Too serious or too goofy?

Honestly? I haven't played it. I haven't even gotten past the first mission giver. I came away with such a profoundly downbeat feeling about the Who Will Die stuff that CoH, as I've said in other topics, has become my #2 game in favor of an MMO in a galaxy far, far away.

It's hard to incentivise me to start levelling up a new Incarnate only to have the sapping turgidness of the Trials awaiting me. And then everything I've read about the results of the Trials just makes me sigh. More war. More uber-powerful beings to beat down on in content that you have no other way to play.

I'm over it.

I've had more fun designing and sketching out a Praetorian character and their fall into corruption and then their redemption than a continual cycle of moral ambiguity and failed heroism.




S.

I've run the arc... Man, dozens of times? I've probably tried all of the options. The first time I tried it, my noble demon saved his clone and released it, because it hadn't technically done anything wrong to deserve damnation. My insect hive queen (LOTS of fun seeing Dean hit on a giant winged bug lady, by the way ) just outright murdered her clone during her escape, as she couldn't allow anyone to challenge her rule over her brood. My megalomaniac overlord saved his clone because it was his property and he meant to use it. When the clone refused, he unceremoniously murdered it because... Well, it's his property. If it rebels, it dies. That's what the one that was so hard to bear. I've since resolved that if I want my villain playing the arc to be a dick, he'll just murder the unconscious clone, as opposed to the conscious one. It's still just as evil, I just don't have to listen to it plead.

Wow... What does THAT say about my mental health?

Happy endings seem to be at a premium in this game of late, and for the life of me, I can't understand why. I mean, sure, I can see having a few downer endings... That's what Westin Phipps is for. But having them ALL be downers? Praetoria I could see, that's its theme. First Ward I could maybe kind of see, but I was hoping for a bit more cheer. Still, that was still Praetoria. But now that it's bleeding into the "old word?" It's becoming a concern.

And what you say about villain endings is very true. A villain doesn't necessarily need a "they all lived happily ever after" happy ending, but a villain still needs a satisfying ending nonetheless. An ending in which something was achieved, the trials leading up to it were worth it and the villain gained something more satisfying than double-fake money. See, villains working for "money" is blasé to me. It's just too uninvolving since we never get to spend that money, not really. I feel what villains need to be rewarded with more than anything else is vindication. Or perhaps revenge, or ego, or any of the very pleasant but largely negative emotions we struggle against every day.

If hero finales are satisfying because they're right and so pleasant, then villain finales should be satisfying because they're wrong, but still very pleasant. The worst thing you can do to a villain game is turn it into a lesson in morality, because then villains are prevented from having fun by doing villain stuff. If evil is not supposed to be fun, a game about being evil isn't fun, either. That's exactly the kind of problem that's inherent in downer endings, especially for villains.

I don't know if happy endings are seen as too pedestrian and not edgy enough or if we're falling over backwards into a repeat of the 90s dork age of comics, but you have a point. The "**** ending," as Yahtzee put it, seems to be setting in as the norm for modern games. At least once upon a time, if you got a **** ending, it was just a basic sequel hook, but now even the proper endings are turning into this. Again, if the original Silent Hill, one of the most grim, visceral and serious games I can think of, can include a diabetes-sweet ending, modern games should also be able to squeeze one of those on the disc.

Very well said. One of Dean's chief selling points is that he's not the boss, he's the lackey. No, he's not even a partner, he IS a lackey. He's the guy who strives to serve and help ME with MY plans. Sure, the arc's plan is not Venture-approved, but it's still better than Kirkland HIRING me to deal with his grunt work. Dean's arc, and subsequently Leonard's as well, are pretty much as close to a story ABOUT my character as the game has ever gotten.

I too believe Dean was a good mix of drama and comedy, even if he leans on the comedy a tad too hard. He's quite well balanced. On the one hand, yeah, Dean is goofy and zany and somewhat out of place on Sharkhead Island, sure. But on the other hand, he's a VERY competent person despite, and indeed BECAUSE of his quirks, and he's serious when he needs to be. More than anything, Dean is useful an not a dead weight, which can earn a comic relief character a lot of leeway.

This is a complaint as old as City of Villains itself, and one I've been making for nearly as long. The whole place is dark, dreary, depressing, bathed in monochrome and earth tones and really bad at setting a positive mood. That, really, is the linchpin of the whole thematic complaint - City of Villains seems to have been designed as a moral lesson that crime does not pay. It's almost as though heroes are good so they get to be happy, but because villains are bad, they need to suffer. The logic, I suppose, is that being miserable is an integral part of being evil. Because bad people can never be happy. The thing, though, is that there aren't very many people who enjoy games that make them miserable. True art that's angsty is just not that popular. The game's villain-side population reflects this.

Yeah, it can be said that people enjoy being good more than being bad, that's entirely possible. But what I feel is even more important is that people enjoy an enjoyable gaming experience more than they do a depressing one. Villains don't need more wangs. What they need is more satisfaction.

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.

St. Martial is a great example of a missed opportunity for some contrast. Yes, I admit it is a significantly prettier zone than most of the rest of the villain ones, but do you know what I've seen of it the most? The black docks, the warehouse district where many of the contacts and vendors are, as well as where the Black Market is, the broken-down devastated areas where most of my missions are and the forest where that one stupid hunt takes place. I'd been playing through St. Martial for months when someone mentioned neon lights and my response was "The who of the what now?" I'd never been sent to the GOOD bit of town, or if I was it was during the day when it's mostly... Well, grey.

St. Martial should have been an island with a very pretty face that lands you at the front doors of a hotel resort and tries to sucker you in one of its many flashy casinos. It should have been the island of decadence and pleasure where you can hire a pretty hotel sweet, be served by clean, beautiful people, look out of your window and see rich, happy people splashing about in a pool below and are generally surrounded by an atmosphere of extreme luxury. Just, ah... Don't go out of the resort. The city isn't very... Interesting. There's nothing there for you. Then it turns out that the extreme luxury for the select few happens at the expense of the local population which lives in squalor and old ratty buildings and has to survive off the scraps of the wealthy. But it's HIDDEN away from the eyes of the tourists.

No. You leave a rusty ferry into military base and run into the Arachnos soldier who says "Hey, if we stand here, we can harass people as they come off the ferry. Wanna'?" Yeah, great first impressions there, folks.

Despite myself, I too enjoyed the Twinshot arcs... Well, the first two. They do a decent job of introducing game mechanics, they're exciting and the characters are memorable. Proton's fate is... Stupid, as far as I'm concerned, which is why I didn't like the third arc as much. Also, seeing the always cheery Twinshot turn emo and not work with the group just ruined it for me. This is where the theme of friendship should have been explored.

I don't really dislike any of the characters there, not even Flambeaux. I'm actually kind of sad to see her go evil later on, honestly. Yeah, she's annoying, but she's not useless. That one moment where Proton's working on a console with Flambeaux covering him pretty much sealed her character for me. Yeah, she's a goofball. Yeah, she's a valley girl stereotype. But none of that matters, because when the chips are down, she'll still have my back. So long as I can rely on her, I'm happy to put up with any nonsense quirks she has to offer.

Dillo I'm less tolerant of, though that's mostly people turning him into a meme that ruins the character for me. He may have been funny on his own, but you people drove the joke into the ground. What's more, it's pretty obvious that that's precisely how he was intended to be handled. I mind characters when their sole characteristic is a joke. Dillo never gets a character moment to himself, never experiences character growth... He's just sort of there. When ******* FLAMBEAUX has more character than you, Dillo, you should be ashamed.

Again despite myself, I found the last of the three Dr. Graves arcs to be very good, as well. Once we're past the goofiness of the "contest" and all the slapstick, once the chips are down and the narrative becomes more serious, that's where the arc really works. Hell, the final villain at the end, and the way the music swaps when her speech bubbles change is just brilliant. THAT is what the arc should have been all along, not me being the court jester for two arcs before I could have an arc that's actually worth running through.

Here's the thing, though - a game can be very dark, but if it doesn't take itself too seriously, it never really crosses into the kind of unpleasantness that makes me want to walk away. Again I quote Mercedes Sheldon. Take a moment to stop and think about the stories she sends you though. The Dirge of Chaos tells about an artefact which drives people crazy and violent. Think Event Horizon crazy and violent. They murder each other with their bare hands, consumed in bloodlust. And Amanda wants to do this to the whole city. Just think about that for a moment. Think about a doting mother just taking her daughter to school. The implications of that one story are actually a lot worse than a lot of the much heavier ones, like The Horrors of War, because that at least just deals with people getting "killed," not violently beaten to death.

And yet, because Mercedes doesn't take herself as seriously as I just took her story, it manages to skirt past the most horrid implications and instead just focus on Freaks beating up Trolls, which is so morally unencumbering it's almost funny. Because Mercedes has a somewhat sardonic, largely disconnected view of events, she's more likely to see them as "problematic" as opposed to horribly devastating. If this were the SSAs, the story would probably linger on the violent death of an innocent by the hand of another innocent in a style not too distant from a Modern Warfare game, but The Dirge of Chaos story does not. It focuses on the less heavy sides of the problem, and then shifts to focus on finding the solution.

You can view this as babying the players, and to an extent it is. That does, after all, shield us from the full horror of events, but it is this disconnect which allows the story to remain fun and entertaining, as opposed to heavy and grisly.

As far as I'm concerned, a story should not take itself too seriously almost ever at all, aside from one or two VERY special moments to serve as the culmination of a lot of buildup. At the same time, a story can't really afford to be goofy on more than a few occasions, either, not unless it's made clear that this is a "joke episode" and it's OK, because outright cheeky comedy does a lot to undo most of the buildup that these specific climaxes rely on. Again, I believe in a careful balancing act that I'm not sure recent stories have done a very good job of.

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's kind of always been the Avenger's schtick (as opposed to the Justice League)

True. And look how well it worked for the Phalanx.



S.