SlickRiptide
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Quote:See _Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_ for a concrete example.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The face is simply someone you cheer and the heel someone you boo, and it's not that difficult to make a story where the audience wants to cheer the villain and boo the hero.
The problem is that there's nothing that "we" can do to give them back their dignity. The writing staff is in charge of that and that writing staff insists on stripping them of their dignity. It's not just the SSA's, you know. I haven't mentioned Dilemma Diabolique but it's just more of the same. Phalanx and Vindicators = Weak and useless. Your supergroup = Awesome winners.Quote:Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
My point is that while what you're complaining about is valid, that ship has sailed. The best we can do now is try to work from there and hopefully give the FF back some of their former dignity, but that'll take at least a full storyline to happen, and you're only on part one of a full storyline. I suggest seeing where they go with this.
It's the difference between writing
"With [Statesman] gone... I do not know if the Phalanx is still up to the challenges ahead"
and writing
"The Phalanx is hurting right now, $Character. It will take time for them to come to terms with their new organization and return to full fighting trim... time that we do not have. We will be relying on you even more as we face the challenges that lie ahead."
You see? It's the difference between "Those guys are old news. Losers. They were only any good at all because Statesman was carrying them all." and "They've taken a blow that might have been mortal to a lesser team and they need time to recover but one day they WILL recover."
I much prefer the latter. The writing staff seems bent on doing the former. If running down the signature heroes is not an official studio policy at this point then it sure is giving the appearance of being an official policy, and that would be a bad policy that requires re-evaluation. -
And... Here's exactly what I'm talking about:
Quote:Yep. I'm up to the challenges that the entire Freedom Phalanx gets a "no confidence" vote on from Grandma.Originally Posted by WavelengthI will be frank, Artiste. I fear for the future. The world has been beset by more threats than the good citizens of this city would ever care to know, and by and large we've managed to survive until now because Statesman has led the way. With him gone... I do not know if the Phalanx is still up to the challenges ahead.
But... perhaps you are. I sincerely hope that is the case.
Phalanx = Teh Sux0r
Artiste = Teh Aw3s0m3
Who could ask for more, right? -
Quote:It's a question of degree and frequency. If this was the first time it had ever happened, then sure. I'd be way more lenient about saying "Huh, I wonder how that happened?" (However, since the pretty obvious answer is "the Well did it", I don't see it as much of a mystery, though I suppose I should finish the arc just to make sure that there aren't any surprises there.)Originally Posted by Doc_Reverend
Acting "retarded"? They got blindsided. And being able to hurt Numina. Ever go and think "Wait, no, that's not lampshading. That's a good question."
But people see what they want to see here.
It's not the first time, though. It's been going on since the SSA's launched and it seems to be the special feature of the SSA's that they're full of hero fail by the signature heroes and full of praise for the player characters. Contrast this to the final scene of SSA 1.7 where Recluse defies Wadelaru by an act of willpower. Villains rule. Heroes drool; except your hero, of course.
Sure, I exaggerated about Grandma Wavelength, but the point is the same regardless. Listening to her express her disappointment doesn't add anything positive to the experience. She doesn't even have much in the way of grounds to be disappointed - with Statesman gone, none of these Phalanxers are "her" Phalanxers. The only purpose to inserting that comment is to punctuate how ineffectual the Phalanx has become in contrast to a hero like your character. Being torn apart by a bunch of trolls, even super-enhanced level 51 trolls, is just the icing on the fail cake.
I'll remind you about SSA 1.3 where everybody fails, your hero allows a famous heroine to die, and the wrapup dialog from the NPC is, paraphrased without any exaggeration, "That was a horrible thing but we're giving you a medal anyway because we know you tried hard."
SSA 1 was one long litany of failure on the blue side and SSA 2.1 is not shaping up to be any better from what I've seen of it so far. I can hardly wait to see how the rest of the Phalanx gets their posteriors handed to them while I handily clean up after them and have Wavelength congratulate me on being able to handle the things that the Phalanx could not.
Yes, I exaggerate about the extent of the writing but the content of it and my reaction to it is genuine. Obviously, your mileage my vary. However, I think that exaggeration aside, that there's adequate evidence that I am not alone in thinking that this constant stream of hero failure in tandem with the attendant stream of adulation by the mission-givers smacks of nothing more than a gimmick designed to make players feel good that their heroes are so much better than the signature heroes who can't seem to do anything as well as our player heroes can. -
Quote:Look up. The point is up over your head somewhere.Originally Posted by Doc_Reverend
"... I'm being praised? DAMN YOU, DEVS! YOU SUCK! MAKE ME LICK THEIR BOOTS!"
In a less snarky vein, the complaint is not "Oooo, people are praising me."
The complaint is "You're offering me praise for being just the same as I've always been but trying to justify the praise by making the signature heroes looks hopeless in comparison."
Case in point - Grandma Wavelength. It would have been enough for her to thank me and congratulate me on a job well done. The writer, however, felt that wasn't quite good enough, so s/he also tossed in some dialog about how Grandma was so very disappointed in the Phalanx, but she supposes that's to be expected. She can't expect all of her grandchildren to be as brave, strong, intelligent, handsome, gifted and all-around wonderful as I am.
All that being over and above my character defeating a bunch of trolls without breaking a sweat, while these same trolls somehow devastated Positron and Numina, and the writer even lampshades the fact that Numina is a ghost, so how the hell did they even touch her?
Magic, I suppose. I couldn't bother finishing the story arc to find out. I'm sure the Well is involved on some level. That much is obvious, even without the title of the chapter as an obvious clue to what's going on. -
Quote:It wasn't always like this, though. Way back when the idea was first being bandied about as a possible epic archetype, the idea of incarnation was literal. Statesman literally was a reflection of Zeus and was wielding some of his power. That's the whole point of the first Top Cow story. Recluse was literally the avatar of Tartarus and so his powers reflected those of the titan, in both kind and nature.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I get that Incarnates were the big selling point and a storyline was needed specifically surrounding that concept. I'd have scrapped the idea from the get go, but let's say we're stuck with it.
An incarnate archetype was someone who was essentially an avatar of one of the gods, and those gods themselves were originally recipients of power from the Well/Pandora's Box so they may well have been avatars of the primal forces of order, chaos, nature, and death.
That's all the story that was required. The obvious problem with this concept is that if you want to make everyone happy then you suddenly have to come up with dozens of powersets, one for each major mythical divinity.
The current, more generic version of incarnate doesn't really embody "incarnation" at all. Granted, it's easier to implement but the downside is that we now have a single mad god as our God and the resulting story that goes with a mad god. HP Lovecraft would probably love it. -
Quote:Power levels are not the point. The depiction of the power levels is the point.Originally Posted by Mad Grim
Its true though, you can choose to not use incarnate powers or play them as you just getting stronger normally. As for the general public treating you like the best hero ever... well, you are. In the last SSA statesman was killed by Wade, and then you beat up Rulawade, who was Wade combined with a dimension eating monstrosity. This basically makes you stronger than Statesman, and everyone knows it.
The method in vogue at the moment is to depict over and over again how the Freedom Phalanx and other signature heroes fail, followed by the player hero swooping in and saving the day, and then the contact telling you how wonderful your character is and how disappointing the signature characters are.
It's about story telling, not power levels.
An equivalent villain story would be that Recluse tries to rob the First Bank of Paragon City, and Longbow captures him so the player villain has to come in, kick Longbow's posterior and walk out with Recluse and the money. Recluse then says "Thanks, $Player, you're so strong and villainous, that I don't know what I'd do if you weren't around to save me."
How likely is that to happen, do you think?
So, why does it keep happening over and over blueside? It doesn't need to. The game can acknowledge the PC's strength and accomplishments without simultaneously tearing down the signature characters by way of shortening the yardstick, as it were. -
I'll promise to try all of the content, and do it with an open mind, as free of pre-judgment as I'm able. I'll refrain from knee-jerk reactions based on the differences between what the game is and what I wish it would be, and I'll try to give a fair and even-handed chance to all of the content, even the stuff that I just patently don't like.
Just, please, stop. Stop kissing up to my characters. It's become unseemly.
I get that your marketing department decided to buy into the whole "no NPC should be more powerful than ME" line of thought. Fine. I suppose you've got some kind of reliable marketing data that predicts that to be a successful strategy.
What you seem to have forgotten, though, is that while there is a faction of players who can't stand the thought of anyone else being Numero Uno, there is also a significant faction of players who enjoy having an ideal to strive for. There are precious few such ideals and role models in Paragon City these days. The current game is all about acquiring power until, apparently, you acquire Ultimate Power and become a deity yourself.
My characters generally don't care about Godhead. They care about leaving the world a little better off than they found it, and maybe finding a restaurant that serves a really good cheese pizza.
Nowadays, as a player I'm having my ego stroked constantly by the game showing me just how useless the Freedom Phalanx is and how wonderful everyone thinks it is that my character is there to clean up their messes. This is not having the effect that I think you intended it to have.
When Grandma Wavelength tells me how proud she is of me, with my college education and six-figure salary, and how disappointed she is in poor bumbling Cousin Raymond with his assistant manager job at McDonald's and his bumbling slacker friends, it doesn't make me feel good about myself. It makes me feel bad for Cousin Ray; the moreso because he buys into Grandma's feelings and telling me that he doesn't know what he'd do without me there to bail him out.
I don't feel proud and accomplished. I feel like grabbing Ray by the collar and telling him, "Buck up, Man! Who gives a smeg about what Grandma thinks? She married smegging Doctor Doom and now she thinks she's a Vanderbilt. You are Doctor Raymond Smegging Keyes. You shoot anti-matter from your fingertips! You're one of the leading engineers of this or any other age! Have some pride! You think the Statesman was a leader because he was everyone's friend? No! He was everyone's friend because he was a leader! He didn't waste his time trying to make everyone like him. If there isn't someone, somewhere who thinks you're a pompous *** then you're doing it wrong!"
Seriously - Just stop running down the signature heroes. It's not necessary and it's detracting from my enjoyment of the game. I feel like I'm surrounded by this gang of yes-men. "Oh, Artiste! You are so strong,and brave, and heroic! Look, those Trolls somehow beat up Numina who is a smegging ghost, and they tore open Positron's armor like it was paper, but they couldn't even touch you! Can I touch you? Then maybe you can... Well, you're right, you should get to know me better first, but I swear I'm totally worth it..."
I just came off of a six-month stint with Another Big MMO. It was my longets stint with that game and a big reason was that their newest content went out of its way to make the level-capped characters feel heroic. They did it, though, by emphasizing my character's accomplishments, not by comparing all of the signature characters unfavorably to my character. "Hey, Player_Character, we've got a situation here. We're holding the line as best we can, but we're going to fail unless we can find a Big Damn Hero to accomplish this task that will turn the tide. You've proven that you're a Big Damn Hero. I know that you've got other things to do but this may make or break our whole story if we don't get your help."
I felt more heroic running those storylines than I ever felt in one of these recent "Look how much better you are than poor bumbling Cousin Ray" stories. I also felt a lot like a Mother Hen at times, but that was better than feeling like the world was pumping me up by knocking down everything and everyone I might ever have looked up to.
If my heroes want status at all, they want to be equals to the top tier. They want to be invited to the party. They don't give a rat's posterior about setting the bar for top tier and they definitely have zero aspirations towards becoming gods.
I'm not saying I represent everyone, and maybe your marketing data shows that I don't even represent the majority. Here's the thing: that theoretical majority just wants to be "the best". They don't really want to be kissed up to by imaginary characters of pixels and script any more than they wanted to be surpassed by those characters. They just want to be recognized as being the top tier. You can let the PC's raise the bar without having to reduce the existing NPC's to second-stringers who can't carry the football five yards without fumbling.
The people who actively want to spit on Cousin Ray and lord their six-figure salary over him and gloat about his not-quite-blue-collar service industry job are themselves a minority, in my opinion. We shouldn't be catering to them. Doing so is detrimental to the game experience, in my opinion. It certainly is detrimental to MY game experience.
Thanks for listening. -
Quote:I got a good laugh out of that. It does raise the question (hey, suddenly we're back on topic!) as to what shape the American military is in and, by extension, that of the rest of the world?Originally Posted by Arcanaville
...I don't think the US military gets out of bed for anything less than an extinction-level event anymore.
An incursion of Primal United States by Arachnos is like an incursion of Bartertown by the Girl Scouts.
In real time, it's not quite ten years since the War. If Paragon City is an acceptable model of the world in general, then recovery is mostly complete, although certain threats, like the Praetorian War and the renewed threat of the Lineage of War might be holding things back and consuming whatever new military resources were developed post-War. If Longbow is being given carte-blanche to pursue their little war, it may be that it's because the government wants to pursue a military response but simply is not in a position to mount one. -
Quote:In my opinion, leaving these matters to Longbow IS taking it lying down, but that's clearly not a consensus by any means.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I don't want to get into politics, but the modern tales of Iraq and Afganistan would suggest to me that the US wouldn't take getting their cities repeatedly invaded and people killed in massive televised terrorist events lying down.
At any rate, it seems that I'm going to have to stop wearing my "anything too silly to be real isn't actually happening" blinders. (Yeah, Arachnos invading the Overbrook Dam for no particularly good reason falls into that category for me. Arbiter Sands is the saving grace of that whole mess. ) -
Quote:No harm, no foul. That's text message communication for you. You've actually given me some food for thought about Longbow that may have me reconsidering some of my opinions about them.Originally Posted by Zemblanity
P.S. Slick, never in any part of my previous posts did I willingly flame you. I'm quite fond of your ideas, and approached this as a healthy discussion rather than a competition (as I did in the past concerning WWD and Praetoria). Again, if I've given you a different impression, I apologize.
Ultimately, what I want is to be shown what their official status is and not just be told "They're the good guys. What more do you need to know?" Especially since much of the time they aren't portrayed as being all that good.
Then again, this is comic book world, where the FBSA apparently has ninja that will eliminate me where I stand if the government thinks I've gone rogue, so why should I expect more than that from Longbow? :-p -
Quote:I'm reading this as an implied statement that I don't know anything about NATO, so go get educated. I'm going to assume that isn't completely what you intended and move on, other than to point out the numerous places in the website where they mention "Peace", "U.N." and "collective will".Originally Posted by Zemblanity
NATO - go read up if you want.
On the other hand, you DID get me envisioning this topic in terms of US vs. the Taliban/War on Terror, so that's something. In that respect, NATO at least claims that they are in Afghanistan by invitation of the Afghani people and with their support. No such claim could be made for a NATO presence in The Rogue Isles.
As for NATO not being "an arms dealer", I can't help what it says on the official backgrounder for Longbow.
The "base" is a ship off the coast. If Warburg is so important, where is their Agincourt? Bloody Bay has a bigger Longbow presence than Warburg has. Never mind that they are facilitating the private acquisition of missile launch codes.Quote:Try entering Warburg from blueside, you'll notice you're standing on a Longbow base.
I'm unconvinced that I should do that. *shrug* You referenced SSA #1 a couple of times. What about the previous 6-7 years? We just ignore that because someone finally wrote a story where Blitz actually made a threat against someone? Again, if Blitz is a rebel, why is Warburg even an excuse to invade the rest of the Isles?Quote:Stop demonizing Longbow.
Prior to the silliness of the Galaxy City/Atlas Park invasion, the only thing that came close to justifying the Longbow invasion is Siren's Call. I happen to think that's also a pretty silly situation; but let's run with it. What's the real situation in Siren's Call? Is Recluse retaliating for the invasion of the Isles? Is there something there he wants? Is this a beachhead for a full-scale invasion of Paragon City?
Who knows? It's just a place where heroes and villains fight each other. While we see what amounts to armies on both sides fighting over inscrutable targets, the official description is that villains are "trickling in"; basically a security breach. Doesn't sound like something to go to war over.
In the six or so years prior to SSA #1, there has never been any credible reason given for the invasion of The Rogue Isles other than "Ms. Liberty wants to send her Uncle a message." THAT is why people demonize Longbow. They're not NATO. There's no evidence that they they represent the US government or have any oversight by the government. In fact, the word "militia" is used repeatedly to describe them, not just because the imaginary Arachnos agent was being colorful but because it's a word that gives a patina of officialdom to the enterprise. They are a volunteer "militia" in the same way that our heroes are "deputies". Why or how they are getting NATO support is a hand-wave that's never explained.
So you agree that the whole thing is basically ridiculous? Again, where's the evidence that the government has anything at all to do with them? It's not supported by the official lore. I'm unaware of any Generals running operations in Freedom Corps. The written background of the group is that they are independent zealots under the leadership of Ms. Liberty who are out to fight "evil" as personified by Arachnos (even though we've never actually seen any such world-spanning evil come out of Arachnos that would inspire this never-ending stream of idealistic youth to come out to fight them, except possibly Recluse's Victory).Quote:Longbow is the government's solution to the meta-human infestation just a few miles off the coast of Rhode Island - pack a bunch of unruly teenage patriots with nullifier rifles and send them hunting. -
It depends on what you define "best" to be, but I would still classify Croatoa to be the "best" overall content. There are many reasons, but the biggest one is that the zone itself tells its own organic story about the invaders. You can learn many things about the Cabal, Tuatha, Red Caps and Fir Bolg just by exploring the zone and watching the NPC's. I still remember the first time that I encountered "Tuatha Island" after I had come to think of them as virtual beast-men as a result of fighting them on the mainland. I saw them in a completely different light after seeing how they comported themselves in their own "home". Likewise, when I moved deeper into the zone, I learned about their relationship to the Red Caps and my opinions about them changed yet again.
From a world-building standpoint, Croatoa is one of the most interesting zones ever added to the game, IMO. -
Quote:The quibble is whether Longbow = NATO, meaning that the Longbow invasion is a multi-national action sanctioned by some subset of the treaty members. NATO was formed to protect Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I have to question whether Albania, Croatia, Slovakia, et. al. actually give a rat's **** about the Rogue Isles. Maybe they'd just rubber-stamp the US government policies; I can't really say.Originally Posted by Zemblanity
Let me remind you that NATO's mandate isn't maintaining world peace, but rather to enforce the interests of a select group of countries. It's perfectly legitimate for NATO to be concerned with a terrorist organization with nuclear weapons operating just off the coast of Rhode Island and take matters into their own hands, even without UN backing.
You're suggesting that nuclear missle activity in Warburg somehow justifies invasion of Nerva Archipelago while Warburg itself goes pretty much unmolested aside from the diplomatic measures that resulted in the death of Miss Liberty? I'm not sure I understand what your point is. If nuclear war was Longbow's concern, they'd be focusing on Marshall Blitz instead of leaving him free to do as he pleases (and incidentally assisting random private individuals to launch and control Warburg orbital weapons platforms).Quote:Originally Posted by Zemblanity
I'm one of the greatest critics of Longbow policies in a fictional, Vanguard dominated world, (mirroring NATO's tendency to bypass the UN whenever it serves their national interests in the real world), but I won't go so far as to say Longbow is Ms. Liberty's private gang. I just don't see it that way. As Issen said, given the events that took place in WWD #3 red-side, would you sit around waiting for a UN resolution while the US coast is being nuked?
In any case, if I was the US government and I was concerned about nuclear attack I'd exercise a military option, not put the decision of how to handle it into the hands of a paramilitary group. -
Quote:Yes. I agree completely. With that, I'm going to drop the discussion; not because I don't want to talk about it, but because I dearly want to say entire screenfulls about it and none of it will ultimately be either constructive or to the point of the original thread.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
You can't chide Longbow for being a bad hero group and NOT chide Arachnos for being a bad villain group. And I don't mean "evil" bad. I mean "this makes no sense" bad.
Just - Yes, the actions of Recluse and Co. are the actions of a second-rate comic book mustache-twirler (Ha ha! Now that Atlas Park is in turmoil, I will oust the mayor, take control, and proclaim it to be Recluseville! Muahahahahahah!!!!!)
The reaction of the US government, to make no military response but instead to "Let Longbow handle it" is completely nonsensical. However, in comic book world nonsense is sometimes the only sense there is, and we've been in comic book world for a few years now.
With that - 'nuff said. The point stands that despite whatever association Longbow has or doesn't have with NATO, they have never been demonstrated to be any kind of NATO department or official division of NATO. They don't get off the hook as being "peacekeepers" just because they have some unspecified association with NATO in their backstory. -
Quote:Longbow is not NATO. NATO is NATO. Longbow is a private mercenary army that may be getting some oversight from some part of NATO. The description claims that they get materials from them but we don't really know how deep the connection is or if there's much of a connection at all. I have a difficult time believing that the rest of the world sees the Rogue Isles as a threat to world security that requires an international military response.Originally Posted by Zemblanity
That said, Longbow (NATO) are openly fighting Arachnos in the Rogue Isles, so it can't be said that the US and their allies are doing nothing. Just not as much as we'd like.
Longbow is nothing but Ms. Liberty's private enforcers, which is why they operate on US soil as well as internationally in the Rogue Isles. They are NOT some international super hero squad fighting for the safety of all people of all nationalities, and their priorities have nothing to do with anything related to the UN or NATO.
I sometimes wonder if Longbow is secretly a project concocted by Recluse himself, to give the Isles an opponent to fight instead of challenging the status quo. It could make for an interesting story if Ms. Lib was faced with the reality that she had been manipulated into forming Longbow and that her uncle had pulled the strings all down the line to make it happen.
Speaking of Longbow, they are one of the most egregious examples of poor super group writing. They're an American force invading a sovereign nation? Wave your hands and say "NATO" and now it's okay. They're sabotaging the UN's forces in the RWZ? That's just good old-fashioned rivalry. They're policing Paragon City and pre-emptively attacking and 'arresting' people who aren't doing anything illegal while talking smack about them? That's just good Heroism.
Meanwhile, we're supposed to be cheering for them as the good guys.
Mad Magazine once did a parody of "A Clockwork Orange". In the film, the protagonist Alex is "rehabilitated" and once back in society he encounters his old Droogs (gang buddies) who are now police officers. They beat the tar out of him and leave him in the dirt. The Mad version of this scene involves Alex talking to his former underlings and the one fellow telling him "Yeah, they tried to rehabilitate us, but they couldn't so they made us policemen instead." After which they beat the stuffing out of him.
That's how I see Longbow most of the time. The sole exception is the Sefu Tendaji story, but the ironic thing is that Tendaji's story works BECAUSE he's a sharp contrast to every other Longbow operative that we run across blueside. -
Never mind, too much potential snark.
Let's just say that I disagree that Sam's comments would have been improved by reducing their length. -
Quote:Sean Fish was the original "Story Guy". I can't say for certain how much lore he wrote but he was the first keeper and maintainer of it, which is why even after he left Cryptic to join NCSoft and was no longer involved in the game, he still occasionally came back to answer lore questions. He also wrote or reviewed all of the lore printed in the CCG cards, which was where all of the Vanguard characters made their first real appearance.Originally Posted by Thessalia
Shane Hensley (Captain Mako) also wrote Deadlands, and Sean Dornan-Fish (Manticore) worked on it too, I think. And either of them could be who Sam is thinking of. They were pretty influential in early CoH/V.
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I think the whole point of killing him was that the studio did not consider him to be "their" Statesman. I don't expect a statue any time soon, if ever. Recession and all that.
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+1
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I know that I sound like a broken record about these things, but it's mostly because I don't understand why the studio has what seems to be an active anti-story stance.
When I stop to think very hard about it, I'm still flummoxed that when they went through one of their periodic downsizings a few years ago, that they didn't just dump Arctic Sun, who was doing most or all of the outside-of-the-game lore at the time. (Hell, we barely have any of that any more.) They dumped the entire Paragon Times. All of it. Thrown away like so much useless trash.
What game company does that? Who made a decision to just delete a couple of years worth of game lore and leave it to the players to try and rescue it from the Wayback Machine and save it in some form approximating the original?
If you met a new hero in Freedom and said "You just got Fly? Cool! C'mon, let's have some fun. We'll buzz the Spirit of Freedom!", that person would have no clue what you were on about.
For there to be quality in the writing and in the lore, the management has to believe that the writing and lore add some value to the game. The studio seems to believe exactly the opposite; that story and lore are distractions and that the game really is all about punching people in the face and looking good while you do it, to quote one of the earliest reviews of the game. -
Quote:Yes and that's what makes things like the Reichsman story arc so painful, but that's a topic for another time.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The writers don't actually work on their own and come up with whatever they like - they have story meetings and discuss what they want to do with each arc and what themes they want to present, and how it fits into the long-term storyline, and the lore in general - like when they decided to revamp DA, Positron didn't just swing by Dr. Aeon's cubicle and say "Mot's woken up, give me 6 arcs about it", and then left him to get on with it by himself.
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Quote:It's unfortunate that most of those associated projects were based on personal connections more than business connections and when it came down to business, the satellite projects folded. Blue King was Rick Dakan, the original City of Heroes designers. The CCG was AEG, designed and presided over by Dave Wilson, who is personal friends with Sean Fish (aka Manticore, the original story guy). The RPG was Eden Publishing, where Jack Emmert had done a stint before hiring on to City of Heroes.Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
I can only speak for myself, but I don't want this game to be it for the IP. I remember a time when 'City of Heroes' was more than just this game. It used to be a comic series, novels, a CCG, HeroClix. IMO, it deserves better than a slow death long past its prime.
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None of those projects were strictly business, even though I'm sure that all of the principles considered them to be interesting business proposals. If those personal connections to those companies had never existed then I think it's likely that none of those projects would ever have existed either. I could well be wrong, of course; it's not as if I have inside information.
It was particularly sad for AEG because the premise of the CCG was that they would do the WoW thing of having "loot cards" that would award in-game bonuses. If that had happened, or if they had launched an online-only CCG with AEG designing the electronic cards, then it might have been more successful.
I'd love to see some new "satellite" projects. I still think a facebook game could succeed, if only because ripoffs like Superhero City (Sort of a like the ******* child of CoH and Mafia Wars) manage to be at least mildly successful. -
Quote:And therein lies the problem, inasmuch as someone might agree that it IS a problem.Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The CoH story writers don't just write stories.
IMO, it's a huge problem, but my priorities are very clearly different from those of management (and there's nothing to say that my priorities are the "right" ones from a business standpoint).
I played the beta of Guild Wars and I bought the game at launch and despite having faded away from it in the past couple of years, there's little doubt that I'll buy Guild Wars 2. It's not just that it looks cool in a half-dozen ways. It's that it starts a whole new story for Tyria and THEY HIRED A WRITER WHOSE JOB IS TO WRITE AND MAINTAIN THE STORY OF THE GAME.
Moreover, that person, Ree Soesbee, is someone who spent years writing story for CCG's of Alderac Entertainment Group. She has experience and as someone who played Legend of the Five Rings avidly for a few years, I have direct knowledge of her "chops" in the story department.
All that to say that story and the company policy to support that story with a real writer in control of it is a HUGE selling point and one that swings the buy decision from "looks cool, might get it sometime" to "I need to have this game!"
City of Heroes could use some of that. -
Quote:Why do you believe this? What evidence do you have to support this belief? You are aware that CoH just had it's eighth birthday, yes? By the above measure it should keel over dead sometime next week.Originally Posted by Fista
For all the people who have said the prefer the status quo you do realize that if there is not a sequel we are on the clock. That in 5 maybe 8 years this game will not exist.
Ultima Online launched in 1997. It's still running and still getting content updates. In just over a month it will be celebrating it's fifteenth anniversary. Ultima is published by EA and you may trust me when I tell you that there is no publisher in the industry that will kill an underperforming game faster than EA will. Hell, they'll kill a game that's performing adequately just because they don't want to be bothered with it.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that City of Heroes, or any other game, is living under some sort of magical but unspecific deadline after which it will die an inglorious death no matter what shape it is in subscriptions-wise.
Assuming that NCSoft does not somehow go bankrupt or otherwise endanger its operations, the game will go on for as long as people are willing to play it and pay for it and it continues to turn a profit. The assumption that everyone will eventually just stop playing it because it's old has so many counter-examples in the industry now that it seems silly when I continue to run into people who believe that "shiny" is the only reason anybody plays a MMO.
Hell, Star Wars Galaxies is the poster child for how to run a MMO into the ground, and it was not shut down for being unprofitable. It was killed by LucasArts to insure that Old Republic would have no direct competition. It was not turning a huge profit, but it WAS turning a profit and it was still getting content updates.
There is no expiration date on CoX. Of all the reasons to make a successor game, that is the reason that is least likely to influence anybody in a position to actually make such a game. -
The short answer to the original question is that I play the game for immersion, not for levels. I have no gripe with people who want to powerlevel; more power to them. Pointless, to my mind, but they no doubt see me rescuing Mrs. Habashy for the umpteenth time and wonder why I'm engaging in such pointless repetition. *shrug*
There is a qualitative difference between living my character's life and fast-forwarding through it followed by selective rewinding of it. If another player doesn't appreciate that differential quality, well, it just means that they want different things from their game than I want from mine.