Techbot Alpha

Everything Snow Globe said.

Meh, I personally detach everything mechanical from everything narrative in game and characters.

Example; my character Leon DeFeurard is stinkingly rich. Not in terms of 'inf', he just has a nearly bottomless Swiss bank account that was set up many, many years ago and has been accruing interest to the point of him never having to work a day in his 'life' (He's a vampire, so technically undead)

'Wealth' in game is not represented. Inf is a game mechanic used to buy meta-game things. He is a vampire; he is naturally good at what he does. His powers don't rely on incantations or magical macguffins to be effective, they just ARE. From a mechanical metagame stand-point, however, I need to level him up and buy and slot enhancements to make and keep him effective. That has NOTHING to do with his character, and is so totally ignored. It's a mechanic. End of.

I work with the game world, its narrative because that is where the characters are. They are a part of that game world. The enhancements and Inf and slotting and Inventions are all NOT a part of the narrative game world. They are a metagame mechanical necessity that happens to have a vague bit of flavour. What they ultimately are are [Enhance Damage Slot] and [Enhance Accuracy]. Because this is a game and an MMO and those are a part of that genre and style of game. As a gamer, I use them because I want my characters to be able to be 'better' and fight tougher stuff and etc etc. As a writer I completely ignore them, because they make no sense in the games narrative world.

Hope that simplifies that down.

QR: Bait and switch? Well, that's an eight year old bait and switch that even Nemesis couldn't have planned out.

i.e. No

"Ahh, 'the greater good'. That's the bit where you cough up a huge pay-cheque before I lend my aid, right? Because, face it, if you are THIS desperate to ask ME, a Villain, for help....then you need my help. Now, I can afford to slope off elsewhere and find a nice quiet place or other dimension to weather it out in. You, though? Yeah, you can pay my price, buddy. That's 'the greater good'."

Savvy?

Dean Mac.
That's it, just Dean Mac. He's fun because, come on, it's this guy trying to be best buds with a powerful villain ("Dean....I am NOT high fiving you. Stop it. It's addressing.") and not being put down by anything....and then you get the rest of the arc, which is fairly straight faced.

That arc, for me, juxtaposed light and 'dark'/serious perfectly. YYMV, but we need more Dean Mac in the game, and less...Shining Stars and....Dr Graves....
Pardon me while I go clean my fingers after typing about those THINGS >_<

The majority of lore I can work with relatively easy. For example, sure, my characters by stuff from shops. Some of them have to eat, some need clothes (some don't) and video games, books, new toothbrush etc.
What they DON'T do is buy cybernetic hearts and fill themselves with 13 of them, or lace their arms with ammunition, or wear 15 pairs of gauntlets, or-

Yeah. You see where I'm going. The enhancement stuff is purely metagame. Ergo, it gets ignored in-character for what it is.
I tend to ignore most of the Incarnate stuff, too. My current main, Chief Centurion Z1, is an extraterrestrial robotic being. He's not 'being empowered' by anything. Really, I could argue that he's always had that level of power (after recovering from major shut-down when he crashed on Earth during the 40s) and he's now having to use it more to fight tougher stuff. My human, rifle wielding guy in power armour certainly isn't being empowred by anything. He works for Vanguard, so he's just packing more anti-heavy and Incarnate-level busting weapons and ammunition, along with shielding and better armour plating.


Stuff like Doc Brainstorms power proliferation gets ignored outright as non-canon guff that should never have been written in the first place, period

Tis true

Doesn't stop it being an awesome image, though. Very nicely done.

New animations for certain. Hell, though, if they ported ALL those new blast animations they did to every other blast set? That'd be a ton of options right there. I simply don't understand them limiting each blast set to the original and ONE variant of the new animations. That seems...well...daft?

If there is one thing I HAVE to do before I die (before #83: lunge wildly at the Pope...) is to find Michael Bay. Get him alone.
AND PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE.

For being an affront to everyone with half a brain and all creatives EVER.
Maybe get a dead turtle and beat him with that, too, just to add insult to injury....

It wasn't a bad ending, all in all. And, yeah, the special maps made me sit up and go "Woh....dude."

Ironically enough, Ghost Widow was actually the hardest fight in that. Gods DAMN, who lets her hold straight through Unyielding? She needs a few more punches, methinks...

Even though I'd probably get lambasted for drawing something related so closely to canon, I'd even be tempted to do a small comic of my character and his team running through that, especially him talking to Scirroco and Recluse. That fitted nicely. And then having Chief and Recluse laying the double slam down on Rula-Wade. That WAS satisfying

I'm having truly weird and BLOODY ANNOYING issues with CoH at the moment. As in "It's the only damn game, either on PC or Xbox, that lags right now."

And by 'lag' I mean ping going from its usual 200-300 mark to up to and over 4-5k. Insane amounts of rubber-banding, power lag...not for enemies, mark you, THEY can still smack me about just fine, but I can't hit back. Chat lag, all kinds of crud.

Before you ask, NO, it is NOT my damn rig. It is also not the net, I did the speed check and suchnot. When the net used to be bad (back in Uni halls) I could still play CoH smoothly. Anything else went and died in a hole, though.

Now I can even play TF2 smoothly, while CoH is in the hole.
So...if that was to do with game memory leaks, that would at least give me some comfort in that it will probably go away next patch. Or something. Either way, though, it's stopping me playing at all at the moment, which sucks. And it's making me go all Karkat on channels...