SlickRiptide

Are the Taxibots even still active? I figured that if they were weren't already retired before Freedom, that the widespread availability of travel powers post-Freedom would have given them cause to retire.

*EDIT*
Oh, there they are, a few posts up. :-p

I never made use of their services myself, but I always did have a fond spot for them just based on their community spirit.

What puzzles me about the "NPC Transformations Pack" is that they chose Praetorian models. Why not Coralax and Ghost Pirate or something else that's vaguely shark or nautically themed?

In the "road not taken" department:

At some point in pre-beta there was some experimentation with targeted damage, as shown in this "classic" screenshot:



The battle is set on the plaza in the original park.

If you've played the game much at all then you would have a difficult time missing out on the fact that a huge portion of the game's lore is founded on mythological sources of one sort or another.

The game draws upon a diverse variety of sources, from classical Greek and Roman (pretty much anything to do with Statesman, Knives of Artemis, etc...) to African (Pantheon) to Sumerian to Irish (Croatoa factions) and even to American myth and legend (Norambega, Roanoke colony), Lovecraft(Croatoa and Coralax), Modern myth (Malta = Illuminati) and others that I'm not remembering off the top of my head. Additionally, we have cryptozoological creatures such as Sally (Lake monsters) and Lusca (Lusca, a Bahamian cryptid said to inhabit "blue holes" and be a combination shark/octopus).

Basically, prior to the arrival of incarnates, it was fair to say that when looking at the game as it launched and for much of the followup content that mythology was a driving creative force. He Who We Do Not Name was a liberal studies mythology student and Matt has stated in interviews that the studio is peopled with a number of mythology lovers.

With that intro, what I'm interested in discussing is the mythologies that the game has yet to tap for ideas or inspiration, and how it might do that. Mythology in this sense is a broad term; not so much "gods and goddesses" but folklore, cryptozoology and modern urban belief as well as ancient belief. Usage in-game isn't necessarily a literal thing, either. The Knives of Artemis clearly are not related to anything Greco-Roman beyond their name. Adamastor in african myth is not anything like a giant zombie. Lusca is only superficially an octopus and it's definitely not the size of an oil tanker. Red Caps, even evil ones, were not nearly as nasty as our version of them.

In other words, the connection between a mythical idea and a game realization of that idea can be a tenuous one, as long as it's a mythic idea that inspired it.

A couple that I can think of off of the top of my head:

Bigfoot/Sasquatch - A lot of people don't realize that the Sasquatch mythology goes rather deeper than just some guys with grainy home movies or a frozen ape corpse in a carnival side show. Many native american tribes have stories about the Sasquatch and their ways.

It isn't just the native americans, either. As an example - some hundred or so miles southwest of Mount St. Helens is a place called the Ape Cave. It's a huge ancient lava tube that is explorable to a certain extent. In the fifties, I believe it was, there were regular tours by a group of local boy scouts/rock climbers called the St. Helens Apes. Many people just assumed the name came from their rock climbing and mountain scaling activities, running up and down mountains like apes.

In actuality, the name of the group was an allusion to the fact that the valley holding the lava tube and it's entrance cave had a history of being Sasquatch territory. Strange things had been reported in the area over the decades and centuries. The particular event that gave the area its moniker and the mountaineers their own particular name was based on a story by a group of pioneers that built a cabin in the woods in the same general area. Explorers, trappers, hunters; that sort of thing. The men were hunkered down one night when strange noises heralded even stranger events - The cabin was attacked by group of large, hairy, ape-like creatures that bashed it, jumped on it, smashed it with stones and generally terrorized the men inside the cabin who fortunately for themselves, had guns and ammunition. They fought them off, left at dawn and didn't come back again, as one might imagine.

That's not the only Sasquatch story from the area. It's just the most bizarre and frightening one. The thing is that if you research the lore you'll find that the story is not unique. There are similar tales of pioneers and hunters encountering the ape-creatures, with more or less violence as a result. Historically, Sasquatch is much more than a guy in a monkey suit leaving fabricated footprints. "Wild Men", like the X-Files take on the Jersey Devil fall into this category as well.

Inca/Toltec - As far as I know we don't have anything in the game that references the Inca, Mayans, or Quetzlcoatl and his crowd. I could see a villain group taking on a "modern Incans" or "modern Mayans" mystical theme, especially if they thought they had the actual key to the whole "end of the calendar" meme.

Egyptian - Blood of the Black Stream was going to be our Egyptian-themed group and that never got off the ground and doesn't currently show any sign of doing so.

Moth Man - Talking about modern myth, you really can't ignore Moth Man, just because it's so completely bizarre and unnerving. Of course, a lot of what goes on in Paragon City is completely bizarre and unnerving, ha ha! Still, it would be interesting to see a faction of opponents inspired by the Moth Man stories, especially since the motivations of the Moth Men are so weirdly inscrutable that you might not be able to tell whether they were heros, villains, or driven by motivations entirely alien to notions of morality or idealism.

So, what mythos, cryptoid, or folklore would you bring into the game as a reference or as background for a new hero/villain group, if you could?

I agree, the Center needs a pencil-thin mustache to go with the whole Foreign Legion thing he's got going.

It wouldn't be the first time I got moderated for bending the rules until they break. C'est le vie if it happens, heh.

Back on topic, G+ has an announcement that August 21 is when Nature Affinity lands. I might have to buy it just so I can have this power:



Although, I do have to admit that it makes me want to dub it the Jordy Verill powerset...

I kinda miss those origin icons.

In the "You never know when the past might become relevant again" department, meet Flashfire:



Prince Flashfire made his first appearance in 2003 before the game was even in beta test. He was created by the Cryptic Studios staff as part of a blaster archetype walkthrough that was intended to show prospective fans what the character creation and power assignment process would be like as well as what blasters would be like as an archetype.

What makes Flashfire more than just historically interesting? Well, if you've run SSA 2.1 (or you clicked through and read his bio already) then you might recognize someone new in town who is closely related to Prince Flashfire:



That's right: Wavelength is his mother! Suddenly after nearly nine years Flashfire gets promoted from obscure made-up example to hip and current modern day lore. One has to wonder what he's up to, these days.

There were other archetype walkthroughs back in the day. Herald for instance, whose bio has some interesting implications for the world of Paragon City if it could be considered canon.

Where are those "walkthrough" characters now, and what are they up to in 2012? Perhaps Wavelength is merely the first of several "long lost" characters that are primed to reappear in Paragon City after all of these years. Time will tell...

*EDIT*

For the curious, here is the "classic" Archetypes page with links to all of the original archetype walkthroughs. Sadly, the Wayback doesn't ever seem to have captured the tanker walkthrough. Thanks to First Contact, however, we do still have a record of his bio: Dreadnought.

Atlas Park

Did you ever wonder where Atlas Park got its name? Sure, there's a big statue of Atlas prominently displayed, but there isn't really much in the way of park land in the zone. There's Lake Prometheus and some lawns with walking paths around City Hall, but otherwise there's just not much you could really point at and call it a park.

Come with me through this convenient time portal I have set up (there are a dozen or so methods of time travel, you know). We'll visit 2003 and I'll show you why Atlas Park was given it's name.

Before we begin, I should note that the pictures in this posting are downsized from the originals. I did this to avoid breaking the forum as well as cut down on the downloading time. Each of the pictures should have a link attached that will take the curious reader to the original "photo". For convenience, you'll find that nearly all of them can be reached at the "classic" CoH website screenshots page.

Paragon City in 2002-2003 was a somewhat different place than the city we all know some ten years later. For starters, there actually WAS a park that lent its name to the zone and acted as its "anchor".

Here is our first look at it:



Two things stand out right away.

The first is: No city hall! There's a big skyscraper in the plaza where city hall should be. Where is city hall? We'll get to that shortly. It's not actually missing but it's not where we're accustomed to finding it.

Second: There's a park! Yes, at the base of the statue of Atlas (some ten or so feet below the level of the statue base, actually) there's a sizable park area, complete with it's own plaza, a couple of (virtual) acres of walking paths and trees and generally park-like open spaces. With Atlas towering over it's terminus, it certainly deserves to be named "Atlas Park".

So, there's our answer. At some point in time, there was an actual "Atlas Park" for the zone to take its name from. There's more to learn about this legacy zone, though. Let's take a closer look.



This screen shot was released to promote Nvidia's new Geforce 4 line of video cards. The Geforce 4 was released in April 2002 according to Wikipedia, so what we have here is one of the earliest screenshots of what would have been an preliminary alpha version of the game.

The most striking thing in this photo, though, is not the detailed textures being shown off on this varied group of heroes. It's the location and the detail of the setting. For one, we get a close-up look at the park itself. More importantly, though, we see that the sculptor hired by the city to create the statue must have been a Star Wars fan because he put the frickin' Death Star on Atlas' back!

Seriously, I have to wonder what the deal was with that early Atlas. Maybe the modeler was going for the "steel plates bolted to an iron framework" look. Whatever it is, the one thing it does not much resemble is a globe. Still, we can't judge it too harshly given that it was probably intended to be a placeholder for a later, more detailed version of the statue.

On a tangential note, given the resemblance of the gold-armor-suited bald fellow to the fellow who currently stands in the middle of Steel Canyon, I suspect that he may actually be one of the first iterations of Positron, before he eventually got his signature look.

Moving on: let's follow our group of erstwhile heroes to a higher vantage point:




From this vantage point we have a much better idea of just how huge the park actually is. The plaza we saw in the first screenshot is not even at the halfway point of the total length of the park. If the building providing the perch for the heroes is as close to the war wall as the buildings at the opposite end are to their respective war wall then the park is taking up roughly 75% of the total width of that portion of the zone. It really is a major geographic feature.

Not only that, but look! There's City Hall! It's situated more or less at the center of the park but well outside of the boundaries of the park proper. It's not in anything like the position it occupies in current-day Atlas Park.

To get an idea just how different Atlas Park 2002 was from Atlas Park 2012, I went into the game and attempted to recreate this screenshot. Here's the result:



The fog is, unfortunately, the fault of my currently crappy Intel generic graphics. What you can tell in spite of that is that Atlas park 2012 has almost no actual park in comparison to its 2002 counterpart. I couldn't get the really long shot of the original. Skyscrapers aside, the war wall was just a few yards behind my character. The zone layout is different enough that this is the best simulation I could achieve.

In some way, it seems less that city hall was moved behind the statue, as it was that the statue was moved in front of city hall, the entire area paved over, and the small sliver of remaining park rotated ninety degrees to fit the new layout. In reality, of course, the entire layout is changed enough that it should be considered a different map altogether.

There were several iterations of the design, of course. Here's a closer look at the city hall in its original location and an updated design of Atlas:



The notable things are the graffiti on the wall surrounding City Hall, signifying the urban decay afflicting the city, and the globe that Atlas holds now looks like a globe, but a hollow stylized framework rather than the solid one that we know now. I'm actually partial to this design. I wish we could have had a chance to see it live at some point.

Just to punctuate it, here is a closeup of the new statue:



The edges of the continents are obviously jagged and pixelated. One would assume that, again, it was due to placeholder graphics rather than finished graphics, but it may be that the "framework" style of globe was passed over because the open space would have made the edges too obviously "grainy". I'd be curious to find out just why the final design was changed to the solid globe that we all know and love.

One feature of note that is easier to see in this picture than in some others is the chain link fence surrounding Atlas. Presumably, it's there to keep passers-by from falling 10-15 feet down to the park below. Pretty ugly fencing, IMO. I think the city planners would have had to consider replacing it with a more aesthetically pleasing rail of some kind if they had decided to go live with the layout in the end. Certainly, the city architects that designed the final version of Atlas' dais seemed unconcerned about people falling off of it and cracking their heads on concrete!

That concludes this trip through the Wayback Machine. With King's Row ready to undergo its own makeover similar to that of Atlas Park a year ago, it's instructive or at least interesting to see just how much the game has evolved over the years as well as how much it continues to evolve. It will be interesting to see what lies in store for Issue 24 and beyond.

Until then, safe time travels!

"I made the pitch to the bigwigs here in Korea. I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that they loved the idea of sending the Praetorian refugees on a one-way trip to the Jurassic era. The bad news is that they hate farming sims in Korea and they're firing everyone even remotely connected to the idea."

New topic, but this seems like a convenient thread to toss it into:

Do people know that your character is an incarnate?

I ask because I was running some of the new DA stuff a while back and I reached a point where I was trying to convince this Tsoo fellow to give me some information. I believe my dialog choices were sort of like "attempt to intimidate him" or "be nice and attempt to gain his cooperation".

The "intimidate" option was represented by the dialog text, "You know that I'm an incarnate, right?" (Implied threat that I can kick your posterior to the moon and back...)

As a player, my first reaction was "How the heck would he know that? How would he even know what an incarnate is?" I was more inclined towards the other dialog option anyway, so I let it go and went on with the mission.

It made me consider afterwards, though, about the ramifications of that dialog option.

Do you as players feel that the world "knows you're an incarnate" on your level 50's? That people in the game world would point out your character and say, "Watch out for him, he's an incarnate!"?

Just as the world at large theoretically doesn't really know about Ouroboros, I've always figured that they don't really know about incarnates and wouldn't truly understand what it meant if they did know. The whole point of the "slow incarnate" business is that you're supposedly sneakily sliding your way into becoming cosmically powered without the Well even really realizing that you're an incarnate. I certainly wouldn't expect my hero to be carrying around an "I'm an Incarnate!" sign tattooed on his forehead.

Am I wrong? Do your characters freely bandy their incarnation about and assume that everyone else does likewise?

This thread has probably gone way past the point where topic drift even matters, but apologies anyway...