Any player who doesn't do a dance emote while picking up missions from the Radio just isn't having enough fun with City of Heroes.
I've said before that I consider City of Heroes to have some of the best writing in MMOs. In this area the game is right up there with Secret World Legends, and that's all the more impressive because CoH almost entirely lacks the tools used by newer games to tell their stories. There are almost no cutscenes - and those that there are use only the simplest in-game animation - and no voice acting. It's all done with a few blocks of text at the start and end of each mission, and a few captions during them, and there are few better examples of how well this can work than the Radio.
This is the only regular contact in the 10-15 level range in Port Oakes, and each mission begins with the character listening to the DJ of a pirate radio station called Radio Free Opportunity. Sardonic, mocking, all knowing and altogether too cool for school, the Radio is offering one lucky listener the chance to make it big in being bad and all they have to do is keep listening!
"If you have the will to power, Radio Free Opportunity is here to provide the juice!"
The missions include a callback to the original Outbreak tutorial from CoH in a pair of connected missions - the second of which is infamous for how long it can take to complete due to having to find four drop-off points on a huge map. If nothing else it's a good source of XP as there's plenty of Longbow to fight along the way. The two hero organisations that aren't Longbow - The Legacy Chain and Wyvern - both feature in The Hit List, a longer story arc which kept me on my toes with some interesting patrol mechanics and a tricky double boss fight.
There's also another two part story about an agent of the Council having infiltrated Arachnos. The second of these missions doesn't work too well due to a long standing issue that goes all the way back to Live - the agent runs for the exit almost as soon as the mission starts rather than when confronted, making him almost impossible to catch. At least there's an option in the story to 'let' him escape.
"The ones you hear as you make the normal folks fear!"
In all of this it's the writing that makes this one of the best contacts in the Rogue Isles. The missions are played very straight and everyone involved is taking it all very seriously, which only makes the Radio's irreverance during the intros and outros all the funnier. For all that it's such an oddball character it never so much as leans on the fourth wall, and there's actually a lot of world building for the Rogue Isles and insight into the various organisations in among the one-liners.
It's never made clear exactly who (or what) the Radio is. Perhaps it really is nothing more than a pirate radio station broadcasting from some rusty tub off the coast of the Isles, or perhaps - as is speculated - it's an auditory hallucination or an Arachnos PsyOp. Or it's something else entirely. At least one later story arc revisits this theme and calls back to these events, though in the end more questions are raised than are answered. That's fitting. The Radio is a magic trick - an exercise in alchemy that turns base missions into gold - and like any good magic trick it doesn't need to be explained, only enjoyed.
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