City of Rogues – bits and bobs (Part 3)

Well, we basically took up our Labor Day weekend playing CoX — which was some pretty fun together-time for me and Margie.  One last round of random comments on the Going Rogue supplement:

1. Our first duo, Golden Judgment and Velorio, hit Level 20 and departed for Paragon City.  We decided at that point to shift over to another duo we’d gotten up to 5, Margie’s Positive Force (Kin/Elec Brute) and my Ms. Crackle (Elec/Storm Controller).  We ended up this evening at 18, well into various story lines in Neutropolis, and quite happy with how the duo plays.
2. Timed missions are interesting in GR.  Unlike “Do X. You have 45 minutes.” types of missions, instead you get “Do X. Additional security will arrive in 5 minutes.”  Sometimes that must means running at full tilt in the mission map to X, then finding your way back out. Other times it means just living with the wave attacks of bad guys that happen with the timer goes off.  The nice thing  is that you don’t Fail the mission by losing the timer; instead, it just becomes more difficult.  (I think in some cases, that’s more to add tension to the situation; some of those missions simply cannot be done in the time alloted, unless you have a stealth power.)
3. Every first mission from a contact you have to return to that contact (with some very rare psychic exceptions).  After that, you get the person’s cell phone for the next mission in the arc.  When I think back to early days in CoH when you never got to call the mission contact, but always had to trot back across the zone (or two or three) to report in … yeesh.
4. Everything in GR is an arc.  Kudos to the CoX team for not throwing a bunch of random one- or two-offs as starting content.  Level progression is steady, and story interest is high.  Randomized missions, a la Newspaper/Police Band stuff, can be added in later supplements.
5. GR buildings have names.  Time to go visit Mr. Yin?  You can find him at the Yin Technologies building, not some random structure in the city.
6. GR has a large number of cut scenes. Particularly nice, your character shows up in several of them.
7. I still resist the idea that it’s all about a binary choice of SIDES.  There are enough moral gray areas in some of the decisions to be made that stepping over the line here or there shouldn’t brand you as an automatic hero to your new side, or an automatic enemy to the other.
8. That said, it’s odd that the consequences of being known as Resistance (i.e., you no longer have the combo to the Loyalist Underground area, nor do you get Loyalist missions) doesn’t mean that you get auto-attacked by PPD (nor vice-versa for being known as  a Loyalist).  That might have to change if they expand the level cap in GR beyond 20, since that’s sort of the Big Final Decision Point.
9. There are no Zone Alerts in Praetoria.  Zone camping areas seem to be smaller in number, too.  On the other hand, it’s very cool that it’s all a huge 3-zone city, and that you can actually either take the train or fly from one end to the other.  No war walls or island barriers.  Really, it’s not a significant difference technically, but it has a different feel.  You can see Cole’s tower in Nova Praetoria, all the way across in Neutropia.
10. Missions are nicely clustered in your neighborhood.  No need to go flying to hell and gone for a given mission (unless you need to go back and sell, or visit the one auction point and invention building in Praetoria).
11. Along those lines, the Resistance has a way better access to commerce.  Their Underground lair in Imperial City has an auction point and a vendor in spitting distance from each other, and the exit point is just down the street from the invention site.  Loyalists have to fly back and forth across People’s Park to do the triangle trade of Auction / Vendor / Invention.

Good stuff.  As much as I want to see new content, I really hope they retrofit some of the GR mechanisms back into the old CoH stuff.