The straight and very narrow

I've described Going Rogue as some of the best content of City of Heroes, and while I do stand by that I'll also acknowledge it's not perfect. As I've played through this run* I've found a couple of things that are not exactly failings, but not strengths either.

The first of these is the difficulty level. GR is CoH on hard mode, but even allowing for that there's a lot of multiple wave ambushes and a lot of boss fights, and the structure of the story telling (and the low population on goldside) means that you will almost certainly have to face this solo. There are certain archetypes and primary/secondary combos I simply would not take into Praetoria, because I can't see how they could handle some of these encounters at this level.

Dominators are on the edge of that category due to the number of times you go up against bosses and elite bosses, who have a lot of inherent resistance to crowd control.

That said, none of the difficulty is insurmountable. The tried and true method of loading up on +defence inspirations has seen me through a couple of these fights, and if all else fails there's always the -1 level/no bosses difficulty setting to fall back on – though personally I never do.

The second point is that Going Rogue is very very linear.

Linear is a word that, when discussing games, is almost invariably used in a negative sense, and usually deservedly so. Here though I'm not talking about instanced dungeons that for all their twists and turns still essentially follow a single straight line, or zones that channel the player from one area to another so much that they might as well be interior locations. Here I'm talking about the way the story arcs are structured.

As I've mentioned before there are four main story arcs in Going Rogue, and if you intend to see your chosen arc through to the end you are, from the start, locked into a specific set of contacts. City of Heroes has utlised story arcs that span entire zones before, and to excellent effect in zones like The Hollows and Faultline, but the difference is that those are single zones, stretching across perhaps 5 levels in all. In Going Rogue the overall story stretches across 3 zones and 20 levels, and there's not really many opportunities to change things up along the way.

It's possible that I'm noticing this more this time because of the way the crusader story arc is laid out. In both Nova Praetoria and Imperial City all of the crusader contacts are found in one location, and the majority of their missions take place in, or are accessed via, the Underground. There's not much change of scenery, is what I'm saying. Indeed, I've spent remarkably little time in Imperial City itself, and a lot of time under it.

*Despite this being my sixth GR post I'm only about halfway through this run – my schedule having gone all to hell this month for reasons unrelated to the game itself.

Comments