SlickRiptide

0-o

Your point being...? No costume element is worth doing if it was never used in a comic book before?

I'd be pretty surprised if you found any aura from the origin pack that had been used in a comic book before.

Are you under the impression that I was claiming that a Zener Card aura is a classic comic book look or something? I'm not. It was just an idea that popped into my head that, if I saw it, would suggest ESP or clairvoyance and which could also be easily adapted from an existing game element. Clearly, your mileage may vary.

If you are seeing my suggestion as some sort of assertion about comic books then I can clear that up - it is nothing of the sort. Comic book psychics are still just as murky as you originally suggested. My suggestion was aimed at a way of clearing up the murk in City of Heroes. It had nothing to do with comic books or any particular psychic/psionic comic book character. In fact, in a comic book world where psychics, psionics, espers and assorted other mentalists are an established fact of every day life, it seems unlikely that something like Zener cards would ever have been invented in the first place. There'd be no need for them. It's hardly surprising that it would be difficult or impossible to name a comic book character that utilized them.

Heck, if we were going to stick to comic book elements then "psychic" characters in City of Heroes probably ought to have radiating circles coming out of their heads or something since THAT is a pretty common comic book representation of projected psychic abilities.

Or maybe just give them an emote like this one: ;-)



*EDIT*

Don't get too hung up on comic books. They're just one medium out of many that encompasses the superhero genre. Commando Cody was on the cinema screen decades before The Rocketeer ever was drawn, inked, and colored. The Shadow appeared in pulp novels and radio dramas before he ever graced a comic. Likewise, the Green Hornet and Doc Savage and a host of others.

Hercules is one of the earliest examples we have a of SuperHero, even though the Greeks and Romans wouldn't have thought of him in the way we mean it in modern Western culture. He served a substantially similar purpose in their culture, though, that Superman serves in ours.

Maybe all psychics should wear togas and olive or laurel crowns? Maybe all psychics should dress as Gypsy fortune tellers? I'm not sure how illustrating "psychic" in City of Heroes has anything directly to do with comic books, any more than it has to do directly with film, books, or ancient mythology.

Heck, this guy would count as a Tech Hero by most City of Heroes standards and he knows all about Zener cards:



;-) He probably has appeared in comics and he's certainly appeared in a number of movies, cartoons, and video games. Film is his defining medium but it doesn't make Peter Venkman any less of a superhero for being a film-based hero instead of a comic book hero. City of Heroes is a super hero game first and foremost; not a comic book simulator. The existence or non-existence of some element in comic books is largely irrelevant to the question of whether that element ought to exist in the game or not.

It's been done.

I've always been a little surprised that the Cole family pancake recipe didn't garner more critical attention from the game industry. You'd think that sort of thing would get talked about, but it's been pretty well ignored.

<Beavis>Nyuck! Nyuck! She said "pancake"! Nyuck!</Beavis>

Expect that there will be discounted bundles at some point as well as limited time sales on various items. One of the market screenshots that's floating around shows a dual inspiration being "on sale for the next 18 hours".

I was sort of half-pondering this question while I was getting lunch. An answer popped unbidden out of my sub-conscious that seemed completely appropriate but that probably shows my age. heh.

If you took the Tarot Card Aura from the origin pack and modified it into a Zener Card Aura, that would shout "Psychic", IMO, without actually saying anything limiting about the origin. Zener cards are the symbol cards that were all the rage for doing ESP experiments several decades ago. They look like this:



I think I'm going to have to figure out whether Jay's thread or one of David's art threads is the more appropriate place and register a suggestion.

Apples and Oranges. Or maybe Lemons and Oranges.

The CoT revamp was viewed as taking an iconic look and downgrading it to a generic look that did NOT tell their story, to use the phraseology of the OP. It had nothing to do with the act of up revamping them and everything to do with the results of the revamp.

I'm not even sure where you get the idea that anybody is calling for a complete revamp of a signature character into something completely different. David's description of enhancements to Hamidon, for instance, are all about enhancing its built-in characteristics. I would expect that any change to an existing character would be a similar thing.

Heck, before we got sidetracked into "Characters that don't comply with the OP and here's why and how it might be fixed", the thread was all about which characters DO represent their story/genre well and could be conceivably brushed up in subtle ways or even used as examples for making less expressive characters become more expressive.

ObArtPoll:

I should add Malaise as a character whose look DOES express his story to some extent. His special pants scream "psychadelic", which is one reason that so many people want them for their characters. He's the guy who "paints with your senses" and his outfit supports that idea.

She may be psychic, but her origin is "magic" and that has a multitude of "triggers" if you will. Djeannie suggested it in her redesign with that little squiggly rune thing. Granted that we have a lot more options today, but signature characters were never originally about player options anyway.

Right now, when I see Swan, the closest thing in my imagination that corresponds to the impression she leaves is Tandy Bowmen, aka Dagger of Cloak and Dagger. I expect to see someone who dances artfully around and uses her powers as part of the expression of that stylized kind of movement.

Now, that's probably really difficult to illustrate in a MMO environment, but it sort of doesn't matter because it's not really what Swan is truly about as far as I can tell.

In any case - put psychic aside (since, it's vague) and give her some magical accessories: runes, crystals, a mystical aura, a caduceus, I dunno. For that matter, if you put a stylized symbol representing a crystal ball on her uniform, then I'll wager that most people would understand that to mean "psychic". I'm not saying that would be a terrific aesthetic choice, but there ARE ways to get the point across.

If you kept Swan exactly as she is but you added the "Magical Runes" aura from the origins pack, I would wager that you would have people start to say "Oh, she's a magician" or "Oh, she's a witch" instead of "Oh, she's a lingerie model".

The visual cues are really what we're talking about here. Witchblade is all about the cheesecake but nobody would ever confuse her with a Victoria's Secret Angel.

I personally care little for iceslide specifically. I suspect that it would get used about as often as power slide currently does, which is to say "Not much".

If we take a step back from iceslide and examine what makes it different from super jump, what we have is a power with a travel aura that stretches both ahead and behind, that offers 100% control over your maneuverability on all three axes, and whose gameplay experience from a first-person perspective would be very similar to that of riding a roller coaster.

A mine car that magically lays down its own track would be substantially the same power as iceslide.

I would much rather see mounts and flying platforms of various sorts (carpets, the Army experimental machines I posted upthread, Dick Tracy style hover vehicles, rocket packs, gyro packs, birds, pegasi) before iceslide. Then again, I'd like to see real animal companions finally added to the game, but that's a whole other topic.

Well, I don't really want to subvert or derail this into a "Let's deconstruct Swan" thread. She really doesn't matter all that much in the larger scheme of things.

FWIW - I have no problem with the amount skin she shows. As was sort of pointed out by someone upstream, if you take her translucent bits into account, she could even be considered semi-modest from a certain point of view. Of course, those translucent bits resemble a nighty/teddy closely enough to just reinforce the lingerie look she has. I actually think the shawl is pretty interesting. It just happens that it ALSO reinforces the Victoria's Secret look.

Basically, I can take or leave her. It's just she screams T&A fan service for no particularly good reason. I don't think there's anything in her backstory to suggest that she's a lingerie model, though that might explain how she first came to the attention of a rich playboy like Justin Sinclair. *laugh*

I'm reminded how for the first couple of years in the life of the game, Cryptic held an annual Halloween real-life costume contest. One of the entries was a girl in a bikini and heels, striking a martial arts pose in an alley. You had the "Woo hoo, you can rescue ME any time!" comments and you had the "where's the beef?" comments because even though it was definitely something you could create in the costume designer and it was certainly something you could potentially see in a comic book, it didn't actually reflect a whole lot of creativity on the part of the contestant. (I'm sure that she was recreating the look of one of her hero characters and so didn't feel like it was lacking anything.)

Swan strikes me the same way. Someone thought the shawl was a great idea, and then either consciously or unconsciously figured that a Victoria's Secret Angel look was the natural accompaniment to it without really thinking very hard about whether it was right for the character. You gotta have at least one T&A hero, right? Swan is there precisely to represent the likes of The White Queen and Lady Death and Witchblade and other skimpily dressed, sexy heroines as for any reason relating to her backstory or the need for another Vindicator. Heck, even Wonder Woman has been depicted as a swimsuit model complete with waxed "naughty bits", at times.

That makes analyzing Swan's costume very deeply to be sort of beside the point, really. It's not intended to say anything about the character. It's intended to represent a genre of costume design.

Look at it this way -- You find yourself surrounded by ten Circle of Thorns, seconds from having a huge fragging thorn plunged into your heart. Which of these two heroines inspires the most confidence in you from the standpoint of appearing like someone you can rely on to rescue you?



I know which one I'd pick, if I was using the head on my shoulders.

It isn't really a question of the size of her "tracts of land" or of style trends in comic books or even of Feminism. Doc Delilah pretty much has the largest mammarial protuberances that you can get short of breaking the slider and she looks perfectly appropriate.

In the context of this discussion, the question is "What does Swan's (or any random hero/villain) costume say about her?"

Whatever it's supposed to say, the thing it does NOT say to me is "This is someone I should respect and depend upon." It says "This is someone I want to pick up at a bar tonight and wake up in bed with tomorrow."

It doesn't say, "I'm a Hero and here's my story". It says, "I'm a Victoria's Secret model." It doesn't even come close to saying "I'm a powerful magician and psychic with a particular grudge against the Fifth Column". Heck, forget the Fifth Column. It doesn't even say "magic" or "psychic". It just says "Look at me. Don't you wish you could have this?"

In the context of this discussion, Swan would not appear an any of my personal lists of characters whose uniform I consider iconic or visually striking.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Except that she's NOT a Valkyrie. She's, for all intents and purposes, an alien cyborg in a suit of high-tech armor and with an unfathomably alien piece of high-tech weaponry.

THAT'S why she's one of the few signature characters who might really benefit from a full re-imagining of her look into something really unique. She should have been something really unique from the start, instead of it being primarily her spear that sets her apart from what players can make.

ObArtPoll:

I like all of David's thought experiments regarding Hamidon. As a general rule, that's the kind of "re-imagining" that I can get behind for any update of any character or encounter in the game. Something that builds on the existing character and expands on its existing appearance to make it "more so" but still recognizably the same as what we know and love.

In fact... This Hamidon discussion really sort of introduces a different aspect to David's "art poll". See, there are plenty of giant monsters in the game who are, well, just bland in the sense that they are basically just big copies of their smaller cousins.

Babbage. Kraken. Jurassik. The Clockwork Paladin. Even Admastor, bless his undead soul. He's got the glowing eyes thing going on but he's basically just a humongous zombie. Meanwhile, the mythological Adamastor:

more often is depicted thusly:



When I read David's suggestions of way to make Hamidon essentially more immersive*, my responding thought is "Yes! How can we do that to the other monsters, as well?"

Now, I "get" that the original design of a lot of these creatures that have mythological antecedents is "what if this mythological creatures was 'explained' in a way consistent with our game world?" Hence, Adamastor is humungous BP zombie. Lusca is a giant octopus and not literally a tentacled shark-thing from a blue hole. Kraken is a huge blob from an alternate world and not a giant squid. (I admit I don't really see where that correspondence was made...)

My question here is whether letting those creatures be upgraded to be closer to their mythological or just conceptual roots would make them more interesting; enough to warrant the expenditure of the resources?

*That was an unintentional pun but in retrospect a pretty good one.

It does have potential. I'd play it, just like I'd play a MAN build or a "hard core" build for a change of pace.

The only real problem here is that you don't have control over your teammates. As noted already, if the team leader sets the slider to "1" and everyone brings nukes and Shivans, well, you can't do much other than get a new team.

The team-wide inspirations are going to be used sparingly, unless there are a lot of really wealthy people playing the game. Likewise, dual-effect. I'd guess that you won't even see them used often enough to notice. If you DO notice, well, it's pretty much like bringing a Shivan to a boss fight. In the end, all you can really do is team with like-minded people as often as you can. The problem solves itself, then.