Samuel_Tow

Then I'll give you a very simple example: Battle Toads. This is a game which requires you to be VERY good at it, if you want to get anywhere at all in the game. It's not a question of semantics or tolerances. The game FORCES you to be an extremely good player "if you want to play it."

Of course, there are always options to try a game before you pay money for it, some more honourable than others, so for one-time purchase games, there's rarely an argument to be made, though there is still room. As was mentioned before, a sequel to a game you like more or less "forces" you to play it, because you liked the old game and wanted something just like it. Oftentimes, a sequel won't be just like the game it extends. As such, people's fandom for a particular franchise may make them play a game they aren't completely happy with.

In my case, I'm "forced" to play Warrior Within because I like Sands of Time and The Two Thrones so much, and the trilogy doesn't make sense without part 2. But it's more an annoying game than it is a BAD game, so it's not such a problem.

Hey, I tried City of Villains, didn't I?

Good call, and this is one I ran afoul of. I heard tell that Fallout 3 was modelled after one of the Elder Scrolls games. I say "one of the..." because I didn't play any of these games, because I didn't really like any of these games. I have my reasons. As someone who liked Fallout and wanted a sequel, but didn't like Elder Scrolls, Fallout 3 was a massive disappointment. I wasn't really a fan of the story or of the gameplay. It was, in no uncertain terms, an entirely different game that just happened to share a title with two others that I really liked.

I should have known better than to expect anything like Black Isle's old adventures, now that they're gone and the world has forgotten their ways, but it was still a massive letdown for me as a fan. As I hear it, though, Fallout 3 won over a lot of fans to the franchise who hadn't been interested before, so it looks like their tradeoff worked. Just not for me.

I want to address this, since it keeps coming up, both here and elsewhere. There are as many definitions of what constitutes being "forced" to do something in a game as there are people who play games. However, one has to keep a particular bit of context in mind - we are not forced to play games to begin with. Once we do play a game, anything we do, we do because we clearly and obviously chose to. As such, I prefer to use a definition of "forced" along the lines of "I have to do this if I want to achieve that." This means we're never forced to do anything, strictly speaking, but but we often are forced to do things if we want to get much mileage out of the game.

For instance, I am "forced" to participate in the plotline of Mass Effect, and would be forced to do it even if I didn't enjoy the storyline (which I do, but suppose I don't for the sake of argument). I'm forced to engage in Mass Effect's storyline because the game doesn't progress without engaging in it, the game does not progress WELL without being aware of it, and there is, quite frankly, very little else of note in that game other than the storyline. As such, I have a choice between playing Mass Effect for the story or not playing Mass Effect at all. And "just stop playing" tends to be an undesirable effect for game designers.

That said, has City of Heroes done anything to FORCE me out of my comfort zone? Not entirely, but it has certainly tried. One of the game's bigger draws is making your characters more powerful, so when additional avenues for this are introduced, players begin to feel forced to participate in them, as it's still more of improving your character, which is what many are here to do. Has that FORCED me to change the way I play? No. Not even close. As has been said - the old game is still here, so I always have the option of playing that.

However, as I said, my questions isn't about Incarnates. I didn't title this "Should Incarnates take us out of our comfort zone?" for a reason. This is a broader question of game design which extends past this one single subsystem and even past this one single game. It's a basic philosophy. Do you pander to your players, trying to guess what they want and provide that, or do you try to push your players in new directions in an attempt to get them to want something else? It's a valid question, and how far in what direction each of us is willing to go is interesting to hear.

I believe that's the fate which befell the Empire Earth series, though for the most part due to a cause of plagiarism. The original Empire Earth was a thinly-veiled clone of Age of Empires, while Empire Earth II was essentially a Rise of Nations clone. I'm not sure what Empire Earth III was trying to copy - WarCraft III, most likely - but it was very much a whole different game and not really worth exploring for fans of the original, for whom Empire Rise of Nations itself wasn't true to form enough.

When a sequel makes a genre switch, it's making a huge gamble. The gamble is that this will earn said sequel more new players than the number of old players who like the old game but not the new one. Of course, some people can make the switch easier than others, but in many cases, fans will be lost. And it's quite natural to do so. They liked the original, but because the sequel is a wholly different game, it is no longer to their liking.

For instance, I found Resident Evil 4's outdoor beat-em-up gameplay to be superior to that of the older instalments, but at the same time recognise that it's a fully different game.

Times were different when Dino Crisis came out. At the time, I considered this genre to be the height of quality. Judged against modern games now, no, Dino Crisis doesn't measure up. But it still measures up better than Dino Crisis 2!

This is slightly off-topic, but it's quite an interesting take on the game. If I read you correctly, you treat the game, in at least some small way, like a puzzle. New challenges represent problems, and you enjoy using the unplanned interaction of in-game tools to find a solution. I can respect that, and in many ways, I even share your take on things.

However, any way you slice it, I keep wanting to play the game like I would Soul Reaver or Oni or Fighting Force - as a "beat-em-up meets shoot-em-up," to quote PC Gamer from 15 years ago. That said, I will try to look at things from your perspective in the future and see if I can't extract some extra fun out of problem-solving, as well.

I probably said that wrong. I don't mean to argue against uniqueness and variety, so much that I mean to argue against using them as an excuse for introducing awkward, stilted mechanics. All I wanted to say is that "different," while desirable, isn't a quality that trumps "good" or "convenient."

Contrary to how I may have came off, I don't have a problem with alternatives to Build Up. My problem is that I HATE most of the alternatives we have to it right now, and fear that newer ones will be even worse as the game runs out of options. But, hey, if we come up with a good alternative, I have no problem giving it a shot. So long as it's not a Follow Up clone or, heaven help us, a Swap Ammo clone.

Really, variety and uniqueness are good things. It's just that the developers seem to interpret them as "even more situational" when I don't feel it needs to be that.

I have a router which comes with software tools to display any MAC address I type in to the network it's part of. That's how I managed to hook two PCs to my ISP despite them having a strict 1 PC policy and securing their network by MAC address verification.

Furthermore, does a site even have access to your end user MAC address? I'm not too tech savvy when it comes to online technologies, but wouldn't that catch the MAC address of a hub somewhere on the ISP's network or, at most, a subnet router MAC address?

You're free to feel as you do, even if going out of your way to silence me strikes me as more than a little unfair, considering my opinion ought to be worth as much as yours. Especially considering most "new" stuff since pretty much I6 onward has been a fit for your opinion, I'm not sure why it worries you that I may have something I like for a change.

What I do know is you're not going to change my opinion, especially with arguments like that. I prefer simple, I prefer conventional, and that's just how I feel.

This is probably where you and I will have to disagree. I'm probably alone in feeling this way, but I have to be honest - what I do now in-game to have fun is precisely the same thing I did back in May 2004 when I first joined - I made cool characters and I ran missions with them. Oftentimes THE SAME missions I did back then. And I really have no problem with it. I never really have any illusions that a game should never evolve and expand - it should. But it feels weird when the old ways appear neglected while the new ways don't interest me.

And so as not to be accused of harping on about Incarnates again, let me bring up a different example: Dino Crisis vs. Dino Crisis 2. The former is somewhat bizarre Resident Evil clone with something of a plot and survival horror gameplay. The latter is - from what little I played of it before I quit in disgust - was an isometric third-person shoot-em-up broken up in stages, timed, scored and very light on plot. Huh?

Or how about Sands of Time? The original was a somewhat combat-light, light-hearted parkour game which focused on a loose narrative and a surreal feel. Warrior Within turned into what we would define today as a "like God of War but..." game, a hack-n-slash action game with a whiny emo protagonist, bloody visceral combat, large-breasted evil women and hard rock music for some bizarre reason, probably because the Scorpion King came out at around that time. Or, further still, Prince of Persia (the 2008 one, not the 1989 one) and its swap from indoor puzzles and large melees to almost exclusively outdoor environments and only ever one-on-one fights.

When I say "force," as was brought up before, I do mean just that. When a game changes to such an extent that it feels like something other than what you originally bought. I'm not saying that this has happened to City of Heroes (even if I've said it before, I don't make that claim here), and in large part I'm not even talking about actual historic events.

Why I bring this up is I've noticed the IDEA that it's good for games to force (sic) players out of their comfort zone, as the only truly great way to succeed. That a game which "panders to the base," as it were, is somehow morally inferior to one which forces the base to change and "man up," as I've heard it said in the past. Granted, rarely from game designers directly (though Bulletstorm did end up having to insult you to buy it in its trailers, but then again that's Bulletstrom for you).

My mother always said that I would deliberately make myself hate things she made me try to see if I would like them, simply because I always would. In reality, I've just always had a pretty good grasp on what I like.

However, I do agree with you - anything in video games is worth at least checking out. As I said, I would never have gotten into female character design as much as I did if I didn't sit my *** down and design a few good costumes despite having no real idea what I was doing at the time. That's at least one point for trying new things and enjoying them.

However, there are a couple of problems regarding that concept.

First of all, I can only get into something new either if it inspires me when I try it, or if I'm otherwise inspired to try it by something else. "When I feel like it, as it were." Who knows, maybe a couple of years from now I'll be inspired to get into Inventions, figure out some system that makes them workable for me and be all the stronger for it. But just being told "Hey, it's in the game now! Go try it!" catches me in the wrong mood more often than not, and my impressions are rather a lot less glowing for it.

Secondly, suppose I do try something new and realise I don't like it after all. Then what? I know it sounds like a loaded question, in that "just do what you did before" is the obvious answer, but should the game keep trying to make me like it? Should I be accused for somehow being at fault for not liking it as though I chose to feel as I do? Because I've seen that in practice.

In short, it's always a good idea to try out new stuff, but that in itself isn't a solution.

This is something I was getting at, yes, and part of the reason I feel this is a question that should be addressed by the public at large, not just my own reasoning and preferences. Some people do enjoy the "challenge," for lack of a better word, of not existing in a static, knowable world where all problems have been solved, all questions answered and mysteries figured out. They thrive on being taken out of their comfort zones and in so doing find new experiences and overcome new difficulties.

I, myself, am completely the opposite. I've always preferred a static, explored world that I can frolic in and have unassuming fun. That's not to say I'm incapable or unwilling to accept change, but more so to say that any change - even positive such - usually demands a period of adaptation before I can appreciate it, and not all changes end up being necessary.

It's kind of the butting of heads between those two viewpoints that I want to look into here, especially cases where one's values get attributed to another. I have, in fact, seen people talk to the effect of "Well, you'll just have to get out of your comfort zone." They make this statement as though it's a given, natural part of video games, and that those unwilling to it aren't up to par, making me recall the old days of games with limited lives and Nintendo hard bosses. I do not miss those days.

Really, I can't discuss the issue without taking a side - I have my own opinion. But at the same time, I want to hear everyone's opinion on the matter, and I don't intend to argue AGAINST anyone here.

Something of an aside here: I know a thing or two about pushing moral event horizons, as I have in a few stories I've written. One in particular went so far over the line that I had people tell me that they refuse to read more of it until I assured them that this wasn't just dark for the sake of being dark and I was indeed really going somewhere with it. That is to say, it's fairly easy to push people out of their comfort zone (in this case the tone of a story), but the reactions to doing so are... Not always pleasant. In particular, when it comes to writing "evil" stories, one has to do so with a VERY careful hand.

It's the easiest and most recent example, but it's far from the only one. I can easily cite the Market as another such example. The Market and Inventions are City of Heroes' answer to loot, that much is beyond reasonable debate at this point, and both systems bring with them that same "phat lute" mentality that is prevalent in other games. Some people embraced the system and fell in love with it. I find it to be cumbersome, clunky, slow, unwieldy and very, very disorderly. To me, Inventions represent a system that, in order for me to engage in it, I have to go quite a ways out of my own comfort zone.

As it is with Inventions, so it is with quite a few other things (the Architect, Alignment Merits, Vanguard costumes, temporary powers, etc.), when I sit down and run a tally of what must happen to my playstyle in order for me to get into any of these, I realise that that would make the game not fun to play. Hence, I am facing the choice between going out of my comfort zone and playing in a way I don't enjoy so as to engage in some of the newer things, or not doing so and effectively missing out, as it were. This isn't restricted to teaming, as I feel the same way about quite a few soloable activities, while at the same time enjoying a few teaming activities, as well.

This is a broader question than just specific examples, however. The meat of it comes down to whether we should accept and indeed encourage games to nudge, coerce and eventually force us to do things we may not enjoy at the time, in the hopes that we will eventually change our minds after having experienced them, or whether games should be less demanding and more benevolent, allowing us to play as we choose, even if that means doing it "wrong." And it's not just an idle question, either, because it goes to a root decision in game design: How many "tough cookies" do you feel you should give your players?

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By the way, this also feeds into innovation, as Uber Guy mentioned, though I may or may not have forgotten to quote him. As a market space becomes saturated with games, newer releases begin having to innovate and give people a more and more different experience to the one they've grown to expect from the genre. To do otherwise is the quick path to obscurity, because it gives people no reason to try a game that's exactly like what they're already playing.

MMOs, by and large, have completely and utterly failed to do so pretty much for as long as I've observed them - and this is a legitimate concern, I think - but the fact remains that sooner or later, we'll start seeing games presenting us with experiences we're not comfortable with, if for no reason other than because they're new and we aren't used to them. Releasing such a game is always a gamble, since you have a far greater chance of ending up as that weird game no-one played than you have of creating that genre-redefining or indeed genre-defining work which will get cited for decades to come the same way games like Doom and EQ were.

In these cases, though, I think it comes down to how people react to your genre innovation. A game like Bulletstorm, for instance, is rather unique among FPS games for having elaborate skillshots for extra points which can then be spent upgrading weapons. I'm sure some find the added complexity and challenge of trying to pull off *** shots and crotch shots all the time, but to me it just ended up ruining an otherwise pretty good game, and ensuring I'll never play it again. Why? Because every time I think to do so, I remember the god damn skill shots and decide against it.

But again - I don't have a good answer as to where the middle ground lies. Clearly, a game which expands its players' horizons can be considered a smashing success. However, can a game which matches its players' comfort zone precisely not be considered a success, as well? Every game review for every game ever made tends to have about as many pros as it does cons, so all games we play have something forced on us that detracts from the experience. Wouldn't a game with nothing to hate about it still be as great as a revolutionary, genre-defining title that still has its host of growing pains and innovative drawbacks?

How much can a game afford to "push" its players in search for this broadening of the horizons before it starts alienating them? How many of us can deal with a yelling drill sergeant? How many of us dread moving to a new town where you don't know anybody? How many of us can stand the monotony of everyday life and watching remakes of remakes of old games and movies? It's not an easy question to answer.

Not to mention not actually banning the specific computer who made the offence.

I don't consider anything in World Wide Red padding, myself, because every mission advances the plot, even if not by much. Contrast this with something like To Save a Thousand Worlds, where the words "Your princess is in another castle!" come to mind. Almost every mission in that arc consists of nothing at all, as almost none of them advance the plot one iota. They're just busywork. Not so in World Wide Red.

You call these "newspaper quality," but I disagree. Newspaper missions have basically no plot and never amount to anything. "Elvis Presley rules downtown! Like spit he does! This ends now!" is not a plot. At best it's a plot point, but for lack of an overall story, it's meaningless. I assume you equate those to newspaper missions because their internal mechanics aren't complex enough, which I can see as nothing but a GOOD thing. Not once in seven years have I asked for more complex mission mechanics. I may have asked for more choice, I'll give you that much, but hostage escorts and ambush spam are not choice. The VERY few times actual choices show up in missions, it's very cool, but these are so rare as to not be worth mentioning.

To me, World Wide Red is the perfect kind of arc - it has a pretty damn elaborate plot when you put it all together, but the missions themselves are simple and uninterrupted. It gives me my fill of plotline in-between missions, but it also gives me my fill of flow in games without halting my playing experience ever step of the way with an ambush or a mandatory conversation or an escort or plot twist or a sudden inexplicable timer or with annoying sidekicks or with constant intercom chatter or with non-combat missions or with any of a whole host of complications that take me out of the experience.

I don't like the new design philosophy of the newer missions, I'll be blunt here. This philosophy seems to regard "killing stuff" as something bad that should be avoided whenever possible, so missions potter along from one set-piece to another, with action treated as a necessary evil to get us from point to point. Look, I made a guy with a cool sword or a cool gun. I want to use that, on real enemies, if possible. Have plot, by all means, but don't let that keep me from, you know, killing stuff.

It's like professional wrestling. Yeah, yeah, we want to follow the storyline and see the "soap opera for men" to its conclusion. That's part of the fun. But ultimately, we're there to see people wrestle, not take turns giving promos for two hours straight, with every match being either a gimmick match or ending in shenanigans or a disqualification.

I was wrong initially. BABs was talking about "cartoony gems" indeed, which implies that it looks bad more so than that it looks unrealistic. I actually rather doubt that, myself, but he is (was) the graphics designer in the house. Hence my response - if it looks bad, make a better version, instead of limiting colour selection.

I hate Power Syphon because it's a gimmick. I know it makes sense, somewhat, but the execution for it irks me, and it's one of the reasons I've let my kineticist linger. In general, I really dislike Follow Up style damage buffs, especially the one behind Dual Blades' Empower combo. It more or less forces the set to open with smaller attacks and work its way up to bigger attacks, whereas Build Up sets can go from big to small or small to big. This helps mitigate incoming damage as a Build Up + Head Splitter, say, can one-shot a minion, whereas Nimble Slash + Ablating Strike + Blinding Feint + Sweeping Strike takes much longer to do so.

Finally, I HATE HATE HATE Swap Ammo. Few things in a Blast set piss me off more than lacking a self damage buff - such as God damn Assault Rifle - and Dual Pistols does just that. The apparent benefit of Swap Ammo is considered to be so great that the rest of the set is gimped because of it, leading to what has to be THE most conflicting experience in the entire game. I REALLY wanted to play that set, because it's probably the coolest of all the Blast sets... But at the same time I REALLY didn't want to play the set because it's just not very good.

Gimmicks are overrated. Literally. When a set gets handed a gimmick power, it has to "pay" for having that gimmick power by losing effectiveness in other powers, all for the sake of having a gimmick which isn't even as good as what it's replacing. Power Syphon isn't even my biggest gripe with Kinetic Melee - it's the low-damage, high-cost ranged attack that bugs me.

Not entirely. First of all, Stalker Dual Blades isn't quite as good, for the simple fact that so many of its combos are either tied behind Assassin's Strike or otherwise open with a small attack, and because the set's two strongest attacks lack guaranteed Hidden criticals for being cones. More than that, though, people always seem to underestimate the power of Build Up by citing over time metrics. The problem is that I don't spend my entire time fighting Especially on a Stalker, I don't spend even more than half my time fighting. As such, Build Up allows me to both focus my damage buff on my strongest attacks where it will do the most good, as well as to focus it in the time when I'm fighting, letting it recharge when I'm waiting for Hide to recover.

This is my problem in general - Build Up works. To my eyes, replacing a power which works just fine with another which doesn't always do that just for the sake of being different is not a good idea, or at the very least isn't a no-brainer. Different isn't bad in itself. Rage is different and it's cool. However, we're dangerously close to running out of different things that are cool, and some of the newer "different" stuff has had to scrape the bottom of the barrel. Not a good idea.

Here's the thing, though - why do different sets have to do completely different things? There are only so many things a melee set can do in this game, and the farther you move away from those things, the more awkward the set becomes. Personally, I like sets like Broadsword and Energy Melee. They do what melee sets should do - deal damage - and they do so in the most direct way - by hitting enemies with damage. No annoying combos, no constant low-grade damage re-buffs, no worrying about minor elemental damage components, no nonsense. Pick an enemy and hit that enemy until it goes down. So why can't any new set ever be as simple as that?

My beef with the need for being different is that it makes every new set more bizarre than the last as the developers try to outdo their own weirdness in design. An it isn't necessary.

When I make a suggestion for, say, a Two-Handed Hammer Brute, I'm really not asking for anything groundbreaking (not in the figurative sense), in that I want a set that hits things with a big hammer. That's different enough for me. I don't need "Momentum" replacing Build Up, I don't need the hammer to inflict a "Bruising" effect, I don't need a hammer toss power or suchforth. I want one guy with a big hammer hitting people, done in as simple a fashion as possible.

*edit*
As for the set itself, I'm not really a fan of it, to be honest, not as proposed. Its resemblance to Spines is a concern, since Spines is not a very good set. It was at one point, but now that so many melee sets have been buffed up or sped up, it lags behind with its slow animation and lack of single-target damage, to the point where Claws does much of the same, only better. A melee set really doesn't need need three or four ranged attacks. I suppose one could look at Electrical Melee and counter me with that, but I contend that - to keep to theme - that sort of AoE potential is what makes Electrical Melee "different." I'm hesitant to repeat that, because I'm not too much of a fan of the set, as lack of single-target damage makes fighting hard targets somewhat problematic.

I would personally go off the Broadsword model - four decent single-target melee attacks, an AoE and a Cone and something exotic. This is where another AoE or cone can come in, or where a very strong debuff can be found, something like a dumbed down Lingering Radiation or such.

I like gimmick sets as much as the next guy, but I'd prefer more solid and less "interesting" sets, if I had a choice.

This is pretty much where I stand. I have an alpha slotted on two characters so far - one was the Axe/Shield Brute I had been playing when I19 rolled around, and the other is the SS/Inv Brute remake of my 50 MA/Inv Scrapper that I focused on to such an extent I played nothing else from 1 to 50. I've yet to play a level 50 anything since, and frankly, I don't feel like I'm missing much.

I've always wanted to have dual origins, to be honest, or at least to have a less prominent and functionally irrelevant "secondary origin," if I so chose. The reasons for this is pretty much what you explained: Some concepts just dabble in multiple fields. I can think up a few off the top of my head right here on the spot:

Demon who is created from magic and is alive because of magic, but who takes up technology as his weapon of choice just because he wanted to be different.

A mutant who was born different and much stronger, but then underwent scientific experimentation to make him even stronger. In other words - Wolverine.

A regular person who was turned into a supermutant by super soldier serum, then fitted with high-tech cybernetics on top of that. In other words - Noble Savage.

Or how about one of my very own: Samuel Tow's most direct power source is scientific experimentation, in the shape of a sentient cancerous implant which slowly replaces his tissues and organs with better ones as the old ones get damage. This gives him, among other things, instant thought and reflexes, as well as the strong body to respond to them. However, the bulk of his offence comes from an unbreakable sword that can cut through anything, self-reloading firearms of infinite ammo and unnecessarily high caliblre, as well as a techno suit to put Grey Fox to shame. So which origin is he?

To be honest, I'm personally growing a little weary of how awkward some of the newer sets are, all in the name of being different, to the point of resorting to out-and-out BAD ideas just for the sake of being different. I'd love to see a simple, classic melee set that doesn't have any cumbersome mechanics or square-peg-in-a-round-hole powers just for the sake of being different, and as a result inferior.

For that matter, I'd like to see newer sets with Build Up. I love the power, and its suspicious absence in melee sets from Dual Blades onwards is a concern for me, and a big one, too. It's gotten to the point where all our new stuff is so "different" that creating something conventional would be different by exclusion.

This sums up my feelings quite neatly. All of CoV feels like it was made on a tight budget and on a short deadline (which it probably was) because it has almost nothing other than the most high-value items, such as story arcs. However, not every story needs a multi-mission arc to tell it, indeed. Arcs are good, but having one-off missions in addition to them is even better.

Papers and tips don't quite cut it, partly because they start looping all too quickly, and partly because they don't actually tell a story. Paper missions depict an event and tip missions focus on character morality, not story narrative, and they rarely end with narrative rewards, to boot.

One-off missions that reveal faction-specific lore or other canon not available in arcs are a very good use for these, especially when they're subtly referenced later on. Take, for instance, the Executable #whatever mission against Crey. It's a two-instance mission, but is not part of an arc. Some time later, "the Doctor" reveals that she is working with Executable #5 against Crey in the Revenant Hero Project.

Tips don't really do that. They rarely have anything to do with any plot thread in the game, and indeed appear to have been written by someone who'd read comic books, but hadn't played the actual game, since they involve Z-list characters and have plot threads independent from everything else in the entire game.

Crimson is a weird case. He has a give-or-tale 20-mission arc in World Wide Red and EVERY other mission he gives out is a three- or four-instance mini-arc. That one contact probably has more raw content to his name than the entirety of Praetoria.

What's funny, though, is that what we used to consider "mini-arcs" has become the standard for story arcs proper these days. A Mini-arc would usually be three instances and a "talk-to" mission, or four instances as is the case with Crimson. Well, most of the post I8 story arcs ARE three missions long. Take Jim Temblor, for example.

1. Save Fiusionette
2. Fight Kurst
3. Fight Nocturne.

The end. That's his entire arc. He then sends you to Penny, whose entire arc consists of:

1. Save Doc Delilah
2. Defeat Muxley
3. Save Wu Yin.

The end. We are then sent off to Doc Delilah, who has the following missions:

1. Find Akashiknight's body.
2. Find Akashiknight's SG base's location.
3. Explore Akashiknight's SG base's location.

Off to Agent Six! I won't list his missions, however, since he has about five or six. The ENTIRETY of Faultline, however, constitutes less content than JUST Crimson's World Wide Red. In fact, it constitutes about four or five of his "missions."

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You know what kills me, though? "Zone arcs." Ye gads was that a bad idea. The so-called zone arcs aren't arcs in the slightest, they're just one-off missions artificially stuffed into the same over-long list of missions that constitute an "arc." This means that most contacts in the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa don't actually have a story ARC to their name. They just have a collection of one-off missions that they pass off as a story arc.

To my eyes, this concept needs to die in a fire. It's not a story, it needlessly locks you into it, with the contact forever displaying a red book, and IT IS NOT A STORY! To my eyes, a contact need both a story arc AND one-off missions, not just one or the other. That's what it comes down to.

While I agree with you on the notion of having standards of quality and not just slapping anything in even if it looks like my *** in a funhouse mirror, there is a flip side to this "Kain's coin theory" - holding something back because it doesn't look good enough against popular request instead of redesigning it to look better AND feature the requests made is not a very good solution.

To put it in less of a run-on sentence: If brightly-coloured ice powers look bad, then redesign the visuals for the custom powers into alternatives that don't look bad with custom colours. Yes, it's understandable that at the time of power customization's original creation, there probably wasn't a lot of time and opportunity to be making brand new effects for entire powersets. I get that. But it's been what? A year now? Sooner or later, better, less cartoony effects SHOULD be introduced.

I'm fine with waiting as long as it takes. What I'm not fine with is the developers looking at the half-***** customization options and going "Welp! We did all we could, so it's working as intended. Too bad so sad!" and declaring the customization of ice sets finished. It's not. What we have for ice power is nothing more than a placeholder. As such, it works about as well as one can expect, if one were to expect a real, actual version of said power customization to be added at a later date.

If certain powers look "wrong" with certain colours, then the solution is not to slash and burn the colour palette. It's to introduce additional FX that do look good with said colours.

Example: Original powers use "bright" sprites that look good in bright, whitish colours, but look terrible in darker colours and in black, because they become almost invisible. The solution wasn't to take black out of power customization, but rather to include both Bright and Dark custom options so that both bright and dark colours could be used for customization. If Ice powers look like cartoony gems when coloured in less pale tones, then put in new effects that look better in said colours.

To be honest, I picked yellowish-green to match Poison, which I customized only because I couldn't quite replicate its colour.

When he was still here, BABs talked about instituting some system to help us figure out which custom colours most closely matched a power's default effect, but this seems to have gone away with him, since nothing ever came of it. As such, the closest I could come to the greenish tinge of Poison was kind of the colour of pea soup, which I considered to be close enough to both Poison and something I could customize my Dark Blasts to.

When you can't make one powerset look like another, make both look like something else altogether