Samuel_Tow

I like my games to be more than just pushing buttons and seeing loud colours on-screen. I tend to look for depth of narrative, quality of writing and so forth. Now, obviously, I won't look for that in a game which is obviously not ABOUT those things. Really, how much narrative power did Space Invaders have?

But City of Heroes is... Or at least WAS a game about good writing, good stories and emotional content. Much of the original Launch content did a lot to inspire me into both the writing style and the preferences I have today. Sure, it wasn't stellar writing, I can admit that, but at least it seemed like it was trying. It constituted a genuine story. A lot of what has come since hasn't been nearly as good, either constituting a messed-up "they just didn't care" tangle of continuity or a complete failure at comedy, which renders any drama behind it a complete failure by default.

I praise the original CoH content for trying to tell a good story, rather than subsisting on knock-knock jokes. And I still respect it for that. Indigo's "person behind the professional" character is something I hold to a very high regard to this day. The end of the Missing Melvin and the Mysterious Malta Alliteration was actually a very touching, if brief scene which inspired me to write quite a few characters and more than a few stories. It's just that good, because it isn't strictly narrative for the mission progression, but it's still a nice and very deep look into the very heart of the character. And it's even a little funny, as well as more than a little sad.

I don't get that from dreck like the Roy Cooling arc or clowns like the Admiral Stutter TF. And I actually LIKE the Stutter TF. I hold the game's writing to a very high standard because it has earned that standard, and it's continually disappointing to see that there's no-one left who gives a crap about it. War Witch is apparently content on throwing in self-referrential humour, but I've long since seen anyone so much as care about professional integrity or artistic content when it comes to writing. It's just an excuse to get us from instance to instance, from one amorphous sack of hit points to another, and maybe throw a very basic joke at us from time to time, because that's about the height of its intellectual aspirations. And it's a cryin' shame to see a fictional world of the quality that Rick Dakan left us with perverted into THIS.

We can do better. We SHOULD do better. And we should not be so quick to excuse bad writing because, really, who cares about writing? I care about writing. I happen to do a lot of that. And it HURTS me when potentially good stories are half-***** because no-one cared enough to even try.

*edit*
I'll be honest here - if the game ever devolved into "the act of punching the crap out of whoever was closer," I'm gone. Instantly. Without a second thought. City of Heroes without the plot, setting and writing is mediocre garbage at best. It's the super heroes, the amazing and improbable stories and the fantasy of "anything goes" that keeps me here. Half-*** that and you ruin the fun of the game right quick.

I have one. Let's pick on the most obvious candidate: You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch... I mean Mr. Phipps! I'll skip the "orange text" as that's mostly exposition and focus on the hero and vigilante responses, instead. I'll do my best to change as little as possible. Here's the Tip's hero and vigilante response text in its original form:

As I said before - multiple-path locations doesn't have to entail open-surface maps with no defined paths, and it doesn't have to preclude going through specific locations. It's what I like to call a hubbed design. This is where you split your map into various checkpoints where important events happen, but give the player multiple paths between said events. In older office buildings, lifts act as such checkpoints. No matter how sprawling one storey is, you can only enter and exit it at one point.

What I mean by this is that a map can be designed with many branching and re-merging paths, but still have a linear progression of important locations if all paths are occasionally bottlenecked through said important locations. All roads lead to Rome, as it were. This gives the map a more open feeling, it makes progression through it easier to track and it gives developers specific locations that they can be sure the player will pass through in order. Other games have used it in the past.

Games have historically always had such bottleneck points, even games where this isn't obvious. Whenever you have a level which ends when you reach a certain point, you have a bottleneck. It doesn't matter how sandbox the level itself is, you can always bottleneck the player at least some part of the way directly before the exit point and force him to go through specific events. Assassin's Creed does that all the time by use of unclimable fortresses with only one viable entrance that specific missions force you to find and then play cutscenes when you do.

All I'm asking for is that a little more care be taken with map design. We're obviously not using random-generated maps (as should be obvious if you do a /whereami inside an instance), so there's really no reason why these should be done with so little regard. Remember, guys - we spend almost our entire time in this game inside instances. These are the environments we see the bulk of the time. They should be an important part of the game which receives a high priority and much developer attention, not something to knock together whenever there's time between other projects and drop it entirely.

---

Incidentally, what killed Halo for me was that its locations were BORING. Forest to indescribable tech base to forest to indescribable tech base. When your locations don't look like anything, it doesn't matter how architecturally diverse they are (and Halo's weren't), because in the eyes of the player, it's all just weird alien tech and non-descript forest. This is a problem we faced with Arachnos maps way back when. It doesn't matter what pipes and cables and consoles you hook up to the sides of your corridors when they're of this hard to describe fantasy tech. At the end of the day, all players see is "still more corridors" with different props strewn about. Locations don't need to BE diverse, they need to LOOK diverse, and in order for one location to look different from another location both locations need to look like something the player can recognise and tell apart.

This is a common problem in modern gaming, especially with the proliferation of the Unreal engine of late: Locations don't look like anything. When it's all an indescribable alien mess of stuff, is one pile of unrecognisable metal really going to look different from another pile of unrecognisable metal when all you really see is just different flavours of the same general thing? It's more important to make your locations memorable in some way, so that when players see one, they remember it, and they remember it when they see the next location, and they can tell at a glance that they're in a different place.

This is why Half-Life succeeded so well back in the day - because its locations looked like something. When you're out at the dam wall, you know it's different from the offices you were in before, and you know those are different the service tunnels you were in before that, and you know those were different from the elevator shafts you were in before still. "Where am I now?" is a question the player should be able to answer at every point in his journey, because if he can't, then every place he goes to will look like every place else.

Really, my problem is less that I don't appreciate the humour (and I don't) and more that I feel it's a cheap humour that gets in the way of potentially less cheap humour. And I'm not trying to bash people's preferences hear. But it really IS cheap, because it's based on an obvious gag, and because it frankly doesn't take much creativity to produce.

If it were just that joke over nothing else, I'd groan, probably complain and move on. But it's not JUST that joke. Because beneath it, there is an actually amusing bit of writing, and I want to highlight THAT, because it's a much more masterful use of comedy and humour. Because it took work, because it took imagination, because it took genuine artistry. Yet it gets buried under the cheap laughs.

To me, it's like going to a fancy uptown shoes-and-tie restaurant and ordering a burger and fries. It's missing the point of what could be so much more. Of what IS so much more.

---

I've spent inordinate time bashing the game's writing in a whole slew of locations, but this isn't because I hate writing or I have the game, merely because so much of it is bad. There's actual GOOD WRITING here, but it's eclipsed behind bad jokes and corny one-liners. I want to bring that to attention, I want to praise it, I want to make it known, because I want more like the actual writing behind Fusion and Jane Temblor, their inter-personal dynamics and their power designs.

Few people fully realise what the two of them represent. Not just good writing, but GREAT writing. We have actual characters who manage to be established and fleshed out in all of two sentences. We have characters having actual believable conversations IN REAL TIME. We have character interaction written just about as well as I've seen it anywhere in this game and coded to a level above and beyond anywhere else that I've seen.

On top of that, we have a boss fight which relies not on simple "Get away in time!" tactics, but on actually using the two bosses to impede each other. Yes, when Fusion pulses, he knocks players away, but he also knocks Jane down. And when Faultline rumbles, she not just knocks players into the air, she knocks Fusion down. Pulling the AVs apart actually removes this element, and playing one boss against the other is a GREAT idea that exists precisely nowhere else in the entire game.

And yet all anyone remembers about them is "Haha! Fusion is wearing a girl's spandex!" It's demeaning to what is probably some of the best writing we've seen in literal years.

I appended mine to my original submission. @Samuel Tow, just to repeat it here.

I was under the impression that the suggestion was to pick Scanner/Paper missions from everywhere that were OUR level, not to enable people to redo old Paper/Scanner missions. If there is need for that, stuff those in Ouro.

I'm personally mostly interested in convenience. The other day I finished my tenth Hero Tip in Founders' Falls. I now needed to kill stuff to get a Morality mission, so my instinct was to tune into the Scanner. Only because this was a level 41 character, I couldn't. I had to trapse all the way to the station to get to Talos Island to get to the Ferry to get to Peregrine Island, because the game wouldn't let me get level 40+ missions in Founders' Falls. Even though I had just come out of a level 41 mission in Founders' Falls.

I understand why this is, or think I do - each zone has its own Scanner/Paper contact with a different set of missions - but if Tips work from anywhere, I see no reason why Papers and Scanners shouldn't.