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The Daily Grind: Who's your favorite villain?
Sometimes villains are individuals, sometimes they're simply faceless armies. Sometimes they're major antagonists, sometimes they just harass you a bit in low-level zones. But every game has antagonists, even if they're no more organized than "those animals milling outside of the front gates." In EVE Online they might be other players, in World of Warcraft they change with the expansion, and in Guild Wars 2 they arrive gift-wrapped with two-week bursts of content to accompany their arrivals. In some games all you can do is kick them around a bit, while in some games your favorite villain has likely been met, matched, and defeated, never to rise again. So today we ask you: Who's your favorite villain? Is it a group of villains, like the Freakshow in City of Heroes? A single figure like Gaius van Baelsar in Final Fantasy XIV? Or is it just a group you personally hate, like every roaming aggressive animal on Voss in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Storyboard: Making villains work
A while ago, I talked about the fact that roleplaying in MMOs most closely resembles comic books. This is apropos of the current discussion because both mediums have a fundamental issue with how villains are supposed to work. A good villain should be roundly trounced by the end of a story, but you also want to bring back a villain for more antics later on. So as I begin the follow-up to my recent column on the topic, the question becomes how you can make a villain who's entertaining and satisfying to encounter without becoming boring or making everyone wonder why no one has stabbed him yet. To be fair, there's no way to absolutely fix this problem. Someone will always have the idea that stabbing the villain to death will alleviate the problem, and that assumption is pretty much right. But there are ways to minimize the issue without making everyone seem like a colossal twit or creating the soap opera problem (wherein everyone is a malicious jerk every so often and no one seems to make long-term changes). This week I want to examine how both antagonistic and malicious villains can be played to avoid those pitfalls.
Storyboard: Villainy afoot
I really thought this was a topic I had revisited on a few occasions, but apparently the only time Storyboard has discussed villainy was back in the column's infancy when I was still properly finding its voice. (Not that I feel that project has ever stopped, but that's another matter.) And it's an interesting topic for many reasons because villainy as a concept really gets put through the wringer in RP to begin with, especially if you tend to let morality be muddled into a few million shades of gray like I tend to. The thing about villains in roleplaying is having a character solely meant as A Villain generally doesn't work as well, simply because no real people are as malicious as that might require. Instead, you wind up with several people serving as the villains in a particular timeframe. So we need to define what we mean by villains, what role they can play in roleplaying, and what the pitfalls are in the first place.
Storyboard: One of us is going down
You and your group of roleplaying companions need something new to do. You've grown tired of sitting around talking about problems in the outside world or engaging in a non-stop soap opera drama wherein someone is always sleeping with someone else inappropriately. By complete coincidence, you and your companions all appear to be heavily armed and armored, leading to an excellent suggestion -- you should go out and get involved in a conflict! A fracas of some kind! What a concept! Sarcasm aside, long-running conflicts are a lot of fun when handled right. While I've talked about them in brief before, today I want to look at a handful of common conflict types and offer some tips about how to run them without tears. If you think drama can spill over into OOC channels when it's just a matter of pretend romances being spurned, you don't even want to know what happens when the knives come out.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Spotlight on the Freakshow in City of Heroes
There are three basic tiers that the villains in City of Heroes occupy. At the bottom you've got guys like the Hellions and the Skulls, chumps with just enough superhuman ability to deal with low-level heroes and villains. In the middle are groups like the Trolls and the Family, groups that either lack organization but have power or have organization but lack power. At the top are people like the Circle of Thorns or Nemesis, organized societies with villainous intent. The Freakshow are another ballgame because they're not organized at all, but they break to the top through sheer power. If you're going to be facing off against street thugs in the highest levels of the game, you'll be dealing with the Freakshow, and that's true of both villains and heroes. The gang is just a group of punks without any real goals or overriding drive, and yet they're a big enough force that even Arachnos has to deal with them from time to time. So it's worth looking at the group as a whole, since they're a bigger threat than they get credit for even if they don't have any sort of real goal.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy's bargain bin villains
The Final Fantasy series has always had some spectacularly memorable villains. Sometimes that's been a challenge; this is a series in which your main antagonists have included an evil tree, a general who dresses up like a clown, and an adult version of the creepy kid from grade school who can't breathe very well. But for some reason, this has never carried over into the online installments. And with Final Fantasy XIV's first major villain debuting in the current patch, it's worth talking about. I don't mean to say that Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV haven't had antagonists or anyone to step into the role of "villain." They certainly have. Final Fantasy XI has an entire rogue's gallery with Eald'narche, Promathia, the Shadow Lord, and whatever we were fighting in Abyssea. (I think it was the dread monster Apathy, but I sort of clocked out for a while there.) But compare it to the villains of Star Wars: The Old Republic or the single-player installments of the franchise. Heck, compare them to the villains of World of Warcraft. The villains here just don't quite get to a memorable level, and I think there are a few good reasons.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: It's all a Nemesis plot
City of Heroes has a lot going for it, but it doesn't offer an easy nemesis for your character. Which is kind of a problem in a superhero game, but also a problem in the sense that you always want a nemesis in a game. You want someone that's just plain bad, a villain whose motives you don't need to understand in great depth. Every so often, it's nice to just have an adversary. I think that was, at one point, the goal behind Nemesis. But the group has wound up in a very different and much less entertaining place. At a glance, Nemesis isn't really all that overused in City of Heroes. Sure, there's the vague implication that he's behind a lot of different schemes, but for the most part that's just window-dressing. Despite the fact that I should adore a group of steampunk criminals in modern-day Paragon City, I feel my hackles raise every time Nemesis shows up, because the group and the leader are both massively overdone.
Issue 3 of Whiteout available for Champions Online players
No job ever goes quite right, no matter how well you plan it. It's as true in Champions Online as it is anywhere else, and it's certainly the case in the latest installment of the Whiteout series. After all, the first two issues made it plenty clear that heroes would have their hands full dealing with a downed alien spacecraft, but now things are going from bad to worse for the Steelhead soldiers and the player characters. It seems there's another player involved in the game who hopes to get in on the wrecked ship... As with previous installments of the series, the new issue can be played by any character over level 11 and provides special rewards in addition to the usual mission benefits. But if you've already played through the mission, you can take a look at the game's latest Art Corner, which shows off the design of the mechanical antagonists plaguing the newest mission installment (and the subsequent ones as well, most likely).
The Daily Grind: What enemy groups do you feel are overused?
There's no denying that the Praetorian Clockwork of City of Heroes are a cool-looking gang of robots. They're powerful, military, and intimidating in numbers, and their prominence in recent task forces isn't unwelcome. Of course, after fighting them all through the first 20 levels of the game, and then fighting them in the most recent task forces, and then fighting more of them in the upcoming Issue 20... some players might be getting just a bit tired of seeing the war machines stomping about. World of Warcraft has at least one troll dungeon per expansion, Star Trek Online loves its Borg, and of course you've got Orcs from dawn to dusk in Lord of the Rings Online. Sometimes they make sense; sometimes they don't. But there's always one group of enemies that seems to get trotted out more often than others. So what group do you feel gets brought into the forefront just a bit too often in your game of choice? Was it a group that you used to like but have grown bored of, or one you never found all that interesting? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Storyboard: The villain in me is the villain in you
I don't play any villains, and I never have. Not in their words, anyway -- they're always noble crusaders fighting against others who are sadly mistaken. Or just driven by pragmatism. Or suffering for the sins of another. They've always got a justification, a reason why the things they've done are somehow necessary. And even though I know (hopefully) that they're full of it, it makes them fascinating to play. So for today's Storyboard, I want to talk about villains in RP and how to make them work in your favor. Before we start talking in-depth, however, it's worth noting that villains do share one thing with in-character romance: they're flashpoints for drama. They're not as bad, since it's a lot easier to separate the player from the character, but they still have the potential. They're also not going to fit into every style of roleplaying, as not every group is going to be conducive to having a specific character antagonist to work around. At least for now, we're just going to take those facts as given and look into the most important part of the equation: making and playing an effective villain in the first place.
