demiurgent (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
demiurgent) wrote2004-05-03 03:12 pm
demiurgent) wrote2004-05-03 03:12 pm
City of Heroes -- *Wow.*
I have found my downfall, and it is City of Heroes. A combination of picking the game up on Friday and my Powerbook dying (cutting me off from e-mail, the web, and 'stuff') led me to playing it for... well, at least thirty hours of the forty-eight of the weekend. It's that good. In fact, it's better than that. Holy mother of God, this thing is good. It's everything a Superhero RPG and a MassMOG should be, but better.
The costume and character design is incredible. I could get almost exactly what I wanted every time -- the costumes look good and every character in the game has personality. It's amazing how well the system works. Further, powers are easily adaptable and modifiable. It's like someone took the very best parts of the Champions or Mutants and Masterminds game, then tweaked it more and added the finest costume designer you've ever seen.
MassMOGs live and die on giving you things to do and ways to level up. In traditional games of this ilk -- fantasy ones -- you go out and kill rats until you're tough enough to kill things bigger than rats. In this game, you save old ladies from muggers, prevent carjackings, stop vivisectionists and cultists from kidnapping people for nefarious intent, bust drug deals and generally run around the city doing Good Deeds. There's no crafter's or artisan's guilds -- pretty much your whole life is devoted to buttkicking. "Dungeons" are designated by missions you learn from contacts, going through an incredibly well thought out tree based initially on what origin type you choose (Magic, Technology, Mutation, Science -- the difference between technology and science is the difference between Tony Stark building a suit of armor and Barry Allen getting doused by chemicals while being hit by lightning -- and 'natural,' which is another way of saying Batman or the Punisher) and what archetype you pick (Blasters shoot energy/stuff from a distance, Scrappers wade in with martial arts or claws, Defenders protect and heal their teammates and snipe from a distance, Controllers control people or the weather or the like, and Tankers absorb massive damage while punching things out around them).
Powers are incredibly varied as well -- even two fire based Blasters end up with very different specializations and abilities, and of course the costume designs are infinite, so no one seems cookie cutter. The superteam system just plain works, and if (like me) your friends who are playing are already ten levels above you... no problem! You can be designated a Sidekick while with them, and fight at approximately their level, while catching up experience-wise. You might never catch them, but who cares?
Because the character system is so well done, I found myself making new characters (you get I believe eight total, and then can delete ones you don't care for). I got a feel for the system -- at least at low levels -- and it's almost as much fun making your character as learning the Clockwork automatons have taken a Mensa meeting hostage to create friends for the Clockwork King, and you have to go take the machines out before someone gets hurt. I will now goob about my characters, including particulars of conception and how the costume came out looking compared to what I wanted. However, because I like you, I'll put it behind a cut.
My first character was Matter Man! This is nostalgic on my part -- my first Champions character -- and therefore my first superhero character in an RPG ever, back in Junior High -- was Matterman, aka Jonathan Carruthers, a brilliant scientist exploring the edges of matter/energy conversion who, after an explosion of his experimental Silveranium experimental reactor, was endowed with the power to convert incredibly minute bits of matter into energy, which he then used to fight evil. Which isn't a bad origin for an eleven year old superhero fan. Hell, it beats "learned the algebraic expression of speed," and DC's gotten away with that for years.
The CoH version of Matterman (named Matter Man because there already was a Matterman in the game, if you can believe it) was designed as a Science Blaster, reflecting the genius and explosion that created Our Hero. His core powers were Energy Blast -- which gives him a number of pure energy attacks he can develop -- and Energy Manipulation, which lets him pull off some potent containments and other means of hurting people. It makes him relatively one-note, but this *was* a first character.
Matterman's costume was a simple orange bodysuit with a yellow M, a mask that covered all his hair, and yellow finned boots. This proved extremely simple to exactly model in CoH.
I didn't play him for long, as he was mostly designed to get my feet wet. When I run out of character slots, he's the first against the wall.
My second character -- and first serious one -- was Scholarman, the Sorcerer Superfluous, based on a Superguy story I wrote for a while. Specifically, this Scholarman was based on one I RP'ed online for a long time (and still do sometimes), and is significantly older and more idiosyncratic than the fictional version. Scholarman is an intuitive mage without particularly good instincts originally, and is a good, distinctive mage sort of person, not like a standard comic book mage at all. So, a good test of the system, in my humble opinion.
For CoH, I decided to make him a Magic Controller -- a nice, basic kind of mage type. His core powers are mental controlling (which seems very magical to me) and a secondary of storm summoning. So, in combat he can put a mental smackdown on people, forcing them into their own little world so they're not fighting you (or fighting back, period) while you hurt them, as well as summoning a gale wind to blow them back out of the way or a snowstorm to chill them down and keep them from being effective in fighting you. As his powers improve, so does his capabilities. He's a *lot* of fun to play.
Costume wise, this was a chance to be very unsuperheroic. He wears a brown tweed coat and baggy tweed pants, with rough leather boots, a tie, and a beaten down brown hat. There's some celtic scrollwork to make it interesting, and he's got a van dyke beard. He looks like a jaunty pulp character, like he just stepped off the hunting field from 1934. He is a *lot* of fun to play, and is up above 7th level now. He's also one of two characters I've sidekicked to the Galaxy Circle, doing some high powered combat with some high level characters in advanced dungeons. This is a tactical blast, wandering about and smashing evil. Also, you can redesign your costume colors to reflect your supergroup, and toggle between them. So, when he's actively with their team, he wears blue and white instead of browns. The jacket looks almost blues brotherish then, although more cobalt, the pants look suddenly like they're made out of unbleached muslin, and the white hat gives him a Gaiman Books of Magic quality I appreciate. It's a nice option.
Third, there is Dangerousgirl. Dangerousgirl was a character in my Adjusted League stories, cloned and mutated from my character Spandex Babe (look, it was a parody series) and made to be a duplicate of Dangerousman, one of Bill Dickson's characters and able to set off a thermonuclear explosion by tapping his foot. This was a chance to have a full on superheroine of the old school, while having fun and invoking a few injokes for my friends.
Dangerousgirl -- Danielle MacPherson, or Dani to her friends -- wields nuclear powers. She could have been a Science Blaster, but I had one of those and wanted to try some of the other quests, and besides, she feels more like a mutant to me. So, a Mutation Blaster it was. However, in the comic book, this wasn't like real radiation, which is invisible and boring. So, rather than giving her radiation powers I gave her fire blasts and fire manipulation. The special effects are spot on for how I see Dani in my mind's eye, and that's all that matters. Oh sure, I know that when Dani rains fiery death down on a pack of street punks, she's also sterilizing them with good old American radioactivity, but there's no good way to represent that visually, so fireballs and explosions works better. Right now, she has a fire blast, an exploding fireball of nuclear death (hurts the whole pack of villains), an explosive burst she can generate from her whole body (to back those mothers off when they get too close), and a ring of nuclear fire she can surround someone with so they can't get away. And, all her powers keep causing damage until the fires burn out. It's so comic book I could cry. Oh. And she can fly.
She can fly.
This game knew from the outset there would be flying heroes. It planned along those lines. And by God, it's running with it. There's a monumental statue (several hundred feet high) of a hero named Atlas holding up a globe. Right after she got her flight power, I flew up and sat on the globe. And discovered another new flying heroine up there, doing the same thing. That's the sign of good design.
Costume wise, I decided to go back to her source, Dangerousman. Dangerousman's costume was an assault on the senses. Bill described it as 'radioactive puke green and orange,' and I discovered that wasn't at all hard to model. The uniform should fairly glow with tasteless colors (since that's how her radioactive body is contained), and so a neon lime green and orange fit the bill. I gave her a couple of flourishes based on the heroine she was cloned from, who was described as having a V belt and shoulder epaulets, which I did. Sadly. they did not have a mushroom cloud for her to use as her chest symbol, so I had to go with a nuclear warning symbol in orange. I finally decided to throw in a matching green headband, just because it looked cool. She's also in the Galaxy Circle, which means she can switch to a far more tasteful version of her costume in blue and white with orange accents.
Needless to say, I love playing Dangerousgirl. Just like Scholarman, she sets off my RPing instincts and is a joy to play. However, where Scholarman's a pulp mystic, Dani's all over the super hero convention, and that makes her perfect for this game.
From Dani, I decided to try out Rip Davis. Rip's one of my RP characters, based on a fictional character I wrote named Memorex (yeah, I know). Rip has the ability to learn to do things he watches, even if they're improbable, and he's watched a lot of Jackie Chan movies. He's also got extremely high dexterity -- in RP, he's as much a dancer as he is a fighter.
The CoH version of Rip was based on a Natural Scrapper. This can lead to a viking, Wolverine, or Jackie Chan, among many other choices. I of course picked Martial Artist, giving him flurries of kicks and thunderous pounding kicks and heightened combat senses that make him harder to hit as he bobs and weaves. Which matches up to my mental image of Rip pretty well, all told.
Costume wise, I decided against Rip's tee shirt and jeans from RP, and went with a black loose gee type thing with white accent lines. It looks kind of like a Capoeira uniform as designed by FUBU. I gave him a somewhat Gen X haircut and close Gen X beard, and added some wraparound sunglasses because hey, they looked cool.
Play wise, Rip works great, but I don't have a lot of interest in continuing with him. I don't like the hand-to-hand combat as much as I like the distance. Still, I'll probably get him up to level 5 or so, just to check out the scrapper quest tree a bit. Still, after Matter Man gets out of the way for another hero, Rip's next up against the wall. Which is weird, because if I could be any of these heroes, it'd be Rip in a heartbeat.
After Rip came LAI-2, based third-order on a villain character from my ALU series named Lady Awe-Inspiring. When some friends and I came up with a knockoff of the Legion of Superheroes once, I created LAI-23, being the twenty-third Lady Awe-Inspiring, and like the Brainiac-5 she was so clearly based on, she was a heroine trying to make up for her ancestor's evil deeds. Also like Brainiac 5, the legend was that the second Lady Awe-Inspiring turned against her mother's evil deeds and overthrew in the name of justice. So, it's that second Lady Awe-Inspiring that got the treatment.
The CoH LAI-2 was so named because Lady Awe-Inspiring was too long. C'est bon. Owing to her genius intellect, I went with a Technology Tanker conception -- LAI-1 was invulnerable, and LAI-23 used a force field enabled suit, so a uniform that added protection for front line combat seemed to fit the conception. For her core power, I went with damage resistance ramped way up, leading ultimately to near invulnerability. Not having a decent force field option for her secondary power (there are force fields in the game, but they're the province of Defenders, not Tankers), I shrugged, decided that we didn't have a lot of info on LAI-2 anyways, and went with Ice Control. The effect looks slightly force fieldish anyhow, and the effect is about what I wanted, so it worked out okay. Well, all right, the Ice Sword is a little different, but that fits the "Lady" part of the name, now doesn't it? The interesting thing (to me) is that LAI-2's damage resistance is always there, behind the scenes, just working, which means all the power effects I use are her secondaries.
Costume wise, I went with the 'almost liquid-blue/black suit' image from the original Lady's conception, which was easy enough to do. I added in shoulder plates and a ring disk on her collarbone, to help highlight her high tech background, and a smooth goggle for her to wear. The costume feels right to me, all told.
Playwise, I like LAI-2 better than Rip, though I'm still not happy about wading into battle smashing things willy nilly. I like sitting back and hammering. So, she'll outlast Rip, but she won't join Scholarman and Dangerousgirl in the 'must keep' category.
Finally, I pulled out one of my favorite RP/fiction characters, Dr. Elizabeth Tirkoff, aka Healer. This was a Superguy character originally created by Gary Olson and traded to me for Mighty Guy in a swap to keep us both below the salary cap. Lil is telepathic, able to heal people of mental problems (and ultimately 'heal' them of their superpowers), and has become the headmaster of the ALU Academy in stories I haven't worked on for years. Still, it's a game, and so she came out.
CoH wise, the first thing she lost was her codename. "Healer" was taken probably on the first day of the beta, and the alternate name I had for her -- Chirurgeon -- was also taken. Which surprises me -- but then, there are literate gamers out there. So, she became Dr. Tirkoff, which is cool enough. I made her a Mutation -- born with her powers -- and further made her a Defender, which makes the most sense to me. She has Empathy as her primary power, which lets her heal her whole group (not that she's in a group yet), and for her secondary power she has psychic powers, including a mental blast and a mental assault that also disorients. It ends up feeling very very close to the conception.
Costume wise, she has a jumpsuit that's white along her outer arms, legs and body, and deep red down the middle, with a white 'red cross' symbol in front. Add a belt with pouches on it and some nice, practical leather boots, and she's a near dead ringer for the current Superguy version. I threw in a pair of glasses (squared off glasses, like bifocals or librarian glasses, pretty chic) to make her distinctive. And, because the character she was based on was known to dye her hair rather often (Gary started her as black haired, then went auburn and red haired, and then I went blonde with her, in part because I modeled her physically after a beautiful blonde ex-girlfriend of mine), I tailored her hair slightly, making it strawberry-blondish with slight brown highlights, to better reflect the dye job. It came out gorgeous, and looks better than most of the straight yellow 'blonde' hair people pick in the game, IMHO.
Dr. Tirkoff plays well. She's a great balance and has that distance thing going that I like. She'll make an excellent team member, too, and while I may join my new and old friends in Galaxy Circle for a while, she's the one I can see founding a Superteam later on down the line. Probably an Academy, just because. She's on the permanent list, so far. Also, it's worth noting that I have two points of convergence in the game so far -- Matter Man and Dangerousgirl are both Blasters, and Dr. Tirkoff and Dangerousgirl are both Mutations, but their quest trees have all been significantly different. Oh, there's some crossover (I think every quest tree has a 'run out and beat up 10 Hellions' mission on it somewhere), but the depth is impressive. And what's more, the beginning quests are broken up into two different sections of Paragon City, so there's some depth even if you play nothing but Natural Scrappers.
The community is a good one. People don't snipe your random encounters without asking, people are polite and generally nice, and the system is designed that if you go into a dungeo-- er, go on a mission into a warehouse, a unique warehouse is spawned for you and your team (if any), so no one else can wander in. And for the most part, people are showing taste and discretion. Oh, there's a few girls with overly suggestive codenames wearing pasties and g-strings running around, and others who take advantage of the neo-Witchblade style costumes that you can choose, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The total lack of PvP (and player villains) bugs a large portion of the gamers (to the point that "City of Villains" has already been announced for November), but where they see bugs I only see features. I'm a child of comic books of the 60's (in reprint, mind, as I was 2), 70's and 80's, when the closest antihero we had was Batman, The Dark Knight Returns was a little shocking, Watchman was very shocking, and The Punisher was wholly classified as a supervillain. City of Heroes comes across as a truly Superheroic game, where the most 'extreme' of heroes still abides by a certain code, and the people who get burned alive are the ones who deserve it. I'll probably shell out the cash for City of Villains, because these people deserve our money, but I'm not that enthused about it compared to CoH.
As for my own wish list, it's simple. I wish there were capes and wings (the company has said they left them out because they couldn't do them 'right,' and if you can't do them right they won't do it, which I respect). I wish there were destructible environments so you could throw cars at people and hit them with lampposts, a la the not quite as spectacular but still good Freedom Force, though I can understand why it's hard for a MassMOG to have that -- if you bring down the 800 foot tall statue of Galaxy Girl, it's going to go down for everyone. I wish you could buy more slots for character creation. And I wish you could record 'movies' of your adventures, save them to disk, and play them from multiple angles.
Oh, that reminds me. It's fun to watch someone with powers different than your own fight crime. Any time a game is cool enough to be a spectator sport, it's a winner.
This game deserves to be on your machine. It will also eat your time alive. Enjoy it. Live it. Be a hero.
The costume and character design is incredible. I could get almost exactly what I wanted every time -- the costumes look good and every character in the game has personality. It's amazing how well the system works. Further, powers are easily adaptable and modifiable. It's like someone took the very best parts of the Champions or Mutants and Masterminds game, then tweaked it more and added the finest costume designer you've ever seen.
MassMOGs live and die on giving you things to do and ways to level up. In traditional games of this ilk -- fantasy ones -- you go out and kill rats until you're tough enough to kill things bigger than rats. In this game, you save old ladies from muggers, prevent carjackings, stop vivisectionists and cultists from kidnapping people for nefarious intent, bust drug deals and generally run around the city doing Good Deeds. There's no crafter's or artisan's guilds -- pretty much your whole life is devoted to buttkicking. "Dungeons" are designated by missions you learn from contacts, going through an incredibly well thought out tree based initially on what origin type you choose (Magic, Technology, Mutation, Science -- the difference between technology and science is the difference between Tony Stark building a suit of armor and Barry Allen getting doused by chemicals while being hit by lightning -- and 'natural,' which is another way of saying Batman or the Punisher) and what archetype you pick (Blasters shoot energy/stuff from a distance, Scrappers wade in with martial arts or claws, Defenders protect and heal their teammates and snipe from a distance, Controllers control people or the weather or the like, and Tankers absorb massive damage while punching things out around them).
Powers are incredibly varied as well -- even two fire based Blasters end up with very different specializations and abilities, and of course the costume designs are infinite, so no one seems cookie cutter. The superteam system just plain works, and if (like me) your friends who are playing are already ten levels above you... no problem! You can be designated a Sidekick while with them, and fight at approximately their level, while catching up experience-wise. You might never catch them, but who cares?
Because the character system is so well done, I found myself making new characters (you get I believe eight total, and then can delete ones you don't care for). I got a feel for the system -- at least at low levels -- and it's almost as much fun making your character as learning the Clockwork automatons have taken a Mensa meeting hostage to create friends for the Clockwork King, and you have to go take the machines out before someone gets hurt. I will now goob about my characters, including particulars of conception and how the costume came out looking compared to what I wanted. However, because I like you, I'll put it behind a cut.
My first character was Matter Man! This is nostalgic on my part -- my first Champions character -- and therefore my first superhero character in an RPG ever, back in Junior High -- was Matterman, aka Jonathan Carruthers, a brilliant scientist exploring the edges of matter/energy conversion who, after an explosion of his experimental Silveranium experimental reactor, was endowed with the power to convert incredibly minute bits of matter into energy, which he then used to fight evil. Which isn't a bad origin for an eleven year old superhero fan. Hell, it beats "learned the algebraic expression of speed," and DC's gotten away with that for years.
The CoH version of Matterman (named Matter Man because there already was a Matterman in the game, if you can believe it) was designed as a Science Blaster, reflecting the genius and explosion that created Our Hero. His core powers were Energy Blast -- which gives him a number of pure energy attacks he can develop -- and Energy Manipulation, which lets him pull off some potent containments and other means of hurting people. It makes him relatively one-note, but this *was* a first character.
Matterman's costume was a simple orange bodysuit with a yellow M, a mask that covered all his hair, and yellow finned boots. This proved extremely simple to exactly model in CoH.
I didn't play him for long, as he was mostly designed to get my feet wet. When I run out of character slots, he's the first against the wall.
My second character -- and first serious one -- was Scholarman, the Sorcerer Superfluous, based on a Superguy story I wrote for a while. Specifically, this Scholarman was based on one I RP'ed online for a long time (and still do sometimes), and is significantly older and more idiosyncratic than the fictional version. Scholarman is an intuitive mage without particularly good instincts originally, and is a good, distinctive mage sort of person, not like a standard comic book mage at all. So, a good test of the system, in my humble opinion.
For CoH, I decided to make him a Magic Controller -- a nice, basic kind of mage type. His core powers are mental controlling (which seems very magical to me) and a secondary of storm summoning. So, in combat he can put a mental smackdown on people, forcing them into their own little world so they're not fighting you (or fighting back, period) while you hurt them, as well as summoning a gale wind to blow them back out of the way or a snowstorm to chill them down and keep them from being effective in fighting you. As his powers improve, so does his capabilities. He's a *lot* of fun to play.
Costume wise, this was a chance to be very unsuperheroic. He wears a brown tweed coat and baggy tweed pants, with rough leather boots, a tie, and a beaten down brown hat. There's some celtic scrollwork to make it interesting, and he's got a van dyke beard. He looks like a jaunty pulp character, like he just stepped off the hunting field from 1934. He is a *lot* of fun to play, and is up above 7th level now. He's also one of two characters I've sidekicked to the Galaxy Circle, doing some high powered combat with some high level characters in advanced dungeons. This is a tactical blast, wandering about and smashing evil. Also, you can redesign your costume colors to reflect your supergroup, and toggle between them. So, when he's actively with their team, he wears blue and white instead of browns. The jacket looks almost blues brotherish then, although more cobalt, the pants look suddenly like they're made out of unbleached muslin, and the white hat gives him a Gaiman Books of Magic quality I appreciate. It's a nice option.
Third, there is Dangerousgirl. Dangerousgirl was a character in my Adjusted League stories, cloned and mutated from my character Spandex Babe (look, it was a parody series) and made to be a duplicate of Dangerousman, one of Bill Dickson's characters and able to set off a thermonuclear explosion by tapping his foot. This was a chance to have a full on superheroine of the old school, while having fun and invoking a few injokes for my friends.
Dangerousgirl -- Danielle MacPherson, or Dani to her friends -- wields nuclear powers. She could have been a Science Blaster, but I had one of those and wanted to try some of the other quests, and besides, she feels more like a mutant to me. So, a Mutation Blaster it was. However, in the comic book, this wasn't like real radiation, which is invisible and boring. So, rather than giving her radiation powers I gave her fire blasts and fire manipulation. The special effects are spot on for how I see Dani in my mind's eye, and that's all that matters. Oh sure, I know that when Dani rains fiery death down on a pack of street punks, she's also sterilizing them with good old American radioactivity, but there's no good way to represent that visually, so fireballs and explosions works better. Right now, she has a fire blast, an exploding fireball of nuclear death (hurts the whole pack of villains), an explosive burst she can generate from her whole body (to back those mothers off when they get too close), and a ring of nuclear fire she can surround someone with so they can't get away. And, all her powers keep causing damage until the fires burn out. It's so comic book I could cry. Oh. And she can fly.
She can fly.
This game knew from the outset there would be flying heroes. It planned along those lines. And by God, it's running with it. There's a monumental statue (several hundred feet high) of a hero named Atlas holding up a globe. Right after she got her flight power, I flew up and sat on the globe. And discovered another new flying heroine up there, doing the same thing. That's the sign of good design.
Costume wise, I decided to go back to her source, Dangerousman. Dangerousman's costume was an assault on the senses. Bill described it as 'radioactive puke green and orange,' and I discovered that wasn't at all hard to model. The uniform should fairly glow with tasteless colors (since that's how her radioactive body is contained), and so a neon lime green and orange fit the bill. I gave her a couple of flourishes based on the heroine she was cloned from, who was described as having a V belt and shoulder epaulets, which I did. Sadly. they did not have a mushroom cloud for her to use as her chest symbol, so I had to go with a nuclear warning symbol in orange. I finally decided to throw in a matching green headband, just because it looked cool. She's also in the Galaxy Circle, which means she can switch to a far more tasteful version of her costume in blue and white with orange accents.
Needless to say, I love playing Dangerousgirl. Just like Scholarman, she sets off my RPing instincts and is a joy to play. However, where Scholarman's a pulp mystic, Dani's all over the super hero convention, and that makes her perfect for this game.
From Dani, I decided to try out Rip Davis. Rip's one of my RP characters, based on a fictional character I wrote named Memorex (yeah, I know). Rip has the ability to learn to do things he watches, even if they're improbable, and he's watched a lot of Jackie Chan movies. He's also got extremely high dexterity -- in RP, he's as much a dancer as he is a fighter.
The CoH version of Rip was based on a Natural Scrapper. This can lead to a viking, Wolverine, or Jackie Chan, among many other choices. I of course picked Martial Artist, giving him flurries of kicks and thunderous pounding kicks and heightened combat senses that make him harder to hit as he bobs and weaves. Which matches up to my mental image of Rip pretty well, all told.
Costume wise, I decided against Rip's tee shirt and jeans from RP, and went with a black loose gee type thing with white accent lines. It looks kind of like a Capoeira uniform as designed by FUBU. I gave him a somewhat Gen X haircut and close Gen X beard, and added some wraparound sunglasses because hey, they looked cool.
Play wise, Rip works great, but I don't have a lot of interest in continuing with him. I don't like the hand-to-hand combat as much as I like the distance. Still, I'll probably get him up to level 5 or so, just to check out the scrapper quest tree a bit. Still, after Matter Man gets out of the way for another hero, Rip's next up against the wall. Which is weird, because if I could be any of these heroes, it'd be Rip in a heartbeat.
After Rip came LAI-2, based third-order on a villain character from my ALU series named Lady Awe-Inspiring. When some friends and I came up with a knockoff of the Legion of Superheroes once, I created LAI-23, being the twenty-third Lady Awe-Inspiring, and like the Brainiac-5 she was so clearly based on, she was a heroine trying to make up for her ancestor's evil deeds. Also like Brainiac 5, the legend was that the second Lady Awe-Inspiring turned against her mother's evil deeds and overthrew in the name of justice. So, it's that second Lady Awe-Inspiring that got the treatment.
The CoH LAI-2 was so named because Lady Awe-Inspiring was too long. C'est bon. Owing to her genius intellect, I went with a Technology Tanker conception -- LAI-1 was invulnerable, and LAI-23 used a force field enabled suit, so a uniform that added protection for front line combat seemed to fit the conception. For her core power, I went with damage resistance ramped way up, leading ultimately to near invulnerability. Not having a decent force field option for her secondary power (there are force fields in the game, but they're the province of Defenders, not Tankers), I shrugged, decided that we didn't have a lot of info on LAI-2 anyways, and went with Ice Control. The effect looks slightly force fieldish anyhow, and the effect is about what I wanted, so it worked out okay. Well, all right, the Ice Sword is a little different, but that fits the "Lady" part of the name, now doesn't it? The interesting thing (to me) is that LAI-2's damage resistance is always there, behind the scenes, just working, which means all the power effects I use are her secondaries.
Costume wise, I went with the 'almost liquid-blue/black suit' image from the original Lady's conception, which was easy enough to do. I added in shoulder plates and a ring disk on her collarbone, to help highlight her high tech background, and a smooth goggle for her to wear. The costume feels right to me, all told.
Playwise, I like LAI-2 better than Rip, though I'm still not happy about wading into battle smashing things willy nilly. I like sitting back and hammering. So, she'll outlast Rip, but she won't join Scholarman and Dangerousgirl in the 'must keep' category.
Finally, I pulled out one of my favorite RP/fiction characters, Dr. Elizabeth Tirkoff, aka Healer. This was a Superguy character originally created by Gary Olson and traded to me for Mighty Guy in a swap to keep us both below the salary cap. Lil is telepathic, able to heal people of mental problems (and ultimately 'heal' them of their superpowers), and has become the headmaster of the ALU Academy in stories I haven't worked on for years. Still, it's a game, and so she came out.
CoH wise, the first thing she lost was her codename. "Healer" was taken probably on the first day of the beta, and the alternate name I had for her -- Chirurgeon -- was also taken. Which surprises me -- but then, there are literate gamers out there. So, she became Dr. Tirkoff, which is cool enough. I made her a Mutation -- born with her powers -- and further made her a Defender, which makes the most sense to me. She has Empathy as her primary power, which lets her heal her whole group (not that she's in a group yet), and for her secondary power she has psychic powers, including a mental blast and a mental assault that also disorients. It ends up feeling very very close to the conception.
Costume wise, she has a jumpsuit that's white along her outer arms, legs and body, and deep red down the middle, with a white 'red cross' symbol in front. Add a belt with pouches on it and some nice, practical leather boots, and she's a near dead ringer for the current Superguy version. I threw in a pair of glasses (squared off glasses, like bifocals or librarian glasses, pretty chic) to make her distinctive. And, because the character she was based on was known to dye her hair rather often (Gary started her as black haired, then went auburn and red haired, and then I went blonde with her, in part because I modeled her physically after a beautiful blonde ex-girlfriend of mine), I tailored her hair slightly, making it strawberry-blondish with slight brown highlights, to better reflect the dye job. It came out gorgeous, and looks better than most of the straight yellow 'blonde' hair people pick in the game, IMHO.
Dr. Tirkoff plays well. She's a great balance and has that distance thing going that I like. She'll make an excellent team member, too, and while I may join my new and old friends in Galaxy Circle for a while, she's the one I can see founding a Superteam later on down the line. Probably an Academy, just because. She's on the permanent list, so far. Also, it's worth noting that I have two points of convergence in the game so far -- Matter Man and Dangerousgirl are both Blasters, and Dr. Tirkoff and Dangerousgirl are both Mutations, but their quest trees have all been significantly different. Oh, there's some crossover (I think every quest tree has a 'run out and beat up 10 Hellions' mission on it somewhere), but the depth is impressive. And what's more, the beginning quests are broken up into two different sections of Paragon City, so there's some depth even if you play nothing but Natural Scrappers.
The community is a good one. People don't snipe your random encounters without asking, people are polite and generally nice, and the system is designed that if you go into a dungeo-- er, go on a mission into a warehouse, a unique warehouse is spawned for you and your team (if any), so no one else can wander in. And for the most part, people are showing taste and discretion. Oh, there's a few girls with overly suggestive codenames wearing pasties and g-strings running around, and others who take advantage of the neo-Witchblade style costumes that you can choose, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The total lack of PvP (and player villains) bugs a large portion of the gamers (to the point that "City of Villains" has already been announced for November), but where they see bugs I only see features. I'm a child of comic books of the 60's (in reprint, mind, as I was 2), 70's and 80's, when the closest antihero we had was Batman, The Dark Knight Returns was a little shocking, Watchman was very shocking, and The Punisher was wholly classified as a supervillain. City of Heroes comes across as a truly Superheroic game, where the most 'extreme' of heroes still abides by a certain code, and the people who get burned alive are the ones who deserve it. I'll probably shell out the cash for City of Villains, because these people deserve our money, but I'm not that enthused about it compared to CoH.
As for my own wish list, it's simple. I wish there were capes and wings (the company has said they left them out because they couldn't do them 'right,' and if you can't do them right they won't do it, which I respect). I wish there were destructible environments so you could throw cars at people and hit them with lampposts, a la the not quite as spectacular but still good Freedom Force, though I can understand why it's hard for a MassMOG to have that -- if you bring down the 800 foot tall statue of Galaxy Girl, it's going to go down for everyone. I wish you could buy more slots for character creation. And I wish you could record 'movies' of your adventures, save them to disk, and play them from multiple angles.
Oh, that reminds me. It's fun to watch someone with powers different than your own fight crime. Any time a game is cool enough to be a spectator sport, it's a winner.
This game deserves to be on your machine. It will also eat your time alive. Enjoy it. Live it. Be a hero.