Things that are more difficult redside, and hence more fun.

Possibly. How many super powered individuals are in Praetoria?

Also how does it feel to be supporting Anarchism GG?

I don't understand.

Why would you try and have a debate with Golden Girl? I tried that once. It's pointless. She does not debate. She merely restates her opinion over and over. And then winks. She could run for office. Of course, that would require her to be evil.

I like playing all aspects in THIS game. 've explored almost all the archetypes, the two that I'm currently lacking in are Dominators and Fortunatas. I've gone a great distance on the different combinations for all the others.

I like having Villains, I like having Heroes. Each side has aspects that are interesting and intriguing.

I've played games where the option remained to be evil (like truly, personally, dastardly evil; Fallout 3 and blowing up Megaton, for instance), and I didn't take those options. Not only did I not "walk the dark path," I simply could not will myself to do it. I don't see the point to it. My characters are just trying to live their lives.

When it comes to how the game portrays events, I like to think of these as not our adventures, but the adventures of "The Hero" and "The Villain" (and soon, the "The Loyalist" and "The Revolutionary"). When my characters wind up working for Westin Phipps, they're not the actual ones helping him, but they're reviewing the story (through journals, articles, etc.).

It's the only way it makes sense to me, that no matter what we do, nothing ever really changes. However, these tasks have been accomplished, leaving the world in its peculiar state of equilibrium. None of us have done it, yet all of us have done it. It's a strange state of affairs.

Now, as far as the Redside missions go, I'm not too keen on some of it all. On Blueside, not every arc needs to be capped off with an Elite Boss/Arch Villain fight. A few of them do, and those missions are memorable. On Redside, though, you wind up fighting an AV/EB as early as Level Six (it's that vampyri in Port Oakes... I've never seen it fought with more than a couple people, so it might just be an Elite, like Cortex). Further arcs involve the Sea Witch (twice, in basically the same exact fight, both of which are just plain NASTY), Calystix the Shaper (a just plain RIDICULOUS fight), Metalshift (Freak Tank Swiper... With Psychic POWER!), The SuperFreak (I'm not writing that in 1337), The RiktiFreak (Retrofitted Superfreak, he says so in his dialogue, again I'm not spelling it in 1337), and a host of other EB/AVs, all of which are statistically more powerful than our characters (simply because of the videogame numbers). If they fought us as Bosses, it would be battles that make more sense, but wouldn't be "challenges" to teams.

Just because a battle is more challenging is no reason that it's better. Imagine if everything was more challenging. Take driving, for instance. Imagine if, in order to drive, you had to reach behind you and hit a switch in the back seat every five minutes in order to keep the engine running. Does this make engineering sense? No. Is it challenging for the driver? Oh yes. Is it better? Hell no.

Now, let's get back to something more comparable. Take sports. Say, football. One team is clearly outclassed. The other team has bigger and more experienced players. They've had the money from the beginning to buy the best talent in the sport into their team. The team of underdogs inexplicably wins, through sheer determination and raw iron will, and becomes the stuff of legends. Is it epic? Quite. They make movies about this sort of thing.

Now, say you're that underdog team... And you have to face this challenge every single time you play a game. Not only that, you're no longer just playing football. You're playing hockey or baseball or whatever. There are new sets of rules to learn for each game, new tactics to master, and new challenges to overcome.

You can fight Metalshift and Sea Witch roughly in the same range. This is what it feels like. Metalshift is a brute. He charges at you, hits extremely hard and leaves you gasping for breath. Sea Witch, however, her battle is chock full of nasty tricks and traps. There are ambushes out the rear (Arch Villains who call for reinforcements still bothers me; I thought these were supposed to be the best, what do they need help for?), and a few nasty runes that summon a complement of elemental creatures to kill you if you step on them. That's quite the steep learning curve for a team, and most players (the extreme most, 95-98%) are too impatient to take the time to learn. Sea Witch is a definite meat grinder for teams, I've seen her repeatedly chew them up and spit them out.

There's a blog I follow from an independent developer whose games I like, The Bottom Feeder, and two of his articles: Why Bushwhacking Your Players is a Bad Idea and Make Your Game Easy, Then Make it Easier explain the basic premise of customer perception in videogames.

Jeff Vogel states "People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again."

There have been many times I have simply stopped playing Redside because the challenge I was being presented was just too much. Hardcase had sent my characters to do battle with a number of Howler Monkeys (I know that's not what they are), including one of their kings, and Johnny Sonata sent me to do the same. Their Arch Villain versions are the exact same thing as the Boss versions, and those damn things get back up after being defeated. Imagine having to fight the same banal Arch Villain twice in succession. On top of that, Arch Villains and Elite Bosses have their numbers ramped WAY up, for no more reason than "they're supposed to be a challenge, so they hit harder, resist more damage, and have more hitpoints than ANY hero can." Disagree? Have another go at Statesman and see if you can hit as hard as he does.

Redside's challenge rating, out of the box, is almost ludicrous. It's not that the archetypes aren't cool. However, the missions and arcs you wind up dealing with are exceptionally harrowing. You wind up feeling bloodied and battered by the time you find yourself (SPOILER ALERT) battling Recluse at the end of your patron arc (it doesn't matter which patron), and even HE can hit like a Mack truck, takes hits like a bunker made out of Depleted Uranium, and summons goons to take you down when you so much as slap him.

A challenge is not automatically better. It's when you win that you feel satisfied and awesome. However, for the five or six times it kicks the tar out of you, you just feel frustrated. You even feel cheated. Some players even go so far as to post here on the forums how they "hate that the game forces [them] to team" or that "the game forces specific team makeups."

A well-executed challenge is awesome. A cheap shot or a grindfest, as most MMOs are apt to do, is aggravating.