SlickRiptide

It's entirely possible that I missed it due to all of the annoying Flash popups in the PDF, but I didn't see any reference at all to a summer event. It looked like it was just a continuation of the interview previously posted on the website.

"maybe...", "probably...", "imagine if...", "I assumed...", "anyone in his situation would...", speculate, guess, infer, deduce.

If the story was complete we wouldn't be doing all of this guesswork and writing our own personalized version of the story in our heads.

If Paragon Studios intends to sell me SSA's as a virtual good, then future SSA's had better be complete stories and offer some sort of tangible game value and replay value. As it stands now, I own SSA 1-1 and that's the only chapter I'll ever need to own since buying extra chapters doesn't give me any more of a reward than owning that one chapter gives me.

I assume you've already experienced Cimerora and the RWZ before.

Eden and Crey's Folly are worth visiting once or twice for the ambience if you've avoided them previously. If you've never done an Eden task force, that's worth joining. If your character is a Praetorian you can use the experience to convince yourself that Primal Earth really does need Emperor Cole's guidance. heh.

Warburg is a good place to visit. You can get the Rocketeer badge and some nifty temp powers at the same time. Who doesn't enjoy carrying the launch code for an orbital nuclear warhead in his back pocket? Sure, it's PvP, but even on Freedom it's a pretty quiet zone. On a less populated server you could pretty much treat it like any other zone.

If you find that PvP isn't as bad as you thought it might be, then give Recluse's Victory a gander.

Is it safe to assume that you have done all of the Ouroboros task forces?

I voted C as the most Buck Rogers-like (love the rings!) but I would kill to have that chest detail from A with it.

I voted B. I find A to actually be a bit futuristic looking while C is too simple for my tastes.

Am I alone in seeing that this is a limited time offer, including a "Cupid Bow" because "Roman" = "Romance" = "Valentine's Day"?

If you want to blame marketing, blame them for thinking that it would be an obvious play on words.

I have at least one character that would benefit from owning the Roman Pack, so I'll probably end up buying it.

My biggest critique of the story is that it's too rushed. That may sound like a "You've got to be kidding me" thing to say about a story that's progressing at one chapter a month, but the frequency of publication is not really the problem.

It's that the story is all payoff and no buildup.

The biggest culprit is Statesman's final thoughts. Maybe they WOULD be sweet and tender and tear-jerking, except that we never actually have any build-up where we get to know Statesman well enough to appreciate that he feels responsible for the entire world as if only he can save it. We never see that he goes off alone to find and face Wade because of his fear that whatever enemy would purposely bait him like that is one that might put the entire Phalanx at risk. We don't see any of the planning and manipulation with a mysterious hand behind events that leaves us wondering what is about to happen and who is behind it. (Maybe more accurate to say that we don't get enough of it.) We don't see Alexis Cole-Duncan meeting with the Phalanx and/or the FBSA and acknowledging the danger but choosing to walk into it anyway because the potential reward is worth the risk.

Basically, all of that "stuff" that people keep inventing to explain why the story has progressed this way when people complain about the holes. We get all of the payoff, the climaxes of the story with none of the buildup of suspense that normally precedes any of them.

That's the biggest problem I have with people who say "Oh, just shut up and suspend your disbelief already!" We're not talking about suspension of belief, we're talking about story-telling.

In an ideal world, this story would have weekly episodes and episode 1 of "Who will die?" would have been the climax of the whole first arc. Statesman's death would be the climax of arc 2. The rise of Godlike Wade would be arc 3. Throughout all of it, we would be seeing the whole story and getting the buildup of suspense that would fill the holes, show us the motivations, give us a reason to "suspend disbelief", show us some kind of growth or at least expansion of the characters involved.

As it stands, we have to imagine all of the substance of the story, ourselves. When we are left with that, we're left with 10,000 different versions of the story and a lot of hand-waving.

The Phalanx appears incompetent because there isn't any story to justify why any of the events are happening. We just get a lot of Kodak moments. "We'll have a battle of law vs chaos by having you fight Manticore!" "We'll have you fight inside of Sister Psyche's mind! Cool!" "We'll have you 'investigate' Wade's lair!" "We'll have you see Statesman's last thoughts!"

It's just one event after another instead of a cohesive narrative, IMO.

Maybe that's the most they had time for. If so, I hope that they take that lesson away from this experience and spend the time and resources to really make the next SSA be something completely fleshed out and worth experiencing as a story.

Let's just say that if my main hero had freedom to act in any way he desired and he was standing beside Justin Sinclair watching as Malaise apparently murdered Alexis Cole in front of us, Malaise would not have left the the Isles alive. I have little doubt that Sinclair would backup whatever story my hero concocted to explain the accident that befell Malaise.

Oh, and Marshall Blitz is apparently toppled as head of state of Warburg? We disabled the missiles and arrested Blitz. Where does that leave Warburg?

I've mostly tried to avoid critiquing the SSA chapters because I know where that road leads for someone as verbose as myself.

Litany of failure aside, I do have one rather big complaint and it ties into what Sam has been saying.

It's this: The rationale of the people (i.e., not just people in this particular thread) who review the arc positively boils down rather consistently to this: "The heroes are not themselves, and so they fail repeatedly. That makes them human, not chumps."

They're not themselves. One or more overcome with grief. One or more are blinded by anger. One or more their defense overloaded. One or more are cocky instead of cautious.

For any of a half-dozen reasons, they are not themselves. Except for my hero, of course. She is the only one keeping her head and wits about her, and that's why everyone depends on her and dotes on her every action despite the fact that she's failing just as badly as the signature heroes.

Yeah, fine. I get it. We're the stars now, and if we had any doubt about it, this arc puts it to rest.

A story where the root cause of the heroes' plight is that they are all behaving abnormally is a story that does not appeal to me or make me feel satisfied with the writing.

To answer your question, Sam, we no longer have any ideals. They are bad business, or so someone decided who apparently listened to the vocal complaints in that department long enough to become convinced that thousands of new F2P players would feel the same way.

You can't just say "Oh, they're human. They're flawed. That makes them more interesting." No, it doesn't. It makes them boring and unworthy of respect.

These are signature heroes. When I read a Retief novel, I don't read about yet another story where Retief bamboozles the diplomatic corps, deduces the fly in the ointment, wins the great diplomatic coup single-handedly, and once again gets all the girls, booze, and prestige while showing up the diplomats for the boring, hidebound, bureaucrat that they all are and then think to myself "Not again. If only Retief had a fatal weakness and he actually lost a gambit once in a while." I read Retief stories because that's the kind of story I WANT to read. If I wanted gritty realistic diplomacy stories I'd go read some real life diplomat's memoirs.

When I want to play a super hero I want to play a story where the heroes act like, well, heroes and not like dense, incompetent chumps who are too blinded by their inadequacies to see the truth that I took about five seconds to see. (Oh,and Manticore showing up with police officers? This is the guy who has his own private mercenary army, right? Who decided they should be rogue law enforcement officers instead his own highly-trained and unquestionably loyal Wyvern troops?)

I'm not saying that heroes should never have flaws, but for flaws to make the hero more interesting then they have to be interesting flaws. So far, this story is not giving us anything interesting. We're not learning about the heroes, or seeing them grow through adversity, or seeing any other redeeming feature of this continual parade of fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

All I'm getting is "Crap, I can't believe that happened! Good thing YOU were there or it would have been a lot worse! I'm so glad that YOU are here to protect us. YOU are the one thing that SuperBad fears. I wish that every hero was just like YOU."

Yeah, thanks. I'll remember that when Alexis Cole's birthday rolls around.

I didn't ask to be the most important character in the game world and as a player I think it's a mistake to send the game in that direction. I don't pretend that my views on that subject are representative of any kind of majority. It might be that the vast majority of players are that self-absorbed that they can't stand having a fictional character be stronger than their own hero. I remain unconvinced of the truth of that statement but I could be wrong.

In any case, I think it's a bad precedent for the game but the die is set and there's really no turning back on that policy any more.