Talk:Westin Phipps
The official thread has been deleted, but I found a quote about Westin Phipps from the developer, Constellation in Google's Cache. - Snorii 07:52, 13 July 2006 (PDT)
Constellation
Sometimes, due to the vagaries of scheduling, one ends up with a bit too much time... But when one
is writing something as dark as Phipps, it helps to put in a few upbeat things.
And actually there are a total of eight of them, if you come in with a large enough team.
And a later repy to Lady_Sadako.
Lady Sadako
If you wrote Phipps, then even more kudos is in order. Those arcs (in my experience and opinion)
are the best written in the whole game so far, especially the teacher story.
How COULD you put that in and then not let us change sides? I was ready to quit villainy for good
after that!
Constellation
Thank you for your kind words. I was one of three writers on CoV, and I've also done a lot in CoH.
I'm glad that the emotional impact of Westin Phipps got across.
Westin Phipps was an attempt to highlight the lowest and most deplorable aspects of evil. He's not
the same kind of power-mad villainy of Lord Recluse, with all of it's bold imagery and
claims of building a new future. But Phipps is the type of small, petty, vicious, soul-crushing
person vital to making such larger villainies exist. Part of the reason he offends some
sensibilites is because his evil is so close and personal. Writing for him was at once
invigorating and draining, and very different from someone like Vernon von Grun. If Vernon's plans
had succeeded, he would have killed far more people. But the delight Phipps takes in
each person's downfall or destruction makes him disturbing. Heck, after I wrote the line about the
daughters I had to spend time figuring out if I really wanted to put that into the game.
A minor theme throughout CoV is the different portrayals of evil. From Mu'Drakhan's elitism and
machinations, to the comic-book hyperactive mad science of Vernon von Grun, the pure utility
of ruthlessness Maros and Tarkoss both exploit, and the alien madness that is Television and
the Radio. Phipps has his place in this spectrum, and when I saw the thread wondering if he
was "too evil", I knew I'd done my job.
Contact Introduces Question
Have finished both arcs, and Phipps is still not offering Arbiter Daos as a contact. I'll finish off the rest of the missions and see if that changes. Taosin 08:52, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
Worked it out. Okay, so Phipps offers Daos after Korol or Dobbs as a single contact option with different introductory text. I do not think the way I tried to show this is correct Taosin 12:11, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
Civic Squad Dialog?
I noticed that the 2 heroes in the "Poison Food" mission (near the bottom) have dialog, and they're part of the Civic Squad which has 8 members in that mission if you have enough people on the team. Did the other members have dialog? The Civic Squad page has battlecries for each hero, so I assume they yell them out at the very least, but do they say anything else? I'm kind of hoping they don't, because then it would become very hard to find people with records of what they said. Felderburg 14:59, 25 June 2013 (UTC)