What if contacts that give missions (assuming that exists in as big a way as it did in CoX) had descriptive text like "noir" and "horror" and "silver age" etc that gave you some indication of what type of missions they're going to send you on. Not in terms of power origin, just like the overall ambiance or theme of their missions. The noir contacts will send you on Maltese Falcon missions ans stuff with whodunit type content, the horror ones would send you on scarier darker maps with maybe some jumpscare stuff going on, and some really grotesque villains (like Dr. Vahz...) and the silver age contacts would send you out to defeat colorful costumed baddies like Doc Ock, etc.
Or would this be better done on a zone by zone basis?
I was thinking maybe every 10 levels or so you might get the chance to pick a new contact and it would offer you a few options, which would mena you could either switch from your current Horror missions to something else or stick with horror, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
It's a good idea for the game to have a bunch of narrow themed quests.
Can you explain more about why you want them labeled as such and why you think they should be limited to every 10 levels or so? I don't see a reason for it but it seems like you have one so maybe you could expand on your original thought.
I like this idea in concept, perhaps not so much in practice. Since the option for being a super-hero or a super-villain will be available at launch, the devs are already making storyarcs to suit both those separate mentalities. I feel the over-genrefication would increase their workload even further. Maybe something with a different theme could be released along the same lines as a Signature Storyarc on a semi-regularly basis, but perhaps not in every zone.
What I'm driving at is, in CoX you had a plethora of mission-giver NPCs and when you hit a new level, your current contacts that were giving you missions would refer you to one or more new contacts, so as you leveled up, you went from one to the next, etc. Generally, in CoX, the "pick your next contact" dialog box would tell you where that contact was located and which badguy group(s) they primarily dealt with. The defining things about the contacts was mostly "what suburb map do I have to go to to talk to them" and "what type of badguys do I want to fight". I'm saying what if the different NPCs giving us missions all had different mission context/theme/ambiance such that some were going to give you spooky/scary/grotesque type of content, and others might be more "iron age"/gritty/street level crime and still others might be more "four color comic"/costumed/"silver age" and still others might be more spies/cloak and dagger/political intrigue/James Bond etc. I can't think of any more themes off the top of my head, but you get the idea. It's more a sign of what the mission stories will be like (Maltese Falcon vs. James Bond vs. slasher film vs. Superman vs. Serpico).
The 5 origins of CoX all sort of assumed that you were of a given origin and that you wanted to fight primarily mission of that same origin. Science toons got sent on sci-fi missions by Jonathan St. John-Smythe, etc whereas Magic origin toons got Azuria and magic-themed stuff to do. Instead of defaulting to making toons do stuff that fits their origin, since CoT won't have official origins for toons, you could ask the player at the end of the tutorial (or whenever) which NPC they want to go talk to first, the options being what I mentioned above. So if you want to do pretty traditional "superhero saves the day" type stuff, you pick that contact, if you want more "anti-hero makes hard choices" you pick the "iron age" contact, etc.
Not that you'd be limited in terms of content, you would likely be able to go back and do ALL of it eventually anyway (flashbacks, or something, I hope) but while leveling, you'd have the option to either stick with one main theme or do a smattering of different stuff as you like.
Then again, maybe CoT won't have differnet levels at which your contacts give you new contacts, I don't know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Now I get what you are saying. I think this suggestion would fall under the path system the devs have spoken about and things like 'horror' and 'silver age' would be a good path for players to choose.
I say that because I am under the assumption that the path system is not an all encompassing game arc but instead offers certain arcs along the way that cater to a specific path, much like Radiac suggested in the OP.
Path system is something I've heard about but have no really well-formed concept of what it is or what it will do.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
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[color=#FF0000]Graphic Designer[/color]
We have only been given a teaser of what it will be so assumptions abound. But in case you haven't read about it you can go [b][url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans/posts/630570]HERE[/url] [/b] and brush up on what we know so far.
Paths are a series of arcs that are somewhat connected, even if only in general concept (like spandex hero, spandex villain, street hero, etc.). We will have 4 at launch. Two for the north side of the bay, and two for the south. Two villain and two hero (1 each for north, 1 each for south). We plan to expand on this system later, but for now they are just the four most common types. We've chatted about having different themed paths (noir, detective, magic, etc.) later, but nothing firm, or even beyond a passing discussion. The whole concept of the paths post-launch is still entirely up in the air. I promise absolutely nothing with regards to later content at this time.
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Conundrum of Furballs
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team, Staff Writer[/color]
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Thanks ConundrumofFurballs. It's nice to know Radiac's good idea is a possibility.
In general I like the idea of these Paths but I do have a few basic questions about them:
Will you attempt to make them as "equal" as possible in terms of access to rewards and related TFs or if you decide to seriously stick to one given Path you're automatically going to be self-restricting yourself from some subset of badges or other rewards? For example will you make certain Task Forces completely linked to certain Paths so that if you're strictly (by choice of course) following a different Path you'll never get the opportunity to do those TFs?
Also will there be enough content to make sticking close to a single Path be feasible or will you eventually have to do other things just to be able to level up from 1-50 at a reasonable pace?
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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I can't recall exactly, I think their plan was to make all things accessible. So even if you are following a different path you could still access the individual arcs. Don't quote me on that. It's a vague recollection I have from long ago.
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Yeah I think the game in general will be open enough that if you wanted to just do any/all missions/arcs you could do them regardless.
The point I think I was trying to make was let's say the Devs create multiple "heroic" paths or story arcs and for the sake of [b]roleplay purposes[/b] you want to "self-restrict" yourself to staying on only one of those narrow pathways. Nothing wrong with that assuming that's the way you want to play a particular character. The concern I had was that if you choose to do that would you necessarily have to sacrifice certain badges/rewards because those things might not exist on the specific pathway you chose.
Bottomline will the only way to get all/most badges/rewards in the game be to give up on "roleplay purity" and just do a random assortment of heroic and villainous missions that would likely have no obvious connections to each other story-wise? Will this game basically punish you for wanting to play it from a strict roleplay point of view by limiting your overall potential to get any badge/reward you want?
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I think you could make an argument that the game should let everyone do every mission there is to do, on every toon they have, as many times as they want, at any difficulty setting they choose. Then you could have a badge for each mission, in theory, as well as other badges for doing masterful things, like successfully completing the mission on the hardest setting would have another badge just for that (for each mission, that's a lot of badges...) completely avoiding the Green Stuff, etc, plus accolades type things for completing whole arcs or whatever. I think that would be good.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Basically it sounds like it's going to be similar to CoH in these respects. When you boil it down there's really only two main "ways" to play a game like this:
You either play as a "completionist" where you more or less disregard lore and story in favor of doing anything and everything it takes to earn ALL the badges and rewards on a single character, even if that means you arbitrarily crossover and do multiple heroic AND villainous things regardless of "alignment" or anything else.
Or you play as a "strict roleplayer" where you choose to follow a certain path of lore-based actions that you do ONLY because you envision your character being set that way roleplay wise. By playing this way you effectively restrict yourself to only following certain story paths and you accept that certain rewards/badges will likely be off-limits to you based solely on your choice to not "break" character.
My hopes are that if you choose to be a "strict roleplayer" that there will still be a reasonable opportunities to get -most- badges and rewards with having too many of them isolated on very narrowly defined alignment based paths.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
It might be better if badge hunting were an account-wide phenomenon in and of itself. Like if any one of your toons has the X badge, then you, the player, count it as one of the badges you "have" for those purposes. That way "you" can get every badge as long as you get it from at least one of your toons. I think that makes more sense for badge hunting and general game play purposes.
Also, when I played CoX, I did almost zero redside stuff, and I didn't really role play or badge hunt a lot. I just did stuff that would get me the stuff that I wanted. I wanted all the accolades for the buffs, temp powers, etc. I wanted certain badges for certain toons (notably Rocketman for my space guy, Capt. Supernova) and I wanted Hero Merits with which to buy the optimal level IOs and Incarnate stuff to get more incarnate powers with. I had a few funny emotes and keybinds for some of my toons, but it wasn't like I went around saying "WE ARE THE SUPER FRIENDS!!!" a la Martin Prince from the Simpsons.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I suppose there are some so-called "completionists" who would accept account based badges as OK because they play a game like this "player-centricly". A player-centric player would accept (like what you were describing) that as long as any of their characters have badge X they can rationalize that they, the player, has badge X. To them their "characters" are not individuals but just multiple avatars for themselves in the game.
Unfortunately for that mindset CoT will be a "character-centric" game, just like pretty much every RPG has been since D&D. This means that you can't freely conflate whatever any one single character has to any other character just because they share a "player" in common. Under character-centric games not only can you not be considered a true "completionist" for having a bunch of characters collectively share all the badges but the very notion of even having "account-based" badges is laughably undesirable at the very least. No real comepletionist would claim victory for having 1,000 badges spread across a dozen different characters - a true completeionist would only be done if he/she had all those 1,000 badges on ONE single character. The badge leader board websites for CoH didn't track the PLAYERS who had the most badges - they tracked the CHARACTERS who had the most badges.
IIRC, at one point one of the MWM Devs finally said in these forums (like a couple of years ago now) that they were going to be trying to keep the overall number of account based badges to a minimum in CoT. Let's just say that was welcome news to me.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Since I'm not a badge hunter per se, I'll defer to your expertise in terms of what that audience would prefer. That said, you're probably going to have to do the "evil" missions to get those "evil" badges with your "good guy" badge hunting toon then. Not MY problem....
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yes and if I recall correctly those things will likely be along the lines of "time played/subbed", "special anniversaries/events", "stars spent", and the like. Shouldn't be too bad.
Oh I fully intend/assume that my "main badge hunting" character(s) will have to be completely agnostic as far as "staying true" to any kind of roleplay theme or alignment. I simply wish it didn't have to be such a binary decision on my part.
In other words I'm hoping my other "strictly roleplayed" characters will -also- have the chance to get a decent number of badges without being effectively locked out of too many of them just because I don't want, for instance, my "hyper-good" guy to ever do anything "naughty". Basically I'm suggesting that EVERYONE should be able to get maybe 75% of the total badges in the game regardless if you're roleplaying your characters or not. It would be kind of sucky if it were more like a literal 50/50 split between "good" badges and "evil" badges.
Bottomline the number of "strictly aligned" badges should be kept to a relative minimum. A majority of the badges in the game should be earnable whether you like to roleplay strict alignments or not.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Right and there's technically nothing "wrong" with having those types of specialized badges as long as you understand they have far more to do with either the "real world" or the "real player" than they do with any one specific character. I'm simply pointing out that these special "account-based" badges as a group should be kept to an absolute minimum.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
To my knowledge, the only things that we plan to have locked behind path content is path content. TFs, Raids, GMs, and all of those things are planned to be accessible to all regardless of whether or not they do path content.
Certain rewards, such as specific badges, temp powers, etc. will likely only be available by doing a particular path. However, we plan to have an equivalent one for each path where we have one.
Most definitely. We are writing it so that there is enough to reach max level. We've probably built in more than that (ok, not probably, almost guaranteed), just to be sure that there's enough. That's not to say that you [i]can't[/i] do other things, just that you won't [i]have[/i] to do other things.
Very few badges will be account wide. Badges are meant to be earned by the character. When a [i]player[/i] earns a badge, such as through a special event, anniversary, etc., it will be account-wide. When a [i]character[/i] earns a badge, such as through completion of a particular mission or killing 10,000 Rikti Monkeys (damn you for changing it the day after I got this!!!!), then that badge is for that character alone and will not appear on other characters on the account unless they earn it.
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Conundrum of Furballs
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team, Staff Writer[/color]
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I'm liking the answers about the amount of path content and the earning of badges.
Spurn all ye kindle.
We still toying with the idea of toons actually WEARING physical badges? ;)
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I don't have a vested interest in how the badge hunting is handled, so feel free to do it in whatever way seems best to you, but I seems to my detached POV that having the badges that are being hunted and counted for the sake of who has the most (i.e. competitive badge hunting) that it would make the badges easier to do if they were tracked as character unlocks for the toons that have them (i.e. my Defender has the "HP healed" badge, but my evasion-based scrapper doesn't because duh) while the official badge hunting tracking could be done per account (i.e. on my account I have various badges counted as "got" by virtue of all the different toons I have that have gotten them at least once). That way you could have badges for darn-near everything, including "staying in the air for X minutes with Fly" and "X DPS achieved over a set time period" because the badge hunters only need to make one of their toons a Flyer or DPSer and can do what the want with the rest. That way any worry that the badges require certain powers would be alleviated by the fact that you don't have to build one toon that has like every power to "get" all the badges, you can make multiples, and in fact would have to make multiple toons probably, to "get" all the badges that exist. That or respec the heck out of the one toon you have. But do it however you like, I've got no iron in that fire.
Edit: In the system I'm envisioning, I think you'd have to refrain from deleting any toons if they have any badges you want, for the sake of being able to prove you do have the badge. That is, I don't think I like the idea of doing an account-wide unlock of a badge for badge hunting purposes then being able to delete the toon that got that badge afterwards and keep the badge credit postmortem. Lose the toon, lose the badges would be the rule, I think.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
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I, for one, would prefer to not give up a costume slot for a badge unless it's for a police-type character or the like.
(insert pithy comment here)
I understand what you're saying here as far as it would "be easier" for badge collecting if you had multiple alts with multiple capabilities to get all the badges. Obviously if what you've called "competitive badge hunting" [b]actually[/b] worked that way then it would be far easier for lots of people to be able to say things like "I have every badge in the game spread across say 10 different alts".
But let me let you in on what appears to be a little secret for you: The top badge collectors in CoH had ALL the badges in the game on individual single characters. I had TWO individual characters who each had EVERY SINGLE BADGE you could realistically get in the game (expect for Passport, which required you to transfer to the European servers and Bug Hunter which was the only badge that the Devs themselves could bestow so players had no direct control over getting it).
So you might ask how in the world did my badge collecting Fire Controller and Electric Blaster manage to earn things like the Top Healing badge or the Top Damage taken badges. Well let me tell you it wasn't easy and that's [b]precisely the point[/b]. That's why it was an important distinction to have as many badges as you could get on single individual characters BECAUSE it was the hard thing to do. Just like President Kennedy famously said in his speech, "...we [do these] things not because they are easy but because they are hard".
Just about any Tank would eventually earn the Top Damage taken badge. Just about every Blaster would earn the Top Debt badge (j/k) and so on. Those things were not that spectacular because those types of characters were practically "designed" to earn those specific badges. No, what made earning badges special and significant was when you managed to earn a bunch of badges on a character that were "against type" and/or otherwise hard for that type of character to get.
Think of it this way: Imagine two mountain climbers who each want to climb Mount Everest. One climber is a young 25 year old guy in top physical condition who's climbed dozens of other tall mountains. When that guy makes it to the top of Everest it's certainly a noteworthy achievement, but it's not really -that- surprising an outcome. That guy was practically built to be able to do that. The other climber is blind 60 year old who's never really climbed a mountain before but wants to do it as a "bucket list" thing. Now if that blind 60 year old actually manages to make it to the top of Everest that would be a newsworthy event praised all around the world because it was so unlikely to happen. See the difference? The "competitive badge hunters" of CoH only cared about individual characters that had the most badges because more than likely a good number of their badges were near impossible or at least very, very hard to get.
This is why what ConundrumofFurballs just said about minimizing the existence of account based badges is very important. It drives home the difference between player-centric badges and character-centric badges. If it's acceptable to you to be able to say (once again) something like "I have every badge in the game spread across 10 different alts" then that is an achievement at least of some note. But I promise you that if CoT inspires people to establish new badge collector leaderboard websites like we had in CoH those websites will not be tracking "collective badge" totals - they will only care about [b]individual characters[/b] with the top badge totals.
Under the "system" where only the top individual character badge earners really matter the idea of ever deleting such a top earning character would be apocalyptically unthinkable and is basically a non-issue.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Try having Empath reduced from 1 billion HPs earned to 100 million HPs earned just a couple of weeks after you had just finished a roughly 8 month farming marathon to get the 1 billion HP version of the badge. I still think Positron secretly waited for me to personally finish off the original Empath before he decided to lower its requirement as revenge for me pointing out in the CoH forum how stupid he had been for setting it that high in the first place. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]