The Big Question of Continuity

[egoprovince]

Maybe it is just another needlessly complex plot by Nemesis.

 

It's always a Nemesis plot.

[DR_Mechano]

Personal headcanon varies per character.

 

Dr Mechano WAS dimension hopping way back when you needed 2 accounts (US and EU), Virtue was considered an alternate dimension and thus he was affected by "Dimensional Scaling" aka the Universe sees an intruder and thus makes it so it has to conform to the laws set out by that universe (thus why he wasn't a fully inventioned out Robot/FF mastermind but instead having to work his way back up), this includes altering a persons form and function as close as it can get to said universe. Just prior to the shutdown he set his dimensional portal to "anywhere inhabitable" and lept through. He's basically pulled a Geralt ("I hate portals...") and has existed in multiple different dimensions, each time pulling a Quantum Leap and trying to find his way back home. He's been through the whole gamut of places. From one close but not quite aka CO, several fantasy worlds Guild Wars 2 (stuck in the body of an Asura as that was a close as the universe could get him), World of warcraft (he didn't enjoy, once again, being a short-arse since now he was a gnome) and even enjoyed some time as a catboy in FF:RR (it was an eye opening experience for him to say the least). Finally, he made the last leap and, while it isn't his true home, it is close enough for home to breath a sigh of relief, work on rebuilding his powerbase, reinvent his AI sons and daughters, try and recruit Shivan Steve (who I had to constantly go get the 'Summon Shivan' power up from PvP with him to RP as) and start causing havoc for the Heroes and Villains of this universe once he gets settled.

 

Amy Zon and all her sister, however, never made it to the portal, so for her it is essentially a classic comic style Character Reboot (I'll be remaking her as a Brute SS/Invuln and taking her from villainside to heroside to get her on the correct path). 

 

Lord Horace Hattings, however, was saved by his mystical mummified cat and dropped into The Secret World, where upon he continued his pulp adventures, fitting right in to the Call of Cthulu inspired mythos. Now he has been yanked back and finds himself back home, his memories of the world he inhabited prior to this are vague and fuzzy but he'll just get back on to raiding tombs, looking for mystical artifacts and fist fighting all sorts of bad guys in the name of adventure and archeology.

[Tariq]

Personally, I've just been assuming "Superboy Punch."

[OmegaX123]

Personally, I've just been assuming "Superboy Punch."

Not Dr. Manhattan meddling?

Either way, that does solve the issue/paradox of some people treating it like 7 years have passed since sunset, others treating it like a different universe, and others treating it like it's the same universe but little to no time has passed, in a way.

[FloatingFatMan]

I don't feel that anything at all needed to have happened.. As far as my main in concerned, time continued as normal.  She had some time out from heroing to have a family, then she got involved in some undercover police work in LA working on narcotics for a while, and now she's back in Paragon where everything's the same.

[FloatingFatMan]

Personal headcanon varies per character.

 

Mech!! Hey dude! Been a while!  ;D

[DR_Mechano]

Personal headcanon varies per character.

 

Mech!! Hey dude! Been a while!  ;D

 

Heya FFM, glad to see you still around and kicking!

 

Also this theme song fits many a returning RPer :D

[Paragon Vanguard]

Unless it becomes something ingame, i really have no plan dealing with the lost time. The world didn't end for my characters because some irresponsible company said so. It really just feels to me like everything picked back up where it left off. I stay away from dates and such when writing on the boards anyway,  so it won't effect me in that manner. I may pick up Paragon Vanguard as moving back, without really addressing why and where he went. Truly just plan to avoid the ordeal as much as possible.

[Xaeon]

My old virtue main; Exo-Buster (or John Eden Matthews) was a twelve year old boy in 2012 and is now a 19 year old young man in 2019 and has mostly been put on a bus back to Britain. His story is mostly completed and he's content with life after completing his journey as a hero, to his place as an incarnate, and from a child to an adult.  He sometimes pops up as a side character but his "arc" was finished off screen and there is little that still needs to be said with him. 

 

Gaela also went from a 16 year old idealist to an angry 23 year old and generally angry radical who's lost a lot of faith in the world and the way it works and has become increasingly disillusioned with working from within the system and a lot of traditional conceits of heroism (she finds the idea that she should offer her labour with no financial recompense obscene) but is still motivated by altruism and genuine heroism and empathy. 

 

Tyrannicus has been essentially reworked into a Thanos esque figure. A looming threat who has put hundreds of worlds in scores of dimension underneath his jackboot. An emblem of reactionary absolutism born of a lightless dark dimension who genuinely believes that he is on a holy mission to save those he conquers from themselves through the imposition of brutally dogmatic hierarchy and controls; believing that through conquest and the unspeakably violent "reordering" of conquered societies he can spare them the pain of fuure civil strife, ennui and wasted lives spent in pursuit of meaningless frivolities and decadent waste. He is basically a completely different and far more threatening person.

[mjrbuzz]

For me as a role player it's simply not a question.

 

For me, the world and even the characters i have verbatim remade. Have no continuity connection of any kind to the previous game for me.

From my POV, this game could have a completely unrelated name, for how much i connect events of CoH to CoHH.

 

I mean you can if you want to of course, the awesome power of RP games is this freedom.

 

But as you see, you now face a "big question." While my approach has kept it not only more simplified, but also more open to imagine whatever i want, without constraints or paradoxes being passed on from the previous one.

 

I treat continuity for my fiction in this way:

 

If it seems to improve it, then effort to get story continuity is good to put out.

If keeping a continuity creates too many issues, a clean slate start is free to be taken at any time.

[Therumancer]

So far I've been deliberately role-playing up the ambiguity and mystery of it. One of the things I like about the Elder Scrolls series of games is that various factions ("historians" "researchers" "whatever") have very different ideas about "what really happened."

 

I'm perfectly fine with the idea that some people "noticed" 5 years missing, other people don't. Maybe it was an illusion, maybe some people really are quantum copies from some other shard. Maybe it is just another needlessly complex plot by Nemesis.

 

At any rate, two of my characters will insist that something happened but they have no idea what (they are low level yet after all and don't have a reputation or access to the sorts of things that would tell them what happened) and the other character will absolutely insist that nothing happened at all and it is just another conspiracy theory.

 

Let there be no right answer.

 

Very long time between when you wrote this and this response, if your even still around or care, but I will point out that in "Elder Scrolls" there actually is a canon answer to the history, I currently play "Elder Scrolls Online" and while no lore master I do know a good portion of it. The reason for the questionable nature of the history on certain points is what they call "The Dragon Break" simply put Akatosh, the Dragon God of time had some serious issues and lost control for a while creating a massive temporal distortion. This distortion largely engulfs the timeline around the period of "Daggerfall" and somehow causes all possible endings of the game to be simultaneously true, as it had an ending where you could put pretty much any major faction in charge, unlike other games where there are far less possible outcomes and thus they just have to choose one. The result of the Dragon Break was that Imperial Domination was the way the world proceeded, but you can find records and ruins in places that are basic carryovers from other timelines. Anyone who lived through The Dragon Break wound up with fuzzy recollection of anything up until the point where the timeline was settled by Akatosh.... it's weird, but this is actually part of the lore now, and since Bethesda is into world building they have said they plan to avoid doing anything like Daggerfall where they are that many possible endings to juggle. At any rate if you pay attention to the dialogue you will notice both Oblivion and Morrowwind do have a very set outcome as far as the later games though as they reference the outcome even if they keep the nature of the hero vague for obvious reasons.

 

If "Homecoming" lasts for the long term, and they add more content, it would be interesting to see if they actually do some major world building and explain exactly what happened here. Personally, if they do, I'd sort of hope they don't decide all the previous heroes and villains died... that's a little grim even if it makes sense. Personally I'd try and write it in a way where these realities could exist even if these servers are one day taken down for legal reasons, and I've also wondered for a while if the original servers could return. As I hear it CoX largely collapsed due to problems with the Korean stock market, I don't even pretend to know all the details but the bottom line was supposed to be that while more than popular enough to exist by MMORPG standards at the time, the lack of popularity in Korea caused it to have some sort of attached expenses that affected NCSoft's stock listings on their primary exchange in a way that was costing them more than the game made so they cut it loose for reasons unrelated to the game's overall success or failure. I've read a lot of weird stuff about eastern game design over the years, so it's possible.

 

At any rate, the point is that weirdly Elder Scrolls isn't a good example of how to handle this, because they basically wrote that into the lore as a time warp so they didn't have to actually explain the ending of "Daggerfall" in the series history. :)