With great power comes no responsibility

And after only 16 hours, I'm out of Praetoria. Damn. Was I really that slow on Mistletoe?

 

Well yes, I was, and Eliminatrix has had several advantages over my Dominator – such as the stealth ability which has made every trip to a mission door trivially easy. Perhaps too easy. I enjoy street fighting and may, now that I'm in the Rogue Isles, rely less on Hide in the zones.

(Yes, I've gone to the Isles. With a name like Eliminatrix was I really going to be a hero? Okay, maybe if I were an edgy 90s anti-hero but... no.)

Though I've still got eight hours of this character to go, this does seem like an appropriate time to take a look at the arcs I went through in Praetoria. Last time on Mistletoe I went Resistance Crusader – the Bad Good Guys. This time I went Loyalist Power – the Bad Bad Guys.

Actually that deserves some clarification. The people you work with in the Power story arcs are definitely not good guys – they're mostly various types of selfish jerk - but while they do shrug off a fair amount of incidental death and destruction it's only a means to an end. The Crusaders often revelled in their body counts but in the Power arcs it's just the cost of doing business – a cost that's invariably paid by someone other than you.

The Power story is all about getting in with the elite of Praetoria, and as you do so you're given an insider view of them, including unvarnished – and consequently unflattering – portraits of several of the Praetors. Praetor White comes out of this at least a little sympathetic, but Praetors Duncan, Berry and Keyes all fall somewhere into the aforementioned selfish jerk category, As for Praetor Sinclair...

Sinclair's counterpart in Paragon City, Manticore, has always been something of a Batman expy, and while I can't say how intentional it is – it's not so on the nose as to be a straight parody – the details of how Praetor Sinclair recruits and shapes his elite agents can come across as a rather cynical take on the Bat-Family. There's a subtly nasty undercurrent to the way Sinclair talks about how he 'rescued' one of his proteges from her parents.

If I had a criticism of the Power story it's that while it starts well in Nova Praetoria, as it continues in the following zones it's not very engaging. The Praetors spend most of their time plotting against each other and the contacts you meet lower down in the heirarchy are all self centred jerks of one kind or another. This is thematically consistent but can get a little samey. That impression is also weirdly underlined by the distinctive speech pattern of the first contact in Imperial City being sporadically echoed by the following two contacts, rather as if some of their mission text had originally been written for him. It's peculiar. Very peculiar.

A couple of the missions also try to convey rather too much of the action in text – something which CoH is usually very good at, but which doesn't altogether work here.

Ironically, given that the Power story is all about building up your (public) image as a protector of Praetoria, I spent very little time battling the Resistance. I suspect that's intentional. You're given a truer picture of the Praetors than that presented to the citizens of Praetoria, and you're also given a truer picture of yourself.