Arilou

Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan

Hm. That's what's going on?

That's rubbish.

Eco

Originally Posted by Venture

Without explicit evidence (e.g. the characters have the same codename or real name) or Word of God, any such conclusion is unjustifiable.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

I'm the wrong guy to say this to. I don't really care about variety. I liked City of Heroes back in 2004 and I liked what I liked back then even to this day. To my eyes, the many gameplay and publicity stunt gimmicks do little more than detract from the experience. I want to experience a story, and the legacy content did this perfectly well.



World Wide Red does not suck. I will take that over pretty much any arc written since 2007. See, new content is like remakes of classic movies. Sure, they had crappy effects and low budgets, but good directors found creative ways to work around those and still make good movies. On the flip side, the prevalence of special effects these days means you can ignore plot, story, shot composition and all the other tricks of the trade and just replace them with special effects. One of the greatest aspects of the original Jaws was the suspense experienced before seeing the actual shark, which wasn't an artistic choice, but a necessity because the animatronic shark they had wasn't working but they had to keep filming anyway, so they used barrels it dragged around instead of showing the actual shark.

Frankly, the SSAs are boring. Sure, they look pretty and, yeah, they have great gimmicks, but they don't offer anything that's actually interesting in terms of storyline. In fact, I'd have given them more credit before I realised what they would be - eight instances of trying to use the Obelisk on each of the Surviving eight, with heroes and/or villains foiling each step. SSA2 involves the Rulu Shin, but at the same time fails to explain anything about them or even make use of them in any way. These could have been Malta, the Circle of Thorns, the Banished Pantheon or any other group and the story would have been exactly the same.

I like World Wide Red because it presents me with a large, complex, well-structured storyline without actually distracting me with pointless gimmicks like five minutes of ambushes or long conversations or timed exits. Because World Wide Red couldn't afford any of those gameplay gimmicks, it had to focus on storytelling, and this it does well. Yes, it's a HUGE story, yes, it can probably be split into three part, but you know what? That's what I like about it. I HATE how so many American shows, both cartoon and otherwise, essentially have standalone, barely-connected episodes you can watch in any order. "Monster of the week" is pretty much what City of Heroes storytelling has become about. You have three missions that correspond to the typical three-act structure - the first mission you find out about the disaster you need to stop, the second mission you chase after it, the third mission you catch it and have a climactic battle, and it's not reference ever again.

I like World Wide Red because it's along story. I like World Wide Red because it's a solid story. I like World Wide Red because it's a complex story. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't waste my time with endless conversations and it doesn't waste my patience with endless gimmicks. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't rely on tricks and attention grabs to tell its story. These days, mission writers have grabbed onto complex gameplay so much that they no longer much care about telling a consistent story that ties into the canon world in general. Everything that happens comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere and is immediately forgotten as soon as it's done.

I am not and have never been interested in the fast food version of storytelling. That's one reason why I prefer anime over American cartoons - because each episode of an anime starts where the last one left off and ends where the next one will begin. This gives me a long, complex, consistent story to follow even if it's broken up into parts, and it allows character development, plot development and plot resolution to stretch over multiple episodes, rather than all having to be crammed into one and rushed like the SSAs are.

Yes, I agree that one of City of Heroes' main selling points is that it doesn't take a solid chunk of four hours to make any progress. You can log in for half an hour, run a couple of missions and leave, feeling like you've made progress. However, this doesn't mean that you have to complete a whole story in that time. You can still complete just part of it and continue where you left off. Once upon a time, it used to take me several days to run through a single story, and I liked that because it gave room for the narrative to evolve without feeling rushed. So what if it takes me five days to play through World Wide Red? I will still have seen it from beginning to end, and I will still know the full scope of its story.

Playing through SSA2 within 15 minutes just means I'm left remembering pretty much nothing from it. And, really, what is there to remember? The Obelisk can't drain Numina's powers. The Rulu Shin are completely incidental to it. In fact, both SSAs are a lot like Unai Kemen's "Your Princess is in Another Castle" arc. Go and find the Obelisk, now go and find the Obelisk and finally, go and find the Obelisk. Then go and get the skull. Now go and get the Skull. Finally, go and get the Skull. It's all gimmick and no substance because there's no room for substance and I don't think there was ever even the desire to put substance into it. The whole of the SSA storyline is unconnected events which exist solely to lead up to another ??? cutscene, but without any regard for making the actual stories interesting in the least.

As far as I'm concerned, Crimson is and will always be the height of City of Heroes storytelling, because he has the one thing that everything made since him has shunned - enough length to have a consistent plot.

Gimmicks do not make a story arc good. In fact, when a story arc is boring, they just make it worse. Graves and Twinshot are the perfect example.

Originally Posted by Lazarillo

I've just sort of assumed that Sutter takes place after all the other Sky Raider arcs, including the Silver Mantis SF and the 20-30 Vigilante mission, and Duray's basically just said "**** it, burn 'em all, I don't care anymore."

Originally Posted by Venture

Yes, we get that. The problem is the Incarnate storyline sucks.

Originally Posted by Dr_Darkspeed

You only list known villains. What if the bad guy is someone we think of as a hero?

In fact, what if the bad guy is a member of the Freedom Phalanx? In which case, we may be the one to kill them!

Originally Posted by Darkonne

It's not a matter of not "liking" the explanations, the problem is that they're more like assertions. We're told that Proton has a reason for being the way he is... but we're never told why or how. For that matter, it's never made clear exactly what "the way he is" even is.

Very, very disappointing. But I'll have to reserve my antifandom for Graves' set of arcs. Those were just straight up terrible.

-D

Originally Posted by DarkSideLeague

I thought we were trying to avoid confusion with acronyms and contractions? Operative Grillo wouldn't be happy getting mixed up with those two.

Originally Posted by 3dent

Ok, this isn't a plot hole. Other points stand. Unless, of, course, in arc 2 mission 1 Grym&Dillo would apologize for pulling your leg and start acting like classy heroes Twinshot herself is, instead of bumbling idiots, and Proton gets some development. (Flambeaux is hopeless.)

Anyway, thanks for saying that the rest is better. I really want a new 10-14 arc I could play on my lowbies, and the experience of the first arc almost made me to fall back on the Hollows.

Originally Posted by Lazarillo

That's the mission that everyone complains about because it doesn't make any sense given previous lore.
The Sky Raiders are tied to Nemesis, not Malta.

Originally Posted by Zombieluvr

I thought Malta was organized in cells, or am I confusing them with the Sky Raiders?

(And isn't there a mission that shows that the Sky Raiders and Malta have fairly close ties? Or am I confusing that one, too? Guess I might need to go replay some of those SR/Malta mishes...)

Originally Posted by Vanden

Something I've been wondering about since running this arc; according to the Guardian in the second mission (heroside at least), the Watchers are more important in Rularuu's hierarchy than Brutes or Wisps. Also, the Rulu-shin have unique chest and glove details with prominent Rularuu eyes on them. What I'm wondering is if the Rularuu = eyes thing is part of the original Rularuu canon for the game, or a recent development. As far as I can remember, the eye focus started when Back Alley Brawler made the Rularuu weapon models, and according to him he didn't even intend to make Rularuu weapons. He said that he had the idea for the look, and it wasn't until after he noticed that the weapons' prominent eyes reminded him of Rularuu Watchers that they got the Rularuu weapon names. Also, in the Shadow Shard and its missions, eyes never show up as an important symbol to Rularuu. His aspects certainly don't display any eye-like markings.

Originally Posted by cursedsorcerer

I bet that since First Ward features the Mother of Mercy Psychiatric Hospital, that may be the next trial, and it will feature Mother Mayhem and Malaise.

And I kinda also want to fight Tyrant in his tower too. C'mon! We have 2 trials in Neutropolis, 1 in Imperial City and 1 in the Underground. Nova Praetoria needs some love!

Oh, and the badge for completing the Trial/TF that results in Tyrant's defeat SHOULD be called "Sic Semper Tyrannis!"

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

It occurs to me that a lot of the newer concept is written to be played BY THE PLAYER much more so than by the actual character. It's hard to explain exactly why, but this is the sort of thing you see in choose your own adventure games that you're only really supposed to play once, and even more so ones that have a specific good and evil karma system like Mass Effect. It's really not intended to be at all accommodating to any specific character who isn't being written to fit events on the fly. And as content written for games intended to only be played once, I'm only really going to play the First Ward once.

Here's the thing: Even if I had a charter who fit events perfectly, the story is still so heavy and so dark and so devoid of a satisfying resolution that I don't WANT to play though that content again. Hell, if I knew what I were in for, I probably wouldn't have played through it even once.

What's there is great, I must admit. The writing is top notch, the mysteries are very interesting, the characters are well-written, ignoring the complete derailment of established ones and the mood and atmosphere are expertly delivered. The problem is that this all comes together to form a story which honestly upset me on an emotional level, and since I don't play games to push myself out of my own comfort zone, I have no interest in being upset like that again. Maybe if there were a reasonable resolution or if the arc weren't so heavy-handed with the depressing plot points things may be different, but as it is, it's just way too heavy to run twice.

And it's a shame, really - First Ward is a great arc, but it suffers for its own greatness by side-lining character concept and trading replayability for moody darkness.

Originally Posted by Mr. DJ

Just throwing this out there again, the EB has no ranged attacks (unless they rectified that already), so he's easy pickings for hover blasting, also, he's susceptible to knockback.

Originally Posted by rsclark

People are complaining that it exempts you to level 20. That's different than what you said.

Originally Posted by rsclark

Does he really not understand that by creating another incarnate currency, he just makes it true that we're forced to grind content. It completely negates any validity behind the idea of "just wait until there are more trials". If new trials = new currency, then there are two grindy bottlenecks instead of one. The could release a hundred more trials, but if they don't share the same currency with the one we have now, it's meaningless.