SlickRiptide

Well, the biggest strike against both of our interpretations of the picture is that the line running down the center of the uniform would make the most sense as a zipper; even to terminating halfway above her groin, like a wetsuit.

But that's not the lore of the game. The lore is that Statesman is stronger than anyone. He could be stronger yet, except that he resists the call of the Well (which gets him direspected by every NPC that has anything to do with Incarnates). If he WANTED to, he could be a god. He just chooses to forgo that opportunity.

Game mechanics don't equate to story and lore. If they did, Recluse would be sweeping streets and your villain would be running Arachnos.

I'm going to agree with this. Those don't look clearly like anything but skin. I'd be pretty surprised if that's Penny. It's a long ways from tomboy teen to that costume.

The most interesting thing to me is her belt. It sort of resembles a whip wrapped around her waist.

Have you read the interviews with Matt, or the Intrepid Informer #17? He's the one saying that they couldn't come up with an appropriate way to do it. I'm not making it up and putting words in his mouth.

What's changed?

Policy, for one. If it wasn't already obvious, Matt has stated clearly in his latest interviews that one of their current goals is to create a game environment where there are no NPC's that are stronger than the PC's. Removing Statesman is part of the implementation of that policy.

Technology for another. The mission creation and cut-scene creation tools allow them to tell a deeper story now than they would have been able to tell six years ago or even two years ago. The death of your flagship character requires that you try to tell as deep a story as you can manage.

Motivation for a third. The launch of Freedom meant the whole game was being shaken down to its foundations. Considering the attitude displayed towards the Statesman character in the past, it would have been surprising if someone had NOT raised their hand at a meeting and asked "Why don't we REALLY shake things up?"

That's just off the top of my head. If you really want to know what changed, maybe you should ask Matt.

Well, let's examine that a moment - If Paragon Studios has finally "left the nest" then it means they are finally divested of the last stigma of Cryptic. They are "adult" now, and fully running their own show their own way.

This is a statement that Statesman, the character, was holding them back in some fashion. Now, if you can come up with some decent rationale for why that should be the case, I'd love to hear it,but so far the only implied rationale is "he was part of the Cryptic legacy and we don't want to be associated with that legacy".

This is only confirmed when you know from Matt himself that they had discussions about offing him at launch of Paragon Studios. The only apparent reason is that he represented Jack Emmert and, by extension, his legacy.

The fact that they chose to keep him around just shows they had good business acumen. It doesn't make the negative feelings towards the character any less negative. If a super-villain decides to kill a hero, but he lets the hero live until the "time is right", perhaps even aiding the hero in his endeavors occasionally, we don't question the malice of the villain when he finally destroys the hero in the end. If anything, we admire his patience.

Fine, quibble about malicious if you want to. I didn't choose that word; I just went with the context of "active dislike for the character". You can't really be malicious to a fictional character that you own, after all.

However, you CAN be emotional in your motivations towards a fictional character. Statesman represented a legacy of a period in time that they no longer wanted to be associated with. That's why they discussed killing him. That's why independent sources talk about the desire to kill him. That's why they ultimately revisited the subject and finally DID kill him.

The fact that they held off doing it for so long doesn't make it any less "malicious". It just means that they had the business acumen to put off their emotional satisfaction until such time as they could get the most business mileage from carrying out the murder of their flagship character. A really classic case of comic book villainy, if you ask me.

I've no doubt that when they put the final nail in Statesman's coffin that there was a toast made in his honor and to the success of his murder by the staff of Paragon Studios. The decision to WAIT was a business decision. The decision to ACT was an emotional one. You can decide for yourself whether that makes it "malicious" or not.

It does make it admirably villainous.

The first place I saw it outside of this website was at Massively.

It just means that they knew better than to bite off their nose to spite their face.

This ^^^.

The conversion from RCS to RWZ was a retcon, not a progression in the story like New Overbrook. If you like, it was the realization of what it should have been all along.

The problem in giving you the information that you seek is that it doesn't exist. We can all imagine all sorts of things but in the end, they're just our imaginings. Whether you're talking Cryptic or Paragon Studios, the company policy has pretty much always been to hand out only as much lore as the players needed to address whatever content was most recently added. They guard the rest pretty jealously so that they have as much leeway as possible in creating content or redefining the lore to fit their purposes.

If you want to see the RWZ conversion as a historical milestone, then it's simple enough to imagine that the ship in the RCS was quiescent and had been for a few years. Therefore, Vanguard had quarantined White Plains but otherwise left the policing of the area to the US military. Rikti sorties were still occuring all over the world; not just in Paragon City where we heroes encountered them. Vanguard focused its attention on dealing with those incursions.

When new activity was detected and the Dark Watcher suddenly reappeared with dire warnings and with the ability to "see" that they were re-opening the portal to their own dimension (perhaps the opening of that portal was an event linked to the Watcher's arrival on Primal Earth; a beacon that led him home), and then certain Rikti pacifists also appeared with warnings about an imminent offensive by the warmongers, they went into high gear and White Plains became priority number one.

However, as I said, it's all supposition. There's no official lore on the subject.

"The last vestiges of the Old Republic have been swept away."

You're suggesting that they could write Freedom Phalanx content and just ignore the leader of the Phalanx as if he didn't exist? Never mind that as the flagship character, he'd be the one that the villains would want most to beat down.

Even now, he's still enough of a flagship character that they plan to leave him on the box. It's a business decision, and the decision to feature him in the game's content instead of sidelining him completely was a business decision. There's no disconnect here unless you want to just ignore business considerations when talking about the game development.

What's weird about it? They saw Statesman as integral to the game experience and so they tolerated him and used him appropriately. "When Paragon [Studios] was first founded, we discussed the idea of a story of killing off Statesman, but ultimately decided that the timing wasn't right." Intrepid Informer #17.

There's nothing weird about that. The decision to do it now was not a frivolous one. It was based on the game reaching a milestone [the launch of Freedom] and attempting to reach a broader audience. IMO, it was based on a decision that having a NPC such as Statesman who was inherently more powerful than all of the PC's was bad for business. The timing became "right" and they acted accordingly. First they neutered him, then they eliminated him.

It's perfectly understandable. The fact that they went ahead and used him in content that was appropriate for his use before that is not some negation of the fact that they preferred that he had left along with Jack Emmert.

You'd be wrong, and Matt makes that perfectly clear with his declaration that the game has finally "left the nest". Likewise from his Intrepid Informer article where he makes it clear that killing Statesman was a topic that came up more than once over the years. Additionally, I've seen a facebook posting by an ex-dev who flat-out said that Matt had been looking for an excuse for years.

Statesman was terminated with prejudice. Whether they did it in a "good" way or not is up to your individual tastes, but make no mistake that the current devs considered Statesman to be baggage that they wanted rid of.

What you've posted there is surprisingly similar to what Matt Miller described as the basic process of "crafting" an archnemesis and then putting him/her/it into the Zig, and rinsing and repeating, until the day that there's a prison break and your entire Rogue's Gallery comes after you in a kind of parallel to the alignment system's morality mission.

That system never got implemented (and the fact that we never heard of it again sort of implies that the design document went with Cryptic to That Other Game) but I have to think that Matt must revisit the idea in his head every so often.

I like the idea of your villain plot template. I'd probably play redside more often if it featured something like that.

City of Heroes, in its conception, was a Superhero game. It was about a genre, not a medium. Comic books are just one medium for expression of the genre. Film, novels, television and other video games are part of the expression of that genre.

The world that Rick Dakken created and that Jack Emmert shepherded into existence had more in common with George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards novels than it had with comic books directly. The intent was to envision what a world of superheroes would logically be like. That's why we have an entire history that covers things like the Citizen Crimefighting Act and hero licenses and other trappings that make the world ring true instead of it being simply a world full of costumed vigilantes. That's why there are war walls to hem in the original zone borders instead of the zones just magically being blocked by invisible borders. That's why the original stories tried to treat the villains as mostly three-dimensional, except in the cases of groups like the Freakshow and the Trolls that were inherently two-dimensional and intended to be comedy relief as much as they were intended to be opposition to the heroes.

Nowadays, we have Lord Recluse twirling his mustache and trying to "take over Paragon City" while the meteor storm has things destabilized, as if all it takes is for a villain to get Mary-Anne, er, I mean the Mayor, to sign on the dotted line and deed the ranch, er, the city over to him.

The current shepherds of the story don't see themselves as shepherds, don't care about any story that they didn't create, and they don't see the game as anything more than a virtual comic book.

That's why I don't really get all that concerned about the story any more, except to note when it's really ridiculous. There hasn't been a "story guy" since Arctic Sun who gave a damn about the lore and the current developers put story as a priority very low on the totem pole behind new game systems and bells and whistles.

Certainly the game has been reduced to that, but it wasn't always the case.

Welcome to the Shadow Shard.

I do find it rather amusing that you seem to be saying "I'm god-like and I'm losing! Something's wrong with the game!"

If you are face-planting repeatedly then it's a sign that you need to turn difficulty slider down, not complain, "I steamroll the rest of the game so I should steamroll these guys too."

Doh! Color me embarrassed...