If you don't like the writing...

Yeah, I wish he were still around. Always liked his Canon Fodder thread.

I know I've made a lot of rambling posts in this thread, but this one actually has a point. I think I've identified a major failing of contemporary storytelling in this game, and it comes down to climaxes <insert giggity here> and the misunderstanding of what makes them strong. So let's take a few moments and review: What makes for a good climax to a good story?

Well, if you watch many Summer Blockbusters, you would be forgiven to think that that's the time where the action is loudest, the explosions biggest, the people most numerous, the drama most violent and the stake the highest. And while that's not necessarily "wrong," it's actually missing the point of what a "climax" actually is, relying on the erroneous "ending with a bang" theory. Again, that too is not a bad idea, but that too misses the point of what a climax to a good story should represent. All of those are specific cases taken out of context from better movies where they represented only part of why the endings to those movies worked. So what IS it, then?

The climax of a good story is a moment of resolution, a moment where all remaining subplots are resolved, when all characters undergo their final act of growth, where all secrets are revealed and where all plots come together in order for whole story to be resolved. A climax is the payoff for the buildup that is the entire story, but you have to be conscious exactly what it is that you're building up and how you're going to have it pay off. "Lots of action and loud explosions" is not the one-stop-shop solution to ending every story, because no every story builds up violent action that needs to be capped by boiling over into an explosion. Some stories build up a mystery, and thus need to be solved by a revelation. Some stories build up intrigue and thus need to be solved by an act of cleverness. Some story build controversy and need to be solved by an act of clear morality.

What I'm saying is that a climax does not equal "explosions," and is in fact very dependent on the kind of story you're telling because what's in that climax directly spawns from what's in the story. What I'm saying is a climax doesn't necessarily have to be about "action," but should rather be tying of the loose ends from the actual story, done in the spirit of the story itself. That's why you can't afford to just scoop up all the characters and toss them at each other in the hopes that this will produce more excitement. All this does is make them irrelevant and mutually-interchangeable, which is pretty much the worst fate an otherwise decent character can suffer.

Imagine a story as a puzzle where ever character and plot point is a puzzle piece that only has one place where it could fit. As you tell your story, the plot should connect those pieces together one by one. Towards the middle-to-end, you should have most of the puzzle put together in several large pieces that still don't fit together very well. Your climax, then, should represent that one last piece which finally makes all the others click together. This is what gives you a solid story that can stand the test of time. This is what gives you a satisfying story that people will keep coming back to. This is what you need to do in order make a satisfying end.

The oldest of City of Heroes arcs actually do this in a rather very methodical way. Instead of having multiple plot threads all converge at the end, they have multiple plot threads all solved in sequences as the ending approaches. Take, for instance, World Wide Red. This pits the player against Malta plan of unprecedented size, comprised of three parts, this the story is roughly divided into three sections. First you deal with Kingodm Red, Moment and the China situation, when that's resolved you deal with Omnivore red and Project: Wildflower, and when THAT is resolved, Malta are pushed and you deal with Dreadnought Red and the Kronos Titan. When the Malta plan has essentially been thwarted, your climax is actually to capture Director 17, now outnumbered, trapped, failed and desperate. You have methodically stripped him of his men, materials, power and influence and it's time to tackle the man himself. The climax here isn't big on action or big on drama, but what it IS big on is closure. Stopping a plan as devious as World Wide Red is a great thing indeed, but you've stopped it step by step and failed to have an overall closure event. Director 17's capture is that event which ties all the plots back to the source AND - in storyline, at least - presents an escalation of the threat and leads to major in-story achievement.

While World Wide Red may not be great in terms of gameplay systems, it is a story well told if you stick to the storyline side of it. Now contrast this against, say, the ending of Night Ward. No real spoilers, but those who've run it will know what I mean. Three out of four story arcs in Night Ward deal with setting up this weird world, the internal politics and logistics and eventually set up an atmosphere of calm resignation as the souls of the dead have largely accepted their fate and are trying to settle into their new home of the dead. Yes, combat and action still exist, but they are created by the clash of the dynamic world of the living with the static world of the dead and represent the "settling-in" of Night Ward as a place that will continue to exist. This isn't a high-octane action story of shootouts exploding computers, it's almost a character study of what a living world of the dead would be.

That's why ending this zone's story on such a loud bang is so out of place. Night Ward is built on the strength of its factions and the strength of its characters, and both of those ARE very strong. There's some might good writing there. What Night Ward should have had as a climax was the conclusion of all the individual personal arcs that get brought up in the zone. What of Pendragon's honour? What of Carlyle's business? What of the Animus Arcana? What of the denizens of Night Ward? We touched on all of these, yet in turn abandoned them with no resolution. A good story would have put off those resolutions for towards the end and then resolved them in rapid succession around the time of the climax, but that's not what happened. Instead, the climax is just a giant clusterhug of a fight where everyone and their grandma shows up not out of any sense of closing open plot threads, but because whoever made that mission thought it would be cooler to have more people involved in the fight to make it bigger.

This is what I mean when I say that explosions and action is missing the point of having a climax. This is the time when you make everything the characters went through have meaning. This is the time when you put a decisive, satisfying end to their personal arcs. This is where you close down everything you left open (unless you're sequel-baiting, which Night Ward is not). A huge fight closes nothing, settles nothing. It's just popcorn-munching eye-candy with no real substance and no real story behind it, because the real substance and the real story lie abandoned on the side of the plot railroad as they apparently just fell out of the rail cars.

A climax is a resolution of plot threads created as the story builds up to the end. It doesn't have to be action-packed so long as it represents sufficient closure to the story it caps. If you're making a slow settled contemplative story - and Night Ward IS one of those - then you really don't need to end it with a bang. You could - and should - end it as you've told it: By bringing closure to factions and bringing peace to characters' internal struggles. And just killing the bad guy is neither.

I want to end on relevant quote from Max Payne: "The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point." Max, I think, says it best.

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.

Never mind, too much potential snark.

Let's just say that I disagree that Sam's comments would have been improved by reducing their length.

apropos Sam's novella, the Ten Best Closing Lines of Books.

Here's something I've given a lot of thought to that has to do with this game's writing, and no, this won't be non-verbose. I'll do my best, but no promises.

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What makes a good villain? That's a dead-end question that has no answer because it's different for different people, but I think by tackling an easier question, I can look at part of the bigger picture, at least. Instead, let's ask this: Why is Sorceress Serene a BAD villain? And when I say a "bad" villain I don't mean evil. I mean that she's the kind of villain who can singlehandedly ruin a story, and she is EASILY the worst thing about all of First Ward AND Night Ward combined. I'll try to give as few spoilers as I can, but honestly... I really don't need anything beyond what's in her bio. Sorceress Serene is the alliteration duplicate of the Primal hero War Witch and shares much of her story, only in Praetoria, her "Ravenwing Cabal" was killed to the last woman by Diabolique, causing Serene to seek revenge, that eventually turns into cackling pointless villainy.

Right there, my question is answered. Why is Serene a bad villain? Because what you saw up there is literally the ONLY characterisation she's given - Serene wants revenge and is willing to go to any lengths to get it. That's it. That's the entirety of her character, and it's barely ankle-deep. Without any sort of characterisation, personality or depth, all we're left with in order to "endear" us to a villain is their modus operandi. What we have here is a paper cutout of a character whose only defining characteristic is a self-expression mannerism that's basically "scaring the little girl."

So what is Serene's "modus operandi?" Well... She whines a lot about boo hoo my cabal and rants a lot about revenge, all done in aggravating scenery-chewing outbursts, but at no point is she actually respectable as a villain. I'll talk about "respecting villains" later, but Serene's problem is that she's whiny, she's annoying and she's one-dimensional. Even her evil is one-dimensional, consisting pretty much of the same clichés as something like Dr. Evil or Hector Con Carne. It's destructive evil without a purpose, it's power without a point, it's a villain that is so focused on being a villain that she never finds time to be an actual character, and thus she brings nothing to the table to endear he to us.

Why is Serene a bad villain? Because she's insufferably annoying with nothing to counterbalance it. I know that's the point - she's the chaotic, needy, arrogant child to Primal War Witch's veritable sage, but I'm going to re-purpose a line from Yahtzee here: intentionally annoying is still annoying. She's Superboy Prime all over again. A villain can be annoying, as a villain tends to need character flaws of some kind, but a GOOD annoying villain has other character traits that help us look past the irritation. A whining, petty villain is not interesting, because those scenes are the COST of creating a specific characters, and they need to be offset by allure coming from somewhere else. But like the Talons of Vengeance themselves, Sorceress Serene has none. She is not a character, she is a construct. It's as if someone asked "What if the villain summoned the Talons of Vengeance to get revenge on Diabolique?" and they just rolled with it with nothing to give her personality beyond that. You can swap Sorceress Serene for ANY other woman from the Ravenwing Cabal and not a single moment of her story would change. THAT is what makes her a bad villain.

But how can we respect a villain? How can we afford to like a villain? Isn't the point to having a good villain so we have someone to boo? Yes. Yes it is. But that's why I like to see this as "face vs. heel" rather than "hero vs. villain." See, the thing is that professional wrestling got it wrong, in the sense that both the face and the heel are good wrestlers and good characters you want to see more of, you just want to see the face so you can cheer him and see the heel so you can boo him. But, at least ideally, neither character should make you want to switch the channel when they come on-screen. Wrestling shows are smart about this, because they don't WANT you to change the channel, or you might not come back. Video games seem to have skipped over this lesson, however, and they have no problem creating infuriatingly bad characters, fully knowing that you won't shut down the game just because Navi is stuck on endless "Hey! Listen!" repeat.

A good villain is not a villain that makes us want to speed past his scenes. A good villain is one that we WANT to see more about so we can boo him more. A good villain - a good heel - is one you intentionally tune into specifically to boo him, because booing the heel is as fun as cheering the face. A good villain is a character that we want to see lose, but whose scenes still ultimately make for an enjoyable experience. A good villain is one we want to lose, but who's still fun at the same time. And that is exactly what Serene is not. She is not someone I want to see more of. In fact, learning she showed up in Night Ward (spoilers, she shows up in Night Ward) was one of the major reasons I took so long to get through that zone - because I couldn't stomach more of that horrible character. Her scenes feel like needles into my eyes, and there is no payoff for this. None whatsoever.

But what brought this about? Well, about a week ago, I burdened Nuclear Toast with helping me salvage a villain of mine whom I'd found to be lacking. Long story short, his goal was to destroy all created things and rebuild them in his image, which just didn't cut it for me. It's evil, yes, but the person behind the evil was, ultimately, a whiny *******. "Oh, I don't like the world. People have free will. They won't do what I say." Whine! Yes, destroying the world is classic villainy, but the WHY of it is what sank me. NT's insight is what helped me find the very simple, very crucial and yet still very little difference that turned it around: Instead of destroying everything because he's unhappy with it, this villain was changed to want to destroy everything because he firmly believes he can do it better than the original creators of the universe did.

Now, to you, the above may not seem to matter. Who gives a toss why some guy's fanfiction Villain Sue wants to "destroy the world?" But the difference here actually IS meaningful, and it's the difference between destructive evil and creative evil. Destructive evil, especially when destruction is born out of spite or other character flaws, is whiny and irritating. It's the little kid taking a magnifying glass to an ant hill. Creative evil, on the other hand, is respectable, because this represents characters for whom evil is merely a tool, rather than the end goal. These are characters that, through their very ideas, become at least partially likeable. These are characters who aren't just complaining that "Everything was better on my earth!" These aren't the Firebrands and Icedrones who spend their time whining what other people are or aren't doing. No, these are characters facing problems head on and doing something about them. And whether we want to admit to it in relation to a villain or not, that kind of attitude is actually incredibly positive for most people.

The truth of the matter is that we want to sympathise with people who don't back down from problems, but rather face them and solve them. When heroes do it, we cheer them, because it's what makes a good hero. When villains do it, we boo them while at the same time kind of wish they won't be killed off for real so we can see more of them. When characters rise to a challenge and deal with a tough situation, that makes them appealing characters be they hero or villain, face or heel. Sometimes we cheer them for it, sometimes we boo them for it, but always, we respect them. Because no matter how much you may want to hate a villain, it's still difficult to resist being impressed when that villain does something truly impressive.

This, I think, is where Serene fails. She does nothing to rise to the occasion and face a tough problem creatively. Instead, she is all too happy to wallow in the pettiness of revenge, live in the past and make increasingly irrational decisions, all because she's angry and malicious and whiny. She's essentially I'll never give it up! Not to anyone! personified, and all of her performances are grating to sit through as a result. And without anything whatsoever to upset her irritating character, the end result is a villain that essentially ruins everything she's in. That's a large part of what sinks both First Ward and Night Ward in my view, because the bulk of those zones that DON'T involve Sere are actually kind of pretty good.

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.

If I may toot my own horn for a moment:
Dr. Forsythe is trying to lay the foundations for a transhumanist utopia, where uploaded immortal minds are free of sickness, poverty, war, etc. But to perfect the brain-uploading process, he's had to kill people. A lot of people. He regrets that part, but it really is all for the greater good.

The greater good stops being good when people die

There's no such thing as an "anti-villain".

I'm with Zaloopa here, man. Just because you don't redognize it as a valid character Archetype doesn't mean it's not there. It's like saying that the Well stuff never...um...I think my analogy would be lost on you here, V...