Storylines - sidelined?

Oh, I fully expect Nemesis to create an automaton of me. I've gunned down his soldiers by the thousands. I can't help it, they line up in those neat little rows and I have Full Auto. And to add insult to injury, I do it with one of his own guns. Which I earned by gunning down the elite soldiers he had so lovingly crafted to mirror his own glorious self.

No, I'm thinking more of the "so and so has actually been an automaton all along and the whole thing was another Nemesis Plot" potential. We got that with the RWZ, it made the alien invaders look like morons, it made the rest of us look like saps and I don't want to see it again.

There is a difference between fake science as a concept without which you'd have no story and really really fake science because you're trying to shove the square peg of your plot into the round hole of how the world you're writing for is supposed to work.

It's as simple as this: If someone got hit by gamma rays and turned pink, I'd be all like, "huh?" Because the fake made-up world's fake made-up science doesn't work that way. You can make stuff up, but you have to be consistent. When you do something that goes beyond what the established fake science can do, you have to explain how you're doing it, or people are going to tell you that you can't.

Well, so far, no such arc.

The argument is about the implausibility of clones gaining genetic memory versus turning big and green when hit by gamma rays. Both are impossible in the real world, but both are possible in comic books.

One is necessary in comic books, or we would have no Hulk. The other is not necessary in comic books, since there are no characters or memorable story lines that I can think of that necessitate it. Spider-Man's clone saga wasn't necessary. I never read it because I don't feel the need to read things that are bad just to laugh at them (I never understood b-movie fandom either), and I don't think I have any less of an understanding of the character of Spider-Man, or of any subsequent non-clone related storylines because I didn't read it.

It's very necessary for a character like Bizarro who has the whole "Me am Superman" schtick.

I'll admit I'm not too familiar with the DC universe, but I'm sure there would have been ways they could have created this character without resorting to the "genetic memory" garbage. Do they not have telepaths in the DC universe? Do they not have hyper-advanced brainwashing facilities?

Interesting. Is the difference that your character could have said "Fark you and fark your Second Rikti War" to keep leveling, or is there a difference in moving through the RWZ story chain and the Incarnate story chain? (It'll probably get bigger with time.)

As an aside, or possibly related, I'm still wondering how there are more player Incarnates than just our own individual characters, at least in regards to Issue 19. (The BAF will unlock the Alpha slot). Does Ramiel get sent back to the present by each player character, does the Praxidae source of the Well get disappeared each time someone wants to be an Incarnate, etc, etc.

I dunno.

Not yet. I do remember that the Time Echoes in Ramiel's first mission tell us that the we've been poisoned by the Well. The players are currently meant to be seeking the power of the Well by any means, currently to fight back against Emperor Cole's Incarnate-buffed invasion forces, and eventually to stand a chance against the big bads of the Coming Storm. This doesn't mean that there's not another shoe that won't drop sooner or later, and I fully expect one to.

I've seen posts on the boards about people wanting, waiting to become Incarnates since Issue 6: Along Came a Spider. It's not so much a matter of what the plot demands, but what the players demand.

Emphasis mine, for the developers. This seems pretty important.

It'd be pretty shocking if the invasion actually succeeded, but then players would be even more irritated, I imagine.

Note that I did not say I wasn't willing to stretch my belief, but my belief has its limit. People can write science fiction about time travel in spite of science fact because we don't have the theory nailed down very well yet. People being altered rather than outright killed by gamma radiation was a concept used in science fiction at the time when radiation was still a sort of scary and nebulous thing, but you don't see it very much these days.

I will grant that City of Heroes was originally written with a Silver Age mentality, so we have stuff like gamma radiation origins and still have stuff like cloned robots and genetic memory, so I may just be forgetting how to have fun in the first place, which I am willing to admit is entirely possible. There may be an issue with the players and the tone of the game maturing at different rates, which goes back to what Eva was saying about the change in the status quo. It has been seven years.

I could have, yes. I chose to stop the second Rikti invasion, but more importantly, my character chose to stop the second Rikti invasion. I was directed through the story by people who asked for my help and spoke to me as, well, people. My progress was unrelated to the storyline. I got better at fighting because I fought Rikti, not because the Dark Watcher was kind enough to grant me more power for performing these tasks for him.

How could my Scrapper reveal the truth behind the Rikti War last week when my Blaster had already done it last year? Things like this do have to be handwaved in an MMO.

In Soviet Russia, story drives you.

They could have gone about it in a different way. There was no need to make the Well a necessary part of it. Statesman and Recluse drank from the Well, we know that, but what was stopping them from stating that Hero One had received his Incarnate powers from a different source? It would have been obvious and easily believable.

It's the nature of a video game, you know you will win, you just have to figure out how. Unless you're a villain of course.

No, I don't think you are. I think you remember very well how to have fun and therefore are annoyed when something unnecessarily spoils your suspension of disbelief, and therefore your fun.

I do think part of the problem is that players are hung up on mechanics more than they used to be. The mechanics are far more complicated than they were back in i1. You can make an entire game out of shopping for shinies. People redo their builds to squeeze out an extra 3 DPS. We have loads of different rewards to chase, and swarms of enemies to pwn in all kinds of new ways. Every time new content is released players flock to either complain about or praise the mechanics. I honestly can't blame the devs too much for thinking the majority of the playerbase just doesn't care about the story anymore. It still isn't a good reason for them not to care though.

From that statement, I'm guessing you've not actually played GR?

And don't forget that one of the main reasons the Alpha slot was cut from GR was that the beta testers were asking for a more lore-based unlock for it, rather thna just buying it with merits

Alright. So do you want to be able to gain Incarnate powers or something analagous without having to participate in a particular storyline? Do you want more arcs at the LVL 50 cap?

Certainly, but we've no way of knowing what development's reasoning from over two years ago was without them letting us know. Do you want Hero-1 to have recieved his power from a different enigmatic source other than the Well and its entity, and other Incarnates from a pantheon of different enigmatic sources, or do you want characters to become Incarnates after meeting certain criteria, with no sort of 'patron?'

/em curseyou

Yeah, I already mentioned that. I think that Eva's played through GR and Ramiel and ain't impressed. :V

Well of course, I want more arcs at the level 50 cap, because it's always nice to have more stuff to do, but more importantly is the sense of character progression being tied into the story. If my Natural origin Super Reflexes Scrapper isn't good enough to dodge Hro'dotz's sword, she can go "practice" until she's better. If my Traps Corruptor's gadgets aren't up the task of defeating Rikti and Nemesis ambushes, he can go back to the drawing board and improve on them. If my Assault Rifle Blaster isn't good enough to shoot Tyrant in the face, she has to go to the Well for help, because the game has told us that we can't improve our skills in any other way.

Hero-1 had Excalibur, so a source rooted in Arthurian legend wouldn't be inappropriate. It would certainly serve to diminish the omnipotent "source of all power, deal" nature of the Well, and show that there are other ways. But yeah, the second one. I don't like the villain PPP unlocks either.

The original means of unlocking the slot allowed the player to put their own spin on it. Maybe I paid a little bit closer attention when I beat up Romulus this time. Maybe I opened up the Orestes Rifle after I finished the SF and went back to my evil lair. Maybe I grabbed a blood sample from Mako, or Hero-1. Maybe there I was, on the Mothership, surrounded by Rikti, about to die, and was forced to call upon hereto untapped reserves of potential I never knew I had. But no. In the future, I sent a guy back into the past to ensure that I became involved with the Well to become sufficiently powerful in the future to avert said future and avoid having to send him back in time to....oh, and it's a Nemesis plot.

So no, I'm not impressed. GR really accomplishes nothing but to drive home the Praetorian threat so we know they're really really bad guys when it comes time for us to stop them.

It's also annoying how Technology heroes get pushed to utilizing Portacio Industries hardware.

Or how some people get forced down the path of utilizing the power of Hamidon to improve. Or just being forced to 'invent' something that is often another signature character's power.

It's also awkward how pretty much all natural heroes apparently were expected to study the various dragon forms of martial arts, or just again mimic a tech origin signature hero.

As a fan of Silver Age comics, I have no problem accepting its tropes in a comic book based game. My characters run the gammut of comic book tropes. My main Hero, Destructeon has a blatant Silver Age feel about him and that's not taking into account the Golden Age alternate costume slot I gave him just for ***** and giggles. I have other characters that are Silver Age inspired and others Golden Age inspired. My main villain, Scythus, is a bit Bronze Age. I even have a few influenced by the Dark Age of comics; their appearance or names dead ringers for that particular era's tropes.

Yes, you're forgetting to have fun. This, being a game influenced by superhero comics should frankly be open to all of the tropes from comics. If I want to have an evil clone of one of my heroes and he has genetic memories of the original, I should damn well be able to create one and damn your "stretch of belief." As far as I'm concerned, if it can exist in comic books, it can exist here.

It seems to me that you are definitely forgetting how to have fun.

Do high level Tip missions. You'll get to "help" Frostfire and Miss Thystle take down an automaton of yourself.

You can create whatever you want. You can create Baron Lord McDarkness the Supreme Overlord of the 17th Dimension if you want. What you do has nothing to do with what I do. What the devs do provides the context for what I do, so I'm holding them to higher standards than I hold other players.

Nope. I just happen to have fun in different ways than you do.

I totally had fun rolling a bunch of A-merits, getting an LotG and slotting it, getting some other good stuff and selling it, and logging in the next day to pick up my 200 mil. I'm sure there's someone who would take issue with this definition of fun.

More like I get to take down an automaton of myself while Miss Thystle and Frostfire blow up a Jaeger, go nuts from the exploding gas attack, aggro the rest of the room and kill a few lieutenants before they get themselves killed.

NPC "helpers" on Nemesis missions are the opposite of helpful.

Whatever. I just find it a bit silly when players get all huffy when they run into comic book tropes in what is clearly a comic book influenced game. Evil clones/twins, time travel, chessmaster villains... they're all part of the genre.

So if certain contacts suddenly refused to talk to any of your characters who were Mutant origin you'd be ok with it? It happened in a comic book.

Or if Sister Psyche was killed off in the Praetorian invasion, meaning you could never do her task force and never earn Task Force Commander again, you'd be ok with it? People get killed off in comic books all the time.

Or if someone's Tech Origin Energy Blaster in a power armor costume was inherently more powerful than your Natural Origin Assault Rifle Blaster in jeans and a t-shirt....you'd be cool with that? Because Iron Man is more powerful than the Punisher could ever hope to be.

Not everything that works in a comic book works in a video game based on comic books, and the things you mentioned don't often work particularly well in comic books either.

Clearly game balance has to be a rule of thumb when playing an actual game and a lot of your examples boil down to game balance. My examples don't. My examples are mostly lore fluff. Where does a clone having the memories of the original effect actual gameplay, mmm? Where does Blue Steel's police career effect actual gameplay? Where does Azuria's cache of magical items effect actual gameplay?

Also, don't forget, Punisher once killed the Marvel Universe.

Just a quick aside, there's a *very* popular game franchise about a certain order of knights involved with the Crusades and the secret order opposing them in the near future that is entirely based around this very concept. Both sides have a machine that will allow it's user to relive the memories of their ancestors by reading their DNA.

Not as out there an idea as some people seem to think.

Well if you consider lore to be fluff then I guess I'm done responding to you on this topic.

Yes, and we all had a good laugh. Or a good facepalm, depending. It also had nothing to do with canon and didn't pretend to.

I'm not sure if the Well is actually the source of all power, other than to give a jump start to the new age of supers, since there's in-canon evidence of super-powered beings before Statesman and Recluse drank from the Well. The five origins we use right now actually seem to be determined by the state of the 'power grid' thing that Dr. Brainstorm was trying to tinker with.

I think the only reason that people roll their eyes at the Origins of Power explanation of things is that it was explained way too fast for something that was supposed to be a fundamental piece of canon, in a 'Oh, by the way, ALL MYSTERIES OF LIFE REVEALED' sort of way. If the idea had been introduced more slowly that superpowered beings exist not by chance alone, but by destiny or potential as well, I think it would have been recieved better/more seriously. I think it's okay, for what's been done.

I'm sure we'll find out what the real motivation of the Well entity is in the future, because I don't think many people buy it's "I don't believe in good or evil, only power and will" stance, because that's a position that most villains claim to take as well. I mean, Merulina seemed to have a pretty good idea of what it was up to, and when she tried to stop it, it killed her and helped Calystix turn her corpse into a gigantic sea monster. Jeez.

It's better than having the lore be crunch.

But I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was related somehow. It did exist long before Statesman and Recluse found it.

Wait, what? Oy vey, that stupid Well infects yet another perfectly good piece of lore. I'm starting to think I should just stop reading mission text right now. What, we can't have a giant sea monster that is just a giant sea monster?

Most any form of iterative fiction from oral tradition to comic books and tv serials are loaded with self contradiction. Shared authorship one culprit, changing zeitgeists its co-conspirator.

A couple tricks I've found to keep the more distasteful corruptions palatable:
- When reading, take the perspective that this is not necessarily gospel or canon but rather the current NPC's localized understanding of the universe
- Cultivate an natural habit of gradated acceptance of each bit of canon. Embrace the aspects you love, outright ignore the ones you despise, embellish and touch up the parts you are ambivalent about as needed
- Which brings me to my third tip: remember that lore, canon, and everything the dev's offer up are BACKGROUND for you, the true protagonist. Sometimes, it's just a damned video game and you need to just focus on the graphic qualities: "my character looks like my character in that costume, moves like my character with those animations, not sure why I'm fighting Malta really but... if this character WERE ever in the pages of a cool comic fighting para-military dudes, he/she'd probably look just like that. Anyways, at least I'm getting the badge!" Other times, a villain group or particular set of arcs will just really click and feel as if they were designed and written for that character. More often it's somewhere in the middle, and just like this were an old text adventure game, a box of lego or even some of the older lo res non-3d graphic adventure games of yore, let your imagination run. Ask it to if need be. Banter in character with a mate or two if it helps. Whatever you do, remember that no dev has ever put a gun to your head and said you MUST accept the canon for all and every character's experience. See what they've written into the game as inspiration. Ignore the well if you need to and just say your character is still improving. Refining gadgets. Training harder. Getting luckier. Mutating naturally. Unlocking their potential. Wherever your mind roams, play first and foremost for your characters. Everything else in game narrative-wise should always come second.

(And for the record, I find the well thing to be rather stupid too. Sometimes I just go to Striga with a character and pretend I'm playing through an old 50's-60's era Weird War type comic, when military and horror genres bled into the flailing superhero comic market.)