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The Character Design "Experience"

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WarBird
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The Character Design "Experience"

We talk a great deal about the mechanics of powers. We spend a LOT of time talking about the number of choices we want and "wouldn't it be great if...?" scenarios. This may be getting a bit ahead, but I'm so durned EAGER!! So, I'm going to try and bring a few threads together and see if we can get the devs to give us a hint about what it will actually "feel" like to design a new character. (Plus throw in some of my hopes and expectations)

So you've just shelled out for your shiny New Account for City of Titans. You sit down at your computer and log into the 'New Character' screen. Will there be a "How do you want to play?" mini-questionnaire that guides you to the power set you want? Will you be asked to select gender/body type/physical stats first?

I'd like to see a choice branch at this point; A) determine your character's look, then decide their powers. B) Choose your character's powers, then design their look.

Let's say you are choosing the powers first. Do you get the list of "effects?" Burning, Smashing, Etc with a little blurb on what type of powers 'typically' fall into this category? Or do you get the list of Stalwart, Enforcer, etc. and have to dig down to find out how those types of characters function? Will there be some way to see where the path you choose may lead as far as what will my powers ultimately include? Will we be able to choose individual powers in any order? Or will there be a typical 'progression tree' where we start with one or two low level powers and get more choices, with gradually more powerful abilities as we level up? Can we preview the power animations and stats before we choose them? I could see hovering over a power icon and getting a popup that shows a manikin going through the animation and a numeric stat description of the effects.

Once our powers are selected we move on to the character design. If we had to choose a gender/body type at the beginning, are we stuck with that now? Personally, I'd wish for the ability to toggle between body types at any point during the process and re-select. I anticipate being presented with a myriad of sliders for facial structure and body part proportions. Will we be able change these "on the fly" as we select costume pieces? i.e. "These boots make my feet look to big." Do I have to go back to an earlier screen and adjust my feet, then go back and forth until the proportions look right? Or can I do it in the costume screen?

As far color selections: Will we have an extensive palette or HSV sliders or what? If so, will there be some way to track color selections from previous parts? Can I 'lock in' a palette for use with that character, but 'unlock'certain pieces?

Then, can I save and re-load this whole design to my account?

I would hope that we get to the "Animations and SFX" selection after we have figured out our costume, so that we can see our character actually going through it. Here we can check on costume conflicts with our powers. Like "My cape ends up over my head after that back flip." type thing.

Do we figure out our name at this point? Or did we have to come up with that at the beginning? If so, can I change/edit that now? Is there a way for me to check against conflict? I know we probably won't have to worry about that with the @global convention. But see, I'd rather be original anyway.

Any answers available to any of these questions? Anybody see a radically different experience? Any details or 'please,please' wishes to drop in here?

Hero_Zero
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I seem to recall a tabbed

I seem to recall a tabbed system. One tab had something like good/evil and class while another had powers. Yet another had body type and/or costume. I think that worked pretty well because you could go in the order of the tabs or choose a different tab to start with.

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Radiac
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I like the tabbed idea. That

I like the tabbed idea. That way you can flip back and forth among different options in whatever order you like.

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I was hoping for a 3.1 level

I was hoping for a 3.1 level power system pick main power secondary power , compliment power, and inherent powers.

i made an AOE Blapper (blaster scapper) electric and fire with ss, stealth, pounce(mechanics were perfect for leapingcin to center of group) and aoed them to death took so much monkeing with powers to get right .

I hopeing for like ex. 1st aoe; 2nd aoe; 3rd defense ; 4th travel{trargeted leaping}

Or 1st def, 2nd aoe, 3rd healing 4th travel

Ex 1st 100% effective of power set; 2nd 80% of power set; 3rd 55-65% of power set effectivness
But of course with booster

and few limits to make balanced

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Redlynne
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UI using Tabs is definitely

UI using Tabs is definitely the way to go. There's a progression for people who are unfamiliar with the system, but if you are familiar you can "skip around" as needed in order to address specific issues.

Personally, I'd be more inclined to put the Tabs for different things on either the left or right of screen (not both), simply because putting them across the top or bottom claims more screen real estate that can be used for other things.

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Lin Chiao Feng
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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Personally, I'd be more inclined to put the Tabs for different things on either the left or right of screen (not both), simply because putting them across the top or bottom claims more screen real estate that can be used for other things.

It can go both ways. If you use longer names for the tabs, then putting the tabs on the top and letting the tabs scroll so they aren't all visible at once will use less real estate. Or you could have it where you only see a subset of tabs at a time, which could make more sense if there are dependencies between tabs (e.g. you only see the "Villain Info" tab if you chose "Villain" in an earlier tab).

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Kiyori Anoyui
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I preferred the top tab

I preferred the top tab method. But definitely tabbed. I thought it was interesting that they split up the scales in CoX though(where the major scales were on it's own tab and smaller proportions were on the outfitting tab). I think that they should have all the proportion options on the same tab though(with the outfit). It would be nice to make the adjustments and actually see what the change to the character looks like with their conceptualized form.

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TheMightyPaladin
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I like tabs but in COH there

I like tabs but in COH there was one tab too many.
I never saw the point to separating play style from archetype.
and it still gets annoying on the offline character creator.
Just tell me what classes there are and let me pick one.
Frankly I'd prefer the game with no classes, just let me pick my powers.

Also I saw suggestion that we be able to do the tabs in any order we want.
That's fine if you want to do it that way but if you have a lot of tabs be sure to have some way of knowing which ones we haven't done yet.
It could get really frustrating trying to finish and not being able to because you didn't do one of the tabs and you can't remember which one it was.

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Lin Chiao Feng
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TheMightyPaladin wrote:
TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I like tabs but in COH there was one tab too many.
I never saw the point to separating play style from archetype.
and it still gets annoying on the offline character creator.
Just tell me what classes there are and let me pick one.

Same here. And way back when, this was exactly how CoH did it. The classes and their descriptions were even part of a slide show that ran while the game installed off the DVD.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Frankly I'd prefer the game with no classes, just let me pick my powers.

Me, too (yay GURPS). I think MMO designs avoid that, though, in order to prevent tankmage builds from turning the game into "build your character this way or lose" messes.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

Also I saw suggestion that we be able to do the tabs in any order we want.
That's fine if you want to do it that way but if you have a lot of tabs be sure to have some way of knowing which ones we haven't done yet.
It could get really frustrating trying to finish and not being able to because you didn't do one of the tabs and you can't remember which one it was.

Or worse, winding up with a character that's wrong because you missed a tab and the game used defaults for everything on it.

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Kiyori Anoyui
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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Or worse, winding up with a character that's wrong because you missed a tab and the game used defaults for everything on it.

Yikes!

I guess the best thing to do would be to have the color of the tab change when everything is filled out, or a red asterisks by the name of the tab that lets you know something is unfinished, and maybe a popup when you hit create character that says something like "There are some options that were not filled out, would you still like to continue creating your character?(Defaults will be used for any unmarked options)"

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

TheMightyPaladin wrote:
Frankly I'd prefer the game with no classes, just let me pick my powers.

Me, too (yay GURPS). I think MMO designs avoid that, though, in order to prevent tankmage builds from turning the game into "build your character this way or lose" messes.

Shadowrun is my choice here... although you do at least have to make a couple of *hard* decisions at the start (ie "magic/no magic" based), but that is because there is *no* actual ingame mechanic to acquire the magic/resonance stat after character creation (even says so in the rules basically... at least in everything up to 5th edition)

But then again, you have a human GM who can change/builds the adventure around your party setup.

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syntaxerror37
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TheMightyPaladin wrote:
TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I like tabs but in COH there was one tab too many.
I never saw the point to separating play style from archetype.

What was great about the CoH character creation UI was that it gave both options by letting you skip over the play style tab. If you were a veteran player it was a no brainier to just select whatever archetype you wanted, but for inexperienced players the play style tab was a way of limiting options based on what type of role they were interested in playing. One extra tab made the game that much easier to get into for new players.

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Radiac
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sarcasm/

sarcasm/

Wait, sometimes I make mistakes. Can we make a game that's so foolproof that it won't let me make mistakes so that I never have to deal with the consequences of my own carelessness? Because that's what I want, I want a game that's so smart that I can pretty much ignore everything, be very sloppy, and still end up getting exactly what I wanted, including the stuff I like that's mutually exclusive from the other stuff I also like.

/sarcasm

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Redlynne
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Can we make a game that's so foolproof

There is no such thing as FOOLproof.

There is only foolRESISTANCE.

Or to put it another way ... "I can heal many things, but I can't heal STUPID."

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syntaxerror37
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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

sarcasm/
Wait, sometimes I make mistakes. Can we make a game that's so foolproof that it won't let me make mistakes so that I never have to deal with the consequences of my own carelessness? Because that's what I want, I want a game that's so smart that I can pretty much ignore everything, be very sloppy, and still end up getting exactly what I wanted, including the stuff I like that's mutually exclusive from the other stuff I also like.
/sarcasm

Really? I thought you were better than that.

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Radiac wrote:
Can we make a game that's so foolproof
There is no such thing as FOOLproof.
There is only foolRESISTANCE.
Or to put it another way ... "I can heal many things, but I can't heal STUPID."

Or how about ... "whenever you make something foolproof nature just makes a better fool".

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blacke4dawn wrote:
blacke4dawn wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Radiac wrote:
Can we make a game that's so foolproof

There is no such thing as FOOLproof.
There is only foolRESISTANCE.
Or to put it another way ... "I can heal many things, but I can't heal STUPID."

Or how about ... "whenever you make something foolproof nature just makes a better fool".

[img=300x200]http://gifsec.com/wp-content/uploads/GIF/2014/02/Damn-Nature-You-Scary-GIF-GIFS.gif?gs=a[/img]

It looks like we have strayed away from the topic lol

Interesting questionaire answers from warcabbit [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/merry-devmas?page=3#comment-101579]here[/url] (Post#279)

Looks like there will be a standard amount of sliders(I'm assuming CoX is the standard)

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