City of Death ((Spoilers Perhaps))

The problem is that this breeds a very real sense of cynicism in people who are prone to being cynical, such as myself. Rather than outrage me and spur me into action, what the SSAs have managed to accomplish is ensure I don't give a rat's *** about any of the game's canon characters any more. I refuse to be invested in a character whose life can be thrown away to feed some writer's obsession with re-enacting the entirety of Countdown to Final Crisis.

Yes, knowing that characters will survive does undermine dramatic tension somewhat. On the flip side, knowing that characters will die serves to undermine emotional investment. Both lead to the same result - I lose interest in the story, instead shrugging at supposedly "powerful" moments and just moving on. As I've said many times before - drama in storytelling is a balancing act. You need to prevent your audience from waling away in disgust at your angsty drama (something I've failed at in the past) before you can even begin to worry about making them fear the worst. People are not going to feel the emotional downs if they don't care about the story.

Most of the villains I make - at least the ones who aren't loyal to other villains I've made - are more the "my way or the highway" type. They care about not just what they want, they care about getting it their way. If, for instance, my flagship villain wants an artefact held in a museum, he's going to take it. If it's guarded, he'll kill the guards. If it's warded, he'll break the wards. If it's suggested to him that it might be easier to sneak in and steal it, he'll scoff at it and wring he neck of whoever suggested it. If it's suggested that another artefact that's almost as strong is considerably easier to obtain, he'll probably obtain it, then chuck it into the sea and go after the one he wanted anyway.

In other words, the villains I make are drawn up to be wilful, stubborn and uncooperative. Why would they need to work for or with other people when they clearly know best and everyone else should clearly work for them? See, Dean McArthur knows his place. It's at at the back of my villain's hand. He's useful, and that earns him a place, but he's not ambitious enough to want to take credit for any of the achievements. Sadly, what happened with Dean has consistently failed to happen again, and that's just disappointing.

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.

Getting two years of something different means the only stories I'm able to enjoy any more are eight years old, if they're not wiped away to be replaced with new, "better" stories. If this were a question of variety, I wouldn't object, but it's not. It's a question of someone on the writing table being convinced that this is a superior way to tell stories, to the point where EVERY SINGLE STORY to come out since I19 is exactly like this.

Maybe if there were a story more recent than 2009 which wasn't obsessed with killing canon characters and preaching doom and gloom, I'd be more inclined to be understanding, but there really isn't. Everything since Praetoria has been the same depressing, drab shade of grey and, from all evidence, it seems like all new content will be more of that kind of storytelling until someone gets fired and replaced.

I'm all for variety, but not if said variety is hugely one-sided. If you'll notice, I didn't start complaining until after First Ward despite all of Praetoria being exactly the same. I was willing to extend that idea a LOT of leeway, to the point where I was willing to accept "morally grey and depressing" is just what Praetoria was. It's not just Praetoria any more. It's everything, and you can't argue about how everything being stories you don't like is bad yet everything being stories you like but I don't is better.

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.

There's overcoming difficulties, and there's paying a guy to punch you in the face for a while because it feels *really good* when he stops.

The very first thing that you do in the NW story arc is free Katie from the Seer Network.

Yeah, but does it stick?

Or does she promptly drop dead?

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

That was my point, as well. Good writing and "everybody dies" are not the same thing. You CAN have a good story where lots of characters we care about die, of course you can. Just as you can have a poorly-written, ugly mess where lots of characters die. The point is that character deaths don't make a story good, and they actually only serve to make a bad story worse. What character deaths do is add drama, but a story first needs to deserve this drama, and the SSAs failed to do this in a spectacular fashion.

Also, character deaths should be treated like a precious commodity, and not because you can run out of characters - you can always just make more. No, character deaths should be treated like a precious commodity because they lose their impact the more you use them. The trick grows old, audiences grow cynical and people grow to expect it. Though a horrible thing to say about the real world, Stalin's famous line is very much true for fictional worlds: A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. Contemporary writing is pretty much on the verge of making signature character deaths trite and mundane, and that's just bad all around.

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.

I think everyone was a bit WTF with that, mostly because it was so badly written, relied so much on holding of the idiot ball, and felt so callously tacked on.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

This is where we're going to have to differ in our opinions on the game (again )
Because, irrespective of 'grimdark'ness or whatnot of the new content, I vastly prefer it to the old junk we had before, because it is actually a cohegent and interactive enough story to engross me and for me to like.

You can argue as much as you like (I'm sure you will, hee) that the old stuff had some absolute gems in it. That's as may be. It's also irrelevant if the old content was so mind-achingly, gum-rendingly dull as to make me never want to touch it again.

This, however, we are in full agreement on.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I've not been impressed with new content since pretty much I18, and really since I17 and Dean McArthur. I liked Praetoria somewhat, and I was even willing to meet it half-way on the depressing, grey, crapsack world theme just because... Well, it's a fascist state with a face of superficial perfection belying a rotten core of corruption and oppression. That's more or less exactly what I wanted a "Nemesis Island" zone for City of Villains to be. And it it had been left at JUST Praetoria, it wouldn't have been too bad, even if I found First Ward to be so depressing I don't want to run through it again.

But everything since has just been getting worse. As you can tell from my other thread, I'm not in the slightest interested in interactivity. I like City of Heroes when it stops being pretentious with its mission design and just sets me in an instance with lots of enemies to kill, without a scripted sequence always getting in my way and distracting me from the action. That's what makes SSA7 about the only decent GAMEPLAY experience that new content has offered for a couple of years now. Whether it was so rushed that the mission designers lacked time to pollute it with trite custom scripts or whether someone finally understood that the more you interrupt people's gameplay, the more irritated people get, I can't say, but it's easily the least intrusive arc I can remember, and that makes it entertaining to play through.

But all the content we've gotten since Going Rogue fails to enthral me. I've run the Praetorian Warden storyline a handful of times so I somewhat remember it, but I've run the Power, Responsibility and Crusader lines precisely ONCE, and I'm really not interested in running them again. Power, maybe, up until Mr. G, but no later. I ran through First Ward once and I'm never setting foot there again. I ran Roy Cooling once and swore to never run his horribly-written, illiterate arc again. I made the mistake of running it a second time, and it only reminded me why I chose to avoid it. I ran the new Atlas Park about twice until I realised it was both repetitive and insulting to my intelligence when the narrative chastises me for playing the game as it's designed to play. I ran the new Mercy Island once, and I never want to touch it again. I've run the DFB about twice, really out of necessity as a means to skip the first five levels, but it transpires that it's far easier to level up just off street hunts anyway. I ran an iTrial once and I really have no interest in running one again. I probably will, but probably when I forget why I chose not to run them.

The fact of the matter is I've run new content since I19 onward roughly once, and each time it's left me uninterested to return. The stories are bland, yet trying to shove in angsty drama they didn't "earn," the technical quality of the writing is just poor, and getting worse, to the point where it embarrasses me to be the non-native speaker pointing out obviously faulty grammar and horrid sentence structure, and newer content's utter disregard for continuity with old content is just disgusting. I fell in love with City of Heroes as it was in 2004, and I fell in love with the stories of the time. Seeing them entirely abandoned, or worse, contradicted, removed and redone into something considerably less interesting, is just disheartening. I don't describe the current development trends as "a systematic destruction of everything that made City of Heroes good" for no reason. That's literally what I feel it is.

I want to see more about the Nemesis, I want to see more about the Rikti, I want to see more about Crey, I want to see more about the Warriors and the Outcasts and the Trolls. I want to see more done with Dr. Vahzilok, I want to see more of the Clockwork King's story. I'm sick and tired of introducing a new "big thing" with every issue and abandoning all the good old things that never got the time of day as if Neuron were in charge of setting priorities. The old stories may not have been particularly well executed, but at least they were still good stories. The new ones simply aren't. About the only thing I'll remember about the SSAs a year from now is how much they pissed me off.

Yes, many things happen in Paragon City other than "rocks fall, everybody dies." In Missing Melvin and the Mysterious Malta Alliteration, Melvin Langley is eventually saved, and he is seen fighting the good fight with enthusiasm later on. Both Crimson and Indigo are pleased. In Division: Line, C'Khelkah is kidnapped multiple times, but she is never tortured, killed or mind-broken, and indeed ends up brokering some degree of peace that was previously thought impossible. In Corporate Culture, the Freakshow are sent to kill Kimberly Kellerman, but she is eventually saved. Later on, Crey kidnap her and her sister, Tracy Templeton, erasing all records of their existence, but both women are eventually rescued and their records restored. In The Library of Souls, Akharist manages to defect from the circle successfully. He is recaptured once, but never suffers for his noble intentions, because he is rescued in time to be saved from a grim fate. Not only that, but the reason Akharist defects is because he has realised the error of his own ways. In The Envoy of Shadows, many policemen are kidnapped to serve as sacrifices for the Envoy, but are nevertheless rescued before they can be murdered.

To say that City of Heroes has ever been all rainbows and unicorns is absurd, of course. The game's story has always had its dark moments. But it kept a balance of positive and negative emotions. When bad stuff happened, the story had enough legitimacy to earn it, and earn a genuine emotional response. I knew bad things may happen, but I also knew that bad things MAY NOT happen, and this made me care. It made me wish that the characters I liked wouldn't die or get horribly tortured. With the new storytelling, that suspense is gone. I know characters will die in a horrible fashion, it's just a question of who they will be, and the answer to that seems to be "just about everybody." At no point have newer stories had the legitimacy to deserve that kind of drama because at no point have they done anything to earn it. It's just one shock death after another until we're no longer exhibiting emotional responses and just keeping a body count. There's no balance in the storytelling at all, and this is what utterly ruins it for me.

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.

As I said, they can always make more. Just look at the Twinshot and Graves arcs - two relatively mediocre arcs, yet both of them together introduce a good dozen other heroes who, annoyingly, keep showing up in future unrelated arcs. At two to three heroes dead per arc as is the SSA standard, that'll last for another four to six arcs. Hell, look at what happened with Sister Psyche - tossed into a fridge, to be replaced with Penny. How hard would it be to toss Penny into a fridge and replace her with Praetorian Penelope Yin?

You can always make more characters to kill. The question, as Jurassic Park would ask us, is not whether we could, but rather whether we should.

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.

What Sister comes back and Positron gets whacked?

There is a vast difference between 1) nobody ever dies 2) it is possible that some deaths may occur 3) important characters could die along with anyone else 4) important characters get killed for shock value.

I do not object to the death of characters, even Statesman. I do object to to the notion that Statesman would die with a Big Smile™ on his face at the hand of his daughter's murderer. Shortly thereafter, Statesman's granddaughter resurrects the evil love interest of her evil great uncle on the off-chance it will make him less evil, but not a word is devoted to why she would not resurrect her own mother and/or grandfather. This isn't Cyrus Thompson-level writing here; that is simply pathetic.

I understand that there are players who want to play their characters like The Punisher and kill, judge/jury/executioner style, every bad guy they encounter. CoH wisely took the official stance that the bad guys are simply "defeated" by the player; what that means is up to the player. If they are all arrested and left hanging in webbing for the police or all shot down a killed, that is up to the player.

But I have to agree with Sam that from the top down, the game is getting progressively more dark and futile. Regardless of player actions, various bad things happen. Indeed, in one of the tip missions, a hero who has been transformed by the Devouring Earth begs to be "put out of his misery" and thanks you for obviously killing him. So, like it or not, the player is forced to kill, whereas before, defeating a foe did not mean that. Ain't that a fine kettle of fish. Or someone dies regardless, because Life is Pain, Princess, There is No Good or Evil and Then You Die sort messaging or something. Whatever it officially is, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So I now avoid such story lines, which unfortunately, I am discovering, lets out a lot of newer stuff.

If the game "officially" flows in a neutrally-worded "Silver Age" fashion, the individual player can spice it up to "Punisher" style by simple decree that they killed every bad guy they encountered. But if the game "officially" takes the "Punisher" position, it is nigh-well impossible to play it any other way when the game says that you killed someone. Further, if death, despair and futility are going to be the rewards in an existential world in which "there are only shades of gray," that is simply not attractive writing as I perceive it. My two cents.

When I say drama is a balancing act, that's exactly what I mean. If you make your audience convinced large parts of your story will be unpleasant, a not-insignificant number of people will simply decline to participate. Call me squeamish, call me a care bear, but it's like seeing a movie that has a torture scene in its trailer. Yeah, I don't care if that's the best thing since the PowerPuff Girls. I'm not going to watch it. And that's exactly the sense I get out of City of Heroes stories - regardless of what the plot is, regardless of what I do, someone's going to die, and it's probably going to be the one whose death would be the most poignant.

The real irony here is that I actually do enjoy stories where the good guys seem in real danger and face real adversity, and I enjoy those the most. But that's because these stories strike a very careful balance between the danger and dark themes and the success and light themes. I've often quoted Oban: Star Racers as one of my favourite series of all times, and it's probably the one with the most oppressive sort of feeling of said favourites, just because the entirety of it has our heroes down on their luck, struggling against impossible odds and following every success with a massive increase in difficulty. The whole show has a very pervasive feel of helplessness and powerlessness, and yet nevertheless, it's one of the strongest, most positive series I've ever seen. Despite all the drama, there are enough positive moments to make it worth watching, because you never know if what's up next will be good or bad.

I don't know what has to happen to convince me that every new City of Heroes story WON'T be depressing, unpleasant and one I want to avoid, but it would have to demonstrate a desire to lighten the tone, not just hand-wave requests by tossing in a token joke character or a very rare, ultimately meaningless "big damn heroes" moment.

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.