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What is the Arc Client?
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‘Secret’ City of Heroes emulator
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My super cool CC build and how to use it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
They were so happy, and I'm happy for them.
I heard the test server they put together had between 500 and 1000 putting it through hell. Took a while to get in (seriously, it's not stable yet) and when I ran around Atlas Park and the Sewer System is was smooth. Got an electric/kinetic corruptor to level 6 before attempting a door mission crashed me out.
That's unfortunate. Their server isn't even a sure thing and they've already turned on us.
I am intrigued by those servers, but I am waiting to hear from NCSOFT before jumping in. The ones really shaking in their boots is the CoH projects. They spend the better half of 6 or so years doing nothing. So much of nothing, that a shutdown title has come back and beat them to the punch.
I'm glad that opinions aren't being bandied about as some sort of fact.
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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And no, CoX was never as good as CO is.
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=Pieces of Stuff=Knock Dead=Cruel Yule=Cremator=Toys from the Attic=
=Gnosis Arcanum=Twenty Seven=Kama D=Critic=Creep Freeze=
=Mangled Man=G.I. John Doe=2D.=Lung the punch drunk monk=
=By the sword=Scild Truma=Shadow Puppet=Lu-7=Erysichthon=
=Nimravid=Buzzard Kill=Lorenzini=Schema=
Well, it was a fun 8 hours while it lasted.
What's odd to me is to listen to/read all of the old players so dismissive about the potential theft of someone else's property. Consensus from a lot of folk is that it's OK the code was stolen/used without permission simply because they hate NCSoft - not to mention any security breach issues with personal account data.
I despise NCSoft as much as anyone else and will never support them in any way ever again, but I don't condone theft of their property. TBH I hope the inevitable cease and desist comes soon.
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Well the server got shut down and the guy running it is talking about getting ready for tons of legal trouble, like years worth and whatever. It might be he shut it down to cover his butt and is just playing up the legal trouble to make it seem like he's heroically taking a bullet for everyone since there's nothing official that any legal action has even been taken though. Or maybe he's shutting it down so he can restart it in a month with much tighter controls on who's getting invited. Well either way, it's been shut down for now.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
First off lets talk costume creator. Nothing makes you appreciate how good a thing you got in CO when trying to make a look in CoH when you are used to CO's modern costume creator. CO lets me put two hairs on my head for crissake. CO has everything alphabetized (OH GOD THANK YOU). CO lets me combine anything and everything almost even if it doesn't look good and lets me the player decide how to sort it out. CO has a search function.
Power selection is a mixed bag. Both games have holes in their selection of powers. City of Heroes has energy blast which has energy torrent and you can now go home you got the most satisfying power in the game: a **** slap with range and knockback and awesome effects. Champions online has yet to offer me something to fill that energy blast shaped hole in my heart. Champions online though has celestial, which may not be optimal for attack and whatnot but I like the cut of its aesthetic jib. City of heroes has plant control and healing. Champions online has never given us plants outside of a vine swing. CO Devs, gib plants plox. CO does have wind though which emulates that enemy chucking hurricane power in one of its moves, whether you like it or not, actually you can just stop using the CO power on the last tick to not toss anything so you can have your cake and eat it too. I rather like CO wind. CoH has a lot more melee options with elemental and energy moves though. I'm not sure how you can really make that work in the framework of CO unless we added some esoteric system of slotting elementals to melee weapons almost like those weird power replacement primary offense gear we had ages back.
Of course during the launch of CO CoH's system of powers and combat felt a lot more together. CO was kinda like "Avoid passive offense powers. Take regen/FF and take force shield with the energy sheathe advantage. Get that one cone power in the set that melts everything and faceroll to victory." Over time CO's powersets got polished, we got more energy unlocks, we got various toggles. The style of play evolved over time and it got polished. And the polishes got polished. And it got polished. If an official picture of Kaiseren were ever to be made I nominate an image of Kai obsessively compulsively polishing a giant alien sword with a rack of weapons in the background all finely polished. Where it stands. CO's combat system can hold its own against CoH. It's much faster and never really creates an instant where your only action is to stare blankly at the enemy while waiting for that endurance bar to fill faster. CO has you fire an energy builder if you end up in that situation (But by end-game you should avoid that situation). Energy builder attacks are about as effective as staring blankly at the enemy but they make it look like you are still fighting at least. Instead of waiting on cooldowns you're juggling procs and status effects while hammering some DPS whammy when all those are looking good. CoH's combat is more about efficiently using all your buttons so nothing is waiting to be used after it comes off cooldown. The procs are there, but it's less of an elaborate juggling system and more of "If I use shadow melee with super reflexes I'll dodge like a mofo" Some of the newer CoH powersets did introduce a mechanic of stacking up a combo status and then dropping the hammer with a combo finisher. Where CO really excels though is in combining things that CoH's archetypes don't fit. Like one of the free archetypes for CO is the rather nice glacier tank. Ranged blasts and taking? AWESOME! Wanna make a melee fighter who fires off heals? Sure thing! You want fire and ice blasts? Oh here, I liked that idea too so have this ying-yang bomb power that combines the two awesomely! Make frostfire green with envy!
Content and missions though is where CoH shines. Especially CoV. I may be biased towards CoV with all these years of CO I've been making heroes. But you know what? I want to be evil. The background, ambience, and writing for the rogue isles is glorious. I may be biased there because I tend to like stuff like deadlands which Shane Hensley wrote, and Shane Hensley wrote CoV. He was captain mako. He had the most awesome post in the CoH forums when he signed off the final time. Most involved him writing in character as Captain Mako going on about this Shane character and how dare Shane claim he made HIM, captain mako and then there was a whole paragraph about the absurd violence Captain Mako was going to visit on shane. Someone offered to make a Deadlands MMO and shane was so on board for it, it never got off the ground unfortunately and it deprived Cryptic of a rather fun writer. Initial launch content for CO was an awful lot of outdoor standard-mmo-fare missions wrapped in a thick layer of referential humor. As time went on they tried to refine it and redid the starter experience twice. A wise choice, starter experience is first impression you want to make a good one there. Interesting thing, I redid the starting areas with a couple friends in CO. Those initial indoor missions get kinda fun with a team of lower level characters, just wall to wall goons.
Missions actually highlight a fundamental design choice difference in CO and CoH. CoH has a real awesome random mission generation kit.
If you get a door mission in CO from a random NPC you can tell by the name of the mission what level it will be. You can know the exact placement of every enemy group if you've done it before. The exact composition of every enemy group and the location of every clickie.
If you get a door mission in CoH, if it isn't a specific map one, like frostfire, then it's anyone's guess what it will be. I mean you'll know you'll be kidnapping Jake Emmett from the one newspaper mission from a warehouse. But that layout of the warehouse varies wildly from any time you do it. Enemy groups can differ. Everything differs.
CoH's interior creation kit has a lot of segments which attach to each other. Each segment has all furniture and plants and everything already placed in it except clickies and enemies. CO's interior creation kit is a lot of empty cavernous rooms and hallway segments to connect them. Each room lacks any furnishing or interior design, it's on the level designer to supply that.
CoH's approach makes creating a map really really really easy. It makes the various segments that make that map rather samey. But the amount of variety between segments and segment layouts enough to keep things engaging. You can learn the segments well enough. You want into 3 tier office plaza with walkways and you know where every enemy group is in that place except for the random patrols. Making maps is so easy in CoH that a computer can do it. Which is how those radio/newspaper missions work. And when you get in random PUG groups in CoH that's what everyone does. Just ask the mad-libs mission generator to roll up a random map to hit up. Kinda dliabloesque run like.
CO's approach does not allow for easy computer generation. The rooms do not have pre-built interiors. This means every CO mission has to be done by hand. The enemy placements have to be done by hand too. If the artist building the mission isn't at the top of their game then you get mediocre maps. If you got a top notch artist you get better maps. This can be the difference between a generic NPC door mission and an adventure pack interior run. It does make the box-maps a little more versatile, a single generic base room could be a science lab or barraks or a garage depending on the placement of furniture. This also makes the placement of clickies a bit easier to refine.
With these two styles in mind it makes sense why CoH had way more door missions and content involving them then CO. It was far easier. Work smarter, not harder. CO had some interesting interior missions but it also had a lot which were mediocre. Interestingly CO they had and still has heap of interior mission maps that were all put in its initial end-game system UNITY. The unity missions might be a chore to do a heap of every single day while running to every corner of pre-vibora CO, but you can't deny that the quality of those interior maps is a solid head and shoulders above most of the other generic door missions from NPCs. In fact when I do UNITY I often hope I get particular fun maps, like the one where you are shrunk the size of a bug to fight a chihuahua sized Godzilla in a cardboard diorama because that was awesome and fun and why the hell is this stuff a rarely accessible piece of content that a large slice of the game population will never see? Another benfit of the CO style though is clickies as mentioned earlier are placed in fashions that make more sense with the general environment. I had a CoV mission to destroy file cabinets because the radio told me to (if you did not take radio as a contact I feel sad for you). These file cabinents were in an office, just out in the open, not against any walls or corners, just sitting there vaguely obstructing traffic with guards posted around them. This sort of thing highlights the weak-point of CoH's system. Any objectives are going to be placed by a computer that has no idea about interior design.
I don't think it was that CO devs didn't want to make door missions like CoH, but I think they made decisions early on in game design that locked them into a situation where they couldn't make a lot of door missions because the mission kits they ended up locking themselves into did not lend to computer generation. This forced a lot more work-hours into content creation which resulted in less content. And the thing is. Even if CO Development team at some point realized they wanted CoH mission creation they would have had to sink work-hours into making all the various modules that make up the missions. And that would have been a lot of work when they had already sunk resources into their current system. Thing about game design is often times you find yourself hip-deep in a decision when you start rethinking your plan of attack but you end up in a point where you can't really change course because its too expensive.
So while it may be easy to go "Oh my those guys made a huge mistake why didn't they see this!" Don't. There were merits to the decision (better map control) there were drawbacks. It didn't work out though. It is important, however, to note how these various approaches panned out so when one of you makes the next big game out there, you can learn from others experiences.
CoH does show there is still interest in Hero stuff though. The biggest server-cluster SCORE pulls about 6000 concurrent users during peak evening hours. I expect this number to drop after a few weeks and the shiny wears off.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is a good thing for CO in the long run because people will play this and think "OH yeah, I liked doing hero stuff, let's see how the other hero games I played are doing."
I asked tumerboy way back when about how many people from CoH were involved in CO development. his response.
"There are still about 20 people at the company that were there the day I started. Now, those are spread across all projects.
At this moment in time, I think robobo and I are the only ones on the champs team (Poz was too), how worked on COX. However, over the course of the project, a good percentage of the folks from COX (minus those sold with the project to NCSoft) have worked on Champs."
From what I was told in another question to tumerboy way back everyone had their hands in Mil city's development. Making it a rather troublesome map to work on at times. It really shows at how much the style shifts manically. My favorite portion of mil city is that gritty neighborhood around the Great Beast bookstore. Anytime I get missions to defeat Demon I do NOT go to the indicated area, I instead fight them around the great beast, because the ambience is far superior.
While you can argue CO faces have less options they have a ton more options in the ability to resize eyes and nose and such. Could probably do for a few gnarly stitched up faces though.
I also forgot to mention that I noticed that the CoH team tried to make CoX more like CO in later updates. They did that galaxy city disaster alert which is kind of like an abbreviated version of mil city disaster with an awfully contrived morality decision along the lines of "Oh here is a downed hero! Do you give him some of your energy and become hero or do you steal his energy and become a villain?" and I'm like "I didn't know I could absorb people's energy or give them my energy..."
And then you get to atlas park and mercy island and there is a new newbie mission chain which is "go to this marker position on the map and kill 10 of this specifically named monster because I said so." and milling around that marker is a dense thicket of longbow communication operators who are milling around reading newspapers, almost bored as they wait for you to punch their snout because some random NPC said so. They also made travel powers available at level 4.
It felt like they were trying to mimic Champions online. Except they weren't really drawing on things CO was necessarily doing better, except not making you run through the hollows at level 10 without a travel power because screw that noise. Travel powers at level 4 was a good move. Standard MMO "go and punch 10 baddies with an overly specific name at an overly specific locale" was not a good move though. I mean street sweeper missions aren't bad, but when you make it overly specific areas it starts feeling more and more contrived. Heck, CoH apparently added a cel shader to the game as an experimental feature that gave it CO style comic book outlines.
I had an eye on web traffic to the various portals to the hero games when they were all up with passive interest. It wasn't the best metric for gauging popularity but CO was beating COH at the time. Granted CoH right at this instant might be pulling more, but it's the shiny new thing that nobody has done for a while.
I'm sorry that's an awful lot of words. But it's thoughts that have been knocking around my head in a while. I can't say either game is superior. They each have their benefits and drawbacks. I do sass the CoH costume creator a lot but it was a strong stepping point forward that lead to the natural evolution into the CO one. At least you didn't get my discourse on ceiling heights and the consequences of third person camera position.
Adventure packs do tell stories better then task forces. But it required a lot more work to make an AP. And luther black is still borked from whatever update put all the NPC internal timers on speed.
If we had a game that played like CO with CoH's mission progression I'd be in hog heaven.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
eh... let's see here, you asked for an erp joke. Oh okay I got one:
So a pregnant woman goes to her project manager and says she's going to need to take 9 months off. The manager responds, "Oh, no that's way too long, let me assign 8 more people to your pregnancy and I'll budget it for one month."
My super cool CC build and how to use it.