I've been playing a lot of Overwatch and Destiny 2 lately, and I've come up with some more stuff I've observed that I would like to discuss.
1. Overwatch is pay to buy, then free after that. You can throw them some money for some cosmetic loot boxes full of random skins, etc, but I never do. I wonder how much they make on that stuff alone in a year per game purchaser? I haven't bought anything since buying the game. Well, that's not entirely true. A friend of mine bought me like $10 worth of loot boxes as a present once, and I did get sucked into Destiny 2 when they were doing the free weekend trial for Overwatch players. I also wonder how much cosmetic stuff CoT players will want and be willing to pay money for. Hopefully more per player than Overwatch, as that is a PvP game in it's heart and soul, which presumably means the players are less concerned about cosmetics than the average CoT player would be, one might expect. But then wanting more cosmetic options and being willing to pay for them are two different things.
2. Destiny 2 has graphics that are of a quality and style that I think is about what I hope CoT is shooting for. Fairly realistic maps that are not too cartoony, not too dark, not too fantasy, not too sci-fi, but a happy medium for the most part with individual areas being more sci-fi (like the Red Legion spaceship dock in the EDZ) here or more fantasy (like the Dreaming City) there.
3. Destiny 2 has a cap of 100,000 on the amount of IGC (called glimmer) that you can carry. The game dumps glimmer on you like it's raining glimmer all the time, so you have to spend it or you won't get any more. I've definitely hit the cap a few times and finding something I want to actually spend it on is sometimes hard. That said, I think the idea of having a cap is a good one. It creates at least SOME resistance against veteran players just racking up so much accumulated loot that the newbie has no chance. Of course, that game has no player-to-player open market anyway.
4. Destiny 2 has an open world with several different types of repeating small events. What I find kind of bad about this is that the events are largely the same. I think there are a total of like 12 actual events (Glimmer Extraction, Injection Rig, Hive Ritual, Aether Resuppply, etc) that happen on like 8 different planet maps. I would have expected each planet to have it's own different events, but no, you end up doing "Taken Blight" on Earth and on Io and on the Dreaming City, etc, you can do "Arsenal Walker" on Nessus or Titan, etc. I think they re-used too many events in too many places, personally. Guild Wars 2, by comparison, has tons of repeating events and no two are really exactly the same. Not to mention the gold heart activities and the hero point challenges, but I digress.
5. Some Destiny 2 content that is needed for advancement has, in the past, been gated behind events that only fire off at pseudorandom times and places (I'm looking at you, Dreaming City). This is annoying as heck because it means you have to be on the planet where it happens and wait for it to start, then run there before it's over and get some shots in. What's even more frustrating is that in other places, they have events that fire off, then there are "jukebox events" as I like to call them that players can initiate at any time which will delay/overwrite the regular events if players do that. So like, when you're on Mars, you may or may or may not get to do the "Warsat Down" event, but only if nobody started an "Escalation Protocol" in the same timeslot in that area. This reminds me of doing the Numina TF in CoH, and right when you get to Independence Port, there's a Rikti Invasion or Zombie Apokalypse going on and there are NO Tsoo to fight. None. ZERO. The only difference being that in the Destiny 2 version some person or persons started that over-writing event ON PURPOSE.
6. In Destiny 2, you don't ever really out-level content, but you might be too low to do some of it. The way this works is, if the content you're doing is intended for level, say, 300 heroes, you'll do less damage if you're just under 300 and eventually you find that as you go lower and lower in level, this content is way too hard to be able to do. But on the high side, once you get to level 300+, it get's easier and easier, TO A POINT. I think the cap now is that once you're at level 350 (it may be 320, not sure) you hit a hard cap for that content and get no greater damage after that. As such, my level 620 hero can run around the EDZ, which was the first zone they put you in when you're level 1, and I still have to watch my 6 or get beat down from enemies that would have "conned grey" in CoX. I think this is good.
7. I just completed the Mars content needed to get a specific exotic sword called Worldline Zero in Destiny 2. I think the design of the content was okay, but the reward schedule was terrible. In order to unlock the sword, you have to go around the Mars map shooting targets with different types of guns. There 45 targets in total (Datto did a nice youtube video on this that shows you all of them). You only have to hit 35 out of 45 to get the sword, but if you get the last 10 too, you unlock.... wait for it.... a totally cosmetic item. In this case, it's a hoverbike (called a sparrow) you can use to zoom around the outdoor maps. That said, this is not the only sparrow you can have, I have like 6 different sparrows already and this one isn't even that great compared to some of the others which I DIDN'T have to grind for. So please, make the rewards worth the effort. Also, that sword isn't even all that good either. If you're going to gate an item behind like 2 hours of somewhat laborious easter-egg hunting, you should at least make it worth the effort.
8. Destiny 2 has a number of instanced "door mission" type maps connected to the main outdoor maps. What happens is, you'll be walking along the EDZ and you'll spot the opening to a cave, so you go in and once you're a few meters into the cave, you'll see a message pop up that reads "Lost Sector Discovered" and the name of the Lost Sector you're now in. At that point, you're now in your own instance, like entering the door of a door map, except there's no door and the transition is seemless. There are dozens of these lost sectors scattered throughout the outdoor maps, so of course, for no good reason, I made a point of finding them all and doing all of them at least once. Each Lost Sector is always exactly the same thing every time you do it, same map, same badguys, same boss at the end, etc. The game has ways of sending you back to these lost sectors from time to time in the form of tip mission type things you can get to go there and redo them for rewards. For example, every time you open a cache or dismantle a gun you don't need (Destiny 2's version of the SO enhancement, to some extent, they drop a lot and are mostly only valuable for the loot they break down into when dismantle them), you might get a "tip mission" type thing that the game calls a "Vanguard Bounty" which might direct you to go do a Lost Sector and then it gives you loot for doing that. I like that composting unwanted items can lead to missions to do, randomly. I also like that one can compost unwanted gear instead of simply deleting it.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
FYI, Overwatch cleared over 2.4 billion in profit (yes profit) last year. That is between new game sales (which declined YOY), loot box purchases, special event purchases (Pink Mercy), and what is likely a decent contributing factor, Overwatch League as teams have to pay ActivisionBlizzard in order to officially join the league. And Act/Blizz also gets a portion of all related merch sales.
Destiny 2 suffered from a clear lack of direction, trying not be an MMO but using many of the MMO systems. It gets pulled into too many directions and thus, everything in the game suffers.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Selling cosmetic stuff can be a good way to make money in a game like this, definitely.
I like the idea of a fairly low currency cap. Too many games, new players take one look at the player-to-player market and immediately check out because they may never be able to buy anything on it.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
Overwatch cosmetics are there to differentiate you from the pack (relying on rarity), match the ethos of the character, or to just kinda look cool. CoT cosmetics will be available to help you craft your own vision of a character. I have never (nor will I ever) purchase lootboxes for Overwatch. I will purchase cosmetic options in CoT (either to help support the project or to fully realize my concept at level 1 so I do not have to unlock it).
"Just, well, update your kickstarter email addresses, okay? Make sure they're current?" - warcabbit
I'll add to this by saying that for me there's a definite difference between buying cosmetic items for a game when I know exactly what I'm buying versus the idea of "randomized skin lootboxes". I'll have no problem throwing a ton of money at CoT and its cash store but I doubt I would ever throw a penny at a game that forces me to buy things that are essentially "sight-unseen" lottery tickets.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
To be fair, you also get loot boxes from hitting levels in Overwatch. Every so many XP earned gets you a level, which gets you a loot box, for free. So you get them just from playing, and you get them faster for playing and winning. Also, you can get some bonus ones from doing certain optional game modes called "Arcade" play. In some cases, the Arcade thing is seasonal. Around Halloween time they have an arcade-game-like mode where you and 3 others try to defend a door from an onslaught of zombie robots trying to break into a castle, co-op PvE style.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Getting something like randomized "lootboxes" for free (or in this case just playing the game) is one thing; paying real money for them is the problem. I don't want to pay real money in a cash store for anything with any degree of uncertainty about what I'm getting for my money.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Personally, I have nothing against the randomized packaging concept, but I see where some people might, especially in a game where you can trade stuff player to player. As soon as you allow person-to-person trades, people try to get stuff they want by paying real money for it, even if it's only a digital item like a +12 magic sword, etc.
That said, I like doing the same content repeatedly and hoping to get a good drop at the end. I feel it adds replayability to the content itself. It was one of the things that I liked about Raids and TFs in CoX. This does lead to the problem of power creep though, because if you're motivation for doing a raid is to get a bit of gear, then they have to use gear to bait people into doing like every raid, TF etc in the game. That said, I don't get a lot of joy out of doing repeated content for NO rewards either. I like having the possibility of getting items of variying rarities to drop at the end of a TF type content run. Uncommon, rare, and ultra rare drops cause me to redo a lot of content, or did in CoX. because the reward was usually worth the effort, even when it wasn't a super-lucky one
, but there were some super-lucky ones.
I liked the 3-tiered system CoX had (I say 3-tiered because I used to think of it that way, "ok", SOs, "better" inventions and "best" purples and Hamios frankenslotted using MIDS). I like raids and TFs type content that gives randomized drops at the end (and maybe in the middle if you hit a milestone) and then you can either use sell or recycle the resulting gear. As I said in another post, Destiny 2 has a system where you get a ton of less-powerful guns and armor that you can't really use because it's not as good as what you have currently, so you have the option of dismantling it for raw materials, which amounts to nothing more than a small amount of IGC and some scrap parts that can be accumulated and then used to get a randomized roll for yet more random loot, which will also probably be useless. But in that self-devouring loot system there are the random GOOD drops that give you stuff you DO want, and therein lies the fun.
The way I would try to set up a game economy and lot system is like this:
Play yields rewards in the form of random drops of items and possibly non-random IGC drops. When you get a good item you actually can use, you slot it up. When you get something good that you can't use, you can sell it on the open market/auction house. When you get items you can't use that are basically garbage, you can combine IGC and the garbage items to get another random chance at an item you do want, which will likely result in getting more garbage, but what else are you going to do with the garbage anyway?
I think one of the big problems CoX had was not that the system was bad, but that it wasn't implemented from the start. Veteran players had tons of unspent Inf lying around the day IOs went live, to the point where low level drops of recipes for wings etc were selling for a MINT because it was something vets wanted. Meanwhile the level 50 enhancers, which were more than just cosmetic and in heavy use, were comparatively cheap because they were getting generated by max level players by the bushel.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
To be clear I have no problem with randomized game play awards. Farming for randomized drops is fine because that's "playing" the game. Where I draw the line is having to spend extra real world money to the game company in order to get a "chance" at getting what I want.
As to the question of players paying other players real money for in-game items goes I tend to be against it although I know realistically it's very hard to prevent it.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
All. The. Stuff.
I'll probably have to stop myself from simply buying EVERYTHING... it would kinda cheapen the experience if I had all costume pieces/auras/power effects/animations/etc. already unlocked.
I don't think it would be.
Just imagine, you brought your Titan all the way to max level and can go toe to toe with the strongest foes... and emerge victorious.
Only to get clobbered by a purse snatcher. Yeah no, sorry. That's kinda anti-climatic.
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HUdf89hI8]Send out your signal, call in your hero
I kidnapped his lady, now his power's are zero.
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There are at least two key things to remember about CoT:
1) The Devs have claimed that their goal is to have anything buyable in the game store ALSO be unlockable in the game itself.
2) It's highly unlikely CoT will offer any "gamble-oriented" microtransactions - you will always know EXACTLY what you are buying.
We'll see how this affects people's spending habits.
Yeah I'm kind of in the middle on this. I think it probably ought to be possible for a level 1 critter to kill a level 50 superhero in CoT. But the only way that might be possible is if the level 50 went AFK and the level 1 had like 30 minutes to just peck away at the level 50 just standing there. That, or if the level 50 was dogpiled by like twenty level 1s and again basically just stood there doing nothing.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Quite impossible. The level lens effects the possible effect range too greatly between 1 and 50. Heck even so, a level 50’s base regen would outpace a level 1 mook’s base dps.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
That's your call for how you want to balance the game. Unlike Radiac I don't really have a problem with the "a single level 50 character being 100% unkillable by a single level 1 mook" scenario.
On the other hand I still think if you set up the admittedly artificial/hypothetical case of having a single level 50 character swarmed by dozens of level 1 mooks that if the level 50 does absolutely nothing but stand still that the swarm ought to have a non-trivial chance of overwhelming the level 50, especially if the level 50 is the type that's not big on "passive defense" (like a CoH Controller).
Interestingly enough there's a real world analog to the idea of a "a swarm of drones killing a vastly superior opponent" in the story of how [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis_cerana_japonica#Protective_behaviors]Japanese honey bees[/url] deal with hornet invaders. The basic idea is that a bunch of bees dogpile a hornet and literally cook them to death with their own body heat. This is possible because the bees can tolerate a temperature slightly higher than the hornet can tolerate. The following is a pic of what such a "bee dogpile" looks like (the bit of orange is the hornet victim's head):
[img=300x300]http://icosa.hkbu.edu.hk/common-use/bbc-killer-bees/files/killer_bees1.jpg[/img]
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The problem with the way Destiny 2 does it is that the basic currency, “Glimmer”, is next to useless. Like Radiac I struggle to spend it. It’s easy to get and you fill up your cap but have trouble finding anything to spend it on.
Instead there are a bunch of other currencies that you use for things that you might actually want, one or two of them are available for real life cash (Silver comes to mind, I think there’s another). To be fair, Silver is spent on cosmetics so it’s not a Pay2Win situation but the low Glimmer cap isn’t helpful.
Also, there’s no in-game economy, you can’t even trade or mail things to others. So again, that cap isn’t helping. It’s also not hurting either, because since Glimmer is useless you learn to ignore if you’re at the cap.
One thing that's funny about Destiny 2 and leveling, you have a character level, it goes from 1 to 50 and is, as far as I can tell, completely ignorable. What truly differentiates toons from each other in terms of "level" is your "Light Level". The character level goes from 1 to 50 in the blink of an eye and is basically ignored for like 99% of your time spent playing the game. Your light level determines which content you're allowed or not ready for yet. Every gun and bit of armor you wear/wield has a light level. YOUR light level is the average (arithmetic mean) of the light levels of all the gear you have equipped at the time.
So right now my character in D2 is light level 655. I believe (haven't tried this) that if I had kept all of my level 100 gear from when I was leveling up my toon a few months ago, I would be able to effectively nerf myself, despite being character level 50 now, and I was probably like level char level 10 then.
In any event, one thing that the D2 style does is it ensures that a high level guy can fight the same outdoor mobs that the lowbies are fighting and maybe you hit a LITTLE harder, but the baddies can still defeat you much like baddies your level would. It's less challenging, but still an actual fight. No sidekicking or other player-to-player teamups required.
And then of course there's the problem of the level 50 zones being full of people and the level 25 zones being mostly barren. I assume the multiplicity of shards will alleviate that. D2 and GW2 always have multiple copies of different zones running at any given time, I assume CoT will do that as well. That way the game always tries to put you in a shard that's neither totally empty nor completely packed.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I know that I will not play a game that removes character progression. I dont really care what "light level" or "shwartze coefficient" I am given, if I do not get more powerful with regard to the mobs withing the open world, there is no reason to play. Ive watched too many games cater to the people that never want to outlevel a zone, in every case I have seen they already had the ability to complete any story that the zone had, they just insisted that they get xp for low level missions. Characters should get better as they level.
All of the scaling games I’ve played don’t really scale like they claim. In Destiny 2, even though the enemies get stronger as I do, I’m still relatively more powerful because no matter what the numbers say, I have more powers and more tricks than before.
Here’s a simplistic hypothetical scenario:
Let’s say you I have a gun that does 50 damage per shot and enemies have 200 health points. I get a new gun that does 100 points of damage and the enemies scale up to have 400 health points to maintain the challenge. I should feel like I never got stronger, right?
But the new gun has some perk that temporarily boosts my fire rate with a headshot, so now I’m killing things much faster and I feel stronger despite the scaling.
Skyrim was like this; even though enemies scale that doesn’t prevent dragons from becoming easy prey later in the game.
I’m playing Anthem and enemies scale to match the attack, so that I can be level 30 and a team member is level 10, and we can target the same enemy and do comparable damage. Yet I definitely feel much stronger at the higher levels than I did starting out; enemies die faster and I last longer.
So despite the claims of scaling, I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that made it so that I don’t feel like I was progressing because of it. Don’t avoid games because of that concern, it’s not like you’d think it would be.
wow even scales ilevel, so as your gear improves you dont get stronger. level scaling is why I no longer pay blizzard a subscription. I have played plenty of games that scale and I know I dont like it.
I think it's technically just an Activision game on the battlenet launcher. And wouldn't it be right to say "Bungie" is the bogeyman here? They are the developers and Activision is just a publisher.
[font=courier][color=#FF0000]Tech[/color][/font]
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In D2, you do get some new options for your Super abilities over time, but you don't really get new powers based on leveling up in the same quantities that CoH had. I think in a game like CoX, people are going to feel more powerful if they're getting more powers as they level up, even if the damage scaling etc doesn't make it look that way on paper. And in D2 you don't have that, because you largely use a gun to defeat stuff. There are still baddies that are too tough for you to beat, it just scales things in such a way that you never outlevel the mobs in the outdoor zones so much that they "con grey" as it were. The first zone they drop you in after the tutorial is the European Dead Zone (EDZ) and you routinely go back there for various missions and stuff later (I mean, I do, and I see others). So you'll see level 50 , light level 660 people like myself fighting the same Red Legion and Fallen targets as newbie level 1, light level 10 people, and we're both having an effect on the fight. When you do queued content, like Strikes, it tries to team you up with people of a comparable light level to your own.
There are times in D2 when it feels like I'm grinding for better gear to improve my light levels just to make a number on my character screen increase, but then witht he scaling, that number being increased doesn't seem to actually do anything. There are two places where it DOES do something, in fact. First, content doesn't scale down to meet you, you have to level up to meet it's minimum requirements, or your going to get whomped hard. Second, it has been shown that outleveling content will make that content easier, but only to a point. I can go back and do old missions intended for light level 280 now and they DO feel way easier than they were when I was light level 278 and trying hard not to die.
But then D2 doesn't have any way for me, a light level 660 player, to team up with any newbie light level 20 people I might be friends with, so maybe the CoX system with levels and conning grey and sidekicking/exemplaring is a better way to go anyway.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Multiple currencies is another thing with its own separate issues, including the one you mentioned.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I just jumped back into RIFT after many years and I can't believe how impressive that game is, still, ten years after it started. The overall quality is superlative, from sounds to animations to music, combat pace, and even the UI.
The world is so detailed and there are many nooks and hidden things. Quests can be spawned from some drops, or just by killing some mobs, which is brilliant. The storytelling is organic to the missions and before you know it, you're deep diving into the lore of factions trying to invoke the power of mighty destructive dragons without ever feeling like you got a lore dump. At all. The randomly appearing artifacts that we can build collections of have me exploring every remote outcropping, tree and cave. If CoT were to adopt anything from it, I would recommend it is the way they did artifacts and artifact collections. I recall from years ago the many hours I spent wandering the world, climbing mountains and swimming to the bottoms of lakes in a relaxing sort of zone, just looking for the twinkling evidence of a hidden artifact. And I'm repeating and reliving those moments again as I play now.
I look forward to a relaxing exploration of Titan City the same way. Somethng that will keep me coming back to the same city blocks again and again because I never know when a certain artifact might pop up and where. The Badges of CoX were nice, but once you collected one, you never needed to go back there again.
I suppose I could say more, but I want to leave this at the threshhold of being a useful post rather than a long "what I like about this game" that people would just stop reading after a sentence or two.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.