SarahTheM1

My question(s) primarily concern writing and I guess zone design. There's a mystery that's tantalized me for years, and it all comes down to three connected elements: The Gamester, an extremely obscure in-game company called DevCon (and their evil counterpart, ConDev), and the Red Rook. The Gamester is obviously just a fun bit of flavor to justify some seasonal events and subsequently there's very, very few references to him in-game. DevCon was only seen on a billboard at the Galaxy City arena construction site and was naturally removed when I4 launched and the arenas were finalized. ConDev meanwhile was located in a building in Aeon City but I think it got replaced by the AE building. Presumably it's a gag about Developer Construction. However...when the Gamester first made his presence known he did so with a Red Rook insignia. The original DevCon sign also prominently featured a Red Rook. And to quote the wiki, quoting an old website backgrounder on Cap Au Diable, "Today, most of the world’s major corporations maintain offices in Cap au Diable including ... ConDev, whose red rook logo acts as the only clue to who might own this mysterious company." Additionally, the neon slot machines that appear in St. Martial (and the St. Martial exit of Pocket D) have Red Rooks as well. So, basically, was there anything more to the Gamester? Or any significance to all these sly Red Rook references? My best guess is all this Red Rook and DevCon business was a running joke and/or calling card for a particular dev, but if so, who? I know the zone designers loved their easter eggs and self-references. Thanks!

There actually are minor differences to be found in early (I0-I5~) hero content if you know where to look. The Hollows comes to mind where the level ranges of enemies are not always your typical 0 to +1. It's been a long time but Atta is usually a good example where it's more like -2 to +1 if I remember right. There's also some other minor differences across the various map tiles and tilesets. For example, I believe only comparatively newer office maps will have mobs spawn in the corner meeting room of doom instead of out in the hall. There's also a very specific dead end "objective room" that was almost completely removed from the majority of office maps and replaced by a larger room. I also feel like villain office maps are more likely to have redundant, looping hallways - if you do lots of paper missions you should know exactly what I mean - which I don't think is anywhere near as common heroside. Of course, it's hard to speak with 100% certainty because some stuff inevitably got ported over or reused or remixed down the road. You also have stuff that doesn't meaningfully affect gameplay at all, like redside offices get an alternate low-ceiling version of the -[]- hallway connector...but it's used infrequently compared to the standard one. Edit: Also speaking to mission design, early heroside outdoor maps are all remixed areas created from existing zone themes. Like the Hydra dimension map that's basically just a slice of Perez Park, the coast that's just a chunk of Talos outskirts, two different Boomtown-dervied crapholes, etc. Story wise I think they're implied to be areas outside/in-between the war walls but regardless are just random extra neighborhoods and districts. Meanwhile, over on redside just about every outdoor map is taken from - and explicitly is stated to be - a concrete location in the zone that you can visit even outside of the mission.

A few folks are expressing that they are mildly uncomfortable with this one specific thing and nothing else. But please, by all means, keep smacking that strawman around. Speaking OOC, this is well-trodden ground and I leave it up to the reader (not that anyone will) to go look up something like the Arkham City Catwoman controversy, which was similarly brushed off by claims of "realism" as if such things are unavoidable and inevitable rather than conscious inclusions. Or something like the second South Park game which had "funny social commentary" baked into its character creator, but left some people put off because they simply didn't need to be reminded of real world ills in their escapist fantasy. I realize that in those cases they were a lot more overt and explicit bits of nastiness reflecting real life kinds of unpleasantness and nobody here is a space alien being legitimately discriminated against, but if you're going with the justification of "obviously some people are gonna be racist against aliens no matter what, too bad" then that comes part and parcel with people who can pick up on the obvious subtext and feel like that vibe doesn't actually have to be included in the game. The "1-50 is the in-game timeline" ship has sailed loooooooooong ago and is incredibly easy to poke holes in in ways both big and small. So early game zones are permanently time locked to five minutes after the Ritki War? How do you explain things like the AE or auction houses? Are those non-canon? How do you reconcile the Echo of Atlas Park if, by this logic, that Atlas Park is the one your level 1 character is supposed to arrive in? Is the Cyrus Thompson memorial and community center in Kings Row a time paradox, because the in-game events that lead to their creation take place in an obscure TF somewhere in the midgame levels but affect a zone meant for levels 5-10~? There's also an inherent contradiction created by trying to play fast and loose - Atlas Park simply cannot be both in the immediate aftermath of the Rikti War AND dealing with the humanitarian crisis of the destruction of Galaxy City simultaneously, they are mutually exclusive. Occam's Razor, some content and story elements are old news by now and the world has kept turning. It does not, in fact, revolve around your character exclusively. I do see what you're getting at, that every character experiences a somewhat subjective timeline of events over the course of 1 to 50. But the tricky thing is that once you introduce subjectivity to it, you can't claim my subjective interpretation is inherently wrong while yours is right. I can't help but wonder how fire farmed characters see the world with that in mind. Hop into VR for <unspecified amount of comic book time> and pop back out to the world being threatened by about 10 different apocalyptic threats (and in several cases their own aftermath and fallout) happening simultaneously. 😵 But quite frankly I'm now done here, because if we're getting into the weeds of "it's fictional so it doesn't matter", well, speaking of vibes I could do without... Have fun!

Helpful visual aid btw, since I didn't have a pic of it handy before now: Same overall design as the other two. The bottom line isn't something you'd see on a random "grr argh aliens go home" anti-alien billboard, it's instead right out of classic propaganda posters, implying all of these are official post-Rikti War propaganda. Which like I said, as relics contemporary with the War (or more accurately the very immediate post-War recovery period) they're a bit unsavory but not out of place. Ten~ years on and after a ton of regrowth and a fresh population of perfectly friendly alien pals running around, Vanguard could stand to take it down a notch. Edit: Otherwise, I do agree that Joe Q. Public might plausibly still have an axe to grind when it comes to aliens. I mean, we don't even need to be talking about the Rikti at all, Galaxy City more or less just happened. My only problem then is that it begs further questions like whether the city would allow billboards of that nature to be put up in the first place.

Apparently we have very, very different understandings of the in-game timeline. Edit: I guess I will also repeat that, at least to me based on the (admittedly limited, open-ended) evidence, the billboards are potentially meant to be from the Vanguard or an adjacent government agency. The government saying "oohrah, all aliens GTFO" lands quite a bit differently from the premise of "some jerk bought a billboard just to say he doesn't like aliens". So that's ultimately the dividing line here.

Weird to quote my words in particular when my post already explained it pretty clearly. Yes, they tie into the story of the Rikti War and in that context they make sense. The problem is that said invasion happened several years ago now (in-game timeline is a bit fuzzy nowadays, but clearly a good chunk of time has passed) and if we do take the billboards as being from the Vanguard, well, they certainly don't seem to be that staunchly anti-alien anymore. Not just with regards to player characters, but things like peace talks with the Traditionalists. So yes, in that sense they are outdated and out of sync with the state of the game world as it currently stands. To paraphrase from the story bible, the Rikti got stranded on Primal Earth due to the efforts of Omega Team. Now cut off from the homeworld, they couldn't maintain their equipment for much longer. So they concocted a plan to trick us humans into doing their work for them - leak key Rikti tech to unscrupulous companies (like Crey), let them reverse engineer it, and then watch as they unknowingly manufacture replacement parts for the Rikti army. In order to help facilitate this, they used a small clutch of remaining genetic resequencing machines to change Rikti back into humans (which would normally be unconscionable to them, but they were desperate). After some failed attempts they succeeded and these spies wandered out into the post-war world to oh-so helpfully hand over bits of Rikti tech they "found" to willing buyers. If any of this made it into actual pre-CoV story content, it's buried in one-off missions somewhere and not any key story arcs. With CoV though, along comes Kelly Uqua who directly addresses the concept.

First one could very well be hinting at Rikti infiltrators, though at least off the top of my head those wouldn't become an explicit thing until City of Villains. They may have been in the story bible already tho. In both cases those billboards date back to launch where there was meant to be a more explicit sense that the Rikti War had more or less just happened. Even ignoring the multitudes of alien heroes joining the good fight before then, Kheldians in I3 definitely made them obsolete and many a joke was made of lingering around the second billboard in squid form. The original writing also had a streak of commentary hiding in the margins, so it's at least possible the screamingly jingoistic second billboard was intended to make you go WTF rather than being taken strictly at face value. (To be honest, until now I never realized just how...much...it is. "Earth" for humans...American flag and Statue of Liberty, uhuh. Sure.) In my headcanon I had assumed they were the work of an overzealous Vanguard (who down the line were painted as kind of shady...not that it really stuck), but now I wonder if the intent was to be more of a "concerned citizen" conspiracy theory thing... Edit: Oh, lookee lookee. Went back-tracing this through the story bible and sure enough, Rikti infiltrators were intended from the start. The header for that section of story is even "They Are Among Us" hearkening to why I connected those billboards with the Vanguard but forgot about: The third billboard of the bunch that states "They Are Still Among Us, Report any strange activity to the Vanguard". Slightly different style of billboard but the exact same font and layout, so yeah, I'm right back to my original thought that it's Vanguard being real aggressive. Or I suppose "just" post-war vigilance being taken to extremes. None of this is to say those billboards aren't still amazingly out of date and out of sync with the game as it is now. Though if I had my druthers I'd love to go through and thoroughly fix like 90% of billboards and signs across the entire game because at some point a bunch of them got all mixed up and there's all sorts of other weirdness.

Apologies for the misunderstanding. Seems like we're pretty much on the same page then - I'd much, much rather start at +0 or +1 and then if things are too easy ramp up from there instead of starting at +4 and needing to beg and plead with an oblivious team lead to pull it back down. In my line of thinking it just has nothing to do with what anyone in particular can solo, which I guess is where I got thrown off. And on that note, another anecdote, this time from the Live days: We're doing the alternate Mercy mission path, ole Dr. Geist. The team leader has decided that our 8-10 team can handle x8/+4 Arachnos. Suffice to say, no, no we couldn't. Not in a million years. In the inevitable and ensuing cycle of people dying, hospitaling, coming back in, immediately dying again that accompanies many a poorly run team, I gently suggested that maybe, just maybe we could be doing better if things were turned down a smidge. To which I was helpfully informed by the leader "Max Team + Max Difficulty = Max XP. Any level." 🙄 I of course went off in search of inferior sources of XP thereafter...

Also speaking of the whole "I'm soloing but graciously allowing you to tag along" attitude, it reminds me of a team gone wrong from a while back... Dude was advertising for portal missions, which hey, it's something different from endless scanners in PI so I gladly joined. It was the very first mission of To Save a Thousand Worlds, which is to say a giant outdoor map populated by identical mobs of 20 werewolves held up by one glowie. Nobody is rushing things; it's a completely casual late night tank and spank affair. In fact, I was particularly delighted because normally werewolves are a slog to fight but this team was cutting through 'em like butter. Eventually after clearing 40-50% of the map we do stumble across the glowie and the mission completes and that's when everything goes to crap. Classic team etiquette problem: When do you hit Exit Mission? Some people have a Pavlovian response and slam that thing the millisecond they hear the mission complete jingle because you gotta go fast. Some people are members of the clean plate club and would rather finish off that 20% HP boss first because XP is nice. And then there's the kill all/kill most side of things, which isn't super common for regular mission teams in my experience but ok. Ultimately none of them is strictly Wrong, but mismatched expectations and lack of communication cause friction... When the first 2-3 people bounce out of the mission instantly, my instincts are thus: If half~ the team has bounced, I bounce. I'm not going to linger around fighting uphill against x8 mobs for no reason. So after a moment to make sure I'm not stranding anyone in a bad fight, I also go ahead and hop out. And hey, it's To Save a Thousand Worlds...there's another map full of identical mobs to farm *every single mission*. Only after half of the team is stranded outside waiting for the next mish does the team "leader" finally speak up to gracefully handle this minor hiccup... "Don't know why you left the mish, I didn't tell you to. You can either wait for me to finish or leave, your choice." Normally on crappy teams I just silently leave at a convenient time or make up an excuse and run for the hills, but suffice to say I had some parting words over that one. Why even go through the hassle of assembling a team if you care that little about anyone other than yourself? Incidentally I appreciate that nowadays people are at least a little more forthcoming about what flavor of ITF or whatever they happen to be running. All it takes is a simple heads up to make sure everyone's on the same page. Now if only we can get people to see eye to eye on the big Vahz ambush in Posi 1...

Oh yeah, to be clear there's an art to it and it can be absolutely be done right. I would never begrudge a tank for running a few seconds ahead to prep the next mob rather than stick around to make sure every last enemy's HP bar was empty first. Things do also get a bit funky depending on the map/enemy group. Not gonna lie that a non-zero amount of my recent frustration has been people who equate "Paragon Protector just popped Moment of Glory" with "Paragon Protector is no longer my problem, NEXT MOB NAO".

At the risk of opening myself up to all manner of downvoting, lectures on how to "actually" play the game, and etc. this is exactly the attitude that drives me away from most higher level teams these days. If I'm hopping on a team it's because I want to experience team play. Not to say I need every mission to be a grueling +4 nightmare that rivals 4 star challenge runs where everyone has to be on point, but lordy do I seem to end up on lots of so-called teams where it becomes abundantly clear that it's actually seven soloers that happen to be sharing the same map. It was a special flavor of hell when I was leveling my Elec Affinity character and could barely stick to one other teammate to bounce stuff off of, let alone multiple. See also: Whatever tanking style apparently requires you to jump three mobs ahead, leaving half the team trailing behind slowly cleaning up purple con bosses that survived the initial alphas on the last several mobs. Really feels like some folks out there don't actually play "tanks" they play "farmers"... Edit: I guess one way to put it is that there's many different speeds of play out there and people are bad at navigating those differences on both the macro ("obviously this is a speed ITF and I don't need to advertise it as such") and micro ("everyone hold back, I'ma corner pull every. single. mob.").

Oh, good to know. Thanks! 😄

Quick follow up, since I'm doing the arc again for the second badge: Skipping the investigation mission entirely via that option did take me to the Rivet mission as intended.

Well that was a bit confusing. Experienced a progression hiccup while doing The Graveyard Shift via Ouro. I decided to investigate the yellow call boxes to triangulate where the medical store thieves ran off to and then after doing that mini-task instead of sending me to the Rusty Rivet like it's apparently supposed to instead I got zooped straight to the big Pathogen warehouse mission instead. I could still complete the arc just fine, but unsurprisingly it made for a pretty significant hole in the plot. 😛

This is kind of tangentially related at best, but does this mean Brickstown might finally be rescued from floating in a featureless void at some point? 😄