SlickRiptide

Honestly, this is the thing that I really do not understand.

First, you make an episodic story and instead of an epic title like "Fall of the Freedom Phalanx" you call it "Who will die?". Instead of roping people in, you give away the main hook of the story and make it your selling point. It's as if you're saying flat out that titillation is a higher priority than story-telling or the solving of a mystery.

Second, you spoil the answer to the question gratuitously asked in the title ON PURPOSE and dispense with any sense of mystery or discovery and certainly any potential shock from learning that the victim is, in fact, the head of the Hero Pantheon. You justify this by saying "It's the way he dies that matters, not the fact of his death." and then you have him walk into a trap and die like a newb, with no exposition before or after to explain WHY he did that.

What kind of marketing is that?

Tell me again why I should buy the full story once all seven episodes are available? There aren't even any in-game bonuses to justify the purchase beyond one bonus mission complete reward.

I hope that the next SSA has a real marketing person put in charge of managing the project and that a real writer is put in charge of developing the back story and producing some out-of-game prose to support the in-game scripted action. I consider this a vain hope, frankly, because I believe that the dev staff are actually happy with doing things the way they have done them, but I hold out hope nonetheless.

Heh. "You keep saying that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

Honestly. Just look at the GvE map of Paragon City and then look at any map of the Eastern USA. You'll see in a few seconds that it's not a problem that can be solved like that. It would have to go the other way and sink a whole bunch of land. The exception MIGHT be that Narragansett Bay gets filled in and Providence gets relocated or expands 20 or 30 miles closer to the coast instead of along the inland waterway it currently occupies.

As for the earthquake that revealed Oranbega, I'm not aware of any lore that says it expanded the land mass of the eventual Rhode Island. I'd be interested in seeing that lore.

The bottom line is that Paragon City can't be an analog of Providence without doing more than just "suspending disbelief". It's a mistake, plain and simple, for Jack Emmert and/or Sean Fish or the other original devs to have proposed Providence as the analog of Paragon City.

Does it really matter in the big picture? No, not really. It IS amusing that so many people defend the mistake with hand-waving about "suspension of disbelief" instead of just admitting that they screwed up.

The silly thing is that the map works if Paragon City was located in Massachusetts. I suppose you can just as easily believe that the state borders are different in Primal Earth and that Paragon City is on the real east coast, as believe that an earthquake created a new east coast that hosts the City of Heroes.

It's interesting that you brought up E&B, Cap, because the E&B route to story-telling would have really been quite the opposite of what we have in the SSA. E&B would have REQUIRED player participation in order to advance the story. The over-arching events might still have been pre-ordained but the specific details would have been influenced by player action and the timing of those events would have depended upon the progress of the players in advancing the plot.

However - that doesn't really work for a self-contained story in which you want to sell the story as a kind of participatory novel and have it be replayable.

The SSA is an experiment along the lines of the original Calvin Scott Task Force experiment. It's too bad that they chose such a significant event as their first foray into this kind of story-telling, but hopefully they'll learn any number of lessons from the experience and the following SSA's will be an improvement over this one.

Technically speaking, the whining is about people defending the writing with the phrase "suspension of disbelief".

As to whether the writing was good, bad, or indifferent, I'll just reiterate that I think they did the best they could with the tools at their disposal. The thing went down about the way I expected it to go down; whether or not I would have done it that way myself is something of a moot point.

Well, since I said as much just a few posts upstream before the big reveal, I'll have to disagree on this point. I got the target wrong. I expected him to be pulling a Doctor Doom on the Well, rather than on Rularuu, but the modus operandi is pretty much what I figured. See the old Marvel mega-crossover, Secret War, for the archetypical example.

The people living in eastern Massachusetts might beg to differ; never mind what a world without Plymouth, Cape Cod, Dartmouth, probably Boston, and any number of lesser-known cities and places would be like. On the plus side, if you let that slide then I suppose you can just as easily hand-wave that Nantucket, the Vineyards, and parts of the Cape Cod peninsula are actually the land mass of the Rogue Isles. As long as we're letting the USA map be redrawn willy-nilly then we might as well go whole hog.

Oh, pish tosh. I'm becoming rather tired of this recent bid to quiet any kind of dissent by categorizing it as someone's inability to "suspend disbelief" and then ridiculing them for their supposed lack of such a skill (since any truly imaginative person is able to use their imagination to fill in the blanks, presumably).

I've refrained from criticizing the arc primarily because I think that they probably did the best they could given the tools they had to work with, the apparent dislike of the dev staff for the character of Statesman, and the requirements that the arc be a certain length. There were a lot of custom locations in that arc and I figure that if some of them end up in the architect that some small good will have come out of the thing.

None of that changes the fact: When I got to the end of the previous arc, the first thing I asked myself was the question that the mission contact asked - Why kill Miss Liberty? Even if he wanted her blood for the ritual, it wasn't necessary to kill her. What was the point. That most obvious answer was that he wanted to force a personal confrontation with Statesman.

If I can figure that out within thirty seconds then I credit Statesman with the brains and experience to figure it out and take appropriate measures ahead of time.

He didn't take those measures. You can rationalize it however you like, but in the end the reason he failed to take them is that the script required that he fail to take them. The requirement to suspend disbelief in such a situation is an implication that something is wrong with the script; otherwise it would be inherently believable.

"Suspending disbelief" is not some wonderful attribute when it really means "deliberately ignoring the weakness in the script". Suspending disbelief is supposed to be about ignoring the things that DON'T matter to the script. "I know that carpets don't fly in the real world but for this fantasy I'll just go with it".

When the script requires its characters to behave in ways that don't make sense, then pointing that out is not some flag that the person doing the pointing has a defective imagination.

There was an implied "To be continued" when Wade monologged about murdering Sister Psyche as his next order of business.

Yeah, there's even a waterway in Northwest Boston that vaguely resembles Liberty Harbor and Baumton Canal. Makes me wonder if they had intended Boston to be the alternate Paragon City at some point. It would have made a lot more sense, (excepting the whole Rogue Islands proximity thing).

I'm going to second this. One of my pet peeves is choosing lower body options and picking the exact color that I used on the upper-body, yet finding that not only does it not match the upper body; NO color option in the palette will match the upper body color.

Well, then I really don't get why Psyche is next on his hit list.

While I agree in principle with your ideas about Recluse, you're sort of expecting him to act like a three-dimensional character and the death of Galaxy City pretty much dispenses with that possibility.

Wade himself has Sister Psyche next on the chopping block though I admit the reasons are opaque to me. He seems to think she's some sort of threat; maybe because she's the analog of Sister Airilia and there's some mystical threat that she poses due to that connection.

Heh. Can you mess up the shape of the ocean without messing up the shape of the land?

Does it really not bother you at all that for Paragon City to exist as described, that you'd have to sink most of Eastern Massachusetts? Providence doesn't actually border the Atlantic Ocean.

It does make one wonder what happened to the Boston Tea Party if there wasn't any Boston.

So much for that hypothesis. I guess we can be happy that Golden Age Statesman had more of a penchant for the soldier of fortune look.

I have this theory that the whole bare-legged-boy-sidekick thing goes back to the days when short pants were literally considered to be children's clothing. Graduating from shorts to trousers was a milestone for a boy of 9-10.

Bare legs (aside from Robin in particular being a stylized circus gymnast or something along those lines) illustrated immaturity in comparison to the fully-clothed mentor hero.

The ****-erotic aspect of things didn't really enter anybody's head until society's mores changed over the course of a few generations.

ObTights: I would be interested in seeing some kind of upper-body tights, with or without long sleeves, that could be combined with a variety of shorts/trunks to give more choice in the men-in-tights and men-in-tights-with-skin arenas. Particularly if the shorts included some kind of girdle; that is, in the sense of "girding your loins", not as in a tummy reducer. I'm thinking of something along the lines of shorts attached to the boxing belt, or maybe a stylized codpiece.

You seriously blame Statesman for all of that? Or are you blaming the writers for some sort of mania that is going to be cured by Statesman's death? Statesman has so little presence in the game proper that I'm raising an eyebrow at the suggestion that he somehow stole so much screen time that everyone else either got developed poorly or never got the chance to develop.

I sure don't see how Statesman dying is going to change the characterization of Longbow or Ms. Liberty. Her mother's death doesn't seem to have fazed her too awfully much.

Here's a really extreme example of what Golden Girl wants to avoid:



The tights in that picture somehow have the ability to outline every contour of Spider Woman's breasts, including her nipples, while simultaneously wrapping itself into every possible contour of her pectorals, her biceps, her triceps, and pretty much every other improbably accented musculature she might have.

Likewise, this example of yet more Spider Woman super cleavage:



That's what you get when the tights are "painted on" and follow every contour even when real fabric would never fall like that; even super-elastic fabric. The suit would have to be built specifically to showcase and support the breasts like that. Not to say that Spider Woman would never showcase herself that way, but the issue is that the current tights in CoH that are basically an overlay over the body are following the same pattern as if it's the natural way for the fabric to fit like that.

This picture of one of the "modern" Wonder Woman styles, on the other hand, shows what Golden Girl says she wants:



This is more representative of how fabric, even elastic fabric, really fits over a female body; even with the still improbably emphasized abdomen that Wonder Woman has there.