signature-arcs
Latest
The first part of the first signature arc now available for City of Heroes
It's no real secret, but the Surviving Eight of City of Heroes are soon to be the Surviving Seven And There Used To Be One Other Guy. The first installment of the arc is now available for players on the live server, with the arc available in the store for free players coming in after the fact. It's a chance for players to interact in a big way with some of the game's major lore characters and see which of the setting-defining heroes is going to be taking a permanent trip to the land of wind and ghosts. So what was the process behind the arc? As is often the case these days, Paragon Studios has furnished players with a new installment of the Intrepid Informer with more details on what the arcs entail and the major challenges of design. To the surprise of almost no one, the biggest issue that the designers faced was the simple question of relevance -- making sure that players felt important as they played through an arc focusing on the life and death of several NPCs. How successfully that goal was met remains to be seen, but CoH players can judge the first installment on its own merits right now.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Someone dies at the end, part two
Welcome back to our intensely morbid two-part series on the answer to the big question from the first City of Heroes signature arc -- namely, who's going to die? The first part from last week covered the four choices that have the most front-cover exposure. If you were forced to name four members of the Surviving Eight off the top of your head, those are the names that would probably come up first, due to both the developers and general storyline importance. Of course, there were a lot of other theories in the comments last week, including suggestions that death is coming for one or two of the members of this week's list. And there were some good arguments in there... but those are arguments that can just as easily be wrong, something I'll address when we jump past the break and start off with the only survivor who doesn't have a task force to his name.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Someone dies at the end, part one
So that doubled experience weekend sort of, um, didn't happen. In my defense, by the time we knew about it, it was Wednesday. That's when you read the column, but not when it's written. So I couldn't do much more other than shake my head and wonder what I was going to talk about when City of Heroes had inadvertently yanked my column topic away at the last moment as if it were a football. Instead, we're going to look at the rumblings about the first Signature Story arc, which asks us who is going to die at the end. Now, to be fair, "nobody" is a valid answer. But it's heavily implied that one of the members of the Surviving Eight will bite the big one, and that means a big shakeup in the game's status quo. So let's run down the big eight and see which one seems most likely to die, at least in comic book terms. (And yes, it's comic book terms. War Witch is already dead, and that hasn't stopped her from being in-game as a trainer, remember?)
