GR's greatest problem

It's great. It's so great that... it just totally blows Paragon and the Rogue Isles out of the water. It's better in pretty much every conceivable way. They might as well just stop making expansions for CoH and make Going Rogue it's own thing, like City of Heroes 2 or something, and just focus on expanding that. It's that good. It's good enough to be it's own sequel and just cut the old content out of existence.

Ok, exuberance aside, how is anyone going to feel good about going back now? As I was joking around in my global channel of choice, Issue 19 might as well be an issue that explains how Primal Earth gets nuked out of existence. Player characters are preserved story wise by having escaped the holocaust through Portals into Preatoria Earth and all old content can be accessed by some kind of Ouroborus system. A new zone can be built in Preatoria Earth away from Cole's city, maybe on the other side of the planet or something, that is claimed by Primal Earth survivors where they fight to survive against the DE that have ravaged the planet, and try to stay out of conflict with the Preatorians.

Anyway, Preatoria is awesome, and makes the old content look that much more outdated and... bad. Relatively speaking.

Praetoria is pretty - but it's also creepy and fake - Paragon City will always be home

It's nice to visit, but does hold a little of that "Perfectville" creepiness to it.

I still love my smoggy, broken-windowed Rogue Isles, though. But Neutropolis does remind me of St. Martial.

Atlas Park is where it's at - the heart and soul of the game

Each has their pros and cons.

The Legacy zones are much larger and more diverse in environment, buildings, and enemy factions. That can be a negative to move around in, but, when you're a long time Vet with lot's of TP options... it's not a problem. Praetoria is better put together and prettier and has a bit of a modern design edge. However, at the high end of UM, the legacy zones look really good and can still be impressive.

Praetoria has better writing for almost all of its content, but, there still are shining moments in the legacy cities. The new arcs in the past year in the legacy zones are just as good and groundbreaking as in Praetoria (doppelgangers and story telling branching in I17, e.g.).

Praetoria reminds me of London: Fantastic to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. Give me Kings Row any day as a place to call "home"

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I appreciate the base game for its liberating simplicity. Praetoria is great, but it's also incredibly heavy. Everything I do is complicated, morally ambiguous and with possibly severe consequences. Everything I do is a difficult choice of morality and ethics. The whole world is far too sterile on the outside and far too rotten on the inside. The whole place makes me uneasy to be in it, more so than the Rogue Isles, even.

In the old game, things are simple. I'm the good guy, they're the bad guys, I learn where they are and I kick their *****. It's that easy. I don't have to be aware of my own slipping morality, I don't have to worry that the people I work with are secretly lunatics, I don't have to worry about the horrible unintended consequences of my actions. I do have to worry about corrupt or robot officials, but those are just more villains I need to beat up. City of Heroes is being the good guy, the easy way. You're always right, the other guy is always wrong, and the only solution to anything is beating enough people up. It's liberating, in a way, which is quite ironic within the context of the switch from Praetoria to Paragon City, because I don't think that's how they intended it to feel.

For me, this was quite a ride. I dove right into Praetorian Earth the day this went live (that is, on Monday), and I did nothing but Praetorian content on that one character all the way up until late day Friday. Finally, I went through the long, heart-warming ordeal of saying goodbye to all the people I had helped, and I got ready to step through the portal. I'd gotten so accustomed to Praetoira that the old world of Primal Earth felt somehow distant, unknown and exciting. Once I crossed through the portal, where would I go? What would I see?

Well, I saw an empty warehouse, I stepped out, and I found myself in Talos Island. And instantly a feeling of nostalgia washed over me. "I am home!" The colours in Paragon City are more vibrant than those in Praetoria, where everything is mostly white or bright shades of other colours. The buildings were darker and more detailed, the rocks were browner, the Warriors more orange, and yes, even the grass was quite literally greener. I was done with all of the new and strange experiences, and now I was home. I knew where everything was without even looking at the map, I knew what contacts I could run without checking my contacts screen, I knew which shops were where... Yeah.

I am not sad to have left Praetoria behind. It's a great piece of content, but the old game has its charms.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I prefer to think of Praetoria as a taste of things to come. Now that the devs have shown us what they can do with the new tech used for the zones and the story arcs I can't wait to see what they can do with that in Paragon City and the Isles. Over and over as I've played through the new content I keep thinking the same thing... this is what CoV should have been. It really does feel like a brand new game, and I'm far more impressed than I was expecting to be.

Visually Praetoria looks incredible and completely outclasses red and blueside - especially blueside. Standing on a rooftop in Imperial City and looking east to Cole's Tower, then turning west to see Neuron's tower and knowing that this is 3 zones you can see, is amazing. Praetoria makes Paragon City look terribly small and cramped and dull and dirty and...

Seriously, those war walls have got to go.

I'll be happy to return to either the Isles or PC, where I can be a hero or villain and not some chump who gets held down and violated by any 3 random yellow minions.

Great post, Sam. I love your description of the ironic contrast, and the experience you had working through Praetoria and then arriving in CoH. Nicely written.

I was all bedazzled with the new stuff, and I'm definitely looking forward to playing through it multiple times to see how the branching storylines play out. I paused with my new Praetorian yesterday though, because I have a Villain I want to get moving towards his redemption. I haven't played him in a while, and left him at level 17. I thought since I need to get him to 20 before I can start looking for tips, I'd go ahead and work on that.

When I picked him up I discovered I'd left him in the middle of Seer Marino's arc. It was just content at first, a means to level. However as I worked through the last several missions and completed the arc, I suddenly thought, "Wow, this feels more like something a Rogue would do, rather than a villain - helping this Fortunata Seer try to save her brother." It starts with threats of revenge against Ghost Widow but in the end, you find yourself helping to resolve, as much as the situation can be, a conflict between two very human (though one is a ghost) characters.

So, I wouldn't say the legacy game is in any way devoid of the same themes that seem to run through Praetoria. It doesn't steamroll the legacy content for me, it actually has brought an interesting extra depth to it.

The mobs make a huge difference too - because the authorities are evil, the whole city feels hostile to you - like fly through Steel Canyon and then fly through Imperial City and the difference is so obvious.
Like in Steel Canyon, there are a few cops about, a couple of famous heroes by the big statue wating to help out other heroes, stores, billboards with various normal posters on them, and a huge a amount of NPCs just going about their normal lives - the places feels real, and it feels human.
But that's all lacking from Imperial City - thuggish cops everywhere harassing the citizens, while the ones not being harassed are very subdued, as they're all drugged - there's just not the same numbers of them as in Steel Canyon either, or the same sense of life - and there are thought police on most street corners who atatck you for "bad" thoughts the moment you go near them, creepy robots clicking and clanking their way around the palce, and hgue posters eveywehere tellingyou the greatest villain in that world is some kind of hero.
The whole atmosphere of Praetoria lack humanity and is relentlessly hostile and oppressive to people who've experienced the normal world in Paragon City - Paragon City loves you, and you love the city - but there's no love in Praetoria.

I'd be concerned if it was

The diversity is great!

This is a game based on the super hero comic genre, which is itself greatly diverse, not only over titles and publishers but over time.

I want City of Heroes AND City of Villains AND Praetoria.

It doesn't have to be either-or.

And if someone just want one particular style... it's there and they should stick with it.

Asking, or even *insisting* that all aspects of the game conform to that one style is pretty... parochial? selfish? short-sighted?