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A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Underused enemies in City of Heroes
Last week I discussed why I'm not fond of Nemesis as a group, and this week I promised to discuss villainous groups that I think that City of Heroes could use a bit more actively. So I am certain that longtime readers expected me to spend most of this week talking about the Fifth Column because of course I would. I love the Fifth Column, I think they're a fantastic group of villains, and I've talked about how great they are as a group over and over. Surprise! Not this time. For all that I love the Column (and their continual curbstomping of their pale imitation in the Council), that wasn't my goal this week. No, this time around I want to highlight other groups that I think Paragon City could use a bit more often, enemies that either fall off the radar or just don't get as much attention as they're due. Even in a game that's been around as long as City of Heroes, there are certain enemy groups that just never get the love they deserve. Maybe the future can fix that for some of these guys.
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.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Spotlight on the Snakes
For the first several villain group spotlights, I haven't been focusing on problems that are unique to the Rogue Isles. This is not entirely by accident -- City of Heroes was what came first, and generally speaking, I'd say the most relevant villain groups started out in Paragon City. And most of those groups do wind up interfering with your activities for Arachnos, too, so it sort of balances out. But Mercy Island faces its own problem, one that starts slithering up from the depths... Unfortunately, this is also a threat that very quickly gets sent back underground. The Snakes are not really what you'd call a big-ticket villain group; they skulk in the shadows and are very quickly supplanted by other villainous organizations. And with the revamp to Mercy Island, they're no longer even your first enemies off the boat. So it's probably for the best that we remember the Snakes now because there might be no more Snakes to remember tomorrow.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Spotlight on the Lost
Paragon City has the same problems as any large city. Drug addiction, financial ruin, and any number of other horrible circumstances have conspired to give the city a large population of the homeless and hopeless, left wandering the streets and trying desperately to survive. But something emerged within the homeless population of the city, something that smells of a familiar evil and a problem that was never appropriately dealt with the first time. If your goal is to defend the system, your enemies will find the people whom the system has failed... The Lost are among the saddest of all of the villainous groups in City of Heroes because at their core the group is made up of people who in many ways simply had no options. It's not even that they turned to crime out of desperation. These are people who, for better or worse, were blameless of anything more than minor crimes and poor decisions. And then they found themselves knee-deep in a war, moving from one sort of victim to another.
The baddies of City of Heroes' First Ward
City of Heroes' villains are some of the most memorable across the genre, so it's no wonder superhero fans are anxious to see whom (or what) they'll be fighting once CoH goes free-to-play later this year. To that end, Paragon Studios' art lead, Gilbert Martinez, has penned a dev diary over on PC Gamer that details four of the villain groups players will encounter in the upcoming First Ward zone. First up are the mystics of the Carnival of Light, the perfect counterpoint to the existing Carnival of Shadows. These new Carnies are much better dressed and seek to "restore the balance of good and evil" in Praetoria. They're followed by the Direct Urban Strike Team (D.U.S.T.) units, elite PPD members with rugged armor and enormous plasma rifles that are surely not compensating for anything. If you're into tentacles, you'll love the failed Seer experiments known as the Awakened. And finally, the dreadful, harpy-like Talons of Vengeance embrace "themes of vengeance, magic, and the embodiment of the apocalypse." Enjoy the new enemies (and their awesome high-detail graphics) at PC Gamer.
