Am I the only one who doesn't care about the story?

I was all for the addition of Tin Mage and Apex, albeit without the stupid level debuff that requires a ham-handed in-story explanation that is quickly forgotten when they want to have us fight Malta. Heck, they didn't even need to be limited to Incarnates only. These are TFs where everything is +4, not just five AVs at the end. It would have given us something to do with our newfound power even if it wasn't specificially labeled "Incarnate content."

Except for the Merit Vendors. Who ARE they!!? Those guys still bug the hell out of me especially in the Isles. Arbiters are inviolate but those guys? Why haven't my villains broken their noses and stolen all of their LotG +7.5% recharge recipes yet?

Because they have a special relationship with the RNG and if you mess with them, they will set it up so you never get a decent drop again, ever. You might as well forget about playing anything with a defensive powerset too.

The problem with CoV is that the story was designed the way a FPS was. Since that game was designed by a guy who made single-player games, that makes sense. Stupid hiring choice and a really bad game designer, but you can see how they got to that point.

The problem I have with a lot of the new Incarnate and morality mission stuff is that it's overstuffed with incredibly uninteresting verbiage. Half the time I just want to use the "yadda yadda yadda" emote when I come across one of those contacts. If you ever see someone shouting in broadcast, "GET TO THE POINT!", that's me yelling at a particularly verbose NPC.

Also, a lot of it reads like a mediocre mission in the AE.

Devs, stop trying to explain game mechanics. That's utterly unimportant. (And take out the ones that are in the game. They're stupid.) Also: brevity is better.

It seems to me they still keeping thing to this holy CoH Bible, however like all religious Scripted, they can be change, edit and reformatted to fit the church needs.

It doesn't help that BioWare has redefined how you move through games with a feeling of complete freedom, even though you still know it is functioning within defined bounds.

So did I - but now I really love it

Mortimer Kal's SF is beyond ridiculous for this.

Note that I am not a tl;dr person. I don't mind pausing to read a long bit of exposition...if it's interesting and relevant. You do not need paragraphs of text to tell a story (this is a game, you should be showing, not telling) or to establish characterization, or to set a mood. It certainly does not help when said paragraphs are riddled with awkward composition and typos.

.

Actually of all the Praetorian arcs I've played the Loyalist Responsibility arc feels the most heroic. Loyalists don't necessarily just "serve Cole". They care about and serve Praetoria. There's a mighty big difference in that distinction.

Now the Resistance Crusaders on the other hand? Those guys are insane.

Kang and Mother Mayhem, are on the responsibility path - you have to choose the Resistance option on their arcs to avoid becoming totally evil.
The responsibility path is constantly bringing up the issue of slavery, and constantly making the support of slavery be the loyalist option.

"Constantly?"
Not quite. On Kang's arc you are looking for a person you (and Kang) believe to be a serial killer. You might argue that the Seers his experiments killed were better off dead. That's a bit of a slippery slope though.

As for Mother Mayhem's arc, what you call the "Resistance" choice in that case I call the true Responsibility Loyalist test. Responsibility Loyalists care about Praetoria and its people. Sometimes that means taking actions against your leaders, because sometimes leaders can be wrong.

Responsibility Loyalists recognize their leaders aren't perfect and are trying to work within the confines of the system they have to effect change and protect the people without resorting to outright rebellion. To classify that point of view as evil trivializes the efforts of the writers of Praetoria's arcs. There are no simple black and white factions in Praetoria.

It's not like the Resistance arcs are all Shining Knight stuff either. How about the mission where Hatchet has you kidnap people to feed them to the ghouls he's captured? Still feeling heroic now?

I asked for that. But we didn't get it.

By helping to keep the people drugged and the Seers enslaved, while working with official PPD torturers like Washington and Kang?
Rebellion is the only option for moral people in Praetoria - no one can work within such an evil system without being evil themselves - loyalists are surrounded by crimes against humanity 24/7, and the only choice to make is to take up arms agaisnt the system and tear it down - like we're doing on the Incarnate Trials.

My dear, I mean no offense by this but you have a very simplistic view if that is really how you feel. You either haven't done Washington's and Kang's arcs or you are choosing to ignore the vast majority of the dialog with them. Both men obviously care very much about the safety of the people of Praetoria. Kang's moral choice mission at the end of Praetoria is proof positive the man has a conscience and is not evil just because he's a Loyalist.

You seem hung up on the notion that Loyalist means "loyal to Cole" when if you would pay attention to the Responsibility Arc you would see that what it really means is "loyal to Praetoria and its people." That makes things a little more complicated than you obviously would like to believe.

But I know from your post history no amount of logic is going to reach you. So with that I think I'll just bow out of this part of the thread. I've said what I had to say. This has been a bit of a threadjack anyway.

I have done their missions and I did read the dialog and both men are rotten to the core. So are almost all the other Contacts in Praetoria. The Warden ones are slightly better, but they're no heroes. At best they're deep in denial about their involvement with terrorists.

No, they don't. Washington is a thug with a badge. This is made clear repeatedly in his arc as he is always described as behaving like a vicious animal. Kang may say he is protecting the people of Praetoria and he might even believe it -- putting us back at that river in Egypt -- but he's just propping up a fascist state. The man throws his own daughter to the wolves.

That's supposed to be the point where he realizes the true nature of what he's doing and turns to the path of righteousness yadda yadda yadda. It's hollow and hamhanded. The only way anyone working in the law enforcement arm of a police state can be unaware of the atrocities such states commit on a daily basis is by being willfully blind to them.

There is no difference. Anyone working in the apparatus of the State is working to keep Tyrant in power, regardless of what they've snowed themselves into believing. Anyone who thinks they're "working within the system" to effect positive change in Praetoria is so deep in denial they can have tea and scones with Stanley and Livingstone.

No, not really. The only thing GG is wrong about is her blind insistence that the Wardens are "the good guys". Not everyone working for the Loyalists is a complete monster who deserves to be shoved against a wall when the revolution comes, but none of them are anywhere even close to being good people.

Aa crazed fanatic who enslaves his own daughter, and a sadistic thug - just two of the "good" people that "responsibility" loyalists help to carry out their evil work.

Yeah, those could have been given a bit of background. Note, I say "background," not "backstory." There's a difference. Take Hero Corps, for example - they have a good bit of background, but no real backstory. Hero Corps is a for-profit business who take on jobs that require meta-humans and then employ meta-humans to do them, taking a percentage from what they're paid for the job to what they pay their metas. There's much discussion about how controversial it is to essentially turn heroes into mercenaries, but that's the extent of their "backstory." Hero Corps Field Analysts exist to "appraise" heroes and so ensure that they are being issued tasks appropriate to their comfort zone. It's an in-game service explained with some background, and it steps on no-one's toes.

Merit Vendors could easily be given a similar background without turning their existence into a plot point. Suppose some visionary tycoon saw that heroes were busting their butts doing some very difficult tasks and not being compensated for their blood sweat and tears and decided to form a business that would compensate heroes for these particular difficult tasks specifically by essentially acting like a non-profit middle man with Wentworth's Fine Consignments. Said tycoon spends a lot of his own money, but in return gets massive tax deduction and amazing positive press. Everybody wins. Of course, the ones in the Rogue Isles would have to be explained separately, but it's not exactly hard to do. I came up with the above background in the time it took me to write it.

I'm with Ironic on this one. The reveal that the Rikti are human, that they are broken up into factions and that they can speak was probably the most excited I've ever been about City of Heroes. Going through the motions in The Eternal Nemesis and watching the guy play everyone for a fool put a smile the size of Texas on my face. Learning the truth behind the Circle of Thorns send chills down my back. Sure, the stories weren't exactly well told in writing, but the stories themselves were very solid and very interesting. They followed a timeline, they perused mystery and revelation, they made an effort to present an interesting experience. Contemporary stories are just not interesting, because they seem like they're rushed and ill-thought-out.

And, in a lot of cases, contemporary stories are horribly invasive of character concept. I still can't forgive the Origin of Powers ********! To see people tell me that the Well of the Furies was the only source of magic in the world simply infuriates me, because that is such an *** backwards way to write an interactive world which is supposed to promote creativity! I've started skipping over storylines, myself, largely because they're not worth reading. In fact, I made the mistake of reading through Montague Castanella's arc the other day. Ugh! The person who wrote this should never be allowed to put words to text ever again! This is a horrible, terrible mess that fails at pretty much every aspect of story writing.

I don't think anyone in Praetoria has a shot at being a good person, which is kind of why the whole thing is so disappointing. As you say, anyone who works for Cole's regime is supporting Cole regardless of his idealistic ideas. But that's kind of why idealist Loyalists leave for Primal Earth, I believe - they realise they're supporting Cole when they shouldn't, so they stop supporting him.

Personally, I'd have preferred a much more solid morality, less grey and grey morality, and more choosing between good and evil. After all, when people asked for moral choices before, they were within the context of good guy heroes and bad guy villains. I'd have been perfectly fine if I were allowed to make moral choices between those obvious moralities. I never saw a reason for a the world half empty that is Praetoria. Hell, if I had my way, Praetoria is how I would write an EVIL world, and they're trying to pass that off as a morally ambiguous one. It's not. We're just all bad guys in there.

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 should probably also warn that anybody who dislikes tl;dr narrative should probably avoid any Architect arc I've ever made. For both our sakes

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.

As far as I can tell, Loyalists (particularly Power ones) leave for Primal because they've run out of script.

Well, there's that, too I actually laughed my *** off when my Power Loyalist called Marchand and he started talking about an interdimensional war and the faith of Praetoria and Primal Earth and ethics and such and all I could think about was "Um... Dude, none of that stuff ever came up in anything I did so far."

To be honest, it seems like the whole of Praetoria only had storyline written up until level 20, because when we leave, we've literally closed every single open storyline and explored every single avenue. It doesn't feel like this is a larger world that we've seen only a small part of. It literally feels like they ran out of things for us to do, so they shunted us off to the old game to serve as filler, in an act not too dissimilar from how Dragon Ball Z managed to dragon for 276 episodes.

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.