City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

So much for my AE idea

Bitt_Player

By Bitt_Player,
Posted on: 2009-07-04 08:23 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

I was going to use my last two AE story slots to write a 2-part arc involving time travel, the Nictus, and an Ourboros conspiracy to attempt to explain the worst plot hole that was ever torn into CoH continuity. I wanted to try to explain how we woke up one day and every criminal act dating back to the 1940s which had been perpetrated by the 5th Column was suddenly caused by The Council.

I had an idea to reconcile how some "new" group -- with identical tactics, technology, and super soldier development -- could just "show up" and "defeat" the 5th Column, and somehow cause ALL of their leaders to "defect" -- which could not possibly have happened because all of those mission arcs clearly establish that they ALWAYS worked for The Council.

Do the devs realize that what they did is more contrived than every DC Crisis put together?

It would have been great. Then I read the I15 patch notes. And to add insult to injury, it's a SF/TF combo, not a mission arc, so I'll probably never get to play it for myself.

So I'm morbidly curious. What did the wizards of smart come up with for the return of the 5th Column? Someone please spoil it.

--
My AE Story Arcs:
Family Matters - 82136

 

Posted

Lameness. Make your arcs. Just from those few words, it sounds like they'll be a lot better than the TFs we got.

"If I had Force powers, vacuum or not my cape/clothes/hair would always be blowing in the Dramatic Wind." - Tenzhi

Characters

 

Posted

It's almost like people think comic book plots have no room in comic book games.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
It's almost like people think comic book plots have no room in comic book games.

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Careful, words like that might attract Venture.... O.O

 

Posted

Horatio already came out and admitted that his understanding of that section of the lore was incorrect, and promised to work on fixing it. Personally, him coming out and admitting his mistake gives him credibility in my book.

[ QUOTE ]
So I'm morbidly curious. What did the wizards of smart come up with for the return of the 5th Column? Someone please spoil it.

[/ QUOTE ]So wait, you talked about how absolutely horrible it was from a continuity point of view, and yet you don't even know anything about the lore of it? Wow.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadowNate
;_; ?!?! What the heck is wrong with you, my god, I have never been so confused in my life!

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
So wait, you talked about how absolutely horrible it was from a continuity point of view, and yet you don't even know anything about the lore of it? Wow.

[/ QUOTE ]

Uhhh ... what? I said that the original attempt to explain the plot hole that had been created was terribly contrived. Arguably more contrived than DC's most convoluted stories could hope to be. I know "the lore" as you put it probably better than the devs do (tho IMO there is no "lore" to it-- it's THAT contrived). I spent a lot of time trying to piece the story together in preparation for writing my AE arc.

I just want to know how the devs "fixed" it in a Geoff Johns kinda way, or if they bothered to and just kept running with their half-conceived mess of a story premise. And since my spin involves time paradoxes, I may well end up doing it anyway. Though even then I still need to know what the plot is so I can work it in.

Thanks for the links. I'm bracing myself now.

--
My AE Story Arcs:
Family Matters - 82136

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
It's almost like people think comic book plots have no room in comic book games.

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Comic book stories in a game based on comic books? what madness is this?!

Really, though, it was kind of weird how everything the Fifth did was suddenly done by the Council. I've been keeping away from the spoilers so that I'll be suprised when I run the Task Forces, but who am I kidding? I never run Task Forces.

BackAlleyBrawler: I can't facepalm this post hard enough.
ShoNuff: If sophisticated = bro-mantically emo-tastic, then I'm going to keep to my Shonen loving simplicity dammit.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
Horatio already came out and admitted that his understanding of that section of the lore was incorrect, and promised to work on fixing it. Personally, him coming out and admitting his mistake gives him credibility in my book.

[ QUOTE ]
So I'm morbidly curious. What did the wizards of smart come up with for the return of the 5th Column? Someone please spoil it.

[/ QUOTE ]So wait, you talked about how absolutely horrible it was from a continuity point of view, and yet you don't even know anything about the lore of it? Wow.

[/ QUOTE ]
That seems almost paradoxical.
It must involve time travel and white Martians being collusionally manipulated by Arcanna Jones who is also being unknowingly manipulated by Helspont.
Or something.

Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...

 

Posted

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That seems almost paradoxical.

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Heh. Well my idea could tank. I'm no Geoff Johns, but I can try.

So the TF/SF makes no allusion to the screwed up history or how the Council "replaced" the 5th Column. But there's dimensional energies involved with this new leader. Okay I can work with that.

A big part of why I am so fixated on this is because the whole invasion from Axis Earth spin parallels my own self-published comic that I could never get off the ground. If I ever do get it back in production, I don't want anyone thinking I ripped off CoH. I wrote it before I'd ever heard of this game.

http:///www.rogue-wolf.net/comics/im...D1-1Page27.jpg

--
My AE Story Arcs:
Family Matters - 82136

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It's almost like people think comic book plots have no room in comic book games.

[/ QUOTE ]

Comic book stories in a game based on comic books? what madness is this?!

Really, though, it was kind of weird how everything the Fifth did was suddenly done by the Council.

[/ QUOTE ]
Well the Council supplanting the 5th Column was very oddly handled, and even from a metagame standpoint it confuses me to this day. The official and fairly widely accepted version is that the 5th were always supposed to have been supplanted by the Council.

The thing that seemed odd to players at the time is that when change over first happened all badges, plaques, mission text and other references in game had 5th Column replaced by Council as if the 5th Column had never existed. (Though the models were still in the .pigg files.) Even alternate worlds accessed through Portal Corp where the 5th had appeared suddenly had Council instead. Apparently the Council was powerful to somehow edit the 5th Column from existence not just on Primal Earth, but in all known Earths. (Which made me wonder why they bothered fighting the 5th in the streets of Paragon City.) This prompted all sorts of uproar and conspiracy theories from some of the players regarding European/German laws and forbidding Nazis in video games.*

The Devs explained that it was just due to an overzealous editor who misunderstood what he'd been told to do when the Council were added. Some of the text in game was edited again, but for a year or more it only mentioned that the Council had replaced a former villain group that was never mentioned by name. Eventually direct mentions of the 5th Column were added back into the game.

Anyway, it was a confusing and, to me at least, amusing ride for the 5th Column from their appearance at launch, to their complete removal from the game's reality, to their reappearance as an unnamed group that the Council had overthrown to gradually being readmitted to the in-game lore, reappearing in Ouroboros, then the ITF and then the mission architect system and finally having both a task force and strike force featuring them.

To this day i still don't know what actually happened inside Cryptic studios with regard to the 5th Column and Council, but i think that in the end we effectively achieved the ultimate in comic book tropes: meta-retconning of the retcon of a retcon of a retcon. Which is sort of awesome, if a bit confusing.




*The fact that there is no law prohibiting Nazis as enemies in video games anywhere in Europe doesn't change the fact that many people on the boards (and, to be honest, possibly some people in NCsoft or Cryptic management) were convinced that there were laws prohibiting Nazis in video games,** and that's why the Council replaced the 5th Column shortly before City of Heroes was to be launched in Europe.

**Or perhaps there would just be excessive controversy.

[i]Edit: Changed an "s" to a "t".

Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...

 

Posted

The plaque under the Atlas Statue still mentions the 5th Column attacks in WW II. It was briefly altered to mention the Council in the Beta issue when they introduced, but when I reported it as a bug one of the devs (forget which one) replied that it should have stayed 5th column, and it was soon reverted.

Personally, I've never liked the Council, and hope that the 5th Column becomes more common in ordinary missions again.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]
The plaque under the Atlas Statue still mentions the 5th Column attacks in WW II. It was briefly altered to mention the Council in the Beta issue when they introduced, but when I reported it as a bug one of the devs (forget which one) replied that it should have stayed 5th column, and it was soon reverted.

Personally, I've never liked the Council, and hope that the 5th Column becomes more common in ordinary missions again.

[/ QUOTE ]
Ah, i knew it was reverted, but i could've sworn that for a time it referred to a less specific "villain group". Then again i haven't read it very frequently. It was the revisions to mission text that were the most obvious and odd to me. Especially the ones that danced around mentioning the 5th by name when talking about the group the Council had replaced.

Anyway, that's all in the past, amusing as it was.

Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...

 

Posted

The whole fifth column thing is a question of back story colliding with game mechanics. It should hardly be surprising that the result is something of a train wreck, though primarily because game mechanics didn't support a dynamic back story.

The whole business happened because Cryptic tried to create a dynamic storyline while still supporting a static game world. This was exacerbated when they put new hires in charge of much of the grunt work, or at least that's how I understood the explanation of things like the story of Atlas being ret-conned.

Actually, I think that the some of the devs back then may have just believed that the players didn't give a hang and just wouldn't notice that Atlas had gone from being a Big Damn Hero to being a guy who saved some lawyers from COBRA.

In a static world, there was simply no room for both groups, and rather than throw away all of the fifth column missions and replace them with new ones, they ret-conned them to Council missions. That's the only explanation that's neccesary, really. It totally screws up the back story but the leadership at the time was okay with that in lieu of investing time and money into what might have amounted to a couple of issue's worth of new backstory. The new backstory effort was put into Striga Island instead.

Leaving the Fifth Column missions in the game would have been confusing to a lot of people. It was a no win situation in a lot of ways, which is to say it was a poorly planned way of trying to tell a dynamic story.

Despite what might sound like a critical tone here, I applaud the devs of the time for attempting to make a dynamic story. I'm just sorry that it worked out the way it did, especially since it seems that the experience convinced them that a dynamic story was not worth or not possible or both. After Calvin Scott and the Council War, we've had to rely on the comics for our dynamic story and now we don't even have that.

Anyway, looking for anything about the Council/Fifth Column to make sense is simply fruitless if you try to do it while ignoring the meta-game considerations. We can at least be thankful for the bits we've gotten in the meantime that show the Column doing what they do best; i.e., hiding in plain sight, waiting for the signal to re-emerge.

Which makes this current Reichsman story pretty rushed out - They're covering story that ought to be told over the course of weeks or months instead of in two task forces. And, sadly, it's not likely that this is going to be dynamic either. Ten years from now, Reichsman will still be just waking up and trying to take over the city, just like he is today.

 

Posted

(qr)
I don't see what's so bad about the Fifth and Council story. Yes, it was handled horribly at the time, and we STILL see some of the effects of it... but the story itself isn't that twisted.

A powerful group (that's existed for quite some time. The fact that they weren't in the game until that point really has no bearing on the story) comes into the light, and challenges an equally powerful existing group. The catch is, the leader of the old group is REALLY working for the new group, and hands over the reigns (even though he still has his own plans, and doesn't do it happily). Many of the troops don't like it, there's some open fighting in the streets, but overall it's a quick and easy takeover. With that threat out of the way, the new group picks up where the old one left off... while adding in their own projects and evil twists along the way.


It's a pretty basic story, and not the first of it's kind, when you break it down to the basics. The problems were with how it was implemented, and how some game mechanics didn't work so well with an evolving story (ie the devs didn't want to throw away all the old missions, so they just changed them to Council missions, etc..). But none of those problems have anything to do with the story. It's all game mechanics issues.


IMHO, trying to make a story to explain some perceived errors caused by the game mechanics, even though the story itself is sound... and when said problems aren't even relevant anymore (and haven't been for a little while, even BEFORE i15!)... just seems like a bad idea. IMHO, again.

 

Posted

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It would have been great. Then I read the I15 patch notes. And to add insult to injury, it's a SF/TF combo, not a mission arc, so I'll probably never get to play it for myself.

[/ QUOTE ]

Sounds like a good reason to go ahead and make it.
There are others like you that don't run SF/TF due to time constraints.

 

Posted

[ QUOTE ]

*The fact that there is no law prohibiting Nazis as enemies in video games anywhere in Europe doesn't change the fact that many people on the boards (and, to be honest, possibly some people in NCsoft or Cryptic management) were convinced that there were laws prohibiting Nazis in video games,** and that's why the Council replaced the 5th Column shortly before City of Heroes was to be launched in Europe.

**Or perhaps there would just be excessive controversy.

[i]Edit: Changed an "s" to a "t".

[/ QUOTE ]There might not be a law precisely against Nazis in video games, but there are laws against displaying any Nazi items (such as flags or armbands). I suppose it would be up the government to determine whether or not that law applied.

 

Posted

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There might not be a law precisely against Nazis in video games, but there are laws against displaying any Nazi items (such as flags or armbands). I suppose it would be up the government to determine whether or not that law applied.

[/ QUOTE ]

As far as i can recall the 5th Column had no actual Nazi insignia, just German naming of ranks and generally Nazi-inspired design. (Gotta admit, bastards or not, most of the Nazis were some pretty sharp dressers for their time.)

Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...

 

Posted

I think Statesman just went off the Story Bible which they've always claim they have. Or he did the easiest possible way to do the changeover--Search and Replace :P. That led to a few hilarious things, like I think WW2 was fought against the Nictus instead of Germany and Axis forces, until they began scrambling to fix the damage the retcon did. Just considering how crummy the Council is compared to the Column proves there couldn't have been much content in that bible to draw off of.

I always figured, assuming they weren't turned into the Council for lolGermany laws, it would've been a similar switchover to what the Lost and the Rikti experienced. Requiem's mysterious source, The Center, were aliens instead of some network of old gestapo farts who kept fighting a decades-old war using nazi gold to outfit the Columnist army. Beyond the elite Vampyre and Werewolves would be the secret innermost Council, who were wise to the fact they weren't fighting for some neo-reich.