Arilou

Originally Posted by William_Valence

Good thing I'm not that worried about your opinion when it comes to what makes a good/viable story.

Level represents current power. Does a level 50 with the "Saved the world" badge become an inexperienced rookie if they Exemp down to do a Synapse, or helping a lower level character with a mission? How about a level 10 being SSKed up to 49? Are they all of a sudden Top tier experienced crime fighters, ignoring the fact that they lose it all the moment they aren't with their mentor anymore?

Security level is a what, specifically what your current power level is. It isn't, however, a why. Explain security levels however you want. Some of my heroes explain it as the ammount of force they're authorized to use against a specific threat. Being given more authority as they gain reputation with officials. Others explain it as the more bland evolution of power as they use abilities and practice. Necromicus' explination is, that he's performing tests on himself and others that require him to limit how much power he uses at a given time. And as I said before, Nagoh Shan's level represents how much equipment he's taken, how many connections he's made, and how much he's integrated himself into Arachnos. Not how experienced he is.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

They're the spirits of the living, I know. I get that it doesn't work on the Vahzilok, but exactly what kind of particular spirit something is is just too fine a hair to split, I think.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

And that's just an excuse for poor writing. There's nothing preventing a writer from writing a level 1 arc that has the player feeling good about himself at the end and that demonstrates the player villain as being somehow special and better than the others of his rank.

They didn't do that. Consciously. Not because they couldn't, not because it doesn't make sense, but because they chose to. And I don't agree with that choice, on account of "my villain is a stooge" being pretty much the running complaint of villain-side complaint since 2005.

Originally Posted by Venture

So are the other characters in this farce.

Originally Posted by Blue_Mourning

What I find odd Sam is that how you describe Halo is how I find the bulk of the old content in this game, which is why I can't figure out how you're viewing the content....

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

Interesting tidbit: The Ghost Slaying Axe does not work on Apparitions. That is to say, it damages them with its lethal component same as my Vanguard Axe does, but its special damage component against "true undead" is never triggered. Aren't Apparitions, like... Ghosts? Shouldn't the Ghost Slaying Axe be especially effective against them?

Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha

Fixed that for accuracy...

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

So, essentially, Kathie Douglass is Mender Tesseract now? I get that she may be angry over the Seer programme, but I don't get how you turn into a sarcastic person when you weren't one before.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

That's what I'm saying. Alistor's introduction is basically him saying the word "power" in quotes and waiting for me to start running a TF for him. The arc is pretty good, and the motivation - if you ignore some rather jarring aspects of it - is decent. But there needs to be a reason why I want to bother in the first place, other than "I as a meta-game player paid for this, directly or through my subscription."

Villains in general need to have a bit more complex of a motivation than "power" in quotes. It can still come down to power in the end, that's not my beef, but geez, guys! Hide it a little! Put a little meat on the bones. Give me a reason other than "because it's there." I know you can do better than this.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

That's what I'm saying. Alistor's introduction is basically him saying the word "power" in quotes and waiting for me to start running a TF for him. The arc is pretty good, and the motivation - if you ignore some rather jarring aspects of it - is decent. But there needs to be a reason why I want to bother in the first place, other than "I as a meta-game player paid for this, directly or through my subscription."

Villains in general need to have a bit more complex of a motivation than "power" in quotes. It can still come down to power in the end, that's not my beef, but geez, guys! Hide it a little! Put a little meat on the bones. Give me a reason other than "because it's there." I know you can do better than this.

Originally Posted by Olantern

I see Praetorian Calvin Scott as one of those characters who's incapable of understanding the possibilty that he might ever be wrong. (In fact, a lot of Praetorian characters are like this, Tyrant being the most obvious example.)

So, for me, the most apt ending for the Scott/Mayhem story would be for Calvin to kill Mother Mayhem while she's still lugging around Aurora's body, because "The Cause is more important than my feelings for my wife." Then our player heroes (with the player villains dragged along, because this'll presumably be co-op) have to take Calvin down. In this scenario, Calvin essentially damns himself to becoming exactly what he claims to fight against, with the added irony that he's incapable of even seeing the possibility that he's done so.

(This'd also have the added benefit, in my opinion, of making the Resistance look a little less perfect. I've never liked the not-so-subtle subtext of "Resistance good, everyone who doesn't join it bad" in Praetoria. In a superheroic adventure story, the protagonist should be the player character, not a political party.)

Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan

You can complete the new tutorial using four single uses of Brawl to tag the only actually required defeats in it and then let the NPCs do all the work. You cannot go below 1HP in it, so there's no danger or challenge or need to avoid mobs at all. The encounter with the Giant Shivan is a cutscene that you can run around in if you like.

I was all 'wow, coool' the first time I ran it. But when I slowed down and had a look at its substance, I saw the man behind the curtain lol.

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

OK, so far this thread has really put a smile on my face The new NPC factions are absolute win and I have no complaints about them (ain't that saying something?) and the comments in here are very cool, too. Thanks

Originally Posted by gec72

In a way though, I kind of wish they'd try. Not actual players of course, but NPC hero groups. Like heroes fight to keep Paragon basically in the hands of good, villains could fight to keep the Rogue Isles not. If that's what they want anyway; they may not care about Arachnos but they may wish to keep the area as lawless as they can.

Now, we do fight some of these forces, but it's more or less just Longbow. Yeah, there are groups like the Legacy Chain, but those groups seem to be too little in number and are probably underused.

Now, one thing I'd like to see is not to have all Arachnos con as enemies. Porting over the tech from Praetoria might be nice here. One of the benefits of being a villain in a City of Villains is that you shouldn't be hunted by EVERYONE. Home turf, safe haven and all that.

Originally Posted by UberGuy

Your functional, game mechanical level of power and the level of power the story assumes you have rarely support one another well under scrutiny in any game I have played. The story very frequently assumes you have limits that you don't actually have in practice, or when those limits exist, they are enforced not so much by your powers, but rather by fiat - you can't go out and take over the world because the zone borders won't let you out, for example.

On top of that, welcome to episodic storylines written by multiple, disparate authors. I'm not defending this, but wild variations in what it's assumed protagonists can do are common in a lot of episodic media. My classic example is Star Trek: TNG, where the ability of the Enterprise C to absorb or dish out damage often varied wildly as served the plot. That happens in our in-game stories, too, except it's just a fluctuation in what the mission narrative assumes about us, not a change in our actual mechanical capabilities.

If the presence of continuity breakdowns like this deeply mar your experience, you're going to be disappointed a lot, and not just in video games. (Heck, for all I know, that's already the case.) If you want to ensure that the game canon holds continuity with the fact that in some TF you once defeated a god, then either everything from that point on needs to assume you only ever face threats on that par, or it needs to never let you defeat a threat at that level to start with. I prefer to have the story variety, and I will mentally gloss over the inconsistency on my own. I'm here to beat stuff up, not to read a grand novel. It's a good thing if the narrative that accompanies that doesn't suck, but it doesn't set boundaries on my enjoyment.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

Here's a question: When WE are playing the bad guys, why can't the game let US win? That's one of City of Villains' biggest problems - it's a moral lesson teaching us that playing City of Villains and enjoying it is wrong, because evil is wrong. The game expects us to feel humiliated and depressed at the end of the day and consider that to be a GOOD thing. And it just isn't.