Ironik

The writing is always the key. Always. You need a good storyteller to take you along. How many times have you repeated a story back to someone and realized just how ridiculous and unbelievable it is? In superhero comics that actually happens a lot, because it's so over the top, wide-screen epically operatic. (For that matter, try retelling some operas and people will just look at you as if you're deranged.) But a good writer can get you to buy into a story, no matter how far-fetched it may be. They do that by connecting you to reality, perhaps even reminding you of your own reality in some way.

I don't know, I've had some characters stand up and get away from me. Although I am their creator, I have on occasion wondered, "Where the hell did THAT come from?" I suspect most writers experience this at one time or another. I know it's just my subconscious taking the controls for a bit, but... what if it's not? Dun dun dun.

These are all reasons I've given time and again for my dislike of CoV, but the two biggies are the clumsy-to-the-point-of-retardation zone design and the fact it isn't a sandbox game, but rather keeps you on rails the entire time.

The biggest part of Going Rogue that I'm looking forward to is taking my much-loved Brute away from the much-despised Rogue Isles.

Decorum is right about your assumptions Durakken. Your assertions are simply just YOUR assertions. So they are no more true than anyone else's.

That said, however, I will point out that both Marvel and DC use both Divergent Reality stories and Different Reality stories when building parallel universes. Sometimes, as in the Marvel book Exiles, at the same time.

While there's no official evidence supporting divergent realities, that's as palatable an explanation as any for the differences between the various incarnations we see when traveling to parallel Earths. It may have been something small or something large that led to the differences we see "today" such as the Rikti Earth being so completely different (large change) or Praetorian Earth being somewhat different (small change).

As I say, I'm fine with divergent realities, and arguing whether that's the mechanism or not is immaterial until something is added to the game (which is canon uber alles, even to Dev pronouncements, per Manticore's canon thread) that explicitly states how it all works.

As Robert Frost said,

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I'm fine with that.

But like I said, it's clear that Statesman is the aberration, based on the evidence we have. All other versions of Cole that we know about are evil.

"Mercenary" to me does connote a certain, shall we say, "moral flexibility" that allows someone to kill and steal fro money without considering the consequences in regard to Right and Wrong. I think Statesman was headed down the road to being just like Lord Recluse or Tyrant or Reichsman but something persuaded him to be good rather than bad on Primal Earth.

I see where you got Far East -- it says so on the official timeline. However, there are two things I think you're conflating, "east" and "Far East," and somehow combining them into the search for the Well.

After WWI, "east" would've been anywhere on the other side of the English Channel, because England is almost certainly where Cole was taken after the mustard gas incident. I don't recall where the novel said he was exposed to the chemical, but it was probably somewhere in France or Belgium, in what was then known as the Western Front. So France, Italy, Greece... these are all east from Cole's starting point after WWI.

The official timeline says "1918 - Marcus Cole, who becomes Statesman, travels the Far East." The only way he would be strong enough to do that is if he had already opened Pandora's Box. I also think the reason that it says that is because the Pandora's Box notion occurred to the Devs after they wrote the timeline. Statesman's original backstory said he'd gotten his abilities because "he'd mastered his inner will." That really sounds a lot like typical comic book shorthand for "learned amazing techniques from wise teachers of the Orient." It's been used by many characters from The Shadow to Iron Fist to recent versions of Batman, to name a few. Now, of course, the "mastered his inner will" line is being waved aside as Cole prevaricating.

Normally that leads to slight incongruities when trying to retcon a new spin on an original story -- the most famous recent example being Obi Wan Kenobi's lame offering of "What I told you was true... from a certain point of view." -- but in this case, it actually supports the notion that Cole is, at heart, a bad guy who somehow managed to beat the odds on Primal Earth and become a good guy, where all his other incarnations turned out evil.

I wanted to call this out in a separate post because I'm wondering where you're getting the notion the Well of Furies is somewhere in the Far East.

Given no other information besides the fact Cole and Richter were in Europe, Cole has the powers of Zeus Incarnate and that it was the opening of Pandora's Box that brought the heroic age back to Earth... I would assume the Well of Furies is in the Mediterranean somewhere, since these are all Greek myths we're talking about.

Besides, the first CoH novel explicitly states they found the box in the Mediterranean.

I would submit that perhaps they all have their world's best interests at heart. They just view the methods to achieve that vision quite differently. As I said, only Statesman embraced freedom through liberty. That includes allowing people to make mistakes, or to make dumb choices. Neither Reichsman nor Tyrant allow that to go on.

I would have treated all the servers as separate universes anyway, because that's how I roll, but speaking as someone who has created hundreds of characters and taken them all through the tutorial, I can tell you that each server is slightly different. Sure, it's only in minor details like how many cops are standing outside the Kings Row police station or what the technician is doing in front of Lt. MacReady in the tutorial (quick, is he standing or kneeling? Ha! Sometimes he's not even there!), but there are subtle differences which underscore the notion they're separate universes.

Just because they all think they're Primal Earth is immaterial, really. I think the recent Dark Mirror missions accidentally emphasize that, since your doppelganger initially seems to think this is his Earth. Perhaps he counted the number of cops outside the Kings Row police station and figured out he was on a different world.






I blame Rod Serling for the dimension confusion. Me, I use universe, but I get why people do it. Kind of like how they confuse the lay term "theory" with the scientific term "Theory."

It doesn't help that the game itself uses "universe" and "dimension" interchangeably.

Every car fancier knows that was a model from Honda.

Between the word "powers' and the word "adopting" can be a moment or a lifetime.

We've already seen two or three really good alternate explanations for how Cole becomes Reichsman (kudos to you guys for putting those forth) but for me, the real heart of the matter is the assumption that Cole was a good guy. Even in Paragon Prime he's kind of a dick, and before he became Statesman he wasn't exactly on the side of the angels. As someone else pointed out, Statesman seems to be the only good version of Cole in the multiverse. I think the real question anyone should ask is, "Why is *our* Marcus Cole a good guy and not evil like all his other incarnations?"

Seems to me that Statesman is the aberration, not the norm. So what was it that caused him to chose the American ideals of freedom through liberty over the Axis ideals of peace through obedience?

I have developed the keen ability to ignore game lore when it doesn't suit the stories of my personal characters. My Electric/Electric Brute, for example, chose Scirocco as his patron solely because the powers matched the already-existing red lightning abilities. Scirocco is all about magic, as his pool is "Mu Mastery." But my brute is a time-traveling combat cyborg with electrical abilities. So I ignore the story for the length of time it took me to complete and just use the powers as I see fit.

Monty Python's And Now For Something Completely Gamy MMO. It's in closed beta right now so I can't say much, but lumberjacks have to wear lingerie.

I assume he has other useful abilities to qualify as "friend." Otherwise, that level of wrong would get you kicked out of my superfriends circle.