Two minds about First Ward

To quote Tami Baker: "I bet it's going to be real juicy and not something boring, like, 'Oh, it was random person A who was the leader all along'. That would be very unfortunate." Yes, Tami, it is very unfortunate, indeed. Circe the Sorceress comes completely out of nowhere with no prior build-up and no hint that she even exists or who she is. She is LITERALL "random person A who was the leader all along."

I suspect that whoever wrote this expected that all we'll want to know about her is that she's the Praetorian War Witch... I think. They give us a real name, but I don't know War Witch's real name, as it's never given in-game. The only reason I think it's her is because she has hair with coloured streaks through it, but by that logic she may as well be Crystalia Amaquelin for all I know. She shows up once, does something, then shows up again, disappears before I'm able to see her, then shows up once more and dies.

Now, I know what you're thinking: How many times does Dr. Vahzilok or the Clockwork King show up? Once? Twice? OK, granted, but at least those people receive many, many, MANY mentions in the game. "Oh, no, Dr. Vahzilok has released a plague!" "Oh, no, Dr. Vahzilok's henchmen are cutting people up for spare parts!" "I did not know that the Clockwork King had been put in this state by a hero!" Even though they don't show up in person, we spend a lot of time talking about them and building up their threat, so that when they DO show up, it's a big thing. Circe the Sorceress is mentioned I think once and shows up I think twice. Most of the time, we're dealing with the Talons. She's just sort of there.

Actually, to semi-quote the Spoony One: Oh, no, Surge! No! ... Who the **** is Surge? I'm serious! We haven't even Surge's face! We don't know anything about him! We haven't established anything about... We haven't established Surge! It'd be like in Star Wars if we've never seen Obi-Wan before and he suddenly shows up and gets killed by Darth Vader and Luke is like: "Who was that old guy?" ... Who the **** is Surge?!?

This is something of a running problem in recent content - a few named characters sprinkled throughout filler and chaos. Once upon a time, if I went to fight, say, the Outcasts, I was actually fighting to push back the Outcasts as a whole, even if I didn't have a named target at the end, and the plot established my reasons for caring. These days, we have a select few "actors" and everything else is just filler, because the actors really aren't affiliated with anything that's going on. They're free agents chasing their own agendas amid a see of derelict, leader-less critter groups.

I'm not sure when this started, but I want to say towards the inception of Going Rogue. All of a sudden we started seeing those "free agents" who just had an enemy group assigned to them because they... Kind of needed minions to spawn in the instance. The first time I remember this is "my double" taking over the Faultline Dam with a gang of Freakshow. Why Freakshow? Why not? We spun the wheel of critters and it landed on the Freakshow. But wait, wasn't there an entire arc about a civil was within the Freakshow over Dreck selling their services for money? Or is it that the don't want to sell out to CREY, but they're perfectly fine selling out to Slime Girl? Why the Freakshow?

It devalues the persistent world when writers consistently treat it as background noise and source for filler in-between plot points with their pet characters. It devalues the world when it isn't being used to forward a story directly, but rather as just a basic setting.

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.

It's also not how the actual Furies worked. Orestes was able to escape their vengeance by convincing Athena that slaying his own mother was "just" (another victory for misogyny!). After that, the Furies left him alone.

I don't see the point of tying the Talons to the legend of the Furies if they're going to ignore the very thing that defines the Furies in the first place. But either way, the treatment of the Talons in the FW arcs is shockingly laid back for what is supposed to be an apocalypse-level threat.

-D

They drop hints that said bad blood EXISTS, but never any explanation on WHY it exists or WHAT it is about.

No, I don't like "in mdeias res" stories when that's how they're told in their entirety. That's why I have an intense hatred for movies like Cloverfield and War of the Worlds, because I'm interested in a complete story, not in the trek of a bunch of people I couldn't care less about.

The story is separate from JUST the action of the actors in it. A "story" that is a basic retelling of events with no background, no knowledge and no understanding is profoundly uninteresting, because it's just events. If this is a real story, it's sometimes interesting when the events that happened are extraordinary, but this is not a real story. It's a fictional story. I am fully capable picking a random sample of event and chaining them into a linear sequence that makes sense on my own. I don't need what should be professional writers doing that for me. What I expect out of professional writers is the ability to use events to tell a broader story.

No-one here is asking about more exposition. In its most basic form, exposition is just bad writing. What we want is more of a background and more of a broad view on the world at large. Just because the game is focused around meta-game instanced missions doesn't mean the story has to be told in instanced, unconnected episodes where nothing outside the bubble of the specific story matters. I want an actual narrative structure, not the cliff notes from the 8 o'clock news.

If you want an example of weaving exposition into natural dialogue, watch 1989's Leviathan. This movie has TONS of exposition delivered through offhand remarks that slot perfectly into the dialogues they show up in, and the narrative as a whole does a great job of giving us the background on the various characters and the setting as a whole, all without the story ever having to stop to explain things. Including exposition in a way that doesn't make it feel like exposition is the first step towards good writing.

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.

Err what?

She summons them because her Coven, her surrogate family, was betrayed and murdered. She sprints right across the moral event horizon, but she actually has a reason for wanting vengeance.

I mean, it's hardly a complex story, but as a basic one it works.

Uh... They do say that. In her description, in her dialogue, in the clues... I'm honestly kind of stumped on how you managed to miss that.

Serene's Coven (that has a name, I just forgot it) was hunted down and killed. Serene is not a happy camper about that, she wants Vengeance, so she summons the Talons. The Talons can't find the proper target to exact vengeance, and so they go off to murder everyone, because that's what they do.

EDIT: I Should not that I don't actually like the FW storyline that much, it has some interesting ideas but it tends to drop them off and never look back (the Survivor Compound, the Apparitions...) There's a bunch of running back and forth, and it's just not that engaging a story. Some of the enemy groups are nice, but they seem to suffer from the standard "only three enemy types" a lot of the time (and I really hate the Apparitions, they're incredibly boring to fight) especially after the awesomeness that was Praetoria it just feels... Weak.

That said a lot of the complaints are really baffling. I think people just need to more, because the story isn't that complex.

But that just reduces her character to a two-dimensional carbon copy of CERULEAN from the same zone. Pure revenge as a motive behind a whole story, especially when your antagonist only appears in the story about 3/4 of the way, has to be handled with much care and great skill, and Circe the Sorceress is handled with about as much care as a man carrying five stacks of pottery down a steep flight of stairs while chugging rubbing alcohol with one hand. Basically, the simpler the story is, the better the storytelling has to be to make it interesting, as opposed to "My mother didn't hug me, so now I want to destroy the world!"

The funny thing is... Cerulean's anger and lust for revenge against Master D&D Nerd Parody is handled much better than Circe the Sorceress', because we spend so much more time with him and get to witness the bitter anger that he hides behind his cool exterior. Circe just shows up and goes "Hello. My name is Sorceress Serene. You killed my father. Prepare to die." There's something there, yes, but it's only mentioned in passing by a character who I just can't take seriously.

I mean, honestly, can ANYONE take Serene seriously? War Witch looks cool because despite her fetish gear, she still has an air of dignity and a great deal of self control. Circe has a constant scowling grin, a hairdo like she stuck a fork in a light socket and a "chin stripe," and she acts like Master Midnight Jr. Her pain doesn't come off as a genuine emotion, but much more so like the tantrum of a spoiled brat. A good protagonist really shouldn't spend so much time whining.

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.

I think we just need to go back and rescue Katie. I'll happily leave out more exposition on the last third of the arc if we get her back.


Also, the interesting question was raised: Does she greet you differently if you freed her?

Considering how he ends up... Yeah. That's almost certainly deliberate.

And as mentioned, First Ward is a really simple story. (really a couple connected ones but...) It's not *bad* (to be bad, I think, something has to be more than just vaguely uninteresting, it needs to actually be offensive in some fashion) but it's not a particularly well-written story. (although some individual bits and pieces of it are)

But then again, so is about 99% of the stuff in the game. (The other 1% basically being some of the Praetorian content) "Here's bad guy with motivation. Bash bad guy." They can vary that in a lot of ways, but it's not a complex plot.

Thematically the vengeance thing works. With First Ward as the abode of the dispossessed and cast-out. It's all about people who refuse to let go.

No, I mean that Cerulean - a supporting character - is given more screen time and a deeper, more well-defined motivation than the entire story's chief antagonist. The reason people feel that the story "kind of ends" is a direct result of this. When your villain is weak and forgettable (and to make War Witch forgettable is quite a feat), then defeating that villain does not feel like a worthy milestone or a worthy climax. Some woman shows up, I kill her, the end?

The story needed a much stronger antagonist established much earlier on and involved with it much more closely. It needed someone we care to defeat and it needed a reason to care about defeating them. And, no, "First Ward goes to hell" is not a good enough reason when I can just leave. And with the Gumbo completely forgotten by the end, my one reason to care is off-panel. Essentially, Circe's defeat is a non-event. It's supposed to be cinematic and climactic and exciting but it's just "meh" because we've barely seen the antagonist.

I disagree. The launch-day story arcs don't have very good narrative in them, I'll give you that much, but they have Rick Dakan's enormous body of content and living, breathing world to draw upon to tie themselves together into a single, cohesive fictional universe that makes sense both in-story and between the different stories. Yes, the Library of Souls on its own is a pretty basic story, but it builds on an enemy group which has been established over the past 30 levels, which has gone from being seen as a cult to being seen as something strange to being revealed for what it really is. And many others tie into this group's backstory, such as the Banished Pantheon.

The Circle of Thorns are Oranbegans whose history ties back to Ermeeth and Hequat, whose story then ties back to Tielekku, who ties with Lughebu, who then ties with the Banished Patheon. In another branch, this whole thing ties into the ancient Mu and their descendants. The lost tie into the Rikti, who tie in with Nemesis, who then ties into a whole bunch of other things.

First Ward ties in with... Not much. We see Noble Savage and Katie Douglass, yes, but they've been retconned into completely different characters, and there's little else to tie this to Praetoria other than about one mention of Praetor Tillman. There's Diabolique in there, yes, but she has never been established, and last I heard about her in the 45-50 Maria Jenkins arcs, she was a ghost without a will of her own who served as Tyrant's herald.

The First Ward storyline is reasonably well told, but it's pulled completely out of an ***, and that hurts it greatly. It's good, but it has no legs, because it has no history, it has no future, it has no depth and it has no breadth. It's a slice of the world invented specifically as a container for these stories. Nothing from the greater world of Praetoria affects First Ward (save for a few small exceptions) and nothing from First Ward affects anything else. The zone SHOULD have a grand history of its fall, decline and corruption, but this is only ever glossed over. A good City of Heroes arc would explore this past, but such doesn't happen. Tillman's Asylum exists there, but aside from "It's there!" there's very little plot surrounding it. We break into it a couple of times, but it doesn't amount to much.

And I still don't know what that vortex in the sky was, why Circe wanted to control the Apparitions or why she stole Blind Indian Guy's spirit sight if the Apparitions aren't even spirits.

A good story is rooted in a larger world. It doesn't have to explain this world, but it should at least act like that world exist and like the story is referencing it, even if it's referencing fiction that was never written about. First Ward's storyline just suffers from an extreme case of tunnel vision: I see only the plot line and nothing else. I have no peripheral vision. I do not see the broader world within which this story takes place.

Rick Dakan and team did a marvellous job setting up a living, believable world for the game to draw inspiration from, but the writers seem to have forsaken all of his work and are making stuff up as they go.

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.

To be fair, that kind of ties into the larger thematic point of the Last Word being a ruin full of outcasts and castaways, the lost and the forgotten.

I don't think the storyline is ended, btw. (the fact that they mentioned they have enemies for the FW enemy groups that go beyond the level-limit of the zone kind of points to this). If nothing else the MoM is almost certainly going to be a trial location.

Except that it wouldn't stay confined to the First Ward. It'd engulf all of Praetoria, and with the ongoing war, probably Primal Earth as well.

I've yet to see evidence to suggest this, though. It seems like it will just let Praetoria go to hell, not necessarily cross over to Earth.

But even if we accepted that this is the case... Are we really telling THAT story again? Heroes and villains must band together to fight a common enemy. We did this in the War Zone, we did this in Ourobors, we did this in Cimerora, we did this in the Incarnate Trials... Are we seriously doing this in First Ward, too?

See, I get that there isn't a true "villain" path through First Ward. It's the old "hero path that's depressing" approach to moral ambiguity. I get that. Technical limitations and all that. But I'm just tired of the "greater threat" theme. It's not bad in its own right. Hell, it's actually pretty good. I'm just tired of EVERYTHING being a greater threat and of villains constantly being roped in to save the world and sideline their own interests.

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 I agree with you on. It's clearly a hero (and to a lesser degree, Resistance) zone that got Co-op because... They couldn't be arsed to segregate their players. (the sad thing is that a few relatively minor tweaks could have made it at least acceptable in that regard, but no, they couldn't be arsed with that)

Vernon Von Grun is greatest villain contact ever. Bar none.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

It's more a question of what "villainous" constitutes. Some people seem to want to come out feeling dirty and disgusted at what they've done, while others want to do evil AND have fun AND feel great at the end of the day. Westing Phipps is decidedly the former, and I can't say I'm thrilled with 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.

According to Twoflower and some others I've heard from, the latest batch of Vigilante-to-Villain tips are as bad as Phipps.

And yes, you're absolutely right. Some people want campy Golden and early Silver Age villainy; some want to push the limits of the T rating; some want blood splatter, some want mind-games; and then there's all the characters who don't consider themselves villains at all. ("I want to make the Earth a paradise, by killing 90% of the people on it. Is that so wrong?")

So no sign of Katie yet, but Desdemona's back for more - and Penelope Yin looks like she'll be a major player in it too.

We've failed the TPN one twice so far, and are about to try out MoM

EDIT: And we've just failed the MoM - although it was trippy and fun

VIP beta - I'm pretty sure she's in the clear here.

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.