See and read the update here: https://cityoftitans.com/content/introducing
As always, comments are welcome below.
—
Wait until you see the... nope, that would ruin the surprise.
Wed, 02/23/2022 - 11:12
#1
Discuss: Introducing...
Good stuff, keep it up!
Not terrifically impressed [i]yet[/i] by what I'm seeing in this update (other than Armstrong Tower and the Dr Tyche "brainglobe" saucer).
To be fair, it's still early days and a LOT of details have yet to be pinned down (like body shapes for starters). So I can't be too critical at this stage.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I'm just satisfied that there is progress.
It's also encouraging that someone else has joined the team. Sadly, I lack the skill needed to be a useful addition.
I expect body shapes will be subject to sliders and we'll be able to fine-tune to our own aesthetics.
My own 'disappointment' is with Anthem's golden arm. I had been anticipating something a little less plain. Perhaps some level of 'etching', some amount of plates, so it doesn't look like she'd just dipped her arm in plasti-seal. Perhaps some slightly fancier boots. Maybe an aesthetic reflecting her arm? Wasn't she supposed to inherit American Star's 'phoenix' thing?
The other costumes shown are clearly generic and could serve as a base for stylistic overlays. I definitely like the look of the HEART armor, but I imagine some variation in the underlayer would make it customizable. The so-called 'Fantasy' dress looks more 'peasant' in its current state. Yes, 'peasant' is certainly a style from 'fantasy', but would a modern woman wear it on the street? Still, I can imagine a different skin on it, with a different style.
One of the things I enjoyed doing with the CoH CharGen is combining and layering different costume bits. I'd definitely like to be able to do the same in CoT.
[img]https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/921f7ff1-1a0d-491c-9028-f0edd9d3f411/d9gpw0e-92d9d480-705f-4dd6-b70a-1cbea6c5bb91.jpg?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzkyMWY3ZmYxLTFhMGQtNDkxYy05MDI4LWYwZWRkOWQzZjQxMVwvZDlncHcwZS05MmQ5ZDQ4MC03MDVmLTRkZDYtYjcwYS0xY2JlYTZjNWJiOTEuanBnIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.Gy6y4HDBqoUp7kD85rAFzAVlVMnN2_VTTPMJauCtM0I[/img]
Be Well!
Fireheart
I adore the heart armor. It's sleek looking, and high tech, great for your science or tech based hero/villains.
However, I do have a question, what is the hoodie going to count as, when it comes to costume pieces? Because it looks as if it's both a chest piece and a headwear piece, or is the hood part separate altogether? Allowing one to have JUST the hood or JUST the hoodie
[center] [i] [color=blue] Unarmed combat best combat. Every media [/color] [/i] [/center]
It might just be the engine being used, but all the characters have a plastic feel to me. Just my two cents.
Yep, I hope that is one of those last pass things where adding some shaders or something that completely changes the look/feel of the artwork. The only reason I mention that is because the developers themselves said something like that years ago when people were pointing out how bad things looked in the early stages. Nothing looks release pretty until about the last year or 6 months before launch. I hope that is the case still. As of now the CoH picture above seems to 'pop' more for me than the CoT characters. /shrug
[b][color=red]Reward tactics as well as damage dealing.[/color][/b]
I think that's the danger when artists try to approach realism. The closer you get, the more jarring the differences become. Also known as the uncanny valley, it can be avoided by going into a more stylistic direction. Another benefit to more stylistic renderings is that they tend to age far more gracefully, ie. it takes much longer for something more stylistic to look graphically dated.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
The question of pushing realism towards the uncanny valley is certainly one issue that has to be addressed in any modern MMO game. As you say going with the "stylistic" approach is one way around that.
But I think what might be more of an obstacle to the CoT Devs is figuring out how to make their character creator flexible enough to make good looking "standard humans" while also allowing for radically morphed body shapes. A perfect game would probably implement dozens of body models with hundreds of sliders each so that the players could create any body shape they wanted. But CoT is currently limited to two basic body models (male and female) and a relatively small number of sliders to tweak them.
Ironically in giving those two basic body models as much flexibility as reasonably possible it's apparently become hard for them to make sure that having "normally shaped" humans was possible as a default. The often discussed problems with the female body model upper arms and hips in the current CoT build is one consequence of those tradeoffs. The challenge for the CoT Devs is to make sure to find the sweet spot between allowing us to make as many morphed characters as possible while still allowing us to make good looking "normal humans" at the same time.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
“Early days”? Lol WHAT
Currently trapped inside the Speed Force...
Yea, it’s a fine line as a fan to be supportive AND realistic.
This is definitely not early days time wise, but development wise yes. But that being said, I want this game/company to succeed, so I will be here and keep up to date and support.
I’m glad they are getting to a position where they can show more. Hopefully it can bring some new excitement around the game.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Sorry but how is this early development wise? Even if you consider when they switched to UE4 in 2015 thats still 7 years. I want it to succeed as much as the next person, evidenced by me paying the Second Chance $50 to get the game. I just wish they'd stay consistent with communication.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Because they are barely in pre-alpha. Do you consider that late in development?
They still have to get the communication system running, the online multiplayer going, missions, powers, etc.
Even when they get these working , they still have many more zones and other work they want to do. I know they probably have a lot of this conceptually done, but actually plugging all of this in takes a lot of time too(for example the powers). So if you look at the game as a 1-100% completion, they are still early development wise.
Not sure if you took that as me dogging on them or the game, because I wasn’t.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I consider 7 years into any game development not early.
I'm not talking about the communication system of the game, I'm talking communication like official status and updates. That's really the only peeve of mine. While I don't consider them in early development, even for a small volunteer team 7 years is substantial, I have never complained about where they are in development...it'll take how long it'll take. I get that.
On a 1-100% scale, I hope they are not still in early development. If 7 years is still only early development, and full game release isn't until 100%, we have 10+ more years to go...which I hope isn't the case.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
I think you are misunderstanding me
When I say development-wise, it has nothing to do with time. I am talking pure status of where the game is at in production.
The thing about game production is the foundation is the longest and most tedious part(although just about everything takes a long time)/along with creating all the characters/costumes etc which by this and the last few updates seem to show that that is in the final steps(in terms of people actually being able to jump in and do stuff).
I personally believe that the pace will start to pick up now that they are at the stage of plugging everything in, but that doesn’t change the fact that development-wise(nothing to do with time spent making the game), everything still needs to be plugged in, which means we are in the “early” stage. Merely for the fact that you can’t play a game on just the foundation, there’s nothing there to play.
But the good thing is the plugging in doesn’t take nearly as long as the foundational elements, so I do not think it will take 10+ years to plug stuff in.
As far as the communication stuff goes, I do think they have gotten a lot better recently and have been enjoying all of artstrong’s streams, even though I have to watch them when they come out on YouTube.
The game is coming along and I think it’s awesome what this volunteer group has been able to achieve.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
With ArtStrong's streams in full force, there's not much more we can do that we aren't doing already. Unless we start posting screenshots of dev desktops while they debug code.
Nobody wants an "Well, it's still broken on Mac, but we're working on it." update.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Well I hope there is more going on than just Artstrongs streams and trying to debug the Alexandria map...at least Warcabbits update in January and Tyches in December alluded to a lot more going on that was ready or almost ready.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Like I said, most of it would be worthless to show, even though it's happening. To prove it, I'll risk getting into trouble here and leak some of the screenshots of work getting done- this is from one of the dev's channels.
[center]
[img=800x600]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/485181652083933210/961802740789563392/unknown.png[/img]
[img=800x600]https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/485181652083933210/894176272090009610/unknown.png[/img]
[/center]
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
There's a difference between show and tell. Why does MWM think that telling must be some showy spectacle?
For example, How far along is the team with all the missions that will be published at launch? [list]
[*]How many mission will be included at launch?
[*]How many missions are plotted out, written, and through the review cycle?
[*]Are the mission maps completed and through the review cycle?
[*]Are the NPC's designed, built and ready to assume their place for each mission?
[*]Have any missions been run through a playtest and approved?
[/list] And that's just one branch of your organization.
Let's talk about Power sets.[list]
[*]How many power sets that will be included at launch are fully calculated out and ready for their effects?
[*]How many have their default animations complete?
[*]How many have their default power fx complete?
[*]How many have their sound fx complete?
[*]How many have been playtested and approved?
[/list]
Need I go on?
If there is so much development happening then the answers to these questions should be exceedingly easy to produce since the program managers must be riding on everyone regarding whatever metrics they are using to measure progress.
Every department has their own management and progress metrics. Surely the public does not need to know all of the nitty gritty details; but backers, at least, should be given some actually granular update.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I didn't ask for snippets of code and you sharing them is not on me. I've never asked for screenshots or to be "shown" anything. I speak only for myself, and I am more than happy with updates that include no pictures or visuals. I thought the team was larger than Artstrong and the coders working on fixing the Alexandria map issue...but if that is all the work that is going on....it is what it is. Again, I have never made a statement that you guys are behind where I think you should be or that it's not good enough or any other opinion on the state of the game...it's only ever been on communication. And we go from last year where the team did a pretty good job of sticking to their own goal of posting updates as close to every 2 weeks as possible, to this year we've had really just 1, the 'Introducing' update. A stream creating a shirt or skirt or some other clothing item is hardly worthy of being called an update, IMO.
Feel free to get upset at me but you guys are the ones that set the expectation last year and made no communication to reset or change expectations. I've harped on this before and I'll do it again; you guys fail to utilize the anouncement banner in any meaningful way. It goes weeks and months sometimes without changing. Surely there are things happening that don't require a 'shiny picture' to update the community. And yes, I know you're going to say "well some people get mad when we've posted small updates in the past with no shiny picture in it" but people are going to throw dirt at no matter what you do...so might as well keep your loyal fans happy and ignore the chimps throwing shit.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
while i get the gist, this game is taking forever
i got my son into city of heroes. it closed
my son saw this game and got in on the second chance.
my son got tired of waiting and passed the key to me
my son has gotten married and had a child since then.
i have told my son that my grandchild can have the key. maybe he will be able to play this game
Hey there - since I am one of the key team members working both on PR updates and on the Alexandria release we have been working on, let me share some of what we are doing so you can know what's up.
We are frantically finishing touches for some big things to release. I'm honestly working night and day on getting things ready to go out the door. We anticipate some of the costume work you have seen in Artstrong's videos going out first, happening really soon. We are also in final testing of Alexandria where we believe that is coming out very soon as well, but there are a few last things we need to nail down before we are certain we can put it in player's hands.
We have been quiet on the PR side directing people to Artstrong's livestreams for now because it is one of the ways people can see some of what's going on, and we know that in a very short time, we believe we are ready to start dropping some big things.
Please feel free to DM me anytime to check-in on status of Alexandria. We may have delays again, but we think we are very close. We don't want to make PR updates too focused on that because we don't want our tech finishing start to feel like Lucy and the football, where we think it's really close, but then find a bug we have to fix and delay again. We are just working on nailing those last bugs and getting it into your hands to play. Meanwhile, Artstrong has a lot of great things to show.
Let me know if that's helpful for now or if you have more questions,
-Red
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Red Warlock is one of the people working hard nonstop on the very stuff we're talking about. So there's a good example of what we'd be saying if we were to put that out as an update. The issue we face is more relevant to this part of the discussion;
Most of these questions have been answered in previous updates. I can dig up the info on the rest, I think. But I wanted to address this part of the discussion in the mean time.
When we put something out without pictures and videos, we get called liars. Or much worse. Even by some of our "loyal fans" here on the forums.
We're all volunteers here, and none of us are getting paid to put up with the stuff we put up with. We've had devs shut down their whole feedback channels and one redname even quit because of the things that were slung at us, so we have to consider the kinds of reactions we'll get when we post an update.
It's sad, but that's the point we're at. Unless people on the Internet suddenly get a whole lot more positive, we're probably going to keep our actual updates reserved for when we have something to actually show or talk about.
That said, as Red Warlock shows, we can still try to answer questions here on the forums.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Thanks, but to clarify I don't look for responses like this in threads. I think part of your response could be put in the banner if you decide its not enough for a full update. Specifically, if I was in charge of the banner this is what I'd put on there:
"5/2/2022: We are frantically finishing touches for some big things to release. We anticipate some of the costume work you have seen in Artstrong's videos going out first, happening really soon. We are also in final testing of Alexandria where we believe that is coming out very soon as well, but there are a few last things we need to nail down before we are certain we can put it in player's hands."
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Our next update we are planning to have some costumes to release, so we certainly want to make it about that if we remain on track to get it out... But it seems like a fair thing to add in our next update if we feel like we are getting dragged with bugs again on Alexandria... I am hoping that we are on track to have Alexandria out in weeks, (maybe too optimistic, but I am seeing really strong progress on many fronts), so if you don't see any statement here or there like that, it probably means that we are cranking hard to get real stuff into your hands instead of explanations for why we are waiting... Whatever the case, this is definitely a place I will try to stay engaged with regularly to keep all of you who are closely watching apprised of what's going on...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
You've always had great responses. But I don't want to DM for check-ups on status just because it could set a bad precedent for you...if multiple people started DM'ing you when they felt it's been too long since the last update, that could get frustrating quickly. I'm no exception.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Thanks for thinking of my time like that, I really do appreciate it. I've actually found 'though, that only a handful of people (some of the most passionate here) have taken me up on it. And we do have more lengthy conversations about what I feel like I can talk about with players, but I wouldn't post in a long statement in chat here... It's actually kind of nice to be able to talk more openly when people want to. So the invitation is there any time, and I've found it to be pretty minimal so far...
Glad that you feel like those are good responses above - I'll keep checking here to make sure you all are up to date, especially if things start to feel like we are dropping off or something. Communication is very important.
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Also, other devs are not as willing to have those PMs because they do find them distracting, so that's why I make a point to note that I'm very willing to have those discussions myself... I kind of like building those relationships and understandings of where we are at with the game for the players...
[color=#ff0000]Environmental Artist, PR Editor[/color]
Considering that the majority of the dev team is doing this in their SPARE time, I'll give them a pass.
They aren't a heavily funded game design company, this is a group of passionate enthusiasts working to build a game for people like them using limited time and resources.
IF they were a heavily funded company, like some of the bigger MMOs around have, then I would completely agree. They have a full time staff of developers and artists working to make everything happen, so seven years should have already produced a first release of the game.
A bunch of volunteers working in their spare time are going to take significantly longer.
[CENTER][URL=http://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm][IMG]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/17.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/CENTER]
I said nothing about how long the game is taking. Thats never been an argument of mine.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
[img]https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/masonry/000/002/109/orly_owl.jpg[/img]
You know, for someone who said [i]nothing about it [b]4 times in 2 posts[/b] previous to your last one[/i] ... that's some pretty selective memory you've got there.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
If you’re going to go THIS out of your way to try and prove someone wrong, at least make sure you’re right. He’s not complaining about the length of time this game is taking in any one of the quotes you’ve cited, he’s merely using it to point out context and issues with communication.
Currently trapped inside the Speed Force...
Please find ANYWHERE where I have complained about the game taking too long or that development is going too slow. None of my statements that you quoted are me, in any way, complainging about the development time table. I see reading comprehension isnt your strong suit.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Selective memory [b]confirmed[/b].
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
ooooh bold letters, that really confirms it.
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
First of all, those were examples.
Second, Just because you may have provided some information on development status once, a year ago, does not mean the mission has been completed. These are called updates for a reason. What we'd like to see are some updates, some follow through, some statements about the next milestones.
"We've been working on something we won't tell you about, but we assure you it will be great. But we ran into some bugs, so we're just going to hunker in our bunker until we fix them" is not an update.
Edit: Technically yes that is an update for you pedants out there (not pointing any fingers, but you know who you are). Hopefully the rest of you understand my point.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
This guy. Move on.
Currently trapped inside the Speed Force...
Next milestones were listed here; https://cityoftitans.com/content/2022-next-steps-city-titans-%E2%80%93-interview-warcabbit
One of the things in that list is the one with the bugs that's holding us up.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]