Just wondering for roleplay purposes, is there a CoT-verse equivalent to mutants where one is born with superhuman powers? It makes writing backstories a lot easier if I can just say "this character was born with it" and lends itself to story possibilities. Does anyone know if there's something like that here?
Thu, 05/17/2018 - 00:25
#1
Is there an equivalent to the mutants from X-Men?
I'm 100% sure that CoT will allow us to make "born with it" / genetic factor mutation superhumans and roleplay as such with no problems. As to whether lore will help us justify and connect their existence into stories, I am highly confident there will be NPC mutants with backstories of their own, including mutants from birth, from which we can borrow references to some event that caused them to be born that way. Mutation is a hugely popular origin both in comics and was in CoH, so a successor game should contain some NPC mutants with backstories from each major mutant sub-origin as well.
We've also been told that there will be no "forced origin lore" wherein all mutants (or aliens or magic-users or ...) are assumed to have some common backstory elements. The devs (and we forumites) have generally agreed that a single lore-forced cause or beginning time (e.g. first atomic weapon test) for any superpower origin like mutants would be too restrictive on our ability to create characters. Our mutants could easily be said to come from any sub-origin imaginable, such as random gene mutation, science gone wrong, science gone right, self-caused by willpower, alien experiments, magic chimeras - whatever you want, and lore will never restrict it. The more unusual player creations will have to exist without solid lore roots or NPC examples, as you'd probably expect in any game.
As many people here are likely aware CoH was initially designed around the concept of "Origins". Every character in the game had to be categorized as being one of five hardwired, preset types: Magic, Tech, Normal, Mutant or Science.
Now while that might have made thinking up a "character concept" easy for some people (i.e. I'm a mutant, period) it actually had the effect of limiting character creativity and ended up being far more trouble than it was worth. In fact the Devs of CoH actually spent much of their time [b][i]ripping out[/i][/b] many of the mechanics related to Origins throughout the course of CoH's active lifetime.
So as Scott Jackson pointed out CoT is going to be designed from the ground up without forcing anyone to be pigeonholed into brackets that might not fully describe their character ideas. If you want to be "just a mutant" like the X-Men there would be nothing stopping you but if you wanted to be "a robot that uses a magic wand" you no longer have to choose whether that'd be a Tech guy or a Magic guy.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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