I've noticed A lot of my posts tend to be very long-winded... I'll try to be brief this time.
One major problem a lot of MMORPGs have these days is that there isn't a variety of missions to choose from upon starting a character. Usually all you have is one main mission path that each faction gets, and you just follow that path while occasionally being distracted by other side-quests along the way.
This is one area where City of Heroes broke the mold and was all the better for it. I remember that every time I rolled a new character, I had options. There were all kinds of things that affected what sort of missions you'd be starting out with... Were you starting in Atlas Park or (for a while) Galaxy City? That could affect your contacts. Your archetype too also affected the missions you went on. The list goes on and on! CoV and the Freedom Update both seemed to abandon this though in exchange for the more common model of nudging you on a specific main arc that everyone in the game followed from the start, but it still didn't matter after the first few levels because they eventually gave control back to you after they'd given new players enough time to get used to the game.
Once you completed a contact's story arc, you didn't go on to one definitive "next" contact in the mission line... Instead, you always were given a list of guys to choose from.
This sort of thing is what I think makes the difference between a game you simply play and a game you get to truly *experience.* In City of Heroes, it was quite literally a choose-your-own-adventure experience. Your "main" story arc wasn't all about one specific pre-defined questline that you follow all the way to level 50, it was about going where you chose to go and chasing down whatever trail you were most interested in that would eventually lead you to finding the villain you wanted to fight the most, and learning his or her secrets in the process.
I'd just like to remind the people working on CoT to please, please remember to give your players some options and a sense of agency regarding where their character is going and what missions they're undertaking. A linear path may be easier to make, but choices are what make a game great!
Praetoria took this to something of an extreme, in which certain storylines could end with the "death" (and removal) of certain Contacts. This meant that if you wanted to do "all" of the content in a specific Zone, you needed to go through the content those contacts offered in a particular order sequence to prevent "killing off" a Contact you were going to need later. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell up front who was going to who "killed off" at the culmination of the arc, meaning that you needed to have a resource like the Paragon Wiki in order to be able to successfully navigate through the options available to you, if your goal was to Do All The Things.
I did the "all Contacts" gig on a couple of my Praetorians (for the Badges mainly) since that was content you couldn't Flashback to and get later. I probably spent about half or more of my time with XP Gain turned off in order to do that, before leaving Praetoria behind for good.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Hmmm... That sounds like the game Punished the player for trying to play a Different way. :P
I don't like not being able to run my Contacts missions, even if i'm level 50 now. Just Auto Exemp me to my Contacts level. :P
This way it doesn't feel like it will All fall Apart if some friends pull me away to do a bunch of other stuff and a number of levels were gained, and the game would be Punishing me by choosing Heads or Tails.
Heads I refuse to go with them and miss out on all the Social interactions, or Tails I go.. but turn off GP Gain and feel like the game handed me the short end of the stick. :P
Question: Would you pick up where you left off with a lower leveled contacts missions.. after coming back from Vegas? (as in: you get roped in by friends on TF's, Raids, etc... and a slew of Team fun stuff)
My Answer: Maybe!?!? Does the Contact give a Non Tradeable reward? Does that reward act like a Puzzle Piece that reveals a piece of a larger picture/puzzle? Not Required, but might be helpful!? :)
I always liked most superficial Visual rewards. ;D
Lorewise:
I dont really spend allot of time reading the NPC texts. It be nice if the 1st paragraph was short and a summary of what the gist of the mission is. If you're a Loreaholic, just hit the More Button/Link/etc.. and it can show the rest of it.. just like articles, it can break down the 1st paragraph (teasers) into its own detailed sections for Loreaholics to gorge on. ;D
One of the reasons CoH had some much different stuff to do in the beginning, was that they based the game around "Origin matters" such that if you made a Mutant hero, you got one contact at level 1, and if you were "Science" you got someone else. So they needed 5 "level 1" contacts, at least, then after that there were more they'd send you to.
Since CoT isn't going to have "Origins" that are tracked in any official way, (as far as I know), this allows for the possibility that every hero gets the same level 1 contact. I would prefer having maybe 4 different ones to choose from, then once you're done with each of them, have another say 2 or 3 people that they might refer you to from there.
Then they have this Tip system they keep touting. I still don't understand how that works.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Don't forget the Path System. That should help.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
We are actually going to have both a specific story and plenty of one off missions, stories involving npc factions, locations, and over-arcing stories that build off others.
The specific story is called our Path system which has been described in our Kickstarter. Paths are entirely optional and it is possible they can be changed through play.
Not all missions will require a specific contact in the "go talk to this npc" context. An uncovered manhole cover could be a "contact". A lead uncovered from stopping a mugger could the a contact for another mission. This is part of our player agency design method.
There will be times where certain decisions will result in something of a permanent change in the character's version of events. This is related to our alignment system. An example of this could be did you arrest, injur to get info, or kill the npc at a specific point.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I probably sound like a broken record, but Swtor did this with class-specific missions. I wouldn't suggest there, but I would suggest origin-specific missions perhaps? Like how you gained a temp power to use at low levels and sadly you didn't have as many contacts in the Rogue Islands...some of the contact were REALLY weird and interesting though there like a sentient Radio (that some players loved dancing to aswell with NPCs) and later a Sentient TV that did the same thing and even had you kill the Radio.
There are still many mission arcs that I still remember because they were so well written and in some cased so emotional. I'll always remember one of the Grandville missions where you worked for a man who was the head of a homeless shelter, but worked for Lord Recluse secretly and he tells you that there is a problem. Years ago there were a pair of kids, a boy and girl who demonstraited psionic powers. He reported this to Arachnose and they were both taken in, however the girl escape to Paragon City and became a super hero. She has now returned to reclaim her friend and this meant you had to find him first and beat him down because whilst females become Widows or Fortunatas who expand their psionic abilities males have it repressed when they become Bane Spiders so that they work as a hive-mind and as her return was wakening him up many of the Bane Spiders were "malfunctioning" so you needed to stop this.
After beating the heroic upstart, Manticore then arrives to reclaim them, but after taking him out they are arrested and caged up, but then you hear from your contact whilst you are talking to him that Blue Shield (I forgot his proper name, but he was bad-ass hero in Kings Row I believe) came in disguised, beat the crap out of everyone and escaped with all three of them. Even though I was a villain, I did love the fact he managed to rescue and re-unite these child-hood friends. The same contact gave a one-off mission that, if you didn't look at the clue, you really missed out. You had to take out the arachnid mutants and the clue you find had a picture of the man in charge of the homeless shelter, with a boy next to him and writing on the back saying "Love you, Papa Joseph" (again I forget the exact words, but you get the idea) which made me REALLY dislike this contact, but it was so brilliant!
It would be certainly very interesting having some missions that make each play through very different. There are far too many classes to have it Class-restricted, but Origins would certainly seem more possible. You'd need it somewhat generic though so people can have their own interesting backstory if they like.
SWtOR has well-written missions, but not much variety of choice. You've got your class arc of missions, but the rest are the same old ones you had with your other character. One planet-zone at a time.
Be Well!
Fireheart
They've said that they won't put in origin as a "mechanic" since it'll be too restrictive since it'll "pigeonhole" everyone powers into one single origin. Just think about it, what would you choose for magically enhanced technology?
Oh how I hated Pretoria, and the opening post pinned the reason.
There was one story to start with and worse it was a story I hated.
There as nothing to do there that I liked.
Once I was free to ignore my contacts I found that there was practically no street sweeping and really nothing to do.
I quit following the contacts after the weird version of Backstreet Brawler had me go pick flowers. Come The Freek On!
Worse by the time I realized that there was nothing there except following a dismal story with a bunch of rude hateful contacts, I'd forgotten who my next contact was supposed to be, so I couldn't just take up where I left off, and didn't care enough to try, and I sure as hell wasn't going to start over, so I tried escaping to the real world through Pocket D. It didn't work for some reason, I really don't remember why, so I deleted the character and never went to Pretoria again.
Killing off Galaxy City Hurt me a lot I liked Galaxy city and spent a lot of time there away from the constant lag of Atlas Park.
Having a lot of options at every level makes having a lot of characters fun. If I have to do the same crap over and over I get bored. That's why I hated the cape mission so much. Not only did I have to do it over and over again, but it was a really long mission that involved traveling to a lot of different loading screens. I hate that.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
+1.
What makes it worse, any time you rerun the Same Fringe mission, SOLO, its 10x worse than if you were on a Team. :/
Come on Izzy you know I'd rather solo it 10,000 times than do it with a team even once.
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The Villain one was better imo. It was shorter and involved luring out a Hero so you could beat them and steal their cape.
Unlike the hero one which was so long-winded and admittedly, I did like it at first due to the interesting story fluff about Hero One, but when you have to do it for every character it gets REALLY annoying.
To be fair, the original Hero Cape mission was written at a time when EVERYTHING in the game was an excessively long slog to do (TFs needing 2.5+ hours or more to complete was the norm). Every major story task was this LONG chain of events and stuff to do, and the Cape Mission was no different. Likewise, you weren't dealing with a game in which everybody had 30 alts already, so having long winded content like this was seen more as Boon than as Bane. I mean, the Positron TF was an absolute stem winder of ridiculously epic proportions that ended in ... an office building in Perez Park (wait, what?). It was not uncommon to need to devote an entire evening to playing ONE Positron TF, and even then you were lucky if at least half the Team finished it.
THAT was the writing standard under which the Cape Mission got created in the first place. Eventually it got updated, but the long pizza run format of it didn't really change all that much, where you spent most of your time running around from place to place, talking to NPCs to learn backstory that ultimately didn't matter one bit. Thus, the whole thing was done as a vehicle for "yabber yabber" telling of Lore ... in a Mission where people mainly were doing the Mission for the CAPE, not the Lore. Misplaced priorities, that.
Which then brings up an intriguing proposition I've just thought of.
In City of Heroes, the vast majority of the Lore heavy Missions were the Story Arcs and Task Forces, where the idea was to create a continuing narrative for people to play through. Problem was, that sort of Lore heavy content focus [i]only matters the first time[/i] ... and then forever after it's just GOGOGO on the replays. I mean, seriously ... are you expecting an entire TEAM to stop and Read The Story every step of the way? I'm sure there were plenty of Players who had no idea what the "story" for any of the Task Forces was, and they only cared about the Smash & Grab that they offered.
So what if City of Titans inverts that dynamic?
Specifically, what if City of Titans were to "banish" the heaviest and most dense portions of its Lore into the Side Story region of its gameplay, rather than trying to force fit it into being a front and center type of deal? In other words, instead of making the Story Arcs and the Task Forces the primary source of Lore for the game ... what about using Newspaper Missions for that? That way the Lore is there if you want to take your time looking for it, but you aren't having to cram pages of text into a Task Force in which everyone just wants to Get On With It Already!
Alternatively, you can write the Story Arcs such that they aren't delving all that heavily into the Lore, but then give that Contact additional "Newspaper" styled repeatable Missions (so that the Contact remains relevant forever, instead of just in a narrow Level range after which you can forget about them) which contain the REAL Lore content of the game. Yes, such Missions would be "disposable" content, but at the same time, since they're entirely optional, if you "stop and smell the roses" along the way while doing them you learn a lot more about the Lore than you otherwise would have. Thus, Lore heavy Mission context falls into the "optional" category, rather than into the "mandatory" category like Task Forces did (for the acquisition of Accolades, among other things).
Note that such a structure would give Explorer types something to chase after, which could aid in Player retention and diversification of the type of Players that the game attracts.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
That's kinda interesting. I could see the main story arcs from each contact having a gloss of lore and a bunch of plot-hooks. Then, players that were interested in the lore could ask that contact more questions and do more missions for them, and dig deeper into the lore that way. This could develop as an investigation for the Character to unravel, as another major story arc, related to the main one.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I think it's easy enough to make every NPC-given mission, TF, arc, tip mission, radio, newspaper, etc its own one-of thing, completely unrelated to the rest of the world. If you do that you then have an environment in which a bunch of unrelated one-of events happen with no real connected stroyline joining any of them at all. The game world is then just a place where stuff happens, but the stuff happening doesn't all add up to anything.
I'm not against that as a way to go. DC Comics, before Crisis on Infinite Earths, had this. It even had differnet Superman titles that had totally different stories revolving around Superman. In one of them he aged a little and had grey hair at the temples, in the other he was permanently like 32 years old.
This type of world would allow all players to write their own stories, and as long as those stories don't involve killing off any of the iconic NPC characters, they're fine. This type of world would also take away the problem of having a TF to go rescue Statesman and then still having an NPC Statesman clearly standing on a sub in Independence Port the whole time.
That all said, I was the type of player that only half paid attention tot he stroylines at all. Other people, I guess, really liked the ongoing storylines that the world at large had to offer in CoX. I can't tell you what those people would think about that.
I could see using NPC-given missions, like the ones we got from the various contacts in CoX, and tips and leads or whatever to be the main storyline drivers and then leave the TFs as the "big scary monster of the week" type of stuff and then have repeatable dailies, like the tip missions, that are just a fun quick romp with no real impact on the game storylines.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'm all for ANYTHING that will reduce or better yet ELIMINATE lore from the game.
I've already said before that I always and forever hate all lore without exception.
It just wastes my time and distracts from the story of MY characters.
I really don't know much about the COH lore because I never had an interest.
For me the game was never about Statesman (who's name I honestly struggled to remember just now).
It was About Paladin, Last Crusader and Übermensch.
I did a task force Once.
The computer I was using overheated after a while and I was forced to turn it off.
An hour later I logged back on and to my surprise I was still in the task force.
The rest of the team told me that the only thing I had missed was getting a Vampire hunter badge.
We finished and I swore that I'd never play another task force ever again.
A vow that I kept.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
I think they only need to reduce the force feeding of lore to a bare minimum. It may be about your character but it is about your character in that specific world, not about your characters in a vacuum.
The game lore in CoX was easily avoided by simply not reading the mission fluff text. I myself had to be told that that big "egads!" secret reveal at one point was that the Rikti were not aliens from another planet but rather mutated humans from another portal-corp-accessible version of Earth.
Never would have figured that out on my own, or cared. To this day I still have no idea how they got that HUGE mothership through a Portal corp portal, or why they ever bothered to try.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Close but no cigar.
Actually it's not about my character "in that specific world", any more than it is about my character in a vacuum.
It's about my characters in the world in my head.
That's why it's so important to have a wide variety of content, including settings, so I can find the setting and type of adventures that work for me.
Statesman not only didn't matter to me but as far as I was concerned he didn't even exist because he wasn't in the world I was playing in.
In fact I never once played in Paragon city. I played in Birmingham Alabama, Frankfurt Germany, China or whatever place I wanted to pretend I was in, and I looked for settings that matched my imagination.
Skyway City looked more like Birmingham than most places.
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Really? That's funny. I never found out.
It's actually interesting. Since you TOLD me about it. But having to DISCOVER it by reading a bunch of lore during a mission was NOT worth the effort.
I mean seriously, millions of people played COH for years and I bet not more than a few thousand people around the world know that the Rikti weren't really from outer space.
Look I like reading, and I enjoy the thrill of discovery,
but I don't want to read a bunch DURING a GAME.
I think a lot of people feel that way.
And it's even worse when you're on a team because the leader is the only one who even SEES the text while everyone else is just standing around waiting. Which is a serious pain if the leader reads slowly, like I do.
(Cut-scenes are better by far because everyone sees them).
More often than not people just click whatever they have to to skip the text as fast as they can so they can get on with the mission.
If it's possible to miss important information and fail the mission people just google it so they can find the info without having to read a bunch of pointless crap DURING the GAME.
See they read what they need to but they they don't want the game slowed down.
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I respect the opinions of the above posts, and I'm in two minds on some of it since allowing for different kinds of players with dfferent expectations and wishes for gameplay is desirable, but c'mon... I think neglecting or sidelining lore and story aspects is absolutely the WRONG way to go in any real mmorpg. If this were an mmo action game, a straight first person shooter or fighting game where gamplay and the social aspects of teaming and competing are the main draws, then fine, but the RPG part here is important, not least because of the setting and background. If this were a military game full of grunts and ranks, say, or one involving wars or a high fantasy setting with clearly established races and archetypal factions then the main objectives in the game play would be straightforward: have fun fighting for your team. Not much lore or rpg required, beyond whatever the download screens tell you about your race and class, etc
But in a superhero setting, which is a version of the real world where the uniqueness, complexity and wide variety of the characters' background informs the setting of the game, I feel it's more than about just faction and class. Involving the player in the lore and having the background engage with the player is IMO central to immersion.
In short, I can understand and appreciate a team-based shooter where we don't really care about the background, we just want to capture the flag or rise to the top of the leaderboard, etc but in a SUPERHERO game, where the whole concept of the background is about people rising above the crowd to "be a legend, Mr Wayne" etc, or psychos trying to show the hypocrisy etc in the system with mass murder and all the other characterization stuff that happens in superhero fiction, then story is essential, otherwise you'd just wonder why the hell all this stuff (the gameplay) is happening. The game would feel pointless without a decently thought-out background, to me at least.
"TRUST ME."
That simply isn't how I play and I had a lot of fun playing COH.
Also I think that the way I play is the reason I've enjoyed Champions online more than most people here and only quit playing it when their upgraded graphics wouldn't play on my computer any more.
I still had problems with it but not nearly so much as some people on this forum have expressed.
Of course a lot of people tell me I'm really missing an important part of what an MMO really is, but I don't care.
To me it's just a big fancy video game.
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I sometimes play CO too, and that game is an exception to what I said above due to its cartoony style and silliness. It is comical and campy in most ways, a humorous setting, and I don't know anything really about the background and often don't read the mission text.
But the reason it's still playable is the comedic/immature style and the fact you can't play a villain, so there is only one 'team' or faction, and that's it. If CoT, like CoH, has a slightly-to-considerably more mature and serious tone and background, as superheroes go, and has more than one alignment, then all the better. And if it does, then background complexity is required, and that is one of the parts of the game I look forward to the most.
"TRUST ME."
Hope you enjoy it, while I enjoy ignoring it. I just seriously hope there are no situations where I'm forced to notice it. Or rather forced to sit through a ton of it when I really don't care and just want to get back to the game that this lore crap has taken me away from.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/browse/pub/3185/Crusader-Game-Books
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC48O9dPcNVdeyNM4efAvX6w/videos?view_as=subscriber
In that case, when UGC eventually rolls around, you probably wouldn't like the ones I write. Depending on what the content creator allows, I plan for decision making and detective skills to be important in some instances, and follow as much interactive (and widely mulitpl routing) narrative as is possible, like a detailed version of the arcs in the Arkham games. Not walls of text, but as much immersion and detail as I can fit, and some emotional depth in the 'story' parts of the arc.
Given your very specific appreciation of aspects of background like morality, I would've been interested in what you made of all that (if it indeed is possible, after launch).
"TRUST ME."
I dunno
I strongly suspect that the whole alignment system is another aspect of the game that I'll find myself trying to ignore as much as possible.
But you've seen what I had to say about that already, and it's really a different topic altogether.
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Just to be clear. I'm saying I can usually give or take lore and might not read a lot of it. In CoX that was totally possible and I didn't feel as though the lore was somehow being forced upon me. I mean, they made you BUY the signature story arcs, and even when I was on VIP after it went F2P I still didn't do them. That said, I wasn't trying to write the whole story of the whole CoX universe by myself. I wasn't even really trying to write a story for my main toon, at least not one I could tell in any detailed way. Radiac was a good guy because I never much liked redsiding (and because I made him in like 2005). He probably got his powers via a science accident of some kind. Involving radiation in some way. I guess.
His origin story was my re-write of the opening credits from "The A-Team" TV show of the 1980s, reworded to describe him, a former college physics professor turned hero. I did that because I thought it would be funny.
Assuming CoT doesn't tell me lore then quiz me on the lore in order to advance in level or get cool stuff, I'm fine with the dev team writing all the lore they care to write.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
DAMN IT!!!! SPOILERS!!!! >:(
j/k ;)
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that the Rularuu on this earth are what the Rikti Become in a decade. Weeding out the weak. Survival of the Fittest. Spanking the .... :o Never Mind. :)
I personally like lore because it gives me context for the world I live in. I enjoy the co-operative element of story telling that the lore provides allowing me to create characters that fit into the make believe world the game is set in. I like knowing why the Skulls have powers and why Crey scientists are bad guys. A world devoid of the who and whys holds very little interest for me.
The things I would hate about lore is if it forces character concept, overall goals or personal motivation. This is why I felt that CoH blue side presented lore well while red side did not. As long as the devs don't force a personal aspect on my character I am happy with the lore.
That said, I would also prefer that lore be 100% a players choice to read, know or care about....its just not deal breaker for me
The place where the lore could get overbearing (and I'm already sure CoT isn't doing this) would be like in Freedom Force, where the creators of the game tried to force the same origin on everyone's powers. Everyone in that game, from Minute Man to The Ant to Alchemiss had powers gotten from exposure to Element X.
I don't want that.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
spoiler: alert
Rikti: mutants
mothership: implausible
Dream Doctor: Rularuu
everything: Nemesis plot
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Agreed 100%