Technically they split into Three. I dunno where Valliance came from, but Heroes and Villains split off from CoT due to differences in opinion or whatever, and yata yata. But people can't let go is the biggest answer. People believe they are the only ones who were passionate about their gone game, though I can show evidence to the contrary for games like SWG, Matrix Online, Earth and Beyond, WAR, etc. This firm belief that CoH was a special snowflake is often amusing.
Wasn't Valiance CoT? Thought they rebranded.
Also, add me firmly to the "bring back Matrix Online" list. That game was a horrible buggy mess, and I loved every minute of it. But, yeah, I hear you. I love this game, and you know what I'd do if it went away? Get really bummed for a few days, then probably switch over to Neverwinter or go back to the Secret World or something. 's just a video game, this happens to MMOs all the time. I feel like we wouldn't be here if it wasn't publicly stated that the game wasn't in the red when it closed, that takes it from "justifiable closure?" to "we was robbed".
And yeah, Mark. Freedom Force was great. We need a reboot, since a sequel's way too far past due.
In game, I am @EvilTaco. Happily killing purple gang members since May 2008. RIP Caine
Nope. Valiance Online and City of Titans were separate projects pretty much from the start, although they all came from the Plan Z movement when the City of Heroes closure was announced. Here's a cheat sheet:
Valiance Online:
Silverhelm Studios
Unity engine
Steam Greenlight
California, High-tech setting that sounds like "City of Heroes 2099"
Sticking closely to CoH play style
City of Titans:
Missing Worlds Media
Unreal Engine 4 (upgraded from UE3, started with a short Cryengine demo)
Kickstarter
Contemporary fictional city in New England (Sort of alt-Boston-ish)
Play style sounds like a synthesis of CoH and Champions Online
Heroes & Villains:
She Who Shall Not Be Named
A collection of Blender and Daz Studio projects
No apparent source of funding
No apparent play style
Started when SWSNBN was kicked out of CoT team before MWM was founded
Could be a game
Probably just the ravings of an unhinged crank who managed to get banned from Massively (which takes some effort)
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
And yeah, Mark. Freedom Force was great. We need a reboot, since a sequel's way too far past due.
It had certain bizarre quirks that needed fixed IMO, but the simple ability to customize powers was phenomenal! I still don't get why the game utterly lacked true healing powers. Everything that looked like a heal was either a set amount of bonus HP that you didn't get immediately, or transferred HP from one char to another.
But certain of the more interesting powers were just crazy.... The ability to clone enemies was a fun one. You could make like Telios and clone an army of enemies... but there was a weird glitch that caused this to reduce your mission score.
I'd have a much warmer opinion about Wastelands 2 if I did not have to deal with glitches or overall bad performance. Considering how average are graphics in this game you'd rather expect it not being a resource hog bigger than Divinity or Fallout 4, lol.
Wouldn't use this game to advocate any engine. On a technical level it's just bad. On a game design level it isn't anything great either. Too many skills does effectively the same, but are very narrow in scope when they can be applied, others are useless point sinks. All in a game where characters are usually short on skill points.
Divinity Original Sin is such a good game ^o^
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Also, add me firmly to the "bring back Matrix Online" list. That game was a horrible buggy mess, and I loved every minute of it.
If any game I felt didn't get a chance, I would say The Matrix Online was it. It was plagued by studio meddling from the start, and yea, it was a buggy mess, but the lore was rich and deep, and the developers got involved with the players with events and progressive in-game storylines. I know I never was contacted about it, but many players would get tells from prominent NPCs (liek Morpheus, the Merovigian, The Kid, etc) and it was canon events going on in game universe. While CoH the devs did interact with players, I remember Ghost Widow interacting with us a lot until that dev was caught up in a scandal, but they never interacted to the point that on-going stories or events would actually be played out in game. Honestly, I think the Matrix Online was the first modern game to offer a truly freeform system. (Modern being post 2004, as Ultima Online and SWG offered those as well). It wasn't until TSW we saw that again, but TSW is only a shell, realistically, of what the potential of the Matrix Online offered, as far as player to dev interactivity and a rich story universe. The world just felt carefully crafted with devotion and love, and the community was one of the best around. I know it probably wasn't, but MMO radio stations I felt became a big thing in MXO because they offered an in game way to play them.
I dunno, something about the Matrix world felt... lived in. Again it was a terrible, buggy mess a lot of the time, but that rich lore and history and the fact the devs dove in on it is what helped it. The xenophobic nature of CoH I dunno, I loved the lore and history and the feeling of the the Rogue Isles, but CoH players have a horrible case of Xenophobia when things to help their game are presented.
If I were to be brutally honest, I think that's one of the things against Champions right now. The lore just is not here. They put in the shell but don't give us some meat. They rode on this idea that we would just buy the Champions books, but that's not what gamers want. Even the most jaded person who doesn't care about lore will want to feel there is a story behind all these locations in game. Otherwise the game just feels like they threw in some buildings and called it done, to be blunt.
has anyone done an MMO where you can build your own powers?
The complexities and balance nightmares of that would probably be astronomical. While it would sound good on paper, look at how many people actively hunt for exploits, and obvious ones, and hide behind excuses of "well it is obviously intended" despite it being so clearly broken.
The xenophobic nature of CoH I dunno, I loved the lore and history and the feeling of the the Rogue Isles, but CoH players have a horrible case of Xenophobia when things to help their game are presented.
Superhero gamers have always seemed to be a defensive, combative lot. I think it was rooted in the close launches of CoH and WoW. Each game took their Everquest influence in divergent directions, but Blizzard's established reputation vs Cryptic's upstart status gave WoW's design decisions more weight. Over time, as WoW grew into a leviathan, "CoH is different" became "CoH is wrong", whether it was true or just perception. CoH loyalists started resenting being punched down at by legions of WoW casuals, and that eventually settled in as part of a general "all we got is us" culture. (Meanwhile, hindsight has led to MMO media posting annual "Why didn't anybody use these good ideas from CoH?" articles, and CO players seem to be punched down at by everybody.)
If I were to be brutally honest, I think that's one of the things against Champions right now. The lore just is not here. They put in the shell but don't give us some meat. They rode on this idea that we would just buy the Champions books, but that's not what gamers want. Even the most jaded person who doesn't care about lore will want to feel there is a story behind all these locations in game. Otherwise the game just feels like they threw in some buildings and called it done, to be blunt.
Champions lore is self-defeating in that regard. CoH isolated Paragon City's most war-ravaged area in Boomtown. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods were left mostly intact from the various Rikti invasions, so we can see old areas that aren't slums and the sites of old superhero exploits. Champions lore didn't even leave ruins of Detroit; Millennium City was rebuilt over it all. No wonder CO's Millennium City map looks like it was built by stitching together Steel Canyon, Brickstown, and a land-locked Founders Falls, and the only sign that heroes walked the streets before us are the statues outside the Battle of Detroit Museum.
(And for the record, CoT looks like it's following CoH's lead, based on the lore dumps I've seen so far: Titan City was hit by a massive hurricane sometime in the recent past, so parts of the city near the shoreline are shiny and modern, but it gets older as you head inland. My only question is which Big Bad got his hands on a weather machine, and what level range are they planning the big reveal for? )
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Over time, as WoW grew into a leviathan, "CoH is different" became "CoH is wrong"
Hah, we've even seen this stupid line of reasoning in action here on our very own forums where people try to say that because CO isn't like WoW in some way that it is objectively failing, despite the fact that there are legions of WoW-clones that tried to be just like WoW, the next WoW, or a WoW-killer, that didn't amount to anything worth looking at.
Champions lore is self-defeating in that regard. CoH isolated Paragon City's most war-ravaged area in Boomtown. Meanwhile, other neighborhoods were left mostly intact from the various Rikti invasions, so we can see old areas that aren't slums and the sites of old superhero exploits. Champions lore didn't even leave ruins of Detroit; Millennium City was rebuilt over it all. No wonder CO's Millennium City map looks like it was built by stitching together Steel Canyon, Brickstown, and a land-locked Founders Falls, and the only sign that heroes walked the streets before us are the statues outside the Battle of Detroit Museum.
(And for the record, CoT looks like it's following CoH's lead, based on the lore dumps I've seen so far: Titan City was hit by a massive hurricane sometime in the recent past, so parts of the city near the shoreline are shiny and modern, but it gets older as you head inland. My only question is which Big Bad got his hands on a weather machine, and what level range are they planning the big reveal for? )
Actually I will disagree with that, and CoT's lore leaves me exceptionally uninterested, and the maps I've seen of that game even more so. While I wish Champions was centered around MC and MC was made bigger (there is more to MC than what we have after all) what CoT is doing is not really better or learning anything. In this case CoT reminds me of them just trying to mash everything together and hope it sticks. There is more to lived in than just looking old, after all everything in West Side looks old and broken down. There has to be that feeling that there is a reason this building is here, or there is a reason that this spot is important.
If you compare CO Millennium City to the actual game book you will find there is practically no similarities. While some of that can be blamed on the limitations of the zone, I think it was a huge mistake for them to just make one zone. Millennium City is comprised of many areas and locations each with interesting things. For instance, in West Side, I bet few if any here know about The Freakshow. A serial killer that stalks down people after they watch a horror movie in West Side.
And that is honestly another thing that hurts the feeling of MC being a city... everything was crunched down into a centralized space. This is and has always been a bad and terrible idea. Having all vendors all conveniences located in one spot in the city. That removes any sense of exploration and wanting to get out there and find things. I would prefer to go to a building in west side to use the tailor in a place that looks like a tailor would exist instead of under an awning in the Ren Center. And the Ren Center looks nothing like what it should look like either, even compared to the real life version. It's sloppy.
A lot more needs to be done, and honestly both Star Trek Online and Neverwinter suffer this problem as well. I don't feel apart of it over there, even less so in those games because they actively discourage any sense of what was this place about. If I go to Carl's Gym, I want Carl's Gym to make me go to myself "I wonder what came before this place, and who is Carl, and how long has he ran this gym?" Instead, you don't even know who Carl is, other than the place being named for him, there is no posters, no sign of a character named Carl, and if there is, he is so minute he is unnoticeable.
This is probably the major part that helped CoH out, as far as the eyes of people that still pine for it. Same with MxO cause I know I still think of that game. The NPCs were front and center, even if they were only minor characters. You still knew about them. Penelope Yin, after all, in Issue 8 was probably not going to be some major character, but she got big and people were interested in her, and all the sudden she was a big part in Issue 10 and then later slated to be put in the Freedom Phalanx (though personally, how that whole story line was handled sounded like spite from Positron anyways).
Champions it just makes no sense because it just looks like it was not given any thought in its design and things were just placed for convenience rather than if it would feel right. I mean, no one thinks of Defender, even though he's right there. With computers and servers out in the middle of the weather. Seriously who does that?
I want a re-visioning project, honestly, for Champions lore, the city of Millennium City itself and I want the whole city expanded. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, because it would take manpower that the bean counters don't want to devote. A game can come back from oblivion, there are many in history that have done it. But these days taking that risk is not done anymore it seems, even though the pay off could be monumental.
>A lot more needs to be done, and honestly both Star Trek Online and Neverwinter suffer this problem as well.
Neverwinter especially. I wanted to love that game. I really enjoy the combat. But the pricing system is off-putting (a bag is HOW MUCH?) and the whole world feels like a theme park. It's The Witcher 3 syndrome: You can tell me the best story on the planet, but it won't matter much if all I see is the same 4 guys standing in a little group repeating the same 2 lines of dialog. I'm not in the world, the world is window dressing for me to experience. CO sadly has this syndrome to a pretty sad degree, NPCs might as well be cardboard cutouts. Cryptic's always had an issue with making worlds that feel a bit static.
If we're gonna talk "ways to tie in the lore and immerse people into the world of an MMO", Secret World is like the high water mark. Say what you will about it, their quests to do research about what's going on in the area around you are fantastic. Really ties you into the world, and makes you interested in the history. It amazes me that in the super hero genre, rife with characters like the Batman and Daredevil, we do precisely 0% research about anything in the whole game. We get the voiceovers telling us what an area is, but what the heck. Why not give us a few quests to find that stuff out?
The "why doesn't defender get an overhang" thing has bugged me for a while. It's goddamn Detroit, you wouldn't really wanna chill out in an outside kiosk in December over there.
In game, I am @EvilTaco. Happily killing purple gang members since May 2008. RIP Caine
Marvel put this game on the back foot the moment it pulled out of Fight Club, and Cryptic has never recovered. But backfilling Champions lore is just one more thing to throw on CO's towering pile of "Stuff Cryptic never doubles back on because they are charging full speed ahead into The Next Game".
The only hope I feel CO has for an overhaul is PWE's push for consoles. Between the lost Xbox 360 port of Marvel Universe/CO and all of the work done to port STO and NW to XB1 and PS4, there's no technical reason CO can't make the leap. The biggest problem is this Superfriends setting at the game's core. Even though later/endgame content gets more serious (the adventure packs, Vibora Bay, the Mechanon arc), you still start out getting smacked in the face with a city that's so themepark, it looks like it was built by Disney.
The good news is that it's doable, both in MMO and lore terms. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn shows how a studio can reboot a struggling game. And what would a comic book franchise be without a Parallel Universes Collide! story arc? You want Champions lore? Empress V'Han is right there, waiting to bust everything up. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out that defeating Shadow Destroyer in Resistance creates a power vacuum that gives V'Han an uncontested beachhead in Multifaria, for example? So after an epic final battle event (and a few days of downtime), all of our PC player characters wake up in the "Ultimates" universe built to give console players a better world to start in.
Or they port it as-is, and CO's reputation and DCUO fight over the carcass.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Taco, I'm totally stealing that for the next time the jagoffs are being jagoffs on Massively OP.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
has anyone done an MMO where you can build your own powers?
The complexities and balance nightmares of that would probably be astronomical. While it would sound good on paper, look at how many people actively hunt for exploits, and obvious ones, and hide behind excuses of "well it is obviously intended" despite it being so clearly broken.
I mention it for a specific reason..... Freedom Force had that. It had a system where it'd calculate the cost of a power based on the stats you chose. Doubling the damage of a power would double the cost, increased range would also increase the cost. Yeah, you could tweak things in all sorts of ways, and there was all sorts of min-maxing you could do.
If you turned several things to max... you could make powers that cost hundreds of thousands of points. For comparison the game had a ceiling on the number of points a character could cost to be used in multiplayer.... 6000.... that's actually less than the points required to make a character with all the stats turned all the way up(about 10k).
Now if only I could figure out how to make screenshots of it....
I mention it for a specific reason..... Freedom Force had that. It had a system where it'd calculate the cost of a power based on the stats you chose. Doubling the damage of a power would double the cost, increased range would also increase the cost. Yeah, you could tweak things in all sorts of ways, and there was all sorts of min-maxing you could do.
If you turned several things to max... you could make powers that cost hundreds of thousands of points. For comparison the game had a ceiling on the number of points a character could cost to be used in multiplayer.... 6000.... that's actually less than the points required to make a character with all the stats turned all the way up(about 10k).
Now if only I could figure out how to make screenshots of it....
This is an MMO. Where as a single player game things like balance aren't exactly the mainstay of the day, an MMO just doubling the cost is not really prohibitive of people making builds that would essentially one shot everything. If you want a prime example of this, TSW's PvP system was monumentally screwed up because of the one build. I don't know if they ever fixed the problem, but if you didn't play the one build in TSW PvP you were constantly one shotted by it. Even from a PvE stand point, as fun as that might be, many people prefer to have their build challenged. But another issue right now, is challenged is different from what the goals seem to be as damage goes through the roof.
I mention it for a specific reason..... Freedom Force had that. It had a system where it'd calculate the cost of a power based on the stats you chose. Doubling the damage of a power would double the cost, increased range would also increase the cost. Yeah, you could tweak things in all sorts of ways, and there was all sorts of min-maxing you could do.
If you turned several things to max... you could make powers that cost hundreds of thousands of points. For comparison the game had a ceiling on the number of points a character could cost to be used in multiplayer.... 6000.... that's actually less than the points required to make a character with all the stats turned all the way up(about 10k).
Now if only I could figure out how to make screenshots of it....
This is an MMO. Where as a single player game things like balance aren't exactly the mainstay of the day, an MMO just doubling the cost is not really prohibitive of people making builds that would essentially one shot everything. If you want a prime example of this, TSW's PvP system was monumentally screwed up because of the one build. I don't know if they ever fixed the problem, but if you didn't play the one build in TSW PvP you were constantly one shotted by it. Even from a PvE stand point, as fun as that might be, many people prefer to have their build challenged. But another issue right now, is challenged is different from what the goals seem to be as damage goes through the roof.
That's just it though.... that style of system in an MMO wouldn't let you make a 300K power. Actually that one power I made could level a city block... yeah I actually designed it to cause absurd collateral damage. As an actual combat power it wasn't that great. It was the impact spawn thing that was dumb. It is 285773 points with impact spawn(4 spawns). removing that drops it to 71555. Removing Chained(which causes it to hit a second target) drops from 285773 to 142887. removing Homing(tracks target) drops from 285773 to 95258. Removing all three drops to 11908.
For more data, this is a Projectile power. Options are: Melee(PB powers, that may or may not be single target), Projectile, Beam, Cone, Area(AoE centered on you), Direct(single target powers that have no travel time), Active Defense, Passive Defense, Special(anything that doesn't fit into the above, they lack customizability).
Damaging abilities have a standard set of options, Damage Type, Magnitude, Energy Cost, Stun, Knockback, Range. Some also have Accuracy, Angle, Velocity, and/or Radius.
You can also choose animations... the length of the animation actually influences how often you can use the power and thus affects the cost of the power as well.
Of course there will be min-maxing, that's inherent to customizability, the trick is to have a variety of things that are viable.
To make things worst, the folks are going into Steam soon. Unless they have some serious unimplemented tech and developers, Steam release will be a $hit show.
My take......
CoT folks have no idea what they are doing, therefore release a ton of dumb story lore bs.
VO does know what they are doing, but do not have the resources to do it.
CO-2 or DCUO2 is the best hope for a solid MMO imo. Cot and VO "games" will be in pre-alpha in 2018.
What do you mean soon? They've been on steam greenlight now for over a year.
If they are pushing to launch that fast, yea, I can't see how they plan to have a working game then. The alpha is just a hideous mess, and incomplete. The 3d models are attrocious and ugh.
I mean, 'pre-alpha' could mean at just about any stage in development, but generally speaking you don't make stuff visible to the public until it's a bit better than that...
CO is the standard for customization, they have their work cut out to compete with this. I want to try out the combat and power-sets. If they are not lying about those pet creation features, I will get my four legged creation system after all lol.
If they have constant content updates that'd impress me more than if their customization matches CO. Content is something this game sorely lacks.
If your base game doesn't impress me I don't care if you come out with new content every day of the year - a large amount of unremarkable content is still just unremarkable content.
To make things worst, the folks are going into Steam soon. Unless they have some serious unimplemented tech and developers, Steam release will be a $hit show.
My take......
CoT folks have no idea what they are doing, therefore release a ton of dumb story lore bs.
VO does know what they are doing, but do not have the resources to do it.
CO-2 or DCUO2 is the best hope for a solid MMO imo. Cot and VO "games" will be in pre-alpha in 2018.
so, let me get this right. One of the spiritual successors seems to be a close copy and the other is way behind production
Essentially. Close copy is being a generous term to. Taking the skins and just slapping a new name on it, if it wasn't for the fact they have what looks to be new art assets and terrible 3d models I would have said they ported directly, though, if I was understanding one of my friends that played the game before it was the public pre-alpha, they had carbon copied Atlas park in there at one point.
As for the other game, way behind schedule is a vast under exaggeration. Last I checked they were still trying to figure out how to get animations hooked up properly just for travel powers. (I dunno if they ever fixed that, but it gets sickening every time you look all you read is bash after bash for Champions as if we were the reason their beloved old game went away.)
I don't think it's fare to compare a fantasy RPG pre-alpha to a super-hero pre-alpha, I can buy all the fantasy RPG crap I want for cheap, including the whole RPGMMO framework if I wanted to, for under $5,000 I'd have all the essential fantasy RPG elements, ready to put together. Hell, for the Unreal Engine I can download $3 million worth of RPG assets for free from Epic games.
Super hero stuff? Not so much of that around that isn't licensed material.
I don't think it's fare to compare a fantasy RPG pre-alpha to a super-hero pre-alpha, I can buy all the fantasy RPG crap I want for cheap, including the whole RPGMMO framework if I wanted to, for under $5,000 I'd have all the essential fantasy RPG elements, ready to put together. Hell, for the Unreal Engine I can download $3 million worth of RPG assets for free from Epic games.
Super hero stuff? Not so much of that around that isn't licensed material.
Super hero is just modern fantasy. To say otherwise is being a bit silly.
I don't think it's fare to compare a fantasy RPG pre-alpha to a super-hero pre-alpha, I can buy all the fantasy RPG crap I want for cheap, including the whole RPGMMO framework if I wanted to, for under $5,000 I'd have all the essential fantasy RPG elements, ready to put together. Hell, for the Unreal Engine I can download $3 million worth of RPG assets for free from Epic games.
Super hero stuff? Not so much of that around that isn't licensed material.
Super hero is just modern fantasy. To say otherwise is being a bit silly.
However, the graphical requirements differ. While technically there's very little difference between Superman leaping buildings in a single bound and a wizard's Flight spell, they're liable to look very different in practice, due to the differences between genre conventions. (I mean, a Wand of Magic Missile effectively functions in much the same fashion as a Glock-17 - but you're going to want to use very different animations for the two attacks...)
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
However, the graphical requirements differ. While technically there's very little difference between Superman leaping buildings in a single bound and a wizard's Flight spell, they're liable to look very different in practice, due to the differences between genre conventions. (I mean, a Wand of Magic Missile effectively functions in much the same fashion as a Glock-17 - but you're going to want to use very different animations for the two attacks...)
Bad example. Gun assets aren't in short supply either.
I don't think it's fare to compare a fantasy RPG pre-alpha to a super-hero pre-alpha, I can buy all the fantasy RPG crap I want for cheap, including the whole RPGMMO framework if I wanted to, for under $5,000 I'd have all the essential fantasy RPG elements, ready to put together. Hell, for the Unreal Engine I can download $3 million worth of RPG assets for free from Epic games.
Super hero stuff? Not so much of that around that isn't licensed material.
Super hero is just modern fantasy. To say otherwise is being a bit silly.
However, the graphical requirements differ. While technically there's very little difference between Superman leaping buildings in a single bound and a wizard's Flight spell, they're liable to look very different in practice, due to the differences between genre conventions. (I mean, a Wand of Magic Missile effectively functions in much the same fashion as a Glock-17 - but you're going to want to use very different animations for the two attacks...)
On the other hand...
"Horror-fantasy" Diablo III mages have better looking beamspam than a superhero game. (Yeah, I'm jealous.) The Demon Hunter class wields pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles that just happened to have "crossbow" and "hand crossbow" skins. With enough ingenuity, you can re-purpose anything. You're still on your own for spandex, though.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Character models are the simple part, though. Time consuming it might be, but not an arcane knowledge by any means. But if you're talking spandex, then one body base could be reskinned ad infinitum.
Character models are the simple part, though. Time consuming it might be, but not an arcane knowledge by any means. But if you're talking sapndex, then one body base could be reskinned ad infinitum.
With experience maybe, but we are talking about fans doing this in their spare time.
I don't know, it seems strange to me to release that kind of thing with a smile, cause while they're making robo hands and hyping themselves over it they're not making the game but they justify that it's going to make an amazing cosplay and uuh that will be good publicity for their game in the future.
"Science teaches us to expect -- demand -- more than just eerie mysteries. What use is a puzzle that can't be solved? Patience is fine, but I'm not going to stop asking the universe to make sense!"
One person has a side project, and… oh, eff it. I'm wasting my time.
Choose your enemies carefully, because they will define you / Make them interesting, because in some ways they will mind you
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Comments
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My characters
Also, add me firmly to the "bring back Matrix Online" list. That game was a horrible buggy mess, and I loved every minute of it. But, yeah, I hear you. I love this game, and you know what I'd do if it went away? Get really bummed for a few days, then probably switch over to Neverwinter or go back to the Secret World or something. 's just a video game, this happens to MMOs all the time. I feel like we wouldn't be here if it wasn't publicly stated that the game wasn't in the red when it closed, that takes it from "justifiable closure?" to "we was robbed".
And yeah, Mark. Freedom Force was great. We need a reboot, since a sequel's way too far past due.
RIP Caine
Valiance Online:
- Silverhelm Studios
- Unity engine
- Steam Greenlight
- California, High-tech setting that sounds like "City of Heroes 2099"
- Sticking closely to CoH play style
City of Titans:- Missing Worlds Media
- Unreal Engine 4 (upgraded from UE3, started with a short Cryengine demo)
- Kickstarter
- Contemporary fictional city in New England (Sort of alt-Boston-ish)
- Play style sounds like a synthesis of CoH and Champions Online
Heroes & Villains:They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
But certain of the more interesting powers were just crazy.... The ability to clone enemies was a fun one. You could make like Telios and clone an army of enemies... but there was a weird glitch that caused this to reduce your mission score.
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My characters
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
If any game I felt didn't get a chance, I would say The Matrix Online was it. It was plagued by studio meddling from the start, and yea, it was a buggy mess, but the lore was rich and deep, and the developers got involved with the players with events and progressive in-game storylines. I know I never was contacted about it, but many players would get tells from prominent NPCs (liek Morpheus, the Merovigian, The Kid, etc) and it was canon events going on in game universe. While CoH the devs did interact with players, I remember Ghost Widow interacting with us a lot until that dev was caught up in a scandal, but they never interacted to the point that on-going stories or events would actually be played out in game. Honestly, I think the Matrix Online was the first modern game to offer a truly freeform system. (Modern being post 2004, as Ultima Online and SWG offered those as well). It wasn't until TSW we saw that again, but TSW is only a shell, realistically, of what the potential of the Matrix Online offered, as far as player to dev interactivity and a rich story universe. The world just felt carefully crafted with devotion and love, and the community was one of the best around. I know it probably wasn't, but MMO radio stations I felt became a big thing in MXO because they offered an in game way to play them.
I dunno, something about the Matrix world felt... lived in. Again it was a terrible, buggy mess a lot of the time, but that rich lore and history and the fact the devs dove in on it is what helped it. The xenophobic nature of CoH I dunno, I loved the lore and history and the feeling of the the Rogue Isles, but CoH players have a horrible case of Xenophobia when things to help their game are presented.
If I were to be brutally honest, I think that's one of the things against Champions right now. The lore just is not here. They put in the shell but don't give us some meat. They rode on this idea that we would just buy the Champions books, but that's not what gamers want. Even the most jaded person who doesn't care about lore will want to feel there is a story behind all these locations in game. Otherwise the game just feels like they threw in some buildings and called it done, to be blunt.
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The complexities and balance nightmares of that would probably be astronomical. While it would sound good on paper, look at how many people actively hunt for exploits, and obvious ones, and hide behind excuses of "well it is obviously intended" despite it being so clearly broken.
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(And for the record, CoT looks like it's following CoH's lead, based on the lore dumps I've seen so far: Titan City was hit by a massive hurricane sometime in the recent past, so parts of the city near the shoreline are shiny and modern, but it gets older as you head inland. My only question is which Big Bad got his hands on a weather machine, and what level range are they planning the big reveal for?
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
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Actually I will disagree with that, and CoT's lore leaves me exceptionally uninterested, and the maps I've seen of that game even more so. While I wish Champions was centered around MC and MC was made bigger (there is more to MC than what we have after all) what CoT is doing is not really better or learning anything. In this case CoT reminds me of them just trying to mash everything together and hope it sticks. There is more to lived in than just looking old, after all everything in West Side looks old and broken down. There has to be that feeling that there is a reason this building is here, or there is a reason that this spot is important.
If you compare CO Millennium City to the actual game book you will find there is practically no similarities. While some of that can be blamed on the limitations of the zone, I think it was a huge mistake for them to just make one zone. Millennium City is comprised of many areas and locations each with interesting things. For instance, in West Side, I bet few if any here know about The Freakshow. A serial killer that stalks down people after they watch a horror movie in West Side.
And that is honestly another thing that hurts the feeling of MC being a city... everything was crunched down into a centralized space. This is and has always been a bad and terrible idea. Having all vendors all conveniences located in one spot in the city. That removes any sense of exploration and wanting to get out there and find things. I would prefer to go to a building in west side to use the tailor in a place that looks like a tailor would exist instead of under an awning in the Ren Center. And the Ren Center looks nothing like what it should look like either, even compared to the real life version. It's sloppy.
A lot more needs to be done, and honestly both Star Trek Online and Neverwinter suffer this problem as well. I don't feel apart of it over there, even less so in those games because they actively discourage any sense of what was this place about. If I go to Carl's Gym, I want Carl's Gym to make me go to myself "I wonder what came before this place, and who is Carl, and how long has he ran this gym?" Instead, you don't even know who Carl is, other than the place being named for him, there is no posters, no sign of a character named Carl, and if there is, he is so minute he is unnoticeable.
This is probably the major part that helped CoH out, as far as the eyes of people that still pine for it. Same with MxO cause I know I still think of that game. The NPCs were front and center, even if they were only minor characters. You still knew about them. Penelope Yin, after all, in Issue 8 was probably not going to be some major character, but she got big and people were interested in her, and all the sudden she was a big part in Issue 10 and then later slated to be put in the Freedom Phalanx (though personally, how that whole story line was handled sounded like spite from Positron anyways).
Champions it just makes no sense because it just looks like it was not given any thought in its design and things were just placed for convenience rather than if it would feel right. I mean, no one thinks of Defender, even though he's right there. With computers and servers out in the middle of the weather. Seriously who does that?
I want a re-visioning project, honestly, for Champions lore, the city of Millennium City itself and I want the whole city expanded. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, because it would take manpower that the bean counters don't want to devote. A game can come back from oblivion, there are many in history that have done it. But these days taking that risk is not done anymore it seems, even though the pay off could be monumental.
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Neverwinter especially. I wanted to love that game. I really enjoy the combat. But the pricing system is off-putting (a bag is HOW MUCH?) and the whole world feels like a theme park. It's The Witcher 3 syndrome: You can tell me the best story on the planet, but it won't matter much if all I see is the same 4 guys standing in a little group repeating the same 2 lines of dialog. I'm not in the world, the world is window dressing for me to experience. CO sadly has this syndrome to a pretty sad degree, NPCs might as well be cardboard cutouts. Cryptic's always had an issue with making worlds that feel a bit static.
If we're gonna talk "ways to tie in the lore and immerse people into the world of an MMO", Secret World is like the high water mark. Say what you will about it, their quests to do research about what's going on in the area around you are fantastic. Really ties you into the world, and makes you interested in the history. It amazes me that in the super hero genre, rife with characters like the Batman and Daredevil, we do precisely 0% research about anything in the whole game. We get the voiceovers telling us what an area is, but what the heck. Why not give us a few quests to find that stuff out?
The "why doesn't defender get an overhang" thing has bugged me for a while. It's goddamn Detroit, you wouldn't really wanna chill out in an outside kiosk in December over there.
RIP Caine
Marvel put this game on the back foot the moment it pulled out of Fight Club, and Cryptic has never recovered. But backfilling Champions lore is just one more thing to throw on CO's towering pile of "Stuff Cryptic never doubles back on because they are charging full speed ahead into The Next Game".
The only hope I feel CO has for an overhaul is PWE's push for consoles. Between the lost Xbox 360 port of Marvel Universe/CO and all of the work done to port STO and NW to XB1 and PS4, there's no technical reason CO can't make the leap. The biggest problem is this Superfriends setting at the game's core. Even though later/endgame content gets more serious (the adventure packs, Vibora Bay, the Mechanon arc), you still start out getting smacked in the face with a city that's so themepark, it looks like it was built by Disney.
The good news is that it's doable, both in MMO and lore terms. Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn shows how a studio can reboot a struggling game. And what would a comic book franchise be without a Parallel Universes Collide! story arc? You want Champions lore? Empress V'Han is right there, waiting to bust everything up. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out that defeating Shadow Destroyer in Resistance creates a power vacuum that gives V'Han an uncontested beachhead in Multifaria, for example? So after an epic final battle event (and a few days of downtime), all of our PC player characters wake up in the "Ultimates" universe built to give console players a better world to start in.
Or they port it as-is, and CO's reputation and DCUO fight over the carcass.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
RIP Caine
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
If you turned several things to max... you could make powers that cost hundreds of thousands of points. For comparison the game had a ceiling on the number of points a character could cost to be used in multiplayer.... 6000.... that's actually less than the points required to make a character with all the stats turned all the way up(about 10k).
Now if only I could figure out how to make screenshots of it....
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This is an MMO. Where as a single player game things like balance aren't exactly the mainstay of the day, an MMO just doubling the cost is not really prohibitive of people making builds that would essentially one shot everything. If you want a prime example of this, TSW's PvP system was monumentally screwed up because of the one build. I don't know if they ever fixed the problem, but if you didn't play the one build in TSW PvP you were constantly one shotted by it. Even from a PvE stand point, as fun as that might be, many people prefer to have their build challenged. But another issue right now, is challenged is different from what the goals seem to be as damage goes through the roof.
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For more data, this is a Projectile power. Options are: Melee(PB powers, that may or may not be single target), Projectile, Beam, Cone, Area(AoE centered on you), Direct(single target powers that have no travel time), Active Defense, Passive Defense, Special(anything that doesn't fit into the above, they lack customizability).
Damaging abilities have a standard set of options, Damage Type, Magnitude, Energy Cost, Stun, Knockback, Range. Some also have Accuracy, Angle, Velocity, and/or Radius.
You can also choose animations... the length of the animation actually influences how often you can use the power and thus affects the cost of the power as well.
Of course there will be min-maxing, that's inherent to customizability, the trick is to have a variety of things that are viable.
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What do you mean soon? They've been on steam greenlight now for over a year.
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Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
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Essentially. Close copy is being a generous term to. Taking the skins and just slapping a new name on it, if it wasn't for the fact they have what looks to be new art assets and terrible 3d models I would have said they ported directly, though, if I was understanding one of my friends that played the game before it was the public pre-alpha, they had carbon copied Atlas park in there at one point.
As for the other game, way behind schedule is a vast under exaggeration. Last I checked they were still trying to figure out how to get animations hooked up properly just for travel powers. (I dunno if they ever fixed that, but it gets sickening every time you look all you read is bash after bash for Champions as if we were the reason their beloved old game went away.)
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Super hero stuff? Not so much of that around that isn't licensed material.
Super hero is just modern fantasy. To say otherwise is being a bit silly.
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- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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On the other hand...
"Horror-fantasy" Diablo III mages have better looking beamspam than a superhero game. (Yeah, I'm jealous.) The Demon Hunter class wields pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles that just happened to have "crossbow" and "hand crossbow" skins. With enough ingenuity, you can re-purpose anything. You're still on your own for spandex, though.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
With experience maybe, but we are talking about fans doing this in their spare time.
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My super cool CC build and how to use it.
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My super cool CC build and how to use it.
(°∇° ) #megalodon2015
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(°∇° ) #megalodon2015
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- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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...pretty sure that means now we're all doomed.
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They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends