I asked on beta boards...

( With issue 21 coming out tomorrow I feel more comfortable talking about this, and away we go..)

If Atlas Park remake was a retcon or a years later to progress the story and some players were kind enough to confirm it was years later, (thank you SlickRiptide and Golden Girl), so it got me thinking, if it is years later about 10 years or more( given how long it takes to see a city rebuilt) what do you think what happened to most of your character would be doing after that length of time? But I know many of my heroes will be retired or dead. I will start with my favorites:


General Surge( lvl 50 SS/Electric tank): No thanks to the Well's influence has forced a rapid mutation that made is electric power go haywire which forced him into seclusion til he controlled his powers.

Doctor Payload( level 30. AR/Pain Corruptor ): After failed attempts to get rich in crime, he became a merc for two years in South America. After many more failures he retired and returned to Paragon City and joined The Crey as security to keep heroes from infiltrating many of the corporations important facilities.

Red Fest( level 9 Spine/regen Scrapper): Gave up his heroic status to become a vigilante, and declared war on the mutant group of Outcasts for the slayings at the university that killed his pregnant girlfriend. After a year gave up his campaign now works a for PPD under a new name.

I have more but I like to see what you guys have.

BrandX: A clone that doesn't age...going on 5 years...and she doesn't look a day older than when she arrived in the city!

Immortality! It's awesome!

Do you think she would still be fighting crime or took a desk job?

I have a whole bunch of immortals, a whole bunch of people who don't age, a whole bunch of people who could be healed, regenerated or repaired good as (or better than) new, so no-one's really dying. I also have a few characters for whom being teenagers is important, so those I'm simply not passing any time for.

The rest, meh. Seven years is not a long time, plus I work on comic book time. It's still the same point in time ten or twenty real life years later. I focus on the here and now. Long-distance retrospectives are always depressing and even when they're not, I feel like I missed out on all the good bits.

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.

Arno would be in his 50's but he uses a powered exoskeleton so it would be 10 years of refinement or at the current rate of advancement his Mark III suit would have gone through the Epsilon variant and on to the Zeta provided he didn't do a clean sheet design and is workking on a Mark IV Alpha model.

Ah but, we're applying real world construction times here. In a city chocked full of super powered folks, I'd say a total city revamp could be done in a year or less.

The problem with time in the game is that there are 2 separate timelines, because it's an MMO.
There's the historic timeline, and the levelling timeline - the historic timeline is the one where the events are tied to certain dates and years - for example, Statesman and Recluse drinking from the Well in 1930, the transit sytem starting in 1951, the first Rikti invasion in 2002 and so on - these dates aren't a problem, as they all happen before the current time period of the game - where the problems start is when the historic timeline moves into the period of the game being live.
That means that fixed historical dates become stretched out, because as an MMO the content has to be repeatable - so while the second Rikti invasion has the historical date of 2007, it's also still happening now in 2011 - the RWZ is in the same crisis stste as it was in 2007 - and that's where things get confusing with the other levelling timeline.
In the levelling timeline, events happen as you progress - the higher levels happen at a later date than the lower levels, which makes sense.
But it leads to weird situatiosn where the Shivan strike on Glaxy City in 2011 happens before the Rikti invasion of 2007 - or that the Faultline storyline happens after the destruction of Galaxy City, even though it happened in 2006 in the historic timeline.

As a basic example, the historic timeline reads like this:

2006 Faultline story/rebuilt
2007 Second Rikti invasion
2010 Tyrant invades
2011 Galaxy City destroyed.

But the levelling timeline goes like this:

Galaxy City Destroyed
Faultline story/rebuilt
Second Rikti invasion
Tyrant invades

So it's quite bixed up trying to decide what's the "real" timeline

Well, what can we say? Ouroboros has been busy.

Someone find the Master.

We need to deal with that Paradox Machine.

It is interesting, my old main is retired, even his costumes are mostly just clothes, with a hazardous environment suit for space travel, and just one actual super hero costume. I even changed his name.

He's just done and in retired-hero/Welcome to Tranquility mode.

I only have one character that I 'officially' retired. Tiny, on Freedom server. He's a part human, part unknown metahuman clone (yes, I know they did that with Superboy, but Tiny came first :-) )

He started as a small, childlike, indestructable engine of trouble, who eventually had to grow up and save the world.

I just returned to the game, so I could probably work well with this. I'll wait for the official explanation so that I can appropriately respond to it with all of my characters.

My BS/Regen doesn't age past 30. She's still a Assistant District Attorney/Crimefighter.

My Fire/Shield is an Efreet and immortal. She's still kicking butt and taking names for FREEDOM!

My Cold/Ice Defender is a witch and is just really being seen as an adult at the age of 59! She's still teaching Ice Magic and a member of the Midnight Squad.

I prefer to operate on Comic Book Time. Things change, but no one ever gets older...

My Elysion would still being doing exactly the same sorts of things they do now, either on Primal Earth or in Praetoria or in the Shard... They were created for a specific purpose and take their task very seriously. The "family" so-to-speak would probably be a bit larger, given the number of pairs there are among the members of the flight, but with only ten years passing the next generation of bird-brains would still be a little young to take up the fight themselves.

Still... It would interesting to puzzle out exactly how the fledgelings from a couple like Shade (dark-phase Kin Melee stalker) and Mist (bright-phase Peacebringer) would turn out. "We suspect they're the brightest, most shiny bird-things in the galaxy... But we don't know for sure. Because nobody can see them."

Dragos has been spending all this time targeting the BAF, Lambda, and that cursed Keyes Island over and over (he has terribad luck on the reward tables)

Deamus the Fallen has been amassing inf for the great "buffening" (where he splurges on Gladiator Armor uniques and Shield Wall sets) in preparation for his glorious return to Liberty.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

Good point.

Given that I'm an RPer (Part of the pinnacle RPCongress, check us out at www.RPcongress.com >.> /plug), A LOT of things have happened to most of my toons, and because I produce stories more convoluted/worse than anything the Devs have dun with the Well of Furies lore, in the case of some, it's easier to ask WHAT HASN'T happened.

Quote:

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.