Vic Raiden

An old photo from the 20th anniversary, showing my girl Deka getting to hang out with the ghost of Statesman himself.

Arachnosifying visual novel backgrounds will never not look great.

It's been an interesting read so far.

So, does that mean redside as a concept is now completely beyond saving?

... I was trying to maintain a bi-weekly post schedule for this, but I've recently hit such a writer's block that I could barely get any work on chapter 3 done. Apologies for any inconveniences.

After all this, I think we could very well close this thread. If you lot really want to comment on something I posted, why not comment on my fanfic instead? (sorry for self-advertising) Also, @Laucianna wins the thread with her take on a minimal FX option.

On the other hand, the default assumption for the ATs was that the player character was an ordinary civilian nobody prior to merging with his or her Kheld partner, be it voluntarily (thus, Peacebringers were Natural-origin by default) or as a result of a mad science experiment (thus, Warshades were Science-origin by default). EDIT: No, I'm not objecting to the origin limitation being lifted.

Okay, sorry for making a dumb, purely cosmetic suggestion in the first place. Could you all PLEASE stop arguing over everything else pertaining to HEATs? Ideally ASAP?

... I created a monster.

Chapter 2: No Mercy for the Wicked The trip from Paragon City to the Rogue Isles took quite a while, so it was pretty much inevitable that the arachnocopter's passengers would eventually strike up a conversation to pass the time, as well as to get to know each other better. A good chunk of that was taken up by Axel telling the other two escaped supervillains stories from his lengthy career. "Wow... You really were quite the guy", said the Destined One with a draconic face after the third such tale, recounting Shade's plot to raise the Terra Volta complex into the air and use the threat of its explosion to press the Paragon City Council to surrender the city to him, only foiled by a timely intervention of Statesman and Galaxy Girl. "Yeah, I wish I got to do half as much before I got busted", added the one clad like an Eastern mage. "I am glad to hear that my tales are entertaining", replied Axel. "But enough about me. How come that throughout this whole flight, I have not asked who either of you are?" After a brief period of silence, the robed one was the first to speak up. "I am Gedeon, Sensei of the Hand of Extermination, Master of Darkness..." "...who got kicked out of his ninja clan for breaking their teachings", interjected his scaly companion. "HEY!" "Sorry." "As I was saying...", continued Gedeon, "my old masters were too narrow-minded to understand the sheer potential of the dark arts I had discovered, and so they turned against me. Banished to that blindingly shiny city, I was lucky to find some like-minded people I could work with." "Let me guess, the Hmong Tsoo?", asked Shade. "No, it was a death-worshipping gang calling themselves Skulls. I quickly earned their trust, made their Lords of Death into my henchmen, and was just about to throw Paragon on its knees before that blue dork with a big badge ruined all my fun!" The cyborg warlord couldn't help but chuckle at Gedeon's story. "Skulls? Really? You wanted to take over the world with a meek street gang?" The Eastern-robed ex-ninja was about to get up from his seat and do something nasty in response, but was stopped just in time by the draconic man. "My turn now", he said. "You ever heard of a hero called Juan Blazelight?" "I may have heard some inmates discuss him." "Well, because it just so happens I'm his dark side made manifest..." With those words, the veins along his scaly body lit up with a volcanic orange glow, as did the wing membranes. "Eternal Juan!" "I have never heard a dumber villain name before." "Ye, I know, I've never been good with names... But you've no idea how much destruction I've wrought upon Paragon while I was still sharing a body with my good self. But alas, we've since parted ways, and then he and that Blue Steel prick got me jailed after I tried to burn the big PPD building." "Now that unironically sounds impressive, especially coming from a fledgling criminal like you." "Meh, it's nothing. Were it not for Juan, I would've torched ALL of Kings Row, if not the whole city!" "On the bright side, the two of us wouldn't have met otherwise", said Gedeon. "We got caught more or less together, remember?" The discussion went on for a couple more minutes. The monotonous droning of the arachnocopter's anti-gravity engines eventually began dying down before stopping completely, which, along with the sensation of delicate impact below the passengers' feet, meant that the craft had landed. Shortly after, the hatch on its side opened, letting in light from the outside and inadvertently blinding the passengers as they disembarked. "AND HERE WE ARE", said Operative Stickmann upon leaving the pilot seat, shortly followed by Jenkins standing at attention beside him. "WELCOME... TO HELL." Indeed, the location the arachnocopter arrived at looked nightmarish enough to pass for a part of the underworld. The entire land outside the landing platform was shrouded in ruins, slums and decrepit Colonial-era tenements stretching as far as the horizon. If one were to look hard enough, they could see people in dirty clothing scuttling about amidst the rubble, searching for anything they could improve their situation with - or anyone they could steal these things from. Coupled with fires emanating from several buildings all throughout, this whole landscape evoked the image of a town ravaged by a brutal war. While Gedeon and Eternal Juan gleefully admired the sights, Axel was far less amused. "What are we doing here?", he asked Stickmann after a moment of pondering. "Were we not supposed to meet Lord Recluse himself?" "LORD RECLUSE DOESN'T JUST LET ANYONE WALTZ INTO HIS THRONE ROOM", replied the lanky zombie-like soldier. "HE HAD DESIGNATED THIS ISLAND - MERCY ISLAND - AS A TEST OF GRIT FOR ALL HIS DESTINED ONES. ONLY THOSE WHO CAN SURVIVE HERE AND EMERGE STRONG ENOUGH MAY DREAM OF COMING FACE TO FACE WITH HIM." "A test? He does not need to test me. He should know how powerful I was back in the day..." "WAS. THAT'S THE KEYWORD. YOU LITERALLY JUST GOT OUT OF JAIL, YOU HAVE NO BIG ARMY TO SHOW HIM, AND YOUR ARMOR HAS DECAYED SINCE YOU LAST WORE IT. CAN -YOU- BE SURE YOU'VE GOT WHAT IT TAKES TO SATISFY HIM?" "Considering what you just reminded me of, not exactly." "EXACTLY! IF YOU CAN'T BE SURE YOU'VE GOT IT, NEITHER CAN HE. YOU DON'T WANNA PROVE YOUR STRENGTH TO LORD RECLUSE, AT LEAST PROVE IT TO YOURSELF, OKAY?" "Fine then. I will take this belittling test." "BESIDES... WE'VE GOT A LITTLE SITUATION IN HERE." Stickmann brought out a pair of binoculars and gave it to Shade before pointing towards an odd structure in the distance. "SEE THAT FORT OVER THERE?" "Yes?" The cyborg could indeed make out the shape of a small Arachnos fortress... with tricolor Freedom Corps banners hanging in all the most eye-catching places, a red-and-white helicopter seated on the rooftop, and several small single-seater VTOL fighters flying around. "THAT'S FORT DARWIN. USED TO BE A KEY PART OF THE ETOILES' NAVAL DEFENSE NETWORK... UP UNTIL THOSE PESKY LONGBOW FELLAS SHOWED UP AND TOOK IT BY STORM. NOW THEY'RE ARRESTING CRIMINALS 'ROUND HERE, PROVIDING AID TO THE CIVILIANS, AND WORST OF ALL, THEY EVEN STARTED A RECONSTRUCTION EFFORT IN THE OLD TOWN! OUR SOLDIERS ARE STRUGGLING TO REPEL THEM, SO WE NEED ALL THE HELP WE CAN GET." "I see... This could indeed be problematic." "PROBLEMATIC IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT." "Okay, so we got here, and now what?" Eternal Juan made his and Gedeon's presence known again. "AND NOW YOU CAN GO MAKE YOURSELVES AT HOME IN MERCY, DESTINED ONES. THERE'S A LOT FOR YOU TO DO 'ROUND HERE." Upon descending down the ramp leading off the platform they arrived at, the three jailbroken villains would gain a better view of what lay behind Mercy's massive walls. Almost immediately they found themselves at a large square-shaped plaza, with a slight rectangular elevation in the middle. Straight ahead they could see the large, imposing building of the governor's palace, decorated with red-and-black banners bearing Arachnos' logo and capped off with a large dome whose supports made it resemble a gigantic monstrous spider resting atop the building's roof. Directly opposite it stood the stronghold's primary gatehouse with its four elevator gates and the ramp leading up to the landing pad balcony, while the remaining two sides were filled in by less significant buildings, most prominent of them being the bank and the Hungry Dragon inn. Normally, this place would be rather empty save for occasional Arachnos patrols or public executions, but today the whole plaza was rife with criminals from various walks of life, some still wearing the orange jumpsuits of Zigursky Correctional Facility prisoners, all gathered in front of a low tribune spread out underneath the Arachnos palace's main entrance, bearing a plain lecter flanked by three Arachnos troopers presenting their jagged submachine guns standing on either side. As Axel and his two companions, approached the crowd, they would poke the nearest person present in a bid to get their attention. "Excuse me, what is going on here?", asked the cyborg. "I don't know, apparently there's some big ceremony we don't want to miss", was the response. It didn't take much longer before the Arachnos palace's double door swung open and out stepped a dark-haired man with a short well-maintained beard, clad in a variant of the Wolf Spider bodysuit distinguished with a red chestplate and shoulder pads and a black collared harness, paired up with a strange backpack and a cape. He walked up to the lectern, while two officers in silvery white suits stood beside him. "Welcome to the Rogue Isles, Destined Ones", the man spoke out with a noticeable Russian accent. "My name is Ivan Kuzmin and I am the Marshal of the Mercy Stronghold, the commander-in-chief of the Arachnos legions stationed here. I have called you all together because you're the worst assortment of lowlife criminals with exceptional powers I have ever seen!" He was making no effort to conceal his sheer villainous excitement. "You're mean, you're malicious! You're MY kind of rotten!" The crowd began cheering. Around the same time, one of the white-clad Arachnos commanders beside Kuzmin walked off the tribune and began making his way through the assortment of new Destined Ones, carefully examining each one of them and having an attendant of his write his judgements on a clipboard. "Ever since our glorious leader, Lord Recluse, launched his ingenious plan to conquer the world, hundreds if not thousands of villains have graced Etoile soil. It is with great pleasure that I am seeing you join them here, in the land of the free. Anywhere else in the world you'd be living in hiding, in constant fear of the forces of justice out to detain you... But here, here you can do as you please freely, just as Lord Recluse wills it!" Once again, the listeners cheered, with the exception of Axel himself, who was not particularly feeling the spirit of the situation. In due time, he too would be approached by the officer in white. "Your name, sir?", he asked upon taking a first look at the cyborg. "Stahleon Hephaestian", was the response. "Yeah, and I'm Sister Psyche. You're not fooling an Arbiter with such a cheap rip-off armor. Give me a real pseudonym or go back to the gutter." Shade sighed in annoyance. Never before did he feel so disrespected. "... Cyberkhan." "That sounds more like it. Write that down, Jenkins." The Arbiter's attendant politely filled in another row on the clipboard. "But how do you not recognize me!?" "Listen, I have too much work to do to deal with your tantrums. Good luck convincing anyone that your delusions are true." With that, the two spider-marked men moved on. Meanwhile, Marshal Kuzmin continued his inaugural speech. "But don't think it's going to be easy. He had you all summoned here because he sees potential in you, potential to change the world. And this is why I, acting on the authority he gave me, am laying a test before you all. Prove that you have the strength, the cunning and the determination to rise above your peers, to amass wealth and infamy like none other, to become worthy of the grace of our great leader! And now, without further ado, I hereby declare that this season of Project Destiny... IS NOW OPEN!" With an even greater cheer than before, the crowd would proceed to surge off the plaza, each crook going his or her way to cause mayhem. Only Stahleon - or Cyberkhan, as he was forced to go by now - remained there. All the way until the ceremony's end, he was too stunned by the "cheap rip-off armor" remark to even consider moving, but once he examined his reflection in a nearby puddle, this confusion would turn into sorrow. Indeed, as he stood now, he was but a shadow of his former self. His ornate black-and-red plating was now severely rusted and damaged, with paint chipping off the once-shiny cuirass and the formerly intimidating head crest having broken in a couple places. The titanium frame hidden beneath it embodied the pinnacle of robotic engineering... by the standards of the 1990s. Nowadays it was little more than a museum exhibit, an outdated piece of hardware nobody would take seriously anymore, especially not in its current bad shape. It was then that it finally hit him: the Stahleon Hephaestian whose very name used to instill fear in the world's hearts was long gone. All that remained was a delusional relic of a bygone age, with no resources nor power nor even respect. As Axel pondered his situation, he would suddenly hear a familiar voice coming up from the landing pad's direction. "HEY. WHAT'S THE MATTER, DESTINED ONE?" "Stickmann?..." Cyberkhan turned around to face the lanky officer. "YOU GOING TO STAND AROUND UNTIL YOU DIE? ...THAT WAS A JOKE, HA HA. YOU HAVE BETTER THINGS YOU COULD BE DOING THAN LANGUISHING HERE, YOU KNOW." "Perhaps, but... Is there even any point? As far as Arachnos cares, I am a fraud." "MAYBE YOU ARE A FRAUD, HA HA. YOU COULD TRY LAYING DOWN AND DECOMPOSING WITH THE REST OF THE JUNK ON THE ISLAND, IF YOU'D LIKE... OR YOU COULD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. I'M NOT YOUR BOSS, THOUGH, HA HA." "Junk? JUNK!?" Shade began to regain his composure. "I am the great Emperor Stahleon! I have done many great things before, I will not let them treat me like junk!" "NOW THAT'S THE SPIRIT." "I will show them what I really am made of. The saga of Stahleon Hephaestian is far from over!" "THAT'S RIGHT, KNOCK 'EM DEAD. AND REMEMBER: NO MERCY FOR THE WICKED, HA HA." "I shall... keep that in mind." With those parting words, a now-reinvigorated Axel Shade set off to the stronghold's streets, in search of something he could do to prove to everyone that his villainous credibility has not yet died down.

Wow... Just wow. All I did was make a simple cosmetic suggestion, and now look what it spiralled out into.

Yes, my suggestion was purely cosmetic. I saw that the human form has animations for all the Nova and Dwarf attacks, so I thought, why not?

Map: V_Sewer_to_Ofc_45_layout_02 The transition room between the office part and the sewer part is bugged to Hell and back. The connectors/doorways on both ends aren't quite properly connected, resulting in views of a black void when looking at them. Collision works fine, but texture culling doesn't.

Exactly what it says on the tin. Peacebringers and Warshades both have their Nova and Dwarf forms, which turn them into alien creatures focused on ranged and melee attacks, respectively. So I looked through powerset customization when pondering whether to make a PB, and noticed all off the attacks exclusive to the Nova and Dwarf transformations have properly functioning animations for a human character model using them, and thus my wish to make it actually possible to use them without necessarily having to take the form of a hovering squid or mutated gorilla first.

I'm all for giving the Rogue Isles Police a greater role than just low-level thugs. Ousting Arachnos from the position of the Isles' official government would probably require a good number of map changes, if only to get rid of the omnipresent Arachnos banners or replace them with a new Rogue Isles flag. Summoning contacts from past arcs is already in the game, kind of. You can call upon your NPC teammates from Sgt. Schorr's arc once you complete it and satisfy certain requirements for each of them, and Mr. G's arc has some other folks summonable like that, I think.

As cool as this would be, I'm still going to advocate for either lifting the level restrictions on zone radio missions or making them auto-exemplar players to the zone's level. Paragon City is big, and it's kind of dumb to lock highest-level characters out of most of it barring the few places Greycat mentioned. Nevermind that half of those aren't part of the city.

Also, yeah, letting players access radio missions in all zones regardless of level would be the best. Now if only there was a way to auto-exemplar a toon without locking them in Task Force mode...

Yeah, I don't like that place either. It's just... I don't know how to call it... not as interesting as pretty much anywhere else in Paragon City? And it very much sucks how it's literally the only place a maximum-level hero is allowed to do anything because the game's leveling system arbitrarily declares you don't care about anything below.

This read makes me wonder if the Rogue Isles have always been part of the plan for CoV, and whether the devs weren't considering indeed going with Paragon City's criminal underworld instead. As things stand now, I feel like redside lore would need a LOT of retconning before it could actually start making sense. Digressing a bit, but I've been doing some pure for-the-heck-of-it exploration of redside zones, and I have a newfound appreciation for how much more distinct eacch zone feels compared to blueside's monotonous cityscape.

In regards to the Longbow war crime digression, I'll just add that international law in a setting where superheroes are commonplace is a whole other rabbit hole. You gotta account not only for people with superpowers, but also for countermeasures against them for use by "normal" people, and then you remember mundane weapons may or may not be technically also superpowers alongside martial arts, and ultimately it gets so confusing that you go 'screw it, there's no such thing as war crimes anymore' because it's easier to just not care than to try and make sense out of any of that.

Either way, the amount of rogue Longbow operatives giving their force a bad name is staggering.

Okay, guns and flamethrowers work up until around level 30, but past that? They need something better suited for taking on high-end forces of evil. That includes choice of attire because there's just no way goofy plain spandex suits would be giving any protection at that level. I guess the problem is less the mere fact of them carrying such equipment and more their eagerness to employ it even in populated areas, with no regard to collateral damage or even the flamethrower soldiers' own descriptions. As well as, of course, failing to have any credibility as a force of good.

Maybe it used to be three separate traps... I mean games long ago, but it's no longer the case. No point in acting as if it still was. Going back to this, I can half-imagine a new, more genuinely good organization being created to replace Longbow in the event they go rogue.

I have taken to updating my redside main, Emperor Stahleon, not too long ago. And then here's an overhauled Major Liberty, now even more American.

A couple distant shots of Peregrine Island.