Samuel_Tow

I tend to work slow when it comes to costumes, largely because I wait until I'm playing the right character, but I do have this 2x2 collage of my Velcro Kitty (a name I intend to change on reroll, as I can't tie it into a decent story):



This was done some time ago when I was still planning for the Vanguard pack and trying to decide what to reroll said Blaster as. My choices were Scrapper, Brute or Stalker, and what I picked would depend on the weapon I chose.

I and a few others settled on Energy Claws. Axe and Shield is cool, but not for this character and both Broadswords and Katanas will be used by other characters. But the Claws were cool enough, and I don't have a Claws Stalker yet, plus the character sort of looks the part.

I was just about to whine about the Vanguard pack and the anniversary badge when I checked the game to see I have access to Vanguard pieces at character creation. Well, that's enough to make me happy. Let's see what I can do with those.

Also, it's worth remembering that we're not going out of our way to poo-poo the official response thread (that I haven't seen but I'm sure they've created). That WOULD be in bad taste.

I'm perfectly happy with with the hero Respec Trial. It's a little on the easy side, but I'd rather have things too easy than fail the damn thing, which I have back when it was harder. It's a trial to snag a respec that you probably need right then and there.

In fact, I'd like to see the villain respec made easier. The Vines section is just annoying, especially with the tree shooting barbs at you and immobilising you while you try to trim the vines before they regrow. Making the tree inert until you can attack it would be much appreciated.

Does anyone have a YouTube link to this cutscene that I can see?

One of the reasons I didn't want to phrase this as a complaint is that we're currently only seeing less than half of the storyline of Praetoria. In fact, considering the pace at which events unfold in the later levels, I'd say we're not seeing more than a tenth of it. So it's quite possible that we'll start running into more magical characters later on, or that we'll find out why magic isn't as prevalent. And when I say "find out," I mean find out, not "make a stab-in-the-dark guess and go with that."

Interestingly, I did a mental tally of the magical enemy groups that we have on Primal Earth, and that came out to a staggerringly short list, too. Mostly, we have the Circle of Thorns, the Banished Pantheon and the Mu, and that's it. We have a few more groups like the Outcasts and the Hellions, but really, the only major spellcasting villains are the Circle and the Pantheon, with "the Mu" being more a cadre of mages under Arachnos' heel. Same for the Legacy Chain, really, and the Midnight Squad. They're just generic wizards in a few different organisations, and if something has indeed happened to drive those underground, it wouldn't be very surprising if they showed up as just one organisation, possibly including an internal rift, like every damn faction in Praetoria.

So, yeah, we'll have to see what comes up next. I hope Praetoria isn't drawn up as some kind of magic-less world, to be honest. That would be needlessly restrictive. Then again, the way it's drawn up even now, with everyone living under Tyrant's thumb, it's very restrictive as it is. I'm really not sure how will turn out, to be honest.

I looked through the magazine and realised I'm exactly the WRONG person to be reading about fashion. I applaud your effort and your ingenuity, but will refrain from commenting on the actual product.

I've been running a new character through Praetoria the last few days, and it made me wonder: What drops magical salvage here? Now, the answer to that question isn't interesting - I keep getting magical salvage, so SOMETHING drops it - but the follow-up question to that has had me going over existing content and pondering:

What enemy group in Praetoria is magical?

Now, yes, I know you can point to Black Swan, Diabolique or Infernal, but those are all old content and they don't show up IN Praetoria. I'm trying to figure out if there is any magical group that new character starting out in Praetoria is likely to meet on his or her way to the old game where magic exists in spades. And I honestly can't think of one. Let's review what we have:

Resistance:
-Primarily Tech. They have techno rifles, power armour, neutron bombs and energy gauntlets, plus hackers and inventors on staff.
-Sometimes Mutation - Vanessa DeVore and the various other psychics they have on staff make this up, but I haven't seen any in the actual rank or file, so there can't be many available.

PPD:
-Primarily Tech. They have power armour, energy shields, energy blast gauntlets, scanning devices and so forth. They're technocops.
-Partly mutation. The PPD do have many Seers on staff and they show up with regular occurrence, so they definitely count.
-Sometimes science. Occasionally, they'll employ Ghouls, Failed Experiments and then there was that Second Division with the reincarnated Colonel Duray as a cyberghoul.

Syndicate:
-Primarily Natural. They employ a wide range of martial arts, both unarmed and using melee weapons and guns of all kinds
-Partly Mutation. Most of the Syndicate Suits are psychic, be that through direct psychic powers or telekinesis or pyrokinesis.
-Maybe Tech? I mean, they have computers and labs and... Motorcycle helmets. That ought to count for something.

Destroyers:
-Purely Science. "Me have body by Superadine!" Well, Fixadine, but the difference is academic at this point. They rarely use guns, they rarely use skill. They're mostly Raging and Crushing through pure brute strength.

Ghouls:
-Primarily Science. They're the Praetorian Earth Vahzilok - mutated human beings and possibly reanimated corpses via scientific experimentation.
-Sometimes Tech. The Failed Experiments have cybernetics, though it's not clear how much those help, and Noble Savage is pretty much a cyborg.

Clockwork:
-Pure Tech. They're robots. Simple as that.

And that's it. That's all the factions I've seen in Praetoria. Mostly tech, sometimes science or mutation. Even if we went ahead and added Natural to all the factions that involve humans, I still don't see a single faction that's actually magical. I never really noticed that before, but it seems like all the Praetorian content enemy factions are all mostly technological.

I don't really mean this as a complaint, really. The last thing I want is to shoehorn in a faction that doesn't fit in, but it's just... Odd that the Praetorian setting is THIS different from the rest of the game. Some people have called it a major departure from established themes (though probably not in those exact words) into a much more sci-fi bizarro future environment, and I can kind of see why. Paragon City and the Rogue Isles are sort of a mish-mash of different fictional worlds that clash in-fiction where they don't go well together in-theme. Praetoria, on the other hand, feels like a Minority Report style alternate future that's focused on its theme to the exclusion of esoteric elements.

I keep wondering: What happened to the Praetorian Circle of Thorns? Cole can't root the Resistance out of his own tunnels. How could he have rooted out incorporeal ghosts out of their miles of claustrophobic catacombs? What about the Midnight Squad? What happened to the Tsoo's ancestral magic? Where did all the demon-worshipping street gangs go? What happened to factions like the Legacy Chain? What about the descendants of the Mu? I mean, we KNOW magic exists on Praetoria, or at least we know by proxy, so where is it? I can see keeping it out of the eye of the public, but would the Resistance seriously never care to explore black magic as super weapon?

I hear we're due for more in-Praetoria content at some point in the indeterminate future, and I really hope they bring some more magic back into the world. It feels a bit too much like Mass Effect as it is now - all tech and science, no magic and mysticism. And we've proven those can coexist.

I foresee much costume fun to be had soon. With the fixes to the Animal Pack and the coming addition of the Vanguard pack, this should be quite tasty!

*edit*
By the way, the title for this thread was inspired by the Angry Video Game Nerd's review of Action 52. Most of the games there are terrible and open with just a white text menu on a black background. So when he gets to a game that starts with a title screen, his response is "Wow, a title screen? Really?" In other words, it's a good thing, but it was just so unexpected.