Part of the lore you love, other not so much

[Redem10]

Well it is a bit straightforward in how you should proceed (don't have to be one thing you like, one you dislike in your replies per se)

 

The Rikti, I feel are were very well made because you the more you learned the more nuance they got and the idea you can have peace with some of them is pretty cool. Another great thing abotu COX lore is that most genre and tone fit into it pretty well.

 

Praetoria, I don't feel it's awful by any mean but in a lot of way it feels like an odd addition, it don't slot itself in the setting as well as the Rogue islands. I think I would find it less odd if the Night Ward wasn't there cause otherwise you have pretty straightforward Dystopian city/Post-Apocalyptic wasteland division, but you also this weird part of the place that's a waystation of the dead whoses lore don't feel as connected tot he rest praetoria and it mostly feel like it's there cause otherwise the Praetoria would  have no magic in it whatsoever.

[DR_Mechano]

2 hours ago, Redem10 said:

Well it is a bit straightforward in how you should proceed (don't have to be one thing you like, one you dislike in your replies per se)

 

The Rikti, I feel are were very well made because you the more you learned the more nuance they got and the idea you can have peace with some of them is pretty cool. Another great thing abotu COX lore is that most genre and tone fit into it pretty well.

 

Praetoria, I don't feel it's awful by any mean but in a lot of way it feels like an odd addition, it don't slot itself in the setting as well as the Rogue islands. I think I would find it less odd if the Night Ward wasn't there cause otherwise you have pretty straightforward Dystopian city/Post-Apocalyptic wasteland division, but you also this weird part of the place that's a waystation of the dead whoses lore don't feel as connected tot he rest praetoria and it mostly feel like it's there cause otherwise the Praetoria would  have no magic in it whatsoever.

Keep in mind Praetoria has been around since the introduction of level 50 hero content (so Issue 2 I think) AND it got a massive overhaul from its original version. Prior to Going Rogue it was basically just your standard mirrorverse with evil Freedom Phalanx and not much else explained beyond that since the only exposure you had to it was really one contact heroside, with it having no presence villainside up until Going Rogue. Night Ward was also not originally in the Going Rogue expansion. Initially it was just the 1-20 experience and that was it.  First ward and Night Ward got added a while after IIRC. Whilst First Ward does actually play into the whole Devouring Earth vs Tyrant I do agree that Night Ward seems to just sort of...be there. It's got its own self contained story which doesn't really affect the rest of the story at all.

Edited February 2, 2020 by DR_Mechano

[Lines]

I really like Malta. I mean, story-wise. I like how it considers the global political impact of having superheroes around and the paranoia-fuelled hypocracy. It's a really cool take on the setting.

 

I don't love the well of furies. Or rather, I don't love being ushered down quite a singular character development path. I guess it's kept fairly vague, but it does detract from the player agency in the rest of the game.

[Gulbasaur]

I really love anything to do with the Kheldians. They're like the CoH version of the green lantern corps  - an inter-planetary group of superheroes who all have similar powers but are all distinct in their own right. Them turning up in ITF and several later story arcs as enemies/allies (police department using peacebringers, or something?) is just really cool as it brought them back into the story, whereas otherwise they sort of sat outside it. 

 

Freakshow have a pretty cool story - it's basically a load of yuppies who decided that they wanted to give up their easy lives, attach robotics to themselves and go on a crime spree. It's a simple idea, but it's specific enough that it works. 

 

The Coralax are interesting because there's so much lore about them that just sort of circles around meaninglessly after a while. I vaguely recall reading they were originally more important, and I think that explains a lot of it. 

 

I have no love of the Legacy Chain - their goals are just vague enough to be meaningless and they're sort of just there. 

[KC4800]

Dark Ward missions with the Animus Arcana, Drudges and such seems like it could have been much better if they had more time to work on it. As it is now, not enough story to understand whats going on.

 

The Carnies, the Malta and the Freakshow are the best. Is it still possible to fight Dreck? I haven't come across that mission yet on any of my alts. 

[Redem10]

8 hours ago, Lines said:

I don't love the well of furies. Or rather, I don't love being ushered down quite a singular character development path. I guess it's kept fairly vague, but it does detract from the player agency in the rest of the game.

 

Yeah it's a bit of an oddity, if you are roleplaying as science base hero and now you way more magic base

 

6 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

I really love anything to do with the Kheldians. They're like the CoH version of the green lantern corps  - an inter-planetary group of superheroes who all have similar powers but are all distinct in their own right. Them turning up in ITF and several later story arcs as enemies/allies (police department using peacebringers, or something?) is just really cool as it brought them back into the story, whereas otherwise they sort of sat outside it. 

 

I do wish we had more space lore, it's sorta understandable why COX focus more on interdimmensional stuff

 

Edited February 2, 2020 by Redem10

[Oubliette_Red]

[Coyotedancer]

I do love my creepy old body-snatching wizard-ghosts... The Oranbegans have always been one of my favorite bits of the game. 

 

I'm fond of the Shard, too, and really wish the old devs had done more with the Rularuu and that gorgeous, troublesome, vast trio of zones they made for them. 'So much missed potential out there. 

[Snarky]

Go Hunt Kill Skulz. So glad to have my world back

 

Nemesis plots. Lmfao

 

ouroboros and Dr Aeon and that Doctor (weber?) who allow the plot to twist around itself and us to run any content at any level over and over again with a (logical?) backdrop

 

lot to love. These are some of my favs

[tidge]

I really enjoyed the Rikti parts of the lore, but after the RWZ revamp it felt as if somethings became muddled. I enjoyed piecing together the Lost-Rikti-Hydra elements. The RWZ arcs (starting in the 30s) simply feel like they are stepping on other content. YMMV.

 

The piece of lore that confuses me is the Shadow Shard/Nemesis/Ouroboros/Dark Astoria (incarnate) interplay. I grok the efforts at high-level content, but at least one too many characters/groups got recycled for my taste.

[Redem10]

The King Row Skulls storyline is pretty amazing, shame that you tend to have a limited number of arc that have this good of a presensaton

 

The change to dark astoria feel like a bit of a mix bag to me, I don't the concept so much because it's actually pretty good lovecraftian, but haunted Astoria was one of my favourite zone

 

The destruction of Galaxy City was a bit of hard blow, understandable, but also no resolution

 

On 2/3/2020 at 10:46 AM, tidge said:

The piece of lore that confuses me is the Shadow Shard/Nemesis/Ouroboros/Dark Astoria (incarnate) interplay. I grok the efforts at high-level content, but at least one too many characters/groups got recycled for my taste.

 

Defintiively think that if they had a resolution in mind for all this, it would have either have been very disapointing or requiring to know what the hell was going on through out in so many factions/lore and being update so much it would have been disapointing for most people

[Vanden]

I really like Rularuu and the Shadow Shard. I wish it hadn't taken the game being cancelled and a lore bible document being leaked to find out what the deal was with the Shard, though.

[Sakai]

40 minutes ago, Vanden said:

I really like Rularuu and the Shadow Shard. I wish it hadn't taken the game being cancelled and a lore bible document being leaked to find out what the deal was with the Shard, though.

There is a leaked more bible?

[Vanden]

3 hours ago, Sakai said:

There is a leaked more bible?

https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Story_Bible

[Techwright]

I tend to like the sci-fi elements, such as the Ritki, and because I'm a fan of 1930's through WWII era stuff like dieselpunk and pulp fiction heroes, I like the Sky Raiders as well (though what I know of their story feels a little light).  Malta are cool (though I detest their sappers), and Freakshow are always fun.

 

What I don't gravitate to is magic, most especially the Circle of Thorns.  I've stated elsewhere that I feel they were overused.  I think my distaste is because I was led to believe, perhaps mistakenly, that the game would develop to maintain a balance between the 5 origin types, and I liked that concept.  But I tend to see magic as having been far more developed than the others.    

[Heraclea]

It's the well developed side of the magical side of CoH that always drew me.  Always been a particular fan of the Circle of Thorns.  Baron Zoria has just enough contacts with occult lore from our world to feel fully fleshed out.  The idea that people are roped in by the promise of magical powers to become vessels of Oranbegan spirits appeals to me.  The Banished Pantheon also had a lot of simple appeal in their first incarnation; worshippers of exotic gods raising zombies and playing the bongos.  Not sure ties to Mot were an improvement.  When you still had to buy enhancements from origin stores, who could deny but that the Magic stores had the most character? 

 

Hellion band posters are probably my favorite bit of obscure lore.  I play the old starting arcs rather than the new ones because I like that mission where they appear.  Firemullet rocks!

[Redem10]

The Fifth Column/Council transitition was pretty rough and unsastifying pretty much happened over night and they were clearly avoiding mentinong the Fifth collumn by name (yeah them wanting the game in Germany was probably the main reason, but it could have been done better) , though they did a lot to improve thing by showing us later on how it actually happened

 

Though it's never as fun to fight council as the fifth collum, since they lack any personality of their own, to the point their main color is beige. It felt like fighting the generic brand.

Edited February 9, 2020 by Redem10

[srmalloy]

12 minutes ago, Redem10 said:

The Fifth Column/Council transitition was pretty rough and unsastifying pretty much happened over night and they were clearly avoiding mentinong the Fifth collumn by name (yeah them wanting the game in Germany was probably the main reason, but it could have been done better) , though they did a lot to improve thing by showing us later on how it actually happened

To be fair, there were zone events all over Paragon City, where you'd be tooling along and you'd see a lot of Council and Fifth Column rush out into an open area and start fighting, where you could jump in or not as you chose, but these only lasted a few days before everything settled down and the Council took over all of the spawns where you used to see Fifth. One of the amusing things that resulted from this was that you'd be doing missions where the mission intro talked about the base having recently been taken over by the Council, but somehow they found the time to sandblast the Fifth Column logos off of all the storage crates and respray them with Council logos. IIRC, it took several issues before we saw the Fifth Column start to crawl back out from under the rocks they'd been hiding under and start to reclaim their position on the streets of Paragon City.

[Haijinx]

Yeah.  I don't like COT either ...

 

Mainly because I hate going to Oingo Boingo.

 

 

[Dreamboat]

I really like the Well of the Furies/Incarnates in concept. I know a lot of people have RP problems with it in terms of character agency, "fit", it being a barrier to endgame content and so on, and those are totally valid, but I'm a sucker for the idea of real-world deities and mythological figures empowering characters. It makes me think of DC's Captain Marvel/Shazam, and I've loved that character since I was a kid, so...

In my personal headcanon, things like the Well and any other ways of becoming an incarnate (e.g. whatever specific thing gave Hero 1 his powers) all spring from the same source, and it contains the potential power of all pantheons and legends, major and minor. Doesn't solve any of the problems, but thinking I could have a Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers-empowered Incarnate makes me feel better!

[tremor3258]

I always liked how the Lost/Rikti was originally handled as a secret connection, though that's gotten muddled since for good reasons that became common knowledge to NPCs.

[GastlyGibus]

I always liked the lore regarding the Rikti. The Rikti War being arguably the single most important bit of lore in the game, they obviously got a lot of screen-time and sub-plots, even trickling down into other groups like the Lost and the Hydra. The whole "Abandoned on Earth and secretly trying to subvert the country through underhanded means" was always really cool to me. Made them a much more dire and real threat to the world.

 

In contrast, I always hated the Family, or more specifically, how they were handled. Or, perhaps even more specifically, how they weren't handled. Maybe I'm missing something, but aside from their little lore page on the website, the Family always just kind of.... existed. You saw them everywhere, they were always referenced as the premiere drug-dealers in the city, but they never had their own story arcs. No special task forces, no plot threads, no events at all. They were just there. Existing. Roughing up random NPC's on the street and not much else.

The Family always struck me as some guy at the studios having just seen The Godfather and saying to themselves "hey, we should have Italian mobsters in our game," and then just throwing them in there with no real rhyme or reason to it. Why are Italian mobsters so heavily focused in one city? What's their connection to every other gang in the lore? Who is leading them? These questions and more will never be answered, and the one thing I dislike the most in stories and lore is unfinished plot threads.

Edited February 11, 2020 by GastlyGibus

[Sakura Tenshi]

On 2/8/2020 at 1:01 PM, Redem10 said:

The change to dark astoria feel like a bit of a mix bag to me, I don't the concept so much because it's actually pretty good lovecraftian, but haunted Astoria was one of my favourite zone

 

Amen to that. A soloable incarnate storyline was cool and it resolved an old plot while making use of a sadly underused zone, but I loved the “Creepypasta” feel of old DA and if I had been asked to revamp it I would have probably made it a lower level zone filled with stuff like your police radio getting strange signals, low combat/puzzle centric missions, even hallucination event triggers.

[tidge]

20 hours ago, GastlyGibus said:

In contrast, I always hated the Family, or more specifically, how they were handled. Or, perhaps even more specifically, how they weren't handled. Maybe I'm missing something, but aside from their little lore page on the website, the Family always just kind of.... existed. You saw them everywhere, they were always referenced as the premiere drug-dealers in the city, but they never had their own story arcs. No special task forces, no plot threads, no events at all. They were just there. Existing. Roughing up random NPC's on the street and not much else.

Paragon City is in Rhode Island. Naturally the Family would be there.

[nihilii]

On 2/2/2020 at 1:35 PM, KC4800 said:

Is it still possible to fight Dreck? I haven't come across that mission yet on any of my alts. 

Unai Kemen (?) still has the mission, but on a timer.