the "Oracle" in the Matrix movie a lot more when it wasn't explained. I didn't really have a concrete explanation for it, but I had guesses. What ended up being used as the official explanation, by comparison, wasn't nearly as appealing to me.

I'm obviously not saying that a "tight" story can't work. Many can and many have. But these need to be done with the greatest of care simply because they need SO MUCH to be done right for them to work. If you can pull that off, great! If you can't, though, that's a problem, and a big one. By contrast, a basic sandbox doesn't require one to do all that much storytelling and writing because the whole point of the sandbox is to empower and motivate the player to make his own fun.

I really cannot stress that hard enough: A person's own fabricated fantasies are always going to be superior to the real thing. That's just how our brains work. The smartest thing a sandbox game can do is encourage people to use those fantasies, and I find that recent writing does a lot to suppress them, instead.

Stories read over and over again sell themselves on their superb quality and amazing ideas. Maybe someone really does feel that the writing in City of Heroes is so breath-taking that it's worth reading over and over again, but I'm not one of these people. In fact, if the SSAs are anything to go by, the writing is looking more and more likely to be the thing that pisses me right off. I like Dean McArthut's arc just because I like Dean McArthut, but I don't recall having "liked" a story since then.

Maybe the game's writers and I just don't see eye to eye, maybe it's something else, but the stories I go through are not stories I want to experience again. I would not, for instance, touch First Ward again with a ten foot pole. It's not because it's badly written, mind you. On a technical level, it's one of the better examples of writing out there. I simply HATE the story it's trying to tell. I'm past sick and tired of darker and edgier stories, and if these stories continually refuse to let me improvise my actions, reactions and motivations, then I'm left with very little reason to replay them.

I don't, for instance, like Unai Kemen's "To Save a Thousand Worlds," I'll admit that right off the bad. It's a giant waste of my time, sending me from world to world to world because my princess is in another castle. But at the same time, being as empty of substance as these are allows me to fill in my own narrative, motivations and even the scope of my adventures there. Because not every detail is spelled out for me, I can take what is a legitimately BAD story and make it interesting. Mind you, that's still 20 missions of sweeping the same five outdoor instances, but no story can salvage that.

Personally, I'm fine with not being in control of the plot. That works well in a single-player game, but in an MMO, you CANNOT be in control of the plot because you can't just change the game for everybody else. And, no, the solution is not to let players change the game for everyone, because then I know I won't be the one doing the changing and will instead keep having my gaming experience yanked from under me. As such, I'm fine with not being able to change the game's status quo. I don't really need to, because I'm happy enough to experience my own story.

What I mean by "my own story" is just the story of my own character existing as part of a broader world, facing challenges, having adventures and carving a spot. So long as I can represent the game in this way, that's more than enough.

How many more heroes must die, indeed.

Why does this man have duck flippers for feet?

The primary reason voice acting can't work in City of Heroes is because it costs FAR too much money and requires FAR too many voice actors. EA can do it because they have more money than Jesus on a bank holiday, so they can afford to hire a legion of voice actors and have them voice a mountain of text. I'd actually wager we have many times more text in this game then they have in theirs, and we have only a tiny fraction of their budget.

There's a reason old DOS RPGs only had voice acting for one or two important characters in the whole game and everyone else spoke in text - because it's cheaper to produce and you can produce a lot more of it. The bloating inflation of game development costs is actually one of the primary sources of the downfall of game quality and the advent of "committee-designed" titles. Back in 1994, you and your neighbour could design a game in your spare time with a budget of lunch money and pocket change and still turn out a highly-competitive product. And you could make that whatever you damn pleased. These days, if a corporation is going to plunk down a hundred million dollars for a "AAA" title, they're going to want guaranteed returns, and that means a "safe" game designed to appeal to as many people as possible and take as few risks as are absolutely necessary.

Voice acting in video games is GREAT, I don't contest that. But voice acting in games costs A LOT, especially in games that require a lot of it. You're really not very likely to see too many MMOs with voice acting, even in the near future, and the ones you do won't really have all that much for the voice actors to tell you. But in this era of small developers releasing small MMOs as F2P, you're actually going to see a LOT more text-only ones.

I read a lot of "choose your own adventure" books when I was a kid. That's actually how I learned to read. And I LOVED those books. I still do, in fact, but most of my old ones are gone. No idea what happened to them. I've always felt that those books were some of the best fun I've ever had, and that really is what I based my dialogue proposal on. I've never been much of a fan of literature in general. Always grew bored of literary works VERY quickly. But choose your own adventure books? I've always loved those.

I remember I had one about time travel where you couldn't die, and it just kept bouncing you back to the beginning "empty plane" outside of time, but with all your items intact. That was always fun. I also remember a medieval one that avoided random roll combat entirely, and instead gave you several options of what to do in combat, deciding the outcome based on those choices.

It's a shame these no longer seem to be made or sold.

I don't exactly roleplay as such, just because I find the game's tools for it a bit too limiting, but I also always have a core story about the character I'm playing in my head. Whenever something at least reasonably meaningful happens to my character, I try to find a reason for it, I try to explain my character's actions and reaction in regard to it, and generally I try to explain it. Ye olde missions more or less required me to do this, because they never really bothered to give me a reason. They simply told me what to do, but never explained WHY I wanted to do it. I found that quite liberating.

Newer City of Heroes missions are a lot harder to "roleplay" in because they really give you all the details in such completeness that there's no real way for you to deviate from the story that you're given. This might be good for a first-impressions experience, but it's murder for replayability. Why WOULD I replay the same story over and over again if it'll always be the exact same story? You can't "fill in the blanks" and craft your own experience because there are no blanks to fill. Everything has been filled in for you, and only ONE single experience is on offer. Where before you could craft different interpretations for different characters, now you go with whatever interpretation the story spells out for you.

It's a lot like a particular game which started me off as a dead person coming back to life with no memories of my past, then asked me to choose my own destiny. I figured... OK, cool. Maybe I can be creative here and invent a wild and wonderful story about my past, of how I'm not even human and came from another plain of existence to... No. By the end, it turns out I'm one member of one order with one goal and that's that. So that's my story, eh? So much for having no past. Turns out I do have a very much solidly-written past, I just didn't know about it until right at the end of the game. Well, now I REALLY have no reason to replay it, because I just don't like that story.

You can only ever roleplay in an environment that gives you room to do so. The reason I say our writers of today are trying way too hard is because they go so far out of their way to leave us no room for interpretation.

What I find wrong with the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa is that they have no real plot. They have a setting, but no structure to the story. David Wincott has a few unconnected missions before he kicks you off to Flux, who has a few unconnected missions until he up and tells you where to find Frostfire, then kicks you off to Julius who's just giving you random assignments until he runs out of esoteric stuff he needs done and then passes you on to Talshak. It isn't until Talshak that an actual story starts to develop where one mission leads into the next and where all the missions can't just be done in any order. Talshak is the first to have a story, and his story ends up in a timed, difficult 8-man Trial in a level range that people spend barely any time in.

Striga and Croatoa are not much different, where only really Lars Hansen and that fat guy near a tree having an actual story. Yes, the zones have a pretty comprehensive setting and yes, the various random missions do play into that setting, but I still vastly prefer actual story arcs that have a cohesive narrative and at least a roughly set sequence of events. Even something as relatively simple as BoneFire still has enough structure to be called a story, but I really can't say the same about the Hollows, Striga or Croatoa. Or about the Shadow Shard, for that matter.

Mind you, I agree with both of you. I find that the more specific a story gets, the less desire I have to play it a second time. I keep saying it in the hopes that someone will pick up on it, but I've always seen City of Heroes as a sandbox game. As a sandbox game, much of the fun in City of Heroes comes from making your own fun, plotting your own course and finding high places to jump off of. Story and plot are necessary to provide a framing device and give you at least some motivation to play the game as intended, but at no point should they be so pervasive that they actually replace the game's core gameplay as a selling point.

I get that story always suffers from the limitations of gameplay. I don't like it, but I can comprehend why that is. But what I CANNOT accept is when gameplay suffers for the sake of the story, because there is never a legitimate reason for it. There are no "technical limitations" when it comes to crafting a story. There's nothing a story can't do. It's gameplay that's the limiting factor, and as such the story needs to be written to be doable through gameplay. It's when you twist and hamper gameplay to enact a story that the game really grinds to a halt because, ultimately, you're not playing a very good game then.

That's really not an argument about short vs. long arcs so much as an argument about "involved" vs. "loose" arcs. The more specific an arc becomes, the less freedom there is to try new things and find new experiences when you replay it. Ye olde City of Heroes might not have had a great story, but it gave us a pretty damn fun sandbox, and this let us make our own fun to a great extent. We wrote our stories, we made our action figures and we just sat down in the sand and played with them. The City of Heroes of today is trying so hard to bring us a "cinematic" experience that it really does begin to feel like I'm supposed to sit and watch this game, as opposed to playing it. It feels like I'm being given one and only one way to appreciate a story, and once I'm done appreciating it, I have no real reason to return.

Let me explain something: One of the most entertaining aspects of City of Heroes, at least to me, has always been motivation. I'd be given a mission, then I'd stand up off my chair, pace the room and try to figure out... Why WOULD Crash agree to this mission? It doesn't seem like something she'd do. But maybe there's more to it? Maybe she does have a reason? I wonder if there isn't some extra depth to her character I could explore to explain this? That kind of re-interpretation of our actions is what I found so much fun, and yet in recent years, the game has done so much to tell me WHY my characters are doing it that... I really have no reason to think about it. I just follow the plotted line once, safe in the knowledge that it'll be the exact same experience again the next time.

It's interesting to me how games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, Arcanum and other "kit-built" games can be so entertaining for so many years exactly BECAUSE the player's interaction with the environment is so abstract and thus so open to interpretation. That's really what City of Heroes used to be, once upon a time - a game that didn't exactly shine in terms of execution, but REALLY excelled in terms of high-concept ideas that fed my inspiration and imagination. At least in City of Heroes, I consider the greatest success in story-telling not as that which gives me the most flashy story, but rather the one that most makes me want to tell my own.

Take a look at most of my posts on the subject of storytelling, and you'll see that the root of my problem with it is most often my disagreement with the writers as to what constitutes a good story. There was a time when there was nothing to disagree about. You could argue that there just weren't any good stories back then, but I just feel there was much less emphasis on rubbing it in our faces how good a story is.

I don't discount that, of course, but this is clearly untennable as a means of breaking into a brand new level range or a brand new "side." If anything, this is the cornerstone problem I have with the Incarnate system - regardless of how good the content for it is, there's simply too little of it to avoid becoming repetitive. I'm sure Dark Astoria will help matters, but not by nearly as much as we really want to hope.

My point isn't to stop making complex missions, so much as that we really need a more balanced approach between complexity and simplicity, as well as between quality and quantity. By all means, make short story arcs with overly complex missions. I never said they were bad. But don't make ONLY that sort of content.

*edit*
But yes, I do disagree with you on short story arcs. I am personally not a fan of them. I simply don't City of Heroes as a game that has the technical capacity to deliver "interesting" gameplay, so attempts at it just end up leaving me irritated as they prevent me from punching stuff. But again, I'm not asking that these kind of arcs stop being made, just that there be more variety. I would honestly pay good money for a 20-mission arc with a decent story even if every mission were a basic defeat-all.

I assumed you were referring to street-hunting, which was the order of the day at Launch. I still remember the utter snore-fest that was Hydra farming in Perez Park.

And I'm specifically "combative" (I like to think of it as "argumentative") in the area of content design because I'm honestly and gravely concerned about the content design approach of the current development team. There seems to be this notion that it doesn't matter what quantity of content gets produced, and it's perfectly OK to make just a scant handful of missions, if only they're packed to the gills with "stuff" like complex scripts, endless dialogues and custom enemies. I don't even want to argue about how this is distracting (it is to me and some, not to others), but this ensures that we will NEVER get another large infusion of content ever again. Not for money, not for the price of our subscription, not ever.

That's OK in a game that already has oodles of content besides, like City of Heroes classic already does, but it's a literal death sentence when you start exploring new level ranges and sides, such as Praetoria or the Incarnate system. This approach to "one over-engineered mission is better than 50 simple ones" is KILLING ME! Possibly literally, if I pop a vein on my head.

That's why I'm so defensive of old content. Not because it's great (it really isn't), but more because it IS good, and it hurts me to see people dismiss it out of hand. Yes, the technology of story-writing in 2004 wasn't the best and many missions were made during a mad crunch for a deadline, but you know what? They're still there, they still function and they still let me get through the levels without having to repeat the same small handful of tasks over and over again. Current mission design makes mission creation FAR harder than it has to be, because each and every mission has to be a custom-tailored work of art, and that simply isn't needed. I want to champion the notion of budgeting story creation effort and more meet on the bones of those bare-bones stories we keep getting, saving the good stuff for specific high-impact moments.

There's nothing wrong with Launch content. It can be improved, yes, but the basis of "Go to an instance and kill a boss, and here's why you're doing it" very much IS a legitimate and often entertaining approach to mission design. That's all I'm saying.

I said "Launch content," as in "the content the game shipped with." Aside from Atlas Park, all of it is still here. Even back before Issue 1, there was enough of that to get me to level 38 without running out and without running TFs, and that's before the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa.

Like I said - you can argue the actual QUALITY of the content, but what cannot be argued is the QUANTITY of it. Yes, I'm aware of the "quality of quantity" moral lesson of contemporary society, but that only really works when you have a certain critical mass of quantity to satisfy basic demand, beyond which you can expand.

Let me put it this way: Suppose for a moment that the development team decided to make a legitimate third side to the game. Let's even suppose that's Praetoria. Now suppose they tried to populate this third side with missions the way they're making them now. How many missions do you think it would take to craft just ONE unique path to level 50? I can tell you for a fact that it's not three or five or ten or twenty. That's HUNDREDS of missions which would need to be written, and at the speed of three per month, that's years and years.

Even if we give our writing team credit and acknowledge that they're making these three missions AND whatever's on Test for Dark Astoria, that's still not a lot of content. It'd be barely enough to cover 45-50. Even if we're generous and go with Praetoria, that needs content 30-50, and that's a LOT of missions. Probably a few Task Forces, too. Maybe some Radio/Scanner/Whatever missions and a Mayhem/Safeguard variety. Maybe Praetoria-specific Tip missions, too. That's a LOT of work.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing a HUGE influx of very simple missions and very basic story arcs. That's my entire point. I get sacrificing quantity for quality, but I just don't want that to be the ONLY type of content we get.