Storyline Wish List/Loose Ends

[A Cat]

Dear Sirs/Madams/Robots/etcs,

 

What is your wishlist of stuff to develop going into the future? The new Aeon SF is not just a gameplay innovation, it is a further development of lore and ties up some loose ends. This has got me thinking of some other stuff I'd like to see going into the future. But what else do you fine fellows want to see going forward into the future?

 

Lore AMA for some reference: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Lore_AMA

 

For me:

 

Praetoria. Honestly, though Magisterium Itrial is pretty sick, I heartily regret that they decided to take the "nuke f-ing everything" option (literally). I would have liked to see the rest of the levels fleshed out with maybe a new zone or two to handle the levels between Night Ward and level 50, so you can have a true Gold Side experience all the way through. Maybe some sort of Hami zone or something. God I love Praetoria. 

 

Scirocco's redemption arc. The Lore AMA had a quick sketch of what the OG devs were thinking about this, and it seemed really compelling to me. 

 

Overall, I hope for more new stuff for the level 35 to 50 range. You spend a lot of time in this level range since it takes a decent amount of XP to get each level. Plus I feel like the lower levels currently have really amazing storylines already.

 

Another thing is that I am a big fan of "zone storylines" like Faultline, First/Night Ward, Croatoa, etc. 

[ArchVileTerror]

I tend to feel that the game lore serves best as a "Set Dressing" for personal player narratives, and much prefer content that's written with a mindfulness for the diversity of the player-base AND setting, rather than as a single-player linear arc.  

In other words:  Build outward and expand, rather than bulldoze and change.

 

Granted, there is room for both.  I'm stating a preference.  Although I feel the current Devs seem far more focused on the latter rather than my preference.

[Darmian]

Oh, deary me.  So much I could write here.  So much. Like yourself, @A Cat, I love Praetoria.  So much so I've been trying to fill in gaps. As for the possibility of getting Gold to 50?  I've said elsewhere that dropping two Underground zones for First Ward and Night Ward would do it.  No need to explain how two new areas suddenly appeared, since everyone assumes they're already there anyway, just locked off.

 

 

[Lazarillo]

58 minutes ago, A Cat said:

Scirocco's redemption arc. The Lore AMA had a quick sketch of what the OG devs were thinking about this, and it seemed really compelling to me. 

My man Scirocco really deserves this.  It'd be frustrating not to still get to be all judge-y of all the "heroes" who nonetheless sold their soul to Black Scorpion for a defense boost, but I suppose I could live without that for a good redemption arc.

[Greycat]

Hmmm.

 

Sure, scirocco's redemption sounds good.

 

The other thing I've really been wanting to see is one of the old EATs, Blood of the Black Stream. Sure, it's not going to show up as an EAT (sadly) but it could be a great vehicle for branching outside of Paragon, as their roots are back in ancient Egypt and could be developed with both red and blue side content. There are so many very obvious, longstanding hooks in game, I'd love to see those paid off.

[Glacier Peak]

Shivans! And space! 

[ArchVileTerror]

I still think that Scirocco should always strive toward but -never- actually get redemption, only to cement him in that position of cursed tragedy.  His struggle is what defines him.  Take that away, and he would need to become a totally different character to continue to be interesting.

[Aurora_Girl]

Anti-Matter's Space Station. 

[A Cat]

55 minutes ago, Greycat said:

as their roots are back in ancient Egypt and could be developed with both red and blue side content.

Depending on how ancient it has to go back, you can make this part of the Cimm "time" and have some real Ptolemaic Egypt style thing going. It is a little vague "when" in Roman history Cimm is anyway so I think it can work. 

[Albion]

I am with the space mood, lets get that moon base on!

[ZorkNemesis]

Scirocco's redemption would be cool, but also Manticore's fall from grace should be touched upon too.  I recall hearing the idea was to have the two of them switch sides (though I think Mu'vhrakon was going to take Scirocco's place in the patron hierarchy).

 

Eagle Eye's arc left a couple unresolved plot hooks.  What was Veles going to be showing to Atta, and how was Atta going to take advantage of it to bring the Trolls to new heights?  How about Deadlock and what sort of thing he would've done to complete his job after you took down the guys paying him?  Back Alley Brawler got his ass whupped, how were things going to play out without him?  I recall hearing Marauder may have taken BABs place while he was out of comission.

 

More importantly, what was Silos' plan to use Ouroboros and Rularuu to fight off The Coming Storm?  The whole Coming Storm/Batallion arc never got resolved and would be cool to know how it played out, especially since the lore seems to indicate that the Rikti are what they are because of The Batallion.

[A Cat]

Shit, forgot one. War Witch is back! There should be a TF or something.

 

1 hour ago, ZorkNemesis said:

Eagle Eye's arc left a couple unresolved plot hooks.  What was Veles going to be showing to Atta, and how was Atta going to take advantage of it to bring the Trolls to new heights?  How about Deadlock and what sort of thing he would've done to complete his job after you took down the guys paying him?  Back Alley Brawler got his ass whupped, how were things going to play out without him?  I recall hearing Marauder may have taken BABs place while he was out of comission.

Oh yeah. That one really begs a continuation. It was just left in such a weird spot. 

[Techwright]

3 hours ago, A Cat said:

Shit, forgot one. War Witch is back! There should be a TF or something.

 

 

 

Not so much back as dopplegangered, at least as suggested in the current description.  Still, 'nough of a mystery there that a TF sounds plausible.

[Icono04]

10 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:

The whole Coming Storm/Batallion arc never got resolved

Personally I would prefer if this one never got resolved. I like the Coming Storm/Batallion plot, but I suspect that because it is such a huge, overarching (sp?) plotline, each of us has a very different idea of what would constitute a satisfying ending to it. By leaving it unresolved, we are all free to imagine that our own preferred ending would have been the one that happened. Kind of like how they ended The Sopranos.

 

As for my own loose ends wishlist:

- Anti-Matter's space station

- Any other out-in-space environment whatsoever. A reskinned Shadow Shard might even work.

- Someplace on Praetorian Earth outside of Praetoria (the city) itself. South American junglescape, ruined Tokyo, someplace in Europe, you name it, I'll be happy with it.

[Britannic]

Scirocco's redemption arc definitely, and finally a story arc about curing Riktified Hero 1. The latter one as an expansion of the Lost Cure and having a wider Dawn Patrol (maybe following up on the Shannon Price and Quint 'The Fist' Velasquez thread) involvement.

Edited December 14, 2021 by Britannic

[Ukase]

I don't really pay enough attention to Lore. What has sunk in, has only done so through sheer repetition. I do appreciate the humor in Aeon SF, though. 

There is one other thing that the Aeon SF does that I hope will become a pattern. When higher notoriety is chosen, the NPCs within the map should present additional attacks or defenses to overcome. 
That said, I would prefer that most, but not all new story arcs and missions follow the Praetorian model, in that they are all in the same zone, and they are never more than 4-5 missions long. And I don't mean like the last couple of missions in Aeon either, where they squeeze multiple objectives across different maps and call them all the same mission. 
The Ripples in Aeon - those are essentially 3 different missions, all within that one mission. The same with the last mission. If a new story arc were to follow this model, that one mission could be an entire arc. In Aeon's case, much of that may be sped through, but if not, it certainly adds to the time involved. And, seeing as how these challenges all but require additional teammates, it's helpful to be able to run these in a single hour long session, or less. 

What might be very compelling is to have "smart" notoriety settings. The game should have some internal mechanism to determine what AT and powersets are present in the map. It would be interesting to see a different set of challenges as far as defenses, attacks depending on team composition. No idea how that would specifically be accomplished, but that would certainly make every mission as close to different as possible. 

Did the fire/dark tank leave the team, replaced by an ice tank? Don't look now, but the mobs in this mission seem more resistant to slows and cold.  Something along those lines. Or use 
"Untyped" damage. I've no idea, but to have the same Frostfire mission, where the challenges encountered vary with team composition automatically - beyond spawn size & level, that'd be interesting. 

[LynxNordique]

22 hours ago, Aurora_Girl said:

Anti-Matter's Space Station. 

 

Well, unfortunatly, there are no loose ends here. *Spoiler alert* Anti-Matter sacrificed himself against the Hamidon, by using himself and his damaged suit (Following the Keyes Trial) as a nuke against the Hamidon. This was quite epic and sad at the same time. He did die a Hero, at the end, despite his rage and his overwhelming feeling of being let down. So the space station is pretty muched an abandonned place now... 😞

[Bionic_Flea]

More Spoilers . . . maybe . . .

 

Spoiler

Didn't Praetorian Clockwork King take up residence in Keyes Space Station?

 

[LynxNordique]

Vanesssa DeVore, arc needs to be modernized. The old type of missions of the arc doesn't do justice to that complexe Archvilain that is a Rikti war hero and do truly care about her female followers (not the male tho... ). The fact that there are now 2 versions of her on pimal earth (one flesh and blood and one in a mask) and the fact that she is most probably Penny Yin's mother (as it is the case on praetoria) could also be explored.

 

*In front of a kneeled down and defeated Penelope Yin.*

 

"Penny, I am your mother"

 

"NOOOOOOOOO"

 

*Penny jumping into the void and holding on to something at the last minute.* 😁

 

Maybe Vanessa could also have a redemption Arc.

Edited December 15, 2021 by LynxNordique

[Aurora_Girl]

40 minutes ago, LynxNordique said:

 

Well, unfortunatly, there are no loose ends here. *Spoiler alert* Anti-Matter sacrificed himself against the Hamidon, by using himself and his damaged suit (Following the Keyes Trial) as a nuke against the Hamidon. This was quite epic and sad at the same time. He did die a Hero, at the end, despite his rage and his overwhelming feeling of being let down. So the space station is pretty muched an abandonned place now... 😞

 

Right...so how is a presumably nuclear-powered space station manned by an incorporeal psychic robot *not* a loose end that begs its own set of arcs, again?

[srmalloy]

15 hours ago, ZorkNemesis said:

Eagle Eye's arc left a couple unresolved plot hooks.  What was Veles going to be showing to Atta, and how was Atta going to take advantage of it to bring the Trolls to new heights?

I always figured that Atta wanted to see Velez's Superadine production facilities so that he would learn where they were, intending to roll over it with a force of Trolls to get rid of Velez and bring Superadine production under his control, reversing the drain on the Trolls' resources from having to buy it.

[cranebump]

35 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

I always figured that Atta wanted to see Velez's Superadine production facilities so that he would learn where they were, intending to roll over it with a force of Trolls to get rid of Velez and bring Superadine production under his control, reversing the drain on the Trolls' resources from having to buy it.

 

Bit of a tangent, but:

 

I always assumed the final confrontation with Veles marked the end of that particular enterprise. I assumed as much when tied in one of my AE arcs (Match Point) to the Eagle Eye story by positing that the Skulls were working for an more powerful entity intent on taking over the entire 'dine trade (to inevitably fund a personal vendetta vs. Kirk Cage). In my connected version, the PC doesn't actually take on the escaped Veles, but instead targets the fund source, coordinating their activities with EE's TF. Thus, the entire enterprise collapses when Veles's lab is burnt down as the real big bad (in the AE story) is defeated.

 

No lab. No funding source. The whole thing just ends there. 

 

Unless, of course, I want to somehow drag all this into the Leviathan storyline I previously scripted.:-)

Edited December 14, 2021 by cranebump

[Coyotedancer]

I have to admit... as fond as I am of Scirocco and as much fun as it would be to see the guy get an honest shot at "going hero", I'm very, VERY wary of anyone actually trying to write that arc and to make all of the changes that would have to come from it. I just don't have the unquestioning faith in The Powers That Be that many of you guys seem to. Not when it comes to messing with a favorite, anyway. (And to be completely fair, I didn't have much faith in the old devs getting that right, either. When I read about the plan? I was honestly kind-of glad that they DIDN'T get the chance to do it. Odds are it would have ended up a ham-fisted mess, and I would have hated to see Scir basically taken out of the game as an active contact.) 

 

What *do* I want to see, though?

 

I want us to go to the moon, 

[A Cat]

1 hour ago, Coyotedancer said:

And to be completely fair, I didn't have much faith in the old devs getting that right, either.

I'm still mad they had some literally who kill off Statesman and Sister Psyche. 

[Eva Destruction]

5 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

I have to admit... as fond as I am of Scirocco and as much fun as it would be to see the guy get an honest shot at "going hero", I'm very, VERY wary of anyone actually trying to write that arc and to make all of the changes that would have to come from it. I just don't have the unquestioning faith in The Powers That Be that many of you guys seem to. Not when it comes to messing with a favorite, anyway. (And to be completely fair, I didn't have much faith in the old devs getting that right, either. When I read about the plan? I was honestly kind-of glad that they DIDN'T get the chance to do it. Odds are it would have ended up a ham-fisted mess, and I would have hated to see Scir basically taken out of the game as an active contact.) 

 

Yep, that AMA just showed that it was actually a good thing they never got to do all the story arcs they wanted to.  Some of their plans were...really dumb.  Like having Cole pretend to be Statesman because humanity needs a leader against the Coming Storm, that was probably the dumbest.  Yes, let's hand a former fascist dictator a cult of personality on a silver platter, that'll end well.  The redemption sotrylines that did make it into the game aren't much better.  Paretorian Percy Winkley kills the entire Midnight club in a fit of incel rage?  Well he helped us that one time, so all is forgiven!  Anti-Matter helped uphold a tyrannical regime and tried to nuke a whole city in a fit of incel rage?  Well he helped us that one time so he's a hero now!  For player characters it has to be that easy because it would be a lot of added work to establish that hero contacts might work with you but they don't entirely trust you and they certainly don't forgive you for all the bad stuff you did as a villain, but for NPCs it's just lazy.

 

So with that precedent, I'd fully expect any Scirocco redemption sotryline they came up with to be wrapped up in four missions, with a "thank you for your service, all is forgiven, welcome to the Freedom Phalanx" at the end.  We'd all know he's not going to forgive himself for all the bad stuff he did, and having him help the heroes makes practical sense, but I wouldn't have expected the writing to reflect that.