Possibility of "Streamlining" the story content?

[SurfD]

I know this is probably WELL beyond the scope of the awesome job the team has done reviving the game, but has anyone ever seriously looked at doing some kind of "streamlining" for the major story content in the game?

 

Specifically, a large quantity of the "incarnate" and "praetoria vs primal earth" content just seems to be a huge mess of a clusterf&@* when it comes to trying to figure out what happens when.

 

I mean, I have seen guides that show you how you could "experience" the full arc of the Praetoria content (from first contact through to fall), and the level ranges are just crazy.  Its all over the place with do this level 20 arc, followed by this level 50 strikeforce, then the entire Gold Side leveling experience, then a level 30 Task force, followed by this entire level 30-40 zone, followed by these 3 Incarnate trials, then 2 more low level arcs, then another strike force, then more incarnate content, then back and forth and back and forth.   Its an absolutely insane mess and utterly bizzare as, say, a new player just leveling through content where you randomly encounter praetorian arcs that may be completely out of sequence and are completely lost regarding what is going on.

 

I have no idea what a good solution would be.   I realize that with the way the game is designed, it probably isn't realistic to try to re-arrange the level ranges of, in some cases, entire zones worth of content to make their temporal flow better in regards to the overall praetorian/incarnate content (and that the game isn't like WoW, where episodic content is restricted mostly to it's own "expansion", but rather the current state of the overall CoH "world" is always considered to be after the events of the latest big thing)  but maybe it wouldn't be too difficult to add some kind of "storyteller" NPC attached to an Ouro like interface that could give you all of the relevant stuff in order with level / difficulty adjustments for being soloable might work?

[FrauleinMental]

This stuff happens all the time in the genre, and perhaps it's only exacerbated by the need to have the story occur at various levels so different-level characters can experience it.  The only things really missing are the references to Other Comic Book #352.

 

Probably not a satisfying answer, but we're just resurging from the Existential Shutdown Crisis.  It'd probably be another Crisis-level undertaking to "streamline" all of those story arcs.  Maybe an Ouro-based mega-arc could handle it, though.

[SurfD]

While I agree that referencing events and temopral shenannigans does happen fairly often in the genre (re: See issue #353 bubbles and the like), this is an order of magnitude worse.

 

From a pure player perspective, as you level through the game, it would be like reading a Superman Comic and being explicitly told that "Superman is Dead, Doomsday died killing him" on the first page, and then like 3 pages later with absolutely no explanation randomly encountering Superman stopping a bank robbery (not Clone Superman, or Super Boy, or Steel pretending to be Superman, but actual Superman).  And when you ask him about Doomsday, he's like "who?".  And then 3 pages after that, seeing Superman and Doomsday dukeing it out on a live televised broadcast, while a second TV simultaneously covers his Funeral.  And then 3 pages after that, having everybody gossiping about this new hero in town, who goes by the name of Superman.

 

It goes WAYY beyond just "this happened in a previous issue" kind of things, as 90% of the time the issue date of specific content is never mentioned.  I mean, sure, they do occasionally give you the "this content took place in Issue X notice", like with the Praetor Marchand After the Fall arc heroes get, but that doesn't really explain why they just hand you you level 35ish content that actually takes place AFTER several dozen level 50 Incarnate/TaskForce arcs.

 

Like, take the ENTIRE First Ward / Night Ward collected story arcs.  As soon as you hit the correct level this can be just thrown at you by having the initiating contact simply pop up in your contact menu, regardless of what faction you belong to, or if you even have the vaguest clue how to get to First Ward in the first place.    First Ward (30-35) takes place like 1/3 of the way through the Praetorian story arc, AFTER the entire Praetorian Leveling Experience, several depreciated story arcs, and 3 incarnate trials (level 50 content), and Night Ward (35-40) is like 2/3 of the way through the Praetorian arc, with yet more Incarnate Trials and Arcs in between it and first ward.    Yet it's entirely possible to just get handed First Ward content and then segue directly from First Ward to Night Ward without ever discovering that you just skipped a HUGE amount of content that comes before and between both.

Edited April 27, 2020 by SurfD

[MTeague]

[Saiyajinzoningen]

I have played through both all the red blue and yellow side lore. I can honestly say yes its a bit of wall of texty convaluted nonsense. However, most comics have some degree of flashbacks and or retcons so if you have experience reading them that helps. Also anime/manga is infamous for dropping random flashbacks in the middle of arcs. I distinctly remember one ninja themed anime that actually has a flashback within another flashback. Stories are not always constructed in a linear fashion. In fact some of the best ones were released out of order and are much beloved (star wars). 

[SurfD]

StarWars is a terrible example to use though.    It was 3 distinct arcs, each of which was more or less completely self contained.  Besides, despite the fact that they are labeled "episode 1-9", the original release order of the trilogies with "Original", "Prequel", "Sequel"  was always the way it was intended, it was never intended to be released in complete chronological order from start to finish.

 

Now try to imagine how well StarWars would have been received if the release order had been something like A New Hope, followed by Return of the Jedi, then a random episode from the First Trilogy, then the entire 3rd trilogy, then another random episode from the First Trilogy, then Empire Strikes back, and the last episode from the First Trilogy.  Trying to make any sense of that mess would be maddening.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

7 minutes ago, SurfD said:

StarWars is a terrible example to use though.    It was 3 distinct arcs, each of which was more or less completely self contained.  Besides, despite the fact that they are labeled "episode 1-9", the original release order of the trilogies with "Original", "Prequel", "Sequel"  was always the way it was intended, it was never intended to be released in complete chronological order from start to finish.

 

Now try to imagine how well StarWars would have been received if the release order had been something like A New Hope, followed by Return of the Jedi, then a random episode from the First Trilogy, then the entire 3rd trilogy, then another random episode from the First Trilogy, then Empire Strikes back, and the last episode from the First Trilogy.  Trying to make any sense of that mess would be maddening.

-shrug- im not really a star wars fan so tbh it would be all the same to me lol

[MTeague]

I was dead serious with the Doctor Who meme.  I've never seen any video game with a timeline more deserving of that quote than City of Heroes / Praetoria storylines.

Only the Doctor Who show ITSELF tops it and that's a 50 year old franchise centered around a Time Traveller.

[FrauleinMental]

49 minutes ago, MTeague said:

I was dead serious with the Doctor Who meme.  I've never seen any video game with a timeline more deserving of that quote than City of Heroes / Praetoria storylines.

Only the Doctor Who show ITSELF tops it and that's a 50 year old franchise centered around a Time Traveller.

True, it is very wibbly-wobbly.

 

I think one of the major causes is the refusal to raise the level cap past 50.  Not that I want a rise in level cap, and maybe it wouldn't even work now, but most MMOs manage their timeline/progression by just raising the level cap when a major expansion comes out.  CoH attempted to give a bit of expansion to all level bands, but it jumbled the story continuity.

 

Star Trek Online hit at least some of the wibbly-wobbliness with its time travel arcs and the introduction of the Romulan third faction.

 

All that being said, I think SurfD does make a good argument for the streamlining.  Some efforts were made during Live, when we started seeing the Signature Arcs and Incarnate content, to retcon some of the older arcs.  But I worry that such a task would be Herculean.

[Lines]

I think a redo of the contacts menu is in order, especially find contacts, where you can be guided towards other contacts, TFs and trials based on the things you've already done. Something more like a log. It would include which Ouro arcs to consider playing to fill plot holes.

 

(Slight side-suggestion, if the menu could also include looking clues and souvenirs relevant to that contact, rather than keeping clues in a separate menu where they don't always make much sense.)

 

At the moment it just really wants to send us to First Ward.

Edited April 28, 2020 by Lines

[Troo]

Are there really no documentations of the story arcs as they were released or unfolded?

 

It's often interesting looking back at old documentation of the game. Example: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/city-of-heroes-walkthrough/1100-6100858/

[MTeague]

Ouroborous at least shows which issue each story arc was released in.  So you know what came from i24 or i22, etc.  Although I think that's just regular story arcs, nothing comparable to it for incarnate trials or such.

[Lazarillo]

2 hours ago, FrauleinMental said:

I think one of the major causes is the refusal to raise the level cap past 50.  Not that I want a rise in level cap, and maybe it wouldn't even work now, but most MMOs manage their timeline/progression by just raising the level cap when a major expansion comes out.  CoH attempted to give a bit of expansion to all level bands, but it jumbled the story continuity.

In fairness, even though they expanded story stuff across all the level bands, it wasn't until late in the game's original life that they stopped respecting the "the story progresses as you level" rule.  Roy Cooling was the first (or at least, the first really egregious) instance that I recall, but then the SSAs started and everything just kinda went to pot.

 

Really, it was the whole "let's kill Statesman" bit that just completely ruined continuity.  So now we have things like Maria Jenkins' arc taking place before the iTrials but after Statesman is dead, but Statesman being alive during some of the early iTrials (notably, Underground).

[SurfD]

Yeah, a lot of it has to do with the thing I mentioned earlier, where the "current state of the world" is always "after the latest big thing".

 

In most MMOs (like WoW), 95% of the "new" content for the "Latest big thing" is restricted to the latest Expansion "world".   WoW adds an expansion, expansion comes with whole new set of maps to explore, previous existing areas get maybe an incredibly tiny tweak here or there, but for the most part remain unchanged.   CoH on the other hand, major events just re-write giant chunks of the world after every one, but leave story arcs in some locations (like Nightward/First Ward) or certain Task Forces (which are basically fixed level content as far as level ranges go) completely untouched.  So you end up with wierdness like playing in a world where Statesman is dead, only to accidentally stumble into a taskforce where he is not, with no real indication that this task force is "previous issue" content, and the like.

 

At the very least, maybe it would be worthwhile to go through a lot of arcs that are heavily dependent on which issue they belong in and making it more clear that "this taskforce or this arc" belong in X issue.