(Note: I'm re-posting and improving this because it seems to have been deleted.)
One of my biggest problems with the majority of MMOs is the speed at which combat occurs and the crazy pace of combat animations. Most of what the industry has been cranking out for the past few years is more hyper-kinetic than Cartoon Network on fast forward: it makes every game feel like a cheap MOBA or FPS and harms the teamwork and social aspects of the experience (old schoolers know what I mean). I sincerely hope that City of Titans is more like CoH in this regard than CO or DCUO. Have great animations and give us time to appreciate them. Provide that extra half a second to do more than mindlessly mash the same two buttons. Make strategy viable again instead of having every encounter become nothing but a reactive free-for-all. Keeping consoles out of the mix certainly gives me hope for a less frenzied experience but I thought I'd go ahead and express this heartfelt wish to the talented people building the game.
Speaking of speed, include me with those who don't want to see people reaching max level within 24 hours of rolling their new character (no matter how much Red Bull they chug). IMO even power leveling to max should take a week at the very least. I'd rather see an expensive "instant max level" item in the cash store rather than a legion of people slaughtering their way through progressive zones in a mad race to endgame. If someone is dim enough to want to skip 90% of the game's content I say take their money, start them at level cap and put a dollar sign icon over their head. It might mean fewer people to play with as I actually [i]play through[/i] the game but at least I'll have lots of mobs to myself, and the folks I [b]do[/b] party with will probably be enjoying the journey as much as I am.
Let's talk travel. It seems like a lot of players have the idea that if they can't teleport from wherever they are to either a teleport hub or [i]exactly[/i] where they want to be the game is wasting their time. If it takes more than a minute to get anywhere in-game their in danger of rage quitting. In a game that takes place mostly in urban areas and where flight will probably be the most common travel power you don't typically have much to worry about in this regard. Fantasy MMOs and even more grounded types of games usually try to strike a balance between convenience and a sense of scale in their worlds. Vehicles and mounts, teleport abilities and even public transit systems are all employed to create immersion. Many games will try to sell you quicker transport in the form of faster mounts, teleportation items, etc. which I have mixed feelings about. I think CoT's travel powers should "level up" just like everything else. DCUO does this, allowing you to speed up your movement at level 10 (which takes no time to attain). Maybe CoT could have three or four levels of travel speed, perhaps with minor costs associated with using the higher forms. It makes sense that if you're super-running at rank 2 speed you would take more damage from getting clotheslined than you would at rank 1 velocity. Moving at speeds above rank 1 might even use progressively higher amounts of "mana" - after all, a travel power is still a [i]power[/i]. If teleportation is a power option then their might be limits on where you can teleport from or to. It might even make sense to have travel powers be just another in the various trees rather than a totally separate category. Like in Champions Online, telekinetic-based flight might have slightly different properties than, say, jet thruster flight. Obtaining a type of travel power outside your primary tree might require a bit of diversity. I hope to expand on this in another post.
What about if cool things could happen to you just while getting around? People might start to look at travel differently. DC Universe Online has these very minor dailies where you can help or take down randomly spawning NPCs. Its also got PvP events in established world areas that run about every 10-15 minutes where heroes and villains can try to complete an objective (and try to prevent each other from doing so). Warhammer Online had its ongoing "public quests" you could jump into - essentially just like DCUO's frequent public events but PvE-only (as far as I saw). I'm know this has been done in fantasy games but I'd like to see events that pop up in different semi-random game areas. Example: you're whizzing along and you jetpack right into a bank heist! There's maybe six banks in the city so it can happen at any of them. You jump right in and start pounding crooks. But if your "public quest PvP" flag is on you get a secondary objective: keeping player villains from opportunistically stealing money from the bank robbers! This is the kind of thing I'd love to run across while heading to my secret hideout.
(Disclaimer: I've only played a very minor amount of City of Heroes, just enough to know that I would have loved the game if I could have figured out its terrible UI. By that time it was weeks from being shut down so I didn't bother looking for mods, if there ever were any).
CoH did have a lot of good stuff, from some cool, longer animations to power sets and IO builds that allowed for fast paced pew-pew-pew builds. I agree that CoT should have the wind-up "ker-pow" type animations and I'm confident that we will have those.
I also agree that taking the time to travel about - needing to take that minute or two, or three, if push comes to shove - can add a lot to a game, both for those doing the travel and those seeing people zip around the city. I do wonder why people want to play such a game if this is too much of a waste of time for them. If people want a lobby game they need look no farther than Skyforge.
As for the leveling speed, I'm ambivalent about that. If people want to rush to the level cap, let them. No skin off my nose. However, if they then sit there and complain that there's nothing left to do, I will privately point and laugh at them.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Interesting point of view. I never considered the possibility that the speed of combat might be a social impediment.
I was never really much bothered by relative leveling speed. In my mind, if someone raced to the top and then whined about having nothing to do, that was their problem.
My perceptions of travel speed have evolved somewhat over the years and it seems that once the genie is released, you can't put him back in the bottle.
When I started playing SWG, the galaxy felt HUGE! Making a two hour trek on foot from Mos Eisley to the Sarlacc Pit was annoying, but if you wanted to do it you made the time and you had a real sense of accomplishment afterward. Similarly, going from one end of the galaxy to the other could take 45 minutes to an hour since planetary shuttles were on a five minute schedule and interplanetary ships were on a 15 minute schedule (with the weird exception of the Theed Starport on Naboo which was always there and had no delay) and you had to jump from planet to planet. rather making one big jump from wherever you were to wherever you wanted to be. The major starports were always filled with people socializing and selling stuff. Then speeders were introduced and you could drive to Sarlacc in five minutes and the timers on the shuttles and starports were reduced to trivial amounts and with Jump to Lightspeed, you could go straight to whatever planet you wanted instantly. The Galaxy just kept getting smaller and so did the crowds of people (who all but disappeared after the NGE Exodus).
Similarly, in CoH the world kept feeling smaller as more and more fast travel options were introduced.
I didn't mind so much by then. In SWG I was a college student who worked part time. I had tons of free time. By the time I jumped ship to CoH I was working full time and wanted a much more casual style of game play which meant time traveling between missions ate into my play time. I'm all about exploring and appreciating the scenery, but when I only have 30 minutes to play, I don't want to spend 25 of them getting to the mission.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
But there's always the same instance to run over and over trying to get that last shiny drop...
I hear you, my friend. I'm not proposing we go back to the days of 20 minute wait and travel times if you missed the airship to Jeuno by one second..Lord, no. (I'm older than about 95% of MMO players, FYI.) However, it does make sense to me that lower level characters should be somewhat forced to actually [i]experience[/i] the world rather than treating it like a "flyover" state from day one. Starting out you should be a fledgling hero who might actually be in trouble if swarmed by veteran street thugs. Plus there's always the possibility of a friend or guidemate giving you a wad of game cash to buy a single-use teleporter or a jetpack that falls apart after five minutes of flight. And that doesn't even cover the possibility of "Teleport Other" abilities. Black mages and white mages in FFXI could make a good living providing teleportation services.
City of Heroes relied on an animation time of 1 to 6 seconds, with most animations being in the 1.5 to 2.5 seconds range. To me, this sounds like a reasonable model to follow. Benchmarking entire powersets to have an average animation time for all Powers in the 2.0-3.0 second range sounds fairly reasonable, and would combat the "frantic" behavior you're citing.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Such selfishly self-centered Players exist, of course ... but it is a mistake to cater to them. Let them self-select themselves out of the pool of Players we want to attract (and keep!) in our game. Instant travel to anywhere you need to go is BORING ... and the people who want it don't want to PLAY the game, they want to SKIP the game.
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As we are going to be able to pick which animations we have for our powers I think this is less likely to be a major concern. I am sure they will run the gambit from quick short animations to slow drawn out ones similar to CoH had. I would like to say that I never had an issue with the beginning powers of Champions (that's as much as I could take of that game) nor did I find the overall speed of animations in DCUO too fast to enjoy. The actual game play of both...well that's best left unsaid.
I am against any purchasable levels or exp boosts (but less so) as they are the start of pay2win models. I really do think that this game will survive on word of mouth for the first little while (unless MWM has a great marketing idea) so I would hate it if there was any reason for people to accuse the game of being p2w thus hurting its growth.
That said, there is no way to stop someone from power leveling beyond hard caps on exp earned/time period. I would rather MWM provide a sanctioned way to PL in which they can monitor and control to some extent....this too won't stop enterprising people to find faster methods but it should curb enough to keep it in check.
This is not the only reason to include mission teleporters. With CoT promising to have its own mentoring system similar to CoT's sidekicking, it would be nice if the higher level player could invite a low level friend to a mission and not have to walk him through the higher level zone. Treat it much like CoT's 1 hour timer.
In regards to the rest of this part....travel powers will presumably be able to be slotted...which requires a player to level....so I think this desire is going to be filled.
I think this is also planned for inclusion.....in the form of badges, zone events, random spawns ect.
I am not sure but I think I read that PvP was going to be limited to PvP areas....could be wrong tho. Still they might have non-combat PvP in which heroes/villains compete for conflicting goals....Not sure how they will do it given the alignment system they are planning on using.
What exactly was wrong with CoT's UI? I found it pretty good personally.
Hehe.. like a XP Debt bar when you're defeated..
..but instead have a XP Surplus bar that fills after the Daily limit is reached..
and next day, it slowly trickles from the XP Surplus bar into actual XP? ;D
That's one way...prolly a bit more restrictive than I am thinking. I was thinking along the lines of a repeatable mission arc that is filled with simple (note I said simple...not easy) foes. The same sort of missions you saw farmers make in AE.
I know this will sound bad, but I remember reading on the CoX forums complaints of the travel times in other MMO's where "too long", even though the travel time wasn't actually *all that long*. It seemed to me that anything that took more than 3 minutes to travel to (even if most of that time was actually NOT pressing keys) was too long.
Sure, going the normal "on the ground" route was slow, but by taking the taxi method it was faster. Hell, in Wildstar I could get from *one part* of the game world all to another part in less than 5 minutes. And that was when I had a call in guild of can someone help me. Of course, scientist path also gave you the ability to summon your team mates (very handy in my mind)
But I can see the point though, of making it too fast is a detriment as well.
Side note: This reminds me of when people suggested a public transport system in CoT. There were people who went "NO, IT WILL BE TOO SLOW! I WILL NEVER USE IT!".
And that was just the suggestion of it.
Sure, it might be slower, but if it helps the city seem LARGE and LIVING, I am all for it.
+1
- Want:
at least one Tram, even if its a full minute away of Flight time to get to.
Tram that takes me to 90% of the zones/areas that majority of the regular (non TF) missions reside in.
- Dont Want:
no trams, and have to jump through 10 Gates at the ends of zones maps and take 10 hours to get to the regular (non TF) missions.
There's quite a bit here. Most of it doesn't worry me in the least.
I do like the idea of thwarting powerlevelers by giving them the option to buy a max level character, but make it really pricey. Say, $100 for one max level character with no Augments or Refinements or customization. You get whatever the randomizer decides you deserve.
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Not so much Pay 2 Win so much as Pay 2 Brag?
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roflmao
I honestly had not considered either perspective. I don't see buying a max level character as "pay2win". If anything, it strikes me as "pay2staybored". But, now that you mention it, "pay2brag" seems like a good way to put it, especially if the cost of entry is fairly steep.
For me, a $100 character would not be a problem. I would never buy a max level character because the whole concept bores me silly. For many players, finding a $100 they could drop in one shot on a single character when they have no way to control what they are getting would be a huge risk. I would assume most of them would prefer to just "waste" time leveling up.
With the branching storylines, three-sided reputation algorithm, and everything else, this game is going to have a much higher replayability factor than any game that has ever come before it. I would hope this would be enough to limit the number of complaints about "but running the same low-level missions over and over again is so boring!"
However, I understand human nature enough to realize that even if there were a nearly infinite variety of pathways from 0-MAX, some people would still complain that leveling was a boring, repetitive grind.
So let them drop a C-Note and take their chances with the randomizer. Maybe they get their dream character, maybe they get a purple zombie that heals and debuffs and has minimal damage output. Or maybe they'll be smart enough to realize changing a contact here and there or even making a few different choices at the end of a few missions will be enough to make it feel like a whole new game.
(And yes, I realize total randomization would be too much of a hurdle and will result in massive BBB complaints. A more realistic approach would to have a dozen presets they can choose from. You get your max level character, but there are scores of identical clones running around that look and function exactly the same way.)
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Honestly, I don't see how this stops Power Leveling. Only a few are going to drop $100 to get a Max level character when they can grind one out in a week. Especially if they can't choose their character. You know who this appeals to? Gold spammers. They don't care a whit about the character. Now they don't even have to grind a character, just plop down the seed money for a max toon and start collecting currency.
If, however, you're looking at it as a revenue stream, it needs to be more attractive. Give them the choice of Primary and Secondary powers, work up an initial costume and hit "enter". You get a random selection of enhancements they may or may not be ideal. Now you can go out and buy/sell what you need and grind for the rest.
Punitive measures like this don't work. There's always a way to get around or exploit them. If this is just more spleen-venting, then please continue.
Won't work since the powerleveling services will just undercut that price, and have the added bonus of not producing a random character.
So we come full circle with a result of Pay 2 N00b.
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One of my biggest problems with the majority of MMOs is the speed at which combat occurs and the crazy pace of combat animations. Most of what the industry has been cranking out for the past few years is more hyper-kinetic than Cartoon Network on fast forward: it makes every game feel like a cheap MOBA or FPS and harms the teamwork and social aspects of the experience (old schoolers know what I mean).
Twitch has become more ubiquitous, not just in games either. Books a century old feel glacial in pacing to what we are use to now. Script writers now get told to get into the story in the first two minutes (instead of the 10 to 15 it once was given to set up the story and its characters). Lord of the Rings was harshly criticised for taking 20 minutes to wrap up a 9 hour story (closer to 11 in fact if you look at the extended edition). Tropes are more important than ever in writing of any sort because they are shorthand to steer the audience's expectations to what they already know. And after that it is rush rush rush to the kabloomie finale. Of course in all that giving the audience what it expects and rushing the chance of anything new is also lost.
Games are not exempted from that rushing through the action, and story being only the barest of something the audience has already lived through a hundred times. And they will complain about the story being a cliche and nothing new. But any game (or book or movie or music album) that attempts to slow down the pacing so it can give something new will get critically panned and ignored.
Which is not to say that this is a good thing, quite the contrary, but the pressure is immense to provide non-stop high paced action over the shallowest of story. It is not what the players by and large say they want, but it is what they will spend money on.
And yes, it is strangling the interesting out of games.
Speaking of speed, include me with those who don't want to see people reaching max level within 24 hours of rolling their new character (no matter how much Red Bull they chug). IMO even power leveling to max should take a week at the very least.
For the sake of a game the difference between a day or a week is immaterial. There is no avoiding that players will crash through the provided game content far more quickly than is healthy and there is not much any developer can do about it. Some players will want to rush through out of misguided understanding of the game, or for bragging rights, or for whatever reason and then they will complain bitterly that they have to wait 51 weeks for more content, that they can rush through in 2 hours. As a developer you don't want these players, even if they are the most likely to hype your game. Because they are also the most likely to start hate campaigns by the time the game ships and doesn't live up to the impossibly high standards.
Let's talk travel. It seems like a lot of players have the idea that if they can't teleport from wherever they are to either a teleport hub or exactly where they want to be the game is wasting their time. If it takes more than a minute to get anywhere in-game their in danger of rage quitting. In a game that takes place mostly in urban areas and where flight will probably be the most common travel power you don't typically have much to worry about in this regard. Fantasy MMOs and even more grounded types of games usually try to strike a balance between convenience and a sense of scale in their worlds. Vehicles and mounts, teleport abilities and even public transit systems are all employed to create immersion.
This is also known as the elevator fallacy. Whenever you question people how long they are waiting for an elevator to arrive, and how long elevator rides last, they will hugely overestimate that time (by several factors or even magnitudes). Initially elevator builders tried to speed up their products to whiplash inducing acceleration. Most elevators now have a waiting time of 30 seconds, rarely more than 45. But even if the waiting time could be reduced to 10 seconds people would still experience it as 'too long', not because it objectively is, but because they are forced to do something they don't want to: nothing. Travel in MMOs (any game really) is the same: players are forced to do nothing instead of what they play the game for.
The solution to this dilemma is similar to what elevator designers and smart interior architects do: add mirrors, human sized potted plants and free coffee dispensers. This gives people something to do and suddenly the 45 seconds waiting time will feel a bit too short rather than interminably long. A loading screen is just dead time the player spends waiting. But standing in a metro car with new things to see and read and do, players will not mind so fiercely. Travel should not be putting your character on autorun and getting a cup of tea while it put-puts along. Instead it should be a puzzle. There should be interesting things to see, distractions. Enemies taking potshots at you that you have to decide about if you should react or try to dodge. There should be large scale air battles that you better get around, or use that cloud bank to sneak past. And on the ground you might speedrun into things that might pose a problem, but can be avoided with a bit of forethought. COs acrobatics travel power was fun because you constantly climbing buildings and sliding down or swinging from them (the parachute hover was a mistake though). It made fast travel ever so tiny a bit of a puzzle of how to go from place to place efficiently.
And for all its many technical design problems, the initial Star Wars: Galaxies was superbly designed from a gameplay point of view. Every so often it forced players to step back, take a deep breath and relax for 5 or 10 minutes in a cantina while watching and listening to performers to get rid of battle fatigue. Some players came in just to get rid of that penalty and occasionally ended up spending a couple of hours having fun with an entirely different type of gameplay that they never had even considered. And yes, the 5 minute wait for a shuttle was often annoying, same as the slow boating in Everquest was. But it also made those spaceports the social hubs they were intended to be. Instead of shortening the waiting time (well, maybe a minute or two less wouldn't have hurt) there should have been more distractions. Why not set up a few slot machines where players could gamble, in a visually impressive way (for player and spectator alike!), a couple of credits. There could (infrequently) be a shoot out between rival gangs right in the middle of that waiting area, computer access for lore, shops that sold things that were beneficial for other players rather than for the buyer. Something as silly as a red ball that a players can emote kick and see it fly through the room (won't take much to start improvised football matches).
The point of the waiting game in MMO is not to drag out the experience, nor to monetise travel convenience. It is to get players to have fun together with less serious (in game play terms) activities. If you don't provide these places where they are forced to hang out for a while, it becomes that much harder to develop a social environment for a game. And unless players develop friendships they're not going to hang on to a game past the first month or two. But if they do they'll be playing the game years later.
I like the idea of giving players places to congregate and reasons to congregate there in the non-combat sense. RPing, socializing, costume contests, just hanging around chatting, waiting to start a TF/trial, buying/selling stuff etc. That said, I don't think time spent traveling from one mission or location to another is time spent in social or RP fun mode, really. I'm not saying I want instant TP to all mission doors, but I would like to be able to get from one place to another very far away place either A) very quickly via a cutscene or B) over say 30-120 seconds of wait time while I get up and go get a drink, snack, check my cell phone, etc. In other words, don't make me have to tediously schlep from one continent to the other by foot, or even by air, while having to mind the controls the whole time.
I personally would rather let people try to level their toons the fastest way they can within the framework of the game than just sell pre-fab level capped toons to anyone. That's my perspective. I think some PVPers want to have instant total gratification in that sense so they can switch between classes and builds faster in response to rules changes and power tweaks. I personally don't care about that and I don't like the idea of making the game so PVP-centric as to cater to that particular PVPer desire. Those people can just make and level a toon as fast as the game framework allows. I think whatever exploit-proofing the game wants to employ ought to be fine.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
You bring up excellent points Nadira, and I think if we were to introduce the idea of a "public transit" system, we could very easily include a system of random encounters, DnD style. How many stories have a super hero going from one place to another, only to find that they're delayed along the way? Maybe there's a supervillain robbery going down at that jewelry store your taxi is passing. Maybe a fight breaks out on the train you're on and you stand up to break up the fight. Maybe you can go through a little bit of threatening to get the bus driver to take you where you want to go. Maybe someone just recognizes you and asks for an autograph. On a less RP based note, it'd also be a good way to introduce in-universe news broadcasts; a way to read about upcoming events, current events, or similar going on in the game world. Could even make it so that SGs can pay for ads to be played on those trips.
They'd all serve to break the monotony, and even give ways to enhance your character design; almost like roleplaying segments. Possibly even use them as small ways to affirm or change your overall alignment. The 'news' ones would make things more available for people to take part in things.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
+lots to Nadira.
After first playing City of Heroes with it's loading screen Trams, I found the "taxi" system of World of Warcraft to actually be a more enjoyable experience. That's because rather than "teleporting" from zone to zone, instead the world was contiguous and the game moved you THROUGH the areas rather than just merely TO the areas. It was a chance to SEE (and be seen!) in transit what would otherwise have remained hidden or unknown.
Needless to say, I prefer moving through the world to "skipping" over and past it.
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Thank you Redlynne, Halae and Radiac for your encouraging words :)
I haven't played warcraft myself, but I have seen my husband play star wars. They have a taxi service that moves you through the world as well, and I agree that it is a lovely way to see a bit more of the game world. Though, if I understand correctly you have to walk to a taxi stop first, so the places you see after that aren't exactly new. And it is important that these taxi rides give glimpses of the exciting content a player can expect in a particular area. So, not the safe and boring cart ride down a hill, but swooping past spectacular vistas, dangerous monsters and colourful battles. Still, even a little on the boring side it is miles better than the old 'wait while we teleport you to the new zone'. In fact, zones are something that we should work hard to either abolish entirely, or make invisible at the very least.
For longer journeys a random encounter should indeed be a possibility. A high tech gang holding up the train you're in, sounds like something to talk about. If it happens rarely so that most players may never encounter it. And not all events should have to involve combat. There is also the opportunity to introduce the bizarre. Like entering a train and discovering that in the next car, if you care to explore the train itself, you run into a dozen elvii going to an elvis presley personification contest. It doesn't have to excatly that, and it too should be rare enough that players may never encounter that particular scenario. But it also is cheap content to create as it requires some simple (or single) model and hardly any quality assurance. Any content designer can create this kind of simple static encounters in a spare hour between working on more involved content. It would not at all be hard to have a hundred of them ready by the time the game slips. (Animated set pieces like e.g. a famous superhero and villain battling it out on the street take a lot more work and so of necessity will have to be much rarer).
I deliberately mentioned three waiting mechanism as they are quite different in purpose and experience, regardless of how they are shaped.
Of the three the forced socialisation time (like SW:G's battle fatigue and cantina visit) is the most controversial, and with good reason. Players who felt they were forced to visit the cantina while they actually wanted to do something else resented the experience, and made life difficult for the players who enjoyed the purely social gameplay of an entertainer.
Still, without some gentle pressure to join the social waiting game, it mostly will not develop. Not even because players don't enjoy it but because all the mechanics of a game are focussed on combat. Social is experienced as 'not giving a reward', and thus players will not invest the time in effort in it. (players tend strongly to optimise their effort per reward). Social rewards do play a (large) role in the form of bragging rights, visually special raid gear and so on, but only at the very highest level of play when the players have mastered the mechanics and focus on the (large) group content and guild/supergroup organisation. This kind of social play is either passive (i.e. one player is showing off but not interacting) or it is confined within a small subset of the player base.
The brilliant design of SW:G is that it gave players that nudge to spend time together waiting, and if the entertainers were good (and early in the game they were very good) they could make the experience engaging and rewarding in its own right. The mistake was that it gave players no real way out. Battle fatigue was an effectiveness penalty that kept growing and at some point a player had to stop playing the combat or hunting game they wanted and go to spend ten to fifteen minutes doing nothing (in their experience) in a cantina. There was no way for them to postpone or avoid this, other than swallowing the increasingly harsh penalty. Inconceivable at the time before microtransations, but a good addition to the system would have been player crafted potions that diminished the effects for a while, but at the price of a faster accumulation for a short while after the effect wore off. And a real money convenience item that allowed a character to recover during off-line time (and to have such tokens as an extremely rare drop in the game as well). This would have given the players the opportunity to influence when they would deal with the down time and even allowed them to ignore it entirely, but neither would be required and players could play for free and occasionally join the social aspects of the game.
Second is the travel to the mission start. This should not be removed entirely from the game (or you end up with what is effectively a lobby design where throwaway parties are formed, do a mission together and break up again. This effectively kills off any social aspect of a game). But what is important is to make it not tedious. City of Heroes had misions, and zones, that ended up at the wrong side of it. Independence port was a good example of a zone that ended up at the wrong end of this divide. It was a big zone, with a narrow band of levels in it, and with the travel powers as heroes had them at that point, it was not so much dangerous (any potential encounter could just be flown, jumped or teleported over, or it could be superspeeded past) as well as tedious. Add to that missions that prefered doors at the extreme other end of the zone and you spend a lot of time just running/jumping/flying/mouseclicking through that zone doing nothing engaging.
Making the travel time shorter though is not going to help. That's where the elevator fallacy comes in. What is needed is that the travel itself needs to be engaging. Which in this case means a minigame that is structured more like a stealth game puzzle than the standard combat. This change of gameplay is also important to create a variation of pacing in the experience (which is a hard thing to do otherwise in a MMO). If a game consists of nothing but mowing down endless hordes of otherwise forgettable enemies it ceass to be fun very quickly indeed. (some of the worst first person shooters are like this, the entire game consists of hiding behind a crate, count the seconds that the enemies that pop up to shoot at you and the seconds they take to reload, and find the pattern where they all reload. Use that moment to pop up yourself and get a quick couple of shots off, and then down again and wait for the next break in the pattern. Rinse and repeat until 'victorious'. The experience is miserable. About as fun as it was to watch a flame tanker herd up a map, stuff them all in a dumpster and burn them to a crisp. Then be told to leave the mission so he could do it again. And again. And again).
Instead you want the terrain itself to be an obstacle for the travel powers. Superspeed, sure, but you know there will be walls you can't scale, and caltrops and webs that will slow you down, so you have to find a way past those traps using your speed. Superjump, again, you will have to spot that tiny ledge that you can jump on to, so you can avoid the smooth walls and webbings and automated turrents.
Flying you are not the fastest and there will be dangers in the air that you will have to dodge and even in the air you can create a kind of terrain that helps you do so (with clouds, blimps and things like that).
The point of travel powers is not to make travel time short (there is that, but it will never be short enough thanks to the elevator fallacy) but to make the world big. And the point to spreading out missions over the zone(s) is not to artificially stretch out the experience (as playes like to believe) but to introduce them to new parts of the game world, and in some (too few) cases to tell part of a story that way. But travel must be made engaging in and of itself or it will only ever be perceived as a time sink.
Third is the change of scene travel. This is the long distance travel. SW:G had this conceptually easy with its interplanetary travel. The equivalents in CoH would have been visiting the shadow shard, alternative earth and the rogue isles (or paragon city). These long distance travels ideally transport you to a plane where the game paradigm is different. It's not a different game per se, but the backstory, and the rules that appy, are at least somewhat different. Enemies are way more powerful than you so it really is only safe for groups, the zone doesn't offer a safe base for you (you change from defender of the zone to the enemy of it so all the normal support becomes unavailable), and so on.
For this kind of changes you want to build in a hurdle for the player. This hurdle represents a (small) psychological, physical and economical cost to the player so the decision to leave for these new zones is not made thoughtlessly. If you cross that border you plan to stay in that other place for a while. In Everquest originally the decision to travel to another continent was so costly (in time investment) that it was one that informed your game play for weeks to months to come. We can't design games this extreme anymore, but the principle applies. When going to another game play paradigm the game should throw up a subconscious psychological barrier of 'are you sure you want to do this'. Building in a little cool down time is a good way to create this barrier. If a player can't even bring himself to wait five or ten minutes, why are they even considering to travel to a new region?
But, as with all waiting aspects, the game should offer the tools and circumstances to make waiting that long engaging in and of itself. As a designer you want to make such travel lobbies engating and entertaining. Things must happen there and players must be able to make things happen. This is where you want to have a band play in one corner so you can listen if you get close to the stage, and where famous superheros teleport in, where a television screen is running with breaking news (of actual game events !), where wacky things happen as well as tense moments. Not all the time, but enough that while waiting something happens to draw your attention. And where there are vendors who (at tax free rates of course) offer one shot goods that help create a party experience. Why not sell a gadget that creates a glitterball or laserlight show. Or a psi emitter that gives some random characters within its AoE access to temporary unique dance emotes? Or aura effects? (and this doubly so goes for the social hub and clubs. You really want to sell things there that boost the feeling of a party). Or maybe a special item that summons part of a drumband. And the more players activate that item simultaneous the bigger the band, and make it include dancers and float and make it, if big enough, something pulled straight out of a brasilian carnival street parade (maybe this one is better suited to outside instead of to a travel lobby). Something like that would be lighthearted fun, and it would cost the player only in game currency, or some small amount of real currency) and it would be more fun if other players join in (that social aspect again).
Enough side tracking myself though. This third type of travel has a different role than the second, but in either case you want to make the act of waiting engaging, and you want to give players the opportunity to make it engaging for themselves and for others.
Because at the end of the day as a designer of a commercial multiplayer game, you want to create a strong social experience, as that is what ties players to your game. I mean, why do we want CoH back? Because we had fun there with the other players. The community was that great and few to none of the games we have tried since come even close to recreating that.
I do not necessarily agree with waiting being a necessary part of the game. There are different people with different opinions on the waiting game. Some do like the idea of having to travel long distances and see lots of sights and contend with lots of things along the way. Some don't want to log into a game and deal with the same. They didn't want to log on to take a 45 minute ride where something may or may not happen along the way to get to where they wanted to be to do the thing they wanted to do.
This isn't something we particular have contend with for this game as we don't have a vast open world where players have to traverse continents and oceans. We have a city with multiple districts on two separate maps. And a game where characters can potentially travel as fast as cars at freeway speed (or greater), travel becomes a liberating experience.
If every part of every map has to be designed as a travel puzzle it must do so in a way that yields parity among every travel power. Gone would be the sense of liberation of travel. This doesn't mean that there should be zero risk involved with the use of travel powers, depending on the location and types of spawns involved, hopefully over time we can introduce plenty of areas where spawns use travel powers, or have the occaisional foritified location that must be negotiated with care. Most players using travel from one mission to the next simply followed the location to the mission door. One of the goals that we have is to provide the possibility of multiple entrances to locations, which can give players a moment to pause and determine strategy. We should preserve and provide for the liberating experience that are the intent of having travel powers.
For some people, the fun is in mowing down mindless hordes of bad guys. Some of our own devs don't care a lick about story, role playing, or hanging around with other players, they just want to log into a game, look cool and bash away at stuff for a while. There is nothing wrong if that is how they want to play.
Having speicific maps (most likely instances) that are specifically designed with travel-puzzles in mind isn't out of the question. One of the pvp ideas we have involves the classic chase-scene which requires travel powers (or vehicles). Such maps would most likely involved obstacles and of course the strategy of the chase itself.
Most humans are social by nature. There are plenty examples of players themselves congregating within games creating their own social experience without much being intentionally designed by the game developers. This is part of emergent game play, and players tend to remember these experiences as much as those designed to be intentional by developers. That doesn't mean there isn't room for both, but my preference is to provide the bare minimum set up and let the players take the ball and move on from there.
We do plan on having certain locations provide natual locations for gathering, including hubs of activity (not to be confused with quest hubs). Waiting need not be a forced mechanism but instead provide the option. Places to do things, leave room for players to come up with their own things to do, all are viable options.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
It is not a matter of waiting being necessary, it is inevitable. Unless you want to remove travel from a game entirely and with it any concept it might have of being a world.
And the waiting time between major zones is but one option that exists to create a psychological barrier to subconsciously inform players that they are entering a new area where slightly different paradigms apply. Again, to instill the experience in the players of it being a larger game world and that the decision to move that 'far' away has some repercussions. I certainly am not saying that traveling to such a new zone should take hours, only that players should feel that the decision to go there is meaningful and has some cost associated with it. Nothing crippling for certain and nothing punishing either. Just a subtle hint really. A short delay before the journey can be made is just one of the easiest ways to go about this.
Finally, I would not say that travel routes have to be carefully designed to be a real puzzle. You don't want the travel time to be (much) more than two minutes or so. What you want to achieve is that travel time to have meaning in some form, and for it to engage the players. In CoH, as in most MMOs nobody really /liked/ the run to and from the mission. Being required to pay attention should be enough in most cases to alleviate that negative feeling. The players get to feel clever for figuring out how to avoid or overcome an obstacle. That's all that is needed, really.
Everyone plays the game differently. Shucks, I play the game differently depending on my mood, my available time, and my level of ambition.
Sometimes I want to teleport straight to the mission door.
Sometimes I want to brawl my way through a hazard zone just because it's there.
Travel options are the key, I think. Not travel restrictions nor travel requirements.
One of the aspects of the Blueside in CoX that really disturbed me was being forced to take a subway to a distant zone just to get a mission in a third zone that only ended when I reported back to the contact in the zone where I started.
Travel powers that were available at level one were some of my favorite veteran's rewards and box purchase bonuses.
As far as the pace of combat goes, for me, CoX had the perfect combat pace. Other games are either too slow or too twitchy.
Travel pace options and combat that allows time to strategize without dragging on.
Freedom of choice is always a good thing.
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I agree that there is a psychological factor and hopefully as the game ages and more maps added, there will be some locales that take longer to arrive to than others. And with that, there may be multiple ways to get to locations. I can say with some certaintanty that there will be options to allow people to shorten travel time wether that be through travel powers, group transports, base portals, and more. There are costs associated with such, either costs in time to earn, cool down of power use, costs in upkeep, or costs in payment as an offset of decreasing travel times. Which requires that there is that psychological factor of time in the first place. Whether it is saving 30 seconds or 30 minutes, it will exist.
Your argument borders on a straw man argument by stating nobody really /liked/...the truth is some people did enjoy the freedom of movement, others may liked it at first and grew tired of it, others didn't care either way, and anything between.
To say all that is needed is to require players pay attention in the open world maps is no simple matter. There will be multiple travel powers, some easier to use than others, some with different mechanical advantages over others, and all those differences would need to be considered in order to design appropriate "obstacles" for each travel power to apply appropriately. Whether those obstacles or physical design, npc spawn locations, traps, and so on. Even then, it would be very difficult to achieve parity and far too easy to unintentionally frustrate players who took certain travel powers and not other types if parity is not achieved.
This is why I said that in certain situations it may work while not so much in others. For example, there may be certain locations where those who fly or teleport too high have to be careful of air pirate ships, so they have to keep lower following street routes and avoiding buildings. Meanwhile super speeders weave around traffic on those same streets and side walk areas. While those who tunnel only have to contened with any possible gaps such as rivers, building complex.
The open world maps are not going to always have factions that represent hostility toward all characters of every alignment not to mention every possible faction reputation rating. The character with flight and positive faction repuation with air pirates may be able to fly high in their locations but not low because they don't have great reputation with TCPD for example.
Quite simply, there isn't going to be a guaranteed way to make sure every character in every part of the city with every possible combination of travel powers (as characters can have multiple travel powers) must "pay attention" at all times to their surroundings.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I agree with Nadira. There's a difference between necessary and inevitable.
Waiting as "necessary" is the mechanic in Star Wars were you have to go to a Cantina and "waste time" healing/recovering. TERA does essentially the same thing with Campfires ... some of which are freestanding in the world (usually as part of NPC settlements) and also the portable/inventory varieties that PCs can drop to gather around and "waste time" to recover and prepare for battle. That sort of time wasting qualifies as being necessary.
Inevitable time loss is things like standing on a platform waiting for the next train/tram/subway/boat to arrive. Cue Nadira's reference to the Elevator Fallacy as being highly relevant. I'd even argue that zone loading screens can potentially fall into this category, since you're basically stuck "doing nothing" while a new zone loads, during which time the game is completely non-interactive (in other words, buzzkill).
So let's start talking specifics.
In World of Warcraft, I'm hard pressed to think of a Taxi Trip that (in vanilla) took less than 1 minute. Many of them would take 2-3 minutes to complete. Flying across an entire continent could take upwards of 5-10 minutes (or more), depending on the route. That still compares favorably with taking almost [b]ONE HOUR[/b] to run (dismounted, on foot, not shapeshifted) across nearly an entire continent (while avoiding combat the whole way).
In City of Heroes, with a combination of Swift (1x Run), Sprint (1x Run) and Ninja Run, [i]any character[/i] could run travel at 60 mph on the ground at Level 50. That's 1 mile per minute. Independence Port was 1.25 miles the long way. It was possible to run/swim the distance between opposing corners of the map in 90-120 seconds. That's 1.5-2.0 minutes. This seems reasonable to me.
The Shadow Shard, of course, blew all that out of the water by having zones almost 5 miles wide with tiny island pockets in them, creating an archipelago effect, with "geysers" that became increasingly "untuned" as the physics of the game evolved over time (and the "geysers" NEVER got updated to match the changes). So flying straight across a Shadow Shard zone could take as much as 3-4 minutes, depending on where you needed to go, and if you were using any of the "geysers" along the way to speed your journey.
The point I'm trying to make though is that a 1-2 minute travel time at 60 mph "feels fair" for sizing districts in City of Titans. That way, if you have to cross 3-4 districts in order to get where you need to go, it might take a little while to "drive" out there. Welcome to commuting. Set up a World of Warcraft style Ferry to take people across the bay dividing the city which comes around every 3 minutes to the pier and you've got a transportation hub with a potential for downtime ... and a potential for "catching" the Ferry without needing to wait.
There needs to be a difference between a "liberating" experience and a "boring" experience. If you can race past all the terrain without a care in the world, then you really won't CARE about what you're speeding past. I know that I personally used to swim a lot in places like Independence Port simply to avoid encounters on the streets (no opposition in the water most of the time). The whole "no mobs in the water" meant that the water was "safe" to be in ... and therefore quite boring, simply because there was nothing to pay attention to. Badge hunting in the waters around Praetoria was a chore, rather than something exciting to do, because there were no threats in the water.
This is a very major part of the reason why early on in City of Heroes (think 2005), it was REALLY HARD to get around [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/The_Hollows]The Hollows[/url]. Travel Powers weren't available until Level 14(!), and Hover was incredibly slow (needed 6x Fly to get close to basic Sprint speed). The Hollows was just DANGEROUS to move around in, and it was all too easy to take a wrong turn or fall off a ledge and then be unable to get back "up" to where you had been trying to get to. Yes, it was a Hazard Zone, for Levels 5-15, but for the Levels it was designed for it was just ominous and kept you looking over your shoulder and scanning the environment the entire time. Needless to say, Taxibots were HEROES for rescuing people who got in over their heads out there.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that aiming for a "balance" between Travel Power choices is something of a mug's game. Back in 2005, I'd beat Superspeeders to Mission Doors using 6-slot Hover (sometimes). In 2012, I'd beat Superspeeders to Missions Doors using Sprint and Ninja Run, simply by virtue of having superior knowledge of the terrain and navigation from Point A to Point B.
Back in 2005, the way I'd explain my choice of using 6-slot Hover (of all things) as my "travel" Power instead of getting Fly (or Superspeed, or anything else, really) was that although Superspeed was faster in a straight line, flying (or just Hovering quickly in my case) allowed me to move [i]in straighter lines[/i] ... so rather than being faster over a longer route, I was slower over a shorter route, and would reach my destinations in time frames comparable to my teammates most of the time. Sometimes I'd be first. Sometimes I'd be last. A lot of the time, I'd wind up in the middle of the pack. It didn't bother me, because what I had was "good enough" for the job, rather than being consistently the best available. And it was precisely that willingness to settle for "good enough" instead of aiming for perfection that made me quite competitive in other areas, which lent themselves to unique advantages no one else had.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Any chance, if there are such load screens for instanced missions, i can choose the Option to show my previously taken screenshots? :D
Or perhaps, use the Take Auto Screenshots at scripted or Cutscene moments in TFs or the like? Pweeese!? :D Just so i'm reminded how COOOOOL my toons are! ;)
Redlynne, the issue lies in making "travel not boring" is constantly being connected to some element of risk or danger. In order to achieve this it would need to result,in parity for every type of travel power accounted through the city maps. And this is even before we get into how to ensure there are equitable results for every character alignment and reputation.
Which of course tpwould cause that "sweet spot" of 1-2 minutes of travel to increase. The likely result is that there will not be parity and certain travel powers will have an advantage over others. With players capable of accessing multiple travel,powers, there is a very real reasonable expectation that they can avoid any possible danger encounter for portions of the city. But for those who take these optimal travel,powers could lead to frustration.mand all the effort in even attempting to yield parity of risk in travel will be lost because one segment of the population can successfully negotiate areas of the city with minimal to null risk, while others can end up at increased risk comparitivley speaking. Especially when the entire point in providing travel powers is to reduce time it takes to traverse the city.
I'm not saying design doesn't have to keep these things in mind. There should be places where players have to be careful, places where certain travel powers have advantages over others, places where players need to think about their next move. Those places will be specific as it would be increasingly difficult to ensure this would be applicable to the entirety of the city maps.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Tannim, the best counterfactual I can give to the phenomenon you're pointing at is the difference in aggro behavior between City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.
In City of Heroes, any time that your PC was +5 Levels above the mobs on the street, the mobs would ignore you (until you attacked them). You could stand right in the middle of a pack of -5 NPC Foes and they'd ignore you (so long as you didn't attack). This led to the [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20120905030853/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=83002&postcount=15]"All Grey To Me"[/url] mentality, given voice by Positron, which dismisses anything and everything "beneath" your Level.
In World of Warcraft (and Elder Scrolls Online, and TERA and numerous others), this simply did not (and does not) happen. There is never a point at which the "aggro radius" gets reduced to zero by differentials in Level between the PC and the NPC. To be sure, the aggro radius of "low Level mobs beneath you" is reduced by Level differentials ... but it is never eliminated all the way down to zero. This means that even a Level 1 NPC can aggro onto a Level 90 PC ... even if the direct effect of that happening results in something that is quite ineffective. However, the INDIRECT effects of that happening are significant ... the first and foremost being the "nuisance factor" of drawing aggro at all.
The major difference is that even if the Foe NPCs inhabiting an area are "no threat" whatsoever, if Players are given a REASON to steer around them to avoid unwanted aggro, the Players will tend to do so. This incentive system then creates a portion of the Obstacle Course of navigating from here to there most efficiently, adding a necessary level of complexity to the transit that would otherwise be completely missing. In other words, structuring things in this way keeps Players [i]engaged in PLAYING the game[/i] while in transit from Point A to Point B, even if the actual "threat" from drawing unwanted aggro is minimal, because the "hassle" involved in doing so is greater than zero.
In other words, Player directed travel needs to involve more thought/interaction than simply pointing the PC in a direction and hitting autorun and then just waiting to arrive because [i]nothing can or will happen during the trip[/i]. By contrast, in-game taxi services (again, referencing World of Warcraft) are more of an "in flight movie" to watch of pre-programmed movement(s) during which the Player can relax and get up and go and make a sandwich while waiting for the transit to end. I know that I, while playing World of Warcraft, would often do a variety of "management" activities while riding the taxis to various destinations (because they were safe transportation). Things like inventory sorting, checking maps, planning routes to destinations upon arrival, organizing quests, that sort of thing. The point being that although I wasn't able to "control" my character while riding a taxi service, I wasn't locked out of DOING things with my character, which meant that time spent on a taxi flight didn't have to be wasted. A lot of time it wound up being just a flying movie, but it didn't have to be. By contrast, a loading screen was time that WAS wasted no matter what, because the interactivity options were zero. I mean, I couldn't even turn my camera around to enjoy the view while "moving" when confronted by a zone loading screen.
Environments that you CAN or otherwise HAVE TO pay attention to keep the Player's attention both on and *in* the game.
Environments that allow you to safely ignore them welcome letting Player's attention wander *beyond* the game, with a commensurate loss in immersion.
Choose you must, how to serve them best ...
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
What happens if aggro won't occur because of faction reputation or alignment? How does an entire wide open city map where players can both soar to the skies, speed along the ground, pop to a desired location and anything between be done in a way that yields parity of risk that has to consider: how the power is used (some are easier to use than others), where it allows the character to go, and faction reputation or alignment leniencies?
Quite simply none of what has been suggested as to "keep travel interesting" adequately addresses all these issues. Indeed, as I've said, even attempting to do so given the complexity of the possible combinations of travel powers, the nature of designing a city scape, and the complexity of possible combinations of alignment and faction reputation that the endeavor to design an environment where every player is forced to pay attention while traveling (which requires some form of obstacle, risk, or a combination thereof) will not be capable off resulting in parity.
Again I'm saying there should be times and places where a player will need to think about how they are going to get from point A and B. there should places where some travel powers are at more of a disadvantage than others.
The most likely result is that for the most part players will figure out a way to get around the general parts of the city with minimal risk or puzzling because of the nature of design. And just to give an idea, there was a time where it was repeatedly suggested internally that players have the option to choose a travel power that uses auto-pathing to a selected point on a map. The city maps as currently designed, are not set up with auto-pathing to and from every possible location. Which means we aren't set up for a "taxi-service" yet either. As we iterate, and new tech becomes a available, this may change, but it is certainly not a launch goal.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
But it is impossible to offer all things to everyone, everywhere. Swimming to my contact in Founders Falls could be seen as boring, but I usually felt Clever for avoiding all of the Aggro I would otherwise attract. Super Jumping to the same contact became an exercise in ducking around buildings to break LoS, since one was practically guaranteed to land in one or two crowds of nasties. One of the irritants of Flight was that you flew in the direction your Camera was looking, so sight-seeing from a 'safe' altitude was non-trivial.
**Hmm, so 'Mouse-Look' ought to have Up-Down, as well as Right-Left...? Or just some way to temporarily de-couple camera and control... which, I guess, comes to the same thing.
I'm thinking that the Devs can/should focus on creating Environments and the Players can figure out how to traverse those environments in a way they enjoy. Since they will, Anyway, it doesn't seem to be something the Devs need to focus on, except in avoiding the creation of 'No Go Zones' where 'casual' travel is simply impossible.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Personally, I don't think all of this thought on the subject of how interesting/difficult travel in general ought to be is really all that productive. I gotta believe that Fly, Super Jump, and Super Speed running are all "comic booky" enough that they're basically must-haves (not that every toon needs all three, just must -haves in the sense that the game has to have them if it's going to be about heroes). By the same token, I don't expect all neighborhoods to have rooftop snipers taking potshots at anything and everything that flies/zooms/jumps by. Maybe near some faction base or stronghold, but not everywhere. As I said in my earlier post, I would expect to be able to get around in an area of several city blocks (like the size of Brickstown) using that type of travel power, then for LONG distances, there better be train or cutscene or SG base TP option or something similar to get me in the neighborhood/section of town where my mission door is without having to use the WASD keys for a whole 5 min just traveling. Travel powers should be used to get me from the train station or "TP in spot" to the door, they shouldn't be the one and only way to get around. I personally don't care for "random encounters" a la DnD (which I play, and like, and use random encounters in) because this isn't that game. For one thing it's not fantasy, and for another its an MMO set in a modernistic world. There simply aren't ant-lions and tigermen and owlbears lurking around every corner in most cities, and even the gangbangers that do exist aren't going to start just shooting at some random guy as he flies 50ft overhead on his way to some other location.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I absolutely support the idea of Calling a Taxi to take me across town. I'd even pay a fare. And I think it would be COOL if the taxi auto-generated a route from point to point, rather than running on the same rails every time.
Be Well!
Fireheart
It should also be mentioned that a lot of the fundamental balance problems in CoX were derived from the massive variance in animation time. Rather than being powerful like they *should* have been, the longer animation powers ended up being some of the worst powers from a DPS aspect. The best attacks, from a DPS perspective, in most attack powersets were the first one or two powers. In several cases, the capstone power was basically a useless showboat: it looked powerful and threw up a big number, but it took so long to resolve that it ended up being a DPS loss (which really makes the whole "extreme damage" listing for it very misleading). Martial Arts was the most egregious example of this, which is why it had to have a complete animation overhaul for balance purposes.
Currently, I'm playing FFXIV which uses a 2.5 second GCD and requires you complete an animation before you're allowed to use an ability (when you want to use an off-GCD ability like a survivability or damage cooldown) which works out very well. The pace of gameplay from a button pushing perspective is slower than many other MMOs, but the game relies *very* heavily on movement to avoid damage and other mechanics as part of it's meta so the longer GCD is basically required.
My sincere hope is that the devs will take the animation time lessons from CoX to heart and use either a standard animation time for attacks or use a GCD. Personally, I'm hoping for a GCD because I was a hardcore Regen scrapper back in the day and *really* hated having to stop punching stuff for a few seconds just because I wanted to use one of my many CDs (which were basically required to be used just to survive because our passive survivability was a joke).
As to the whole travel time argument, there are some serious design decisions to make. Taking a taxi around everywhere isn't really very heroic (I recall a lot of people making a similar comment about the trams and ferries in CoX) but having to waste 5+ minutes going from mission when you're ready to just get into the thick of it again gets old *very* quickly (this was part of the appeal of AE missions: they had a single entrance you used multiple times so you could go immediately from one mission in the story to the next; portal missions were much the same as well because there were only the 2 mission portals that it could choose between).
I hate to sound like a fanboi, but I think the best solution I've found is used by FFXIV: each zone has one or more teleportation nodes that you can attune to in order to be able to teleport back to it immediately at any time (as long as you're out of combat) with an 8 second cast that doesn't have a CD. Each time, it costs you money based upon the distance traveled, but it cuts down your travel time to just a 3-5 minutes at most, most which is spent navigating your destination zone rather than crossing long expanses.
To further "complicate" matters, FFXIV also uses something called FATEs (Full Active Time Events), which can best be likened to the old firefighting event in Steel Canyon except they give experience like a mission and scale you down to its level when you join them (so that you can never just walk up and demolish everything). You can easily bypass them as you're traversing a zone if you don't want to do them (they're marked with icons on your map and mini-map), but they provide a nice distraction as well as source of xp when you feel like doing them. In fact, because of the general lack of repeatable content in game (once you've beaten the main story, there's basically no more quests to do), FATE grinding the most preferred method of leveling.
The nice thing about this is that it tackles a lot of the issues that people had in CoX. it would provide you with impromptu heroing opportunities (I imagine a potential one being a burning building where you run inside the non-instanced building to break down obstacles, rescue people, and try to avoid becoming a victim yourself from the constant fire damage) as you run to your next mission and make traveling itself more interesting (but only if so desired).
I HATED Claws Melee... Becuase most of the animations look like they were doing Paper Cuts to the enemy.
I'd take Energy Melee any day over Claws Melee. And I hated Energy Melee too. :/
Its not always about DPS. I wanna Feel POWERFUL sometimes. At the expense of Extra time. As long as i'm OWNING the Enemy, its all good. ;D
There is one unexpected benefit to having powers with long animation times. Mid-fight mental downtime. The time to check how everyone is doing, give your own health more than a glance, or even type a short message in chat. Because for the next 3-4 seconds, my character is on auto-pilot due to a long animation. Especially if I've already queued up the next power, too.
So having some slow big hitters or AoE buffs or whatever warrants a long animation might be worth considering for the social side of things. Mental focus is a precious resource. Giving players some in-game downtime to recharge is a good plan, even if it's just a second or two in a fight. This is probably why flying was so popular, other than you know, it's flying. You could fly high into the air and set a destination, then focus on other things while you were going there.
I feel that MWM is on the ball with this approach. Designing travel to be some kind of "faux combat" experience runs the danger of irritating a lot more people than it pleases. Travel is going to require the player to pay some amount of attention to what they're doing. If that player wants to add some element of challenge to how they're getting to where they want to go, I'm certain that they will have the opportunity to do so.
If my travel is interrupted because I was careless, be it because I got stuck somewhere or was "ambushed", that's on me. If my travel is interrupted because the game is designed to do that, unless I carefully plot my path, that's annoying. With the exception of the situations outlined by Tannim, above, of course.
To wit, I'll sweep the streets if I want to street sweep. I do not want the streets sweeping me.
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Arcana made a post (about three weeks ago, on the Titan Network forums) that also pointed this out. The original performance regulators used in CoH were endurance and recharge. Energy Transfer was another "victim" of the devs realizing the importance that animation played in DPS.
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Sadly enough, when you're talking balance, it *is* all about DPS. The extended hangtime on Eagle's Claw, Headsplitter, and Golden Dragonfly were all basically removed even though they definitely made the attack feel much more epic.
The important thing to remember is that 2.0-2.5 seconds is actually a pretty long animation. In CoX, "Fast" animations were less than a second and most "standard" animations were 1.5 or so. Those animations that basically made the power worthless took so long generally because they had some period of time where either the animation slowed to a crawl or simply stood still (which is why most of them that had said periods removed when they were fixed didn't really see anyone complain about them no longer feeling powerful).
"Feeling powerful" is more about the animators being able to create compelling animations than the time the animation takes. The effects of the power matter as well, namely knock up and knock back, because you're actually seeing an obvious change in the enemy's state.
It's nice to know Arcana is alive and well and still contributing to the community. I remember asking a friend of mine who still played whether she was still around but never got an answer. She was, and still is, one figure online that I will always hold in the highest respect. Most of what I know about balance and number crunching is derived from what she taught me.
This always really bothered me, mainly because, if I'm remembering correctly, they both had their values determined as a function of their damage, rather than independent aspects of balance (e.g. a power with a long recharge that's basically free can be balanced against a short recharge power with an endurance cost). Whenever someone complained about Shadow Maul (which was often, seeing as it was this great animation that was absolutely horrible to use), Arcanaville was always quick to point out that Shadow Maul was one of the few (only?) powers that got a significant discount on its endurance and recharge given the damage it dealt.
You have to admit that pre-nerf ET was absolutely *insane* in how much damage it dealt, and it didn't even look all that powerful because you were just reaching a glowing hand out. Even *with* the nerf, it was still one of the best attacks in the game, which just goes to show you how utterly insane the power was in the first place.
We aren't using a global cool down in the game. Each power will have its own recharge. Thankfully our system for power design takes all the aspects of a power into account, including animation time and its recharge for determining output.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
To reiterate the point I think I already made before
The travel is NOT about making it like combat. It is not even about create combat. It is about creating what is essetially a distraction so as to create entertainment out of what otherwise likely would be perceived as boring and tedious.
Entertainment generally (and in games in particular) is created when the tension releases of some obstacle being overcome. This MAY be winning a battle (the obvious solution), but it also may be successfully avoiding battle. Or in story driven environments, finding some information or understanding that was until then hidden. There is an uncertainty and it is resolved through a player action (in games anyway).
Travel is not inherently entertaining when there is no tension, or when there is no player action. E.g. teleporting in CoH wasn't fun, even though as a player it kept you busy. This was because it was just clicking the mouse button every three seconds and nothing else. Same with flying You just zoomed to the ceiling, pointed in the correct direction and went to make yourself a cup of tea. Swimming through Indepence Port was another example of not-engaging travel. On the other hand, Founders Falls was an example of how minor situational hazards made travel engaging in and of itself (at least until you were too high level and everybody just ignored you). Even the canals were not entirely safe, and what was unsafe was not static either. And the only thing the developers had done was putting some snipers on rooftops with a sight range long enough to cover even the canals, sometimes. This gave players the freedom to trade safety for speed. You could bull through, but that meant several street sweeping battles along the way. Or you could sneak through the canals, but the more safety you wanted the more attention you needed to pay.
So travel through Founder's Falls was rarely dull the way Independence Port generally was.
And it doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
The other thing that I would like to stress (and repeat) is that there is a sliding scale and ani inverse relation between ease of travel and the perceived size (and meaning) of the game world.
At the one extreme you have a game where you just click 'enter' to start your mission. In this situation there really is no world. There may be one designed and even it may be part of the mission, but functionally it amounts to the game either being a series of platformers (e.g. there was no sense of a world in games like Donkey Kong and similar jump games). Or there is a world map, but the sense of geography is limited to story/shop hubs and random 'a challenger has arrived' scenarios in between.
At the other extreme would be a game with realistic size and travel speeds. Where just walking to the next village would take two or more hours, and where travel to another continent would take a year. As a player you certainly would have a sense of how vast the game world is, but it also would be rather boring.
Games need to be somewhere on that line, and depending on where exactly they place themselves, they need to provide the mechanics that go with that position. If you create a lobby game then any effort to build a coherent game world is largely wasted. The arenas in which an event takes place (because that is what we're talking about in this type of games) may be 3D environments, but better prepare for players complaining that the zones are too big and they have to travel too long to find all the enemies (remember the Oranbega maps?). That, by the way, is the Elevator Fallacy in action agaiin.
All of this makes travel in some form or another inevitable, and means that the game designers must spend some time working out how to make engaging whatever travel time they decide is optimal for their game. Most MMOs start out with restrictive travel,, and keep adding more features to make the travel faster and less meaningful. But all this achieves is making the game world less and less relevant, while still never achieving the goal of making travel fast enough for the players who complain about slow travel. The correct solution is to make the action of experiencing the game world in and of itself more fun and more (emotionally) rewarding.
Random obstacles along the way are just one approach to this, which I mention because it is cheap to create from a developer's perspective. Skyrim achieves much the same goal by making the landscape visually stunning, encouraging players to wander off and explore.
The Secret World does it by sprinkling environmental quests throughout the zones for players to find and get sidetracked about. Pokemon does it by dropping rare pokemons everywhere that a careful player may discover.
All these things serve the same purpose (and there are more options still), namely to give the player some kind of payback and (emotional) reward for the traveling they are required to do.
Part of our mission design addresses the last point made here, as mentioned in our Player Agency update. Not all missions will be doled out from one contact npc leading to the next. The Leads system acts as a contact where a mission becomes available from earning a Lead from either doing something in a mission, or more to the point being made; involvement with open world encounters.
A super simple example: stopping the random mugger may cause a Lead to drop. This Lead opens up access to a mission.
Other unorthodox contacts may be in the environment. An open man hole cover on a street is both the "contact" and mission entrance to a mission involving something going on in the sewer.
And then there are plans for events both personal (see solo) on up to district-wide events of which may be triggered, on a timer, and random. An example of a solo like event, to borrow from an old trope is like save the kitten from the tree.
Basically there will be things players can choose to look for while traveling or ignore on your way to where you want to be.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Ok.
But just like my very very very old [url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120906104843/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=279809]Chain Melee powerset[/url] suggestion on the old forums, and [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/chain-melee-powerset]this here forum[/url], i think a well balanced powerset could have Short Animations, as well as Long animations, and still look/work well in one powerset.
I'm not saying it's not possible. It's just going to have massive variance in the damage dealt by the powers, especially when you consider that long recharge powers should deal more damage in the same time frame as short recharge powers, so a long animation power with a long recharge should have absolutely insane damage compared to a power with a short animation and short recharge.
It's for this reason that I really think that keeping all (attack) animations within the same comparatively small window is a smarter move than going the CoX route and having massive variance in animation time.
Umbral, that approach is simply a matter of putting training wheels on what can be done and setting up the game to ride on rails (game mechanically speaking). You're minimizing variance ... literally ... in search of a uniformity that would result in a generic "sameness" for all of the Powers in the game.
Depending on how much you want to tighten the screws on such a mandate, that quickly transitions from benchmark to straight jacket. Not necessarily recommended.
Remember, if following the City of Heroes model (which may not necessarily hold true) ... animations had fixed lengths but recharge times could be shortened through enhancements. This did some relatively wacky things when assembling attack chains intended to supply continuous animations without pauses, due to the duality of factors to account for.
City of Titans may have a less restrictive mandate for animation times (i.e. they might be allowed to get faster through Augmentation/Refinement), but I wouldn't expect such a performance increase to be folded into and part of a recharge time reduction. Indeed, if the option is there, I know that I personally would prefer to see animation time reductions be "controlled" by a different (competing!) factor than recharge time reductions, just to keep things more complex and give the Player more factors to juggle in the eternal search for maximum advantage.
I am also well aware of the "buzzsaw" builds that relied on the shortest animation times loaded with Damage Procs rather than Damage Enhancements that developed in City of Heroes. At best, I'd want to see City of Titans tinker with a "variation on the theme" of that by having a Powerset (or few) that has its average animation times for the entire set rate as being "faster" than ordinary, but I wouldn't want that sort of thing to become the normal/baseline that everything else gets judged against.
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I'm all for variety in the powersets and powers. The desire to make different power sets distinguishable from each other basically requires that some powers and even some sets be better than others overall, and thus better at a particular play style. If your play style is "defeat all badguys as quickly as possible while soloing" there will likely be a "best option" for that, no matter what. I like having differences among different options, even though I know this means some options will be "bad" while others are "good". You have to accept that if you want there to be any difference in the powers and sets in the first place.
As for animation times and recharge times, I think you could start by making that stuff slower than what CoX had and then give people the option to improve one that stuff using Augments, etc. I think it might also be good to make the powers and Augments/Refinements work in such a way that you can't actually improve every aspect of a power to the point of diminishing returns and as such you have to make a decision (for each power's slotting) as to whether you want to go for best recharge rate, best endo cost, best damage or best accuracy, etc. Then the powers themselves would all behave differently, so for the ones that have naturally low damage and high recharge rate, you might opt to do one thing, but for the other ones you might make a different decision, all of which is related to your desired attack chain having as little "down time" in it as possible.
Also remember there will likely be powers that make other powers recharge faster a la Hasten and Speed Boost, so starting out with relatively slow recharge rates is probably a good idea.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
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That's quite the strawman argument you've put together there.
Limiting animation time to a comparatively small window isn't the same thing as trying to genericize all power. It's limiting a single (major) balancing factor that has a significant impact upon perceived v. real effectiveness (which you want to ideally minimize so that people can feel effective *without* having to do hours of research). It still leaves plenty of other things to be modified on the power (damage, accuracy, recharge, secondary effect, cost, procs; animation time could still be reduced via enhancements as well), but it makes sure that every power remains on a similar level of analytical comparability (by which I mean that they can be compared side by side without having to do major conversions between the two, not that they are identical).
I actually disagree with you here, mainly because the "eternal search for maximum advantage" isn't really an eternal search. The search lasts only as long as it takes to figure out what the optimal composition is. Adding additional balancing factors simply serves to make the search take longer and make effective builds more and more outside of the realm of the casual player (not to mention adding to the work that needs needs to be done to make all sets viable and balanced in the first place).
If they do allow animation times to be reduced, I'd like to see that folded into recharge time reduction (and, ideally, have recharge times determined by when they are executed rather than when they have resolved, but that's a different issue altogether) unless they do some *really* weird stuff with the numbers of the customization system that varies the weight of different enhancements to a *much* more significant degree than CoX did it while simultaneously varying the weight of the same enhancements within different powers.
The most egregious example that I can think of to demonstrate the need for this being the ability to enhance the secondary effects of most attack powersets; because it was the same modifier regardless of the power, using Dark Melee as an example, you could increase the give Shadow Punch three slots of tohit debuff enhancement and never notice the difference but give Touch of Fear a single slot and most definitely notice the difference. You, from a semantic standpoint, had the option to enhance Shadow Punch's tohit debuff, but, in practical terms, it was choosing to waste those slots. An example of the extreme differentiation I'm talking about is having a single slot of tohit debuff increasing Shadow Punch's by 100% while that same slot only increasing Touch of Fear's by 33%; ToF would still have the larger the net increase, but they would both be large enough to notice and be valuable. The same could even be done to allow a low-damage controller power to actually do appreciable damage, such that you have the real choice between making the power more of an attack that happens to hold or a pure hold.
It would probably have best been said that all powers within the same set should have similar animation times, rather than all powers in general, because effect that an limited ranged of animation time is intended to make power-to-power comparisons within the same set manageable. Set-to-set limitations would be completely unneeded because, as long as the animation reduction is "global" to the set (e.g. all powers within the set have 1.5-2.0 sec animations instead of 2.0-2.5 sec animations).
It should also be mentioned that they're not really doing powersets in the same way that CoX did them. From what I gather (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), they're allowing you to create your own powerset by choosing two templates to apply to the entire powerset (one for damage type and another for secondary effect) and then you choose suites of "basic" powers that determine their baseline attributes (damage, recharge, cost, etc.), so it's entirely possible that one of the themes could be Speed, wherein all of the powers within the set you design have animations that finish faster but deal less damage (ex: a 20% increase in attack speed and a 10% reduction in damage, assuming that the themes are intended to provide a 10% "buff" to the powerset).
You can still have significant differences in powersets while preserving their functional balance across multiple situations. In fact, that's what the CoX devs actively tried to do and, with the attack sets at least, did a reasonably good job with (a lot of their balance was heuristic balancing rather than actual numerical balancing too, but that was largely due to survivability and support sets using a vast array of different mechanics that made numerical balancing a nightmare).
(preface: this is the design/balance paradigm that I adhere to; it might not be the same one that the CoT devs have chosen to follow)
It all breaks down into what's important is that all of the options for a set have roughly the same performance for their primary objective and then creating the differences between the sets in their secondary objectives (e.g. all melee DPS powersets do roughly the same single target damage, but one brings control, one brings support, and another brings extra AoE damage). An example of this is the melee powersets: all of them should have had roughly the same single target DPS capability, because that's the primary objective of the set. You then create the differences by giving them different secondary objectives, like increasing survivability, adding control or debuffs, or simply doing more AoE damage. The problem that the CoX devs had was that they had a tendency to try and consider the capabilities of the set holistically rather than looking at relative functionality in specific areas, which ended up with a set like Spines (which had absolutely laughable single target DPS and utterly insane AoE DPS) trying to find a balance against Dark Melee (which had absolutely laughable AoE DPS and utterly insane ST DPS). You could make the argument that they were balanced, but it's obvious to anyone that Spines and Dark Melee had no real functional overlap even though they were both Scrappers (which were intended to be boss killers). Without that functional overlap, the only balance you could really manage was a heuristic one where you were forced to gauge the importance of AoE damage compared to ST damage.
Another example would be Kinetics compared to Force Fields: Kinetics had absolutely *insane* offensive support but negligible defensive support whereas a set like Force Fields had absolutely insane defensive support but negligible offensive support. They were both obviously support sets, but they had no functional overlap because one was basically only useful when you had a group with defense covered and and another was only useful when you *didn't* have defense covered. There wasn't really "support" so much as two different sub-types of support as governed by their focus on offense or defense.
(postface: this type of balancing is predicated upon the placing a high degree of importance on roles within the confines of group formation, such that you can expect a certain level of performance in requisite areas from all members of a role rather than having to know exactly what they are)
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Um, Umbral? You can't claim "strawman" and then affirm and validate everything I just said as being true about making animation times generic, uniform and narrowly defined ... i.e. using training wheels and riding on rails ... so as to remove animation times from the factors needing to be balanced.
With respect to shortening animation times, if you put the controlling factor on that into recharge reduction, you are once again reaching for the training wheels and rails. You are actively advocating breeding diversity OUT of the system.
I'm, of course, the "wacky one" when it comes to these things (just ask anyone around here, they'll tell you), and so I think it would be rather interesting to see animation time reductions be controlled via Accuracy enhancement (of all things) rather than Recharge reductions. It's one of those things where if you stop and think about it for a little bit, would not only make sense (after a fashion) but also be a design point that could produce a wide variety of build strategies. For one thing, it would give a reason to "overbuild" for Accuracy that would otherwise be wasteful/meaningless.
And now I'm out of time for any additional posting right now ...
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Cast Times can be altered with Refinements, the cast time is the part of how the power functions, not the effect (which is what Augments are for). At this time we aren't planning to create such types of Refinements, but the option exists if we choose to do so later. The reasons are many, which include not driving our animators crazy with making sure the blending with sped-up animations work in all situations, ensuring we can accurately track performance bounds and pin down any times animation time may be the factor we want to adjust (or when a dev puts in a request to change an animation time as a suggested solution, determining how it will affect performance). Because, as I said earlier, we've already taken cast time into account as part of determining power output.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Even if one power set option in the melee attack sets is considered the "worst overall DPS" for melee sets, and thus the worst set to take in many people's opinions, there will still be people who take it and try to optimize it, not to try to make it "good" by comparison to other sets, but maybe just to make it as good as it can possibly be in and of itself. In Magic: the Gathering, the people who do this are called "people who play green decks" and I'm one of them:) But seriously I think we can all agree that nobody wants any set to be egregiously overpowered or underpowered as compared to the other options, but when you start comparing sets, and powers, there has to be a cutoff where you say "okay, we're not going to make these two sets EXACTLY the same DPS" for the sake of parity. When you do that, the choice of "fire or ice?" turns into "do you want orange flamey powers or white snowwy powers?" because everything else is the same in the end. I would like different builds to play differently.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'm totally against the idea of all powersets in games like this being 100% cookie-cutter equal to each other. If that means there will be some sets that are considered to be "less desirable" numbers-wise than others then so be it.
People often forget that not everyone is into hyper min/maxing their DPS numbers to get the absolute highest values. Obviously there are many MMO players out there who are obsessed with that kind of thing and I'd hope CoT will provide suitable outlets to allow those folks to tinker as much as they like. But there are plenty of other players out there who want to play with X, Y or Z powersets and couldn't care less if all the "cool kids" have decided that those powersets are the "worst" for whatever reasons. Sometimes people actually don't WANT to play a god-like Superman afterall.
As long as the "non-number" casual people out there are having fun and feel they are being effective at what they're doing (regardless of what the numbers might suggest) it shouldn't really matter if the number-wizards have their own opinions about what's best or worst. Where this gets bad is when you have "build elitists" who won't group with other people who don't use what they think are the "optimal" builds. Fortunately most people were not that idiotic about those things in CoH so I don't really expect to see too much of that kind of discrimination in CoT either.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I agree with Lothic and Radiac. Obviously power sets need to at least be comparable, but beyond that they're going to be a lot like animation suites or costume sets. People will choose them because they think they're cool, like how they feel, or because they fit the character concept, even if that power set is not the best performer in that absolute number sense. Heck, there were plenty of people who did not play strong power sets in CoH because, to those players, they felt weak. That, in turn, could have been nothing more than a case of their play style not being a good match for that set.
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All 3 of you are making the same logical mistake that I saw a metric crapton of people on the CoX forums make concerning balance:
"Balanced" is not the same as "identical" (or even "nearly identical").
What matters is that they have a *similar* end result ("similar" being extremely important here; the only way to achieve 100% parity is to do the cookie-cutter thing and no one wants that; the goal is to minimize variations in performance while maximizing real choices). How they get there is incidental (as far as balance is concerned). When people in other MMOs talk about various DPS classes/jobs/builds/whatever as being balanced, they're not saying that they play the same; they're saying that classes that perform the same role/function have similar enough output at that role/function that the choice between them doesn't matter, which means that people can choose what they prefer to play without having to consider how good that choice is going to be. It's not as if choice and balance are mutually exclusive concepts.
I mained a Dark Melee/Regen Scrapper for my entire run in CoX. When I first began playing it, DM/* was basically considered worthless because it has absolutely abysmal AoE, but I still played it and optimized it because I enjoyed how good it was at single target damage. Groups still brought me along because there was still a reason to bring me along: I could kill bosses faster than anyone else in the group. Later on, after Jack Emmert got done with it, */Regen was considered to be an absolutely horrible set because it now relied on cooldowns rather than toggles for its survivability (making it the only "active" survivability set) and was often considered to be absolutely terrible. I still played it because I enjoyed the challenge of making the set do obscene things (like being the first DM/Regen Scrapper to solo a pylon).
In both of those cases, people would often argue that DM and Regen were not balanced, but that's simply not true. DM was balanced because it still had greater effectiveness in it's niche that provided value enough to make up for the lack of AoE; */Regen was balanced because it became a skill driven survivability set rather than a set-and-forget style survivability set (it just got a bad rep because it was the *only* skill driven survivability set and most people simply didn't have the experience/mentality to get the most out of it).
I want there to be a metric shitton of options, but I want those options to be balanced against each other so that choosing between them isn't basically telling me to choose whether I want to be effective or not (and, yes, I know that some people would still choose to not be effective, but my point is that they *should not have to*.
(Incidentally, I've always found it strange that CoX players, more than any other game I have ever played, often seem to take it as a point of pride that they didn't care about balance and chose sub-par performance sets to prove it, but only really began to do so when the community began to realize that CoX was so poorly designed that real balance was basically impossible; I always suspected it was a kind of Stockholm Syndrome where people who loved the game regardless of balance convinced themselves that they loved the lack of balance in the game simply because they had no other choice).
What Umbral is referring to here is what we call bounds of performance. There is no "balance" in the sense it is typically used, heck we don't even use the word in our discussions with people from other departments because it is too prone to misconception.
I've a lot I'd like to say, but am holding back in the hopes that there will be an update in the future on the topic of power set design. The power set frameworks we designed we've provided each play style with a variety of sub-play style categories, and within those sub-categories, an applied tactic (this can be raw damage, uses a combo, etc...). Our power design system ensures that there is parity between sets taking into account how the power is designed to operate (as I mentioned we've learned from the past and animation time accounted for in determining output).
Between the way power sets are designed, the power design system for each individual power, and the Mastery powers each classification can use, players will be able to choose their prefer play style, apply in it in a variety of ways (Maseries), and everything will operate within the bounds of performance we aim to achieve. I'm sure we won't get everything "right" and adjustments will be made as we iterate and even after live play (cause players 'break' things). The result is that while there will be "best and worst" sets for stuff like DPS, they'll all perform in a range that is acceptable for progression in the game, and those sets that are "worst" in something like dps will likely be due to they are not a single target set either having more AoE attacks, or additional utilities like methods to increase protection or debilitate foes.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
For what it's worth, I played a lot of support toons in CoX (defenders mainly) and wouldn't have a problem with such classes being somewhat slower to level solo and somewhat faster on a duo or larger team. For one thing, I like to socialize while I play and for another it adds variety. Even if a particular class is "bad" as a solo in PVP, team PVP is another story, as is team PVE.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Ha! That was impressive. I've never really been accused of suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome" in relation to being confused about game balance before but I guess there's a first time for everything.
I actually realize you can achieve effective game balance without making powersets 100% cookie-cutter identical power for power. I've only had close to 40 years worth of playing games like these (PnP and computer based) to understand that. But I realize something you clearly don't: game balance can also be achieved without making powersets 100% cookie-cutter as EFFECTIVE power for power. You claim that all players "should be equally effective". Why? Your definition of "effective" requires us to equate apples and oranges - that's never going to happen in ANY game much less CoT. Your own Scrapper example shows us that people could make any build (regardless of the numbers) do "obscene things" if they put their minds to it.
My main point, which you clearly missed, was that there was a significant portion of the CoH playerbase who happily played the game for years without worrying about any of your silly notions about being "effective" in terms of absolute damage output or caring about min/maxing at all. The very idea of worrying about picking the "right" build to have the best play experience was at best a completely foreign concept to them. I strongly suspect that CoT will also have a good number of players who could care less what people like us might call "game balance" at all.
You've made the logical mistake that thinking being "effective" means that you're doing roughly the same amount of "numerical output" (however you want to define that nebulous term) as every other build you think you're competing with. To many people being "effective" simply meant having fun regardless of what anyone else was doing.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
For me, being "effective" meant being able to pull my own weight in Teams ... with Solo being a Team of One. It wasn't about who was "best" so much as who had something to contribute, as opposed to being deadweight and just leeching off the rest of us.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
One no ever needs to tolerate literal "deadweight" or "leechers" on teams. That's pretty much obvious.
But if your character can only produce 80% of the DPS mine can that doesn't automatically define you as deadweight or a leech in the least, especially when considering your character can more than likely do something else much better than mine does (like in the areas of CC or healing for example).
People who worry about all team members (or even all powersets across a particular archetype) being "equally effective" to each other usually forget about these important aspects of overall game balance.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I specifically created one of my characters to cast 'Freezing Rain' and 'Rain of Fire' together. I never even considered whether casting 'Rain of Chaos' (which is what I called that combo) was desirable according to some metric. It was Fun, so I did it. I had no other motivation, really, although I did want to be an effective character, able to hold my own on a team, or solo.
Similarly, I never compared my characters to anyone else's. Not in a 'value judgment' way. I never thought, "Wow, my costume is so much more 'effective' than theirs!" I never considered, "With me on the team, we don't need an (insert Archetype)." There were things I could do with my Mind Controller, which I could not do with my Fire Controller, but I never wished I wasn't a (whatever I was).
I guess what I'm saying is that a metric like DPS, for instance, never interfered with my playing the game and the character that I wanted to play. The idea that Others might be better at that metric never bothered me, though I was open to learning new tactics and strategies for using the abilities I had in more 'effective' ways.
I'm expecting that City of Titans will be much the same. I also expect that, if there is some glaring Flaw in a particular (anything) in the game, then someone will fix it. I'm not worried.
Be Well!
Fireheart
In the spirit of "travel broadens the mind" ... I must say that playing different classes/archetypes is definitely one of the better ways to get a handle on group dynamics. When you've actually PLAYED the other classes/archetypes yourself, you KNOW what they are capable of ... and what you can do with your current character to compensate for any deficiencies in the group's capabilities. Heck, I've used my knowledge of how other classes work to [i]instruct[/i] new Players of those classes of successful tactics and strategies, helping make them better Players.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Agreed, although just being interested in other classes/AT's helps a load as well.
And sometimes, just sometimes, you can take things from playing another class and use it in your own class (it might not necessarily be *safer*, but it could well be faster if you were forced to think outside the box).
ie, in Wildstar, on my spellslinger (glass cannon) ranged character, I would normally kite kite kite. That makes sense. What I didn't realise though was that for the melee classes they could avoid the same issues that I would have just by running through the mob (to get behind it). Slower turning time for these mobs helped as well (to prevent the instant snap around to attack you).
Now if you kite, running all the way to go behind the mob takes a lot of time. You are basically face tanking at range the whole time. However, I applied the same idea on my spellslinger, and I actually found it a lot easier. It was riskier, because I had further to travel, and more likely to be hit, but with practice practice practice, I managed to come up with something that worked well for me (and became another tool in my arsenal)..
Similar things were doable in Tabula Rasa as well.
Of course, just plain experience in the game can open up loads of new avenues for your alts as well... you know more about how the game works, so some "Underpowered" (to the new player only) sets really become their own once you know more about how the game worked (such like Smashing/lethal damage in CoX was not "ideal" to be dealing because more mobs resisted that type... the more esoteric damage became better the higher up you went)
(EDIT: My PC Decided to post before I finished typing)
THIS statement fills me much 'YEAH!'. Actually, everything Tannim posted did - it shows they're putting a lot of thought into the game. It's making me excited to see this. Sadly, I don't have the history with CoH/X you crazy cats do, but I about 'squeed' like a little girl when a friend told me about CoT.
For the most part, I have to agree with Lothic, at least with regards to the 'effectiveness' aspect of balance. As long as a player brings something to the table - CC, off heal, off tank, kiting effectively, or even just bringing the 'right' buffs in the form of Auras or what not that give other players their 'edge'. Effectiveness and balance comes in what you bring to the table 'over all', not just numbers.
I really wish I had something more productive to bring to the conversation.
A little nonsense now and then, is relished by the wisest men.
~Roald Dahl
This here is the core of the issue with balance. As Lothic says, dps is not the only measure for a powers use.
The devs have to not only look at things like dps or spike damage...they also have to look at extra effects the power can impart...synergy with the other powersets.... how it will be influenced by enhancements... specialization ect ect ect....
To use only one metric to determine a powers usefulness will just lead to nerfs when the inventive players find the game breaking combos.
I think the reason people misunderstood you is largely due to the fact that you stated that
Which made us think you were looking at the idea of balance from only one aspect.
All in all your clarifications since have merit. It is possible to create parity without creating interchangeable powers.
But I would like to point out that after the first round of balancing CoH did, there was a parity in powers (to an extent) most noticeably in regards to recharge, animation time and endurance cost. They were just tied to a powers type.
The most obvious example is assassins strike....the recharge, end cost and animation time was basically the same. Snipes were another easy example of parity. This type of 'balance' was pretty common in CoH... a specific power type would be the same tier, have almost the same end cost, recharge and animation times. AoE holds were the same tier, close (if not the same) end cost, animation time and recharge with little variation.
You saw a bit more variation in melee sets (and to a lesser extent ranged damage sets). But they too tended to follow a type of formulaic progression of powers.
Your issue is your DPS mainstays of a particular set (usually the first two powers) far outweighed the DPS of the later powers .... as they should because they are not DPS powers.. they are spike powers. Putting all powers into a small range of animation time (what you seem to be advocating) will remove the concept of spiking those foes you need to put down faster..... It also limits some (note I said some not all or even most) of the strategic uses of powers that involve a risk factor.
Limiting one aspect of a power (animation time or recharge) to a small window will have a negative impact on the overall dynamic of combat IMO.
I remember playing CoH early on and hearing the endless cries in AP for 'Healers' or 'We need a Rad of Sonic' because those sets had specific traits that those groups were looking for. In the former case it was because a lot of players were porting over from WoW and other 'holy trinity' games where having a Healer was believed to be mandatory. In the latter case it was because there was a monster or boss at the end fight and certain sets were known to be really good at debuffing single targets.
Now think back to that last golden year we played. I remember making up a new toon (because Going Rogue had come out and I could run my heroic MasterMind!) and just taking it all in. Now the cries were for 'Someone start a CC' or 'What should I do for a new powerset combo that looks cool?'. Why? Because after all those years of playing we'd evolved past the point where every team fighting a boss needed a Healer or a Rad or a Sonic to succeed. There were SO many ways to do things that nobody cared. Sure, some things were tougher than others like taking out the end boss with 8 Tanks (serious lack of DPS warning there) or fighting Incarnate content with MasterMinds (minions can be SO squishy!). However for the main game the instances of needing a specific type of build or powerset were few and far between. This meant players could do what they wanted and have no trouble finding a team.
There are always going to be cases where one AT or powerset might not perform as well as another and that's fine. As much as I like to solo and therefore believe that as much of the game should be playable solo (even for Blasters...), there SHOULD be situations where a player thinks to himself 'this might have been easier if I'd brought that guy who was asking to team earlier'. It encourages teaming without making it feel mandatory. Rewarding the team for good play should be encouraged. However I dn't consider taking 8 of the same thing just because it's the 'most effective' build to be good play. We should studiously avoid the idea that one build should be the best at everything.
As for avoiding cookie-cutter powersets, there HAS to be some semblance of balance and stability or else players are going to be put off. Every Blaster set had 2 ST blasts, a cone and an AoE. Out of 9 powers that's less than half that were considered the standard...the benchmark. Having those 4 powers meant that players could try one Blaster set, then play a different set and not have as steep a learning curve. However it was the other 5 powers in the set, as well as the specific effects (DoT, -Def etc) that made them different.
Every set and every power HAS to have a purpose or else it's just wasting space in the game. To this end, no two powers in different sets should be identical. However, stating that 'all ranged attack sets should provide a choice between 2 ST powers, a cone and an AoE' is NOT cookie-cutter design...it's providing a set of choices the players can be comfortable with and learn quickly.
CoX had some sets and builds that could be very effective but they took a particular play style to work. You couldn't stand and shoot as a Blapper...you'd get killed. Of course wading into a fist fight when all your powers have 100' range isn't necessarily a good idea either. The idea is to give the players a choice and let THEM figure it out.
Playing a superhero MMO is a extremely subjective thing. One player might think his character is ok but the next person might think the exact same character is the bomb because they can use bright pink FX on EVERYTHING. That's fine...to each their own.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
[youtube]6GMkuPiIZ2k[/youtube]
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I'd like to touch this one because I don't think it's been expanded on enough.
So will it be a queue system much like in CoH, or.. will powers begin to fire off as you press them? Because I can definitely see a Swifty Macro happening in the even of the latter.
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
More like a queue system limited by animation time of the power activated. At least, this is how were prototyping combat, but we're limited to just a couple of powers at the moment. The intent of the design is to keep it that way, and once we've fully expanded to an entire character's build worth of powers against a range of scenarios we'll know for sure if the intent of design holds up. Early simulations indicate as much, but we still have more sims to run and of course, full prototyping to verify before we can say with 100% certainty. Basically, the veracity my original statement is based on the magic 8-ball says "signs point to yes".
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Believe me when I say that this course of action is the preferred. I really hope it works out well.
When you say "limited by animation time", is there any disparity between Animation and Visual Effect in the current design you're working for? Say Minuteman uses a buffing power where he raises his arms up and causes a bunch of fireworks to shoot in every direction, his arms lower but the fireworks continue for 1 second more. Would the next queue'd power begin its animation after the arms lower or after the fireworks stop?
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
RIght now there aren't any effects we're using (well that I've used, we have a few place holder effects soonish), so animation time is solely limited to the actual animation time of the power. Wether or not there are any ongoing particle effects occurring beyond the power's animation time are not a consideration for the moment. Something like this comes down to answering the question: do the ongoing particle effects need to occur within the cast time, or can they continue after? Both play a part in the look and "feel" of the power, sometimes they may play a part in providing indicators of a power continuing to work.
An example could be say a damage over time effect continuing after the power is used, let's say a simple fiery punch attack that leaves the target on fire for a bit. The punch is done, but the target continues to have some damage over time with a visual particle effect being used to indicate the damage over time. The punch may have taken a total of 1.5 seconds to animate, the damage over time continues for 3 seconds. The next power would have been available to actual fire off (assuming it is ready) at the end of the 1.5 second mark, not the 1.5+3 second mark.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Personally for effects for buffing, debuffing, DoT and HoT powers I'd make sure there is a visual cue of some sort on the target.. though to prevent excessive amounts of effects on a character the newest visual would overwrite any previous ones. Say I've been hit with a debuff like Bleed and it causes an effect of small droplets to drop from my character. To mitigate this DoT, someone casts Ice Armor on me. The droplet effect would cease the very second that Ice Armor starts working and it would be replaced with an effect of my character being covered head to toe in chunks of ice that follow his skeleton.
One of the most important things when it comes to a slower combat system is damage calculation and WHEN this happens. Even a half second can mean the difference between life and death. From what I've seen, there's 2 schools of design and MMOs usually mix and match them between abilities. Either:
The damage/healing/(de)buff numbers is calculated the very second the power is activated and the effect begins, however it is not applied until the effect actually comes into contact with the target.OR
The damage/healing/(de)buff is calculated the very second the effect makes contact with the target. It is then applied within that same second.
Now obviously for melee this doesn't mean as much, but for ranged characters it's almost an art to time correctly.
Say I'm a Corrupter using a Snipe Attack. Under the first condition, I would want to use a +Damage inspiration the very second before the Attack fires off to maximize usefulness of the Insp. However, under the second condition I would want to use the Insp before the effect of my power comes close to touching the enemy. The same goes for my target if it is a player. If the first is the case, he would want to pop a +Resistance or +Defense Insp as I get ready to fire to maximize uptime, but would rather wait until it gets close in the second instance to pop them.
Has this been considered and if so, is there any word as to when the calculation will be done? I would hope if it has that again, things are mixed and matched so as to keep things from being too predictable.
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
Right now calcs are performed at the instance of activation, not at the end of animation. The second allows room for reactive response to being attacked as we have quite a decent range for animation times, the vast majority of which would be slow compared to most reactive gaming (at or over the 1.5 second mark). Just as in your example the maximum effectiveness would require near perfect timing of activation at the instance of the animation / particle effect about to connect with the target. We have stated from the beginning that we aim to mimic the feel of how the old game played even if some of the underlying mechanics for how that is operated is different.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Nightmare is pleased.
[img]http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrqnup286A1r2wnzqo1_500.gif[/img]
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]