If you don't like the writing...

I don't actually read the stories. In pretty much any game.

I feel like a lot of cut scenes, story pop ups, and so on are the game equivalent of telling rather than showing. It's sometimes effective, but too much of it just makes me want to close the screen as soon as possible. There is a rule in screen and novel writing that you should only have a scene when something is supposed to be happening.

I have joked in the past that "Talk to..." as a mission objective would be better suited to me if it said "Click on..."

Anyway, some people might interpret rejection of Story as a rejection of Setting or Atmosphere. For me those are totally separate things. Players are the story for me. I'm much more interested in what is going on with other people--what they're wearing, what they wrote in their bio, what powers they picked, whether they suck as teammates (kidding mostly). And I am interested in the atmosphere too. Just not in stories that happen in a vacuum--I have to unlearn what happened in them in order to communicate clearly with other players.


PS one thing that often stands out to me as missing in CoX is proper sound. Both sound effects and music. Occasional voice over can be effective too (just not the type that's like "Thank you for rescuing my cat. Let me read this book to you now.") It strikes me that for all of the citizens we save or imperil, we never hear them scream. Winning an iTrial also results in an awkward silence where I would a satisfying death scream or explosion, along with a change in music to reflect victory, would go a long way, IMO.

NIGHT WARD SPOILERS because I just HAVE to talk about this:

There's nothing worse than a "who dun it" story where it's obvious who dun it pretty much the moment the story starts, and the Bedwyr story in Night Ward is exactly this. The first mission introduces Lorn (an obvious red herring because he's an *******), Bedwyr (who isn't eligible because his description leaves no doubt) and Pendragon who's been all over the game and the forums of late so he can't be it. Oh, and the Black Queen, lest we forget. The second mission has a letter from "someone" inside the Black Knights with a lot of authority who is a traitor. It's the Black Queen. I called it as soon as I saw the letter. Who else could it be but "the evil woman?" For as inspired as this is by Arthurean legend, it's just far too transparent that it would be the woman who'd be evil.

But OK, let's say I didn't catch that and move on. Four missions in the Talons of Vengeance say "Soon the Black Queen will open the eternal prison!" which I interpreted to mean that soon the Black Queen will open the eternal prison, but Bedwyr, apparently having grown dumber since we last spoke, interpreted this to mean that the Talons wanted to kill the Black Queen. So here I am, yelling at my screen going "She's the traitor you idiot! They told you straight up!" Nope. We're saving her. Six missions in, Pendragon shows up. He learns of what the Talons said and instead of parsing it literally, he too chooses to go with Bedwyr's mistake that the Talons want to kill her, so he goes on to "confess." Confess what? Yeah, I'll get to that. So he goes to save the queen and Bedwyr is so worried and assuming that the Talons have warped Lorn's mind.

Let's think about this for a second. What happens when the Talons corrupt a person? This person starts talking about death and vengeance and murder. What did Lorn do? He declared Martial Law, then he spent an hour talking about honour and the Order. Not typical. In the meantime, the Black Queen - despite not being accused - said pretty much the equivalent of "I have only one day left to retirement!" which is "Um... I don't know anything about this." Yeah. So we go through the motion, stupid men killing each other, and then it turns out the Black Queen was the traitor. Dun dun duuun! Oh, no! How surprising! I never saw that coming! And then she proceeds to laugh the evil laugh and give the evil speech and do the "You have outlived your usefulness." shtick and oh goodie. The cliché is complete.

I think Viking said it best: "Numina calls her transparent." What happened, guys? Were you budgeting your characterisation and you just happened to run out after writing Bedwyr and Carlyle? They're both deep, interesting, fleshed-out characters that demand respect and admiration, and then we have THIS? The cackling, obviously evil woman with no personality and no character? Why? Was she wronged in some way? Did she have dreams of power? Nope. She's evil now. She's with the Talons, and we all know that's the easy excuse. "Hey, why are you evil?" "Oh, the Talons made me evil." "Oh, OK. That makes sense." No it doesn't! These are characters! You've proven you can do characters well. So why didn't you do it for this one?

And just when I was starting to take the Talons of Vengeance seriously, too. Everything they touch, they corrupt, but even they can't corrupt me, so they're instructed to avoid engaging me until they have the keys. Which they do. Finally! They are able to think past "Rivers of blood will cleanse the world!" Finally we get to see that the various members aren't just stupid but rather that they are controlled when they say things like "You've freed me!" as they die. Finally there's a glimmer of substance to the faction... And then we have The Black Queen, who doesn't even get the benefit of having a name. Ai ai ai...

Quote:

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.

No more spoilers from this point on

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kirsten I gotta agree. The really old arcs have some great stories, even while being stuck under...uh...squiffy mechanics. I wish we could have more stories like those. Think how awesome they would be now that we have the modern game mechanics that exist today!

I don't know. On the one hand, I can admit that basic kill-alls can become somewhat stale after a while, but on the other hand I can't really say I prefer the "new" approach to mission design any more, either. Too many gimmicks, too much reliance on fighting back waves of ambushes, too much reliance on "large" spawns and too many "talky" missions that consist of 50% NPCs talking at each other or defeating a boss and going through a three-page dialogue with him. It's especially aggravating when I run into cutscenes of essentially the villains going "Aha! Here's my evil plan, and you can't stop me because you're frozen in place watching this cutscene! Ha ha! Die, Statesman!" Yeah, even the newest content has that, and I don't like it.

This is kind of like every instance of replacing something with something "better" that isn't actually better. You need look no further than Atlas Park and Mercy Island. Praise those missions all you will, I still refuse to run them because it's the same story every time and I can quote it in my sleep now. Same for the tutorial. Twice the action, twice the flash, twice the boredom, twice the pointlessness. Basically, what's "better" isn't actually better all the time. For as "bad" as they may be, I can run kill-alls all day, but drag me through "Protect the Midnight Mansion" again and I'll just about **** kittens, if you'll pardon my word choice. Yeah, we're doing the old Jack Emmert "This mission is hard! Get a team or abandon the story arc forever!" Ugh...

It's not as bad as it was during the Twinshot/Graves days, but it's not exactly good, either. I'll need to see more of the newest type of mission design before I can trust our mission designers to potentially ruin arcs I actually enjoy. Maybe if they didn't use anything not available in the Architect I could be more easily persuaded, but otherwise?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex Anyway, some people might interpret rejection of Story as a rejection of Setting or Atmosphere. For me those are totally separate things. Players are the story for me. I'm much more interested in what is going on with other people--what they're wearing, what they wrote in their bio, what powers they picked, whether they suck as teammates (kidding mostly). And I am interested in the atmosphere too. Just not in stories that happen in a vacuum--I have to unlearn what happened in them in order to communicate clearly with other players.

I feel completely the reverse. I've almost never met a person whose costume or story impressed me enough to want to dig deeper. Sure, there have been a few exceptions, and even those mostly come out of the Best Costume Designs thread. That's not a dig against other people, mind you. I'm not saying there aren't creative folks out there. It's just a personal preference thing. The kind of fiction I like just isn't the kind most people write.

By contrast, I LOVE the game's lore and its backstory. It might not be quite Tolkenien levels of pedantic detailing of every last story bit, but at least the older world is detailed enough to inspire. I've had this discussion with Nuclear Toast quite often, but I like to explore different stories in search of inspiration, and people's stories just rarely have anything they can offer in this regard. I'm sure these stories are very meaningful and dear to them, but I rarely find something I can take away and use. To a large extent, it's a function of the medium - stories are limited in size and costumes are a "next best thing" fit. The game's canon, by contrast, has a lot of room to work and a lot of room to build an actual world.

I don't try to fit my characters into the existing world so I don't expect other people to do so, either, but that doesn't mean I don't want to lift ideas from the world, either. And for as much as I've dogged our writers, they STILL have very good ideas. I love the social structure of Night Ward, I love the presentation of SSA2, I love the direction of threat that Dark Astoria takes. I love the story and I want to know more about it. If it's like reading a book, then a book I shall read. I don't read physical books, so why not?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex PS one thing that often stands out to me as missing in CoX is proper sound. Both sound effects and music.

This, on the other hand, I can't disagree with. City of Heroes loses SO MUCH by not having decent music and, for the most part, not having music at all. For as much as I HAAATE Dr. Graves' arc, that one moment right at the end when the façade drops, the text bubbles swap colour and the music changes abruptly is just genius in theatrics. I LOVE it! And yet I walk into Apartment Whatever to go to Dark Astoria and you'd think there'd be some kind of foreboding music but no. There's silence. I get dumped into a garden with tentacles looking at me with eyes, so you think there'd be some kind of suspenseful music, but there's nothing. Instead, I walk around First Ward shopping and I'm followed around by the world's most basic action music until it becomes annoying.

Music and sound effects matter. To this day I keep pointing to Aquaria as a game that is MADE by music and wouldn't have been even half the experience it is if it played in silence. Music can create emotion even in the most soulless among us, even if you can't sense it, and it can help us care about what we're seeing. Music can set the tone and communicate so much more than text ever can. Yet City of Heroes uses it almost not at all. Simply check out an old midi and tell me that music doesn't tell you a story of what's going on even though you can't see moving pictures on the other end. Why can't we have music like that? It would make so many more encounters so much more personal and memorable.

The same actually goes for sound effects. City of Heroes used to be pretty good about this, but that was a long time ago. It used to be doors didn't make a sound, remember that? But these days they barely do, footsteps are quiet, most surfaces sound like concrete and most of what we do generates no sound. If I'm interacting with a box, then play a small box opening sound. If I'm interacting with a computer, play a small computer sound. Have enemies give cues to what they'll do in audio. I just got out of a Space Marine multiplayer game I can can tell you for a fact that every time I heard that low, rumbling "Waaagh!" as made by a large ork, I took notice. Nothing of the sort happens here. If I'm being ambushed, the first time I learn about it is when I "hear" the ambush announcing its presence over text, but I don't actually hear anything.

I know some people play with the sound off, and I can't blame them, but the game is more than just visuals. Sound and music should be a bigger part of it, as they can help the writing tremendously.

Quote:

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 agree with what you're saying, Sammy. What I meant was Touching up some NPCs, removing kill-alls, maybe adding ONE VERY BRIEF cutscene at most, *posssibly* adding some dialogue balloons and captions. I'm not a huge fan of in-mission long dialogue menus and long, frequent cutscenes, but a little bit more talk on the part of characters and a carefully placed cutscene can really make storylines come to life. Like in anything, it just requires judicious application of resources.

OK, storytelling exercise. No spoilers here, just hypotheticals.

You have a story, and in order to build for the final battle, you need bad things to happen. OK, that's all fair and good, let's work with that. How you DO NOT do that is have me run mission after mission where I get to a place, see a cutscene of the villain being evil and doing something evil, teleporting away, and be told I should mop up. How you DO NOT do this is string me along on a wild goose chase only to finally reveal that... Well, my actions right at the end are ultimately responsible for the great evil. That might have worked for Liquid Snake, but that's because Liquid Snake I could take seriously and because he'd proven himself to be a capable planner beforehand.

If you want me to care about a story, then what you don't do is constantly dangle the smug villain just out of reach like he's the frikkin' G-Man from Half-Life. Why? Have you ever teased a cat? Like, really get it mad at, say, a chew toy it wants to have but you won't let it? Do you know how the cat responds to that? It'll spend a while looking for the toy, and after that while, it'll bite YOU. Same deal here. You, Mr. Screenwriter, can only jerk me around so long before the same happens. I can only be mad at the villain so long before I start being mad at YOU for putting me through this.

I don't get this. I ran through a story that honestly felt like it was turning over a new leaf and actually being told in a productive manner that isn't designed to upset me, and then it's like the writer was holding it in, holding it in, holding it in and BAM! SSA1 all over again all piled on top of each other like you tried to hold down a sneeze for five minutes and then failed spectacularly. If you want to make a decent story that I care about, please stop rubbing a Villain Sue in my face. I know YOU like the villain very much, but I don't because you went out of your way to make me hate that villain. And not in that "love to hate" sort of way, but more in that "Get off the stage!" sort.

Oh, and here's something else you don't do. When you already have the Gozer building in your game with a gateway to another world and a giant vortex over it, you DO NOT have a goddess ask "Are you a god?" There's homage and reference and then there's just going through the motions. Yes, we all saw Ghostbusters. Even people who haven't seen Ghostbusters now saw Ghostbusters for having played through that. I'm pretty sure I saved Dana Barrett somewhere along the way, and now I know why Shadowhunter's "Giant Corgis" look the way they do - because they're patterned after those statues that came to life. We get it. Thank you for running what was actually a pretty clever and interesting reference into the ground to where everyone now knows what you were referencing. Why not just go ahead and slap a "We are referencing Ghostbusters here!" caption while you're at it, because at this point you pretty much did that.

---

Look, if you want me to hate a villain and want to defeat said villain, you need to build up the threat, or at the very least the villainy. But what you should not build up is the annoyance. I shouldn't roll my eyes every time a villain is on-screen like Superboy Prime just showed up. I'm fine with being told I was too late. I'm fine with succeeding only partially, but a cutscene of me being too late every mission, capped by a "you played right into my hands" moment does not work. It might have worked once, but here's the thing - you already used that on SSA1. As a point of fact, you already used that in First Ward and Dark Astoria. You've used that exact same plot in every major storyline within the last year, and it gets less and less convincing each time it repeats.

*edit*
And here's something else: M. Night Shyamalan twists are not a get-out-of-jail-free card. That's not to say they're a bad thing. Far from it, a twist pulled off is a beautiful thing. But no matter how well you pull them off (and they can be done better in this game), you simply can't support a story that grows too many at once. Once the twist becomes the norm and people expect it to the point where playing it straight is the surprising twist, you've officially gone too far. Because right now, I go into every major event expecting a twist, expecting an angle, expecting a betrayal and a switching of sides of some kind. Again I refer to you the Vince Russo school of bad booking which teaches "Why have a match, when we can have a gimmick match?"

There's nothing wrong with having just a simple, by-the-book climax. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Not every time. You don't have to insert twists and gimmicks and more twists. Not every time. It's OK to have a straightforward, good story that doesn't try to throw us a curveball every chance it gets. It's not a surprise if people expect it, and finding a surprise they weren't expecting when they were expecting one is not a success story. Do simple stories. There's nothing wrong with that. At least do them SOMETIMES!

Quote:

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.

OK, another storytelling exercise: Odysseus and his artefacts that bear the mark of the Well of the Furies. That's not a spoiler, don't worry. It doesn't relate to anything, it's just a critter's description.

You have a problem. You need to sell Odysseus as not just a powerful man in control of powerful artefacts, but indeed a nearly ALLpowerful man in control of artefacts of the Well of the Furies, and you need to do this in the 30s before the Well has been established. Why is this a problem? Well, for one, you're breaking continuity. You can't have an omniscient narrator (i.e., the "voice: behind the description box) breaking continuity by discussing a concept which has not yet been established as something widely known. In the case of the Well of the Furies, this is especially problematic since it not being known is a key aspect of Mender Ramiel's story arc, which revolves around discovering and partially explaining it, and that takes place post level 50.

So how do we fix this? Well, it's not simple, but you can refer to the Well indirectly. Let's review - why do we call this the "Well of the Furies" in the first place? Because when Marcus Cole and Stephen Richter drank from it, it took the shape of a well. Now, you can argue that because we called THAT the Well of the Furies, we can use that name in storyline, but that's not the case. This doesn't work when the greater trans-temporal entity behind that one source is also called the Well of the Furies, thus calls to that name will refer to it. If you want to say that the artefacts are connected to the "Well of the Furies," what you want to do is mention "the Well that Statesman and Recluse drank from" and then leave players with knowledge of future storyline to make the connection themselves. If the artefacts are connected to the well Marcus and Stephen drank from and that well is connected to THE Well, then the artefacts are connected to the Well of the Fires and aha! I see what you did there. It doesn't take much more text to say it, but it flows better.

For another thing, you can't talk about artefacts "that bear the mark of the Well of the Furies" when that mark has never been established as a thing. We know of only a single artefact of the Well of the Furies - the shapeshifting one we take from Trapdoor. But here's the thing with it - that's not an "artefact," it's a "source." Why is that a meaningful distinction? Because the actual Well of the Furies - the physical well full of water - is just a source itself, as is Hero One's excalibur, as have others throughout time. What this means is that anyone who possesses them has the power of an Incarnate of the Well. Now, you can argue that Trapdoor was unable to use his artefact so Odysseus is probably not able to get full power out of his, but there's a problem with that, too. Trapdoor wasn't "unable" to use his artefact, because the artefact isn't "used." It's a connection to the Well, a conduit through which the Well's power flows, thus a person could only ever get power out of it if he were a chosen of the Well. Considering I kicked Odysseus' teeth in, that can't be right.

So how do we fix this? Well, there's an easy way and there's a hard way. The hard way is to have sort of like what Vincent Ross did and imply that aspects of past Incarnates can still serve as connections to the Well, allowing a user to draw power from it without being an Incarnate. However, Vincent Ross' artefact relies on an artefact from A DEAD GOD, which makes it pretty unique, so having a warehouse full of 'em seems... Implausible. And THAT artefact burned out pretty quick. So you'd need a whole other story - one per side - to tell how artefacts are starting to show up, showing markings similar to the one the Statesman brought back from the Well of the Furies, that only some people can use to gain power. However, that's a lot of work, so here's a simpler solution:

Imply this. Nothing more complicated than putting the storyline I suggested for the arc above as an implication as plain text in Odysseus' description. For instance: "You've heard of artefacts with the markings of the Well that the Statesman and Recluse drank from have been showing up thought the city and granting people great power. It seems like Odysseus heard this, as well, because his warehouse is full of them. He must have had his Warriors gather them for a long time." Done deal. Sure, it doesn't explain anything, but it implies that an explanation can exist, and that's usually enough.

Finally... OK, so it WAS Odysseus stealing Mercedes Sheldon's artefacts? That might have been good to establish. The hero-side arcs really don't make this clear. Yes, the final arc has the Warriors in possession of the Crown of Glory, but how do we know it wasn't given to them by another party? How, specifically, when we know Amanda Vines got the Dirge of Chaos from the Magic Man, who got that and the Devil's Timepiece from the Warriors, who had those and the Crown of Glory. But the Crown of Glory wasn't in the possession of Odysseus, it was the possession of Hector who fought against Odysseus, and there was no indication to suggest the Warriors had anything more. For all we know, it could have been the Nemesis who stole the artefacts and gave them away to people so he could cause chaos to hide a scheme of his. The villain-side arc does reveal that Odysseus himself has another of Mercedes' artefacts - the Dead Man's Deck - but he doesn't seem interested in keeping. There's no indication still that he's the original thief.

How do you solve this? Simple - modify Mercedes Sheldon's dialogue prior to encountering Odysseus to say "So, as we suspected, it was Odysseus' men who stole my family's magic artefacts before they could be hidden away in the Midnight Club's vaults. Only now that he knows I'm onto him, he's stopped using my artefacts and I can't track them any more." Bada big, bada boom. All you need to do. Again, it doesn't take a major storyline to explain every minor detail. Something as simple as "The Moon's gravitational field will hide us from their scanners!" will usually suffice.

Really, considering how little text is in those dialogue windows and that description window, there's enough room to play around without going overlong.

Quote:

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.

Right, I'm assuming that whoever wrote the fiction for Night Ward was a fan of Gaussian's arc, where the name of every major named character is taken from Oban: Star Racers, only in the case of Night Ward, it's Ghostbusters. So far, we have the Gozer building with a door at the top leading to another plane of existence, we have the "Are you a god?" line, we have a character referred to as the Keymaster (and I'm pretty sure we'll be meeting the Gatekeeper soon, making my joke about rescuing Dana Barrett weirdly accurate) and... What else are we missing?

I don't mean to be a spoilsport here, but copying names and phrases from a popular movie is not clever or amusing. Doing it once where appropriate? Yeah, that can work and yeah, it can be quite clever. It's a neat little reference. Going down the list of memorable parts of a movie and putting them in one after the other, however, is neither. It's taking a joke and running it into the ground. A "reference" is something that only people who saw the original work will get. It's an Easter egg there for the observant and the "in." Making five separate references to the same movie is no longer a "reference." It's throwing in famous movie quotes and hoping they stick.

Really, once is enough, twice if you have to. Five times is too much.

Quote:

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 agree with what a lot of people are saying about the missions relying too heavily on flashy mechanics. I like the mechanics, but they can be overused at times. But I rather liked Twinshot...I suppose it's all about balance and individual opinions. And balance. And also balance. Did I forget balance? Because it needs that. Balance...

The point being this is a GAME first, a work of fiction a distant second. If the game doesn't work then no one will ever care about the fiction (unless it is really, really good I suppose). 1st Star Wars game is proof. If there was ever a fan base based on story there it was, but they still failed because game stunk.

Complaining about a game because you don't like the story behind it is like complaining about a book because it won't make a good movie.

The opposite is also true. When the cut scenes get in the way of the game the story has to go. The game comes first. This is what they did with BAF cut-scene for example.

The story and all the fiction going with it is a nice to have, not a requirement.

Personally I like some of it a lot and others I completely ignore. I liked the original idea of telling the story of the villain groups through a series of story arcs as you leveled up. I thought that was cool.

The thing is, without a decent story, it's just punching mooks ala "Bad Dudes". A perfectly valid type of game, but it leaves a lot of people feeling hollow. Gameplay is important, and often more of a draw than story, but that doesn't mean that improving gameplay should come at the cost of story quality...Like I said, a balance must be struck. I mean, Stories of Herakles aren't compelling just because of Herk's powers. They're so interesting, so retold, because he does things. He actually follows a narrative, as opposed to beating the royal jelly out of random dorks for no reason.

Also, NIGHT WARD SPOILER because I need to discuss the ending.

I honestly don't get the story of Night Ward. More specifically, I don't get the writing behind it, the story itself isn't all that complex. In a way, it's a lot like First Ward - it starts out very deep, with a lot of characterisation, a lot of cool little details that paint the background of a strange fictional world that I can still mostly understand. It gives me several characters with great personalities, it gives me plots that make perfects sense and have people act like, well, people, despite being abominations from another world. Aaand... Then it all goes coo-coo for coca puffs. It feels like either the story swapped authors for just the last story arc, or the story's "big" missions were written by one person and everything else by another... Or indeed like the writer was suppressing his desire for horrid cliche monologuing cackling villains and cutscenes that have me stand by while the villain's plan happens and a constant barrage of allied NPCs fighting enemy NPCs until he finally admitted he's coo-coo for coca puffs and exploded all over the last story arc.

All three of the first arcs in the zone pretty much split their time between setting up the logistics of the world of the dead - the Taskmaster's Office and the railroad of the dead run by profiteering ghasts, the Anumus Arcana who superficially have only a facsimile of sentience, but who indeed develop true intelligence and feelings, the Talons of Vengeance who are having to play smart, hide in caves and work in secret as their sheer raw strength proves to be insufficient, and the Black Knights who are a semi-medieval society run on a strict code of pride and adherence to dogma for whom deviation is tantamount to treason. It also sets up the world of the dead as less of a place of torture and horrors and lost souls and demons and more as just another world where the souls of the dead find new home and face a cadre of daily tasks that, while very different from the once they faced in life in terms of substance, aren't that different in terms of theme. They need a place to live, they queue up for transport, they argue with officials, they take strolls through the perpetual night and occasionally attempt to remember their lives. It's a very well set-up world...

Which begs the question why ALL THAT is just crumpled like a dixie cup and tossed in the trash. Why did I spend all that time gathering an army of Black Knights if they never came into play? Oh, they help me assault the Asylum, sure... Because that matters when I'm forced to watch the Black Queen get what she came for and leave while my body is paralysed by stsceneitis. Why did I leave that Black Knight helping the Animus Arcana if I'll never see him or the AA ever again? Why did I leave Carlyle alive if he'll never show up again? In fact, I kind of promised him I'd get the soul railroad running, and I never did, did I? What about the Midnight club? What about the Survivor Compound, for that matter? What about this whole interesting, intriguing world? Why cast that all aside for a last arc that might as well have been SSA1? That might as well have been Roy Cooling?

Mission 1, lots of fighting between my NPCs and the enemy NPCs, then a cutscene where the villain gets away, then boss fight. Mission 2, lots of fighting between my NPCs and the enemy NPCs, then cutscene where the villain gets away. Then find Shadowhunter, then never mention him again. Then out of ******* nowhere, go bug Odysseus, because he can't have his own story. Then last mission, pretty solid until the overbooked fight on the roof that's filled with about two pages of NPC chatter that scrolls by so fast I can't read a tenth of it when everyone and his dog shows up to help for a massive clusterhug. The villain is transparently evil and given no depth no any motivation beyond "destroy everything," Lamashtu is WASTED, Bazuzu is a complete Deus Ex Machina, the keys that were mentioned in a much better arc are just found off-screen, the new keys are made off-screen and it's all just a huge mess.

And I don't get why that is. Why did we spend so long building up this intricate world if we're not going to reference it at the end and we'll just turn it into another soulless gauntlet of "race to the top, punch the bad guy, you are winnar?" It's not like there are many stories taking part in this well-set-up world that this is just one of where we don't need to reference everything said previously. This is THE storyline of the zone, so why not do more with it? And why has Katie Douglass right at the end devolved into an almost mentally challenged person saying things like "You are mean, evil lady!" like she's frikkin' Wretch? What IS the deal with Serene? Who the Frank is Lamashtu and why does she have a glass jaw? If she's the mother of all monsters... Why didn't she spawn some monsters for me to fight? Or are the Talons on the way "up" it?

Honestly, for as good as Night Ward is - and it's REALLY good - it feels like that last arc was slapped together in a hurry, not proof-read and just based on a surface-thought idea of what a "cool conclusion" might be, which is to say lots of fighting with no real depth or character to it. Talons evil, kill they ***. The end. Which is a real shame if you actually stop to read Lamashtu's bio, which suggests that SHE, not the Furies, gave birth to the Talons of Vengance. So apparently Percy's Chronicles of Doom are wrong and these aren't some kind of hand of divine justice, they literally are complete monsters, birthed out of a rabid beast drunk on the evil and destruction that is her nature. As plots go, this isn't exactly the Challenger Deep, but it's a HELL of a lot better than what the Talons started out with. Is anything made of this? Of course not. That alone could have been a whole story arc, and yet I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't taken the time to read Lamashtu's bio while kitty was kneeling.

And what a way to waste a LITERAL GODDESS! She comes from nowhere, goes nowhere and is instantly forgotten. She doesn't even get her own look, just a mish-mash of parts with a very clear seam between legs and feet. Think about the other two goddesses we've met in person - Hequat and Tielekku. Sure, they only show up for one and two mission to be taken down, respectively, but the lore surrounding them is all over the game. Hequat is the primary instigator behind the entire histories of both the nation of Oranbega and the people of Mu and is the original creator of Sharkhead Island when she entombed the Leviathan underneath it. To this day, some of the Mu worship her as a goddess. Tielekku, in her own right, is one of the key players among the gods, the originator of magic as a separate thing from the power of the divine, the teacher and instigator of Ermeeth's heresy (yeah, where was Prometheus when Ermeeth taught people magic?), she is the one who led and ultimately won the war against Lughebu and his pantheon of death gods.

So who's Lamashtu? Mother of all monsters? Yeah, mention it twice in total, show her face once and have her purr, then have her carted off to the Eternal Prison of eye strain all over again. What a waste of a great idea. That whole last story arc is a waste of a great idea. It's full of plot holes, easy conveniences, unlikely coincidences and Serene chewing the scenery like like Balky from The Langoliers. It's just... What went wrong, guys? You were doing so well right up until the transparently evil Black Queen started talking and... What WAS her deal, by the way? People told me I'd be given a reason, but the reason confuses me. She dies because death is the final key, but was she being controlled by Serene? What was this about being Pendragon's lover? Or was she an ally of Serene? Because I have it in my chat logs where the Black queen says "I -Serene- *omnonmon* Mmm! Delicious scenery!"so which way is it?

You know, when I talk about bad writing, this is the kind that gets to me the most. Roy Cooling, that's just a mess. I couldn't possibly care about that story less because there's "story" in it, just a sequence of events pretending to be a story. But this? Night Ward actually had a heart of gold to it, a really, really cool idea, an interesting world, and THIS is how it ends? Are our writers simply incapable of writing an escalating climax without the story spinning out of their hands and embedding itself into the side of a cat? Because right up until I met "the magician," I was poised to praise Night Ward as some of the best storytelling I've seen in this game for years... And then that happened, and now I feel like how I felt at the end of Mass Effect 3.

What happened?

Quote:

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.

Sammy, regardless of if I had already finished Night Ward and then been able to read that post, I'd probably say that you are the unofficial master of TL;DR.