The Marketing of WWD, or A Question for Black Pebble and Co.

I agree with pretty much everyone in this thread who has found this to be a wasted opportunity or at the very worst, an egregious turn of both story and in fact storytelling.

Sam, to be perfectly frank with you, the whole arc was concieved and purpose-built to be a) A publicity stunt (look, Paragon Studios are killing off their central marketing character, how daring!) and b) A somewhat ham-fisted attempt to move the canon forward.

I agree it's succeeded on the latter part of the equation, but it certainly didn't require player involvement to make it happen. And Sam's also right when she says all the hoopla squarely focused on killing off Statesman, and somehow Sister Psyche's story became practically inconsequential as a result.

I can perhaps appreciate a full breaking from the lingering traces of Cryptic and Jack and all of that business, but to publicly come out and say so whilst not really disguising that was the purpose of these stories really dented my faith in the objectivity of the storytelling. It totally undercut my empathy for Statesman's eventual death because rather than being emblematic of the character at their best, it was a pastiche of character moments that weren't more than an echo.

I had the opportunity last week to show a friend of mine who doesn't play the game at all and asked them to evaluate a video that someone posted online of said cutscene. I gave them just enough backstory to fill in, and their sole comment?

'Why didn't he put up a fight?'

If a casual viewer could make such a pointed observation about the story, then it told me volumes about how it was written.

I'll be perfectly honest here; I am playing the glowy stick game far more than I am this one right now, because for all its flaws, all of its 'things that CoH doesn't have' (an argument that annoys me when one is comparing a seven year old game to a three month old one, ARGH), I've at least had the illusion of choice given to me. The choice is in my hands, not the story's. I can choose how to react, which is far more than Paragon Studios have let me do lately.

Sure, I might save the world in WWD#7, but I suspect a) It won't because of anything I do directly and b) I have trouble caring because I've been forcibly distanced from the story so far.

The studio and their marketing department need to take a step back, and I mean an actual objective step back and ask how we can be involved, rather than publicly pat themselves on the back for a series of well-constructed cutscenes.

Dark_Respite/Samuraiko does that and gives us a story. They'd do well to learn.




S.

The arc wasn't the best story line this game has offered. There were a lot of silly moments which weren't fully explained, which made our heroes and the Freedom Phalanx do things that only a rookie hero would do.

Like I said, it's not even so much about the storyline. That raises its own debate.

I'm strictly talking about how the publicity for this was handled. I sometimes wonder if they throw darts at a board to determine what gets publicized and what doesn't. And Gods know that if given the chance at the Pummit, I'd love to corner Brian Clayton, Black Pebble, Ghost Falcon, and whoever, and go, "As someone who obviously doesn't understand Marketing, how was this meant to be successful?"

Coz I honestly can't grok this. I've tried. I only know what *I* would do, but I'm not in Marketing. And I'm hardly in a position to say, "MY way would work," because for all I know, I'd make some novice mistake that violates Marketing 101 and it'd fail. But I'd really like to understand the rationale behind it.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite