McNum
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Kyle Katarn of the Jedi Knight games might fit. He was an Imperial Officer who switched sides later. Another character would Crix Nadine. He was part of the Empire, but defected to the Rebels with the plans for the second Death Star. There's also that female Imperial Remnant Admiral in the later books. She's kind of an Imperial Responsibility character... even if her Empire starts and ends with the three ships she's flying around in. Also Grand Admiral Thrawn. Nice guy, likes art, military genius, not really into the Empire's policies, mainly because they're pretty racists against non-humans. Something he, with his bright blue skin and eyes that glow red likely had run into once too many.
You could possibly make an argument for Darth Vader. "Join me and together we shall bring order to the galaxy." If he meant that, he might not be in it for the evil. (And there is that What If? where Darth Vader defects and returns to the light side of the Force... with pastel-white armor and all. Now we will never speak of that again.) Darth Vader might just be a guy who wanted order, and now he's stuck too deep in this whole Evil Empire thing to back out. At least it's what he thinks. -
Quote:Yeah, I wish there was a decent way to play the antagonist in more RPGs, but it's really rare to see. I wish some designers would learn that just as "Good" doesn't have to equal "Nice", "Evil" does not have to equal "Jerk". I could easily see an evil character be a genuinely nice guy. Treat his minions well, even help save the world if needed to, but still basically be a greedy powermonger who wishes to take over the world. (Of course!)Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Ugh! I agree, so few games get "evil" anywhere near right. As Yahtzee exposits in his review of Alpha Protocol, most games give you three options: Neutral, Good and *******. I am honestly entirely fed up with "evil" in games being defined as "the opposite of the Good option" or "being a dick at random" and this continues to be the case in new games being made even today. Good characters are relatively easy to relate to, and they tend to do the wrong thing, but no-one ever seems to get evil characters right as writers keep assuming they will undoubtedly do the "wrong" thing, where "wrong" is defined as the opposite of the right thing.
I've spent the last five years designing evil characters that I could not just stand to play, but actually enjoy advancing, so I like to think I know a thing or two about how to make a character who's evil, but evil in a way that makes him a cool and important antagonist, rather than just a random jerkass because the script says so. And that, as well, is what bothers me about Villain tip missions, in that they seem to present villains as malicious bastards far more than they do as actual antagonists in a decent story.
A good villain is not someone walking down the street kicking puppies and looking for people to punch in the face, and I would really, really like if RPG makers would understand that.
In this regard, I do agree that Praetoria did a very good job of putting down some hard but fair moral choices and blurring the line between hero and villain. For the first time in a long while, it FORCED me to dissociate from my characters and pick options that THEY would pick, rather than whatever I thought was best, forgetting there was a character between my mouse and the choice prompt. In fact, I've found myself liking certain characters less and less the more I "let them" do what they're likely to do.
Cedric, for instance, killed a clone he's saved previously, even though the clone only came to thank him. Why? Well, Cedric is a conqueror. Everyone must bow down and serve his will, and those who refuse simply die. It was a hard choice for ME to make, but from the character's perspective it was little more than a shrug.
I have trouble making a good villain in CoV, too. It's hard to find a good motivation for me. I've got the assassin for hire, she'd likely go Rogue. I've got a mis-summoned demoness, who's evil by nature. I've got a girl whose powerful psychic subconscious has taken over. But someone who's just an evil jerk? None. That kind of evil is just petty and uninteresting to me.
Praetoria is fun in that you can be both good and evil on both sides. Or more likely a good blend of each. And the evil things don't seem tacked on just to have an evil opposite of the good.
I took one of my characters trough, intending on going full Loyalist Responsibility. But at the final morality choice, I knew that she'd stand for a lot to protect the citizens, but genocide isn't one of them. So she defected. I thought she'd come back to the loyalists at the end of the Warden arc, then. But as that choice appeared, I realized... she wouldn't. I wanted her to, but really, she wouldn't. She'd seen the truth, and she would never help anyone conceal it again. So the Enriche plant had to go. I actually caught myself thinking "Two days ago, she'd been the one rushing in to stop the bombing. Now? She's arming them." And you know what? If the game can pull that off, it must be doing something right.
I just realized, aren't we comparing the writing in Going Rogue to what Bioware usually puts out? I'd not be shy to say that Going Rogue has nothing to be ashamed of in that comparison. Especially since it's an MMO. I hope that what comes next here is just as well written. -
Quote:Don't even get me started on the anemic "evil" options in a lot of RPGs. Saint vs. bully. There's no real option to be evil in most games. I like to run an evil game after doing the good first, but frankly, it matters so little in a lot of games that I just don't care. Going Rogue got some of this really right in Praetoria, though. I swear, some of those choices you have to make are made just to make you feel bad. I'm not saying GR did it perfectly, but it's telling when I say that it pulled it off a lot better than some single player RPGs I've played. For an MMO, that's amazing.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Ah, that's something interesting to expand on: Empty characters. Gordon Freeman kind of gets a free pass, because even if it doesn't seem like he's all there, he's all there because people keep acting like it. That and because it's a really cool game series regardless
But Dragon Age I never even tried, and for this precise reason - I like Protagonists who speak in voice and have personalities, especially when I'm limited to concepts constrained by the genre. This is actually the same reason I LOVED Mass Effect. In a lot of cases, I didn't really know what to do, how to act or what to say, but Shepard always knew. If I got his persuasion skill high enough in the first game (and I made that a priority) or his Paragon score high enough in the second game, the guy was awesome. Man, the way he saved Tali's *** at her trial and essentially bluffed his way out by the sheer awesome of being completely right was amazing.
In many ways, I like to trust my characters to do the things they are supposedly so good at doing. If a character is supposed to be very eloquent and persuasive, I'd rather hit the "persuade" button and let him do his thing. I'd much rather do that than trying to be persuasive and eloquent myself and do it for him. Or if a character is really evil, like the Cedric I may have talked about before, I'd rather be able to just trust the game to treat him like a high-class evil dictator, and the bad thing about that is it really doesn't. Tip missions for villains seem to be more of the "jerkass" variety than the "evil overlord" variety.
But bringing up Mass Effect's Commander Shepard vs. Dragon Age's Your RPG Protagonist is a good point to make. -
So, just to give that annoying non-answer that everyone hates: That depends.
It depends mostly on the medium. I have no need to identify with characters in books, films, plays or whatever non-interactive medium you can think of. I'm not Luke Skywalker, but I'll happily admit to have cheered him on the first time I saw him do the Death Star run. Likewise, I just reread Lord of the Rings. I don't identify with anyone there, but it's fun to read about all these characters and what they do in a world on the edge of despair.
Frankly, I hate the blatant "you're supposed to identify with this guy" character inserts where none are needed. Transformers comes to mind. I'm seeing that for Optimus Prime. Yeah, we need a human-robot liaison, and that can be anyone, but does it have to be a teenager every time? Even as a teenager myself I thought that was tacked on. But Optimus Prime battling Megatron? Awesome! Go you big truck-robot guy! ...what, you died AGAIN?!
However, just to turn it upside down, when playing video games, I can't help but self-insert in the character I play. No matter what game it is, if I can't identify with the character, I get bored really fast. God of War comes to mind. Kratos is a fierce warrior, but he's also a big jerk. I simply cannot identify with him at all. Big, angry, and hates everything. I have nothing in common with Kratos, and even though I'll happily admit that the God of War games are well crafted beat 'em ups, I cannot play them.
On the other side we have characters like Guybrush Threepwood. Dorky, clever-in-a-weird-way, thinks pirates are cool. Likable and there's at least something to identify with. My all time favorite video game character, though, is Vyse from Skies of Arcadia. He is awesome, because of a relentless optimism that even I have to admit is hard to keep up with. I've seen other optimistic characters, but Vyse simply takes the cake, and he even follows up on it. I've even added one of his lines as a somewhat of a motto: "Impossible is a word people use to feel better about themselves when they quit." Plus, he gets the girl(s), and there's nothing wrong with that. I actually bought Valkyria Chronicles for PS3 because he had a cameo. Turns out, the lead character Welkin Gunther is a pretty good character, too.
So just to confuse the matters even more, I hate empty characters. Dragon Age comes to mind as a recent example. I make my own protagonist, and 20 hours later, I just don't care. The game happens around my character, sure I get to pick how thins turn out, but I'm just a spectator to the events that happens to all the interesting characters. Morrigan is cool, Leliana is fun, Alistair is a kind of dorky knight, and "the Carth". But my own character? Eh, he's... a warrior who usually picks the "nice guy" options. And that's about it. He's just boring. I'd much rather play a character that's a part of the world itself. Consider this, you could remove the main character of Dragon Age and just play the NPC party members, and there would be little to nothing lost storywise. So why is he/she/it there? Now Mass Effect's Sheppard, she's a fun character. Yes, "she". Sheppard is female, and no one is ever going to convince me otherwise.
And how does this affect my CoH characters? Hmm, I don't really know. I make my characters with a clear concept in mind and play them thereafter. Even if it's not the mechanically best way. I cannot play just another Fire/Kin, I'd need to know why he or she has fire and kinetics powers, how they'd act with it and their motivations for being Heroes (or Villains now). I've got a Forcefield Defender with a protective streak, calling her maternal doesn't begin to cover it, I've got a Stalker who's a pro, pay on time and she'll kill anyone you want, I've got a legacy Hero trying to live up to her fallen mentor's name. Every single one of my active characters can be summed up like that. Currently I'm leveling a Scrapper who's motivation is simply that she likes the adrenalin rush of fighting, and if she can be a hero at the same time, so much the better.
So, to sum it up. I like to cheer for characters I watch, but I have to be able to identify with characters I play. -
Most likely. So, time for another experiment with nitrous?
What color do you think his replacement is going to be? I kind of want a red Stig. -
What.
This exists? That's just so mindbogglingly stupid on so many levels. Superman and Big Barda... makes a porno? And it's a real comic? What the... why? -
Quote:I know, that's what makes it sad. There was a problem with not getting people into PvP, but the changes needed were not really to the powers, but to the content. Sure, we can see that some things in old PvP were plainly overpowered, but that's a small fix. What the old PvP needed was a solid answer to the question: "And why would I want to do that?" As far as I'm concerned, there's still no answer to that.Originally Posted by Neuronia
We HAD this.
Sonics had to keep up Clarity, cage people, drop Sonic Siphon and keep the shields up.
Kins had to kite IR, keep SB up, etc.
FFers could cage, use Force Bolt, use Force Bubble to move people around and put up the small bubles.
These days, it's Blasters & Emps and a Rad and maybe a Brute. The changes simply didn't need to be this severe, and it's telling that Arena matches use the No Heal Decay and No Travel Suppression options as well. -
I like #7. The "Sid Phillips likes this" tag is just perfect.
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Quote:You don't want to pilot a Zeus. Trust me. You really, really don't. Ever wonder why Psychic powers work on them? They have a brain, a human brain. Not the whole human, mind you, just the brain. Usually not a volunteer brain either. Kind of icky, really. So trust me when I tell you that you don't want to pilot a Zeus.Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
I'm still annoyed that the Rogue morality mission I did din't allow me to pilot the malta Titan like the ARbiter wanted me to
I mean, come on! Piloting a Zeus Titan?! So. Much. Win.
Sad panda... -
Outlevelling story arcs in the middle of them is bad and wrong. It is worse than that, it's badong. We must make them the opposite of badong: "Gnodab".
I'm sorry, but I can't get that line from Kung Pow out of my head when I see the title of this topic.
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Quote:And this is different from pre-I13 PvP... how? All I remember from that is a sudden case of teleportation followed by death. And if you managed to survive, the attacker would already be out of range. However, as a peak kill speed in the game, I'm okay with that, as long as there are more ways to excel in PvP than raw killing power. Take the Sniper of TF2. He can one-shot anything, even a Heavy. That's pretty much all he can do, but he's very good at it. But he's usually not running any briefcases. That'd be the Scout. And he's certainly not a frontline fighter like the Heavy or Soldier, or setting up sentries, teleporters and dispensors like the Engineer. No, he's just a guy with a rifle and an Australian accent, doing what he does best: Headshots. (And getting backstabbed by Spies.)Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
It's not as fast as you're describing it, however, especially if you consider PvP to be an offshoot of PvE. The PvE game is very slow in terms of reaction speed, at last for most ATs. The difference between "doing great" and "about to die" is so smooth and slow to occur that even the slower-paced players are able to catch it in time and react to it. I can see a battle going sour from a mile away and I have ample time to do something about it. A fight that takes two seconds from the moment I lay eyes on my enemy to the moment I'm dead does not give me anywhere near this kind of reaction time.
What you're proposing sounds a lot like my experience in Battlefield 2142. That is to say, almost 90% of the time when I die, I die within a second of me becoming aware I'm even in danger and with precisely zero knowledge of what killed me. Around 90% of the rest of my deaths occur when I walk into a situation where I'm well aware of the danger, but am physically incapable of reacting to it due to game-imposed constraints such as necessary gun windup, depleted ammunition or simply being overwhelmed. I've been playing the game since it came out, and I can count the deaths I suffered where I could have easily done something about it but simply screwed up and died on the fingers of one hand. And most of the time, I die because someone tossed a grenade which exploded a millisecond after I saw it on-screen.
City of Heroes may be fast FOR A STAT-BASED MMO, but the speeds you are suggesting are far, far too fast for it. Such speeds eliminate all player participation aside from ahead-of-the-fact preparation and pretty much reduce everything to attack chains. They leave very little room to explore what I feel is this game's greatest strength in combat, which is situational awareness. The ability to see a situation as it develops in real time and decide how to react to it as it's developing. The more you take the game out of the real-time confrontation and drag it back into the ahead-of-time preparation, the less interesting PvP becomes.
Yes. more often than not, a fight in CoH lasts well over 2 seconds, but a Stalker or Blaster who set themselves up for the perfect situation? 2 seconds, tops. Like it used to be. But I could easily see Tankers drawing enemy attention away, Brutes and Scrappers leaping into action with a fearless glee, Defenders trying to keep them alive and the enemies hurting and so on. It'd need teams big enough to support this kind of distinction, which is one of CoH PvP's problems. Little to no casual PvP players.
To get this to work, it's all about critical mass. You need game types that are interesting enough for the "not-Deathmatch" types of PvPers and a PvP system that's close enough to the PvE system that transition is smooth. If you get that, and get a decent amount of people to come, you can have a fun team based FPS-type/MMO-gameplay PvP experience that few if no other games can offer. Especially with the mobility powers we can have in this game. A lot of strategy will probably be on how to counter these. Dropping Caltrops for Speeders and Jumpers, having anti-Air defenses... and how do you stop Teleport, anyway? With a twisted map layout? -
Quote:Try a hovering FF/Energy Defender. I had no idea he was supposed to have a super move. I just did the usual and stuck to the ceiling while pelting him with energy blasts, while hitting Aid Self when he got a lucky shot through. Then again, that's pretty much my strategy for anything that's tougher than a lieutenant.Originally Posted by Fury Flechette
Once you figure him out, he's extremely easy. Ranged classes walk over him. And if you're melee, simply hit and run. I'd imagine a hover blaster/corruptor would just laugh at him. I've faced him with a blaster with combat jumping, a tank and a couple of scrappers. I only had difficulty the first time. After that, the fight is trivial.
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Quote:I don't see much difference, to be honest. The thought "I want to attack him." turning into either a flick of the wrist and a shotgun blast or a point and a click followed by a power going off isn't the point here. The point is that for a stats based RPG, CoH is fast and has several positioning tools available.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Uh... Not in the slightest. The only reason you're allowed to kill someone in two seconds in an FPS game is because that requires you to have good aim, fast reflexes and not a small amount of skill. There's a reason FPS games don't have auto-targeting and randomly-missing weapons very often. City of Heroes may be fast and it may "feel" like a shooter, but it is very much not. City of Heroes is a click-n-kill RPG of a VERY archaic kind that is not applicable to shooter and fighter styles.
Which is why it could benefit from the closed area, high mobility game modes commonly found in FPS games. I'm not arguing that CoH should be an FPS but it has the speed and mobility to consider if FPS game types are worth implementing. Don't try to slow the game down for PvP, keep the speed, but change the objectives of PvP. Make being able to take out another player character fast a nice ability to have, but not the only ability worth having in PvP. -
If there's going to be a new PvP makeover, I'd like the Devs to take a good long look at Team Fortress 2. Now look closer. Every class has a purpose, there are several objective based modes on fair, but varied maps. CoH plays fast enough to have PvP play by FPS rules. It's perfectly fine to kill someone in 2 seconds flat in an FPS, and the same can happen here in CoH.
Opposed Mayhem/Safeguards is an obvious choice, and classics like Capture the Flag, and Domination modes are never a bad idea. But CoH isn't really made for Deathmatches. The AT powers are way too different for that to ever become an even battleground. But we know that already.
Really, there's potential for a good PvP game with CoH, it has the speed and the variety to keep a good PvP community going. Except, ironically, in PvP.
I'm not that much of a PvP'er, but I really hope that PvP gets something soon. It's the big glaring weakness of CoH, I'd like to see it upgraded to something for everyone, and not by equalizing all characters, but by allowing a much greater diversity. Sure, an Earth/FF Controller isn't going to kill you fast, but he sure as heck can make life hard for you if you try to run by him to get to a control point. Where the team Stalker is probably lurking about, anyway. That's the kind of PvP I'd like to see here. Deathmatches just get old, especially when there's only a few builds that are worth it. -
Quote:No, with the perfect final shot to link the prequels to the originals. The binary sunset shot is one of the iconic shots of the original Star Wars. To use that as the ending of the prequels is a perfect way to end them all.Originally Posted by UnSub
... with grown men crying over how Lucas ruined their childhood?
Besides, the crying was more over the special editions.
Speaking of Star Wars, here's fun little thing to think about: At the end of Return of the Jedi, the rebels are celebrating their victory with a meal together with the Ewoks. Earlier in the movie, the Ewoks tried to cook and eat Luke and Han. There are several empty Stormtrooper helmets shown in the ending. So here's my question: "What exactly are our heroes eating?" -
Actually, concerning the Star Wars Prequels, they did one thing right: Their endings. Especially Revenge of the Sith. No, not Vader's "NOOOOOOO!", but the very final shot. We've seen a movie where everything went wrong for the good guys. The Jedi lost, hard. Then in the final shot, we see Obi-Wan hand off Luke to Owen and Beru and they step outside and watch the binary sunset, just like Luke will in Episode 4. The music swells and... END! See you in A New Hope!
For all their faults, the prequels ended exactly the way they should. -
Quote:Yeah, some of them get tempted by greed and start churning out Hero Merits instead.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Not all of them
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"Going Rouge"
No, that's not a misspelling. -
Hero and Villain Merits self destruct if you change alignment. You won't see them again. So if you have some and want to switch sides, use them.
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Quote:To be fair to Doom, when you're a scientific and magical genius and ruler of your own sovereign nation, squirrel-proofing your armors does seem a bit excessive. Still, he probably should have done so after she beat him the first time.Originally Posted by Lightfoot
This.
Squirrel Girl > Doctor Doom
'Nuff said!
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Quote:The obituaries in the villain paper missions all end in 2008. I think that's the newest date we have.Originally Posted by Lazarus
All of the CoH content in general operates on comic book time and is somewhat fluid. You'll notice that aside after the first Rikti invasion in 2002 pretty much no exact dates are given in game.
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Maelstrom has a stealth power. You can't see him when it's on unless you get really close to him, or he attacks you. That or pop an Insight, if you have one.
He won't die from the fall. NPCs, like players, can't die from falling. Their HP just go to 0.01. -
There are several Elite Bosses my character wouldn't have been able to beat if it hadn't been for Sasha. So yes to craftable Chain Guns.
Because there's a little Heavy in all of us. -
I resisted smart phones for a long time, too.
Then I saw that some of them have built in GPS and navigation. My sense of direction is terrible, I'm the kind of person who wishes to have a minimap in real life. Now... I do! It's a silly reason, yeah, but I needed a new phone and I could get one with Google Maps. So I did. -
It's mostly straightforward.
Power is where you play along with the government for your own profit. You try to sell yourself as a hero, even if that's blatantly false advertising. As you usually set up some of the situations where you go rescue people.
Responsibility is going along with the government, but trying to help people. A sort of noble idea, but it gets increasingly difficult to be heroic as you learn more and more about Praetoria.
Oh, and each of these arc have you so some evil to questionable things for the Loyalists. But that's all part of the fun.