SlickRiptide

No. The developers don't want us to have that kind of information.

That's only somewhat hyperbolic.

There is no official canon repository at all. The closest you can get is the backgrounders on the official website, under "Game Info".

The best unofficial repository is paragon wiki. The devs have stated that they use it themselves to "remind themselves" what they have revealed of the games background.

The problem with Paragon Wiki is that most of the lore in it is unsourced and basically apocryphal. It's true that most of is taken verbatim from the game, which could be sourced if someone put their mind to it, but a significant amount is also just personal opinion and conjecture from the forums or is based on actual redname statements that are now unverifiable and so apocryphal.

There are various posts by rednames throughout the forums, many of them now deleted for age or for board upgrades. The most useful of these is the Canon Fodder thread.

The long and short of it is that the devs don't want you to know the full background of the game because that would constrain them when it comes to rewriting portions of the background to fit their latest ideas. Given that they totally remade Praetoria and that Matt Miller is on record saying that he'd be a poor boss if he forced his newest employees to allow current continuity to constrain them from realizing their own ideas, I really can't see how publishing the full background of the game would be any different a situation than we already have, development-wise.

That might just be my frustration talking. I've been griping about the way the devs hoard the lore for years now and it's a tune that has no doubt grown tiresome.

In any event - the short answer is "No, there is no such lore repository or guide to the future of the game." Paragon Wiki is the closest non-official equivalent.

While I won't argue with this statement,given that time has proven it to be basically true, that is not what GR was advertised to be.

It might as well never have been developed at all as far as I am concerned. The whole business is basically a big bait and switch.

No, I actually didn't intend to imply any such thing. I meant exactly what I said - The overworld exists for flavor and little else. That flavor is important to some players; less so to others.

For what it's worth, I agree with a lot of your points, Sam, but then again that's because I "grew up" with the old game the same as you did so it's what I think of as "the game".

People who yakk on about "City of Heroes 2" don't seem to realize that we're already playing "City of Heroes 2". We're not playing the same game that we played eight years ago except in the most general sense. That's why legacy content can be seen as a poor representation of the "real game" as I might take some rather large liberties to paraphrase Nethergoat's position to be.

The old content IS obsolete. The fact that a few people like it is not a recommendation except that people can get some variety if they desire to work their way up instead of power-level through Death From Below.

The developers purposely set it up this way. It's not as if they went through all that beta testing somehow remaining oblivious to the feedback about the speed of the lower level game, only to be blindsided and surprised when it went live and everyone leaped into the twenties and thirties. They made it this way on purpose. They intended to make King's Row and The Hollows effectively obsolete and they intended that primary path of advancement into the upper levels would lead through Steel Canyon and maybe through Faultline.

If you enjoy doing King's Row and taking your time, that's great. I enjoy it too, but the plain fact is that the appeal is to the old-timers. I would be unsurprised to learn that there are large numbers of post-Freedom players who have never set foot into King's Row outside of doing Montague Castanella's missions to cure the Lost. Those same people are focused on getting to the next mission door. They aren't focused on walking around the world and looking at things. They mostly don't know or care if they get ambushed. If they weren't already trained by other MMO's to follow the carrot to the next reward, the new streamlined version of CoH is teaching it to them.

I'm not calling for anything to be eliminated or changed. I'm merely commenting on that state of the game. I don't think that one way is "better" than the other, even though I enjoy the old game much more than most of what I've seen of the new game. (Admittedly, I still have to visit the new Dark Astoria.)

Obsolescence doesn't imply that anything should be done about the obsoleted content, unless it's a world-wide change that is designed to make the entire world relevant again. Otherwise, I'm perfectly fine with leaving the legacy content to the legacy players. I'm one of them, myself, after all and like you I'm not keen on seeing stuff I've grown attached to be destroyed in the name of questionable "progress".

Does this explanation mean that you agree that the expression of history in the game has become untenably unwieldy? I'm not sure what the takeaway is supposed to be, otherwise, unless, GG, you've somehow acquired the notion that I've failed to grasp the time mechanics of the game despite having been around here for eight years...

I normally don't QFT, but, well; QFT.

Exqueeze me? Where did you get the idea that this is General Forum Belief or that there is anything in the game that supports this theory? Less confrontationally stated, "What in-game lore is there that you think is suggestive of such a relationship?"

Handing her Excalibur is not such lore, in and of itself. We don't know the circumstances of that exchange, that I've ever heard, anyway.

As far as the copy-and-paste retconning, I'm sorry to say that I don't really expect better than that these days.

^^^ This

There's a point where criticism (or vocal praise, for that matter) loses its credibility. That point is roughly at the stage where you see the same people repeating the same opinions in most every thread that brings up a particular topic.

_Who Will Die?_ has been hashed into very fine hash at this point. There's little to be gained by jumping into a praise thread and detailing all of the reasons it should not be considered praise-worthy, when those details have already been pointed out many times in multiple threads in the past.

In the end, it's a subjective experience. If someone enjoyed it then they're entitled to share their good feelings about the story without becoming a target for nay-saying, when the nay-saying is mostly just a repeat of previous nay-saying.

The devs know how the regulars feel by now. Hearing from new people who try the content and other new people who respond to that appraisal is what they need. If some people think it's good content (and there were plenty who did) then it's alright to let them celebrate their enjoyment. That won't somehow erase the dissatisfaction on the other side of the scale unless the devs are self-serving egomaniacs and I would not describe either Matt or Melissa as such.

I say this as someone who pretty much /facepalmed at 85% of SSA1. However, I had my say about it and behaving like a broken record isn't going to make a better impression on any Powers That Be than they already have, assuming that anything I said already even made an impression in the first place.

It's okay for people to like the SSA.

The Hollows a bit of an experiment that had mixed success.

The story is the search for the Cavern of Transcendence. Unlocking the Cavern trial and then organizing a group to defeat it is supposed to be the point of the whole zone.

The problem, if problem you deem it, is that you don't KNOW that going in. All you know is that something awful happened to Eastgate and the Trolls had something to do with it. It doesn't help that the initial missions aren't about the cavern at all, but about trying to reclaim Eastgate from the gangs. You don't really even get into the meat of the whole thing until you reach the last contacts.

The Hollows is also another exercise in environmental story-telling. This was done to great effect in Croatoa. It's less well done in The Hollows, but that's mostly because you can't actually learn much of anything about the motivations of the Trolls and CoT from their actions in Eastgate. Mostly, the gangs, including the Trolls, are just standing around being gangsta. Watching the Trolls, you can figure out that they are causing the mayhem with their home-made bombs. Watching the CoT, which should be the big clue, you mostly just get that they are "looking for something" which is too non-specific, given that they're ALWAYS looking for magical artifacts and junk. The Coralax are just a mystery - I suppose they were intended to be a teaser for CoV or something, but they are entirely unexplained and they serve no purpose except to make you wonder what they are doing there.

Then there's the Seaview Project, which you learn about via exploration badges. Hopefully, sometime during the last eight years someone remembered they were down there and rescued them. I always hoped that the Coralax incursion was going to be related to that but it seems that it wasn't meant to be.

Most of the specific info about the Cavern itself is in its own trial. If you outlevel the zone and leave, you never learn about it. If you DO learn about it and its special mechanics that require a full group of people acting in synch, then you are likely to just skip it anyway as too much trouble.

This is only exacerbated by the speed at which the modern low-level game passes. Barring a deliberate decision to go to the Hollows and do your leveling, there's simply no reason at all to even set foot in the place any more, story or no.

So, yes, there's a story; or rather, a series of stories that sort of lead into the main story. It just isn't entirely obvious that the story exists because there is not an overarching story driving all of the sub-stories like there is in Croatoa.

Don't even get me started on that. I prefer to just enjoy the calibre of the writing of the Aaron Thierry arc and ignore the stupidity of the whole Arachnos invading Paragon City part of the story. When the developers write dumb stories because "Hey, it's comic books and comic book villains do that!" and players defend it because "Hey, it's comic book land and we shouldn't have expectations that our game would exceed the lowest levels of schlocky comic book plotting!" then there really isn't much you can say about it beyond /facepalm.

Actually, no.

Not that Venture needs any defense from me, since he's perfectly capable of defending himself should he see a need (and frankly, the need is questionable) but if you're new around here and you're judging him with the apparently knee-jerk reaction that you're describing then you're misjudging him.

That's all I have to say about that. Venture isn't everyone's cup of tea by a long shot, but he's not a troll. If you keep an open mind when you read him, I think you MIGHT come to recognize that. Maybe not. As I said, he's not everyone's cup of tea, and quite a few people find him unpalatable but that doesn't make his criticisms any less valid. For quite a few people, the real problem is not what he says, it's HOW he says it. "mean-spirited" is in the eye of the beholder, but he seldom says whatever is on his mind due to some desire to harm or step on another person.

Now, if you feel that everyone ought to have criticism handed to them with a dose of padding to soften the blow and artificial courtesy to make it taste less bitter, then yes, you might not like being on the receiving end of Venture's criticisms. That's a different thing than being attacked because the person just gets jollies out of attacking you, however.

In the end, the Ignore function is your friend. You don't like a forumite? Mute them and your forum experience becomes enjoyable again. I say that without a hint of irony - I've earned a few /ignores in my time, despite having certain other forumites commend me for being fairly reasonable about most things. Different strokes for different folks.

Except that's not what they were supposed to be. They were supposed to be an altruistic alternative to Hero Corp, and Hero Corp has never been portrayed as anything like a PMC. Hero Corp is literally heroes for hire. They're not mercenaries and no lore exists that portrays them as such. If there's anything shady about them, it's that they attract as much super-crime as the mundane crime that they prevent, with an implication that they could be creating the super-crime themselves in order to justify their exorbitant contracts with their customers.

Freedom Corp's mission was to be early responders in the case of disasters and large-scale emergencies, much like a super powered National Guard. Training is, or was, their primary function before CoV, which is why they have offices in an each of the early-to-mid-game zones. By level 30 or so you've outgrown them, and they don't appear any more.

Blame it on Ms. Liberty or just blame it on whoever decided that villains needed a force to reckon with and that force needed a familiar name attached to it. Either way, someone perverted Freedom Corp's mandate and turned them into something like a PMC. It's ironic that an organization created by heroes like Statesman to show that commercial interests should not sully the purity of altruistic heroics done for the public good, would find itself sullied by political interests instead by the descendants of those very heroes.

No they aren't and Sefu Tendaji is the best example of that. In fact, the whole point of that story is that you find that at least some Longbow are worthy of respect despite your differences with them.

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To put it bluntly, the actions of Longbow in that story are the sanctioned policies of Longow leadership, not the actions of a "rogue" element.
</edit>

Longbow itself is something of a rogue element as it's portrayed in the missions. They've never been anything BUT fanatical, arrogant, and self-important. Tendaji was the exception. Given Longbow's tactics, attitude and questionable legality they are borderline villainy in my book, even if they're deluded into considering themselves heroes.

Is that Kathleen Turner as Serial Mom? That's almost more disturbing than the zombie avatar.

If the heroes and villains were intended to be entirely separate and never interact then I'd think it would be easier and safer (from a programming perspective) to just go the Ouroboros route and have two separate but apparently similar versions of the zone, each with its own orientation.

I personally would rather have a single zone that catered to both factions and just deal with the immersion problems of cats and dogs comingling. Similar immersion problems in Wow have never prevented their PvE servers from being far and away more popular than their world PvP servers are, and I think you'd find that to be true in most games that feature a choice between a PvP and a PvE environment, even if the game is ostensibly a PvP game.

*snerkle*

There actually could be a weird, surreal satisfaction in that idea if it turned out in a year that, in fact, every horrible event in the collective stories turned out to be a step in a grand plan to achieve something entirely mundane, yet the entire sequence of earth-shattering events was, in fact, the only possible way to achieve exactly what she was after. Megan turns out to be the ultimate mastermind, heh.