Samuel_Tow

I'm the wrong guy to say this to. I don't really care about variety. I liked City of Heroes back in 2004 and I liked what I liked back then even to this day. To my eyes, the many gameplay and publicity stunt gimmicks do little more than detract from the experience. I want to experience a story, and the legacy content did this perfectly well.

World Wide Red does not suck. I will take that over pretty much any arc written since 2007. See, new content is like remakes of classic movies. Sure, they had crappy effects and low budgets, but good directors found creative ways to work around those and still make good movies. On the flip side, the prevalence of special effects these days means you can ignore plot, story, shot composition and all the other tricks of the trade and just replace them with special effects. One of the greatest aspects of the original Jaws was the suspense experienced before seeing the actual shark, which wasn't an artistic choice, but a necessity because the animatronic shark they had wasn't working but they had to keep filming anyway, so they used barrels it dragged around instead of showing the actual shark.

Frankly, the SSAs are boring. Sure, they look pretty and, yeah, they have great gimmicks, but they don't offer anything that's actually interesting in terms of storyline. In fact, I'd have given them more credit before I realised what they would be - eight instances of trying to use the Obelisk on each of the Surviving eight, with heroes and/or villains foiling each step. SSA2 involves the Rulu Shin, but at the same time fails to explain anything about them or even make use of them in any way. These could have been Malta, the Circle of Thorns, the Banished Pantheon or any other group and the story would have been exactly the same.

I like World Wide Red because it presents me with a large, complex, well-structured storyline without actually distracting me with pointless gimmicks like five minutes of ambushes or long conversations or timed exits. Because World Wide Red couldn't afford any of those gameplay gimmicks, it had to focus on storytelling, and this it does well. Yes, it's a HUGE story, yes, it can probably be split into three part, but you know what? That's what I like about it. I HATE how so many American shows, both cartoon and otherwise, essentially have standalone, barely-connected episodes you can watch in any order. "Monster of the week" is pretty much what City of Heroes storytelling has become about. You have three missions that correspond to the typical three-act structure - the first mission you find out about the disaster you need to stop, the second mission you chase after it, the third mission you catch it and have a climactic battle, and it's not reference ever again.

I like World Wide Red because it's along story. I like World Wide Red because it's a solid story. I like World Wide Red because it's a complex story. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't waste my time with endless conversations and it doesn't waste my patience with endless gimmicks. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't rely on tricks and attention grabs to tell its story. These days, mission writers have grabbed onto complex gameplay so much that they no longer much care about telling a consistent story that ties into the canon world in general. Everything that happens comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere and is immediately forgotten as soon as it's done.

I am not and have never been interested in the fast food version of storytelling. That's one reason why I prefer anime over American cartoons - because each episode of an anime starts where the last one left off and ends where the next one will begin. This gives me a long, complex, consistent story to follow even if it's broken up into parts, and it allows character development, plot development and plot resolution to stretch over multiple episodes, rather than all having to be crammed into one and rushed like the SSAs are.

Yes, I agree that one of City of Heroes' main selling points is that it doesn't take a solid chunk of four hours to make any progress. You can log in for half an hour, run a couple of missions and leave, feeling like you've made progress. However, this doesn't mean that you have to complete a whole story in that time. You can still complete just part of it and continue where you left off. Once upon a time, it used to take me several days to run through a single story, and I liked that because it gave room for the narrative to evolve without feeling rushed. So what if it takes me five days to play through World Wide Red? I will still have seen it from beginning to end, and I will still know the full scope of its story.

Playing through SSA2 within 15 minutes just means I'm left remembering pretty much nothing from it. And, really, what is there to remember? The Obelisk can't drain Numina's powers. The Rulu Shin are completely incidental to it. In fact, both SSAs are a lot like Unai Kemen's "Your Princess is in Another Castle" arc. Go and find the Obelisk, now go and find the Obelisk and finally, go and find the Obelisk. Then go and get the skull. Now go and get the Skull. Finally, go and get the Skull. It's all gimmick and no substance because there's no room for substance and I don't think there was ever even the desire to put substance into it. The whole of the SSA storyline is unconnected events which exist solely to lead up to another ??? cutscene, but without any regard for making the actual stories interesting in the least.

As far as I'm concerned, Crimson is and will always be the height of City of Heroes storytelling, because he has the one thing that everything made since him has shunned - enough length to have a consistent plot.

Gimmicks do not make a story arc good. In fact, when a story arc is boring, they just make it worse. Graves and Twinshot are the perfect example.

Most probably, but "done well" is really the stumbling block. There are games out there which can afford to have non-combat tasks because they are built with an extra layer of gameplay beyond simple combat. Maybe they have a complex and involving dialogue system like Mass Effect, maybe they have a great environment interaction system like the Soul Reaver series or the Prince of Persia games, maybe they have a strong emphasis on puzzle-solving like Portal, or maybe they just have graphics and art design so good they can afford to have missions which are just about seeing cool locations or observing cool things.

City of Heroes really doesn't have any of that. The most we have is a dialogue system, but so far, our "non-combat missions" have hardly used any of that. Especially Graves and Twinshot have dialogue VECTORS rather than dialogue trees for the most part. Because City of Heroes is ostensibly 3D version of Diablo 2, non-combat missions end up feeling cumbersome and unnecessary because the game lacks the tools to give us anything to do in them. Even avoiding "alarm" spotlights is funky because we are (a least I am) playing with 250+ ms of ping and using "floaty" movement controls that weren't made for precision.

If the Super Secret Whatever Skills Thing had ever materialised, then I might have seen it, as you'd have missions of finding evidence, breaking through security, searching for hidden doors, following footprints or digging through archives, and those could actually be interesting. Sadly, City of Heroes' interaction with the environment extends to clicking on it and watching a bar fill in or speaking with it.

Allow me: Not everyone cares about the systemic technicalities of a numbers-based system. Some people - myself included - simply don't like to lose, and when I get beaten down by what can sometimes amount to 50 people at a time (hello, Ghoul Waves in every mission they show up) is not my idea of fun. I don't care if I get Paragon Points every time I die, I still don't want that to happen because it means I've LOST. If I can recover, sure. That's what Rise of the Phoenix is for. But if I have to go to the hospital, then this is wasteful and humiliating.

You talk about ambushes as an "immersive tool" out one side of your mouth and yet dismiss defeat as an immersive tool out the other.

No, it's not. DEFEATING overwhelming odds is what I like about my heroes, because that's what makes them badass. Getting dogpiled, beaten to death and humiliated isn't what I look for in a hero. If I wanted a "humble" experience, I wouldn't play a game where I can make an 8-foot-tall giant robot.

Having occasions of extreme difficulty to make our characters even more badass for defeating a worthy challenge is one thing. Having extreme difficulty tossed at us every damn mission is quite another.

Ambushes are not an immersive tool any more so than "Influence" is. It's development shortcut, and this one is of the lowest kind. They're the one-size-fits-all solution to every problem. Don't know what to do with your mission to make it better? Toss ambushes in it. Don't know what to do with your story to make it more immersive? Toss ambushes in it. Don't know what to do with you ... to make it more ...? Toss ambushes in it.

It's not immersive. It's lazy.

Every single mission ever made can have "... and then lots of enemies rush in!" appended to it as a finisher and still makes sense. Like any gimmick, it's only good when used sparingly. When overused, it starts getting annoying.

No, we should revive it and stop pretending it's dead. The storyline needs to progress with level progression.

Actually, now that the developers have the ability to make gender-specific alterations to text, such as Dean asking guys out to a beer and girls out to a candle-lit dinner, I'm not sure if that couldn't have been the case. Simply call male character "new guy" and female ones "new girl" and be done with it. Granted, there's the problem of calling grown women "girl," but that seems a bit more easily acceptable.

Or dispense with the complexities and just gi with "rookie." "Kiddo" is both archaic and something an old man would say, and again - Twinshot does not look like an old woman. Hell, I'd be surprised if she were older than I am. "Kiddo" assumes age, which is not a safe bed. "Rookie" assumes a level of power and experience, which IS a safe bet because it is defined by the levelling system. Sure, I might want to claim that my character is an ancient immortal vampire of incredible power, but if he's level 4 and obviously can't back that up with action, he's still a rookie.

Honestly, that's Twinshot's biggest failing in terms of writing - it's written with the assumption that we'll all be playing junior heroes. That's why dialogues make us sound so goofy and awkward and why everyone treats us like kids - because the writer honestly thought that's what we'd be.

Graves' arc, even if it were perfectly phrased and not a concept railroad at all, still fails because it's just a gigantic mess. It's a horribly poorly-defined contest that Dr. Graves essentially spends the entirety of two arcs and probably 90% of a third one explaining the rules to. It's BASEketball all over again - the rules are whatever we make up on the spot so it's funny. Actually, no, Dr. Graves' competition is more like the Freaklimpics - a parade of random nonsense violence designed to keep the attention of a bunch of doped-up idiots with metal claws instead of brains.

"Playing the hero" has to be the goofiest part, because at that point we're essentially LARPing. You want to have a contest? Set up its ground rules ONCE, then just have us compete for them in several missions. Say, like the Freaklimpics. Today is the Council gear stealing round. Whoever steals the most expensive or highly-advanced piece wins. Tomorrow, it's the snake-wrangling round, where whoever brings down the biggest snake wins. The day after that, it's the information extraction, where whoever gets the most important piece of Arachnos information without getting detected wins. Just set up the rules so they make sense, rather than seeming like random events happening on the screen.

NCsoft is a South Korean company with a US branch. It's Paragon Studios that is a US-based company.

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

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I should point out that I don't think the game is capable of doing functionally "endless" ambushes. Every single mission I've so far heard listed as having endless ambushes doesn't. It just usually has between 10 and 15 of them. Yes, I counted. There are a lot of missions that, if you try to run them while ambushes are spawning, will end up feeling like they're endless because they're such a pain, but my solution is to pick a spot where I can blindside the ambush easily and simply take ambushes out one by one. At least when they have the courtesy of not spawning so fast they stack.

I'm not saying that as a good or a bad thing, just putting it out there. Endless ambushes aren't.

Ignoring the problems inherent in wrapping us up in predetermined plot, that's still 400 Points PER ARC. If we assume all eight arcs will be 3 missions long, which seems like a fairly safe bet at this point, then all eight arcs will come up to just 24 missions. That's the length of World Wide Red, more or less. If that whole thing came out for 800 or 1200 points, then yeah, I could see it as good value for money, but at 400 points per arc? Put it like this - if I weren't a VIP already, I wouldn't spend money on them. What's there is good, but there just isn't enough for 400 points.

My point is that, yes, it's a long and difficult mission which involves a lot of searching nooks and crannies, but at least I never get ambushed in it, there's nothing to distract me from wiping out probably a good hundred mages and ghosts and it's essentially the game in its purest form - go into an instance and kill everyone, or complete an objective that will be achieved if you kill everyone anyway.

Really, that's all I ask. That's all I've ever asked. It doesn't have to be more complicated than this.

Yes, yes, of course. My concern was more about the general mentality of non-combat missions in itself. It takes a much more sophisticated game to pull this off well, and I just don't think City of Heroes is it. I mean, look at what we got last time they tried to add "variety" - protect item objectives, fleeing boss objectives, killable escort objectives, simu-click objectives, easily the WORST kind of objectives in the game, and a great bane to my enjoyment.

To pull this off in a way that doesn't feel like shackles around my feet would take a much more complex system than what we have, something on the order of Alpha Protocol or Deus Ex, and we just don't have that.

Like I said, though - if I can opt out of these, then sure. I have no complaints.

That's the catch, though, isn't it? Complex, time-consuming, intricate systems are interesting the first time through, possibly at most a couple of additional times through, but I have something like 60 characters at this point, more if you count everything I've made and deleted, even more if you count the 50s I've rerolled into new sets and ATs. I still play City of Heroes even so many times over because it's a simple game that doesn't make any one activity too cumbersome to do many times over. Combat is involved, but not "complex" and the basic build system (if you don't delve into Inventions much) is easy to replicate over and over again with only a modicum of effort.

When you start throwing in complex chains of event triggers like the Twinshot and Graves arcs... How many times do you realistically expect me to sit back and read all that stuff when I've already read it and probably know it by heart? When Street Justice came out, I made five new characters (four brand new plus one reroll) and in addition to them, I have a few more I left at level 1 waiting to be played. I went through Twinshot's arc once. I'm not going to go through it again on my other characters, because it takes SO much time to read through all of this text, much more so than would be the case with regular missions. If I do end up running those arcs, it'll be like a munchkin, just clicking "accept" without reading the briefing and clicking through dialogues without reading the text.

I do make it a point to read all of my mission briefings, even on missions I've run many times before. I do read my clues, as well. But even then, there isn't too much to read as compared to what there is to kill. The new arcs invert that, and as a result I just start to lose patience which what is, practically speaking, a distraction taking over the game.

Wrong guy to ask, Bill. I don't give a toss about badges. Sell them, take them out of the game, strip them of all players and make us have to reearn them, it doesn't impact me in the slightest. It's like asking me if I'm OK with people in China not having to pay garbage tax. Um... Yes? No? Pick an answer, it's all the same by me.

Going by presumption that you don't want badges sold for money and hypothesising for a moment that I agree with you - I don't think anyone here is talking about buying the badges associated with these unlocks, just the unlocks themselves. I want the Rularuu weapons, not the achievement (such as it is - I've always asked other people to unlock them for me and will continue to do so) or the badges associated with them. I just want the weapons.

As has been my stance pretty much since day one, I honestly couldn't care less what other people have that I don't, or that other people may be given for free what I paid money or did work for. I'm only and solely concerned with what I have, and if other people have more than me, then more power to them. Right now, you can only earn these badges in-game, and wait quite a while before you even get a shot at them, if we're talking about getting them "the right way." Having them sold in the store does not remove this from the game, and you can still technically earn them for free if you didn't feel like paying for them.

Some people look at this and postulate: "It's not fair that I had to work when you just got it off the Market!" while others simply scoff and say: "You paid actual money for this? Why? You can unlock it in the game for free! I did." So long as we're talking about cosmetic options, I'm fine with seeing them all buyable in the store AND earnable in the game, and that includes previously purchase-only boosters. If you want to pay money for the Animal Pack, buy it. If you're too cheap to buy it, then run a 35+ TF and you can still have it.

As far as I'm concerned, everybody wins. Other than people who want me to specifically NOT have the costume pieces in question, of course.

I agree with this completely. The game's storyline might change in real time, but so far it seems like this is being handled like changes in the timeline. For instance, Galaxy City was fine yesterday, it's destroyed today, but this didn't just "happen." According to silos, there was a timeline where this never happened at all, and the Shivans instead landed in Atlas Park, so the game's plot changed, but as a result of someone tampering with the timeline.

This kind of explanation is the ultimate saving throw. It allows us to have our basic timeline expand as the player advances in level, but it still leaves the door open for major changes to happen that affect the low levels as a result of events taking place in the later levels. Someone messed with the timeline, so what's happening at levels 1-5 isn't a direct result of what happens in level 45-50, but instead the whole 1-50 timeline has shifted so that something which was supposed to happen later happened earlier, but time progression with levels remains the same.

It's an idea so awesome I'm ashamed I didn't think of it, myself. This is the perfect workaround, and at the same time it leaves no excuse to NOT have the level-based timeline consistent.

Pariahs look like the old "naked alien" Rikti of old, so that connection was never secret, and it was never a real reveal. What people are referring to is the information contained in the Omega Clearance date, namely that the Rikti are not aliens from space, but rather from an alternate Earth where they've modified their own biology to such an extent that they have become unrecognisable as humans, at least in terms of physical appearance.

That's supposed to be a reveal in the 35-40 range, and to the game's credit... It kind of is. You can either get it from the original Omega Clearance, or from the Dark Watcher in the same level range, or from Timothy Raymond who throws it out as an afterthought because whoever wrote his arc did a singularly inept job of it. But all of that is restricted to the 35-40 range.

In fact, when running the Midnighters' arc - at least in the 10-30 range - you run across a "good" Rikti and the narrative wonders aloud how such a thing is even possible. To the game's credit, that's done fairly well.

I agree. It's certainly better than throwing around straw men and useless sarcasm and greatly embarrassing ourselves in the process.

Whadda ya mean "cliché"!?!

No, it IS the same as never. There's no point in running low-level content if you're no longer low level. The content itself wasn't great, it was just better than what replaced it, and I vastly prefer levelling up on Snake missions and the old Origin contacts than the only path I have now. When you see people pining over the legacy content, it's rarely because that content was good, but rather because, as an alternative to new content, it's seen as better.

When running new content, I find myself with hands extended towards the screen, yelling "Wrestle! Wrestle!" as I read through reams of text and have my gameplay interrupted YET AGAIN with more "dialogue" trees that I have no input into, or I find myself put into irritating gimmick fights that take me out of the experience one too many times.

I used to defend Twinshot's arc, but in retrospect, it's because I actually was playing a "kiddo" in it, so the specificity of her narrative didn't register with me at the time. Looking back on it, it's just the same mess as Dr. Graves - it assumes my character is a young rookie who fell over backwards into super powers. Just yesterday, I was proofreading someone's backstory which showed his character as a capable, smart veteran cop who knew the system and was simply dissatisfied with it. Getting called "kiddo" by a woman who looks like she can't be a day older than 30 doesn't strike me as appropriate in the situation.

Bottom line is, I'd like to have an option to run the old starting content AS I'M STARTING OUT.