Samuel_Tow

This brings up an interesting point. I agree with you - the hero-side lower-level game needs more story arcs, and such that don't consist mostly of time sinks. This much is a given. However, I actually do enjoy the one-off missions, as well. OK, not the street hunts, not those, but I have nothing against my contacts having a few one-off missions IN ADDITION to the arc(s) they offer.

There has been a great decline of one-off missions over the years. You go from City of Heroes, where contacts had almost as many one-off missions as they had arc missions, to CoV where contacts have one to three arcs and maybe two one-off missions, to Praetoria where one-off missions do not exist. And I'm not sure that's a good thing. Let me explain:

An arc requires a great effort in writing. You need to put down a meaningful plot, pace it over multiple missions, try to keep consistency, flow and logic, construct many missions and in the end you can still have one single stupid mission that ruins an entire arc to where people will no longer run it (see: Stop 30 Fir Bolg).

By contrast, one-off missions don't really have any of those pressures. You only need as much "plot" as to carry one instance, and it's fairly easy to fit that into overall canon. You don't need complex mechanics because you've had no story to build up to them, and you don't need massive amounts of writing since, hey, it's a one-off. Briefing and debriefing will do.

I would personally like to see a great body of one-off arcs be created "on the cheap" with simple mechanics and simple stories, just so as to add some more meat to the CoV and Praetorian contacts, and to make it feel that much less like I'm literally exhausting every last bit of content the game has just moving through the level ranges.

This is probably where we'll disagree, but I enjoy kill-all missions. Even when my mission has "easier" objectives, like defeating a boss, clicking a glowie or surviving seventeen ambushes 10 feet from the entry door, I'll still usually sweep up and down the map and kill everything anyway. I actually miss the old days when I didn't have to worry about ambushes, talking glowies, missions failing abruptly, squishy escorts, backtracking objectives, complex patrols, non-combat missions and so forth, and I could simply go into an instance and know I can achieve my objective by killing everything, whatever that objective may be.

Sure, it's not good storytelling, but I consider it the best kind of gameplay, since it constitutes the fewest interruptions. I wouldn't want to make stories entirely of kill-all missions, obviously, but that's why I'm suggesting one-off missions in addition to arcs - so that they can serve as the simple, direct alternative to the more complex arc structure. That way, we'll always have a choice between complex, slow, plot-heavy paths and simple, basic, combat-heavy paths. Theoretically, this should leave something for most everyone.

Love it! Thank you

That's the problem with a lot of the CoV missions - they go nowhere. Darla Mavis, Angelo Vendetti, Lorenz Ansaldo, Vince Dubrovski, Golden Roller and so on and so on. These may be well-written arcs (MAY be), but they're arcs about other people that we essentially cameo in. At least in the old CoH arcs, our cameos are rewarded with some sort of revelation, like "ZOMG the Clockwork King is psychic?" or "Hey, so the Outcasts are working for a bigger player?" Many of the CoV story arcs essentially come down to "go there, do that, go away." I'm not interested in fake money that I don't even get, or to forward the agenda of a resistance I don't care about. I want a story that has some sort of closure which I - and my character - can care about.

The CoH arcs I mention are easy to miss since the 10-15 range only has two arcs to five contacts. One is the Clockwork Captive where you look for and save Lu the mechanic, and the other is BoneFire, I believe, which deals with the war between Hellions and Skulls. There may be a Vhaz one I'm forgetting. The Vahzilok plague is a 15-20 arc which is actually pretty cool. Your contact sends you to fight diseased zombies, then is shocked and amazed when you contract the disease. You get that cured and end up fighting Dr. Vahzilok in person.

The thing, though, is that all the arcs I mention end up with a revelation of some sort. They don't pretend to reward our characters with fake money, but instead reward US with more lore. The CoV story arcs, by contrast, have no interesting lore at the end. It's just wham, bam, thank you ma'am. Story over, nothing has changed. That's why I like how Leonard's arc ends - sure, I still get fake money, but at least it leaves me with the satisfaction that I took it from Protean, who's pretty easy to hate.

Some of the Praetorian story arcs are good in this regard, as well. Most of the starter Power arcs end in self-gratifying closure as you steal the spotlight, and many of the earlier Warden arcs are at least less morally-ambiguous. But each path has one chunk of the overall Praetorian storyline that it reveals along the way, and THAT matters.

No, I agree that the problem needs to be fixed, I just don't agree with the slash-and-burn approach people tend to default to when proposing fixes. One doesn't need to nuke the Launch game form orbit, because it has a lot of good stuff in it that I'd like to see preserved. It merely needs to see Security Chief and Forced Introduction missions weeded out and, if necessary, extracted to new contacts, possibly Security Chiefs.

I also don't always agree what constitutes a "fix" on older content. One of the criticisms usually levied against it is that missions are simple, repetitive and boring, and newer content is brought up as an example. The only problem is that I've liked content less and less the newer it is, because it becomes overcomplicated and fat with exposition. Yes, I want story and background, obviously. But I want a good mix of "just fighting" in there, too. And this complicated method of content design creates far too many missions with almost no combat and far too much sitting on my hands and reading in-between missions.

After the release of the Architect, the developers committed to creating content more complex and more elaborate than what players could make, as an answer to the concerns players had of developers outsourcing new content to the players. In my eyes, this was a mistake, because the complexity of content has been raised to such a degree that the cost of creating it now appears prohibitive, and the result is fat and cumbersome.

Praetoria's story is interesting. Once over. Any more than that and it becomes unwieldy to be bogged down with this much text. It's getting to the point where if I skip reading the text, I can run an arc for a third of the time it would take me if I were diligent with my lore.

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To summarise: Kill or translocate Security Chief and Forced Introduction missions (and PvP liaison) missions. Add more content TO THE OLD CONTACTS, but don't make it so complex and intricate so as to feel like it's from another game entirely. Make regular missions simple and end arcs with a more complex finale. If need be, rearrange mission door locations to be in the same zone as their contacts at least for the first 20 levels.

This should fix it.

Hmm... If Ashley did indeed have two dozen father who all happened to look the same, it might explain a lot of her dialogue...

It depends on the powerset, really. Weapon attack Masterminds who have weapon-wielding or "eccentric" henchmen aren't really customizable. A Mercs Mastermind has the same three blasts that the Commando does and that some of the other henchmen do, but because AR attacks are not customizable, the henchmen aren't, either. They don't even get weapon customization while the Mastermind does.

As a general rule of thumb, I'm finding that any summon power which takes custom colours somehow affects the summoned pets' powers, as well as the summon effect colours (sometimes). That is excluding Poison Gas Trap which is bugged and doesn't take custom colours for its large-scale poison gas field, but that's besides the point.

And, yeah, I did miss it. It was partly my fault in not even imagining that kind of customization could exist, but I lay part of the blame on the Power Customization interface, too. It does a good job of showing us what we're changing on Click powers, but not on anything else. We barely see our toggles, we don't see what any of our pets do and sometimes we don't even see the actual power effect if it grants a power to the entity, like Detonator's.

I hear Incarnate Powers are customizable, so I hope this comes with an upgrade to the power customization interface down the line.

Story of my life.

Actually, I DO question this. The assertion that Praetoria is unquestionably superior rests on the assertion that more complex missions are always better than simpler missions. I don't think this is a claim one can make on its face, if for no reason other than because I honestly disagree with it.

Whenever I go back to the old City of Heroes game, I do cringe at some of the writing, the typos and the pointless missions, but at the same time, I feel much more liberated from the straightjacket storytelling of City of Villains and especially Praetoria. In those, there seems to always be a game mechanic waiting for me around every corner, booting me out of the flow of the even more basic fighting mechanics. There's always something complex, always something that I have to stop and think about, always something that's a bother.

In fact, Praetorian missions appear to have an almost unjustifiable ratio of gameplay to text. In City of Heroes, I can usually expect to take a mission and be given an instance to clear out, meeting a few clues, maybe some NPC banter and a boss or two. In Praetoria, I'm given a conversation, then a long briefing, then a short mission with nary a handful of spawns with three clues and an in-mission NPC conversation, then booted back out into the street to speak with another NPC, then back to my contact for more long briefings, then back into an instance that consists of just one conversation with one guy, then back out for more clues and briefings, then back into a mission which consists of six ambushes before it ends, then my arc ends... And that's it. I've run some arcs where I've defeated fewer spawns than the number of missions in the arc!

You know me - I'm the last guy to argue about less reading and less plot. But it's like watching a movie: After a certain point, it has too much exposition and not enough actually fun stuff taking part in it. Missions and arcs don't need to be over-engineered to the point where I spend 90% of my time reading mission text, conversations, clues, pop-ups and NPC chat. At its heart, City of Heroes is still a game about fighting stuff, and while a plot is nice, I'd sooner play fights with little plot than read through novels of plot with little fighting.

In short: Breaking down my game into small bite-sized single fights punctuated with a plot is not an improvement over having back-to-back fights with almost no plot any more so freezing to death is better than dying in a fire. We need a happy medium, and Praetoria ain't it. CoV is a lot closer, ironically.

Once towards the end of the game is enough, really, at least as far as I'm concerned. If you sprinkle in other people attempting to do the same and being foiled - either by you or others - you can at least make the world appear as though it's capable of these things, even if it practically isn't.

Then there's also the other side of the coin: So I tried to take over the world and failed, but perhaps I achieved something very impressive in return for said failure. I know you hate the Clone Factory storyline, but considering it ends in a total loss... It doesn't really end in a total loss. Sure, we have no use for Protean's money from a gameplay perspective, but the satisfaction that HE doesn't have it is usually enough for me to gain quite a bit of closure.

A lot of times, a decent villainous story doesn't need to end in success to be satisfying. I'm perfectly happy seeing my villains fail if they manage to make everyone else FAIL HARDER. Sure, I couldn't take over this Arachnos base for my own, but at least I set it on fire so now they can't have it, either. In this, I invoke the Nemesis principle - even when I lose, I still win, if for no reason other than because you lost even more.

Speaking of this, something struck me just yesterday - I'd appreciate it if the button to Accept were bigger. A LOT bigger. Back home, I have a very large screen with a very fast mouse, so the unnecessarily small button makes the process more annoying than it strictly has to be.

I must have misunderstood his post, then. To be honest, with how many people are asking for a redesign of the basic ice armours (the blocky snowman looks IS a bit passé), I'd say we may be due for a redesign of ice and snow powers in general into something that would look less "bad" when coloured in brighter shades.

Well... You learn something new every day. So that's why people draw comparisons between the Wrath of Kahn and Nemesis.

So, how about them model sliders?

I want to bring up a bit of context here. When I say "lower-level," I usually mean sub-20. I don't swap characters on a whim, meaning the only time I'll swap a character is if I'm putting my current one on hiatus and picking a new one to focus on. What this means is that on a new character, I can go from 1 to about 25-26 before I lose interest and switch focus. I've done the 1-26 trip about five times since I19.5 came out, and haven't done much else.

That TF is so obscure and the contact for it so faceless I'm surprised anyone even remembers it. I have NEVER run this TF, I have NEVER seen it advertised or heard anyone talk about it... I don't even know what it is about Hell, I can't even remember if the guy looks like a Wolf Spider or like an Arbiter.

To a large extent, that's the problem. City of Heroes has never been a large-population game, even by PlayNC standards. So it seems a bit... Odd to me that they're designing larger and larger team encounters.

It also means I get sick to my stomach of looking at the same damn zone over and over again, and doing the same five missions and the same one contact chain on every character I make. City of Heroes has enough variety to where I can run three or four characters back-to-back without really running much if any of the same content. City of Villains doesn't have enough variety for even just one.

Leeeeeave eeeet!

When it comes to customization of the actual henchmen, by the way, I want to see something more exciting than getting the same soldiers with different faces. If we do indeed get the choice to pick from a variety of henchmen models, I'd like for the customization options to span as wide a thematic field as possible. Off the top of my head:

Soldiers: The current soldiers we have resemble generic modern-day armed forces, SWAT dudes and an Arnie-style Vietnam era commando. An alternative could be WW2 soldiers, Star Wars reminiscent storm troopers, black armour clad faceless goons and even alien soldiers, like lizardmen. Bonus points if each model comes with its own custom weapons.

Thugs: We have modern-day gangs. How about Freakshow-inspired cyberpunk gangs? How about Wild West bank robbers and gunslingers? How about la resistance?

Robotics: We currently have largely Malta-inspired robots. How about more human-looking androids? How about less human-looking Rikti-drone-inspired things? How about WallE style torsos on caterpillar tracks?

Ninja: We have B-movie ninja filled in with what looks like esoteric stuff. So how about techno-ninja in the style of Metal Gear Solid's Grey Fox? How about orange jumpsuit wearing ninja? There's room for more options.

Not touching Necromancy at the moment. I'm happy with them right now, which blocks my imagination on the subject.

I tried to stay out of this as much as I could, but there's something I have to say to this train of thought:

Just because meta-game limitations will not allow us to do certain actions, it doesn't mean that the game shouldn't let us at least ATTEMPT them, even if we all know they'll never succeed. It's a lot like Wardog's plan to nuke all of Nova Praetoria. From the very moment he suggested it, I knew it wouldn't work, because I knew we couldn't remove a zone from the game. So when the twist came to make sure he couldn't, I was not surprised, but I still appreciated the storyline.

One doesn't need to be allowed to destroy or rule the world, but one should at least be given the illusion of trying to do so, nevertheless.