What will you miss from Galaxy City?

QFE

This is one of the big things about Galaxy City, and I don't mean the size of the statue. Galaxy Girl is MORE iconic than Statesman, to my mind. Moreover, she belongs to Galaxy City. She lived there. The people there loved her and they benefitted from her presence in many other ways than just by virtue of her crime-fighting.

The whole zone is themed this way. Orion Beltway and its associated statue honors the hero who saved the people living on that street and in that neighborhood. The history plaque commemorating Atlas vs Teal Serpent likewise honors his rescue of the people on that street. M1's statue commemorates a local hero made good and honored by his neighbors. There are other statues mentioned in the lore that don't actually exist, but that likewise honor "home town" heroes.

Galaxy City is a place where heroism is personal and the people appreciate their heroes.

Which is why she's staying there







See above

It's our Galaxy City - but it's being updated to match the new look of the updated Atlas Park - the old buildings are being replaced with new ones.

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.

Your statement confirms that it is NOT our Galaxy City.

Everybody sing:

We don't need the looks updated
Don't make it look like Atlas Park
No new replacements for old buildings
Dev-ils leave this place alone

Hey! Dev-ils! Leave this place alone!

The wiki for starters. There's also the Galaxy City zone info page on the website, there are various plaques scattered throughout paragon City, such as the statue for Dauntless in Steel, and then there's the Canon for the Fodder thread.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Like, what in particular, Sam? Like most everything else in the game, the actual lore is pretty sparse. Galaxy Girl DOES have more written about her than almost any other hero, but that's not actually saying much. Heh.

The existing lore primarily comes from the statue plaque, the history plaque, and the Galaxy City backgrounder on the website. Oh, and the "Dauntless" badge. Arctic Sun (You remember him?) did a rewrite on the Galaxy City background that went into a fair amount of detail (relatively speaking) about Galaxy Girl. I think he may have re-done the statue plaque also, actually, as I remember a time when the statue's blurb was along the lines of "Kelly Graham got mugged and BIF,BAM, POW, she was Galaxy Girl!", in typical terse statue plaque fashion.


I miss Arctic Sun. When they let him go, that was when the background lore development took a nose dive that it never recovered from.

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.

If you consider the website lore to be "expanded universe" then I'd answer a qualified "yes". The website, Paragon Times, stuff like that is, to me, just a way of publishing stuff that won't fit into the game client. It's still all derived from the "story bible" and all composed and published by Paragon Studios.

The novels and comic books are what I would classify as "expanded universe".

I don't really say "expanded universe" in a derogative way. It's just that I tend to stick with what's in the actual game client and somewhat rarely go out-of-game to look for fictional backgrounds. I mean, It's just hard for me to be motivated by lore that's almost entirely unrelated to what I see in the actual game.

I especially didn't care about the Paragon Times articles. They were well-written, I'll give 'em that, but I honestly do not care about why flies the Atlas Park blimp or where the old newspaper HQ was. This isn't restricted to just this game or games in general, I tend to rarely care about the specific history of elements not immediately relevant.

For instance, the History Channel people like to just pick a person who lived through WW2 at random and explore his or her story through the war. I've tried watching these, but they just don't interest me, since I have very little reason to care about the person in question. I'd rather watch about the Battle of the Bulge or the siege at Sevastopol than follow the history of a random German soldier.

Again, it feels like the War of the Worlds movie. I wanted to watch a movie about... You know, a war of the worlds. I wanted to watch a movie about aliens attacking Earth and people fighting them off. What I got instead was an hour and a half of Tom Cruise doing things that ultimately didn't matter. And the aliens died by themselves in the end anyway.

Like I said - I'm not dising Galaxy Girl. I'll have to go read her backstory some time. I just thought there'd be more in the actual game.

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 got some bad news for ya... that's pretty much how the original book went too. Only replace Tom Cruise with an H.G. Wells self-insert.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Yeah, I know. It took a while for me to learn of this as I haven't read the book, but I wouldn't lay the blame at the movie-maker's hands. I'm sure I'd have hated the book just as much as I hated the movie. More, probably, since books tend to take longer than 90 minutes to read.

*edit*
And that's not bad news, actually. It just means Hollywood sucks less than I thought it did, which bodes well for future movies

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.

Coolio Wolfus leader of Coolio�s Crusaders on Union.

Tekna Logik leader of Tekna�s Tormentors on Defiant.

Creator of: Coolio's Tech Beacon Replacements

AE arc 402506, 'The Rise and Demise or Otherwise of Tekna Logik...'.

Actually, I'm glad you mentioned all of that. I have another thread around here about "is the back story adequate?", and one of the things I've been complaining about is that so much of the existing lore is 1) missing and 2) outside of the game where a new Freedom player will have problems finding it.

If a veteran player is in that boat then it just emphasizes the need to bring this stuff into the game proper.

(Anyone else unable to load this twitpic? I've tried unsuccessfully from both my PC and smartphone.)

I get a broken image from it. Probably a case of an incomplete link.

I agree with you. The backstory is largely sufficient to support the action we're seeing, but not enough to set up a believable, consistent world. Far, FAR too much of it exists outside of the game where even when you know about it, it takes time and effort to go read up on it. Long, unconnected articles like the City History ones can often feel like homework.

The death of one of the Phalanx members also brings up the lack of story regarding them. I'm sure there was a lot of it written down... In the comic books and in the Web of Arachnos book and probably on the site. But for anyone just playing the game, they're the random NPCs who give you Task Forces and nothing more. Some of the more recent stories seem to have tried to insert the Surviving Eight into the game, but it's actually had the exact opposite effect.

For instance, we fight the Manticore Automaton in that Shadow Shard map and it's throwing around sarcastic comments. I guess I'm supposed to think "Oh, that Nemesis, he's captured Manticore's sarcasm so well!" but instead I'm thinking "Manticore jokes? Since when? What did I miss?" The way they were introduced into storyline just made me feel like I'm watching the sequel to a movie which doesn't exist, and like there's a TON of storyline I never saw that I needed to fully appreciate what I'm seeing. And now we're going to see one of them die. And this is supposed to be shocking and heart-wrenching? How?!? We barely even know them!

Or, for an even better example - Morality and Alignment missions. They're chock full of about two dozen characters swapping alignments back and forth all over the place, and I'm somehow supposed to keep track of them. Once upon a time, Doc Quantum called me and the game treated him like a complete bad guy. Hold the phone! Just yesterday, Doc Quantum was trying to stop my villain from robbing a bank! What happened? So he's a bad guy now? When did that happen? Why? What did I miss? A friend of mine told me that there is kind of a storyline if you do all the missions from in all the level ranges in order, but that kind of requires you to run Alignment missions as both a hero and a villain. But if I choose to run one at, say, level 35, I am completely lost. It's like tuning into episode 12 of a 24 episode series - I don't know who's who and what's going on at all.

The backstory delivery could use some work.

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.

Coolio Wolfus leader of Coolio�s Crusaders on Union.

Tekna Logik leader of Tekna�s Tormentors on Defiant.

Creator of: Coolio's Tech Beacon Replacements

AE arc 402506, 'The Rise and Demise or Otherwise of Tekna Logik...'.

/this. Or "update" while keeping the buildings looking *like galaxy city.* That doesn't look like Galaxy City at all, any more than me saying "This is manhattan!" with this pic:



If anything, that one pic (not the one above) looks like an updated Steel Canyon, or perhaps Talos.

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Excellent - thank you.