I was writing a new Stout Henry story last night, when I got the idea to try and model him with the character creators from all the MMOs I had which could actually make unique characters. That left out EverQuest and World of Warcraft right off the bat; neither one has many character choices and people generally look a lot like other people of their race and gender.
I started off with City of Heroes, because its character creator is legendary. Unfortunately, the options are not tuned so much for a medieval adventurer wearing simple clothes and wielding a staff. Still, after a couple of tries, it didn’t come out too bad… but it wasn’t Stout Henry.
Next up was EverQuest 2. Unlike EverQuest, EQ2’s character creator is pretty customizable. Stout Henry would be a bruiser in EQ2 terms, and I soon had a decent looking character, except that the clothes were entirely wrong. Also, he’s a little TOO clean cut. Personal hygiene is not at the top of Stout Henry’s priority list.
Given the discussion we were having yesterday about the Vanguard character models, I figured I’d have a go with theirs. When I saw the Qalian human disciple, I’d found Stout Henry. Nothing to be done but level him up to 3 and buy a staff, and there he was. My hero.
 City of Villains |
 EverQuest II |
 Vanguard |
Since I was in City of Heroes *anyway*, I decided to look in on my mastermind, the villainous Tara Mythcrafter. Next up on her mission list was a mayhem mission, where she would go to Paragon City and raise havoc and rob a bank and survive somehow. I failed the mission right at the end. But I had realized why I always fail these missions — I keep thinking the point of the mission is to rob a bank. That is NOT the case. The POINT of the mission is to cause MAYHEM — killing the good citizens of Paragon City, blowing up cars, breaking through barricades, defeating so-called heroes, and in general, making your mark on the world.
Next mission sent me to the PvP area, so I went to Booty Bay to look around. Some sort of player-run PvP battle was just ending, so I made a note to look them up when one was starting, and went to Pocket D, the CoX nightclub, to hang out with some fellow costumed adventurers.
There weren’t enough people there to make it interesting, so I accepted a team invite and as anyone who looked at Xfire saw, spent the night in CoV, doing missions and hitting level 19.
After the team broke up, I got a new mayhem mission from my contact, returned to Paragon City and played the mission how it was meant to be played. I blew up EVERYTHING. Cars, trucks, mailboxes, bus stops, phone booths, cardboard boxes… here’s me and my crew villainously attacking a dumpster.
We robbed the bank, too, and defeated the heroes they sent at us. Afterward I kept blowing up cars and cardboard boxes, working on badges, until the timer ran out.
I did get some writing done, but not enough, so that will be tonight’s job. I hope I don’t get sidetracked again….
Is that Vanguard model from Test Server?
How appropriate that Stout Henry should be a Vanguard character.
Maybe you should make him in WAR at a later date also.
No, that’s the live server — Seradon, same as my “real” characters. You can see that S.H.’s face is still in shadow. Even though Qalians run a little darker than those from Thesla, he’s not that dark. It had to be Qalia for the hairstyle.
Spore does such a fantastic job at making critters, I’d love to see their take on a human character creator.
Playing mayhem missions solo it is certainly good to cause some mayhem before going to the bank to bring the timer up a bit. Besides, blowing up things is fun 😉
In large teams it might be easier though to rush to the bank directly, at least if everyone has their travel powers and everyone is fairly synchronized. Not always the case with PUGs…
I am a bit surprised that the Vanguard characters look as good as they do, my recollection of my playtime in Vanguard was that many characters looked quite horrible, at least non-humans.
Well, I think the halflings in Vanguard are particularly bad, for the human-seeming ones. The non-humans just look totally bizarre, but once they get the armor on it hides the fact that their heads and bodies don’t match. One thing about EQ2, the non-human races LOOK DIFFERENT. The Ratonga, Kerra, Sarnak, Iksar, Arasai and Fae all look unique and move in their own ways.
In the triptych above, only the rightmost picture is from Vanguard. The EQ2 version in the middle looks spectacular, but too clean.