Following on from my last post I've been thinking about other frequent criticisms I've seen of City of Villains – that the villains aren't pro-active enough, working on other people's schemes and not their own, and relatedly that they have to answer to Arachnos, the organisation that runs the Rogue Isles.
There's some validity in both points, but I don't consider either of them to be problems.
That characters react to situations that they are presented with, and work on behalf of others, is something that comes with the territory in any MMO that is structured around quest-givers, though some handle it better than others. For a hero that's fine – there's a long narrative tradition of superheroes setting out to foil villainous schemes after being pointed in the right direction by a friendly contact. Just ask Commissioner Gordon.
For villains it's different, and over the years the writing has tried to present some story arcs as being instigated by the player character rather than them merely following someone else's orders. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The end result remains the same – here's your mission, now go and do it.
(They tend to come across as somewhat better worded versions of the automatically bestowed 'while you're here you should kill some animals' quests I talked about in LOTRO.)
Most of the time though the player villain is going to be working for someone else. That this is a problem for some people is, I think, rooted in a mis-reading of the setting of the game.
The universe of City of Heroes/Villains is not the universe of Marvel or DC. The core difference, I think, is the number of heroes and villains in this world. On any given day there will be more heroes roaming around Atlas Park alone than would be seen in any Marvel or DC story except for the biggest of crossover events, and CoH/CoV does something that is rare in MMOs – it recognises that all of these characters actually exist in this world.
The internal logic of an MMO setting is often strained if you think too much about the presence of all the other players. The more important your character is to the events that shape the world the more hollow it will ring when mission-givers tell you that You Are The Chosen One (and so is everyone else.)
In City of Villains you are not the Big Bad. That's Recluse. You're one of the villains that Arachnos broke out of prison and dumped on Mercy Island to see what they were made of, or you came to Mercy by some other means to gain enough power and influence to survive in the Isles.
Like the new heroes running around Atlas Park you are one of many. It's a society where only the strong will survive and prosper, and you're not.
Not yet.
So you'll work your way up, and that means working for (with?) others who are further up in the heirarchy than you are. One day you'll be on top, or at least so close to the top that even Recluse will respect you.
That's the overall story arc of City of Villains. The setting reflects that. The mission text reflects that. The fact that if one of Recluse's inner circle tells you to do something you will almost certainly do it reflects that.
It's a world that only makes sense because there are so many heroes and villains in it. costumed heroes and villains are a lot more common in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles than they are in most superheroic universes, and there's ultimately less freedom of action for villains* than in those other settings because the power structure of the Isles is set up to control what they can and cannot do.
Most of the time.
*Heroes, of course, will do as they're told anyway.
While the internal logic of the setting is good of course the specific details of a character's experiences will inevitably still stray far from what might be considered realistic. The events that form the story arcs a character runs will be experienced in the same way by other characters running the same story arcs, but even in this the cyclic nature of superhero narratives allows something of a justification. There's often no reason why other heroes or villains wouldn't have had the experience of battling a particular opponent, albeit not in exactly the same circumstances – death is rare in this genre, and enemies almost always return to fight another day.
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