SlickRiptide

It's a reasonable guess about the statue but I'm unaware of any official lore that confirms that the statue is Peregrine, or what it is that she might have done to deserve a statue.

The real problem is not that the task force was so very uncharacteristically and inconsistently (yeah, that word again) written as a Legion of Doom scenario - It's that someone in upper management thought it was a good idea and gave it the green light.

People point to Matt's statements about being not beholden to the existing lore, but before he ever made any such statements, this task force was the first really big example of those attitudes at the studio. It wasn't just that the writer either didn't know or didn't care or both - It's that the people above him also didn't know or didn't care.

I try my best to forget that it even exists.

Something like that would be a logical extension of the Hero->Incarnate->Ascendent progression, but I think it would take a different studio to create it because it would be, as you say, more of a single player RTS type of game. If they created a link between the two game styles, it might make for an interesting adjunct to the existing game.

The "baggage" is the big reason why there won't be a CoH2 as such. A sequel has to be more than just "the current game only cleaned up and built on a stronger foundation". It really has to be a radically new game to make it worthwhile. The only way I could see it happening is if they decided to take a stab at creating a completely skills-based game that dispensed with archetypes, much like the original vision for the game. Just rehashing this game with a "better" game engine isn't a good enough reason to make a sequel.

Where did you get that idea?

As long as the game is profitable, development will continue. I've never understood this idea that some people have that anything "old" necessarily will eventually just die. We're talking games, not puppies, and MMO's in particular tend to find a steady state level of subscriptions and stay there forever unless they somehow become horribly out of date. Even with that, EQ and Ultima Online are still around and still getting new content. I've never played Meridian 59 or some of that vintage of game but some of them are still around also.

Why does a "CoH2" have to be a new game? A few years ago, it was "impossible" to do player programmed stories, power customizations, and modern high-rez graphics. Heck, Water Blast was a powerset that was "never going to happen". All of those things are here now, because the devs continue to improve and update the game and the game engine. Sure, it would be nice if the foundation could be rebuilt, but making a new game to get that is a proven money-loser.

As long as CoH continues to generate a healthy profit, it will continue to live and grow. Heck, NCSoft has already shut down lots of their MMO properties that were failing to support themselves, even some high profile games. They've continued to invest in this game. That says something about it and it's staying power. It also says something about NCSoft's corporate policy - If CoH fails to the point of going into "maintenance mode" and fading away, it will likely be shut down long before the fading away point became a possibility.

If you're not turning a profit and there's not reasonable expectation of turning one in the near future, then you're gone. CoH2 won't even be a possibility.

I presume that I don't have to explain what I did there.

There are classes of words that are useful despite being somewhat vague by themselves. If someone really wants to know what's "good" or "inconsistent" then they can ask. More often than not, the person who wrote those words already made the detailed analysis previously in the thread. In other cases, the person is referring to eight years of accumulated writing and is giving an impression of the whole thing. Nobody is going to give a detailed critique every single time they mention something. If people want details (and as you see from the many of the responses, the respondents would prefer that the "usual suspects" not expand on their opinions) they'll ask for them.

If I'm criticizing a particular task force, then sure; I'd give details about the problems. If I was talking about that same task force a year later, I'd be less inclined to do so. If I was referring to the entire history of Paragon City, I'd probably just wave at that portion and say "it's ____" and go on to whatever my actual point at the time is.

"Good" is just as meaningless and useless as "inconsistent" or "boring" or "exciting" but it doesn't stop anyone using those words as if they have some top-level, mutually-agreed upon meaning instead of being entirely personal and subjective in meaning.

It's a losing battle to insist that everyone who writes criticism (positive or negative) does it in a detailed and thoughtful manner. Most people don't have that much investment in their opinions and many times they're just reaffirming opinions that they are already well known to carry.

Rather than insist that everyone should be a literary critic when discussing these things (and let me just forestall the knee-jerk response that you didn't actually say that since we both can see that you didn't say those precise words; you just insisted that vague is "bad" and precision is "good" which amounts to the same thing in my mind) it's better to ask for some elucidation on any particular thing that you find to be "fuzzy" about someone's opinion on something.

If you're going to insist that only quantifiable things can really be "inconsistent" and even then they should be called something else then I can only nod my head, say "Okay, sure" and go on using "inconsistent" or "good" or whatever other vague but generally accepted words I use, for their generally accepted purposes.

I'm right there with you. I think the studio just considers them superfluous these days. Their schtick is that they are the natural origin villains; the guys who are literally warriors because they train and hone their skills without benefit of super powers. That's about all they ever amounted to in terms of the game. They're just the "Talos Island Gang".

After eight years, they're still getting their butts handed to them by the Freakshow in all of the street battles. In every other zone, the developers split the street conflicts evenly between the warring factions, but in Talos Island, for some reason the Warriors are portrayed as the losers in all of the battles and they're even given really wimpy, lame dialog to boot. Nobody seems to care to fix it. Given that, I conclude that nobody at the studio has any kind of investment in them.

As much as I love the Warriors, I'm afraid that the answer for them is that they are a joke with a background tacked on. As a European, Sam, you might not be familiar with the 1979 film _The Warriors_. (That IMDB plot synopsis is a little off - there is nothing in the film to suggest that it takes place in a dystopian future. The power of an otherwise semi-cheesy flick is that it takes place in the present day.)

The Warriors in the game are very clearly modeled after the titular gang of the film. The rest of it is tacked on background to justify having them there and calling themselves "The Warriors".

Someone really liked that film - The gang chatter of the game is full of quotes from the film. "I like doing stuff like that", for instance, which makes perfect sense if you've seen the film, as does "Come out and plaaay!" ( I haven't seen that one in a long time.)

It's not a big stretch to imagine that the gang depictions in the film went a long ways towards contributing to the visual conceptions of gangs like the Skulls and the Hellions. I've often wished that there was a Baseball Furies style of gang in the game, heh.

In short, I am fully behind the fulfillment of your wish but would be unsurprised to learn that they don't really have much of a back-story beyond a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" to fans of the film.

Oh?

Is there a different way to interpret the above statement?

I will disagree with this in principle because so much of the game is already based on world mythology that nobody would normally know anything about, from Adamastor to Norumbega (Oranbega) to Jack-in-Irons (though the Irish/European stuff is admittedly more widely familiar than the non-European stuff.)

I personally believe that the strong mythical foundation of the game is one of the reasons for its initial and continued success. It set the world apart from being a simple generic super hero setting and the mythological trappings gave at least the appearance of a kind of depth to the factions that they otherwise might not have had.

The game would only benefit from having more content related to classic mythology of any sort. Heck, getting back to the Well, it was really the initial description of it as it related to Pandora's Box and to the idea that the Greek Heroes of Old were the original "super heroes" that made the Well interesting. The current version of the Well - Not so interesting, IMO.

So, he's trying to emanitize the eschaton?

As a magazine, Cracked sucked eggs. As a website/blog, it is comedy gold. I still have to shake my head in wonder at it, sometimes.

I am not sure what else you expect him to do when you take a perfectly good word and insist that it's actually meaningless and impossible to use for its intended purpose...

Precisely. All of that prior lore is summarized inside the game in book form.

Our studio has a "story bible" which contains much the same sort of world lore within its pages. Most of it is probably as not as thoroughly developed as that other game's past history but is that really a reason for NONE of it to be accessible inside the game?

I have to think that even if they only put a single summer intern to the task each year that the past eight years would have been plenty of time for most of it to have been typed up and formatted and fleshed out and inserted into the game.

The fact that a forum thread like the Canon Fodder thread can exist or that I could write Manticore or Arctic Sun or Hero One or (apparently) Protean and get answers means that there are answers to be had.

They just don't want to give them to us and for the life of me I can't understand why. Well, I DO understand: the whole straight jacket thing, which is my point - other games don't seem to feel that their lore is a straight jacket. They feel that it adds value.

Why does our studio treat player access to the lore as a liability?

Going strictly from the way the company is presented in the back story, it is a private company that nevertheless offers access to outside help when a situation requires it.

Yes, in the real world a technology like that of Portal Corp. would be regulated and probably kept top secret, but in the real world you wouldn't deputize a meta-human and let them run around town in spandex beating up on anyone labelled as "bad guy".

It's not the elevator, it's the city fire code that assumes you are being chased by a flaming entity of some sort and requires you to lose it before you can escape the burning building.

The current lore seems to be that the Well connects all humankind in all dimensions. This includes the Rikti. They are attached to our Well whether they like it or are aware of it.

It's possible that the Rikti DID make themselves or their connection to the Well unpalatable. Their "allergy" to magic and loss of inherent magical ability (including the loss of their Gods) could be ascribed to an alteration in their racial connection to the Well. The method is mostly irrelevant - Maybe the magicians themselves acted when they realized the nature of Battalion.

The effect is that they erased the Magic Origin, amputating it if you will, and cauterizing the "wound" to prevent any future congress with magical energies and effects.

That damaged their connection to the Well just enough that it made them or It indigestible and turned Magic into something mythical and incomprehensible.

That's one way to tie the whole thing together and make the Rikti a possible ally against Battalion when it finally arrives.