Remember when...

... they were talking about making an archenemy system, where you could have a recurring opponent for your character? I wish they would look into that again.

While playing "Who Will Die? Part 1", I thought of this again when Echidna attacked. I kind of like having the Rogues Gallery of recurring villains for us to face, but I would really like having one of my own villains be the one to jump in at that point to fight my hero. I wondered how hard it would be (or if it would be even possible) for the game to pick one of my villains from my account to come after the hero I was playing.


Now, this won't always work, since not everyone has a villain character and due to power level differences. Even if 2 characters are at the same level, I tend to RP a bit, imagining my Inv/ SS tanker to be near Superman in ability, while my favourite Stalker is just a normal, highly-trained human. I would find it odd to have them face off against each other. Also, I know that many people would dislike having their character show up in a story arc as a servant or pawn to the main villain.

Still, I think it could be a neat experience to create a villain and link it to a hero (perhaps in a way similar to level pacts) and have the villain pop up from time to time in missions.

Just a thought.

I, personally, would love to see some form of recurring arch-rival, let's call it that. We already have doppelgänger tech, so we know that the combat side of things is easily workable. The game can use either a copy of our current character or one from our list, or even one made in the Architect's interface, possibly even other people's characters, and that should be easy to achieve.

The bigger problem lies in personality and storyline. If I were using an arch-rival to one of my heroes, I wouldn't want him to be the lackey of a canon villain, as I simply don't write or like villains like this. I'd want said villain to be the master of his own destiny, and probably the master of his own evil group. I'd also want to pick how this villain sounded - do I want him to be stupid and brutish, clever and arrogant, alien and incomprehensible or smooth and suave? This matters.

In fact, speaking of pie in the sky ideas, I'd like to pick a whole rogues' gallery for my existing heroes. I have a few villain groups of my own who usually share the same SG, and most of the time I'd pit my heroes against the entire villain group, so against four or five named, costumed villains.

I'm really not sure how that might happen mechanically, and my head's all over the place right now, but yeah - I'd like to see that

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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.

This idea is as dead as the City Vault. The Devs said as much on a Ustream (don't know which one, so don't ask) and said that AE is there should you wish to do Archenemy stuff. That's the official stance.

I'm happy with that, frankly. If any char is going to have an archenemy, I want to be damn sure I have control over how the writing goes, not the Computer 'Hurr-de-durr'ing it up.

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Oh, I understand completely about not wanting one's own villain to be poorly written. I even mentioned that. I wouldn't want my characters to be portrayed as lackeys, either.

I suppose a compromise might be to have a signature villain tagged in some way (even randomly) to be the hero's archenemy. They could pop up periodically to make the hero's life miserable. How about a long story arc that covers levels 1-50, with missions only coming up every so often-- perhaps a total of 20 missions during a character's career. As the character grows stronger, so, too does the enemy, with a final battle occuring at level 50 or thereabouts. They could make a couple of these "career arcs" and have them randomly assigned to a character at creation. Or, if time and resources allowed, perhaps one such arc or recurring villain for each archetype.

I did the Nemesis thing in the competitor's game, your nemesis gets to be either a cackling mad scientist, hulk-speaker, or a freaking idiot. It was clumsy and poorly written.

I still like the idea.
Just for the fun of discussion... I'd say it'd be cool if you could select an archenemy for your character.
You could leave it blank/default... and get the Rogue Gallery/Or-Whatever-The-Devs-Determine enemy instead.
Or, you enter your own archenemy character's name and costume and powers, just like a custom AE enemy (hopefully with power customization).

Whether it is pie in the sky stuff or not... I think it is a good idea. You never know what may happen eventually.

Indeed, the AE is a great way to create these sorts of possibilities.
I think, maybe, the answer is in improving and expanding the AE (in fact... overcoming the "AE" aspect of it and focusing more on the Mission Architect outside of the AE building. I think that is a big aspect of that system's failure. It feels far too cut off from the rest of the game...).


I remember!

I still like the idea too. I wonder if there were some way to put together something like a Mad-libs AE mission maker to facilitate this sort of thing. Give us a bit more character-wise than the three broad types that the competition used, and allow us to drop in even more enemies from our existing character list or made in the AE for mid-mission mini bosses/filling out the Rogues Gallery.

Granted, I'd like doing this sort of thing as a surprise drop in of my villains/heroes, as well as specialized tip missions. But, a short form AE mad-lib and play would be a nice alternative, because sometimes, I don't want to have to slog through the AE to pick every little detail and there's no surprise, if I make the mission.

Whereas, a short AE fill out form and options to add in mid boss-types and the broad selection of interesting NPCs to fill out their minions that we already have in-game with spontaneous mission generation on par with say the simplicity of the radio/newspaper or tip system would be cool.

I'm all for the creative types to get their story on with the AE, but I don't know if I have the patience/confidence to build something worth messing about with. That, and most of the time, I just want to jump into the mix without having to go through the hassle of figuring out proper mob drop-ins/odd word filter/everything else that can go wrong when making your own customized AE mission.

I still love the idea too, hopefully one day we can see this become a reality.

Love this idea

A big con for me, in terms of using something like an AE-style medium to create an Arch Enemy, is that players in general cannot be trusted to not create an enemy that is very weak versus their character. Fire Farms and all the other types of farming exploit have shown us this.

So I think an Arch Enemy system would have to provide no extra benefit to a character other than flavour. And so, for that, you may as well just use the AE and at least get some reward for it.

Hehe...

Here's my thread from 2009. Let me be your Nemesis It was my attempt at providing this service free of charge. As you can see, not that many people were actually interested in using such a service. The few I made really got into it and loved not knowing when the next 'attack' would happen.

Eventually though, I started getting swamped with requests and started getting yelled at over not having a new one every single day so...

Still, I think this idea has promise. I came up with this idea when I started using AE to make my own characters interact. I realized it was kind of boring to play through it, knowing everything that would happen.
So I thought how cool it'd be to just give a basic outline for the Arch-Rival and then let someone else craft the particular stories. Leaving me to interact with someone out of my direct control.

Proved to be very fun while I had players interested.