A Bit On The Nose
September 7th, 2018
I've gone on about two of my favorite City of Heroes characters of late, but I haven't touched on City of Villains, yet. The City of Villains was an expansion to City of Heroes, which allowed you to play the role of a villain, instead of a hero. Which I'm sure sounds obvious, but I figured it needed to be said, in case one or two of you out there were utterly unfamiliar with the source material.
The setting was an island chain whose government had been knocked over by a terrorist organization known as Arachnos. They were sort of like Cobra in a sense, in that they were a critter-themed villain group comprised of countless minions, most of which were filed away into specific ranks - each with their own, special costumes and abilities. The leader of this group was the kook known as Lord Recluse.
While your villains were generally unafilliated, aside from vaguely being tolerated by the group running the islands, you could build a literal member of this organization as an 'epic' character archtype once you finished the story with another character. And thus, you can see the replay value / addictive tendencies mixed into the game, because it just kept giving you more, the more you played.
Once I'd earned access to the epic villain archtype, I built a Crab Spider Soldier of Arachnos, which comes with a cybernetic backpack thingus and the extra limbs there, each of which is basically a blaster! While struggling to name my latest creation, I found an alias which should have been taken a long, long time ago, and was inexplicably still available. And thus, the Obnoxious Jerk was born!
While I paid light lip-service to role-playing in the game, mostly in the map chat or such, I never really embraced it as much as I did with the Jerk. I wasn't downright rude to other players, but I was, well, quite obnoxious - even when otherwise being helpful! And the jerkiness extended to every aspect of the character, from hogging the limelight while teaming to wearing the most distressing of costumes.
Or almost nothing, when it came down to it. I'm sure I was more than a little bit annoying when I broke the Obnoxious Jerk out, which was frequently when not building up some of my other villains in the City of such. But he was simply too fun an opportunity to pass up, whether steamrolling over the good guys, vexing my fellow players, or even trying to out-smarm my main character, Dash Apostrophe!
Installments in this series: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14