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Anyone else playing on Thunderspy? Although it's way lower pop the fact that contact missions scale has essentially fixed the game in my eyes.
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Mar 16, 2024 07:33
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that's such a smart idea, the whole concept of leveled/intentionally obsolescent content is so bad and wasteful
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Mar 16, 2024 12:20
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They were/are trying to do that on Homecoming but they were also trying to get the new content patch out at the same time so I presume something had to give.
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Mar 16, 2024 13:17
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I was really uncomfortable with Thunderspy after they did the whole 4th of July event with them releasing the 5th Column costume parts, running a costume contest for 'best nazi supersoldier' with them, and encouraging villains to join a big event joining the Column to attack Paragon City. BUT Homecoming just also added their first 5th Column quest giver, so doing work for nazis isn't considered a bridge too far anymore, I guess. 
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Mar 17, 2024 01:06
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Or celebrating Hitler's birthday on their official Discord. Or the fact that they split off in the first place because Homecoming was enforcing rules against hate speech. Even if they do make interesting changes on Thunderspy, it's still a bunch of Nazis.
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Mar 17, 2024 04:48
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See I could see having a semi ironic 'Fifth Column' celebration, especially if it was in a series with the Skulls and Crey or whatever, but I feel as though celebrating Hitler's birthday puts you over a certain line. Have they gotten verified on X.com, the everything site?
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Mar 17, 2024 07:13
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Crasical posted:BUT Homecoming just also added their first 5th Column quest giver, so doing work for nazis isn't considered a bridge too far anymore, I guess. The worst part (well the other worst part beyond having to work with the 5th) is that his mission arc is so bland as to be forgettable. Literally nothing happens in it that’s memorable beyond you rescuing the guy who is your next contact somewhere in the middle. I can barely get mad because you could have a training dummy giving the missions and nothing would change.
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Mar 17, 2024 13:33
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A 5th Column contact seems like a perfect place to put in one of those late-era choices where you wrap up the story by stabbing him in the back. And by stabbing him in the back, I really mean feed into a woodchipper.
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Mar 17, 2024 14:17
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I don't think a boring 5th Column contact is really any worse than some of the other fascist organizations, homicidal maniacs, and brutal corporate overlords villains already willingly work alongside. And all he even does is just ask you to like, pick up some weapon crates. But man, they had to have known how the community would react to it anyway. It really is a boring arc though, I didn't even end up bothering with any of the followup contacts when I tried it. I think I read someone on the official forum saying it was the author's first work with the content creation tools, and intentionally designed as a really straightforward and simplistic series of missions that resemble content from the first couple issues of the game. Mission accomplished, I guess? Oh well, I appreciate that they added anything at all for villain content. And low/mid level content in general.
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Mar 17, 2024 15:54
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The real boon is having content available to help avoid needing to ever do Sharkhead loving Isle ever again.
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Mar 17, 2024 18:17
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but sharkhead has d-mac!!
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Mar 17, 2024 19:01
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I really just mean the core, launch-era stuff (with the exception of Doc Buzzsaw and maybe Diviner Maros). Which admittedly was already much easier to avoid thanks to double XP and the new stuff. But to me Sharkhead is an infuriatingly perfect example of everything wrong with City of Villains.
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Mar 18, 2024 12:20
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Sharkhead was really the perfect storm of more annoying enemy groups, depressing atmosphere, and more dead time between contacts since brokers wanted you to do more filler missions.
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Mar 19, 2024 08:52
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it has a pretty great strike force though (lately I make it a point to unlock and run more of the odd stuff like Mortimer Kal)
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Mar 19, 2024 13:25
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The contacts in that level range are also a massive nothingburger, too. It really feels like a step backwards from Cap au Diable. In the previous zone you're out there doing actual supervillain stuff, and then you get to Sharkhead and you're back to being a Family legbreaker, or breaking up dockworker strikes, or some generic whoop-up Longbow missions. Nothing happens in any of these story arcs. Nerva kind of suffers from that too, where the mission writers couldn't think of anything interesting so half the contacts wind up being "Hey Player Character, we need someone to kick Hero X's rear end, here's 3 filler missions leading up to the boss fight."
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Mar 19, 2024 14:26
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Also excruciating redundancy. There's like 3 different arcs in Sharkhead that boil down to "oh gently caress, the Leviathan cult!" and then the stock zone SF is. ..oh gently caress, the Leviathan cult! Slag Golems are a miserable, overtuned enemy type that they spent one of the dev docs hyping up because I guess the garbage sticking out of them is procedurally generated or something. Great use of resources, guys. And let's not forget that despite like 50% of the zone's content being centered around the Cage Consortium (a boring palette swap security guard faction, incidentally), Kirk Cage himself just...never appears in the game at all whatsoever.  And it's the second instance of them doing that, see also: Goldbrickers. Assuming Golden Roller wasn't meant to be King Midas at one point.The basic premise of industrial stripmining of an elder god is fun, and the Hellforge being the Cryptic logo was cute, but there's painfully little else to praise outside of the aforementioned small pool of legitimately fun or interesting contacts.
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Mar 19, 2024 14:39
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Goldbrickers are off the hook because of the Aeon Strike Force though
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Mar 19, 2024 14:55
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Flesh Forge posted:Goldbrickers are off the hook because of the Aeon Strike Force though Yeah, a decade after the fact thanks to the current developers.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:07
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Waffle Shake posted:The contacts in that level range are also a massive nothingburger, too. It really feels like a step backwards from Cap au Diable. In the previous zone you're out there doing actual supervillain stuff, and then you get to Sharkhead and you're back to being a Family legbreaker, or breaking up dockworker strikes, or some generic whoop-up Longbow missions. Nothing happens in any of these story arcs. Nerva kind of suffers from that too, where the mission writers couldn't think of anything interesting so half the contacts wind up being "Hey Player Character, we need someone to kick Hero X's rear end, here's 3 filler missions leading up to the boss fight." Nerva has you beat up Aurora Borealis in three different story arcs. She's having a bad day.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:08
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In one instance it's clearly supposed to be Ms. Liberty but I guess her fightable version wasn't done yet so Aurora is inexplicably "addressing the troops". At least in fairness, two of the "go fight this hero" arcs are from a dude whose entire job is to take out heroes. Now, why exactly he's subcontracting out to your character...
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Mar 19, 2024 15:45
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Also I still have no idea if Timothy Raymond's weirdo Rikti stuff is actually canon or not.
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Mar 19, 2024 15:47
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John Murdoch posted:Also I still have no idea if Timothy Raymond's weirdo Rikti stuff is actually canon or not. Nah, it lines up pretty well with what you should already know from Omega Clearance (Steven Sheridan's arc): "Rikti" are humans from an alternate dimension where a starfaring race of Progenitor Rikti (name pending) shoved the science/magic slider all the way to the science. They're genetically within striking range of this Earth's humans, but their use of genuinely alien technology pushes even their altered biology beyond its limits. The Lost are a feeder gang in a rather literal sense - some members can become Rikti, but others are just organ banks in waiting to replace some upper echelon's failing specimens. Timmy might believe some things that deviate from this as well, but most of that's because he's getting gatekeep girlboss gaslit by both Arachnos and Official Crey Industries Alien Spy Kelly Uqua.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:08
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General agree on most of these points, Slag Golems are miserable to fight, the Cage Consortium is underexplored and underutilized, and the Striga arcs are, well. Not *great* writing. I was totally expecting to betray or be betrayed by the 5th Column contact, though. Diviner Maros is pretty cool, though. I will forgive a lot for my mind shattered, displaced-across-all-of-time buddy. I was able to pretty much skip Sharkhead on my arse/arse dominator due to the fancy new 'get patrol exp from exploration badges' mechanic, doing Striga Island content, and then doing Maros and... I have already forgotten his name. The crazy legacy chain member.
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Mar 19, 2024 17:14
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I made "Backwards Day" in Architect primarily out of love of Maros's gimmick and backstory, and also as a total stunt run where the mission briefings were completely reversed - so since the normal order is mission offer, mission accept, bother contact, mission complete, you started off the arc by hearing mission 5's mission complete about a total disaster and tried to fix it, and you got the mission 5 bother text on mission 1 accept, the mission 5 accept text on mission 1 bother, the mission 5 offer on mission 1 complete, and so on and so forth. And then when you were about to get the original mission 1 offer text to find out why you wanted to take such a risk in the first place, you beat mission 5 and broke the loop so you never got it.
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Mar 19, 2024 19:10
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John Murdoch posted:At least in fairness, two of the "go fight this hero" arcs are from a dude whose entire job is to take out heroes. Now, why exactly he's subcontracting out to your character... On some level, it's amusing that the hero assassin finds himself so busy that he has to subcontract his work. There's just too many capes to murder! Abyss does the same thing, though I was getting the impression that she had somehow failed upwards, and was "subcontracting" to cover for the fact that she absolutely could not do the job herself.
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Mar 19, 2024 21:25
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even for redside content, fighting scrapyarders feels bad, man. the focus should have been on Cage
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Mar 19, 2024 22:16
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lol it's one of the fairly few Actually Villainous things I can think of from all the content, yes it "feels bad"
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Mar 19, 2024 22:51
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Love fighting Scrapyarders just because they get such unique models and attacks. I just kind of forget everything past Cap au Diable. Nerva is just a big blank space in my brain, and while I like Grandville thematically and aesthetically I hate actually doing missions there. Lot of wasted potential and what feels like a really stubborn dedication to a boring theme in general, Redside. St. Martial's good too, but even that doesn't really get fully explored.
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Mar 19, 2024 22:56
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Redside content was just massively hobbled by the tension between the central conceit of high-level villainy (having the power to shape a world to your will) and the stasis of a shared MMO world. Not sure if anyone has a really satisfying solution to that. The fluid status of the PVP zones probably presented the best starting point for a solution, but PVP is fundamentally broken in the base game. The other major problem with it was how it split up the player base, and so it's all the more baffling how they somehow managed to do an even worse version of that split with an even smaller player base by introducing the Praetorian content.
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Mar 20, 2024 03:09
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yeah that notion of split sides and characters being locked to a side was another idea probably inherited from Everquest/Dark Age of Camelot. At least they came up with an interesting and fairly reasonable way to change alignments eventually - released with the segregated start for Praetoria at the same time. I don't mind the split start for Praetoria characters though because it's only to level 20ish and with some pretty fresh environments and mission content.
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Mar 20, 2024 12:55
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The Praetorian missions are really pretty great! Some of the best writing and design in the game. The reason I called the splitting "even worse" though is not just because of the segregated 1-20 content, but also the fact that the capstone missions for each arc forced you to split up the party if you wanted to play through them. Just an absolutely crazypants design decision in a game where one of the best feelings is getting a good groove with a good team and just blowing through arc after arc.
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Mar 20, 2024 13:28
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Also the 1-20 Praetorian content is some of the most consistently well written stuff. Shame that everything after that got increasingly hosed.Glazius posted:Nah, it lines up pretty well with what you should already know from Omega Clearance It's been a looooong time but I vaguely remember them throwing in some details about Rikti reproduction completely outta nowhere and some other stuff that seemed like them haphazardly jamming in old story bible scraps. (With Kelly Uqua herself being exactly that as well, but I like her.) I mean the bigger question is why poor ole Timmy is even a villain contact at all. Or why Nerva needed so much Rikti-focused content beyond the convenience of them fitting the level range. But it fits another pattern in CoV of awkwardly recycling/rehashing random stuff from CoH. Like the Port Oakes arc centered around the terrifying...Council Vampyri! Or the one that iirc boils down to "the Hellions exist and are loving around in the Rogue Isles for some inexplicable reason". John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Mar 20, 2024 |
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Mar 20, 2024 13:32
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Yeah, should have specified that it's specifically the 1-20 Praetorian content that I liked so much. The later First Ward/Night Ward stuff just totally lost me with its plotting (and how long it dragged on), and the character writing was often pretty amateurish. I think CoV never really could figure out if it was treating it as a new game for new players or an expansion of experienced players who knew the role, and it never really separated the two, which is why you see both the rehashing of original content as well as the shoehorning of "for the fans" story bible scraps, as you put it. Still a good number of good arcs and good moments, but all throughout the game's lifecycle I think its philosophy of "letting the creators go wherever" was both a strength (some really good ideas) and a weakness (metaplots that never get resolved, endlessly introducing new ones [that also never get resolved]).
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Mar 20, 2024 13:44
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Crasical posted:General agree on most of these points, Slag Golems are miserable to fight, the Cage Consortium is underexplored and underutilized, and the Striga arcs are, well. Not *great* writing. I was totally expecting to betray or be betrayed by the 5th Column contact, though. I loved Diviner Maros' Shaper Cult arc because one mission set up the perfect scene for Bewb Widow... 
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Mar 20, 2024 15:55
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usenet celeb 1992 posted:Yeah, should have specified that it's specifically the 1-20 Praetorian content that I liked so much. The later First Ward/Night Ward stuff just totally lost me with its plotting (and how long it dragged on), and the character writing was often pretty amateurish. First Ward is like...half good. But each arc feels like it was written by a totally different writer and so it lacks focus. And I honestly still don't fully understand how and why the zone even exists, it very much feels retconned in and maybe loosely recycled from their scrapped Rift Enclosure plans. Night Ward is just trash. I have no idea what happened there. The devs really wanted you to care about Pendragon but never got around to explaining why. And of course Master Midnight is either #1 or #2 absolute worst character in the game. The finale of the story ends with the single most egregious and indefensible recycling of the office map tileset. gently caress Night Ward. With CoV my much less charitable gut feeling is that the rehashed stuff was primarily done to cut corners. There's a lot of sloppiness and weird vestigial elements that seem to point to things being very rushed. Though I guess this was also still the Cryptic years so it could've just been down to simple boneheadedness. Edit: I think the dividing line for me is the inconsistency. If CoV exhaustively reintroduced concepts that were old hat to veteran players that's be one thing, but instead it's completely random and scattershot. And meanwhile the game largely fails to elaborate on a lot of its own new content. I think 95% of our understanding of the Legacy Chain comes from the website rather than anything in-game. 
John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Mar 21, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 16:58
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that mission drives me crazy because Barracuda and Ohmtown always spawn in the same hallway when I do it, so there's this gigantic blob of mixed freaks and arachnos, with multiple ambush waves coming after you take Barracuda down. That first little corner is such a clusterfuck.
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Mar 21, 2024 16:58
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I think my favorite thing about First/Night Ward is that, in the end, its a 20 level, 11 story arc set up for one big Ghostbusters joke. Just an overlong setup to fighting a Babylonian deity in front of a spooky portal on a skyscraper. Come on, guys. Special shout-out to doing a full rework of Shadowhunter and making him seem really scary and cool, then killing him off camera.
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Mar 21, 2024 18:03
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John Murdoch posted:
Ha ha. Yeah. I wondered if it was the brainchild of someone who really really wanted instead to be working on their Big Idea for a dark urban fantasy MMO and just shoehorned their ideas haphazardly into the Praetorian storyline. Just a complete departure tonally and plotwise from where everything else had been going with that plotline. What were their scrapped Rift Enclosure plans?
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Mar 21, 2024 21:33
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It doesn't help that I was just burning through Belladonna's incarnate level arc the other day. What's even better than a worthless character thrust into the forefront of the story? An evil shadow clone of said character so they could have an extra body to throw at you in an Incarnate raid, created via a series of nonsensical asspulls.  Anyway, take this with a grain of salt because it's gleaned from table scraps. But once upon a time instead of the Rift Enclosure being under the Keyes reactor I believe the plan was for it to be a military blacksite carved out in the wilds beyond the regular borders of Praetoria. There was concept art for it floating around and Going Rogue even shipped with an unused day job badge for it. I assume it got cut because ultimately they didn't really have anything for you to do there. Despite ostensibly being a huge plot element for the whole Praetorian Invasion in the final game it comes up astonishingly little, and its most prominent mentions are sending your character through it to get them out of Praetoria. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 22, 2024 |
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Mar 21, 2024 23:55
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I like that you can still occasionally see random Praetorian Hamidon tendrils pop up around the bounds of Praetoria, rare spawns but you'll hear a roar and they'll pop up in the distance out of bounds. It shows that despite all of its problems they did put some lore love in to at least some parts of Going Rogue.
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Mar 22, 2024 08:23
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