Olantern

Oh, man, how could I forget that one? I remember Asking the Newbie in the summer of 2006 or so what the devs were REALLY hiding in the then-sealed area at the back of Faultline. His answer: "Villain Epic Archetypes. Wearing trenchcoats."

I thought Deth Kikking came from the Lesbian Hellion bio.

Ah, "One of Our Fifty is Missing," the best part of Albuquerque magazine. How I miss it ...

You actually get them as soon as you create your account, but they've been cow-nerfed so badly that not only are they invisible and untargetable. Further, this particular nerfing was so powerful that it also erased the very knowledge of the cows' existence from everyone's mind.

Incidentally, I see open beta has begun, which has already produced the gnashing of teeth I mention, as well as a nice Samuraiko video. Thanks for that, and special thanks for noticing the cow thing ...

Decimator, Destroyer, and Destructor appear in the "Bonefire" arc, along with one of their Skull counterparts, Marrowsnap. All three Hellion leaders are just named Damned bosses, and Marrowsnap is a Bone Daddy. To my knowledge, Marrowsnap's brother, Marrow Drinker, doesn't appear anywhere, though he might show up in Bonefire if you do it with a large enough team.

Tempter, however, doesn't appear anywhere.

When sonic blast was released, I made a character called the Singing Mikado, who gained superhuman powers after seeing The Mikado 1,000 times. Unfortunately, he also fell under the delusion that he really is the Mikado, and now patrols Paragon City seeking to let the punishment fit the crime. I have a Drosselmeier (from The Nutcracker) character as well. Those characters are unambiguously in the public domain and ought to be okay.

I'd be more cautious with something like "Thor" (if it were available; see upthread). The GM's, like most people, aren't concerned with how a court would rule on whether a character infringes a trademark or copyright; they're concerned with how likely it is that someone will get the idea to sue after seeing one, since defending a suit successfully is nearly as draining as losing one. It's frustrating, but I can't say I blame them.

Sure, Freedom Force also benefited from having a preset cast of characters. The game's designers knew it would be not just about some superhero fighting Nuclear Winter, the Soviet Snowstorm, but about Minute Man fighting him. This contributes to the player's sense of "immersion" as much as or more than the fact that the heroes can throw barrels or knock down walls. It's an actual story with an identifable protagonist.

This doesn't work as well in an MMO. Any good RPG game master knows that the most important characters in the story are the protagonists, the players' characters. An MMO needs to obey that same dictum, but the writers of MMO stories need to deal with knowing next to nothing about their protagonists. (Witness all the wailing and gnashing of teeth when a mission dictates even the smallest thing about how our characters act or feel.) It's possible to get the same feel from a well-written single player game in an MMO, but it's much, much, much harder. (Incidentally, using a preset group of characters makes visual design and animation much more predictable, which I think also makes things like throwing barrels easier to program.)

This isn't even considering the importance of setting and tone. Another reason Freedom Force works is that it isn't just a superhero game; it's an animated '60's superhero comic. That makes it easy for the writer to create characters that instantaneously resonate with the audience's expectations (impetuous ex-gang member, tragic guy imprisoned in armor, super-smart alien, communist agent, etc.). This can be and has been done to some extent in City of Heroes, but it's prompted little but hostility from the player base; I see routine complaints that "Nemesis is too cartoonish because cackling evil masterminds are dumb" and the like. For the most part, though, City of Heroes doesn't stick to any single tone, theme, or comic book influence. Instead, we fight magical cults, comical cyberpunks, evil corporate suit-guys, and pseudo-Napoleonic armies, all in the same game. This adds some nice variety, but it also makes it difficult for the game's writers and designers to impose the unified vision of setting and tone that makes a world really come alive.

So, in conclusion, I enjoyed Freedom Force, but I think people tend to credit too much of its success to things like destructible environments and throwable objects and not enough to the fact that it's a single player game with a fairly coherent story and look.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind more maps, more variety in objectives, and more stuff to do outdoors, but if the comparatively limited number of them that exist haven't made me quit by now, they probably won't in the future, either. For whatever it's worth, comments the devs made at PAX East suggest that some of the new, upcoming things in Going Rogue will place a renewed emphasis on having to do things in the outdoor game world. Zone events were specifically mentioned.

This is assuming that Going Rogue both is and is meant to bring in significant numbers of new players, as opposed to bringing back veterans. Given the past marketing strategy of the game, I find this unlikely.

Personally, given the increasingly negative climate on these forums and in-game, I think it's unlikely that any increase in subscriptions from Going Rogue can offset the continuing, slow bleed of subscriptions.

Indeed, things have been so gloomy lately that I'm considering just giving up now, rather than going through several more months of cheerleading for a game no one else seems to want to save.

Exactly.

Also, B.A.B. just dealt me 812.4 points of bonus Sarcasm damage! 8)