Samuel_Tow

I'm kind of surprised people agree with me on the "transitional" nature of Rogues and Vigilantes. And here I thought I was arguing against the grain I mentioned being surprised these aren't treated as final moralities, but do you know what surprised me even more than that? That we ended up with not one but two "middle ground" moralities. Again, I wasn't thinking about this from a gameplay standpoint when I first heard about the side-switching system and I never considered what content a "middle ground" character would have access to and which UI that character would use.

However, this came almost immediately after Going Rogue, the expansion, which gave us Prateoria. Praetoria is a place where there are no real heroes and no real villains. It's all morally grey. It is, effectively, one huge middle ground. Even the interface is grey by default. Now, granted, I later learned that Resistance characters were treated as heroes and Loyalist characters as villains for system purposes, such as the various Valentine's events that require a hero or villain specifically, and I believe they fell prey to the various limitation on cross-faction teaming in co-op zones, but I didn't know that at the time. I genuinely thought that we'd end up with three legitimate moralities, being Hero, Villain and, um... Neutral? I mean, isn't that what Praetoria was supposed to be? City of Neutrals? Well, apparently not. Apparently, it's just a bit of extra content to give Incarnates some context and it was never intended to be a legitimate "side." But that's what I thought at the time, and that's what I expected.

I'm saying all of that to give a bit more context to exactly how I expected things to work from a narrative standpoint and why I ended up vehemently disagreeing with how moralities ended up being interpreted in actual storytelling. Again, the actual writing in there is very good, but even a well-told story doesn't cut it when it's a story I don't want to hear, and that just happens to be what the story of Vigilantes is.

Somewhat sideways of that, a lot of the thematic snarl comes from the fact that the side-switching system actually covers two entirely independent concepts and tries to cover them with one singular narrative device. Those two concepts are a character's actual morality AND a character's area of operations. For years now, hero players have been asking to be allowed to go to the Rogue Isles and start cleaning the place out while villain players have been asking to move to Paragon City where they can commit crime without being under Arachnos' thumb. Both of those are legitimate requests from a conceptual standpoint, but both of them are also unreasonable requests from a technical standpoint because the content for it just isn't there, and there's SO MUCH of it to produce it's unlikely to ever happen.

I mean, say what you will about Launch content, but at least there was enough of it to move people through the levels for the most part. This getting three missions every month and having to pay for them that we're seeing now is NOT going to produce enough content to support a villain in Paragon City AND a hero in the Rogue Isles any time soon, because content production has all but abandoned any sort of aspiration of quantity.

That said, the problem comes when you mix the two. You can't be a hero in the Rogue Isles, because the only way to go to the Rogue Isles is to start down the path of a villain. The Rogue Isles is not a place for heroes, it's where villains hang out. There was a pretty funny quote from Rick Dakan back from 2002-2003 or something like that, where he says something along the lines of "Well, we could have two separate cities, one with only heroes in it and one with only villains in it, but that'd be silly." Trouble is, that's exactly what we got, and that's exactly what requires a character to become evil to go to the Rogue Isles and become good to go to Paragon City. It's a content issue, at the end of the day.

Speaking of content, the path of progression of any of the Tip Mission recurring characters is ridiculous and literally impossible to follow unless you do ALL tip missions from ALL moralities and even then you'd have to have very good memory. Either that, or read up on ParagonWiki. Their stories are scattered both across the level ranges AND across the different alignments AND those stories assume that we actually know who these people are to begin with. And, really, aside from Frostfire... I don't. Still don't, as a point of fact. These guys were pulled together from the roster of random button characters that show up to stop you from robbing banks or show up in jails to be rescued, and their info screens include about two sentences of handwave backstory. And now all of a sudden they're these deep, complex characters? OK, I'd buy that, but at least establish this first, please!

I remember Doc Quantum from the Tip missions where he gives people sadistic choices just because those are written so as to be memorable. So I ran one of these one time and it was good. A couple of days later, I was playing a villain and went to rob a bank when all of a sudden Doc Quantum showed up to stop me. Huh? The hell? Wasn't he supposed to be evil? Well, apparently not. Not at that level, anyway. Then I ran the SupaFreak's Architect arc and found Overdrive helping me. I thought she was a villain? I asked SupaFreak about it and he said she wasn't. I checked and he was entirely correct, but I was so convinced she was a villain. Do you see how it might be hard to keep track of who has flip-flopped to which side at what point?

I honestly would have preferred of morality and alignment missions focused on OUR alignment and morality, as opposed to polluting it with people swapping sides left and right. It diminishes the importance of the moral choices and it just create a fiendish continuity snarl that to this day I cannot untangle.

If they institute this, it would be the very first case of virtual used goods sales in recorded history, or at the very least that I'm aware of.

I don't mean to sound dismissive when I say this, so please take heed, but: Is this argument over which origin covers what character really relevant? I'm not saying it doesn't matter, so much as I'm saying that origins appear - at least to me - to be drawn so broad as to show different faces to different people intentionally. From the various interpretations of various people I've heard over the years, Origins seem less like hard facts and more like a Rorschach inkblot test - you see them as what you're predisposed to see them as.

One reason I say this is that even if you proclaim a character to be of the "Natural" origin, that alone doesn't make that character fit Leo's concept of the Natural Legends. Remember, our "Natural" origin is quite broad. Jack Emmert himself insisted that if Superman existed in City of Heroes, he'd be Natural. Argue with the man if you want, but it's still a possibility. The example I most usually like to give is Son Goku and pretty much everyone alive by the end of DBZ. Sure, Goku and the other supers aren't quite human, but Kurinin and the others are, and they can still blow up mountains with their inner energy.

Speaking purely for myself, I no longer have any "Natural Legends." I used to, back before I had a character past level 30, but once I actually got to 50, that ambition took a dirt nap. The way the game is designed, your character will eventually be forced to fight giant robots, space aliens armed to the teeth, gods and more, and forced to fight them head-on. In a movie or a book, these situations can be solved by some kind of plot device, but City of Heroes has many instances where that simply isn't possible. You WILL fight Hequat, and you won't beat her by exploiting her weakness or somehow finding a third option. You will beat her by punching her in the face repeatedly. And I remind you - Hequat is a literal goddess.

I really don't hold it against people who play these kinds of characters. I'm sure the game, as presented, can be reinterpreted to suggest alternate solutions to brute-force problems that a more regular person who can't take the Kronos Titan's Quad Plasma Cannons to the face can still employ. I know that, personally, I just don't enjoy that just as a matter of opinion, and this predisposes me to seek the much simpler solution, which is to make super characters who are overpowered enough to face down those exaggerated threats exactly as the admittedly limited gameplay depicts it.