The darkest shades of grey

Going Rogue has some of the best content in City of Heroes, but at the same time it's probably the worst possible introduction to the game for a new player. I'm not just referring to the fact that GR defaults to a higher level of difficulty than CoH or CoV. I'm referring to the tone, and to put this in context I have to look back for a moment to City of Villains.

When CoV was released back in 2005 one of the criticisms was that villains weren't allowed to be villainous enough. They spent too much time – it was said – fighting other villains and not enough time being villains, or more precisely, being evil.

The response to this came with the release of Grandville, the 40-50 zone for villains, and one contact in particular – Westin Phipps, the most evil man in the Rogue Isles. This won't be the last time I write about Phipps, because he and his missions are some of the most memorable content in the game, but for now I'm mostly thinking about how in a couple of ways he acts as a precursor to the story arcs in Going Rogue.

Most obviously in that years before actual side-switching through morality missions became a thing players would intentionally fail one of Phipps' missions, letting it time out to ensure that the good guys won, because Phipps made you think about the rights and wrongs of what you were doing. Not even so much if you were a bad guy – that goes with the territory in Rogue Isles – but what kind of bad guy you were.

There was no reason in the game mechanics to do so as side-switching wouldn't be introduced until years later, but for some players Phipps was a step too far, and rather ingeniously the devs provided a way out that didn't involve leaving the arc unfinished.

Phipps pushed the limit of what was acceptable in CoH to the limit. CoH almost entirely lacks the main tools of modern MMO storytelling – cutscenes and voice acting – and so has always had to rely on its writing, and in Phipps' missions a lot more is implied than shown.* It works, for the same reason that in the horror genre what you don't see – but can imagine – is far scarier than what you do see.

*This near total reliance on the writing is one of the reasons I rate CoH so highly when considering the best written MMOs. Secret World Legends, for example, is brilliantly written, but also has well made cutscenes and superb voice acting to back it up. CoH has text boxes and some simple scripted sequences, and still manages to deliver some of the funniest, most moving and most memorable stories in MMOs.

Which brings me back to Going Rogue. One of the central features of the expansion was the side-switching system, which allowed Heroes to become Villains and vice-versa. The stories in GR tie into this by exploring what it means to be good or evil or – and there's a lot of this – to be somewhere in between.

This is what I'm thinking of when I say the tone of GR is drastically different from much of the rest of City of Heroes. Even as a Resistance Warden – the most obviously 'good' option of the four arcs open to a new Praetorian – it's a challenge to come through GR and out the other side with clean hands and a clear conscience. In the Loyalist arcs – rather wonderfully called Power and Responsibility – it's less a question of if you can stay on the side of good than it is a question of just how bad you have to be, or want to be.

Then there's the Resistance Crusader arc, which is pretty much about being a terrorist.

No, really it is. I'm not kidding.

For a crusader the ends always justify the means. That's the viewpoint of the ones who genuinely believe in the cause they are fighting for, but there's also those who are simply using it as a justification to cause chaos and destruction for its own sake, and you'll work with both. This is a story arc where you start by carrying out a nerve gas attack on a police station, then take part in a plan to reprogram maintenance robots to attack random civilians in the streets. That's in Nova Praetoria. Once you get to Imperial City you've moved on from nerve gas bombs to human bombs and from civilians being terrorised by hacked robots to civilians being fed to your cannibalistic allies... who are also human bombs.

It's strong stuff that gains impact for being so at odds with the tone of most of the rest of the game, and in that respect it's very reminiscent of the way that Westin Phipps differs from any other contact in City of Villains. In the Rogue Isles there's usually a sense that everyone is playing by the same rules – at least most of the time – but Phipps breaks those rules with his gleeful targeting of innocent people, and the crusaders are similarly callous, even if they have better reasons for what they do.*

As I said in the opening post of this run, Going Rogue was developed with veteran players in mind, and it's best experienced after you know what it's like to be heroic in Paragon City and to do villainy in the Rogue Isles. GR is all about the shades of grey that lie in between, and some of those shades are very dark indeed.

*Better, in this case, is highly relative. Whether or not at least some of the actions of the crusaders are justified is open to debate, and that at least puts them ahead of Phipps, who revels in cruelty for its own sake and whose motivations are some of the darkest and most twisted in all of CoV, even as they cast an entirely unique light on the true nature of the Rogue Isles.