So Division 2 just came out. I was really surprised at the quality at launch, something I had soured on recently due to the deluge of poorly made AAA releases.
You may say, hey, isn't that an action game that has nothing in common with CoT?
Honestly I think there is a lot it does right that can be directly learned from that applies to CoT.
* Level design (the DC museums especially)
* Enemy variety and design that forces different approaches and counters certain strategies
* Abilities and their usage
* Tactics used by your coop team and by the AI against you
Most importantly, all three of these tie in together in really important ways. Some abilities are standard damage and healing type stuff but many are more about controlling areas and forcing relocation. Positioning is a big deal, and level design obviously plays a big part in how you can approach to encounters and react to surprises.
The AI in particular is impressive in how it intelligently reacts to situations and forces players to make good decisions or be punished. At the same time it never feels like you are playing chess against big blue where the AI is strictly better at you and you don't have a chance. There is always hope and failures are almost always a direct result of your team's actions, so the player is consistently able to learn from their mistakes and feel justified satisfaction when they do beat a tough fight. It also encourages a variety of gameplay as different enemies play very differently. Even in the same environment players will have to use different tactics and equipment against a group of stand off snipers vs a rushing melee horde or a team of ability using support enemies that try to trap you and control you.
While aiming and flanking aren't really a thing in a more RPG focused game like CoT, the general gameplay of controlling enemies and outplaying them on the game board is definitely shared. The aesthetic is different but the gameplay is not as far apart as it might seem. It is even an rpg if you think about it, with stats, loot, aggro, and abilities. Even the guns can be basically translated into CoT terms with close and long range and area of effect.
I wanted to call some attention to it as it seemed like something that stood out as doing an exceptional job in these specific areas that many other games struggle with, and also being something that might fly under the radar of this crowd.
Taking a look at other games to see how they do things is always something worth doing. But Radiac has already been talking up a storm about D2 in particular on this forum in the last few days:
https://cityoftitans.com/forum/more-destiny-2-nonsense-rad
https://cityoftitans.com/forum/more-observations-other-games
https://cityoftitans.com/forum/how-not-handle-badges-and-such
Welcome to the party I guess...
P.S. For what it's worth I've been playing Fallout 76 lately. It's hardly as "broken" or "horrible" as everyone seems to think it is although it's probably good that I couldn't play it until it had be launched for several months so I didn't get to play though the "un-patched" period that everyone's apparently bitching about. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Ooooh yeah I played it around release. It was ..... playable, and I had fun with friends, but to say it had a rough launch is being very kind. I often snatch up anything oriented around small groups even if I know it won't be great. Playing with friends is fun.
Thanks for linking those threads!
Destiny 2 vs the division 2... right?
Compulsively clicking the refresh button until the next update.
Ha you're right. My bad. The more the merrier. ;)
Radiac usually refers to "his game" as "D2" so I honestly didn't pay too much attention to whether the "D" stood for Destiny or Division. If I'm not playing them games like that usually just blur in my head regardless.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Oh good catch. Yeah I meant division 2.
Looking at those threads it talks about a lot of things from destiny I didn't touch on like vendor pricing.
While I have been impressed with division 2 it was mostly focused on environments, abilities, AI, and the way they interacted to challenge the player to make the most of the playing field.
Do you use a gun in Division 2? If so, It's probably not all that dissimilar to Destiny 2. Aaaaaannd SPEAKING of Destiny 2...
They have this relatively new NPC contact. She's a robot that runs a black market gun store called The Black Forge. She sells quests to go forge different types of guns in the forges they have. The forges are in instanced maps that are constantly getting attacked by bad guys, so its a lot like the Terra Volta Respec Reactor TF from CoH. You set up some pre-quests before hand (mostly quotas like "defeat 30 randoes with headshots from an auto rifle" etc) then you go do the Forge run. If you successfully keep the forge running (by throwing power packs at it that the baddies drop) then defeat the baddie boss at the end, you get a gun.
Which gun you get is determined by which gun FRAME the NPC gave you to start the quest. At any given time, she has three different frames that she offers, and which three you can get is determined, I think, using pseudo random algorithms. The offerings are changed with the weekly reset.
So the gun frames offered SHOULD theoretically change each week with the weekly reset, but for the last 3 weeks now the three guns offered have been 2/3 the same as what was offered last week and the week before.
Let's NOT do this in CoX, if it can be avoided. And by "this" I mean having an NPC that is supposed to have a rotating list of different items you can craft then make it the same 2 or 3 items three weeks in a row.
That said, I like some things about the way this content and rewards system is designed. There are 4 forges, which you have to do PVE content to unlock. Once you unlock one or more forges, you can get gun frames from the NPC contact, Ada-1, and do forge runs to get the gun that your frame makes. Assuming it's a gun you don't actually want to keep (they usually get dismantled for parts) you can use the parts to make a thingy that get's you an armor piece to drop when you forge another gun. Since all of Ada-1's weekly frame offerings are the same for every player, there will usually be other players doing the same forge runs to queue up with, since each frame sends you to a specific forge to make the gun.
This is better than just offering all of the gun frames all the time and letting people do whatever they want, because it concentrates people on a few frames that lead you to 1 or 2 specific forges, instead of allowing the players to just craft anything at any time which causes more division of the players among the 4 forges. The forge that makes the gun I want to make is probably twice as busy as it might be otherwise due to this, I bet.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yeah, division is a looter-shooter action RPG like others in the genre. It leans more towards the action and the XCOM style squad tactics for gameplay focus on a bit less on the RPG aspects. That focus is what really makes the parts I brought up shine though, since it turns from a pure action and reflexes game (decided by skill and execution) or a pure numbers game (decided by grinding and time investment) into more cerebral exercise. Execution and gear matter but encounters are largely won and lost by planning and being able to adjust to surprises.
The gameplay does feel loosely like old CoH in the way you can deal with enemy groups. Control them at choke points, lead them into traps, sneak up on them and devastate them with an initial ambush. Bully them with a shielded tank that is getting healed by your support and then let the team pour damage on them while they ignore the dps. Debuff big bads and CC them in place to make them easy to deal with.
And laugh when the AI does all of the same things to you if you let it!
It just feels great.
Destiny 2 and Division 2 are loot shooters. It’s a genre of FPS games with RPG character development (stats, experience levels, talent builds) that involve defeating enemies that continuously drop better and different guns and other items that modify stats. The Borderland games and Anthem are also examples of the genre. So it’s fair to compare and contrast them.
Most of them are online games as well, and there’s enough of an overlap with an MMO like CoT that’s it’s worth looking at what works and what doesn’t in those games.