I'm going to preface this by saying that what I know about coding, graphics and other mechanics of games would not fill a thimble. The genie that makes my machine work occasionally lets the magic smoke out and then stops working.
We're asking the Devs for a LOT. We're debating back and forth over what we want, what we think we should get yadda yadda. However I have to admit that some of the stuff I might be asking for might be tougher to code than I think. If that's the case, I'm willing to take a seat and wait a while rather than advocate for it a lot now.
My question to the players is what do you REALLY want at launch (other than the obvious basics like 'A Working Game' and so forth)? Would you be more inclined to have a core game with fewer Power and AT choices but LOTS of frills like clever NPCs, neat Base features and the like? Or would you prefer more of the core of the game (i.e. stuff centered around the characters) and let the frills come later?
Personally, I'm a serious altaholic, unabashed and unrepentant. I'd rather see a little bit of EVERYTHING and let them fine-tune it later than have tremendous detail for a few facets of the game at launch. If we get Bases (but only a few options), Vehicles (almost no options), animation choices for Powers (but only a couple) and so forth I'd be thrilled. That would scratch the itch (for me) while they put the other things in play.
So how do YOU feel? Would you lobby for a broader, shallower experience at first with details to come after launch or would you rather have more detail in some spots while other things are postponed?
Note: NOT talking any specifics here to try and avoid the thread being turned into another 'This Power/AT/feature is the greatest we MUST have it at launch!' thread please.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I'm going to lay down something of an odd marker on this.
Whatever gets released at launch [b]needs to be extensible[/b].
What I mean by that is that the systems and rules and styles and so on that get put in place for launch need to be structured in such a way that they can be built upon and added to in an easy way ... which means robust tools for development, and "strong" guidelines for how the game is intended to be extended on into the future. That means creating a deliberately open ended architecture in which more "stuff" can be added on (zones, storylines, NPC groups, costumes, emotes, animations, powersets, etc.) with the least amount of fuss (also known as Blood, Sweat and Tears to Developers).
In other words, don't paint yourselves into a corner from the get go. Always build things with the notion in the back of your minds that what you're doing NOW ought to be paving the way for other developments LATER as well so as to keep the ball rolling. Build with the notion of "layering" content in, such that over time the richness and diversity of the game's content is intended to increase, rather than setting up a situation where (like with City of Heroes SG Bases) any changes or adjustments you want to make end up being like playing Jenga with a stack of wood THAT IS [b]ON FIRE[/b] while you're trying to play with it.
A lot of this basically boils down to what amounts to exercising Code Control (programmers, take note!). Always be mindful that modularized code can only be reused for additional purposes if it wasn't written to achieve an exclusively single purpose task in the first place (and would therefore "break" if asked to do anything else).
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I think that you need to have a great character generator...it does not need to have every conceivable option, but should have the place holders for adding them. For example, even is there are no waist caps at launch, better make sure that it supports adding them.
Should have the basic stuff that everyone NEEDS...dont worry about unique starting quests for each AT or Origin...those can be added later.
Make sure that all of the SG and teaming options are there...sidekicking/exemplar...team chat, team buffs, etc. Make sure we can have 8 person teams.
The more ATs and Powersets the better...but dont worry about alternate animations...if every blast uses the same animation at launch...no big deal. But again, make sure that those options can be added later.
I feel like having the right infrastructure in place by launch is going to be critical, since it will be impractical to fundamentally change that later. While they will need a certain amount of content in those systems to be present at launch (for people to consider the game to be 'game enough'), it's expected that content will be added over time in updates... it's an MMO, after all.
What I am most concerned about in infrastructure are the systems they'll use for missions and rewards. It isn't that there aren't a lot of things I would like to see in gameplay and whatnot, but I can see there are a lot of people who care about that other stuff already, so I am less worried. Part of my concern is that I want the game to be friendly for casual teaming during leveling (and I think that is a big part of hitting a 'spiritual successor' goal, since I believe it was part of what shaped the community in the game), and the nature of mission and reward systems will impact that directly.
Another reason for my interest is that I love their idea of having multiple arcs through the same overall story, based on the character's genre. For instance, if there is an overall story for a zone, you could trace an arc through that story that would suit a gritty streetlevel character, another suited for a more shiny silver ager, another suited for a student of the arcane arts. It's obviously neat from a telling-a-story aspect, but it is also great from a design aspect, since you can add more quality content while still largely-reusing existing art resources, and it supports alting (which I expect to be a thing in this game, as it was in CoX). There are lots of genres, of course, and I don't think MWM should feel they all need to be in place at the time the game (or a later new zone) is launched. So, that is another area where, if the infrastructure is in place, they can hit the most popular first and add layers over time.
Global: @Second Chances
SG: Fusion Force
"And it's not what I wanted
Oh no, it's not what I planned
See it's not where I thought I'd be
It's just where I am"
Simply put: A character generator in which I can spend a good hour or two to create characters! But yeah, also; Unlockable Costume sets!
Why? Simple put, I love to write, characters and create new situations. Is that not enough? :)
~~~~~
Twitter: [url=https://twitter.com/Franzseska]@Franzseska[/url] // Tumblr: [url=http://franatastic.tumblr.com/]Haus of Zapatera[/url]
We are VERY aware of the need to build both out and up as it were. There is a keen sense that we have limited resources in a physical sense and man-power sense as well. Everything we do is with the knowledge that, at start, there is much more which needs to follow, so that everything we do has to be done in a manner through which we can add to with as much ease as possible. Efficiency is one of the keys for our success; efficient budgeting of funds, hardware, software, time, coding, writing, and manpower. We even had to institude mandatory days off for fear of people getting burned out!
Dr. Tyche has posted on KS a little about how we're putting together our power framework so that once it is in place we can quickly add more powers and power sets to the game. Our mission design system is being build with player use in mind to cover both base building and possibly player created content later down the line so that we don't have to build seperate tools for each. City districts and stories being told have to be modular so they can be built upon easily, and when needed can easily make connections to each other.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The things I seek most are:
1) Quality based debuff (crowd control) system: A fair system where debuffs aren't weighted by a binary on/off switch. Where mez and debuffs can be measured just as damage and heals can and counted toward mission completion (For instance you can now give mission credit for when players defeat an enemy with a confused enemy because of the large amount of mez points needed.. not necessarily for the damage done to the enemy)
2) Mobile combat: A system that encourages run and gun with tab targeting. A system where longer range attacks move slower and melee attacks move faster. A system where being a super speedy character comes with speedy benefits. A system where crowd controlling can include slowing enemies and have that actually effect enemy gameplay.
3) Complex NPCs: Enemies and allies in RPGs are often dumb HP sacks. I hope that in City of Titans they aren't so easy to kill. I hope they have mez abilities that require mez resistance. I hope they have healers. I hope they have Tanks that actually steal player threat. I hope they use movement powers (even if in a slower and more predictable pattern) in combat. And finally I hope they respond to the changes we make in the world. If I go and rid Ironport of the threat from the Black Rose, I want the black rose to retaliate and/or migrate in reaction.. instead of the elastic "you beat us.. now let us respawn in the same place"
4) Missions based on emergent AI where you are reacting to the world around you not just following a quest path (there should be both). This includes escort missions, interact/intel gathering missions, defeat 30 villain missions, defeat this character missions, and Random bank robberies and the like.
5) Pay to Play but not Pay to Stay. Which in my mind really is "Pay for Development". If I have to pay to stay the reality is I simply won't stay as long.
I would say something about costumes, but I already bought my design concept in the Kickstarter so..
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I'm not familiar with the terminology. Pay to Play refers to subscription MMO games, right? What is Pay to Stay (sounds an awful lot like "subscription")?
If there is a monthly subscription model, that to me refers to pay to stay.
There are games like Guild Wars 2 where you pay for the initial access to the game ($50) and you never again have to pay for access to the ALL of the game. They go as far as to say expansions too.. but I am actually willing to pay for expansions.
- -
Pay to stay refers to needing to pay continually for access to the game. This only goes to further diminish any cash shop value, because if you buy something from the cash shop and, for whatever reason, do not pay for the access to the game.. then your cash shoppe purchase is ZERO value until you pay for the subscription again.
My opinion of this changes for games with perpetual servers and continuous change (I will likely pay the monthly cost of Everquest Next)
Crowd Control Enthusiast
What I think JayBezz is referring to was mentioned in the [url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans]Kickstarter notes[/url] under "Budget":
In other words, pay once for the game, and then pay more for extra stuff, or to get earlier access to new stuff, but most of the stuff you need to pay to get (hopefully all) will be cosmetic or convenient, not stuff you can't play the game effectively without against people who have bought the stuff in question, or against an environment made to challenge such people.
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
.
Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
Hey! Good question. Wish list for launch day. OK lets see:
Costume creator with robust options. Hopefully with hi-def textures, textures are nice
Just a small handful of powerset choices (at the start) per each archtype would be fine for me (five per primary, five per secondary)
Fully functioning game that I can play and level up my character, with interesting mission types and level design. I would feel like I was playing an actual real game with production values that I could appreciate
Looking For Team options and other chat stuff that I came to take for granted in CoH
Macros. I loved my macros. I had some really super uber sweet macros that I used for everything in CoH
(I Think) That's all I would really need at the start. Well, along with the assurance that more content, like endgame stuff, morality shifting, costume stuff, SG bases, more powersets, veterans rewards, invention/crafting system, player generated content, PvP, or whatever else I'm forgetting that I took for granted in CoH, I wouldn't mind seeing rolled out per updates/Issues just like CoH did it. I know so many of these systems are viewed as 'standard' now, but I also accept each system requires development resources to be made balanced and fun. It took CoH seven or eight years to be the game it was when it shut down, and hey, I actually don't expect CoT to be ALL THE WAY up to what CoH was AT THAT POINT. If the game can capture enough to really 'FEEL' like the spiritual successor at launch, than hey, I am there from Beta all the way to Live.
And furthermore, I was a subscriber. I tried the F2P version of CoH. It was not cool, compared to the subscriber version. If CoH was still around, I would still be subscribing. That was the ONLY WAY TO GO for me. The F2P just had too much Good Stuff made Not Available. If CoT offers subscription (close to the same price point), then I will subscribe to it too, most likely, I enjoy having everything the game has to offer all the time. I never felt that the 13 or 14 dollars per month they asked was not worth the value they offered in entertainment.
Why? If you buy it in the shop, you would still have it if you stopped subbing.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Good customization offerings. Costumes but especially powers and combinations of build choices.
Gameplay that have something for all or at least as many as they can, play styles, equally. Less favoritisms or feeling of being nudged in a certain play style direction or feature.
Decent stories. If it's going to be serious be serious without coming off as trying to hard. If it's going to be comedic, be comedic without coming off as a fall flat joke. If going to be cheesy be cheesy without coming off as ham. While making the player feel like a star or somewhat the star and hero/villain instead of being a side kick or errand boy for the big dogs. Less "Good job, let the Real heroes/villains take it from here" missions. Villains should focus on villain stuff, hero stuff should focus on hero stuff without feeling the need like they are doing it and everything for another hero or villain's glory. Less taking orders from the main NPC group or main NPC villain group and more simply saving the world or destroying the world under no one's command or orders.
Something new that haven't been done before in a super hero game or if possible in any game for that matter.
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want, I wanna...
Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Costume creator(tailor) with huge amount of costume pieces, more than even Champions Online has. And add a lot of badazz wings:D (i love wings)
Top gears should be farmable either from PVP store or from bosses, or other mobs.
Travel powers.
Auras.
Pre-order items(devices and other goods)
Freeform characters.
Big world obviously.
Races.
Raid bosses.
Vehicles.
Mini-toy creator(action figure)
Hideouts.
Subscription.
Coming back to the OP, and the first response, I would like to have a whole bunch of stuff at launch, but the question is, in my opinion, what can we live with as a minimum starting point?
Well, as i understand it, we're getting only thirty levels (although that is cool...think if it was only 10!), and a smaller "zone" and limited storylines and backstory because all of that will develop over time.
I think Redlynne has the right philosophical perspective. The game needs to be extensible. If there will someday be 5 billion combinations in the character creator, but we start with one million, we can work around that as long as we can change to look of our first toons later. If there are only 100 predefined missions on day one, that's ok as long as we get thousands by the end of year three. A zone four times the size of Atlas Park to begin with? Fine, as long as it grows over time to 100 times that...
Like Comicsluvr, I'm an unapologetic altaholic. I will likely make 20 toons in the first 6 months, testing ideas, seeing how the game differs from COH, and just playing for fun. But I will definitely want to come back and level most of those toons to 50 later, correcting costume deficiencies, and changing powers, when the game is more developed.
Devs, please try to enable the later improvement of our first toons. :)
Also, I advise this -- once the early stages of the game are up and running, MWM will likely have a rapidly growing income stream. You need to plan, very carefully, for expanding your pool of permanent paid employees so that you have the trained resources to actually transition the game from a near-final-beta to a competitive game that holds players due to superior content. Rapid expansion and improvement of the game will require rapid expansion of MWM and transition to a more corporate, less volunteer, development organization.
I hope you do another kickstarter for the working capital to enable that transition.
Sorry, Comicsluvr, I started a hijack of your thread with an unrelated idea...I now return control to you.
Thank you for implying that I ever had any sense of control lol!
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I know a lot of people have posted wishlists, but from the perspective of someone who was a year-after-year subscriber to CoH since Issue 2, I'll echo the others who say they want a game designed from the get-go to be easy to add on to and update as time goes on.
I recall a few posts from people like Matt "Positron" Miller who said more than a few times that the CoX game code was so rickety and erratic by I24 that half the development cycle in every Issue was spent just fixing the things that broke when they added new content. While this may someday happen with CoT at some point in the future, I would hope it would be well enough built that it's either not going to be as hard to fix as CoX was, or that the game will be built so that it's easier to add to in perpetuity (a longshot, but fingers crossed. :) )
One thing I would definitely like to throw my two cents' worth in for is the large number of alts in the server screen. It was an awesome thing that each server in CoX had TEN CHARACTER SLOTS per server, for the user. Not this business of 2 or 3, then maybe 5 or 8 if you paid for a subscription. If you were playing the game, you had ten character slots, and the server could support THIRTY slots all told for a single player. That contributed hugely to my enjoyment of the game, because I could let my altitis out to play, and not have to erase characters just to make room. This meant that I didn't have to make one or two alts, grind them all the way up, then decide which one I was attached to less. I could built many alts, play them at any speed I wanted, and enjoy the game with any AT combination I felt like at any given time.
Oh, and I know I said one, but if I had to come up with a second, I'd ask for something similar to the chat box from CoX. That thing was so *intuitive*! I spent many a night just logged in chatting with teammates, the SG, or private chat lines, while standing on a rooftop somewhere. I've never seen a chat system as simple and intuitive to use as the CoX system in the other MMO's out there. Considering how elemental the chat system was to draw people together and create communities, I'm surprised how hard it is for other MMO's to get it right.
Seeing as the ones with the "limited" slots, are generally Free 2 Play (no purchase required to play), it IS a sensible design decision. Hell, City of Heroes implemented this as well for those truly Free 2 Play people when Freedom launched.
And considering the grief that Eve Online gets for the style of game it is, it has a very similar chat setup as CoX had (if not slightly more powerful, in that you are not limited to the number of global channels you can join).
If anything, I found the Eve Online community VERY friendly in person, willing to help out wherever they can, especially the player ran meet ups (talking about the VETO Corp player meet that I went to with a wheelchair bound person in tow... the only person there who actually had mobility issues...)
-Solid character creator, with room to grow. Ability to store and swap costumes easily.
-Decent sounds and voices (if used)
-CHAT BUBBLES/binds. For those of us who actually enjoy RPing in our MMORPGs, it's amazingly annoying to have no idea if the person you were just emoting to has been abducted by aliens or is simply carefully polishing an (overly long) response. A chatbind emote can also go a long way to establishing mood and characterization
-same philosophy: some kind of bio/description space on the character screen
-Variety of activity. While the 'go kill n of x' missions will always be with us, I'd like to see more creativity in mission types. Escorts of AI NPCs, timed challenges, anything, just not an endless stream of "Defeat boss, click glowy".
-a sense of humor that doesn't hit you over the head with a rubber chicken every thirty seconds, and doesn't come across like a very badly written Saturday morning cartoon (y'all know who I'm pointing at). There are wonderfully humorous moments to draw from in comics and superhero movies that do not reek like year-old fromage bleu.
-at SOME point, access to building tools like the MA or PW's Foundry, to make our own content.
I am [b] not[/b] an altoholic! I can stop whenever I want. No, really...
Don't know if its possible but i wouldn't mind a higher ceiling to the open zones. Maybe three tiers! The first would be from ground lvl to highest skyscraper. Next would be from skyscraper to about 85 thousand feet. At the second tier you can create sonic boom, max out on flight speed, an can only reach the third tier if your high enough level. If not at the required level to exceed the second tier. You begin to ice up like iron man in the movie. Once you reach 3rd tier capability. You can reach the highest orbit/ozone layer. Sitting above the planet like superman in superman returns. Maybe even see strange objects in distant space. Enemy ships above certain zones indicating an impending invasion. I never liked the fact that the helicopters in CoH were flying in a space I couldn't travel.
Different color blood effects for different types of species.
Crit attacks give a blood/ spit effect like a boxing game. Maybe a spray across a wall if near by.
Might be a strech but higest tier types of powers that make you unique. If my group is in a heated battle Which takes place in an outside zone. I can hit "Orbit smash"! Calling in a satellite strike, fly too space an come back to deliver a blow that shakes the entire area on impact. If im in the sewer then it doesn't work. Just cool situational options.
Lots and lots of different types of weapons/weapon color options. In city of heroes. I used the rularru sword but hated the fact you couldn't fully customize its colors.
The one thing above most that I would like to see perfected is...rememberable music! I'm talking secret of mana, chrono trigger, magus theme, night time skyrim(secunda), the original Michael myers, Friday the 13th for the Nintendo, bad dudes, festers quest, metroid, the wonder years, dukes of hazard, night rider, up all night tits of elvira type rememberance! Lol Sometimes all it takes is the right music to fit the mood an dialogue. An you could end up with lifers on your hands based on the one thing that effects us all...music.
P.S Plz devs don't make an extremely cool "main" character that we all grow to love. Just too kill him off later. I already had the horrid experience of dealing with optimus primes death twice. Once as a child. Then again as an adult!( @%$! You Hollywood!!!)
Don't know if my heart can take that kind of abuse again lol
We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free.
Angels 850? That's twice as high as most airliners' flight ceilings, and way into uncontrolled airspace. Way into you-can-see-the-Earth-curve territory. What is up there worth going to? It'll take several minutes to get there, at least, if you're not riding a rocket.
That would cross Paragon City in a couple [i]seconds.[/i] There is absolutely [i]zero[/i] reason to make the playing area so large you have to model the planet.
You're basically asking for [url=http://www.x-plane.com/]a flight simulator[/url] at this point.
At that height, a zone is just a couple pixels across! And the movies can cut out the half hour it took Supes to get there.
Blame [i]that[/i] on the war walls.
This would be cool so long as it doesn't mess with the T rating.
Meanwhile, the team is 1) wondering where you flew off to, and 2) when you get back.
And that's going to be some seriously messy knockback.
Oh, yeah. Definitely that.
There are still times I can remember the music in Atlas Park. Definitely set the tone for the game.
Also the original login screen music.
... Heh. Heheheheh... [evil grin]
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Optimus Prime came back in the animated series, as well as the comic books.
And died.
And came back again...
And died.
And came back again.
You could say that dying was a hobby for Optimus Prime, especially in the comic books.
[url=http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//e/e3/AtlasPark_N_AtlasPlaza.ogg]Atlas Plaza music[/url].
[url=http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//f/fc/H_music1_loop.ogg]Original Login Screen music[/url].
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Instead of asking for specific functions which I already know are going to be in place. This is because I have been stalking the developers comments here, on KS and youtube to find out what their visions for the game are. I think for me I would like to keep my wishes simple. My wish is for the game to be fun to play and not overly limiting in gameplay options. That would mean it is not bogged down with rules and regulations of gameplay so that it makes it impossible for people to enjoy. Everyones gameplay style should be factored into it, and it should be open for all player styles and gameplay options.
Example
Let's say I have completed the game 3 times with different AT's, I have toured the city, collected the badges, completed the storyline missions multiple times to experience the different threads, hung around all the cities venues, and played the game in thousands of teams. So we are talking about a player who has already immersed themselves in all the games content and lore. At this point some people may want to roll out a new character, but don't want to be forced to run through the same events repetitively simply because the game forces a route on them. There should be an option for characters who have completed the game already to be able to skip the initial gameplay route and just grind the levels in different ways. The more open ended the game play is, and the more accessible and welcoming it is to all levels of players and player styles the more enjoyable the game will be.
I would like the game to be amazing for new players, and unrestrictive and still interesting for experienced players.
day one vet
That's when you have CoH style content that you could level up through multiple different missions and not TOR where you are stuck running the same planet quests over and over.
CoH had lots of options to go different routes, people just generally didn't take those options.
Most important things to me...
1) Varied power animations! Need to step it up from the beginning to surpass CO and DCUO in the power concepts. I'd even say add in some options not seen in CO or DCUO to help draw people to CoT.
2) Big selection of costume choices.
3) Varied contacts for different run throughs with alts. Yes, there's going to be some repeating of contacts, but given enough choices, it can be varied up quite a bit.
Which is why I am asking for it to be a staple of this games design, I enjoyed CoX being free and open in all respects for me to play however I felt any given day. More freedom would be better if that is even possible.
day one vet
That's the great part about an orbital type attack when it happens for the first time. The hero/villain could say something cool in a bubble text an just takes off. As he comes closer an closer to impact. Everyone would hear a sound that gets louder an louder till the boom! It wouldn't be KB. Just an extreme version of KU( giants of skyrim ring a bell) that annihilates everything under boss level except teammates. Including user. Maybe a satellite attack that radiates an area making the AoI have a red screen heat wave effect melting all resistance overtime in the area. Just the enemies lol. Solider types can call for an airship strike/ hero calls for there vehicle to do specialized attack.
I
OK maybe 85 thousand feet was a stretch. Just high enough to make the zone look like a puzze at max height. That could be realistic. I know I was not the only one skydiving in coh, chillin out with friends on high risers. Trying to destroy at least one of those rikiti ships. Would have been possible if they just circle the area an not leave the zone completely.
I'm sure the devs can comes up with cool things to happen at that height. Cosmic lvl threat to big for earth so we have to face it out there. (Unicron,Galactus) Great spot for SG or personal vehicles to be used if your not a flying hero. Invasion "first phase" "dog fighting" event. Good spot for some kind if space station/prison.
We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free.
Something that I haven't seen anyone mention yet (or if it has, I missed it) is ... the ability to export data to text files, and import data from text files. Things like Costumes ... should be export/import enabled from text files. SG Bases ... ought to be able to be exported to text files, and imported from text files, so that Base Editors can create offline backups of their bases. Note that this would mean that in City of Titans it would theoretically be possible to create "backups" not only of SG Bases but also of any Instance Environment being created either by the Developers and/or by the Players in an Architect Entertainment setup. This would then make it possible to "copy" SG Bases for use as Mission Maps, should that be considered desirable. Character Builds should also be something that could be exported and imported from text files, allowing improved compatibility with a Mids' Hero Planner like application for handling Respecs.
Essentially, a lot of the "structural" aspects, functions and features of City of Titans should ideally have an export/import tool that would allow editing (and trading!) via text files for a variety of purposes. Note that such functionalities would aid and abet being able to pull information from the game's databases for use in a wide variety of web applications.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Very useful, I can see this being something a lot of people would use too.
day one vet
The equivalent of Thorns/Regen Scrapper.
Buy This:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AQ6ME8O/ref=s9_simh_gw_p351_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1DFFWWTAAPX6V6Q4YTXE&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200382&pf_rd_i=507846
Just gotta make sure there's no bug in the import function that can be exploited. Parsing is [b]hard.[/b]
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
That would be exceptionally cool, given some of the amazing things people created, outside of something being built on Test, the chances you would get to see super awesome hero base 1 were slim, you'd need to be on that server, part of that SG.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
I could make alts listening to the original login for hours. It had a mixture bag of serious, heroic, creepy, military feel too it IMO. Miss that!!!
We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free.
Regarding expansions; one of the failures of CoH was that from Day 1 til "The End of the World", 50 was the max level (yeah, I know 50+1, 50+2, 50+3). One thing Everquest has done right, and has kept players paying and participating for 15 years is that expansions included (more often than not) a level cap increase.
The original EQ capped at 50, within 18 months, new cap of 60 ... now 15 years later characters can get to 100th level. I imagine more than one Dev has played EQ, so they should know how it uses level requirements and level scaling on equipment to drive players to achieve newly available levels. There's a frenzy every time a new expansion comes out ("First Necro to 100th on Tribunal Server!!! Woot")
EQ also has an enormous amount of different zones, allowing you to go from 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 etc in vastly different environs with different opponents and different drops.
A robust tradeskill system and many alternate currencies are also big plusses. I loved CoH, but it could have definitely taken a few lessons from the EQ model.
Looking forward to CoT release.
Chivalry lives while I breathe
The thing to remember about CoH as opposed to other games is that it didn't have what I would call a hacked-character exploit. Essentially, what has happened periodically with games like WoW, where someone hacks someone's account, logs onto their character, and sells/transfers everything they own, leaving the actual owner with bupkus. That kind of behavior was possible on a game like WoW, because the items people acquired were not essentially tied to the character, and had in-game value.
The closest people came to that in CoH was the Invention system, but even there, you had no visible clue whether someone had a Purple IO in their inventory unless they bragged about it. And if it was slotted into their character, it was theirs, and could not be traded away. The Enhancement system made it possible to improve player capabilities without creating a system which lended itself to that kind of abuse, entirely because the valuable commodity wasn't what the character was wearing, it was the characters themselves. And those couldn't be sold/traded. (Not to mention Incarnate upgrades, which were also unique to the user, and could not be sold or traded to anyone. It prevented a system where the accounts were worth hacking for their contents, and thus kept the worst sorts of abuse to a minimum.)
A lot of these games which introduce level increases are doing so to add more powerful equipment, which you would have to grind relentlessly to acquire. As a WoW addict friend of mine has attested to on occasion, it's not about leveling up to the higher cap that matters to them, it's the lure of ever-more-powerful ultra-rare loot, which they usually have to grind Orc Toes or Athena's Centerfold Publications for eight or nine months until they can build their next piece of equipment. That's what games like that do. Their time-sink is the loot system. If you want the epic stuff, you have to grind the same actions over and over and over for months on end, paying them subscription fees all the way, until you get the latest item... which will be completely invalidated with the next update, anyway.
I don't see much of a need to keep raising level caps for a game built in the image of CoH. And I hope it doesn't follow the model of those other games. I've had an account on WoW since Burning Crusade, and I think I have a single level 15 character, because I couldn't stand the relentless loot grind. It was all so pointless, and detracted from my being heroic.
("Yes, sir paladin! In order to obtain this you must go into that orc tribe, and sacrifice all the children, bringing us their heads! When you have returned with the sacrificed heads of orc children, I will give you the next piece of worthless loot in your endless quest for more stuff!")
"MEH" to all of that...
Not quite true... it did happen. It might not have been items that were sold, but inf was "stolen" from accounts. Bind on Equip/Bind of Pickup items can only be sold for a pure gold value, and for the rarer items, it is a *very* small return compared to what you could auction them off for.
I know of a few players who had their NCsoft master account banned because they DID what you said (although in this case, it was transfer the inf to a mule account, and then back to their own).
Wasn't day 1 level 1-40?
The devs gave a very good reason why they didn't raise the levels in CoH. But you are correct, a lot of people like to keep making their characters more powerful as a since of accomplishment, which usually means more levels and better gear.
CoH though was more an alt game. Which I don't think hurt it. I think other things that happened hurt CoH. No loot (generally, players like loot) to really speak of, no economy, big nerfs to PvE and PvP. I don't think the big nerfs to PvE would've been bad, if they had the IOs (which was also the new loot system) in place right away.
The classic "raise the level cap" trope worked easily with games like EQ because they were skills/points based. CoH (and probably CoT) are powers based, which means you get predefined powers at set levels. In a nutshell that makes it much more difficult to simply raise an arbitrary level limit value without restructuring the entire powers progression system. Even though CoH launched as a level 1-40 game it had always been designed to finish as a level 1-50 game. I suspect CoT will be designed from the beginning to max out at 50 as well.
You might consider that a "weakness" of a powers-based game. But frankly I found it a bit refreshing not having to deal with those periodic level cap increases and loot upgrades in CoH. I honestly believe most MMOs rely too heavily level cap increases and find the concept relatively stale and old-fashioned. CoH's Incarnate system was an interesting alternative to the "boring" way to increase level caps and I'm hoping hoping CoT will offer an equally unique way of handling end-game advancement.
For what it's worth CoH did pretty well for 6.5 years before it even offered the Incarnate system so clearly the game was always strong enough on its own to keep players participating without actually needing any kind of "periodic level cap increase" scheme at all.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
MWM stated in a KS update that they see alting as a primary branch of their endgame model (in addition to the yet-to-be-described traditional endgame option), so I'd guess that ever-increasing level cap is unlikely.
That's interesting, because I always thought lack of loot was one of the main advantages of CoX over other MMOs. I think I'm correct in saying quite a few others have listed that as one of the features that made CoX stand out, especially regarding the effect it had on cooperation vs competition and the type of community that encouraged.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I consider Invention Origin Enhancements to have been CoH's loot. They served the same purpose as any other game's loot system.
A key difference between CoH's "loot" and other games' loot is that CoH's loot had absolutely no effect on how a character looked.
Many people are probably locked into the classic mindset that if you look like you're wearing +1000 Platinum Dragon Armor then you must be powerful. With CoH you could look like the proverbial level one noob but still technically be one of the most powerful characters on the server at any given moment.
The fact that you didn't have to look powerful to be powerful might have been "too weird" for some people. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I think that this is more because with a few exceptions superheroes *rarely* changed their appearance the more powerful they got. Their improvements were generally of the self improvement kind (either of gear or of actual training).
However, with fantasy (and to a lesser degree sci-fi), where the "heroes" of the story are just *normal* people, who are reliant on equipment (again, there are exceptions), a different piece of gear will more often than not look different to what they are wearing at that point in time.
I can see work arounds, although they are better suited for sci-fi than fantasy (the fantasy route I am thinking of is dependant on a whole entire magic system as well...).
But I guess that is where it all comes down is what the person themselves is more acclimatised to.
For me, although I read comics when I was a kid (Marvel UK Transformers ftw), I was more of a fantasy/sci-fi fan. And in those, when a guy replaced a gun, sword or armour, I didn't think that they looked the same, I imagined that it was different, in shape or form.
Whereas in superhero comics, with a few exceptions (iron man for example, with the evolution of his suits, which was marvellous for story progression), the heroes there rarely if ever changed their overall appearance. Their abilities were either tied to their gear/gadgets/personal abilities, and yet they kept their appearance relatively uniform over the years.
Hell, after reading the "A New Hope" novel, I actually imagined Luke Skywalker to look different to how Mark Hamill looks in the film.
So here we are... two groups of people, one where they are explicitly told every 3 or 4 seconds what the characters look like (comics), whilst in another they are told once or twice what the character looks like (with reinforcements as and when it happens) and then the rest is up to the persons imagination. Infact, unless the person is SHOWN what they look like, I bet you that most people will have varying descriptions when drawn of what a character from a book looks like.
So I don't think its weird... I think all depends as to the viewpoint that you take when coming into the MMO genre.
In addition to that, the "look" of drops themselves were different. There wasn't all that ta-da! loot minigame stuff you see in other MMOs, like visible loot bags and need-or-greed windows. They originally intended to have drops announced to the team since players "generally like" the loot minigame , but it turns out that the CoX folks who gave feedback didn't.
Global: @Second Chances
SG: Fusion Force
"And it's not what I wanted
Oh no, it's not what I planned
See it's not where I thought I'd be
It's just where I am"
I think that's changing. Look at TERA and TOR. Both games having set it up so you can look the way you want, while still going after the better stat loot.
Probably becoming more popular when the plan is to have a cash shop. No point in getting the nice new outfit if you're chasing after the best gear. Unless they put an equal or better stat gear in the cash shop.
Well since playing CoH I definitely prefer any game that will give me the most freedom to have my characters look the way I want regardless of the emphasis on loot in the game. That's probably one of the lasting legacies CoH will have on the future expectations of gaming.
I don't mind the idea of modern fantasy/sci-fi games being more "loot-centric" than superhoero games as long as the most powerful loot doesn't make everyone look identical in the end-game. That's the "weakness" CoH managed to overcome that most other games used to suffer from.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I know that in wildstar, you can choose to use the look of the gear that you are wearing, or you can instead use the look of gear that you already have.
Hmmm.
So for people who like to show the bling, they can?
Then for people that may not like to show their bling, they dont have to show their bling?
And both groups can play in the same game at the same time, without having to worry about "Well I cant play that game because I cant show what armor I have." or "I cant play that game because I must show what armor I have."
I thought that was impossible to do in the MMO world where everything is a like a light switch and must either be either this or that but never both. :p
No, really that sounds good. It doesn't always have to be one or the other. There are ways to cater to, in one game, different mindsets and play styles without feeding one set and leaving the other to starve or rather feeling like no one want to come out and say they are not welcomed and just money bags, and merely tolerated in while other side get all the stuff they want in said game. Choices. Let the players have choices within the same game without being penalized for either going either way. Too many games have "Choices" but is more like the choice of "Do it this way, or do it that way and face every single hurdle we can throw at you." AKA with the costume thing, if implemented people that choose to not let gear affect appearance go around unhindered while those that do end up with limited slots and gear and a lot of gear that don't work for appearance and when in gear affect appearance mode, it do not work. Or having gear that affect appearance do not work as well. Or vice versa. That is by definition of choice but not a proper EQUAL choice.
I want us to be capable of taking on a large amount of low level enemies with no difficulty once we reach our max level. I loved being able to head to Perez Park, wade into a large group of Hellions or Skulls, and send them flying. It was a great way to release stress lol.
I don't get mad, I restructure the laws of quantum physics and resolve the situation with temporal engineering.
Red, I have the flu and I am in no mood for games (pun intended), try to spell out what you are saying for my currently mucus afflicted cognitive functions. If you would be so kind.
I don't get mad, I restructure the laws of quantum physics and resolve the situation with temporal engineering.
Feh. Reply went to wrong thread.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Me too, Auto. Have been all but bedridden since 02 Jan and still feel terrible. Hope you feel better soon!
Spurn all ye kindle.
In CoH we had 'Costume Slots' for more than one costume. Other games, particularly games with 'Stat-Gear' (ie gear that changes the character's abilities) have 'Vanity Slots' which allow you to choose the visible Look of the character, separately from their actual equipment.
My expectation is that CoT will not have ability/statistic affecting 'Gear'. Therefore, there's no need to change the look of the gear, so we can just have Costume Slots that change the look of the character.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I want...
- A world where I can create my very own superhero (or villain), who looks like no other character and has powers that look and feel like they should.
- A world populated by colorful, yet not too overshadowing enemy groups and NPC characters. It should me MY story. (And every other player's story.)
- A world that has its own story, with lots and lots of little hooks to inspire new character ideas and latch on to, without needlessly blocking out character concepts due to lore.
- A game where combat is easy enough that you can play more of a social "let's beat up the badguys" game with any combination of characters, as long as the players are decent.
- A game were buffs and debuffs are powerful, but require some specialization to get really powerful.
- A game with meaningful choices, both in character creation, power choices, moment to moment combat, and even in branching paths in stories.
- A game where the character itself and player is what makes a character powerful, not what loot they're using.
- A game where looks and power are completely separate from each other.
But most of all I want...
- A character creator flexible and powerful enough to get some of the hero concepts that have piled up in my mind since City of Heroes closed a chance to be real, and seeing some of my old favorites revived.
I hope City of Titans can hit most of those, maybe not at launch, but over time.
I have a long list, but if I have to condense it to one wish only it would be:
events, events, events.
Static events (as part of missions). There were some really really awesome ones in city of heroes (starting with the special lairs missions in your first origin series of missions), but developing in awesome reveals, cutscenes and plot twists.
Triggered events (like The Paladin, that you could summon if you knew how and had a bit of patience)
Heroic events, like the assault on the Rikti Mothership.
Random events (like the giant monsters that you could not trigger but that just sometimes showed up)
Seasonal events (like halloween, especially the increasingly powerful invaders till you have a battle against a elite boss on your hands, preferably in a zone a bit out of your power levell)
Long running special events (the Rikit Invasion was a wonderful event, making you experience a little bit of being your superhero)
And one can expand on that by adding events that just run and have no (or at least very little) 'safe' space. If you are in the zone you are part of the event.
And events that are more like the original Task Forces, except not geared towards a single group spending ten hours but tens of groups each spending a few hours to move the event along.
And events that are geared towards the player (i.e. signature villains working against you during normal gameplay).
Smaller scale events that happen just before you and make you decide how you react (e.g. rather than having a radio scanner mission where you know there will be a bank robbery, just have at random intervals an urgent call from one of your contacts that a bank robbery, or worse, is underway. Or you just see a group of armed men breaking out of a secured building and through the police blockade.)
And of course events should have a lasting effect. A giant squid in the harbour means no trade, which will lead to food shortages and from there riots are not far behind. If you decide not to bother with those bank robbers too often your heroic status at least with the public opinion (i.e. what random passerby's say about heroes when there is a player character near enough to hear them) will plummet and their comments will become a lot less charitable. If rampaging super robots knock down a couple of buildings they should a) be knocked down and b) stay knocked down for weeks (months game time). If you blow your mission you should be confronted with the cost of failure at least visually. And yes, maybe you can do community service rebuillding the damage to atone. One of the most powerful images (not out of the actual game) of CoH was that of the surviving eight doing rescue and rebuilding work after the rikti war. That is another aspect of heroism that is in my opninion even more important but gets neglected because of the more flashy (and easier) combat focus.
My recipe for a fun game :)
1 part toy - provide me with things to tinker with, costumes to play with, badges to find, puzzles to solve, bases to design, loot to find that can be used to create other loot.
1part challenge - give me things that make my brain and fingers numb trying to outwit and outmaneuver opponents in both PVP and PVE settings.
1 part social - provide an infrastructure that supports team building, and communications, that doesn't take itself too seriously.
1part anti-social - allow me to putter and play on my own and still be successful for those days you just want to level up while on a conference call ;)
Pepper in lots of choices , options and goals to achieve and I'll play that game for a long time.
Wow, this is simply brilliant. Sign me up!
The number 1 thing I want is the ability to play offline. I want offline play so that I will always have the game and it will always be able to live on because everyone has it.
Of course, I want the ability to play online as well, for teaming, and special bonus items for missions.
I liked the COH winter events.
I want the auction house.
Have people pay for enhanced content like special outfits, weapons, pets, ect.
Cars and motorcycles as well as flying cars would be great. Customizable Batmobile type cars, ect.
I want the same amount of character customization as COH or more.
I want auras, capes, and wings.
I want a basic set up of architecture of the maps that can be enhanced over time for more detail.
I want the ability to adjust graphics to play on even older computers.
I want miniguns. (personal gatling guns)
I want customizable power colors(if that wasn't already implied in character customization)
I want beautiful cities like Atlas Park with artful architecture that is bright and clean, with green landscaping, perhaps some sculpted bushes.
The travel powers of COH were great. The recall friend was invaluable. Keep those.
Eventually an underwater area would be nice, with scuba gear for some characters, and all sorts of interesting sea monsters, ect.
Space missions would be nice, wearing suits or force bubbles.
Medieval type armor ie 15th and 16th century European especially, with characters with magical swords and armor, and horses. Flying horses, like The Black Knight.
The time travel to ancient Rome in COH was great. You could add Samurai/Ninja Japan, as well as other times and theaters.
The ability to go into a pvp area like SWTOR would be great. Magical transport to other dimension to fight enemies or be pitted against other heroes if option selected.
The option to have your own personal theme song as soon as you get into close enough range to other players, or just play on demand would be neat. Songs could be selected from a menu, or ideally composed by players.
I want bases, but I would also like the ability to have an outside environment or a base inside an outside environment with architecture designed by players, like The Sims, only with more rounded premade shapes available. Taj Mahal Shapes, as well as Great Pyramid shapes would be great.
I'll think of more later.
Pretty much this. All this. And, at some point (sooner the better), a Mission Creator that allows me to live out some of the side stories I've written in my head for my characters, and share them with others.
What kept CoH alive for me, and kept me subscribing to 2 accounts for 6 six years, was that I always felt it was a creative outlet. The more the game is designed around the players having freedom to explore "their" particular stories, the more it will be the much-referred-to spirtual successor to CoH.
That and an easy to use chat interface that adds to the teaming experience, rather than distracts you from it, will go far to helping build the other most important thing from CoH: Community.
I want a fun game with good story telling and good customization.
"In the end there can be only one" The Highlander
Totally forgot about the mission creator. Yeah, it would be nice to have one of those again. Maybe not at launch, but it was fun to make and play stories in that. I still remember making a story about toys coming to life and going rogue. You just have to love a game where you get the thought "Now, if a Barbie doll had superpowers and attacked people, what would they be?" (Energy Melee. You know, cheerleader pom-poms of doom!)
I just hope that City of Titans will learn from City of Heroes' example and try to limit excessive powerleveling through it. I mean, people are going to powerlevel, I just want the mission creator to not be the obvious optimal choice for doing so. If they can't figure out how to do that at launch, I'd prefer waiting a bit for it.
This is probably what ruined Champions Online for me MOST was the vehicles, superheroes shouldn't need vehicles in my opinion. Even Batman doesn't use his that much.
As my knowledge of most mappers goes, this is generally the easiest graphics update (which is why CoH did it despite the small staff).
Running UnrealEngine3 would be a requirement since that's the engine they've decided to work with. Other than that, unless we have 10k poly shirts (lol) this shouldn't be a problem, unless you have something to the scale of a Rikti Invasion.
I think something like this would be quite easy with the engine they're working with without it creating any lag, thanks to Normals (displacement maps), something CoH's engine never had the luxury of using.
EDIT: I missed this, but theme songs can be quite a bothersome thing if other players can hear it, take APB for example, which has this, and all people do is make obnoxious, earbleeding sounds with it, not to mention the budget would increase exponentially to add something like this (one reason why APB's company went under)
One thing that I think needs to be addressed which probably hasn't been until now is server-side character backups.
I'm sure the plan is to have a robust backup strategy for client data, but I've also seen the "Customer Service" (and I use the parentheses deliberately) model practiced by other games out there. Most of them have a "Screw You" policy regarding anything that happens that causes a person to either lose their account contents due to hacking, or some other form of account damage. They don't usually keep data on client accounts past 3 months, and won't refund or restore any paid content which has gone missing. In short, if you buy it with real money, it's really not yours. It's only yours until something happens, at which point, they refer you to the policy I mentioned above.
What I'd *really* like to see on-going, is for some kind of robust client data archiving practice in effect. So if someone emails customer support and says, "I've been away for a few months, came back, and all my alts are gone!"... the Customer Service department won't just say, "Oh, you have to enter a trouble ticket, but don't hold your breath, because we don't archive your characters, can't reconstruct what happened, won't refund anything you've purchased, and basically just don't all-around give a damn. You gave us your money, and we've spent it already. But have a nice day anyway!"
I'd like to see some kind of ability and archival support in place for a CS person to be able to pull up account history, figure out what happened (IP address examination, however you go about determining if an account's been hacked, evidence of nonstandard behavior like selling everything off or transferring property to another user...) and the ability to set it right in a timely fashion.
Of course, some of this goes back to something I posted a while back about not making the loot drops worth anything. Make them like enhancements or IO blueprints. Maybe valuable in that context, but nothing forcefully given away can gimp your character. And the ability for CS to restore characters in the event of a hacked account.
The beauty of CoT separating Character Animations from power sets is that they can release a "Riding" animation set that can be used on concert with Horses, Motorcycles, etc.
This would cost a lot of resources to create so I'd recommend it cost a lot of resources to use and ONLY if the player base shows enough actual interest.
I hate the way Champions Online handled vehicles. Do not copy that.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I think the idea of vehicles in CO was good idea. Not good implementation.
Remember not all heroes fly, super jump teleport or super speed. Some heroes or anti heroes, rogues, vigilantes, villains use vehicles to get around.
Although the Batman thing, he do use vehicles very often to get around. Sometimes it's his bat jet, the bat cycle, or the most commonly used one, that is now as part of his character as the emblem, the batmobile. Now of course he do not use it much relatively in combat, (which is where I think CO kind of messed up).
Hero- (everything in between)-Villains
Xmen, have their Blackbird jet.
Batman- have what ever a billionaire feel like buying. :p. No seriously he do have various vehicles. Batmobile.
Silver Surfer- A surfboard thingy. HIs transportation. May not qualify as a vehicle per se.
Ghostrider- motorcycle
Fantastic Four- Only one of them fly. The others usually take some sort of flying device.
Metron- His chair thingy. although he possesses god like powers.
Wonder Woman- Her plane. Although it's rarely mentioned now and days.
Punisher- His van. And later a Glider thing a few times.
Blue Beetle- His bug ship
Thor- In movies he mostly teleports to where he needs to go. In comics he used a chariot.
Captain America- In movies like Thor, his mode of transportation is not really shown much besides in the beginning of his first movie, but in comics he got around often on his motorcycle.
Two-Face- Car
Catwoman- Especially during the Silver Age used variety of vehicles.
Lobo- IIRC some sort of bike.
Just to name some that I know of that use vehicles in their respective comic and lore.
I understand many superheroes and villains have these things, but I just don't see how it would be implemented unless the world was entirely 1 zone, otherwise, it would be quite overkill (aside from maybe a motorcycle or say a surfboard) to "drive" from one place to the next in a relatively small area, like atlas park for example. Even something as large as Steel Canyon would be pretty cramped with every hero using a vehicle, even if they're all aircraft.
But if MWM can implement it nicely, then I'm all for it.
You have to remember that City of Heroes existed in the "lots of small zones" phase of game development, causing lots of zoning in order to get across the "city" to places. Contrast that with a game like World of Warcraft or TERA where the world is (seemingly, to the player) continuous, after a fashion, and thus lacking in zone loading screens. You still have "regions" in World of Warcraft, and also in TERA, where there's a different ecology (jungle vs desert for instance), a different season (spring/summer/autumn/winter), different weather (tropical rainstorms vs snow vs sandstorms), and so on ... but the difference is that you don't "zone" into those regions the way that City of Heroes forced you to "zone" all the time when traveling around Paragon City. It's just a very different philosophy and design directive in World Building.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Players really just wanted them as travel power style powers. CO decided they wanted some sort of PvP with it. :/ They do have a problem with ground vehicles however, with more than one wheel coming off the ground when not on a flat surface (problem with game engine they said), sadly they haven't implemented a uni-motorcycle yet.
I think City of Heroes got it right. Focus on the core game play - the character creator, fun and balanced power-sets, the environments, villains and story (story is SO key) to start, and bring the frills later. I played COH from Beta, and while it was frustrating waiting so long for bases; the game was still a wild blast without it. Super-teams could meet on a favored rooftop if they had to, because the core of the game was there.
That being said, if there's one thing that I would like to see sooner than later, it's something equivalent to the flashback system. Specifically, some way of ensuring that when new, low-level content is released, I can go back and enjoy it with my high-level character.
I remember when badges were first introduced into COH. I was extremely frustrated because I couldn't get the "plague stopper" badge for defeating 100 infected, because the only place the infected spawn are in the tutorial, which you couldn't return to. Eventually, they created Recluse's Victory, wherein ONE infected randomly spawned every 30 minutes to an hour or so, in a little corner of the tram station. I spent a year and a half visiting that tram station every 20 minutes or so, knocking off that stupid infected, determined to get my badge, until I finally got it.
Two months later they introduced flashback, allowing people to run missions in an instanced version of the tutorial zone, making the badge easy to get. X-[
Oh, I hope we never allow that sort of thing in a flashback! That said, I also hope we don't introduce new badges in tutorials either. If we have something akin to it at start, all good, if people skip it, it's on them.
Well it's not about skipping, it's sometimes about not knowing.
With side-swapping in CoX you needed the flashback system to get every badge.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
I think it should be okay that you can't have every badge, like the Hero and Villain side tutorial badges.
Every badger would disagree with you.. what's the point having any badges then?
Well.. that is a stupid question because there aren't really any points to having anything..
what's the point playing.. what's the point going to work etc.
If you're going to collect badges (or anything) you need them all.
Plus flashback was free content provision.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Yeah you meant the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Isolator_Badge]Isolator[/url] badge for killing 100 Contaminated but who's picking nits? ;)
CoH experienced a sadly unique situation when it came to the Isolator badge.
Since badges weren't introduced to the game until Issue 2 any characters created prior to Issue 2 (who had already exited the tutorial) had absolutely NO chance to earn the Isolator badge through absolutely NO fault of the player who created those characters. I can't think of much that was more intrinsically unfair than that. *shrugs*
It wasn't strictly a question of a "new" badge being arbitrarily thrown into the tutorial at some random point after Launch - it was that the entire badge system didn't even exist until well after Launch. The equivalent problem (the Jail Bird badge for villains) never was a factor because villains themselves didn't exist until Issue 6 long after everyone knew about the concept of badges. If you missed earning Jail Bird as a villain that was your fault, not the game's.
Positron's shaming over his silly mistake of trapping Isolator in the tutorial eventually lead to his "screw-you response" to badgers in the form of the laughable "RV Isolator" farm, which to this day I have no doubt he still has semi-sadistically fond memories of. After 18 months of putting badgers through that torture the game finally provided the tutorial Flashback mission which made getting Isolator relatively trivial.
So the easiest solutions to avoid another Isolator debacle in CoT would be to either A) start any kind of badging system on Day One of the game so (as you implied) there's no excuse for not getting any of them and/or B) never trap any badge in any physical game location that cannot be reached by any character.
With the new "gray" alignment system of CoT it'll be interesting to see how overall mission assignment and/or Flashbacks are even going to work vis-a-vis badging.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
My #1 priority is an awesome costume designer. I don't mind buying costume peices (microtransactions), but the DCUO system where you have to find costume parts in-game sucks. It will be tough to compete with the costume designers in CoH and ChO, but if the costume creator doesn't at least equal the existing one, this will be a bomb for me. :(
#2, I'd like to see a wide variety of powers. Every Superhero MMO so far has had large gaps in power selection. For example, ChO still doesn't have a shields or staffs.
- Shecky
Yeah especially with point number two there. I do not get the aversion against certain power sets in some games. Surprised CO do not have at least Staff skinned weapons. And it doesn't have shield. Even COX waited years for shield and staff came about near the end. As many villains that uses some sort of staff, and fighters in variety of media that uses shields with at least one being very famous for his shield, I would have thought those two would be a staple in line ups. Guess I thought wrong.
It's probably not that CoH wanted to wait all those years to finally give us shield and staff powersets. I suspect all things being equal implementing things like shields and staffs were relatively hard to do animation-wise and it took a long time to figure out. That probably also explains why CO still doesn't have those things yet. Just because something is a staple in the comic books doesn't mean it's easy to create in an MMO. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
True.
But then again what is easy to create in an MMO? Seems like most things take time or is hard to code in MMO.
Body types and sliders. And an interesting art style.
Touche,
Although there seems to be a belief by some that a body types are not easy to code either, i.e fat body types.
Again all things being equal I'm sure some things are easier than others. For instance CoH didn't even have capes until Issue 2. What could be more a staple to superheroes than capes yet CoH didn't even manage that until roughly 6 months after its launch.
I tend to think the Devs of games like CoH and CoT don't have an "aversion" to anything superhero-oriented. It's always been more a matter of what they could give us and how soon/easy it'd be for them to deliver it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
It's a belief that was backed up by multiple MMO devs, including CoH Devs, saying it becomes harder to create more costumes, when they have more body sliders to take into account.
Nobody ever claimed these types of things would be easy. If they were CoH might have had a 100 or more body sliders back in 2004.
On the other hand a number of modern MMOs (notably some of the newer Korean titles) have indeed somehow figured out how to offer literally hundreds of body sliders with a huge number of costume options to go with them so these kinds of things are at least possible in 2014, even if they may still be generally difficult to do.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Sorta true. In my experience, those with more sliders (like Aion) have less options than CoH when it comes to outfits.
Which is sorta my point. In CoH we didn't get new costume sets of awesomeness all that often, one thing I hope to see CoT do better than CoH, is more updates, though obviously, that means seeing it become a big success.
Sorry if this is written somewhere...putting my newb hat on right now. So are they going to have one body for male and one for female? No "brute" or "Amazon"(s) will be available? That's kind of disappointing...will definitely still play! That's not a game breaker for me but will be weird play in a world where everyone has the same silhouette.
Last I heard, the plan was to have an Athletic Body (male and female) and a Huge Muscles Body (male and female).
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
That would be enough for me. :)
Does my heart proud to see my little thread, all grown up. *sniff*
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
To be perfectly fair there's no real engineering limitation, causal relationship or Law of Nature that forces a game having more body sliders to automatically have fewer costume options because of it. If a game decides to prioritize having lots of both it'll have lots of both.
As we all know games like CoH (and hopefully CoT) set an unusually unique top priority for having as many costume options as possible. This was one of CoH's defining strengths. I would imagine it'd still be pretty hard to find ANY game that has as many or more options than CoH provided regardless of the number of body sliders it provides. Clearly games like Aion lack in total number of costume options mostly because, when compared to CoH, pretty much EVERY game lacks in costume options.
So while it remains to be seen just how many sliders and/or costume options CoT launches with there is no technical limitation that would force one of those qualities to limit the other. If CoT decided to follow CoH in setting a top priority on providing as many options as possible that's what we'll get despite the number of sliders it also provides.
I suspect in the end CoT won't provide as many sliders as the typical modern Korean MMO, but I do suspect we'll have more sliders than CoH offered ALONG WITH roughly as many costume items as CoH had when it launched.
Games made in 2014-15 are simply easier to make and update than they were in 2003-4. I'm not going to expect we'll get new costume items virtually every day. But if for some reason we don't get new things a bit more often than we did during CoH’s run I'll be at least vaguely surprised.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I love playing a support character, not a combat character. I hope that at launch there are some fun support characters to play.
I hope the play style and character building is comparable to CoX so I don't have a huge learning curve. I'm not a power gamer, and I hope that's not necessary to play in the game.
If I could stretch just a bit, I hope the iOS and Android character creators also have some kind of built in communication system. It would be really nice to have the "bat signal" on my phone go off saying that my friends are online and need a Guardian ASAP. Bonus points if I can actually reply to them and say I'll be online in an hour.
I hope I can get a travel power quickly. Gosh, wouldn't it be great to just start with one? I hate having to spend the early part of the game running around, slowly, from encounter to encounter. Sorry if that's too specific for this thread.
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