Just to be clear, there's other origins and story themes than magic, k?

I only knew of it from when my friend was telling me what Hamidon is. I wasn't playing the game back then but was interested.

Really, this whole thread is just one big excuse to invoke Arthur C Clarke.

And going by both developer random comments and the general gist of in-game stuff, Incarnate content is supposed to be our equivalent to "Cosmic Marvel".

EDIT: Damn you and your fast fingers, Liquid!

Slow brain, though. I can't believe that I didn't see it until just now.

There's a passing mention of magic in the Hamidon's rarely-read origin story, but in-game, the Devouring Earth is almost always dealt with non-magically. They drop tech salvage, for example. Praetoria keeps them at bay with sonic fences, not runed walls. Scientists work to cure the transformed, not mages. Overall, I feel pretty confident calling it a sciency bio-threat, not a magical one. It's eco-terrorism on an apocalyptic scale, not angry nature spirits.

Edit: Moreover, when I think of the big plot twists in Praetoria, the first things that come to mind are Enriche, the War Walker invasion reveal at the end of the Loyalist line, and interdimensional portals, which are all definitely not magical.

I think it seems magic is such a dominating force in our universe, because it seems to require the most effort to utilize. Every other origin, Science, Tech, Mutation, and even Natural have some form of catalyst to being super, but magic needs you to want to be powerful with just your own will power. I think because of this will power, it taps directly into the conduits between humanity and it's Well. It's the hardest Origin to master, but you get closer to the source when you do.

I'm betting Batallion isn't going to be magical. Just sayin',

I tend to, when being as broad as possible, group things in only two ways.
Science: Wherein the way current real-world science understands things to work is either used as the hard rules or as the basis of the hard rules of a setting.
and
Magic/Not-Science: Wherein brand new rules for how things work. exist that do not have to have any connection with the real world at all.

The whole idea that "Cosmic" is anything other than magic is kind of odd considering Science doesn't say jack crap about these concepts and tends to go against them.
Things like
A giant wall filled with dead gods at the end of the universe

a god that is the conscious, living, sentient, LITERAL personification of entropy and eats planets.

ANOTHER sentient force that is ALSO a LITERAL embodiment of the concept of "Speed"

What crazy world do we live in, or what Scientific journal have I missed where this wasn't anything other than pseudo-religious stuff, AKA MAGIC?(remember, your "magic mumbo-jumbo" is someone else's religion)
Ten years down the line if we find Galactus nomming on Jupiter we can call this science fiction. If he refuses to tell us hos origin and we come up with "Lived before the big bang and is the living embodiment of entropy" we can even call it some speculation on grand cosmic forces. but right now? tastes like magic.

That said I still go with the side that says it's been a pretty even split between magic and science the last few issues. Science and Not-Science are pretty ubiquitous throughout the CoH world and you can never get too far away from either in your adventures. I think it's important, when judging which has the most significance in a story to think of
1: The explicit nature of the enemy/conflict in a story
2: The explicit nature of the solution to the enemy/solution
3: the explicit nature of the Supporting cast/Contact in the story

Judging from there, Magic is non-existent in Praetoria until First Ward. That's three zones and their stories right off the bat. Atlas has the hellions but none of their magic ever really comes up and their story is more tied to Arachnos and the Shivan aftermath than anything else.

Dark Astoria is Very Strongly magical without question


SPOILERS!




Even First Ward, the last bastion of magic in Praetoria went out of it's Way to tell us it's "Ghosts" weren't really magical ghosts but some crazy sci-fi psychic thing, before delving into the realm of it's ultimately magic-oriented story.

These threads make a lot more sense if you replace "superheroes" with "the sort of writing I like" and "magic" with "the sort of writing I dislike".