Where is the Chase Scene?

What's the most common scene in a movie? Probably the chase scene! So where is this aspect of hero-ness in City of Heroes?

I would suggest that one way you can add this is when a villain escapes from a safeguard mission, then you can spawn a van on the map with a HP bar and have faction enemies shooting the heroes from nearby rooftops as you try to beat the van up. For City of Villains, you could do something similar, I guess you're beating up a potential victim's van.

This could also be added into the game as a triggered event or even a spawned event. It would be neat if the van could zone, too, perhaps.

I can see the barriers that would prevent this, but if all you do is think about why something cannot be done, it'll simply never happen.

Got any thoughts that might make this idea better? Please state them!

I think this would be a cool addition to the "Stop X from escaping" mission. Instead of outright failure, the guy makes it to the door or teleports out, you're forced to exit and outside is a vehicle set to whisk them away. You give chase and try to take them out.

This would work best in zones with good road layouts, like St Martial, Skyway City, Talos Island. However it could just as easily be a helicopter or Arachnos Black Chopper and lead to an airborne battle.

Good idea.

Only problem is that if that were to be implemented what's there to stop a nearby player killing the target the current mission holder has to kill?

I don't know.

With some characters, it's somewhat fun. With others - "That *#&$% boss is running. AGAIN." isn't fun, period.

I guess it would depend on how it's handled.

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let a AV get out the bank door in a safeguard and it will turn into a chase scene.

Not sure though how a chase scene could play out in a game full of controllers and super speedsters.

Might be interesting to have a chase scene in a building (not a cave) with close quarters, say, an apartment complex, where the runner can dart and weave through small rooms, side doors, etc.

After giving some thought to it, my biggest problem with the concept is going to be how Travel Suppression effects the way it plays out.

Fly/Run/Jump ahead, pew pew pew, Fly/Run/Jump ahead, pew pew pew, Fly/Run/Jump ahead, pew pew pew doesn't sound very fun.

A way to save the idea might be to make success more about protecting citizens and preventing property damage. Last I knew, clicking a glowie didn't suppress movement, so maybe if you had civilians or vehicles in the path of this oncoming escapee, but they were 0second glowies, that would mean you could swoop in, click on them and they're teleported away by Medicom as a preemptive measure or something.

The greatest difficulty becomes: Is the chase scene scripted, or unscripted?

If it's scripted, that makes it into essentially quicktime button-mashing "press 'X' to not die" sequence (the problem with these; if they're in any way common, they quickly become annoying and unfun, especially for people who don't have the quickest reflexes); while if it's unscripted it simply allows the player to come prepared and utterly decimate the person he's chasing in a few seconds.

A chase scene would also very likely penalize melee classes, especially the ones with no supplementary ranged attacks (Axe, Mace, Martial Arts, the Swords, etc); while forcing other sets to take the supplementary ranged attacks (which are typically awful) in order to have any chance at success.

That said: I would LOVE to see scripted police chases tooling around Paragon. And since cars in paragon move slower then most people can run, that'd still create a situation where the players could help out by blasting away at cars and helping in the chase; or to simply ignore them the way they do any gray mobs. There could even be a "police chase in progress" message that pops up; that creates a scanner-like mission if you defeat the car.

... and it could even be a good way to add the Freakshow Sportaur and Nemesis Horsemen to the game; as well as a way to make Sky Skiffs look like they're actually good for more then simply randomly exploding in Striga.