Vic Raiden

Unpopular opinion: I genuinely like the Circle of Thorns temple maps, if only for the aesthetics.

As an avid TV Tropes reader, I really appreciate the effort you put into this. But now we gotta back it up with a primary powerset.

How much more obvious did that How much more obvious did this use to be? Yeah... Fun as the arc was, I too caught myself seething a few times playing it, whenever I ran into something I knew my character wouldn't do. Closest thing to a workaround I found was spelling the character's ACTUAL thoughts, speech pattern and all, out via local chat.

I have made some updates to the mission to make it more lively: - added an intro pop-up and dialogue lines for the boss - added ten patrols wandering the middle portion of the map - added an ambush triggering upon defeating a fixed (but not mandatory) lieutenant in the final room

Haven't ever played WoW, so I can't say much, but I do kinda know there are two main factions the players can belong to that try to be at constant odds with each other even though greater cosmic-level threats keep piling on and neither side is actually all that committed to either good or evil barring the oldest questlines. CoX feels somewhat the same, except all areas are also alignment-locked unless you're one of the two "grey" alignments which are just the basic ones except capable of going wherever they want. It's more than a bit problematic in that blueside gets over twice as many zones as redside, and the two sides don't even get to cross over outside of a handful of instanced missions taking place in an isolated fragment of the opposing side's home turf. That's just not all that fair.

I tend to keep minions basic, with just basic attacks and maybe a shield or non-annoying single-target debuff power on some rare ones. Lieutenants, they're typically either expanding on respective minion types or getting more gimmicky stuff like flight or ally buffs. Bosses, though, that's where I go crazy as long as it suits the faction's overall theme.

The other day, I've used Ouroboros to run some arcs I missed, that being Sondra Costel, Julius the Troll, and Archmage Tarixus. While doing missions for them, I saw their trust gauge go up as expected... but when I completed their respective final missions, I found that none of them are in my Inactive contact tab, and clicking them led to them giving me their "not introduced" lines instead of the "no more missions" ones. I've been told that Ouroboros-ing content is kind of creating an alternate timeline where I did a given thing which still remains not done in the prime timeline, but that just rubs the completionist in me the wrong way. So my suggestion, as given in the topic title, is to have the game flag contacts completed via flashback as already introduced, and thus properly tag them as completed upon completion, regardless of whether the player had been actually introduced to them in normal play.

I'm not going to take a stand in this discussion, I'm just concerned about it getting so out of hand that GMs have to get involved.

Another major problem I noticed is that all interactable objects - doors, glowies and the like - turn solid black when cel-shading is on.

Even then, it feels awkward that there's an entire category with only one item in it. Also looking at the Jet Packs here, because I don't get why the Gold Bricker jet pack gets its own category when the rest are just lumped together with normal backpacks.

There's also a couple Jackets options with long coat tails which likewise block out back details, so... 🤔 Think those should be moved there as well?

Harris also has a mission where you're tasked with clicking three glowies, and then one with destroying some Legacy Chain runes... neither of which disappear upon mission completion, oddly enough. I'd be happy to see that changed as well.

Long-overdue update: this project is not dead, but its scope has significantly grown. Not only did Stahlheim forces develop so much that I had to split them into several smaller enemy groups so that the various branches don't bleed into one another, but I also decided to stretch it out into a series of three arcs because I felt that just a single five-mission arc wouldn't be enough to flesh out a large-scale enemy organization enough.

Thanks! I do admit that I didn't think much on the bios. I was simply trying to frame the Watch as a heroic organization with large presence similar to Longbow (European counterpart, perhaps?), so I decided it wasn't worth going into too much detail on individual units' descriptions. As for returning to mission exit, it was purely for flavor reasons - the idea was that the player would escape the base by submarine and then detonate the bombs from a safe distance. Which yeah, doesn't work all that well with a map as large as the one I picked. Maybe if I added someone the player would need to kidnap... EDIT: Fridge thought: I could probably have added an optional "defeat all enemies in the final room" objective which'd then spawn some ambushes trying to stop the player from escaping the base, or placed some patrols in the middle in addition to the static spawns, to make the experience more dynamic. And maybe add some basic dialogue, too.

Okay, now that you elaborated upon your point like this, I do understand where you're coming from. Admittedly, playing a bad guy as long as they're presented as good is a problem in this game, because aside from a small handful of dedicated Rogue arcs and tip/alignment missions, Rogues are basically stuck doing purely villainous stuff, only with the ability to visit Paragon City at will outside of instanced missions. I can't really think of any solution to that beyond eventually making more content dedicated to the two intermediate alignments. That said, I still suspect redside content isn't seen as all that fun by most, and I think playing a villain could be more appealing if villains got more interesting things to do, both in terms of quantity and interestingness... but then bluesiders would still only go redside temporarily to do this particular content before switching back to blueside, thereby perpetuating the problem. Therefore, I propose another solution: dispose of Null, or at least revoke his power to change player alignments on a whim.

I don't like to play devil's advocate, and I apologize for how late to this I am, but I believe you're missing the original poster's point. It's less about superheroes and supervillains in particular and more just about morality in general. Grand Theft Auto is a series where the protagonists are all criminals (and thus villains, however sympathetic) to start with, which nobody would ever play if your statement about nobody liking to play a villain was completely true. And yet these games exist and are well-liked, simply because messing around as a gangster can be just that fun, a nice change of pace from both the typically uneventful everyday life and the tendency of other games to cast the player as a hero. Similarly, Warhammer 40,000 is a setting populated nigh-exclusively by various shades of evil forces, with the Salamanders chapter of Space Marines (as well as Ultramarines, Blood Angels and Lamenters, to name a few others) being one of the few active forces of genuine good, memes about their burn-on-sight racism against Eldar children notwithstanding. But good and evil aren't even the main draw of any 4OK faction - it's their aesthetics and combat doctrines, or even simpler, how cool they can be. Now tying this back to the main topic, it's not at all uncommon for villains of various works, superhero works included, to gain significant fanbases simply because of their inherent cool factor. And let's face it, who wouldn't enjoy being the cool bad guy who doesn't have to obey all the rules, even if just from time to time? Unfortunately, that kind of coolness is kinda hard to find in City of Villains because all the real supervillainy is handled by NPC factions, leaving players as errand-runners with little to no agency in the game world. And I don't doubt that this is at least one of the reasons why people don't stick much to redside: they come in expecting to be awesome supervillains like Lord Recluse and his cronies, get disappointed by the contact-and-mission system still being in effect, and decide to stay blueside because there they at least know what to expect.

I'm not sure how many of you remember that Attack on Stahlheim project I wrote about on this subforum quite some time ago. It's still being worked on, albeit slowly because a) I ended up having to restructure the entire antagonistic force, and b) I feel like it should be bigger than just one five-mission arc. But anyway, the point of this topic is to share assorted lesser things I make. Let's start with my first published arc, literally just titled Liberty Watch Test. As its name implies, it's just a single mission with hardly any story, meant to test a custom enemy group obviously called Liberty Watch. ID is 59603, in case anyone wanted to check it out for themselves and provide feedback.

On that note, let us create custom Rikti NPC costumes. Also, more map proposals: - the farm from Trilogy's missions (both normal and ruined) - all the Signature Story Arc maps that haven't been already added - the lava-filled 5th Column base from Dark Astoria - the various floating sea bases from certain TFs - Longbow warship from no idea what arc - Council skin for every unique 5th Column map, and vice versa

While I can make a full evil organization via Mission Architect, and in fact I have already made one, I just don't really feel like it's enough. Sure, I could make a couple arcs which would let players fight against my forces, but... well, it's just being a punching bag. Can't even flaunt my army much in roleplaying, it's all stuck on my hard drive and a maximum of three arcs I can have up online at a time. ...think posting a folder with all the subgroups forming my empire would be enough? And again, I do respect that keeping the game fair is a considerable limiting factor for player villains' influence on the world, I'm just trying to have ideas.

Once again, true that. People have their comfort zones, and most aren't comfortable being the villains of their own stories. But on the other hand, given it's really not uncommon for viewers to actually enjoy seeing the bad guys in action (if not outright cheering for them)... ... ... Maybe that's one solution? Note how redside contacts, with a handful exceptions, tend to treat players like deniable associates at best and downright garbage at worst. But if there were more people like Dean MacArthur, who actually do get along with the player and don't act like their bosses, perhaps that'd be at least a little less discouraging. There's also these well-discussed older ideas of creating 1-50 arcs which could let one actually realize themselves as an independent player in the Rogue Isles instead of being a minion for hire, but I'm not going to reiterate them.

Kinda bumping this, but yeah, I do agree more co-op content would be neat... just as long as it doesn't pigeonhole villains into clearly heroic jobs.

That's one way I could go about it, thanks.

Sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if it'd work out in this particular game. And to my recollection, GW wasn't above outright ignoring player achievements and forcing an outcome they were more in favor of.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. But it still doesn't answer my question of how even to roleplay a ruler-type villain while complying with the game's limitations and the fact most people aren't in the know on who my character is. I mean, I can't just keep the "ex-overlord who lost everything once and is STILL trying to recover" story going on forever, can I?

Like I said, I'm sorry for the necromancy, but I genuinely didn't use to know this thread even existed, let alone that nobody replied to it before.