The story design and direction of the game

The general use of shorter, more concise arcs is one of the reasons I preferred CoV's mission structure to CoH's. Most of my recent characters brought to 50 were villains, but I recently went back and leveled up an old lowbie Controller hero. I found the experience of the arcs boring and frustrating compared to CoV because of large numbers of missions defeating all foes (often without saying in the mission objectives that they were defeat-alls), usually in the same kinds of environments. I think the fact that this grated on me is noteworthy, because I actually like defeating everything. But there's a difference between choosing to do so and being forced to do so.

I'm well aware of, and even agree with, many of the complaints about the overarching story in CoV, given how it spends so much time having us be lackeys of Arachnos, and making us fight Longbow and Arachnos ad nauseum. But even with all that, I so much prefer how CoV's arcs are put together and how almost all missions are actually parts of arcs (less "stand-alone" missions).

I liked the original content we had. Otherwise I wouldn't have been around for as long as I have.

I also like some of the new content in moderation. The "modern" and "advanced" mission layout takes a lot of development resources though, and the more of it we have, the more we expect it. Plus, honestly, the more "special" it becomes, the less replay value it has (to me, anyway).

I really like the revamed Faultline zone, but I don't want every zone to turn into Faultline. I like the new Atlas Park, but I got tired of playing through it after just one or two playthroughs, and it's just easier to streetsweep (or DfB) out of it, than run those exact same arcs again.

Basically, the more specific the story gets, the less freedom you have for making up your own reason for helping out and that, at least for me, takes away some of the fun of playing through it. That doesn't mean I don't want to see zone revamps, I'd just prefer a happy mix of the two story styles.

Tip and newspaper missions actually are fairly close to our original mission layout... except they don't progress the overall metaplot, or really take you on a tour through the background story of the city (which, to me, means that only running newspaper missions is out of the question. Gets boring!).

Anyway. I'm rambling. To sum up: I like new content (at least new content that isn't specifically designed to suck for stalkers. *cough*firstward*cough*). But I also like old content, and I don't like to see old content sacrificed for new content because it makes the overall meta story of City of Heroes really weirdly fragmented when you just yank out an entire zone worth of old story clues.

The "new style" of CoH story is what I assumed the game was going to be like before release and what I subsequently figured they'd be adding as soon as they had time to work on non-filler content. Wouldn't you know it, I was right! I just didn't expect it to take them years to get to it. To be more fair, the Hollows was definitely an early attempt to engage you with the environment you're in and to give the so called story arcs an actual arc to them. You start out by meeting a rather hapless cop and by the end, in theory, you're rescuing his kid from mystical forces.

The hollows failed as a storyline not because of bad writing or a lack of ambition, rather simply because the game wasn't up to the task back then. The zone was horrendous to navigate, aggravated by the fact that every spawn was vast and sprawling and missions had you criss-cross the zone. I don't remember if the ability to call contacts even existed in issue 2. What barely existed was exemplaring: if the stars didn't align for your pick up team, or if your seven friends didn't coordinate their leveling precisely, good luck running that trial. You know, the one that supposedly ties together the plot threads of the zone, only unless you're the team leader and you take the time to read everything on a hard-as-hell-at-the-time trial with an uncomfortable time limit you won't see a single word of exposition. Even if you did do that it was unsatisfactory simply because the tech didn't exist at that point to have exposition occur during missions except via clues, which trials never had.

Imagine how frustrating mission design must have been for the game's first writers. They certainly didn't lack big ideas, yet leader-only text dumps were their one and only means of expression. Praetoria, tips, faultline and so on are better because their designers had the wherewithal to make them better. Legacy content was hobbled by default.

It seems to me that they'd have loved to have had at least a couple contacts per zone that dealt with that zone's character. You can almost see it in a couple of the Kings Row contacts, but that may as well be coincidence: Kings Row's character is out of control gang violence, and its arcs simply had nowhere else to send you trotting off to (apart from Galaxy City, and Perez Park... the horror, the horror.). One look around Brickstown should be all the proof one needs that something big was supposed to happen with that prison, for instance, but they were never able to make it work. Actually when I put it that way I recall that the prison was indeed meant to be the site of a trial, as was the mystery geometry BEYOOOOND THE DAAAAAM in Faultline. Odd that it took them seventeen issues to add the next trial that they were to add, heh.

I have to say that although I still believe that many of the Redside arcs are better than Blueside (Ghost Widow's origin story with Wretch encountered in the 20s is a wonderful tale), I AM finding much of the GR stuff good too. There have been many complaints over the years (some by me...) about Redside arcs not feeling 'Villiany' enough. Often we felt like errand boys rather than villians in our own right.

Yhen along came the Villian switching arc where I encountered a future version of myself. I was told I'd made a terrible mistake in the future and I had to fix it NOW or repeat the same mistake, I encounter myself several time during the mission, each time from farther into the future. The final ME was an awsomely powerful shadow of the future me when I've destroyed ALL life in the galaxy and still exist...utterly alone. My future self tells me NOT to steal the power in front of me of else everyone will die...but me.

So, in order to become a villian, I do exactly that, but this time I steal it ALL instead of merely part of it, the better to insure my victory and survival. To me THAT'S a villian...someone who KNOWS his decisions will bring about the deaths of everyone and he doesn't care.

Yeah...I praised the writers greatly that day...

I much prefer the arcs to one-shots.

Especially when one of those one-shots is assigned to every mission contact in the zone and you eventually reach a point where you have to take that one mission to advance any contact. But that was early City of Heroes and the designers' perverse love of forcing street hunting and hazard zones onto players.