Samuel_Tow

That's exactly what I mean! I get that it's a striking visual and I'm sure it's symbolic of something, but... Nightmarish it ain't. Nightmares shouldn't make me chuckle to myself This is something to look out for when writing stories and doing artwork - always consider what the thing you're working on would look like if taken out of context and displayed by itself. If it comes off as infinitely goofy... Think about toning it down a little

Speaking a tad more seriously, though, I don't see Diabolique's costume as frightening or even monstrous. What it looks like is a dominatrix, primarily. The costume also makes her look significantly older, which ends up giving her more of a "matriarch" look of authority. That's actually a good thing, and sufficiently weird to look otherworldly. ... But it's not scary.

See, the thing is that making something scary takes more than just just making something tall or even just making something monstrous. What's truly unsettling is the combination of something familiar and something alien, something desirable and something disgusting, it's the the expectation proven wrong and the desire perverted. Starcraft's Infected Kerrigan is a pretty good example, actually. On the one hand, she can look attractive and sexy, just because of her body shape and facial features, but on the other hand, she is a homicidal slimy insect creature covered in carapace, and it's exactly this kind of dissonance that makes her presence unsettling.

To be honest, Diabolique's "Numina look" was a bit tame and unimpressive, but that's kind of what I found to be threatening about her. She looks like a smiling, cheerful ghost girl who's not just completely rotten on the inside, but also immensely powerful. Now she's just Matriarch Benezia. Not a bad look, just a strange choice.

If you're talking about Grimfalcon or whatever his name is from the Reichsman TF, then I don't talk about him because I like to pretend that TF never happened. It's such a hideous bastardisation of canon characters and concepts and such a horrible boring fight on top that it ruins my fun of the entire game if I admit to myself that it exists. "The leader of the Malta Group" shouldn't exist, because Malta don't have A leader. They have a board of directors. Roger Vrable may have been an authority figure, yes, but he's been dead for quite some time now.

If that's not who you're referring to, I don't know what we're talking about, then. I do have a hunch, however. I suspect you're thinking of Director 17, the boss class Gunslinger that shows up at the end of World Wide Red as the Director I'm complaining about, and I'm really not. He's not an Archvillain, he's a simple boss. A bit overpowered, but we can say that the guy was a decent soldier who had exotic weaponry. Boss level is about right, considering he's not THE final boss of that arc. The final boss is, of course, the backup Kronos Titan trying to tear down the War Walls. As it should be. Director 11 is the level 54 AV who shows up in the Tin Mage II TF.

You're entirely correct - this CAN be explained. However, I see such explanations as an excuse, in the sense that we know it's not a good, thought-out story, but we're trying to make it work anyway. We, as players, shouldn't have to be put in the position of having to salvage official storylines by explaining away plot holes. I'm not averse to it, mind you, but I just want to hold the development team to a much higher standard. I don't want them to settle for mediocre writing for the sake of explaining away a gameplay element, I want them to write good stories that make sense when you walk away from them.

I have no problem whatsoever with human-looking enemies threatening my godlike characters. Even basic humans with guns can be believed, but what matters is presentation. WHY are these people so powerful? What makes them such a threat? How is a basic human able to deliver a bare-hand punch more damaging than a burst from a high-calibre rifle? Hell, even the crazed civilians on that sped-up world have a reason to be threatening. Their time has been sped up, so we can assume this has given them enhanced strength and speed, as well as driven them berserk, thus making them even more dangerous. And even they seem somewhat goofy by comparison.

City of Heroes needs greater internal consistency. We need to be able to compare two situations on equal terms and be able to make conclusions based on the difference. We need to have some kind of consistent context, otherwise the game's story is just an amorphous blob of vagueness.

Funny you should talk about opinions, then go ahead and tell me I should shut up and hold mine in. Sadly, that's not how it works. As long as I am a paying customer with access to the forums, I WILL make my opinion heard by the other players and by the developers and I WILL campaign to get my ideas into the game. Whether you like it or not. Precedent shows that the development team are not locked up in an ivory tower, and are more than willing to listen to reason when reasonable arguments are presented.

I try to present a reasonable argument for my own point of view, and you tell me that it's not my place to argue for myself. Not only will that not happen, but you've also ensured that I no longer feel inclined to respect your point of view if you'll disrespect mine with such abject dismissal.

Think about it, though - what does stone have to do with fire or ice? What does crystal have to do with it, either? And, yes, that is crystal. The "forest of geometric shapes" design of the shoulders is nothing if not cartoon crystal, because that's not the kind of shapes ice forms. And I get that "magma" was the link between rock and fire, but that's only tentative. What this set could have been was genuine ice body parts and "aura body parts" made to resemble fire.

What I think happened is they were making a new Earth-themed set separate from the fire swords and the snotterall backpack, decided to pack them together and rebranded their rock and crystal pieces to fire and ice pieces. But seriously - aside from the fire swords, fire wings, fire tail and waterfall backpack, the rest of the set IS Stone Armour.

That's really not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a case of weird set naming practices.

Faultline 15-20 is six missions that barely get you a level if you're lucky. I wouldn't call that nearly enough.

This is more or less the issue we addressed with David Nakayama during the fallout from the "Gunslinger" set. It seems the art team really was mired in the "men are strong, women are sexy" mindset that, while it can produce interesting material, also serves to limit what the team is able to create. I think that after the stink we raised, we may have been able to bring at least some moderation to the situation, but as with everything else in this game, it'll probably take a year before we see the fruits of our labour. For what it's worth, I look forward to having more women in this game intended to be admired, as opposed to ogled.

Though, to be fair, women with funeral pyres on their heads ARE an exception, as far as I'm aware.

Characters can act as plot devices, but that doesn't mean they ARE plot devices. Characters can move the plot, but the plot doesn't have to move the characters. This is not semantics, you're simply applying a one-way-street relationship in both directions. Yes, the plot CAN control the characters, but that's more the realm of hack writers (One More Day comes to mind) than the realm of good fiction.

A good character has the personality traits of a real person, or what a real person might be if he came from a specific fictional world. A good plot is written around the personality traits of good characters, such that it feels like the characters are moving the plot, as opposed to them being constantly ret-conned and changed to match a narrative.

Yes, ultimately, everything is a literary device to craft a completed work, but the whole point of good writing is to present that as a compelling, believable story. Creating a story with the kind of cynicism you display here is precisely what's responsible for the downward spiral of City of Heroes storytelling. When the writer is convinced that his characters are just plot devices, there to butcher as necessary just to give a gameplay element some basic explanation, then the overall story this writer is in charge of suffers, and suffers terribly.

There is a certain amount of "passion" and "heart" inherent in good stories, a certain feeling that the writer in charge at least somewhat cared about the story on higher level than basic word structure and plot logic, that usually makes it worth reading through. There are some stories that give the impression that their creators were able to suspend their disbelief and see their characters as real people stuck in a real situation, albeit in a fictional world, and it is those stories that come off feeling the most genuine and compelling, at least to me.

At the very basic of levels, the Statesman may be a plot device, but he shouldn't have been treated as one. We don't care about the Statesman as a character because the people writing the story didn't care about the Statesman. They only cared about what the Statesman represented. Jack Emmert may have written him as a mary sue, but at least he gave the guy SOME personality, especially if you read his long backstory.

For iTrials, probably, but then I'm not interested in that, myself. Luckily, for most anything else, team composition doesn't matter all that much. I intend to use it for TFs mostly, and the way I see those advertised is:

-Such and such TF looking for members!
-I want in. What should I bring?
-Whatever you feel like, we'll be fine.

Look at what I'm responding to, though: "The scales of power are all in your head." No, they are not all in my head. They are written into the content. They are canon. Nothing is more official and working as intended than this. I can close my eyes, plug my ears, go "LALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!" and pretend what I'm clearly seeing on the screen clearly isn't happening... But the thing is, I shouldn't have to. Like every time this has come up before, it's a question of presentation.

For instance, look at the Malta Group. They're guys with guns, so it's a bit iffy on face value, but they really work. Sure, the Operatives are peasant, but you have Sappers who have weapons designed to depower super beings. That's serious. You have Gunslingers armed with special, exotic weapons. That's serious. You have frikkin' giant robots! That's some serious ****! While on the micro scale, the Malta Group seems like it doesn't belong in the 40s, overall, they have enough serious gear to present a legitimate, credible threat. Hell, just the Kronos Titan itself is credible enough.

The problem is that THAT serious gear is what should be threatening us, NOT Director 11 or whatever his number is. I get that authority equals asskicking, but it's much better presentation for the Malta Group leaders to be the bald, fat old bastards, the bigots and racists of the old guard, the 50- and 60-year-old men who rule the world from behind closed doors while the strong, young, capable fighters and future tech is at their beck and call. That's a much more grounded type of conspiracy. It shouldn't be Director 11 that threatens us, it should be an Upgraded Kronos Titan that does this, or some kind of hyper-advanced Zeus Titan with technology stolen from the Praetorian and the Rikti and Arachnos put together into one machine. It should be what's threatening about the Malta group that's threatening, instead of being threatened by what should be decisively harmless for dramatic reasons.

Sticking our heads in the Architect and pretending this problem doesn't exist is only going to make it worse. This game needs to get its presentation of threat straight first, and when that's actually consistent with itself, then we can head off to the Architect and expand on it. My point is that the Architect should not be used as workaround to broken storytelling and as an excuse for why storytelling doesn't need to be better. It should be used as a supplement for GOOD storytelling. Some of the best arcs out there are inspired by the actual game, and for this to happen, the actual game needs to aspire to inspire, not resign itself to mediocrity.

You do have a point, though. An easy example of a character that's likable is "your double" in Jenni Adair's arc. It's mostly just a narrative "cheat," granted, but it worked for me. Basically, every mission includes something you need to do and something else your double needs to do. In a more traditional game where you're the only competent person in the whole universe, you can count on having to do your bit, your partner messing up and you having to do his bit, as well. Not this time. Your double is capable and even says things like "Don't worry about me, just do this." when engaged in a pretty heated fight. It gives the impression of an NPC helper that, for the first time in the whole damn game, is actually capable enough to not have you babysit him.

Making signature characters into companion NPCs in missions is a TERRIBLE idea. Their pathfinding sucks, their AI is always aggressive... Essentially, you spend half the time going back because the Statesman got hung up on a corner or his feet sank in the floor, or you end up cursing his name because he aggroed three spawns at once. And on top of it all, his powers are magnitudes stronger than your own, so you can essentially lead him on a leash and have him solo the mission for you.

Putting signature characters in the game and subjecting them to objective game mechanics is always a mistake. As far as I'm concerned, they should act as supporting characters and be part of the story arc, not part of the NPC lineup. Not frequently, anyway. Consider the following example:

You are given a sadistic choice: The kind-hearted hero who helped you so far is tied to a bomb on one end of the city and a monster is about to slaughter a school of children on the other side. You can't stop both disasters, and just as things look hopeless, your phone rings and it's the Statesman. He heard about your plight and he can handle the monster while you go save the hero. That way, he's useful, his strengths are put to good use AND you don't have to trip over his broken-AI *** fumbling its way through a mission on the strength of overpowered stats. Everybody wins.

Yes, it's false tension of a sort and yes, it often comes off as contrived, but I still feel it's a good way to involve these guys in storylines without making said storylines ostensibly ABOUT the signature characters. Best of both worlds, as it were.

This strikes me as conspiracy theory of the kind that just makes me feel ill to listen to it. No offence. I'm sure you like this drastic reinterpretation of everything and anything, and I'm glad the Architect could provide you with the opportunity to tell your own side story, but here's the thing - it's not canon. At the end of the day, the Architect is just fan fiction, and if fan fiction is what I want, I'm more than capable of writing my own without needing a game to do it in. The reason I play a game with a set storyline and existing characters is because I don't want to be the only one doing the work, because I want some sense of mystery and broader storytelling and more than anything else, because I don't want to be the one doing all the heavy lifting.

You can "pretend" that you're playing a completely different game with a completely different story. Matt Miller (I think it was him, one of the developers at any rate) seems to have been very amused by some player remaking the Doom game in City of Heroes, and I just have to shake my head at that. What we need is a story that more consistent with itself, not one that's comprised of whatever contradictory fan fiction various people put together over the years. Since CoV, pretty much, I've been campaigning for consistent, persistent and well-written storylines, and what you're extolling as the Architect's selling point is its single biggest downside.

No, they're not. When a citizen can take me out with a tossed rock, that's not in my head. When a guy in a flack jacket and a rifle can take me out, that's not in my head. When a guy I've consistently beaten for the entire 50-level spectrum all of a sudden can one-shot kill me repeatedly from across the map, that's not in my head. City of Heroes is not a PNP RPG, it's not all in our heads and our imaginations. It has a very real visual representation that needs to be consistent with the story the game is trying to tell, and when it comes to Incarnates, it simply isn't.

The very basic fact is that a god should not need help in order to progress in EVERY way available to him through content at or around his level. Dark Astoria promises to fix this problem, but like always, I'll believe that when I see it.

Then you ignore the very idea of writing characters, as opposed to writing stories that progress those characters. Characters' actions are never "scripted" when they are part of their own personal stories. It's only when characters are ret-conned or "progressed" as a means to set up the next plot point in a story and with little regard towards that character's own story when it's "scripted."

Telling me that my character is afraid of Arbiter Daos and so chooses to be a loyal Arachnos puppy and betray Ghost Widow is scripting MY actions to fit YOUR plot. On the other hand, my depiction of an assassin who hates mages and thus prefers to take missions against the Circle of Thorns is writing a character whose concept dictates the plot of the story. And therein lies the crucial difference that you're just glossing over - the Statesman had his own story, but lost it when he became a plot device. He is no longer a character in his own right. Why NOT kill him, at this point?

Being able to solo bosses was unintended behaviour, so I don't disagree. The thing, though, is that all bugs are UGLY, and I'd really like to see this one addressed. I have a hard time actually animating my powers when I want to, so this isn't as beneficial to me, and if we're supposed to be overriding rooting, then it should be official.

No, I know what you mean, but the thing is... I no longer have the kind of faith in the writers to pull this off. Not after Atlas Park and Mercy Island. The last thing I want to see now is even more of the good old story arcs binned in favour of this new style of mission-making which seems to forget we're playing a game and yet forgets to tell a good story at the same time. I'd like to see the writers try their hand at some new stuff for a while until they give me more evidence to believe they can handle the old content without dropping it and smashing it by accident.

It seems like Paragon Studios doesn't do "small adjustments." They either ignore content and leave it to linger forever, or they take a jackhammer, a shotgun and an axe to it, then try to pick up the pieces and see what comes out. If at all possible, I'd love for them to make a pass through the game and clean up mission mistakes, or even prune unnecessary missions. Something like this happened to the Ouro introduction arc, which is both a good idea and a subtle fix. Now Mender Silos talks about an alternate timeline when the Shivans landed in Atlas Park instead of Galaxy City, and this is spliced into the old text, which I remember by heart because I'm an idiot who plays that mission every time and learned the text of it.

Sadly, the splicing is done quite badly, as you can REALLY tell Mender Silos' new dialogue apart from his old one. The style of speech is quite different: He uses more contractions, he uses more colloquialisms (Paragon City becomes "Paragon," Galacy City becomes "Galaxy" and so forth) and the basic paragraphing just seems odd. It's clumsy, but as subtle changes go, this one is about the best I've seen since Altas dying while defending Independence Port from an invading alien armada (which is still in the Security Chief briefing for Indy Port, mind you), and it represents one of the best - BEST - ideas for real time in this game: Alternate timelines.

Here's how I see it:

Back in 2004, we were just getting out of Galaxy City and just facing the Rikti for the first time. Now Galaxy City is destroyed the Rikti have invaded as soon as level 1. So what about those characters and storylines that take place afterwards that don't make sense with these changes (Angus McQueen)? Alternate timeline. In THIS timeline, by the time we reach Angus, the Rikti have already invaded, but our characters that worked with him before they were invading from level 1 weren't having a daydream. It really happened. But someone's been messing with the timeline, so their past changed from right under them, and it seems like Angus was simply unaffected.

Yeah, it's kin of a cop out, but it's the good kind that's actually quite enjoyable

Looks kind of like a fountain of soot on my end, but that's probably just my interpretation.

I heard Rock's T4 is called Roll, but I can't check to confirm.

I'm talking in terms of writing. The Wardens are the "do the right thing, feel good about it" type that's material for being a good guy. The rest kind of can be argued to be good, but it's more morally grey. And the Crusaders are jerkasses, but that's a given. Moreover, you just don't get that in the First Ward. The Resistance are ********, the Praetorians are dickheads, the locals are mean and there's a crab flying through the skies.

To be fair, that's not always the case. If you're someone like me who likes the "power armour minigun guy," you're pretty much SOL. There's no AT that has both a minigun AND armour in its powers... That's ignoring the fact that no AT has minigun to begin with, that's easier to solve. There's also no AT that has both pistols and fast reflexes, nor an AT that has both a sword and a gun.

While I realise that those are just the limits of the game, having signature characters that CAN have this really does play with my emotions more often than not.