SSA #6 Story Discussion ** SPOILERS **
By
15bribri15,
Posted on: 2012-02-21 05:43 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I died multiple times, but then I got better.
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Am I a bad person because I laughed when Manticore did his epic pout?
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Originally Posted by Santorican
Am I a bad person because I laughed when sister psyche got shot?
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Ignoring anyone is a mistake. You might miss something viral to your cause.
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No it's not how the Freedom Phalanx handles a chain of crises.|
Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
Did I miss something? What mistakes has Wade made? He looks to be firing on all cylinders, to me. Mistakes that he makes off-screen where I never see them are useless from a story-telling standpoint. Why should I grant him a pass because he might have made some mistakes that I don't know about and never will know about?
I, as a player/reader, should not have to invent a second story in order for the first story to become palatable. I shouldn't have to wave my hands and say "Wade did have setbacks but they didn't involve you so you don't know about them." or "Wade did have contingencies and he was forced to use some of them but you don't get to see that he had to do that because it doesn't affect your perspective on the story." That's the big problem here. Almost everyone who defends the story starts writing their own story to fill in the blanks. Well, the blanks are what I'm complaining about. If I wanted a story full of blanks to fill in, I'd write it myself and tell the story I wanted to tell from start to finish. This is supposedly the premier super hero team in the world. Instead of working together and having each other's back, they're all working at odds and they have no frigging clue what they're doing most of the time. This is not a team. It's a group of individuals following their individual agendas and behaving like rookies. Frankly, if this is the way that the Freedom Phalanx handles a chain of crises of this magnitude then they deserve to go down in flames like they are currently in the process of doing. |
This is how the writers wrote them to handle them so they could get from Point A to Point B of their own agenda.
No. They couldn't go about it another way, they HAD to go this route, as it was what they decided.
This is no different than those comic book stories you've (ie people in general) have read that are really just about them screwing up and not acting as they would have, so they can complete the story and have it end the way they want.
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No. We all hate Manticore.
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Originally Posted by MrHassenpheffer
Am I a bad person because I laughed when Manticore did his epic pout?
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In Camazotz all are equal. Everybody is the same as everybody else.
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Wade accomplished what he wanted in the first arc: Which was to test the obelisk and make sure it works. Permanently putting Synapse out of the picture would have been a bonus, but was not his goal.|
Originally Posted by Doctor_Minerva
He didn't Synapse's power. He didn't get Numina's power. He tipped his hand by showing up in the Midnighter's mansion. He leaves enough clues that you figure out who is behind the plan. Malaise failed against Sister Psyche. Wade twice failed to kill you. He tried to double cross Tyrka and made an enemy out of an ally. Redside, he does the same thing to the PC. These are pretty trivial, sure, but he certainly didn't get everything he wanted.
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With Numina he was checking out another possibility, something that only worked out because his assault of the Midnighter Club went off more or less perfectly. While showing up at such a specific time may have tipped his hand, he still got everything he wanted and likely got the satisfaction of rubbing Montague's face in the fact that he could even be in the club.
Malaise failed with Sister Psyche? Hardly. The Dirge of Chaos worked exactly as Wade intended, Malaise screwed with Psyche's mind exactly as he was supposed too, and finally Malaise got himself killed in exactly the way he wanted to die. You could argue that the Aurora fragment ended up not doing much overall, but she was never supposed too. All she was supposed to do was set Psyche up for the next part of Neme- Wade's plan.
I don't see how Wade double-crossed Tyrka at all. In both arcs she was sent to stop or otherwise distract the player from doing something. Which she only succeeded at in the blue story, and in red-side she stops being herself and instead becomes the Aurora Fragment. As a CoT, this will probably only piss her off until she can get a new body and then she can resume working for Wade.
Now, the player. From how it looks, it seems that the player was one thing Wade had not even started to plan for and has to fall back on sheer brute force or more half-cocked plans to take care of. So really, the PC is Wade's only failure in all of these arcs, which almost doesn't count since we're the freaking player. Then again though he may not know how to deal with us, it's not like we can stop his already laid plans from cooking off to perfection.
So yeah. With the exception of the PC, Wade has gotten everything he's wanted out of this arc. Tested the obelisk, check. Tested Numina and stealing necessary artifacts, check. Obtained the blood of Statesman, discredited Manticore, and depressed Statesman, check. Incapacitated Sister Psyche and got his insane co-conspirator killed off, check. Killed Statesman and got his power, check. Killed Sister Psyche, got her powers, and made Manticore even more of a vigilante, check.
Lord Xanatos indeed.
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
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I'm saying that while Wade seems to be better off in each arc, things could have gone better for him. I think you've diluted the trope to meaninglessness if you're going to define it as "Getting most of what he wants."|
Originally Posted by Khellendrosiic
Wade accomplished what he wanted in the first arc: Which was to test the obelisk and make sure it works. Permanently putting Synapse out of the picture would have been a bonus, but was not his goal.
With Numina he was checking out another possibility, something that only worked out because his assault of the Midnighter Club went off more or less perfectly. While showing up at such a specific time may have tipped his hand, he still got everything he wanted and likely got the satisfaction of rubbing Montague's face in the fact that he could even be in the club. |
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Originally Posted by Khellendrosiic
Malaise failed with Sister Psyche? Hardly. The Dirge of Chaos worked exactly as Wade intended, Malaise screwed with Psyche's mind exactly as he was supposed too, and finally Malaise got himself killed in exactly the way he wanted to die.
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Originally Posted by Khellendrosiic
I don't see how Wade double-crossed Tyrka at all. In both arcs she was sent to stop or otherwise distract the player from doing something. Which she only succeeded at in the blue story, and in red-side she stops being herself and instead becomes the Aurora Fragment. As a CoT, this will probably only piss her off until she can get a new body and then she can resume working for Wade.
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In Camazotz all are equal. Everybody is the same as everybody else.
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Technically, things could always go better for somebody. The heroes could act even more stupid, there could be a freak water main accident that kept the rest of the Phalanx from rescuing Synapse, any sort of thing like that. But my point was that Wade accomplished all of his primary objectives. Stuff like taking out Synapse and Numina would have been secondary.|
Originally Posted by Doctor_Minerva
I'm saying that while Wade seems to be better off in each arc, things could have gone better for him. I think you've diluted the trope to meaninglessness if you're going to define it as "Getting most of what he wants."
Maybe, maybe not. I only ran the redside #6, so I could well be in error, but my reading of it was that the AB fragment realizes that Wade was never going to free her, gets kicked out at the last minute and takes up residence in Tyrka's body. |
And yes, you're right about what happened with the Aurora Fragment. But what happened to her ties into Wade not being able to plan for the PC. He had a plan all set to take care of AF, but the PC intervened and stopped it. But once again the AF was nothing more than a loose end. His primary objective was likely the death and depowering of Sister Psyche and he accomplished that just fine.
Really, I should not have mentioned any trope stuff. I'm not trying to arguing any of that, but just how it seems based on the story we've been given. And what we've been given is Wade being a mastermind who surpasses even Lord Nemesis, the villain who is all about have contingency plan after contingency plan and is shown to use such contingency plans or else turn his defeats here into victories elsewhere.
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
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The writers who keep producing the Manticore and Friends show seem to think that we love him.|
Originally Posted by Doctor_Minerva
No. We all hate Manticore.
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I don't hate him, but I'd sure like to see someone else get the spotlight.
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I don't. He just keeps getting written so god awfully, much like the rest of the Freedom Phalanx.|
Originally Posted by Doctor_Minerva
No. We all hate Manticore.
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They all have potential to be cool and engaging. But someone on the dev team just keeps saying "lol nope!" And we get this SSA, or the Top Cow comics :|
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I'm largely in agreement with a fair majority of the criticisms of the arc. Manticore is a buffoon with plot immunity and there were some specific things that Wade could not t have anticipated. Under other circumstances, I might be attacking it, assuming someone could be found to defend it.|
Originally Posted by Khellendrosiic
Really, I should not have mentioned any trope stuff. I'm not trying to arguing any of that, but just how it seems based on the story we've been given. And what we've been given is Wade being a mastermind who surpasses even Lord Nemesis, the villain who is all about have contingency plan after contingency plan and is shown to use such contingency plans or else turn his defeats here into victories elsewhere.
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However the two points I will dispute are Wade's plan is egregious is compared to the kind of Doctor Doom/Kang/Mordru/Batman/Cobra Commander/Deathstroke plan you find in comics all the time, and at which comics fans don't bat an eye and that the heroes were cartoonishly bad. I think they did the best they could with the intelligence and resources they could be expected to have.
In Camazotz all are equal. Everybody is the same as everybody else.
For the record, I'll just say here that I do appreciate how easy it is to be an armchair quarterback about these things. I've made a few Architect missions and learned from the experience just how difficult it is to introduce any kind of subtlety into a medium that is mostly a point-and-click environment. My initial comment on the story was that they probably did the best they could within their constraints and I still think that's true, assuming that one of those constraints was time.
They basically rushed this thing out the door in order to give the Freedom launch a big-ticket marquee to draw people in with. "Hey! Look! We're going free to play and we're killing our signature character! You don't want to miss that!"
In an ideal world, the first SSA would have been a setup for THIS story, and this story would be wrapping up with the launch of I-23 when Statesman gets removed from the game environment. In fact, the events of I-22 would have served as a credible distraction that itself could help explain why the Phalanx is failing so epically. What better time to launch your own bid to conquer the universe than when the defenders have their hands full trying to deal with some other joker who's attempting the same thing?
One of the hallmarks of Paragon Studios has always been that the company policy was "If it's a choice between do it fast or do it right, then do it right." I feel like someone in authority chose the former course this time instead of the latter.
We'll see how chapter seven falls out a few weeks from now. I just can't see how this is going to turn into some eleventh hour success for the heroes that also happens to be a satisfying ending to the story.
As for Darrin Wade, I'll echo Khellendrosiic. Wade has achieved all of his primary objectives without any significant complications. Even saying that our PC hero is the one fly in the ointment isn't saying all that much, when he was able to plan far enough ahead to constantly distract our hero away from the true action. That's why Tyrka, for instance, doesn't really count as a failure for Wade. Her goal is to distract the PC hero, which she accomplishes. That's all Wade really cares about.
The details of whether she retains control of her current body or whether Faux Aurora gets obliterated or not are of no concern to him. The outcome of that encounter is not a setback for him because the encounter itself is all that he cared about. Just as he distracted our hero into wasting time shuffling through his hideout while he was busy luring Statesman into his trap. He may not quite know how to disable our hero but he knows how to keep us occupied and out of the way, which is all he needs. If anything, that makes the Xanatos/Nemesis comparison all the more apt, IMO.
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True, Wade's plan does sound a lot like a real comic book story, but I would end up hating such a story in that medium as I do with this one right here. I think I'm just gonna have to disagree with your opinion in this instance. Not being the guy who wrote this stuff, I can't very well argue that they could or couldn't have done better. |
Originally Posted by Doctor_Minerva
I'm largely in agreement with a fair majority of the criticisms of the arc. Manticore is a buffoon with plot immunity and there were some specific things that Wade could not t have anticipated. Under other circumstances, I might be attacking it, assuming someone could be found to defend it.
However the two points I will dispute are Wade's plan is egregious is compared to the kind of Doctor Doom/Kang/Mordru/Batman/Cobra Commander/Deathstroke plan you find in comics all the time, and at which comics fans don't bat an eye and that the heroes were cartoonishly bad. I think they did the best they could with the intelligence and resources they could be expected to have. |
Statesman said let there be heroes, and there were heroes.
Lord Recluse said let there be villains, and there were villains.
NCsoft said let there be nothing, and there was nothing.
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Not in front of the children.| Wow, if I'm disingenuous at best, I'd hate to see what you think I am at worst. |
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| It seems like you've defined your thesis to be unfalsifiable. |
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| All sarcasm aside, it really seems like your claims can be reduced to "Leaving aside his mistakes, Wade has not made a single mistake!" and that's technically true, but by that time the argument has been reduced to meaninglessness. |
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| You gave me a sarcastic non-answer when I said that it was foolish of Wade to show his face to the Midnighters. There are any number of possible explanations for why he did this, but the fact remains that it was done. |
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| I'll leave some blank space here so you can post yet another link to a sixty-year essay on writing mysteries, which, as we all know applies equally well to all media and should serve as the perfect roadmap for writing an interactive story in a 2012 online superhero game. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
I'm not fond of him, but mostly because he's still the batman expy. I'm kinda glad they're cleaning up some of the blatant copies, might make room for more original or at least less standard characters to step in.
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Who was Sister Psyche a blatant copy of?|
Originally Posted by Agent White
I'm not fond of him, but mostly because he's still the batman expy. I'm kinda glad they're cleaning up some of the blatant copies, might make room for more original or at least less standard characters to step in.
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Manti is the blatant copy of Batman and he's still alive.
Malaise?
Statesman? He was the Superman type, never would of called him the Superman copy. Or does Super Strength/INV just mean Superman to you?
BrandX Future Staff Fighter
The BrandX Collection
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Jean Grey?
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Originally Posted by BrandX
Who was Sister Psyche a blatant copy of?
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I think we would be better off just ignoring the Origin of Power arc and all it's idiocy. Although I did like taking the silly part about mutants and making a character who was one of the "first mutants" who appeared in 1938...
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
But if all of the narrators are unreliable, what's the point of having an Origin of Power story arc in the first place. The arc is almost nothing but exposition. An arc that is nothing but unreliable exposition about a subject the players themselves rarely agree upon and the devs then proceed to do nothing with is basically saying that the reason Origin of Power is not nonsensical is because its pointless instead.
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Winner of Players' Choice Best Villainous Arc 2010: Fear and Loathing on Striga; ID #350522
...I have a question for people who are in Beta.
The Dilemma Diabolique Trial has a phase where some random signature characters are bound to her will, and you have to fight and defeat them during a phase. (In fact, during one of the final phases you can get a badge for not freeing them.)
My question is... which heroes aren't present? Those would be the ones who would live through the entire arc, right?
The SSA's for the most part haven't thrilled me. I play the first run through for the merit and then do one that's easy for whatever character I'm on at the time. At least 6 didn't involve so much standing around not being able to do anything. The story hasn't engaged me so much except for inside Sister P's mind which now feels like a set up to make me feel bad she died. I actually liked the character development in that one but now it doesn't seem genuine so I'm less involved in it. I think the 3rd person narrative cut scenes are difficult to handle and haven't been done well. It makes it difficult to separate what I the player know from my characters. Switching narrative voice is very advanced writing wise and I don't know how well this medium handles it. I'm not aware of anyone who's handled it well in an RPG environment where the player character is really the first person voice having the element of agency pulled from the player into a set piece we have no control over is a bit jarring. Movies and books have trouble with switching narrative voice and it's a lot easier in those media.
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The fact that a statement is true does not make it not falsifiable. The fact that a statement is not falsifiable implies there exists no test that can confirm the statement is true or false, and by extension the claim that the statement is true is generally of limited or no value.
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Originally Posted by Venture
Well, that's because it's true, and therefore cannot be false.
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In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
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No, it just means the statement isn't a scientific one. The statement could be an axiom, or a tautology, or a theorem derived through valid rules of inference, etc. This isn't a discussion about science; falsifiability is not a useful metric.
| The fact that a statement is not falsifiable implies there exists no test that can confirm the statement is true or false, and by extension the claim that the statement is true is generally of limited or no value. |
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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I suppose that's progress. You've been clinging to the claim that Wade hasn't made any mistakes for a long time, and it's heartening to see you move on admitting he hasn't made any real mistakes. |
Originally Posted by Venture
Well, that's because it's true, and therefore cannot be false. Certainly whoever wrote WWD could have included meaningful setbacks for Wade but as the vast majority of respondents have already observed, they didn't.
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Originally Posted by Venture
Between the Villain Sue and Idiot Balls and the use of one of the most miserable factions in the game (Rularuu) it's more aggrivating than entertaining and ends up drawing the audience's attention towards its weaknesses instead of diverting it from them.
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Originally Posted by Venture
The only explanation that matters is that it is just bad writing. It's done so the writer can have Wade twirl his moustache and rub our noses in the fact that
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Clearly you don't believe the SSAs compare favorably to your own work, and not yet having experienced your arcs, that's something to which I can't comment. However, in analysis such as this, simply rejecting the reality of the the arc and substituting your own should absolutely be a last resort. "I don't like it/I would have done it differently, so it's bad writing" is not persuasive to someone who does not already share that point of view.
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Originally Posted by Venture
he's a god-moding
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Originally Posted by Venture
Villain Sue
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Originally Posted by Venture
and there's nothing we can do about it. His appearance serves no other purpose, either in-story or from a meta perspective. It's certainly not "a flaw in his plan" because his plan, both the immediate one in that chapter and the overall one, has gone off without a hitch.
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Originally Posted by Mercedes Sheldon
So... They used Johnny's song to power the Dirge, which forced Sister Psyche to absorb all the negative emotions it was sending out, allowing Malaise to get inside of her head... It's a complicated plan to be sure, Character. One that I can safely say Johnny Sonata did not come up with. Ugh... but I think I know who did do all of this. It's all starting to add up. Who? Darrin Wade. Ugh, that little... how was I so stupid as to think he was there at the Midnighter Club to HELP defend us against the Rulu-Shin?! He was probably the one who helped them rob us! Wade has sent some cronies before to rob us, but he wanted a full scale assault this time, something that would weaken us and give him the tools he needs. But, for what? I could never figure out what's going on in that stupidly shaped head of his. |
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Originally Posted by Venture
"The Simple Art of Murder" is not about "writing mysteries",
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
The fact that a statement is true does not make it not falsifiable. The fact that a statement is not falsifiable implies there exists no test that can confirm the statement is true or false, and by extension the claim that the statement is true is generally of limited or no value.
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Originally Posted by Venture
No, it just means the statement isn't a scientific one. The statement could be an axiom, or a tautology, or a theorem derived through valid rules of inference, etc. This isn't a discussion about science; falsifiability is not a useful metric.
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In Camazotz all are equal. Everybody is the same as everybody else.
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Heh. One time I was on a Manticore TF and the discussion turned to "Who would win in a fight, Batman or Manticore?" and we went back and forth before somebody suggested that Manticore would just recruit seven or eight appropriately leveled characters and get them to do the job for him. |
Originally Posted by Agent White
I'm not fond of him, but mostly because he's still the batman expy. I'm kinda glad they're cleaning up some of the blatant copies, might make room for more original or at least less standard characters to step in.
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Though I'll never respect someone who needs at least seven level 30s to take down Hopkins.
In Camazotz all are equal. Everybody is the same as everybody else.
So far, who died in the SSAs?
Miss Liberty
Malaise
Statesman
Sister Psyche
Anyone else? Its almost a death for each SSA chapter