It's probably too early to know exactly how many travel powers we're going to get or how many different kinds of alternate animations we're going to get with them. But based on the power customizations we got in CoH (and how much easier that'll be to do using UE4) I figure we'll be able to change the colors of any travel power effects as a bare minimum.

I'm actually hoping for more than just color customizations - I think it'd be cool if you could choose from several different animation styles for each travel power. Maybe have an animation style for Fly that looks like the way Superman flies but also have another style that looks like the way Magneto flies. Both versions would be functionally identical - they'd only differ in how they're animated. They could have multiple "animation styles" for every major travel power (i.e. SJ, SS, Fly, etc.) which would in effect make it seem like we had dozens of "different" travel powers to choose from.

Radiac wrote:

This reminds me of something I wanted to throw out there. Remember how (in CoX) you used to have to take Hover to unlock Fly? What if they set up CoT in such a way that Fly is the FIRST power you take, and then that choice unlocks a few other powers, and some/all of them modify your flight characteristics in some ways or give you things to do while flying that are otherwise not there?
For example: You take Fly and it opens up two further powers: Air Attack (an attack you can only use while Fly is toggled on whereby you kick the target by dropping down on top of it from above) and Turbulence Shield (a static defense or damage resist power that only protects you while Fly is toggled on and you are actually moving at some stated minimum rate of speed).
Or Super Speed could unlock Flurry of Punches (a super fast attack that deals a lot of damage with a fast animation, but uses a lot of endo and recharges slowly) and some kind of Flame Trail power (like Diablo II had, where you trail fire behind you as you run, basically it lays down a series of fire damage patches on the ground behind you as you move along).
Super Jump could unlock Jump Kick and something akin to Inertial Reduction where you get to control your jumps better by taking advantage of air resistance or what have you.
Teleport could unlock a Tele-punch attack and something like Recall Friend.
And you could chain stuff out so that if you take Tele-punch that then unlocks Teleport Foe but if you take Recall Friend it unlocks some kind of "Teleport Team to Mission Door" power usable only a few times per day, or whatever.
You could also make it work in such a way that if you take Power X and Power Y that combo (different powers in different sets) unlocks Power Z, which is totally different and in some way represents the intersection of X and Y. So for example if you have Super Speed and Fly it unlocks a toggle power called "Supersonic Flight" which when activated causes your Fly power to propel you much faster than regular Fly would, but with less maneuverability and its only good for long flights from say one outdoor location to another in some way (long recharge time, more endo use, etc).

I don't have much problem with "travel oriented combat powers" that have a movement element tied to their animations. But I'm less in favor of having various powers be specifically dependant on having base travel powers first, especially combat oriented powers. What if I wanted a character who could perform a Flurry of Punches but couldn't necessarily travel fast for long distances via Super Speed? What if wanted a character who could perform short distance Tele-Punches but couldn't travel for miles like Teleport itself allows?

I just think trapping a bunch of powers behind other prerequisites would needlessly force people to take a bunch of "base" powers they might otherwise not want or use. That was precisely the reason why the CoH travel powers were reformed to finally not require ANY prerequisites before you got them - people generally didn't like powers trapped behind others.

P.S. For what it's worth you never had to take Hover in order to get Fly. Even at the beginning of the game there was the option to take Air Superiority in order to unlock Fly. Just saying...

To respond to Lothic's comments (I don't want to quote it because it quotes all of my earlier one, and that starts to get excessively long), I just want to say, yes I remember Air Superiority very well, I was only giving Hover as one example of a power unlocking another one. But beyond that, I think making powers a total and complete free for all is something I personally would not want. People are apt to try to min/max builds, and making players have to make choices is, I think, a good thing in that it makes the game harder to min/max and thus more interesting to play. If you can just take whatever powers you want, people find the "right answer" combination very quickly and it degenerates into a bunch of fully optimized clones running around. Some people who play CO have mentioned that that level of freedom of choice is something they'd actually prefer NOT to have for this reason. For me, I just want the character build choices I make to mean something and I want every power chosen to have advantages but to also have an opportunity cost. As for having to take Teleport to get Tele-punch, I don't mind that, myself. CoH was wired up in such a way that you had room for "throw away" powers that you only took to unlock something or to use as receptacles for IOs that you wanted, which then makes this kind of thing possible and very doable. I like the idea of some things unlocking other things, for what it's worth. I also don't hate the idea of primary and secondary power sets, pools, etc. The more rigidly the game treats this kind of stuff from the outset, the more room there is for improvement later on in the form of new sets, new pools, new things that allow you to shortcut old rules, etc. I firmly believe that they ought to make it impossible, on day 1, to actually hit the damage hard cap, or the defense one or the damage resist one, etc. I feel like if there's any hard upper limits on stuff, it should take a few years for it to even become possible to actually get to them.

I agree with Empyrean. This is a bit of a paradox that needs solving, and has multiple directions you could go in to solve it. We could:

1. Create powers, presumably in a vacuum, and then allow any character to take any power. This would undoubtedly cause problems which would require some kind of rules against abusive combos, etc to follow in due time. Even this option won't ultimately allow total and complete creative freedom of choice in making a character, and I personally predict nothing ever will, short of writing your own game from the ground up, powers and all. This option has the advantage of allowing the maximum amount of creativity on the part of the player, while having the drawback of allowing people to make "tankmages" which have a lot of damage output and no real glaring weaknesses, etc. I predict PVPers would want this, because individually they feel like they have the opportunity to be the first to find a broken combo and start exploiting it before everyone else catches on. This option also brings with it the pain of the banhammer once the devs catch on to this kind of stuff though.

2. Create powers in sets (like CoX did) and allow players to pick which sets they want to work with at various different times during the leveling process. You don't have to take every power in a set, you can emphasize multiple sets or focus on only a few, etc, but you can't take powers from outside the sets you chose. This option compartmentalizes the brokenness to a large extent, but isn't totally free of imbalance, especially in PVP, as we saw with CoX. This option doesn;t really allow for total freedom of choice either, and as such it's a compromise. Personally I Think it worked well in CoX and wouldn't mind seeing it come back in CoT.

3. Create trees of powers kind of like the technologies in Sid Meyer's Civilization. If you take power1, it unlocks power2. Later, being level X and having powers 1 and 2 unlocks power 5 without having to take powers 3 or 4, but you can still take them if you want. etc. This can work, and does technically allow for a lot of freedom, but I think it often is executed by the designers in such a way as to push people into a few specific builds that were designed to work well to the abandonment of all others (i.e. here's a maze of options, most of which are not that great, now you get to find the "right answer" solution to it).

4. The "spend your points" method. One way to work this system is to have every new level bring with it some number of character build points, which you can then spend on making your toon better either by taking new powers or investing points in the ones you already have to make them better (more slots for enhancements, or just better overall numbers, etc). Or maybe they let you bank points for a level or two until you save up enough for something really good,. etc. This requires the devs to put a points price tag on everything, which isn't easy because some things are merely okay in a vacuum but bonkers in combination with each other. Thus the pricing of the options would need to be something that changes based on which options you already have, etc.

And those are just 4 I came up with on the spur of the moment. And I haven't even touched on the whole "Archetypes or no archetypes?" question. Personally I'm pro archetypes. I like being able to understand what everyone does or is supposed to be good at by looking at their "class" designation.