I am curious to hear about people's recollections about the missions in CoH in terms of how much time they required to complete.
I never paid any particular attention to this, so my already hazy recollection is going to be very subjective, but on the whole I felt that most missions provided a decent amount of content. It is important to note that I am the type of player who will usually clear the entire map, so effectively the opposite of a speed runner. (That's not including those times I spent 10+ minutes failing to find the damned glowie, or discovering that the last enemy of a kill-all mission was stuck in a wall.)
This thought came up when I realized that many of the more recent MMOs feel like they are focused on speedy accomplishments.[color=red]*[/color] They put a player into a location with three or four missions in close proximity, if not overlapping, so that in the time it would have taken me to complete the average CoH mission I've got four or five missions to turn in.
All in all I'm much more a fan of the CoH approach: some meat on the bone, as it were.
Which brings me to the point of the exercise: how do you feel about the CoH missions, missions/quests in other MMOs, and what would constitute your ideal typical mission?
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[color=red]*[/color] Presumably they wish to cater to the type of player who will get bored if they cannot turn in a mission every two or three minutes.
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I too tended to go for defeating everyone on a map.
I guess it breaks down to: a good mission is over too soon, but a bad mission can't be over soon enough. Perhaps modern mission design is biased towards not letting players get stuck doing something they hate for too long? Personally, I was lucky enough that even when working full time I could play CoH for several hours a day, but I know there were people who had limited game time. If you only get an hour a night to play, you may not want to get stuck on a slog of a mission.
I will say there was a set of players in CoH who were very obsessed about completing missions and TFs as fast as they could, saying things along the lines that stopping to sell drops was "wasting time they could be making XP and Inf". Not all of these people where those on limited time either.
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The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Short: 5-10 minutes
Medium: 10-20 minutes
Long: 15-30 minutes
Purely a rule of thumb and the "gearing ratios" of the benchmarks I'm setting are kind of obvious, but that's kinda the point. The above are predicated upon a Clear All Foes tasking for a Soloist.
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No rose-tinted glasses or sugar coating it:
Mission length was usually linked to the map. Some maps were extensive, maybe with doors you had to unlock by defeating certain enemies or if you were in search of a particular glowie on a large map became a tedious trial of patience or a metagame of memorizing maps and glowie hotspots. Solo/duo often had missions ranging from 5min to 45min in that sense. With stealth powers, some missions would only last 2min or so which was a nice change of pace as I used to play Stalkers decently often and would still make a quick sweep of the maps to assure there were no glowies or extra dialog to catch.
All in all, though, most missions were extremely repetitive (not talking about paper missions either) and if your character was vulnerable to a particular group, very annoying.
On a near-full/full team, missions were much more stable in the sense they usually had a smaller range of duration (so long as people didn't do their grocery shopping between missions) and a lot simpler.
If I were pitching a benchmark for CoT's mission duration ranges, I honestly couldn't. I'd hope they'd combat repetitive and annoying mission design first as well as varied means of completion for some missions. I stealthed through to the end of missions, not because I was in a rush, but because I could and it was in character for my character to do such. And it varied the monotony of kill-all missions.
Interesting question. I never timed them specifically, but a rough idea of 15-30 minutes for a "normal" mission is floating in my head. That's not including missions like Atta, which I believe required three successive human lifetimes to complete.
I definitely agree with Leo that map size was the primary (perhaps sole) determining factor, in my experience. Aside from the blueside respec, of course.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I am in the same boat. For once I am doing an alt in Wildstar, and already I am (without realising it) actually doing the content differently to how I did it first. Not necessarily more *efficiently* because I know how to complete it, but just differently, taking it from a different point of view (as it were). I even did one part in reverse (as it were) because of how the content lined up for me at that point, it was actually "faster" to do it that way for me...
Originally I would kill just what I needed to progress... now? Well lets just say that my engineer enjoys causing havok...
Assuming the last one had life support lol.
As Red said I think 30 min for a typical mission would be the long end. On a good map though that's not so bad. Some of the CoH maps were very cool. SOme were loathed to the point that the team lead would drop the mission. I firmly believe that our trusted Dev team will learn from this example...
One thing I didn't like about CoH was that some maps were never seen outside specific arcs or TFs. Yes, I understand that you want a TF to feel special but I never saw the inside of the Hospital scenario until someone used it in the AE.
I agree that some maps (like the ending fight from the ITF) should be unique but for some of the lighter-weight stuff I'd like to see maps reused if only because somebody spent a LOT of time on them and many players will only see them once if at all.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I ran across this in the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Lore_AMA]City of Heroes AMA 1[/url]. While this is a rather exceptional case, insofar as the player would have been seeing/experiencing the world through an iconic character, the implementation still makes me wince. Given roughly an hour's worth of content, I would much rather it be broken up into no more than five or six missions, rather than over a dozen missions.
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