Who Will Die Part 2 SSA - Thoughts

I'm the wrong guy to say this to. I don't really care about variety. I liked City of Heroes back in 2004 and I liked what I liked back then even to this day. To my eyes, the many gameplay and publicity stunt gimmicks do little more than detract from the experience. I want to experience a story, and the legacy content did this perfectly well.

World Wide Red does not suck. I will take that over pretty much any arc written since 2007. See, new content is like remakes of classic movies. Sure, they had crappy effects and low budgets, but good directors found creative ways to work around those and still make good movies. On the flip side, the prevalence of special effects these days means you can ignore plot, story, shot composition and all the other tricks of the trade and just replace them with special effects. One of the greatest aspects of the original Jaws was the suspense experienced before seeing the actual shark, which wasn't an artistic choice, but a necessity because the animatronic shark they had wasn't working but they had to keep filming anyway, so they used barrels it dragged around instead of showing the actual shark.

Frankly, the SSAs are boring. Sure, they look pretty and, yeah, they have great gimmicks, but they don't offer anything that's actually interesting in terms of storyline. In fact, I'd have given them more credit before I realised what they would be - eight instances of trying to use the Obelisk on each of the Surviving eight, with heroes and/or villains foiling each step. SSA2 involves the Rulu Shin, but at the same time fails to explain anything about them or even make use of them in any way. These could have been Malta, the Circle of Thorns, the Banished Pantheon or any other group and the story would have been exactly the same.

I like World Wide Red because it presents me with a large, complex, well-structured storyline without actually distracting me with pointless gimmicks like five minutes of ambushes or long conversations or timed exits. Because World Wide Red couldn't afford any of those gameplay gimmicks, it had to focus on storytelling, and this it does well. Yes, it's a HUGE story, yes, it can probably be split into three part, but you know what? That's what I like about it. I HATE how so many American shows, both cartoon and otherwise, essentially have standalone, barely-connected episodes you can watch in any order. "Monster of the week" is pretty much what City of Heroes storytelling has become about. You have three missions that correspond to the typical three-act structure - the first mission you find out about the disaster you need to stop, the second mission you chase after it, the third mission you catch it and have a climactic battle, and it's not reference ever again.

I like World Wide Red because it's along story. I like World Wide Red because it's a solid story. I like World Wide Red because it's a complex story. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't waste my time with endless conversations and it doesn't waste my patience with endless gimmicks. I like World Wide Red because it doesn't rely on tricks and attention grabs to tell its story. These days, mission writers have grabbed onto complex gameplay so much that they no longer much care about telling a consistent story that ties into the canon world in general. Everything that happens comes out of nowhere, goes nowhere and is immediately forgotten as soon as it's done.

I am not and have never been interested in the fast food version of storytelling. That's one reason why I prefer anime over American cartoons - because each episode of an anime starts where the last one left off and ends where the next one will begin. This gives me a long, complex, consistent story to follow even if it's broken up into parts, and it allows character development, plot development and plot resolution to stretch over multiple episodes, rather than all having to be crammed into one and rushed like the SSAs are.

Yes, I agree that one of City of Heroes' main selling points is that it doesn't take a solid chunk of four hours to make any progress. You can log in for half an hour, run a couple of missions and leave, feeling like you've made progress. However, this doesn't mean that you have to complete a whole story in that time. You can still complete just part of it and continue where you left off. Once upon a time, it used to take me several days to run through a single story, and I liked that because it gave room for the narrative to evolve without feeling rushed. So what if it takes me five days to play through World Wide Red? I will still have seen it from beginning to end, and I will still know the full scope of its story.

Playing through SSA2 within 15 minutes just means I'm left remembering pretty much nothing from it. And, really, what is there to remember? The Obelisk can't drain Numina's powers. The Rulu Shin are completely incidental to it. In fact, both SSAs are a lot like Unai Kemen's "Your Princess is in Another Castle" arc. Go and find the Obelisk, now go and find the Obelisk and finally, go and find the Obelisk. Then go and get the skull. Now go and get the Skull. Finally, go and get the Skull. It's all gimmick and no substance because there's no room for substance and I don't think there was ever even the desire to put substance into it. The whole of the SSA storyline is unconnected events which exist solely to lead up to another ??? cutscene, but without any regard for making the actual stories interesting in the least.

As far as I'm concerned, Crimson is and will always be the height of City of Heroes storytelling, because he has the one thing that everything made since him has shunned - enough length to have a consistent plot.

Gimmicks do not make a story arc good. In fact, when a story arc is boring, they just make it worse. Graves and Twinshot are the perfect example.

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.

Interminable, grindy and boring?

You need to read the text, not just fight all the time

You're complaining about "The Princess is in another castle" and then hold up World Wide Red as a GOOD example of storytelling?

I have to admit, I'm struggling to reconcile these two quotes. You like long, drawn-out stories... except when you don't?

Is that a requisite for the story? Reading individual biographies that happen to be a game mechanic. This is a terrible story decision, if in fact that is what you're saying it is.

And Sam isn't praising WWR for all the criticisms people are bringing forward. He's praising it because it is consistent and makes sense.

Unlike, say, the the Fifth Axis of Council Column Reichsmann Nictus Earth Peacebringers who were destroyed by the Battalion that is the Coming Storm, created the Rikti, and is evidenced by the Shivan advance scouts and Nemesis traveling back in time to fight them. Even though Nemesis brought on the Rikti War, while the Praetorian War may or may not be tied to the Well of the Furies seeking a champion to fight off the Battalion.

World Wide Red contains the best ambush ever. Protean just wishes he could top it.

Exposition, yes. But when that exposition is one line out of line after line of jokes or "characterization" (said characterization lately consisting mostly of gimmicks or characters who speak very much alike), the actual story-relevant information is, again, lost to most people.

Tried.

I agree with everything you said here.

World Wide Red is not an example of "The Princess is in another castle" because every mission actually contains plot-relevant information. If World Wide Red was more like Maria's arc (the epitome of "Your Princess is in another castle") it would be just as long and in the last mission you'd find the Chinese ambassador.

I think a few brain cells died after reading that.

When it's all said and done I hope they make a way to run the arc as one complete task force instead of in bits and pieces the way it is now.

Maybe it will be better in that format...

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The worst part was all the stuff I left OUT of it. IE, Cimerora's Fifth Column/Nictus connection, the Void Hunters, the Nictus takeover of Earth, etc.

Have you actually played the arc somewhere within the last seven years? Because it's nothing of the sort. Not a single mission in World Wide Red ends with "We accomplished nothing!" There is even a mission which a mole specifically gives you to waste your time and distract you, and even out of that mission you leave with clues to Malta's greater plan.

"Your Princess is in another castle!" is a storyline where most actions generate no consequence and could easily be skipped and the story would move forward just the same. Unai Kemen's "To Save a Thousand Worlds" is a good example - you have to search through probably 16 "wrong" dimensions until you find the right ones, and the act would suffer nothing if you simply went to the right dimension straight away.

World Wide Red is different. Each mission generates leads which advance the plot. Each mission produces clues which contribute to the greater understanding of the overall scheme. Each mission matters.

If you read the clues and briefings, of course.

And I'm not saying that off-hand. I've run this arc many times, and quite recently, as well. I SPECIFICALLY looked for pointless missions that wasted my time, and there were none. Not a single mission failed to advance the plot, and by quite a bit. Can some of those missions be combined? Probably, but it would be at the expense of making the story worse off for it. World Wide Red is a HUGE story comprised of at least three different parts that interact with each other in a multitude of ways, and it simply takes time to fully explore the situation and give enough substance to both the background world AND the current action.

World Wide Red is a feature-length movie. SSA1 and 2 are 20-minute self-contained episodes.

Except World Wide Red, if you take the time to play through it without skipping content, is roughly 90% doing things and only around 10% reading text. Each mission has a briefing, a debriefing and a couple of clues, but each mission is also around half an hour long with mostly fighting stuff involved.

It actually ASTOUNDS me that people keep insisting that older content is all boring reading when over half of my time spent "playing" through new content is spent reading briefings, captions, NPC dialogue, captions, clues, conversations, more captions, more NPC dialogue and more dialogue "trees." I've done more reading just playing through one of Twinshot's arcs than the whole of World wide Red combined, and that's three missions and about 15 enemy spawns between them. If that.

I like the old stories because they're gameplay with a story added to provide a reason for it. Almost all new verbose storylines that begrudgingly let you play on occasion.

Let me put it this way - after I've read my briefing, I want to kill a lot of things before I have to read more text. And when I read more text, I'd like to spend a lot of time killing stuff before I have to read text again. World Wide Red is a perfect combination of both. It gives me A TON of narrative, then gives me half an hour of gameplay before it bugs me with narrative again.

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.

Xenosaga.

Your thoughts?

No... It's not. It's simply moving the wall of text from one point to a different more accessible point. My issue was not utilizing other visual components to tell the story instead of banking so much on the walls of text.

Two issues with that.

I dislike that the indication that the Reward Bribe warrants a 7x price multiplier.

Also, it only provides said value to only one of the arcs [whichever one happens to be quickest], since the reward cooldown is shared across the arcs. With subsequent arcs only having the Bribe reward of the initial run [5$ for an Alignment merit is not a bargain].

Isn't that a console exclusive? At any rate, I haven't played it. If we're talking about examples, though, let's go with Half-Life. 1 or 2, either works. The episodes a little less so.

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.

XenoSaga is interesting in that it's on the other side of the spectrum. More long movie interspersed with occasional elements of player control. While not as bad as it's predecessor in that reward [Darn you XenoGears Disc 2], it's still fairly strongly on that side of the spectrum.

And yes, console exclusives.

The problem with the Shadow Shard TFs isn't that they lack instance maps - they have enough random cave interiors to last 20 missions easily. The problem is that they ran out of PLOT. In fact, I'd be willing to wager a small sum that the Shadow Shard was conceived only as a basic framework idea without really writing too much "story bible" about it, with the intent to figure it out when it came time to add more stuff.

Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that, as per Jack's CoH dis interview, him and Matt designed the 40-50 game to last as long as the 1-40 game, which meant they had to add a LOOOT of padding. As with Unai Kemen's "To Run a Thousand Missions, Plot be Damned" arc, much of the Shadow Shard suffers for its padding. Why stop Crey by shutting down their base when you can shut down three bases in the Shadow Shard and run three 50-Rularuu hunts before each and then shut down another base in Paragon City? Why clear one instance when you can clear three and find nothing in the first two? Why find a whole verse when you can find pieces of it in five different instances one after the other?

The problem with the Shadow Shard TFs is that they don't have enough plot for the length they were projected to have, which produces complete crap like Dr. Quaterfield's TF. Here, have a read of a part of the souvenir:

Do you see the kind of blatant padding and pointless time-wasting? If Quaterfield really had enough plot for 22 missions, this wouldn't be needed, but his entire TF consists of precisely 3 plot points - 1. Crey have a portal to the Shard, 2. The Soldiers of Rularuu try to use it to get to Paragon City and 3. Shut down the portal! Everything else is just so much salad dressing and padding. It's taking a task and repeating it four times, the padding the space between every two tasks with large-scale hunts. Even Faatim the Kind's TF, which I believe is by far the most interesting in the Shard, is still padded to hell and back, and is essentially one giant case of chasing the Dragon Balls to collect the whole verse, all so that Faatim will trust you.

Here's an incomplete list of missions that do nothing but pad:

1. "I don't trust you, so do this padding task first."
2. "So you found nothing in that building? OK, lets try this one."
3. "Good, good. Not just three more to go."
4. "OK, so this had nothing to do with with the plot. What a waste of time!"
5. "But first you must secure a boat with which to travel to Paragon City."
6. "The item wasn't there? OK, time for plan B."

And so on. Any mission which wastes my time without advancing the plot in a way that not having done it to begin with would have made not a lick of difference is padding, and padding is simply not necessary.

The reason I like World Wide Red is it's 24 missions long and yet I don't recall a single mission of padding.

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 now we know why. It's new, because it's about the Rulu-shin--the eyes that look to the beyond. Did anyone find anything with better hints to WWDIII, outside of Penn's "Manticore and Statesman" comments?

You do get a reward for each part, you just only get it once. The very first time you run each of these arcs you get the larger reward table. After that if you run any one of them you can only get the weekly reward. So right now, if you are running them on a fresh character you can get up to 3 hero/villain/astral merits in a row by running part 1, then part 2 then one of them over again - after that you are on the weekly timer and have to wait a week. When all 7 are released you will be able to get 8 in a row on a character new to them, provided they are high enough level to run all 7.

The reason that they don't have each arc on its own separate weekly timer is that would let you get 7 alignment merits a week on every single character for only a few hours of play (and maybe even less - I can run the current SSA's in 10-15 minutes each), which is way to much reward considering the only other way to get alignment merits gives you 1 every 2 days at most.

I agree that this makes the SSA's not really worth the cost for premium players - but I tend to agree with other folks that the SSA's are really meant to be VIP bonuses more than something that premium's are expected to buy in huge numbers. After all 7 arcs are released I personally expect to see a discounted package put in the market for all 7 - if they discount it enough, it might be worth it at that point for premium players.

Me, either. I guess from reading through this thread that he is introduced in a villain arc somewhere, but since I only play blue-side, I have no clue really why he popped up, or why I should care.

As for the arc, the final EB was too much for my Elec/Emp Corruptor to defeat solo, so I had to drop the arc and restart with a team to finish it. Annoying!

Of course, he was very easy with my Fire/Shield scrapper!

I don't recall, but both arcs thusfar have connected things back to Sister Arlia in Cimerora.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

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.