Location, Location, Location

A long, long, long time ago I remember hearing some developer discuss the idea of having enemies hang out in more 'logical' locations. That is, you wouldn't have Hellions hanging around the parking lot around the Atlas statue, where eighty-hundred percent of the heroes are having a costume contest. Instead you'd have to go to dark alleys and abandoned areas to find your enemies.

The problem with that, according to the developer, was that players couldn't *find* enemies to fight. While it sacrificed realism, it was ultimately more enjoyable that enemies weren't difficult to find, and that's probably why we have them on every street corner.


As an aside, I like how Preatoria handled it's utopia with the invention of passive 'enemies'. Obviously that doesn't work in Paragon City where you wouldn't encounter any enemy who didn't also want to kill you, and you certainly wouldn't be attacking 'innocent' people such as police officers and the like. In Preatoria though, it really helped make the city feel 'sane' while still giving me targets to beat up if I decided I wanted to be a jerk right then.

I can't remember where I read this, but I think that in the very early (like, pre-release) days of the game, enemies on the street were originally a lot less common than they are now. Crime happened in alleys and the like, but the streets were, on the surface, safe. This was changed pretty quickly because it made it very difficult for players to actually find mobs to beat up so they could advance, and it was generally unfun even if it was more realistic.

(I think this might have been in a WarWitch interview from a while ago, but I'm really not sure. It's also possible that my memory has failed me entirely, and that this was never true.)

Basically, I don't think criminals are actually as brazen in everyday life as they are when the player runs into them. It's one of these those aspects of the game that I just don't interpret literally - otherwise, I, personally, across all my characters and for all the years I've been playing this game, have more arrests on record than the entire NYPD last year. And I'm just one player. Crime is as inflated as it appears to be because players need something to defeat in order to get XP.

I think it'd be pretty cool if criminals stop spawning for players in areas that they've completely outleveled, as a symbolic show that you have made a real difference in the area's crime rate. Or if you only got spawns outside if you flagged yourself as 'On Patrol.' Then again, it's not really broken the way it is now, so there's no real reason to do a bunch of work to make it happen.

The answer is really quite simple. Almost all of the 'civilians' in Paragon City are Nemesis automatons. As for the Rogue Isles there are plenty of real world places (Somalia, North Korea, Detroit, etc.) where being an 'average Joe' is just as bad.