Level 53 and weaker than a Hellion

I was waiting for someone to beat me to it, and was shocked when no one mentioned it. It's something that always tends to come up during videogame discussions whenever there's an issue between the gameplay and the story. All I do is just point to the trope.

I'm not trying to trivialize the discussion, but it seems that the core of the problem, what the entire argument/debate boils down to, is this one trope.

Actually, the Gameplay/Story Segregation IS occurring, with regards to the Citizens. Yes, those people SHOULD NOT be able to under the circumstances even scratch your armor. However, they obviously (and quite alarmingly!) do.

That's the segregation right there. The story says it's outright impossible unless the Seers are somehow capable of that (And Telepathists aren't a normal form of Seer), but the gameplay mechanics say they can, and will, hit you for significant damage.

Likely because it's a heavy-handed hint that you need to get rid of the Telepathists before they turn too many citizens (which results in a hailstorm of firebombs and rocks)

I feel it has slipped badly.

Although I appreciate old plot threads being picked up on, it really is a double edged sword as I see old stories suddenly twisted to fit the new lore. Although I enjoyed Vincent Ross' arc, the way it was being used to jam Well Lore into the early game was painfully obvious. The same goes for Praetoria.

I used to enjoy reading clues and delving into the backstory of various groups. It felt consistent, real almost. Now there's so many inconsistencies and retcons, it's lost that. The writing isn't so much bad, it just feels careless and players have to make up things to cover the Devs' lack of attention to detail, just as this incident with the rocks shows.

On the bright side, some of the detail in the SSAs and their referencing of 'old lore' has been great and I wish I saw more of it.

Not so much gone, as locked away by NCSoft accountants never to see the light of day again.

When there was a very small dev team, even under Cryptic in the bad old days, you could tell that there was a passion from within, that the devs loved the game like they loved a child.

With the rapid influx of new developers as GR and then the Incarnate story came along and subsequently Freedom was released, that passion has been diluted - the new people don't have the emotional buy-in that the original crew did. They don't necessarily know the lore as well - and are mostly picking up a pay check.

They don't engage with the fans to the extent that some of the original Devs did... Many of the "names" have gone, and I'm not simply talking about Jack, but Manticore, BAB, and several others have moved on to pastures new and I've noticed that War Witch herself has gone very very quiet recently.

What that all tends to lead to is shipping product as opposed to labour of love and we're feeling the difference in the incarnate bollox.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I don't really agree. I think the current wave of developers are very passionate about the game. IMO what we're seeing is a clash of priorities, not passion.

I should also probably add that very few people go into video game design for the paycheck. It's an incredibly stressful job that often involves long hours, punishing schedules, and capricious clients (that is, the players ).

Although I have been very critical of some elements of the incarnate content, and think it needs improvements, some of the overall ideas are actually pretty good. My criticisms mainly have to do with how much of it there is--a glut of interesting ideas piled on top of each other. I feel that the concepts are interesting but don't always play out. Some of it also seems conflicted about what it is trying to be--mostly anonymous "invasion" content like a Rikti or Zombie event or organized raiding groups like seen in other games.

It's also obvious to me that whoever is designing the incarnate content has a pretty decent understanding of the core game and its issues. They've created content that changes some of those expectations. If they just wanted to collect a paycheck, they could have taken the same mechanics from the core game and extended them and the whole trial could be about watching an Illusion/Cold solo a boss to stupid to fight back. They didn't do that. They created something entirely new. That something isn't perfect, but they've at least given some indication that they are willing to work with us on it.

One thing I will say for City of Heroes as a game is that it has figured out something that every other MMO has fallen flat on their face trying to implement, and that is how to encourage players to team together as a regular activity at all. Most MMOs follow a model that works like this: spend hours and hours mostly soloing so you can reach the end game and start teaming regularly. CoH has a much more open model. If the incarnate content could capitalize on that strength I think it would be loads better than what other games offer. The same thing is true once you can do solo and small team incarnate content. It's appalling to me that with 2012 fast approaching, the MMO industry has still not caught on to the CoH team model and keeps regurgitating the outdated "individual quest" methods used by the 800 pound gorilla, but this is where we are.

I actually don't have a problem with concluding a story with great finality. You obviously need an "out" to explain why you can still visit old locations and still fight old enemies in the streets who say old things, but you can usually just say "Well, change takes time. You've won, now sit back and wait for the consequences of your actions."

But wrapping up a plot line doesn't mean you have to exhaust every shred of backstory it had to its name. What makes a world feel living and organic is the sense that there will always be more story to it than you can ever realistically explore, that there's a whole world of adventure out there that you're just seeing the small part that's immediately around you. And that's a problem with Praetoria - it has only ever as much fiction behind it as is expressly necessary to drive the plot and not a smidgen more. And I don't like that.

Take the bum in the sewers who talks about "A land called America," for instance. Nothing ever comes of this, and it's never mentioned again. Even War Dog, who is positively psychopathic with his love of history, doesn't actually get into said history to explore the old America before the coming of Cole. All I know about it is the world went to hell and all the governments capitulated to one guy who could save them. The end. You'd think there'd be more people left who remember the past. You'd think old politics, factions and ideologies could play a part. Nope. Everything from the old days is rolled into one monolithic concept or another.

The Tsoo, the Family and all the other organised crime are just rolled up into the Syndicate seamlessly and uniformly. You get a gang war between the various Syndicate factions - Octavian vs. Wu Yin and so forth - but none of them trace back to any ancestry or legacy conflicts. It's just the old guard vs. the new guard. You'd think such a schism could occur along traditional fracture lines, like Tub Chi Tan and Wu Yin representing the more mystically-inclined, honour-drived Eastern crime syndicate legacy, with Octavian representing the pragmatic, greedy, utilitarian Western organised crime mob, but that's not how it is. The ideology is there, but the history isn't, because the Syndicate is just one monolithic entity. You don't HAVE different factions in it like you really should.

Or how about the Carnival of Light? I get that they're an amalgamy of all the old magical factions, like the old Carnival, the old Midnighters, the old Legacy Chain and suchforth. OK, that's not a bad idea, and unlike the Syndicate, they actually do depict different lineages of Carnival Troops. But why, then, does the Schism occur between white masks and black masks, where both Light and War field a cross-section of all available troops? You'd think the schism would have fractured the group along faction lines, such as the former Midnighters feeling betrayed when the player becomes allied with Master Midnight and breaking away from the Carnival of Light to form the Carnival of War, while the former Carnival mistresses remain loyal to Vanessa, and the former Legacy Chain warriors are torn apart in the schism, leaving them fighting on both sides. You'd think, and it would have taken less artwork to depict even, but that wasn't acted upon.

What I'm saying is that Praetoria could have used a lot more plot and history, even if much of it was never actually really used, just mentioned and explained. What I'm saying is that what happens in Praetoria should have been based on the socio-political environment and ingrained history of the world, rather than based on the whims of the narrative. The whole point of writing a persistent world is so you can then draw from it to form stories which feel organic and also limit yourself to it, such that stories have some sense of levity in that they obey rules, rather than "whatever I can come up with on the spot."

The big problem that I see is just how much short gameplay and frugal marketing have usurped storytelling in this game. There was a time when a story arc was expected to stretch to 10, 15, even 20 missions, doling out storyline piece by piece, with time and opportunity to develop leads, establish characters, foreshadow future events and generally with enough elbow room to tell a story. These days, a story arc is lucky if it gets three missions, and even more lucky if all three are real missions, as opposed to one being a gimmick "go in, speak with one guy, go out" deal. A Task Force has to be as short as possible - an hour at best - and a Trial has to be even shorter than this. Everything's faster, everything's smaller, everything's much more fragmented and there just isn't enough room for a story to be told.

I'm more than convinced it's nigh-on impossible to tell a good story in just three missions. There simply isn't enough room for it, especially when you have to contend with the overhead of having actual gameplay in the arc. And if you DO try to tell a story in few missions, you end up with Twinshot, which has so much narrative, character development and exposition that all gameplay is butted off the arc and you're left with what amounts to an interactive book. Or, like... A Bishujo game, but without the pretty girls.

I don't have a problem with City of Heroes gameplay being rushed. It's just a fast-paced game for an MMO. But I DO have a problem with the story being rushed along with it, especially solo-doable story arcs. There's no need for a story arc I can break down between multiple days to rush to tell me a story like I'll run out of attention span any minute now. Make it long. Make it 20 missions. Make it meandering and complex if you have to. I'm not going anywhere, because I'm here for the long haul. I'd rather see one long good story than ten small crappy ones.

I don't know if it's time, money or what it is, but ever since CoV, story arcs have shrunk down significantly, and in so doing they lost their ability to truly explore their own ideas and truly develop their own settings. And that's a cryin' shame.

Man, the artwork in that comic book is bizarre. Why does the Dark Watcher have a Sergeant Slaughter chin? Why is Naked Positron so big and muscular and resembling a skin-draped Bastion? Why is Levantera's hair incapable of being on both sides of her head in the same panel? That the hell is wrong with Lady Grey's face?

You do have a point, though. A lot of the game's stories try to do the "skip the first act" approach to storytelling, where we skip all the build-up and character development and hop right into the action. And while there is no real problem in using this approach on face value, you still have to put in backstory and character development SOMEWHERE, and the more recent storylines simply don't. The SSAs are actually TERRIBLE at this. While playing through SSA3 and seeing Alexis die, I felt almost compelled to do Spoony's "Who the hell is Serge!?!" because we've not established Alexis, we've not developed Alexis, we've only just barely introduced her. We need someone to kill who's important. Hmm... Oh, there was this woman who's important, do you remember her? No? Well, she's important. Just trust me, she is. So this woman, she dies. Are you sad yet?

You'd think with a series of these arcs, they'd be able to weave a consistent, large-story narrative, but no. Each SSA is its own out-of-context sound bite. And that's just not a good way to tell stories. And it's a cryin' shame, because it doesn't have to be this way. The point of having a large persistent world is so that you can draw from it without having to establish, develop and explain characters IN your own story. If you've built your world well enough, you can simply draw on it, because these characters and events have been established, developed and explained in the world already, and you can just use them.

Nemesis gear shows up, but the player has no idea who or what that is. "Nemesis. THE Nemesis. The villain who almost took over the US with poison gas in the 80s. Man, it's a good thing the Freedom Phalanx managed to stop him, but it was a close call!" That's all the introduction the Nemesis gets when he's used for the first time, and it's all the introduction he needs because he is an integral part of the city's history, and when it comes time to face his troops directly, he is explored in more detail then, but that's all the way in the next level range. That's why a persistent, pre-planned world is a good thing. That's how it helps. It introduces your players to the characters you want to use so they don't end up asking "Who is this and why should I care?"

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 agree here; I just think that from the story side it is reasonable that the Telepathists can translate those thrown rocks into psychosomatic or even telepathically-induced damage.

My point is that IF that is what is happening (and if it is not being left up to us as 'writers' to justify how we are taking damage), then it should be presented so clearly that we would not be having this conversation.

Flambeaux is going to be mad at you once she parses what you just said

I think the storytelling can work with the shorter arcs, so long as they dedicate several arcs to each story. They are kind of doing that with the SSAs, it's just that those are not containing enough history and personality for my individual tastes.

Part of it is my own expectations, which I must applaud them for circumventing. I was really expecting a "day in the life"/origin/backstory dump about each Phalanxer, ending with the one Who Will Die, whose story would have been trickled in all along.

I'm still hoping for a future series of stories about the surviving surviving 7 (assuming that many survive) that give us a chance to really feel who they are, the way every fan knows who Superman and Batman are.

About the comic: Statesman is at ground zero of an antimatter explosion that he failed to stop, several of his teammates are dead, he himself is KO and picked up by a spirit, and he has the nerve to say, "we didn't need your help"? What a ...detective.

That's a fair perspective too. I'm not sure I agree but I don't disagree... but I hadn't necessarily considered at that level either, but I do stand by my assertion that the passion isn't what it used to be. But maybe that's not important.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

The whole situation feels, well, a lot like what periodically happens in comic books

You get a new writer/editor on board, and the focus of the stories change. The new team feels just as passionately about the characters as the old, but they want to tell stories with a different feel than what you are used to.

Daredevil goes from being a generic street hero with radar sense to being an uber ninja. Batman goes from being a 'jolly old chum' with a theme and gadgets to being an angsty avenger of the night. Superman grows a mullet. That one mutant team suddenly becomes major players.

They'll learn soon enough. As a playerbase, we are pretty easy to please:

- We want long stories that you can play through quickly
- Light stories that are deep
- And challenging missions that are easy

See? Simple!

Several story arcs as episodes of the same story is really not that different from one long story arc telling the same one story. World Wide Red, for instance, is one story arc, but it has at least three different stories in it. One is the Chinese Ambassador imposter Moment, the other Project: Wildflower (seems like someone really liked the Project: Name format), and the other is Director 17 and the overall plot, involving the Kronos Titan(s). This could easily have been done in three separate stories, told in order, each referencing the previous ones, and it would have been pretty much indistinguishable to my eyes.

The thing is... That's not what they did with the SSAs. These really don't form into a continuous narrative CHAIN as they are all paths that off off a common story hub. The main story is Who Will Die, but it only joins the actual arcs all by the same tail end. If you take all the SSAs and thread a narrative JUST through their endings, you'd get a story arc that's about seven or eight missions long, with the beginning and middle of the SSAs not really being terribly relevant to much of anything.

To my eyes, the SSAs are about the worst kind of episodic storytelling, where each episode is more or less a standalone story, but they each end in some event that fits into a much slower parallel narrative. I, myself, far prefer the anime approach to storytelling, where a 26-episode series essentially tells one 520 minute story that's just cut up into 26 segments, each 20 minutes long. But stitch them together, and you have one continuous narrative. The SSAs, by comparison, don't really have a continuous narrative. They depict a whole variety of discontinuous events that all happen to involve a common element, but where most of the events are irrelevant. That makes them less of a broader story and more of a TV series with a loose overarching plot.

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.

Isn't Pacification a DEFENSE debuff? If they wanted to let those civvies actually hurt you a Resistance (and Defense) debuff would have made much more sense.

A main battle tank won't take any more damage from a pebble thrown by a five year old when it is stationary compared to when it is moving.

Paging Dr. Hickman, paging Dr. Hickman...

These examples abound in the comic, and alas, they have made their way into the game.

As Samuel Tow summarized, you cannot just skip Act One. The reason that "Hamlet" is a classic is because of the examination of the characters, not because there are more folks dead on the ground at the end than at Gettysburg. When you skip the exposition and development, you have a bad Season Three Star Trek episode where a red shirt nobody cares about gets offed. Right now, the Incarnate Lore is playing about as well as "Journey to Eden" or "Spock's Brain."

To be fair, you CAN start a story with Act 2, but you have to be very careful about it and craft your narrative accordingly. You need to find a way to explore the characters and advance their storyline without the benefit of having an Act 1 to do it. In fact, when I write stories, I tend to prefer to start them from the middle and progress in both directions. As actions advance the timeline forward, they reveal information which puts into perspective the timeline back from before the starting point. It doesn't always work, mind you, but it's doable.

And yet while you CAN skip Act 1, that doesn't mean you can actually skip it. You still need an Act 1, and if it's not at the start, you need to scatter it throughout Acts 2 and 3, because the character exploration in it is vital to a good story.

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.

You are, of course, quite correct in this, but especially so that it must be done carefully and skillfully. In theory, I know how to pull a fastball to right field, too, but don't expect to see me in the majors. Likewise, I get the feeling that some of the writing in CoH is being done by someone who thinks they are Christopher Nolan producing "Memento." I don't think so, Tim.

In this instance, you cannot care about the characters if you don't know them. One of the reasons "The Empire Strikes Back" is so lauded is because the huge plot reveal happens after we have had about four hours worth of background on the characters involved. If it had occurred in the first half-hour of the first movie, it would not have had anywhere close to the thunderclap impact it had back in 1980.

I am sure that there is an official name for the sorts of mistakes they are making, but I think the biggest irritant is that the bad writing in CoH suffers in comparison to the rest of the game. I love CoH. There is so much that is GREAT about it. And then we get awful lore tossed onto all of the game and it really honks me off.

When the plot gets shoehorned, and shoehorned retroactively, I might add, so that the sentient, insane, possessing Well of Furies is the shaker and mover for every hero in the game, that is failing-grade story construction. Reed Richards only THOUGHT it was Gamma Rays... it was actually the Hoary Hosts of Hogath all along that gave him his powers! And now, they have possessed him like an Elmo muppet! Blecch.

And to your point, Sam, there might be a way that an engrossing, enthralling story could be constructed so that getting defeated by a rock is an appealing challenge to be overcome and not an appallingly infuriating turn of events... the Devs did not pull that off. Not even close.

There might have been a story between Statesman and the Dark Watcher, but all I know is that this DW character appeared and started bellowing things that did not make much sense. As such, it is lousy writing, and it suffers enormously more when compared to the way "Smoke and Mirrors" was scripted and plotted.

You know what the real kicker is, though? I... Actually really like the idea of the Well of the Furies. The thing has enormous potential if done right. The well is the sort of meta-story explanation for powers, it's the plot device to explain normally abstract concepts like the beginning of time, eternity, providence and what lies beyond the horizon. As a plot device, this is precisely what we need as way to really surpass all limits and borders, which should have been the whole Incarnate motif. It should have told us that no matter how strong, no matter how ancient, no matter how godly our enemies are, they still have their limits. But by tapping into the Well of the Furies, we do not. Our potential is limitless. There are no ultimate bad guys, because no matter how strong they are, we can be stronger.

The Well didn't need to be sentient, or at the very least it didn't need to be malicious, plotting and scheming. It would have sufficed to have a very basic intelligence which reacted to power alone. The millstone around the neck of the whole story is that we're fighting to earn the favour of the well, and this sits wrong with me, because being given someone else's power is just... Irksome. If the Well were represented as nothing more than potential personified, a sort of abstract entity which had no power of its own, but to inspire, then it I would have embraced it. Without the well, an inventor eventually runs out of ideas. With the Well's help, his inspiration to create never ends. Without the Well, a mage's power is limited to what others have written in the ancient books of magic before him. With the Well's help, he is inspired to experiment, and he becomes one of the people who wrote those ancient books, one of the people whose spellbook will be mentioned for aeons to come as one of the great artefacts of magic.

The Well is a unifying force that transcends class borders. Before we knew about it, we knew that we were mortal, physical beings whose powers are restricted to the environment which spawned us. Gods existed, and they were born better than we could ever be just for who they are. We are not gods, and we can never be gods. The Well serves as the equaliser here. Yes, they are gods, but through inspiration, through perseverance, through the will to bend the cosmos to our wills, we have the potential to match the gods blow for blow, and even exceed them in time. When we have reached the pinnacle of our powers and it feels like there is nothing more to do to move past that end point, the Well appears and inspires us to see the path which we were blind to before, our thinking far too small, mired in the logic of a simpler, less cosmic world.

And the beauty of it all is that the Well didn't have to be magic. It didn't have to be anything at all. The Well didn't have to give us power at all, it could have simply inspired us to seek it out, to train, to persevere and find it, it could have inspired us to tempt fate and force it to bring us close to greater sources of power. The Well didn't have to be a source of power, itself. It could have been as simple as a multiplier - the inspiration which drives us to excel, which drives us to persevere where others would stop and feel that they have enough.

I said that City of Heroes hasn't impressed or inspired me recently, but I was wrong. There was one idea which sent my mind racing, and it had to do with the Well of the Furies. I forget who it was that said it, but it was made clear to me that the Statesman and Recluse have great power, but when they came upon this power, they were mere men with no unusual powers of their own. We have, at that point, grown to match their power through our own devices, strength to equal that of the Incarnates, but without the help of the Well. Now just imagine what the Well could do for us, who start off so much higher than any of the previous Incarnates. If the Well is a multiplier, then we are starting from a much higher base, and our potential may well be limitless. The concept of this revelation both impressed and inspired me... But this is never expanded upon.

And this really is the problem. There was such potential for the Well of the Furies to be used as a device to tell truly unprecedented stories in this game's narrative and style. It could have been used to quite literally exceed all previous boundaries of storytelling and style... But it just wasn't. The Well could have been used to explain the gods and goddesses of the past, telling us how their progenitors were inspired to excel and evolve into divine beings by this source of inspiration... But it wasn't. We could have been the played as special, as a new breed of being that is not "made," by the well, isn't uplifted from simple existence by divine power, but reached divine power by itself, and though this awareness was able to control is ascension.

BUT WE WEREN'T!

Not only was the opportunity to play the cosmic game and elevate us past existing boundaries squandered so completely, the whole story surrounding the Well ended up being just an i-appended retread of the beginning of the game. Instead of depicting us as superseding our rivals and enemies and truly enjoying the power of ascension, now being able to explore secrets too grand to tackle before and face enemies that opposing was never considered, we are simply given the same enemies as before, only power-levelled enough to curb-stomp us into submission. We're made to fight in a mortal's war against other mortals, to fight punks with guns, prisoners and confounded CIVILIANS!

When the Banished Pantheon threaten to bring Lughebu to our world, our contacts quake in their boots, because if he returned, we are ******. Well, now that we're Incarnates, then bring him on. THAT is the cosmic threat we should be worrying about. Have him send angels of death to fight us, have him send his envoys, have him show up in person. We have the power to fight him back. When the Rikti threaten to open a portal to their homeworld and send forth another invasion fleet, our contacts cower in fear, because if that happened, our world is screwed. Well, now that we're incarnates, then they're welcome to try. We should have the power to fight them back. The Statesman was bringing down entire shuttles by himself back in 2004, so it can't be that bad. That is the large-scale threat we should be fighting. Gods, armies and ancient terrors.

It really pisses me off that the people at Paragon Studios squandered such a cool opportunity because they refused to think big. I get that there's only so much content you could make for Incarnates and some has to reuse existing assets, but having Praetoria be the end game content is just a bad decision, because Praetoria IS NOT godlike. You can claim Tyrant shared his ambrosia in a can with his followers, but that doesn't make the story any more godlike, it just makes it that much harder to take seriously. Neither the scale nor the scope of the storyline is particularly godlike, nor indeed out of line of what we've been doing in the 40-50 level range. You can call them "Warp Rats," but they're still the same rats I fought at level 1, only with higher stats. That's not more impressive, just more insulting.

---

The Well of the Furies had enormous potential to be one of the coolest things to happen to City of Heroes since its creation. I honestly truly believed it could add up to sheer awesomeness. Yet iTrial after iTrial, we keep falling short of the mark, and I keep wondering what the point of this cosmic talk was to begin with if it's just the same old ball game, just with a different name. It doesn't look more impressive, it doesn't feel more impressive, it's not cosmic and it sure as hell ain't surpassing any limitations.

We shouldn't have to learn to walk in the Incarnate system. We learned to walk, run, jump and fly getting there. That's WHY the Well responded to us. We shouldn't have to re-learn how to walk with Ascension boots on. We should be learning how to walk through time, walk to other dimensions and walk across the infinite expanse of space. We should be entitled to this greatness, because it was our power to begin with that earned us this entitlement.

The Well should have been a literary personification of potential, entitlement and grandeur, not just another Rularuu.

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.

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."