Olantern

I agree. Not only was he well-spoken and interesting in his presentation, but he was also had one of the few really classy "casual" outfits I've seen on a creative industry person (one of my heroes has a surprisingly similar costume).

Aside from that, this was worth watching just for the video of Chris Bruce trying out a bullwhip.

I, for one, don't relish the idea of WoW-style mega-raids, since I don't think the smaller servers will be able to muster the numbers for them consistently (leading to more bleed to the big ones, more people quitting in frustration, and more merge/don't merge/shutdown/don't shut down brouhaha). Additionally, I just don't like that kind of thing. That said, I believe a significant number of people do want this kind of thing and have for a while, so I suppose it's good they're (probably) working on it.

Of course, I haven't played through the arcs, either, but I suspect that the point of the Praetorian content will be, "If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem." I expect to have it hammered into my head that anyone who supports the Praetorians is either a stupid sheep or someone without a shred of compassion, and that the Resistance, while some of them might be a bit nutty, is the "heroic" way to go. That is, if you're a Loyalist, no matter how noble your ideals, you're still on the road to villany because you're supporting a group that's bad, deep down, even if they perform the occasional good and useful deed. The choice I expect to be presented with is "support the guy who made sure all the trash is picked up in the streets, even though he has a torture chamber, or rebel [psst, the right choice is 'rebel']," which is no choice at all for anyone outside a comic book, in my opinion.

This makes things simpler from a mechanical point of view, too. If "ultimately support Tyrant" corresponds to Villain and "ultimately fight Tyrant" corresponds to Hero, then only two "morality" play paths need to be created, probably as arcs in the upper teens. (Note that such arcs could operate independently of whether a character starts off tagged "Loyalist" or "Resistance.") If both heroism and villany are open to all characters, regardless of their attitudes toward the Praetorians, then that's at least four paths: villanous Resistance, heroic Resistance, villanous Loyalist, and heroic Loyalist.

I suspect that the vaunted "moral ambiguity" of the Loyalists and Resistance the devs have mentioned is more along the lines of the way most players seem to view Longbow (i.e., they're supposed to be good, yet everyone treats them as a more colorful version of the Council or the Malta Group) than the lines of "the Praetorians are neither good nor evil."

My main concern is that the "right" and "wrong" choices remain clear. I don't want to have a character I see as heroic sent down the villanous path or vice versa because I disagree with or just plain don't understand the moral system the devs are pushing. For instance, one choice mentioned in an early Going Rogue interview was, "Do you let the despot who's killed hundreds of people and will do it some more go, since it might destabilize things, or do you kill him, to save the lives of some specific people you know?" I can't say which of those choices is the heroic one in the context of a computer game, since both are pretty awful. They could tell me upfront that we're using Batman Morality and Killing Is Always Wrong, No Matter The Circumstances, but that sort of defeats the significance of having a moral choice. It's a challenging design problem with no easy solution, unless you believe that the player base has a much more universal code of what's right and wrong than I think it does.

No, you're not. Do you know why they did?

I agree with the first paragraph of your quote.

As for the second, I think it's the latter (i.e., she's spent the majority of her career using other people's bodies). I'm working on an arc sort of about this at the moment, but I can't get one of the missions to play right. (BlueBattler, feel free to PM me on this if you want, since it was one of your posts a couple years back that gave me the idea for it.)

Note, though, that the recent backgrounder on her Praetorian counterpart seems to imply that Shalice Tilman's career began rather more recently than World War II. Basically, like so many other points in the game's backstory, character age is a garbled mess, but no more so than a lot of things in the two major comic book universes.

I can't help you with a "correct" version of the official lore here, unfortunately, because I don't think there is one. However, I should point out that this is an area where the City of Heroes lore deviates wildly and probably, for the most part, unintentionally, from real world history.

Just to complicate things, in very brief terms, in the real world, both the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller, also called the Knights of St. John (the original name of the Knights of Malta) were founded as separate military orders (essentially, monk-knights) in the 1100's or very late 1000's. When the Latin foundations in the Levant fell, the Hospitallers eventually moved their headquarters to the island of Rhodes, where they became the Knights of Rhodes. This would have been around 1300, with the full move taking place in 1306-07.

Meanwhile, also in 1307, the Templars were accused of all sorts of trumped-up heresy at the behest of the King of France, who wanted control of that order's wealth. The Templars were eventually suppressed. That is, the order lost its papal sponsorship and was dissolved. Some members, mostly in France, were famously executed, giving rise to an assortment of goofy conspiracy theories that persist to this day, but many, particularly in places other than France, were simply told by the Papacy to join other military orders. Many became Hospitallers, i.e., Knights of Rhodes.

Still later, in 1523, the Ottoman Turks took control of Rhodes, and the Knights of Rhodes/Hospitallers ultimately fled to Malta, where they became known as the Knights of Malta. They not only resided there but actually ruled the island. They participated in the famous battle of Lepanto, which dealt a severe blow to Turkish ambitions in the Mediterranean, and in 1565, in their last major military action, they fought off a major Turkish seige of Malta island. During the 1600's, they became less monastic in nature and more involved with European politics than they already were, though also less important in the European political world. They ultimately lost control of Malta and became more of a religious outfit once more. I should also note that the Knights of St. John are still around; from what I can tell, they spend most of their time assisting pilgrims at Catholic shrines, doing charitable work, and contesting the legitimacy of various spurious Orders of St. John, a number of which cropped up after the 1600's for a variety of confusing, political reasons.

Returning to City of Heroes, it appears that one of the people working on the story bible wanted to evoke the conspiratorial rumors that have swirled around the Templars for centuries while using the name "Malta," which, while intriguing, doesn't immediately give the faction's backstory away by screaming "secret society" the way "Templar" would. The reference to the 1300's comes from the dissolution of the Knights Templar in the 1300's. The reference to the 1600's seems to derive from the eclipse of the Knights of Malta as a political power in the 1600's. I suspect that whoever wrote the group's backstory knew more about the military orders than whoever wrote the missions, resulting in some garbling when the sketchy entry in the story bible got translated into in-game text. (See the example of the Minions of Igneous in Manticore's old Cannon Fodder thread for an example of how far the in-game interpretation of something can go from the vague notes that get written down during development; he actually quotes what's written in the devs' notes, and it bears little relation to the Igneous as we see them.)

If I had to reconcile the dates you give, personally, I'd suggest the following, using the real history as a guide. Additions to the real stuff for City of Heroes purposes are listed in italics:

Circa 1100: Knights Templar and Knights of St. John formed.
1291: Kingdom of Acre, last Latin bastion in the Holy Land, falls. Members of both orders scattered.
1307: Templars suppressed on accusations of all manner of evil. Some join Knights of St. John. Meanwhile, Knights of St. John take Rhodes. Some of the accusations against the Templars are true. These Templars escape execution and are among those who join the Knights of Rhodes.
1523: Knights of St. John move to Malta, becoming the Knights of Malta.
1600's: By this time, the moral descendants of those evil ex-Templars control the Knights. With the Order's power past its peak, this group goes underground and becomes a secret society of its own, eventually evolving into the modern Malta Group.

That's the best I can do. I find attempting to untangle this kind of thing a futile endeavor, unless one is one of those, like many on these boards, who simply enjoy calling the devs bad writers.

Personally, I just posted this because I happened to know a fair amount about military orders, and the amount of misinformation and such out there about them just plain annoys me. This stuff isn't too hard to find; I checked the dates I used here in one of the basic works on the subject, The Monks of War: The Military Religious Orders, by Desmond Seward (Penguin: 1972).

I just wanted to mention that even without the costumes, I really like this concept.

Are those the craftable Winged Boots he's wearing, or something else? I don't remember the Winged Boots as looking like that.