I Sing The Praises of First Ward

I do enjoy First Ward and I think my opinion of Diabolique may have changed a bit after all those arcs.

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Originally Posted by Golden Girl The Incarnate Trials are the climax of the Praetorian storyline.

I would argue the climax of the Praetorian storyline was already in the game; Namely the Tina MacIntyre and Maria Jenkins arcs. After all, that's where the entire Praetorian story originates from (besides some devs who clearly watched a lot of Star Trek Mirror, Mirror episodes ). Although it doesn't exactly wrap up Praetoria well overall, those arcs are still the ones involving taking down all the Praetorian AVs.

Besides, they're constantly going back and updating those arcs to fit their newer designs of Praetoria. To-wit: The Praetorian War now being The Anti-Matter Collision - an entirely redesigned 40-44 Anti-Matter arc by Tina post-i21.

I can't say exactly where I want firstward to continue but I can say that I loved twin shots arcs in Atlas park. And I'd love to see that storyline between them and the little supergroup you form with them continue on from that level range all the way to 50. Doing more missions with them and making them an important part of the journey to 50 and beyond. Kinda like how faultline and fusionette make little appearances in tfs and other story arcs later in the game. But for twinshot and crew, you should have atleast 1 story arc per level range for them.

Whomever designed the characters and wrote the story scripts for them did a good job. I found them more enjoyable than the signature story arcs. Very interesting, humorous and exciting missions. Not a dull point the entire time (unless you don't like reading the contact windows and caption)

It's missions like this though where I'd like to see voice overs and player character voices for picking options and not just because ToR is doing it. I think that one little detail could add alot of extra enjoyment to these.

personally I haven't had much chance to check out the story arcs that far but aside from the amazing job you guys did on the zone I do have one bit of feedback I would like to focus on...

the zone itself is WAY too dead population wise. I think a great deal of this is due to confusion on how to get there. any time I bring up the topic of the zone I get lots of people confessing they haven't been there because they don't know how. I am SURE its just a bug but the contacts don't show up under the contact list in my experience.
Personally I think it would be much less confusing to put one contact in studio 55 that takes you to First Ward. this would make it less confusing and easier to get to the zone.

Also I recently found out that the reason I could not get any contact to talk to me was because the contact (red or blue side) I needed to talk to in order to get the ball rolling. In my experience, any contact that doesn't give you something to do, most people skip it, and I was not the only one on my team that couldn't get any contacts to talk to them. the whole team were long time vets and all were confused

I really do not care for the Praetorian storyline but the zone itself and the new maps... freaking gorgeous. Simply amazing.

Very impressed with First Ward as well. There are still some unanswered questions, hoping they get answered in the next new zone (please please please) and/or an upcoming trial.

I just finished the First Ward arcs on my pure Praetorian toon. Daaaaang that's some good writing (even the Ghostbusters bits) and the art is awesome. Kudos to all involved.

I flew around the zone, enjoying the design and admiring the visual details. Unfortunately, I don't have a single character in the right level range to do the content, and it appears that there is no way to access it through Oreoland. I really wish we could do away with level gating...or have Praetorian content added to the flashback system.

I am the sad panda.

"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend

I find myself having to praise the First Ward, at least as much of it as I've seen so far. For the first time in a VERY long while, I find writing that I honestly can't complain about, and which is both incredibly immersive AND very good in terms of personality characterisation. I've often found that writing which does not require description and is instead able to deliver all necessary subtext on the strength of its language is great writing of the highest level, and that's what I'm seeing in the First Ward. Even the quirky characters who I usually hate work very well. The zone is just the right mix of crazy and cool.

The visuals of the zone are also impressive. The shadow paths are very well done, even if the transition vortex that plays when you enter or exit one is usually delayed, especially if you cross a path too quickly. Good use of the phasing tech, I must say, and creepy, otherworldly feel when you're on one of these paths is really, really creepy, which is exactly as it should be. I also found a wall of posters while on a shadow path that suggested the whole place might not even exist, and instead be a collective dream of some sort, which would certainly explain a lot of the nonsense in there, though that's probably just someone's ramblings.

However, the zone also has a lot of bad to it, too.

The first thing I noticed when zoning in was that the giant vortex in the sky that's supposed to dominated the whole zone is VERY pixellated. It appears to be over the middle of the zone somewhere, but I could see the pixellisation from the edge where you enter near Jester. It's also very transparent and almost single-colour, which reduces what could have been one of the game's most impressive visual effects to a very obvious prop. I think this thing needs to be MUCH higher resolution, and possibly either not be one piece or have more going on there. Granted, I run the game at 1920x1080 and all of my loading screens are also highly pixellated, but the sky still looks way too flat and way too low-res.

There are also a couple of contacts I found around the survivor camp that I was never introduced to, and I'm not sure I ever will be. I asked around various globals and was told that these are repeatable mission contacts. So here's my question: Why are they not in the Find Contact list? I get not being introduced to them, fine, whatever, but why can I never know of their existence unless I trip over them or, in time, check the Wiki?

I also just defeated a DUST leader, who collapsed and wanted to talk to me. I'm starting to get more than a little tired of that "on hands and knees" pose that seemingly every single boss in new content assumes when defeated because every single boss wants to talk to me. Why does every boss want to talk to me? Additionally, this came with the "Alpha Protocol" problem of me picking a conversation line thinking it means one thing and my character actually meaning something completely different. I'd honestly appreciate some kind of tip as to what the option I'm picking actually means.

For instance, the DUST leader in question gave me two options, effectively "Stand down" and "I break your neck!" I presumed that threatening the man with breaking his neck would make him reluctant to answer my question, so I ordered him to stand down, whereupon he hopped up and said "So you're letting us go?" What? No! Well, apparently I am, because I had inadvertently chosen the mercy option. I never even suspect the choice was between murder and mercy, I just thought I'd get a little bit more flavour text if I treated him better, plus my villain is very polite, but the game interpreted my politeness as a desire to ally myself with the DUST leader, and I'm sure that'll come back to play a role later in the storyline. Why? I wanted to kill him, I just didn't want to be a dick about it.

None of these are big concerns, really, but the longer I play, the more I start to dislike how City of Heroes handles conversations. First Ward itself is still pretty cool, but correct me if I'm wrong: Why does it seem like the zone only has a heroic story arc with ******* cosmetic options thrown in there? I was invited to the First Ward by the Carnival of War, I presumed to aid them in whatever warfare they were rustling up, yet the first mission had me actually fight and thwart a Carnival of War operation and then proceed to help the Carnival of Light, instead. I don't really dislike the arc that's there, it's just a bit... Surprising that we're going back to the Rikti War Zone approach of having one heroic story arc in the zone that villains can just choose to participate in.

Overall, the new zone is made of awesome, but it still has these niggling problems which I highly suspect will come back to bug me some more as I proceed through the storyline.

*edit*
Before I forget - why are the First Ward abandoned office buildings using the Paragon City white office interior instead of the Praetorian yellow and orange veneer one?

*edit*
Aren't the buildings in the First Ward abandoned? Surely they can't have power. If so, then why do their windows light up and night? Also, when I approach any of the large air conditioning units on the roofs, all of them seem to be operating just fine. What am I missing?

*edit*
Hey, do you know the dialogue between Anna and the Monarch? That went at about three times the speed with which I can read. I didn't catch a tenth of it, because by the time I was half-way through one text box, another two appeared. This needs to be slowed down significantly.

*edit*
Having the NPCs narrate dialogue text in their own NPC captions so that the whole team can hear the conversation is such a brilliant idea I don't know why it never occurred to me before. That alone is a GODSEND to merit of conversations on teams. I love it!

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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.

There's one last thing I want to say about First Ward before I go to bed:

It's been YEARS since City of Heroes has managed to make me stay up until half past 3 AM, thinking I'll play just one more mission before to bed... AFTER that one last mission which was going to be the last.

I honestly don't know what it is about the zone... Maybe the feeling of solitude and remoteness from civilization, maybe that this is the first time that City of Heroes has had a genuine mystery since Division: Line, maybe it's the strength of the writing, but First Ward keeps me coming back. I'm just sorry I didn't run it with a hero, but sometimes even I can let character concept stand aside and just enjoy a good story, so if I have to run through the arcs as a hero on a villain ONCE, then so be it.

Good job all around, I couldn't be happier!

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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.

OK, this has to stop. Enough with the unlabelled speech boxes already. I don't know who's talking! "She is our patient" "You mean host?" Who are these people? Is one of them on my side? Is one of them my contact or my psychic sidekick?

Look, when you have three three-line speech bubbles AND two caption text boxes on the screen at the same time, you have problems. Dial down the fast-moving text! I can't read that fast, especially when I'm fighting boss spawns that spawn as bosses even though I have bosses disabled. And put names on the damn caption boxes. I can't see what colour they are because they vanish so fast and I can't tell who's talking when I review them in my Dialogue tab.

This is getting really irritating and it's completely and utterly keeping me out of the plot.

*edit*
OK, knowing I was possessed makes these lines make a slight more sense, but my point remains - caption boxes need to stick around longer and be named, and they CANNOT stack on top of each other. Also, NPC dialogue needs to not be split in this many speech bubbles. I play with bosses disabled, so when I hit a boss with a critical Build Up Swoop, he spits out four lines of dialogue all at once. Just because bosses can have on-attack, 75%, 50%, 25% and dead speech doesn't mean they always SHOULD. That's the first thing they teach you in the Architect - don't spam more text than the player can reasonably read in real time.

*edit*
Also, why is everyone acting so out of character? Vasilokos in legacy Praetorian content is this kind, confused, benevolent doctor who only really wanted to help his kind. In First Ward, he's a dick who barks threats and says he'll wear some guy's neck veins as a bracelet. What happened? Noble Savage went from a kind, honest person who just wanted to do what's right to a raging monsters yelling things like "I'll kill you all!!!" Though he does calm down eventually. Then there's Kathie Douglass, who in legacy Praetorian content was a kind, jovial soul who still acted like a kid, but who was most concerned with being nice and helping people. Then all of a sudden she hates the common people of the first ward and acts like a complete *****. And then she goes on to say "But I'll never forget what happens to my sisters and I'll always associate it with you!" And I didn't even do anything!

Why are all the full-blown good guys from 1-20 suddenly ********? There's character development and then there's character derailment. It's like if all named characters were replaced with goatee evil counterparts of themselves, which is twice as funny when you consider Praetoria itself is already a goatee evil counterpart universe to the game's main setting.

I honestly don't get that. These characters were perfectly fine as they were. They were great, in fact. Now all of a sudden they're jerks? What, was there a fear that introducing too many kind people wouldn't make the First Ward quite depressing enough?

*edit*
OK, seriously, what is up with Kathie Douglass? All she can do is snark and act like a complete jerk, and for what? Who kicked her puppy? That's not a woman being angry about losing her "sisters." That's just a jerkass, which I'm assuming will turn into a jerk with a heart of gold. Will she act different if she recognised me from Praetoria? Because I tell you - the way she was thanking me on my last character leaving there, her behaviour makes no sense.

And if it's Apparitions switching everyone's head with their buttocks, I'm going to cry foul.

*edit*
"I'm psychic, not bullet proof. Quit running off." No, you're a ***** is what you are. And what do bullets have to do with anything? The DUST don't use bullets. ARGH! Why does she have to be such a drag in EVERYTHING she says?

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.