Remember that whole "choice" thing?

Or there's been some "character development" somewhere inbetween the level gap. It's curious he was stealing Arachnos' idea. I'd say between the loss of his Praetorship and his failed attempts to prove himself to Cole, he... just kind of wound up losing it in the end.

When it comes to that *****, even you have to realize that her ideas are not what's best for the people of Praetoria.

That Resistance is the only option by the time the endgame storyline starts

Just another crazed loyalist

But protecting the Seer network is the responsible thing to do - the game tells you that

Yeah, but Tilman kind of craves for things that go beyond her Seer network, like gobbling up other minds just for the Evulz.

Technically not. I mean you end up fighting the Resistance a lot in the First Ward, you end up fighting them in the Maria Jenkins arcs, and you fight them in the BAF (admittedly not by their own will).
I think it's safe to say that by the First Ward, you literally have to stand out on your own side outside of Cole or Calvin, because both have gone off their respective deep ends and decided to go around the office one morning and shoot anyone genuinely trying to do something good for Praetoria that hadn't already left.

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.

I don't know, maybe taking down the sonic fencing & then sealing all dimensional gateways to Praetoria would be a better option.

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

If my hero could deal with Praetoria properly, he'd probably take down every single Crusader in sight, Calvin Scott included, if the world were playing by Primal Earth's rules. They're far worse than normal Loyalists, outside of the Praetors themselves. Hell, even one of the Praetors have better intentions than Crusaders.

Yeah- there's some strangeness going on with Keyes. In his Praet arc, while he's self-interested, he seems less "eeevil" about it than other Praetors, and has some degree of societal concern. In the story prelude online here for the Invasion story, he almost seems decent...

And then when the Keyes trial came around, he's positively genocidal. Mother messing around in Keyes' head, maybe?

I'd say he's just frustrated and PO'd.
I mean as he spells out: he's lost his praetorship to a guy who really is his inferior and only beats him because Neuron can steal his ideas and submit them faster, after the guy who took his Praetorship fails horribly, he's still passed over by Cole and everyone else is getting handed out pieces of the Incarnatedom pie but him.
He's also helped develop a lot of the tech used by the IDF but apparently has been given zero credit, he's been repeatedly humiliated, and has basically been pushed out of the way by Cole onto his reactor island.
And now, the same group of people who have already had a pretty decent record of dismantling Praetorian stuff have come for his reactors. As he puts it: They're his legacy, they're the ONLY thing all of Praetoria gives him credit for, and they're the only major accomplishment he has that Praetor Berry cannot steal.
And let's be honest, he probably knows he has no chance with Praetor Duncan but can only cling to a mad hope.

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.

As a man of science, who seems to be used to using his brain, you'd think he'd have worked out by now that his pathetic sense of entitlement, desperate neediness and whining self-pity wouldn't be the best way to impress a woman who seems to be attracted to powerful men.

He's funny - he's like a supercharged Robert Flores

Inter arma enim silent leges.

Myself, I've enjoyed the First Ward I've done so far. Narratively, it seems that it fits a lot of Praetoria's themes of bleakness and despair, and First Ward is about scraping out a little window of light in a miserable place, the idea of hope against reason; the notion that it's worthwhile striving for what we have here, these little moments of things that make life worth living.

(I really don't get claims of difficulty, though...)

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Why is that a shame? I go to great pains to ensure this happens even when I have no content to outlevel

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.

And that's the big problem. When you shoot for giving players the illusion of choice, the WORST thing you can give players is ACTUAL choice, because then you end up developing five separate games on top of each other. People talked about CoH and CoV as different games while CoV was still considered an "expansionalone," but even then, THE GAME had only one actual storyline, in that there was no way to branch in one direction and make large chunks of later-level content incompatible.

Now with Praetoria, the studio actually IS designing two separate games, because any storyline which involves Praetoria HAS to account for whether a character was Praetorian or not, and what faction in Praetoria said character belonged to. Or, they could do what they did in First Ward and write the zone and its arc like an extra hero zone and let villains and Praetorian run through it if they really wanted.

This, of course, has the problem of "half-hearted inclusiveness" that the Rikti War Zone first demonstrated. See, because the War Zone was co-op, you couldn't have straight up hero work as villains wouldn't make sense, but you couldn't have outright villainy, either. So you end up doing straight up hero work, but your contacts are all complete jerks so it's written like a villain story. Rather than being inclusive to both factions, it ends up being largely inappropriate to everybody.

Same with the First Ward - it is, at its heart, a hero story, but it couldn't be JUST a hero story because this is Praetoria and it had to make sense for villains, too. To fit Praetoria, the story is depressing. To fit villains, you're given something like four chances to be a dick. In the end, it's not a villain-appropriate zone because much of the story is straight-up hero work, it's not a hero-appropriate zone because one HAS to do too many morally-questionable things, and it's not a Praetoria-appropriate zone because accounting for that would have been too complex and costly to account for the "Loyalists vs. Resistance" clash, so your prior alignment doesn't matter.

Last night, someone mentioned in general chat that "villains were a failed experiment." No, they were not. In fact, with their newer arcs, villains are getting better than they have ever been. The writing and subtleties are often suspect, but the game accommodates them quite easily. If anything were a failed experiment, it was Praetoria, because to make that side of the game work means essentially two of practically every new storyline. Either that, or simply an abrupt END to the Praetorian storyline so that characters can shed their Praetorian affiliations and conform to the old world content.

And I honestly don't see a way around that.

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.

Same. Loved First Ward.

"Hey Katie, how've you been? Good good... Listen everyone you know and love is dead. Friends? Yup dead. Your mom? Yeah dead. But hey, you're alive right? Alive and alone and ... aimless. Bet you're glad I didn't put you back in the box. Sure a few thousand people died horrible deaths and may or may not be walking around as meat suits for the Apparitions, but you're okay and that's what matters. Yup. Good times. Why're you crying now?"

That's kind of my point. The more the game becomes fractured into sub-games, the more redundancy new content needs, lest some people feel forced into other people's experience. Going Rogue took the tough call and made four whole paths through the game, and to the writers' credit, they present fairly unique experiences. I had a sneaking suspicion that this would be unsustainable in the long run, and it looks like it was.

I don't think you're taking into account that this is a paid-for zone. "New players" in the days post Freedom means something quite different than it did back in the day. "New players" typically means "Free players" because now that the game has that option, it's only natural that's what people would try first. New player VIPs are going to be extremely rare in the future, that much I can bet money on. So you have new players trying to game for free, and their purported new player experience is in a paid zone that's not exactly cheap. Of all the things they could buy, "more content" when they have mountains of FREE content they haven't run yet just isn't going to fly.

Which would work, if I couldn't just walk back through the door I originally came in from and screw the lot of 'em. There is nothing in the slightest to be gained by being in First Ward. There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, as it were: No large treasure, not hidden knowledge, no secret weapon, no favour with anyone at all. Saving First Ward is its own reward, and if just saving things isn't an appropriate reward for your character - which it rarely is for villains, then the whole place is not appropriate.

This is my whole point. At its core, First Ward is a hero's journey, which is dressed up in shades of grey only after the fact. It's like taking a Carebears movie and trying to inject moral ambiguity into it - sure, you can, and I'm sure you can make it pretty damn depressing, but it won't really make it any more "realistic" and will simply end up ruining the mood for everybody. Which is what First Ward does. It's not right for heroes, it's not right for villains and it ignores Praetorians.

City of Heroes is exactly the wrong kind of game for that sort of plot. Being a survivor requires several conditions that City of Heroes cannot meet. It requires seclusion and being cut off from lines of supply and support, which can't happen because you can't trap people in first ward without having players throwing a fit. It requires constant, unavoidable danger, which First Ward cannot deliver because the game's combat is still subject to game balance and because no-one likes overpowered enemies in this game. It also requires a degree of attachment between the player and the world, which the apathy and melancholy of the narrative's attempt at moral ambiguity simply don't permit.

A survival story is only meaningful when survival is actually meaningful, and when you can turn around and head back to town, there's no "survival" to be had. In fact, I often wondered why I couldn't just lead the lot from the Gumbo back through the door and out into the sewers of Imeperial City. A level 25 Noble Savage would have eaten anything in there for breakfast and asked for seconds.

The First Ward story is good in concept, and it's definitely good in terms of writing, but it's trying to tell a story a way that the game really doesn't support because basic game architecture hamstrings what writers can do. And you're right - they could have just delayed and accounted for everything, or they could have ignored those limitations and just made a good story. They kind of did it half-and-half.

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.

In hindsight I think we can see that Praetoria was always intended to be its own thing, and that they never had any illusions of being able to apply 100% of the new tech to the rest of the game. I don't really understand whether you're saying that the game being fractured into sub-games is a bad thing or not. In my own view the more diverse the experiences they can deliver, the better. Sure, if you hold up game systems side by side some of them might clash, but what could be more in keeping with a game that lets you create as godawful a costume as your heart desires?
This simply is not in line with my own experience so far at all. On Protector, of all servers, I've already seen loads of brand new players talking on the full range of channels as well as globals, so clearly they've either subscribed or purchased loads of points. On Virtue, the overstuffed Atlas phenomenon is beginning to creep into the higher level range zones and there are plenty of chatters, controllers, mms, kinetic meleers, et cetera. To be honest I haven't been back to First Ward since my first run through it before Freedom proper launched, but I expect to see it bustling. If it isn't I'll eat my words.
I'm not sure this is a fair criticism for this game or any game that tries to give players a continually expanding experience rather than a fixed storyline. Yes, you can leave, but from a story perspective the reason why you wouldn't leave is because you've become immediately embroiled in the events that are taking place. At the same time, nothing's stopping you from "roleplaying" that your character got fed up and bugged out. In that same vein, are you willing to say that it's impossible to conceive of a reason why a villain would want to go through First Ward? Surely not. Even without having to come up with your own backstory to justify it though, one thing that is absolutely true of villains in the CoX universe is that, like heroes, they are often motivated simply by a desire to explore new places or the consequences of actions. How would your villain know that by going through that portal, they'll end up saving people from various things? While it isn't tied to the plot, your villain can also partake of the repeatable villainous and loyalist missions for a little bonus darkness.
I don't agree. I loved the tone of the zone, it was perfect for the hero I ran through it, and I found it obvious that they had a very specific vision of what First Ward would be like and set out to realize it just as they did.

It seems like one of the persistent complaints about Praetoria and now First Ward is that the setting is more clearly defined than the original content, but I don't think that means you have to mold your own characters completely around it. You might have to pay slightly more attention to "canon" than you previously would have but is that so much to ask?
I propose to you that no game can meet goals this lofty. A dedicated game about survival still falls apart by these criteria the second the player learns how to manipulate a game system to her own benefit. Take Stalker, for example. A game utterly steeped in the concept of forcing the player to survive against the odds, yet by the end of the first area you can be toting several high level guns around if you find the right guys to steal them from, trivializing anything that follows. Does that make it a bad survival game? I think most would say no.

What you can fairly say is that First Ward is not an effective tale of survival without a modicum of cooperation on the part of the player. It's also true that your SG mates can email you powerful inspirations, temp powers and inventions while you're in First Ward, giving you advantages not accounted for by the story. Why can't you distribute them to the refugee camp and solve their supply problems? Because the game doesn't work that way and it would be silly for them to produce content that factored in that eventuality. Suspend your disbelief just an inch off the ground, though, and many of these concerns vanish.
I'd so much rather see the devs reach for the stars of storytelling and come up short in some ways than simply squirt out whatever lame mush precisely fits the confines of the technology they have to work with. This is why I still love CoH and have never stuck with another MMO.

That sounds like one of those IO sets that almost no one ever uses

That's not really correct - players are only allowed to help out the Resistance and their allies, even though the zone provides a pretty large loyalist presence with the Seers and D.U.S.T. - there's no option to be Mommy's little helper, or fight alongside D.U.S.T., even though Mother Mayhem is an established loyalist contact, and has her lair in the zone - and the only returning NPCs from GR are Vanessa DeVore, Noble Savage and Katie Douglas - who, to loyalists, are a terorist leader, a traitor and an escaped prisoner, and all enemies of the state - but all 3 are presented as people every player wouldn't think twice about helping.
There's not even a token "I-don't-really-like-this-but-what-we're-doing-is-for-the-greater-good" D.U.S.T. contact in the arc chain, and the only loyalist NPC who isn't an attack-on-sight target is an insane orb who's soon turned into another enemy, while some of the Resistance fighters in the zone are even given yellow reticles, and many of their Carnival of Light allies are simply flagged as friendly and unable to be attacked by players at all.
There's not even the little cosmetic perk of a loyalist lounge in the D.US.T. HQ for players flagged as loyalists/Villains - everyone just hangs out in the compound with the Resistance and their allies.
First Ward is an awesome zone with an awesome storyline - but it's totally not a "fair" zone alignment-wise.

They needed one new zone, with half hero missions and half villain missions. They could have even gone the SSA route and had mirrored content. Sure, we would have ended up with less content for any one single character, but overall it would have been just as much content. The only players who would have received less content would have been the ones who play one side exclusively, and that's entirely their own choice. With co-op content though, only heroes really get new content. Villains get to access it as an afterthought.

The portal back to the Rogue Isles does not vanish though. It's not strictly a meta-game thing. It is real, the contacts acknowledge it, and successful content would immediately provide answers to the question "why don't I take it?"

One thing they could have done would have been to make Sorceress Selene be using some kind of artifact to boost her power, and that would become some kind of temp buff for Villains at the end of the arcs, to represent them taking it for themselves, which would give more motivation for Villains to help out the people of First Ward.