Some top-notch villainy last night, with the Cabal of Evil taking on a number of assorted missions, and completing them with various success.
Aside from the accompanying text-box descriptions though, there doesn't tend to be an awful lot to distinguish one from the next. Sometimes it'll be against the Legacy Chain, a kind of Paladin-type dogooding mystical order, or the Circle of Thorns, evil Wizard types, but mostly I seem to be beating up a huge amount of Longbow, Paragon City's combined Police and Army, and masses of fellow Arachnos minions. The instanced mission maps, while possibly different, do tend to blur into each other a bit, and come from a surprisingly small number of tilesets. It all makes prolonged soloing quite hard work and repetitive, I'm finding, and CoX in general, is probably more about The People, than The Game, than is usual in most MMOs.
One nice CoV feature that I didn't notice in my early CoH adventures is the Souvenir tab of the Clues window. As you complete little story arcs, from each of your nefarious contacts, this window updates and gains a new entry, each of which is a long compilation of all the clue steps you found during the mission, letting you read the whole thing back as a complete story.
While the actual activity involved in each of the missions is often quite samey; (fight to here, click that, fight to there, lead NPC to exit), the stories behind it all, mostly told in text-form by the contacts and the clues found, are all quite interesting so far. I was going to expound at length about The Ghost Widow, Pia and The Wretch, and the Corrupting of Pyrissa, but seems Sente is a few diabolical steps ahead of me, so go read about them there instead!
The stories are quite a redeeming aspect of what otherwise might be starting to become a bit of a "samey" game. And I'm only on my first "real" character! Mind you, I must admit to feeling somewhat special having actually now met The Ghost Widow, one of the super arch-villains featured on the poster art! (She's the white haired goth lass here). Its always nice to see an MMO that doesn't regard its own half-arsed made-up Lore and Backstory as being too 'important' for actual players to be involved with.
I spent years in EQ and AO and never saw Fironia Whatserface or Phillip Ross once, in their respective games! On the other hand, I've actually done quests for Warchief Thrall, I regularly party with Devona, Cynn, Mhenlo, Eve and the other Guild Wars Poster-Boys-and-Girls, and have now saved The Ghost Widow from a dastardly conspiracy. Well, sort of. Turned out she didn't need my help at all, but appreciated the gesture anyway.
Its nice to be involved, rather than just another passing mercenary on the periphery. Its stupid, but the idea of an audience with Lord Recluse himself, the big guy with the glowing eyes and cloak at the back, on the above box cover, is actually something of a goal for me now. I want to be like The Ghost Widow when I grow up; dead, quite bitter about it, and very driven!
Anyway, one particular mission did stand-out last night, a jail break. A Stalker, a Brute and a Corrupter walk into a riot...
"Ah, that's right...one of us is invisible!"
"Is it me?"
I put my invisible face in my invisible hands.
A long mission indeed, but fun none the less. I'm not entirely sure what the exact particulars were, it not being my own mission, but for one reason or another, the three of us ended up boarding one of those nifty black Arachnos Hover-Jet thingies, headed for 'The Zig'.
The Zig is some kind of maximum security prison facility, designed to hold delinquents of the super-powered persuasion, a kind of Arkam Asylum for Paragon City. Most notably, its also where new players start life in CoV, and almost immediately, I realised that it was in fact the map from the Tutorial, only we were starting at the finish, and working back. Nice reuse of a map you'd otherwise never really see much of again, barring alts. Longbow troops were everywhere, in fairly large groups, and with some horrific placement, causing a lot of secondary chained aggro and the whole thing got a bit hectic as we worked our way inside to the cells.
I blame the Brute, perhaps unfairly, as they seem to get some kind of built-in 'rampage damage bonus' thing, which positively rewards reckless behavior, a lot like WoW's Warrior 'Rage' bar. We all got swept along with it to be honest, and despite the Corrupter having some kind of AoE party heal, it was all to easy to get overwhelmed. I mean as long as the Endurance holds out, its all Monster-Stompey-Happy-Time for all, but attrition is often the killer in CoX, and that awful 'Ker-pooooooo...' noise that tells you that all your toggled defence powers have simultaneously shut down. Uh-oh!
Matters were not helped once inside the cell block, as a difficult initial clump of warders and Longbow just kept getting worse and worse; an unsporting amount of sudden ambush waves of Longbow reinforcements just...kept...coming... Logic was telling me that they were scripted, and that there had to be a finite number of them, surely? But they just kept coming, appearing with little warning behind us.
We managed to spring three super-villains to help us, one black and red stalker type, who got steamrollered very early on. Then there was a blue highspeed ice shooter person. I must have blinked or something, because he disappeared under a tsunami of flame-throwing white-n-red spandex moments after his release. The third chap lasted a bit longer; a very large 'hulk' type gentleman dressed all in black leather, with robot claws and a 'gimp mask' and a very beleaguered expression. I guess he really wanted out of his cell, as he made it all the way back to the extraction point with us, intact. Dressed as he was, I can imagine why.
One out of three isn't bad, and for Supervillains, Natural Selection is a harsh mistress!
Next week we're going to have a crack at the first Strike Force mission. How badly can that go?
But yes...I'm increasingly of the opinion that CoX is a Sometimes Game, suitable for drop-in play, a few hours a week. Time enough to knock out a few missions, dabble with the markets a bit, invent something, maybe flit about Bloody Bay, and leave content, which these days, suits my available time and inclinations admirably.