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CO-2; what would you like to see?
Thoughts?
I think it would behoove them to make a sequel of some sort. Imo, the only way CO could gather a new audience is coming to consoles, therefore I think CO-2 should be PC/Console since CO ditched that idea way back.
I would like to see
1) CO-2 confirmed for development: Heck, even if Cryptic wants to do a kickstarter or something, I am sure folks would pitch in.
2) A pet creator: My character in CO was a engineer named hybrid. He builds mechanical animal robots in the form of my alts. Alts where his inventions. His name was hyrbid because the machines could fuse to together to form hybrid versions of the creature, similar to animal hybrids in real life, but without the restrictions.
3) Option to create huge characters. Some people on the VO boards discussed implementing high ceilings to carter to huge folks, not a terrible idea...not sure if it is worth the trouble or possible, maybe, if planned ahead in the development process.
4) Nunchucks
5) Animal mounts and vehicles
6) Console port at some point, take over the sub-genre. More folks paying and playing, equals better stuff for us in the future.
I think it would behoove them to make a sequel of some sort. Imo, the only way CO could gather a new audience is coming to consoles, therefore I think CO-2 should be PC/Console since CO ditched that idea way back.
I would like to see
1) CO-2 confirmed for development: Heck, even if Cryptic wants to do a kickstarter or something, I am sure folks would pitch in.
2) A pet creator: My character in CO was a engineer named hybrid. He builds mechanical animal robots in the form of my alts. Alts where his inventions. His name was hyrbid because the machines could fuse to together to form hybrid versions of the creature, similar to animal hybrids in real life, but without the restrictions.
3) Option to create huge characters. Some people on the VO boards discussed implementing high ceilings to carter to huge folks, not a terrible idea...not sure if it is worth the trouble or possible, maybe, if planned ahead in the development process.
4) Nunchucks
5) Animal mounts and vehicles
6) Console port at some point, take over the sub-genre. More folks paying and playing, equals better stuff for us in the future.
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This is a big journey, so far if you're reading this, wish you a good day
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2) Not an MMO. Make it either: a single-person (or small scale co-op) game, preferably with a mix of random instances and storied quest chains (think Elder Scrolls games); or a ruleset and toolkit where people can create their own city servers with different themes (e.g. art-deco retro-future vs. grim post-industrial blight), types of bad guys (mobsters vs. aliens vs. mad scientists vs. mutants vs. eldritch monsters), etc.
Keep a similar degree of character customization and power choices in either case. Just... please, for the love of gaming, no more MMOs.
3) Music that sets the tone rather than music that hits you in the face.
That'll do for starters, I think...
This is a big journey, so far if you're reading this, wish you a good day
Besides, single-player games, co-op games, and DIY games (for want of a better term) don't have the same network overhead or the "least common denominator" effects that MMOs have to deal with. That gives them a bit more freedom (per unit of development) to focus on designing the game itself. While that certainly doesn't guarantee better gameplay, it does offer greater potential. All IMO, of course, as an armchair designer...
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On a related note, I'd like to see more support for the "open world" or "leveling game" experiences than content that drags out the experience for max-level characters who have gone well past the point where they should have been "retired."
Teaming should be worth doing - not "teaming" in the sense of the uncoordinated, highly transient, button-mashing messes that happen in GW or ESO, but in the sense of getting a group of people together that stays more or less consistent for an evening's session, giving them a chance to banter, get to know each other, and walk away with stories to tell tomorrow night's team.
Kill achievements. Kill guild rewards that come from grinding. Kill all the obviously artificial crap that 1) takes people out of the game to accomplish, or 2) puts people on carousels forever reaching for that brass ring. Games should be fun for their own sake - they shouldn't need to reward people with artificial titles or petty xp buffs or any of other crap that's become so widespread.
Some might say that CO captures a lot of the above, and that's a fair argument. However, this recalls my second point, that a "good" MMO might no longer be supportable in today's market. "Good" means "money," and in the current reality of F2P games and the rise of online arena games, it's tough for a MMO to get enough of the pie to allow meaningful development. It looks like CO is in the hole in that regard, and it's not alone.
That's about all I can say without getting to specifics - which opens up a whole other topic. Just to point to the tip of the iceberg, I think MMOs are technically capable of handling nearly the whole range of genres and formats we see from single-player games - but I really haven't seen any of them try (except in a very superficial sense).
In the end, though, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that anything that can be done in a MMO can probably be done better in a co-op or networked DIY game.
Your point about teaming seems kinda delusional. Why would people do that? or do you really think people secretly want to hang out with you in-game for hours?
Also... What do you think the game SHOULD be funded by? Hopes and dreams?
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Has the social element of MMOs become so boiled down that basic human interaction really seems that far-fetched? I guess I wasn't clear on my point that funding a good MMO is increasingly difficult in today's F2P/arena environment. Or maybe I didn't expressly state that the current market seems to support cash-grab design over quality and persistence. Regardless, I'm aware that MMOs require substantial money to develop and maintain. That's kind of the problem - the money isn't there anymore.
2: If you want to do that why are you PUGging?
3: sooo.... you dislike the current model but have no ideas as to how to make it better without killing it?
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1. The Focus has to be on the city.
The super hero genre, even with occasionally visiting vastly different locales, is still always centralized around one city for a group of super heroes. Batman has Gothem, Flash has Star City, most of the Marvel Universe has New York. Rare exceptions tend to go beyond that on a regular basis, such as Green Lantern and even he tends to hang out in Coast City more often than not.
As such, Millennium City needs to be fleshed out. It needs to be developed, it needs to not just simply have a bunch of samey buildings copy and pasted all over the place. Even if that means the city has to be broken up into its own individual zones to make it bigger and more sprawling and feel like a city. It needs to feel like its own character. It can't just be a location with a bunch of pretty pixels in it. People have to feel, even if they care little about the lore, that the location they are staring at has a history, that there is a reason it is just there, not because some artist said well I think it would look cool plopped here. People want to feel that Carl's Gym has weight and history behind it, but instead, it just looks like another block in MC with the name Carl's Gym on it (which funnily enough use to be Carlos before the West Side revamp).
This of course does not mean other zones should be de-emphasized. I think going to the wasteland to help out, or Snake Gulch, or Canada or other parts of the world is a cool thing and should not be ignored. That was one of CoH biggest flaws to that the city was too centralized. But MC can't just be another location because the city is as much apart of the hero as the hero is apart of the city and they both have to feel like they are apart of each other.
2. Maps should have been broken up and divided, or some way to figure out how to expand them appropriately of trying to squeeze as many locations together.
One of Champions Online's greatest weaknesses, and it can also be attributed to travel powers being way too fast, is that the zones feel too small, and they don't feel like they flow or are lived in or there is a story to be told. West Side you got Little Italy, China Town, a prison and a high school way too small to be a high school all crammed together in one location too small to fit it all. And West Side has much more rich history than the game gives as the redesign has essentially turned West Side into a poor Big Trouble in Little China story. While references are not bad, and people are just silly if they think that any game is free of referential material, it went overboard and the story did not feel proper to itself. For instance, there is no mention of The Freakshow in West Side, a cereal killer most noted for stalking victims after they see a horror movie.
Then of course there is the Ravenswood Academy. That poor school just slapped in the worst possible location just near the jet in the Ren Center, when that place is filled with so much lore and history. It should have been its own large zone with maybe social environments and quests, but instead it was just a bunch of generic builds that don't even match the environment they are in and it just so out of place now.
The Renaissance Center was poorly conceived as well. It has always been and always shall be a bad idea to try and centralize everything because of convenience. It causes poor design decisions. The fact there is no reason to leave the Ren Center because of that is disheartening in itself. It looks so terrible and gaudy, having tailors under awnings instead of their own buildings, or the fact that there are no proper looking stores. The Ren Center is suppose to look like a mall, but it doesn't. Earth Space Dock in Star Trek Online looks more like what the Ren Center should look like in Champions with the mall styles, club, elevated walkways, and other such things. And speaking of El's the lack of the El Train lines throughout the city just makes it look wrong to.
And finally, the biggest travesty, the fact there is so little of the city. Going by Champions you would think that what is there is all that is there for Millennium City proper. If you've never touched the lore books, you would never know there is a Belle Island, Rivertown, Theater District, Cultural Center, Memorial Park, Northside or any of the areas beyond. Each of them could be rich with lore and history and provide alternative ways to level easily. But instead the city itself is mashed together and everything is not where it should be. Downtown is in the wrong place, the Dr. Destroyer memorial should be Memorial Park, Homestead should be between Downtown, City Center and West Side, not next to the Ren Center, and so much more. Instead all of it was ruined for convenience and it killed the life and blood of such a world because convenience does not mean good.
3. The lore has to be apart of the world and not just haha funny stuff. You need reasons to care for the stuff and want to be apart of it.
Another big mistake was the skimpy treatment of the lore, as the devs just expected people to pic up the PnP to learn the true history. You can't do that. You have to give enough lore that people become interested. Expecting people to see a person, get little information about them, then expect them to pay more money to pick up a book to find out what is really going on is silly. A lot of people want to invest in the history and lore of the game, and not giving them much or giving reasons to learn anything is disheartening and one of the many reasons more modern games are not doing well. There is no reason to invest in what is before them.
If I meet an NPC I want to feel they are special and important, not just feel that hey, it's a quest giver and that's all that matters. Why should we care about Kodiak? Why should we put any time towards learning about Sapphire? While voice acting gives them a voice it doesn't give them a character or a reason to invest in them. Saying we are suppose to care about these characters is ridiculous non-sense when we don't have a reason to invest in them.
4. The social dynamic cannot be ignored.
Club Caprice is a terrible place and so is the VIP Lounge. Not because of the reasons people will say, but because they are terrible social locations. Club Caprice feels nothing like a club should, and the VIP lounge just feels like a hot mess as well with a bunch of conveniences for convenience sake thrown in. The rest of the locations that were meant to be social all suffer from the same problem. They are not very conducive to the social environment.
No matter what people may think, ignoring the social aspect of an MMO is just very bad. It should not have to be mentioned or repeated constantly that there has to be some locations devoted to the socialization of people. The RP community is much bigger than people give them credit for, and ignoring them just isn't conducive to a healthy game. They need variety as much as those that play the game to kill things. I think this is a factor that Star Trek Online got right, to some extent. ESD was fixed and made social, then you have Starfleet Academy, Vulcan, Andoria, DS9, Risa, Drosa, and many other locations in STO that offer that social environment, and during certain seasonal events something extra for the people that just game or even achievement hunters.
Champions needs this. Ren center, Club Caprice, the courthouse, and all the various locations need a desperate redesign and the social aspect of Champions needs to be brought up. People don't want to stay if they don't feel like socializing is possible.
Then of course there is the issue with Super Groups. Again people want to feel apart of something, like they belong. These Super Groups need something, to be able to expand and provide atmosphere as well. Hideouts also need to be improved and allowed to have great customization than they currently have.
5. Powers should have been made more focused and centralized.
This one will be a hugely controversial statement, I know that much, but the powers system is a mess. Power sets should have been made more focused and centralized, but instead a decision was made that instead of making power sets unique and feel full and well developed, it was decided because players could get a similar power effect from else where the freeform system was fine as it is. Now we got a cosmic mess of a power system that was originally intended to allow players to make builds and templates to be able to swap to specific duties for situations as they arose. And now Champions is currently suffering because people continue to be the inferior every man instead of more focused and the new content ends up feeling too hard for those people.
Each power set should have felt self sufficient able to be made tanky, damage, control or even support focused without having to go outside of it. While I know some concepts would suggest that their heroes would be less focused and more generalized, most heroes and villains are focused on a few powers in general. This creates a huge disconnect between what feels like a hero and just a character that is a collection of powers. Toggles should not be a thing, and the powers should feel more proactive and less reactive. You get effects from use, not standing there turning power X on.
6. The stat system should feel more like the PnP, and the information should be more clear.
Champions stats are a mess now. They should have stuck with the 10 through 100 and not have stats be influenced much, if at all, by the gear. Instead the secondaries should have been the primary focus, and the stats themselves should have only been Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Ego and Presence. Endurance and Recovery should have been something else entirely, secondary stats at best. And people should have been made to want to actually have mixed stats to balance out instead of focusing hardcore on singular stats they do now.
What a stat means should have been more clear and concise to. After all people get confused what 100% resistance means on their character sheet while still take gobs of damage. There should have been more emphasis on people making a choice of which stat to take as well instead of everyone having critical everyone having offense and everyone having defense and dodge. Dodge itself should have been better named, called Deflect instead, because it makes people think they can avoid damage completely with it when that's not what the stat is.
Anyways, there's more to it than that I will probably add more later.
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For CO 2.0, I'd recommend narrowing and abstracting power customization, predicated on primary and secondary roles (defense, offense, crowd control, healer, buff/debuff), but throw the options for visual customization wide open to compensate. Superhero games are character sandboxes, after all.
For example, consider a Ranged Attack With Knockback. Pretty simple right? But think of the visual options you could tie to that:
- A shaman conjuring a spirt wolf that charges and leaps at the target
- An archer firing a boxing glove arrow
- A martial artist "pushing air" in a concussive wave, with a visual distortion effect
- A Cyclops clone firing a red beam from his eyes
- A CoH vet feeling nostalgic and layering white fireballs with blue Kirby Dots.
(And don't tell the accountants this came from me, but the visual effects can be packaged the same way costumes and auras are.)You'd need modifiers on those powers, of course. You know, the classics: Fire DoTs, ice slows, radiation debuffs, electricity
overcompensates for how off-scale it was in your previous gameAoEs.I'm mostly pulling things back toward City of Heroes and Freedom Force, sure. But CO 1.0 has proven that build diversity demands more structure than Freeform provides.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
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Block timing explained
Because, like it or not, players do not always know what they are talking about or know what they want. And 5000 people all wanting something different doesn't work out. But player to dev interaction, and not just them talking or being here, would be something that is needed.
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7. Being a super hero does not mean the bad guys are push over.
Contrary to the popular belief, what makes most super heroes, super heroes is they are overcoming adversaries and situations that are greater than themselves. This does not mean the mooks are made impossible or hard, but this does mean that signature villains and tougher bad guys should be a credible threat to the characters in the game. This also means that environmental challenges need to also present a situation that is both challenging and, unique and fun. Repeating the same content with only a slightly different skin just isn't engaging because the tactics become old hat.
Speaking of, the bad guys need to do more than just stand around to. Being that we tend to handle stuff in first world countries with laws, the fact the worst crime we constantly beat up bad guys for is loitering needs to stop. They need to look like they are doing something, committing a crime or something or we need to have clues that they are in the process of committing a crime. Just standing there idling against a wall is not a big enough crime. Sure there should be idlers, because it fulfills the Batman part of shaking down lowlifes for information, but none of the criminals or mooks in Champions are doing anything other than loitering.
Finally, not all missions should be about beating up the bad guys. We should also have to do stealth missions or missions that require gathering intel. It's just as simple as that.
8. More hero based activities need to be involved instead of just the same old bad guy beat em up simulator.
Heroes need clues. Heroes need to do detective work and investigation stuff. The quest system where someone just hands something out just doesn't cut it. And while the whole investigation thing was tried with Nighthawk event, it just wasn't done right. Realistically, a quest system should be formed where heroes find clues to piece together and use a contact to get them leads to more clues on the missions. Missions should also be multi-step processes, with sides like helping a lady who is being mugged or preventing a car theft here and there, but over all the whole back and forth between a quest giver and unrelated missions is a huge disconnect. It's kind of silly that this aspect is lacking and has been lacking in every super hero MMO that has been released, when it is a very important aspect of the genre.
9. Developer interactivity with the community as a whole.
No, I don't mean just showing up and doing big bosses or running dungeons or just standing around being noticed in the middle of the Ren Center. I mean that developers need to get involved with community events or help promote storylines as they go. One of the biggest factors that I think gives MxO such a big amount of feels to those that played that MMO, was the devs interacted on a story level with the players. They would take the roles of various characters and help promote a storyline moving forward. Static scenarios and such do not help promote this feel and it makes a huge disconnect for people who want a human touch involved.
(more to come)
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In Mass Effect 2, Shepard starts off with facial scars from all the surgery needed to resurrect the character. If you went Renegade the scars could actually worsen (although you could also smooth them out with a device in the sickbay); going Paragon caused them to heal on their own. You also tend to get both different reactions from people and different dialog options, depending on where you were on the Paragon/Renegade balance, in each game. (There was a glitch in the original ME that let you max out both Renegade and Paragon points, opening all dialog paths in the game. IMO, that made it a lot more fun, although the grinding through the same conversation over and over to get those points could get boring.)
Ted, what Mark was doing is called "poking holes in your logic". Your posts seem to essentially be similar to the positions of many political radicals - "tear it all down" with no practical suggestions for how to rebuild it afterward. This sort of thing doesn't "just happen" - it has to be done.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Did my desire to have good, positive, social teaming experiences deserve to be called "delusional," for example? Is my preference for world-building over end-game design really that much of a "holy grail?" Did I indicate one way or another whether I PUGged, to what extent, and whether I thought the PUG experience had changed? When I pointed out that the cost of a good MMO might no longer be supportable in today's market, was it right or even meaningful to suggest that I thought MMOs could somehow be built on "hopes and dreams?"
I won't go over what I consider to be the constructive parts of my posts, in part because championshewolf did a better job of explaining a lot of 'em - and in part because I suspect it won't matter. However, I don't think it's destructive to point out the reality of the current market, and to suggest alternate formats for delivering a customizable superhero experience that might bear up a bit better than MMOs.
10. Roles, passives and blocking need to be completely rethought.
And by completely rethought I mean rebuilt basically. Roles should not be a switch you push, but instead should be determined by your set up and potentially passives you have slotted for your deck build. Passives themselves should not have been an end all be all of either defensive or offensive but provided boosts to your power set in general that affected whether you would be more tanky, do more damage or more focused on support and control. This is what would have encouraged build diversity, and encouraged people to experiment with certain builds and set ups. The system shouldn't have had passives named regeneration, invulnerability and so forth slapped in. That just makes people want to take those and end up being inferior in every way.
Finally, there's block. Let's be factual about this one ability; it has become the crutch of Champions. The new content is now centered around tanks holding block longer, instead of being used as a power for specific timing. Block should be helpful but not this powerful. It should not be allowed to be held down and kept up indefinitely to, and should have a stamina limit. In almost all super hero show downs where a hero is blocking and on the ropes they are usually straining to maintain whatever field they are using to protect themselves or others, especially against a heavy onslaught. Block should have been made a timing thing and avoiding or dodging other types of attacks should actually be the rule. it just isn't fun to conducive for tanks to be spending a majority of their time holding down the block button. This would make a stamina recovery passive for tanks more important to and encourage more build diversity.
11. Millennium City should be broken up into it's respective locations as individual zones and those zones made large and feel expansive.
To expand upon the fact the city needs to be the focus above, each section of MC (West Side, City Center, Downtown, Rivertown, etc) should be its own major zone. This way they could be given more size and feel more expansive to themselves and not feel like everything was crammed into a singular space.
This of course expands to the other zones as well, specifically the Desert. Wasteland, Snake Gulch, the Stronghold and so forth should not have been on the same map, at all. They should have been their own zones to focus more intently on their storylines and make them tighter. Of the three major locations, only the Wasteland feels the most fleshed out, and only by proxy that it was the most developed. But Snake Gulch and Burnside should have been together, to keep the theme. Talisman being the mastermind behind the irradiate uprising, when it was originally Gigaton and Shadow Destroyer's manipulation is just way out of place now, and creates a disjointed story. If anything VIPER should be removed from the Snake Gulch plotline and the robot uprising and Burnside should be handled by Talisman. And Talisman needs a larger role in the grand scheme anyways, since this is Witchcraft's sister.
12. Graphically, if Champions is going for the comic look, then it needs to add more of this look.
I think that is one thing people see, because the original graphics look so bare bones, people assume the rest is just as bad. And later graphical additions look out of place along side the old graphics as well. We aren't talking they need to be cutting edge, but if we are going for the comic look then it should look more comic bookie, like Borderlands, most TellTale games, No More Heroes, and games of that ilk. This would go a long way, and such.
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And playing by myself since Aug 2009
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In effect, what I'm saying is that CO-2, released as a MMO, would almost certainly fail harder than CO-1, so why not consider other formats that haven't bottomed out the way MMOs seem to have?
...
...eh, who am I kidding? I can't leave without playing your game... >:) I'm sorry you've never had a genuinely social teaming experience in this or any other MMO. I understand that sociability has become less valued by the gaming population over the years, and I regret that you aren't likely to experience the sort of fun I had in CoH, pre-Wrath WoW, or the original Guild Wars, to name a few.
There - how's that feel?
Note: as previously mentioned, "hopes and dreams" is not adequate.
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-the same comic like style graphics, but done better, something like tell tale games (wolf among us comes to mind)
-the same or even better character customization that CO has
-a cross between freeform and archetypes for power customization, we want to be able to customize them, but there's no need to have to select each and every skill individually.
-less campy than CO but more campy than DCUO, I want something that can be both serious and funny but not stupid jokes either.
-The most important, a way for players to make new content for others to play. this alone would be awesome to so many people!
What I'm thinking is that the development studio creates the game mechanics, the assets, and the tools to plug 'em together to create a decent, superhero-themed world (plus some starter templates). The community uses the toolkit to design their own levels or content. That last bit is key - content design isn't trivial, and if kept solely in the hands of a development studio, will proceed painfully slowly at great expense (or will devolve into fluffy cash-grabs). If a game is decent, however, and offers players the chance to play around with the world, there's no shortage of players who will happily do so for various reasons.
Strawman #2: I never said games of any kind weren't expensive to make. It's fair to ask where the money would come from, but clearly the question can be turned in the other direction - where would the money come from for CO-2? Not from Cryptic, certainly, and probably not from PWE...
No, I'm talking about potential return on investment, which has to be there before investors will come snooping around. MMOs just don't offer much promise of ROI anymore, compared to other game formats. But if you're going to equate "investor expectations" with "hopes and dreams," well, I guess there's nothing more to discuss. Strawman #3: I never said that I expected people I PUG with to become friends. However, it happened often enough "back in the day" that I was happy to PUG on the pretty good chance that I'd have a fun time with other people who also liked the social aspects of teaming. The "getting to know" bit happened naturally, as a result of normal, multi-lateral social interactions. Do you think I was spamming "Tell me about yourself" in group chat or something?
I'll grant, though, that I may have sour grapes on this point. Things changed at some point to make PUGging more convenient (LFG tools and auto-grouping, shorter and generally easier instances, etc.), but in the process, many of the social aspects inherent in PUGging were removed (e.g., having down-time to chat a bit, strategizing before the next boss, and so on). There's no reason to make friends on a PUG these days because any warm body is effectively as good as any other, and there's no time to make friends because things happen at a much faster pace. It seems like, for some folks, "other people" might as well be NPCs with slightly more unpredictable behavior. It's gotten to the point where simply saying "Hi" on joining a team can get you kicked.
And I'll admit, I don't really have a solution that couldn't be construed as anti-convenience, or as a desire to waste everyone's time. So I'll concede the point. PUGging should be a mechanical affair that has no goal other than to get that sweet, sweet loot.
But that said, MapHack was one of the most popular cheats on the D2 realms because people didn't actually LIKE to have to explore the dungeons they were looting... Random maps were great fun to explore when you weren't in a hurry. but only then.
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Isn't that the new thing all the cool kids play?
And we allready have fully fleshed heroes/villains to choose from. So no need to create your own.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
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They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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I've already explained this in my above posts. But let's go compare to Vanilla WoW to Vanilla TOR. Visually, sound wise and even dare say combat wise, TOR is the superior game, as those things were concerned at the time of TOR's release. However, all the pretty voice acting in the world still didn't give that game a soul or character, because you did not feel you were in a Star Wars world as much as you were being showcased showpieces, that had no weight, history or reasons to exist beyond they existed. You didn't care so much why that tomb was there as it was just another place to finish a quest to level up. Contrast it with WoW at the time, which was still riding high on the coat tails of Wrath of the Lich King and Vanilla where there was still a lot of soul and character in the game. While Cataclysm started the downward spire of WoW just making set pieces, people still felt like investing in the world at large, because there was weight and lore behind it all.
Every modern MMO keeps making set pieces but they do not try add character or soul to their game. It isn't because only WoW was the best, because while WoW has some good basics, the game as a whole is average. They took some things refined what the industry did, for their game, but they really didn't innovate beyond that. SWG, Matrix Online, City of Heroes, Ultima Online, are all memorable in the industry because they had a heart and soul, a character. Matrix Online and City of Heroes didn't really have innovative game play that made them interesting. Hell, City of Heroes was nothing more than a room of the mission event, with the only narrative even giving you a clue of what was going on was what a contact told you before and after a mission. There was precious little variety in that game play, but that isn't what people stayed for. There was a feeling that a history is there, and it felt homey, like it existed. You had an egg crate style city in Paragon, almost practically, but there was this weight of an actual history and it felt like it was crafted with love and care.
This is the heart of what draws people to stick with games. Modern MMOs don't do this anymore. In fact most just take a single player game slap MMO on it, and put little effort into giving people reasons to continue. If you don't give people a reason to invest in your game, people have little reason to stay with it.
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One of the things that Spar stirred up in my mind is sense of place. WoW and CoH had it, SWOTR and CO don't.
One of the reasons WoW feels more fully-realized is that it all belongs to Blizzard. They built Azeroth up from a series of square grid maps and RTS units rendered in 2D engines into two continents full of nooks and crannies that called back to events before and after the RTS stories. (Which is why the Old Draenor dead end as we transition from Warlords of Draenor to Legion is so disappointing. They got some of that old world-building magic back, then dropped it for more demon invasions on Azeroth.)
The Old Republic in general, however, was doomed from the start. Even the single-player games looked like an offshore knockoff of the Star Wars we knew from the movies. Bioware gave us all the trappings, but everything was slightly and arbitrarily different, by necessity, because it's set in the past. But it doesn't actually look older, just different, then we're told that it's some 3,000 years before A New Hope? It might as well be an alternate universe, almost identical yet entirely disconnected. It's all the parts of a Star Wars Lego set put together wrong. It just doesn't stand up to any scrutiny.
That's the difference between CoH and CO, too. It might have started out as a Champions PnP campaign, but CoH's lore grew a life of its own. Cryptic made the effort to build a timeline from the dawn of creation to millennia in the future, then wove that timeline into every aspect of the game's zones and quests.
I loved finding out that a statue had a plaque attached to it in CoH. I remember the one at the bridge in Independence Port. It was dedicated to a speedster who ran herself right out of existence trying to save as many people as she could from that very bridge when the 5th Column attacked the port in December 1941. Did she phase out of reality? Jump forward or backward in time? Slip into a parallel Earth? We never found out, but it was cool to think about.
The statues in RenCen are just there.
Icon was a chain of superhero clothing stores with locations all around Paragon City. In fact, almost all of the vendors in CoH were located in thematically appropriate retail stores.
CO has in-game service providers standing in the open to provide in-game services. At least they gave the tailors in RenCen a canopy after a while. It was originally a single NPC standing outside the door of the "blimp" building. "Greer & Harlick" inside the Powerhouse feels like an afterthought.
The boardwalk in Talos Island was named for early 20th century mayor of Paragon City "Spanky" Rabinowitz. He was based on Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, a real-life politcal insider and organized crime boss in Atlantic City. Johnson was also the basis for Nucky Thompson in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire.
CO smacks you with those damned Big Trouble in Little China and Anchorman parodies before you leave Westside.
And the sad thing is, Champions lore is so much deeper than this. Hell, it's deeper than CoH. We just haven't seen nearly enough of it. It's probably because it was a late change to the game, and Atari was going to keep Cryptic to their deadlines, so they had to cut corners at launch. Trouble is, they stopped going deeper after Vibora Bay, and we're left with a Millennium City that differs from the fake western town in Snake Gulch only in production values.
OK, this turned out to be more of a rant than I thought. It's on my mind, though, because the writers at Missing Worlds Media have been pumping out plenty of lore dumps and stories from City of Titans to bide time as the engineers perpetually spin their wheels in systems development. They're working on a webcomic, too. I think they understand well the difference between CoH and CO in world-building, and want to make sure CoT has that same sense of place CoH had.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Is CoT still a thing? I mean being alive point of view.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
What in the blue world? No Marvel Heroes is not a MOBA. It's not an MMO either. It's an online Diablo clone.
And CoT is still pretending to be a thing, but it's just spinning its tires for the most part. Will it ever come out and stop being vaporware? Who knows. Considering the number of big promises I've seen over the years from MMO designers, I am not going to put my faith in an indy company relying on volunteer time to get things done. The number of success stories in the MMO genre specifically in that department... well is kind of still zero. And not for lack of people trying since there have been dozens of indy volunteer MMO ideas thrown around over the years.
Silverspar on PRIMUS
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It sounds like what you really want is to look around and feel that you know why things belong where they are?
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in WoW and Gw2 there's lots of backstory to mostly every map, the NPCs talk about it, you find info about it ingame, like books, statue plates, memorials, etc...
In CO there isn't much of that, even though from what I have read, Champions lore is vast and diverse. but none of it reflects in the game. I think that's part of what adds to the "soul" of a game. lore, backstory, make a believable world and zones, and characters. give important characters reasons to be like they are. people don't want to go find a wiki to find that, they want to find it ingame.
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One is suppose to be Nimbus, one is suppose to be Jonny Hercule, one is suppose to be Amazing Grace, and one is suppose to be Vigil, but they are so ambiguous looking. I mean there is nothing to say who they are, except just random statues scattered around. And there is nothing that talks about the fact the Battle of Detroit's anniversary is July 23rd, and happened in 1992. In other words it has been 24 years since it happened both in lore and in the PnP.
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This point feels even more bizarre considering even @sistersilicon chimed in on it and gave her point of view of the matter, and I even posted a video for you on this.
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