I'm still debating whether I'll kick $10 to them. I enjoyed CoX, but I came to CO and stayed here for a reason.
At this point the game is still very far away. Once the game is closer to release, assuming it even gets that far, I'll likely hope for beta and go from there... or get impressions from a couple friends who have already paid $10 for eventual beta access. Even though it's supposed to be a "spiritaul successor" of CoX I'll be judging it as a standalone product when/if the time comes.
I would think about it, since this game doesn't want to add anything I want. So for me, i am done giving my money to this game. I stay for RP.
If it looks like CoT could actually suceed, I would give them my money, but I dont think it will go anywhere.
I generally prefer CO to CoH, but dear god I wish I could have hybridized them.
Shields (I had an ex-Lost hero with a manhole cover and a firefighter axe in a stained hoodie. He was AWESOME)
Plant powers. Energy powers. Faces with actual character.
An active dev team with an aggressive development schedule.
A UGC system (however flawed).
God, if we only had that stuff in CO.
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Yeah, all this people saying "I like this for this reason" and "I like that for that reason" is really all fantastically boring and all, but now let's talk about something important. Best sandwich spread?
Yeah, all this people saying "I like this for this reason" and "I like that for that reason" is really all fantastically boring and all, but now let's talk about something important. Best sandwich spread?
I like this one because it's nice in my mouth.
I just tried that stuff for the first time two weeks ago trying to see what the hype was. My wife, OTOH, was super excited about it and crushed me with the knowledge that it was around when she was in college. I thought it was new...as in the last two years new. So sad.
I just tried that stuff for the first time two weeks ago trying to see what the hype was. My wife, OTOH, was super excited about it and crushed me with the knowledge that it was around when she was in college. I thought it was new...as in the last two years new. So sad.
I still have never tried the stuff. It just looks kind of evil.
... right. My bad. I thought we were having an intelligent debate over what constitutes "choice" and "variety"...
No, that ended when you openly admitted that your idea of "variety" is a bunch of powers that all do the same damn thing, only with different special effects.
For myself, I find my favorite healing "power" is Regeneration. I have trouble keeping track of my health bar and my energy bar and the health of my opponent(s) and which power I'm using next - with Regeneration, if I miss the health bar for a few scans, it's okay, it'll probably refill shortly anyway. (I ran Honey Badger up to lvl 16 before the end of the Destroid Invasion, and I had to pop a heal on him exactly twice - and one of those was before he got Regeneration.)
So, you see, which heal is "best" depends entirely on your playstyle. Regen works best for me; I don't have it on all my FF toons only because it doesn't always fit. (Star Knight, for instance, is focused entirely on his laser sword - I only gave him Invulnerability because he needed it, and because I could handwave that his alien costume had a skinfield generator built in. And Dr. Destiny uses Night Warrior as a passive because it's his invisibility spell.)
Also, if you just absolutely need a good burst heal, take all those MCPD and PRIMUS Recognition Points you're probably building up without using (you are playing the missions as well, right?), go to the Recog Building, and buy yourself some Healing Patches. (HOT Bots are, as the name implies, Heal Over Time, and the magical version, as I understand it, requires that you pay back some of your borrowed health later.) You can also buy them for Resources from Karneeki the Great, at one end of the curved awning in RenCen.
"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!"
I still have never tried the stuff. It just looks kind of evil.
Well, evil isn't always bad, right?
Seriously, that stuff is rich as Bill Gates, thick as Dennis Rodman's skull, and possibly the best sandwich spread or toast topping on the planet.
"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!"
Well, yes. And a Toyota Camry will get you to the grocery store and back. But if you have the keys to a Porsche Boxster...
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
She might have been right. On the other hand, it may have been a slight hyperbole in passing, as casual as the mention is. It probably was one of those "profitable, but just barely" things.
The full context, I believe, is something like this.
Paragon had an undisclosed project under full development using CoH's engine -- most of the studio was working on it.
The implication from Posi and WW is that the studio as a whole was profitable, even while supporting the second title's team (something like 50 developers). NCSoft seems to believe that the studio as a whole was slightly unprofitable, perhaps using a different accounting scheme. But the difference between the two positions was likely not very large.
The takeaway, however, is that CoH was earning enough money to support the development of a second title. A very, very rough guide of what it takes to support a professional employee (including salary) is 2 X base pay. Let's say 50 people at $35,000 X 2, about $3.5M. That really doesn't seem out of line with CoH's revenue being in the neighbourhood of $10M a year. Someone even has a chart, http://evilasahobby.com/2012/02/19/how-many-players-did-city-of-heroes-villains-have-after-launching-freedom/
All that said ... $10M US is a rounding error when it comes to NCSoft's balance sheet.
Look, this wasn't meant to be an arguement or subjective statement, I made my judgement on better or worse based on game design. I liked both games. COX just has a better design overall even if CO beats it in some areas.
Lets try to take this from a design perspective from step 1 so we can get this argument done. So lets follow a general progression order of coverage from creation to max level. But lets also keep in mind the expectations for CO should be higher. It was a gen 2 MMORPG made 5 years later by the designers of the COX, it SHOULD be doing most everything better because it has better core foundation tech and infrastructure to build on.
Character Creator:TIE. I find the two games generally tied on this. Each had strong points like distinctive faces, better costume texttures, way better power customization, auras, and overall more plentiful options for COX and yet CO had many things COX didn't like plentiful back options, stances, and moods. COX had a better organized costume UI, but lets be honest both games could have used more streamlining in that regard.
So yes, this is a tie. In all honesty what any future game should aim for is to take the best of both Character Creators and streamline it as much as possible.
New Character experience:CO wins this one. In COX making a new character was a little slow as you tried to get far enough along to really fight in an interesting fashion. This is not a matter of feeling powerful, it's a matter of combat not flowing well at these levels. They should have given you more starter powers for each power set or something IMO. Most new characters didn't get fluid until level 6, 10, 12, 18 or even 22. Story lines didn't come out really until like level 6-8. You didn't start with a travel power and actually had to sacrifice a power to choose one, which sucks. This improved greatly when F2P changes were made, but it didn't eliminate it and it bears mentioning. Mission Architect also improved the early level progression GREATLY, however you should never have to go out of your way to fix that kind of problem, that's bad design.
Meanwhile CO starts you out swinging and feeling super. You drop into the fray vs bad guys and can immediately start feeling heroic and awesome. You are also well capable of handling your own at these levels easily, which is not always the case in COH before you hit certain level/power milestones.
Power Progression:COX wins this hands down. In COX you start as the equivalent of an absolute rookie, fighting the basic street thugs of Paragon City and work your way up the power ladder as you level until you are fighting threats to the world instead of purse snatchers.
The power of your hero follows suite with this, steadily progressing from a equal match to a LT and a few minions to a point where you can handle a boss, multiple LT's, and a small swarm of minions on your own. It feels absolutely super and gives a real feel of power progression that is supported by both character power level, enemy selection, enemy lore, and story. The only real mar on this is the lack of fluidity of play in the early levels.
CO has a nearly flat power curve. You start out the game TROUNCING enemies and you try and maintain gear and power selection to maintain these levels of power. It isn't until select points in your character build that you spike in power randomly (depending on build). While you can end up more powerful than you started it is not nearly to the degree and feel as it was in COX for nearly all builds. Min/max builds can be an exception.
The story and enemies follow suite and you are fighting world destroying threats from very low levels. While this does make the beginning feel a little more epic, it robs a great deal of "growth" and progression from your character and the games story.
Movement Powers:Advantage COX. I want to start off by saying that CO had many movement powers COX simply didn't because it's restrictive power pool system which was coded too deeply into the game to fix (ahhh, legacy code). A system that also cost you power choices to achieve them, which sucked.
However, I give the advantage clearly to COX because it was just plain way more satisfying to move through the world of COX with travel powers than it was in the world of CO. I read many conversations in CO in game echoing this sentiment. COX made traveling a joy and feel both fun and terribly fast (even when it would take you a few minutes to reach a destination). CO's travel powers just don't have the same impact on the player on a "awesome level" :P. Further hampering this is the fact that CO travel powers start out pretty slow. Baseline travel powers in CO felt about the same speed and sprint + swiftness in COX.
Furthermore CO did technically have many more options for fly poses, ways you could fly, run poses, movement powers like tunneling and grappling, etc. But a good portion of these were pay and many were way less useful indoors, or outdoors. COX travel powers were useful everywhere. One last note: COX did teleportation very close to right, CO made you turn into a fast moving cloud :x.
Gear:Advantage COX. Even though the power upgrade system of CO was fairly simple, nice, and streamlined the gear system was extremely loot based. COX managed to implement gear in a way that was far less invasive and required less management but was still very meaningful.
This was true to some extent pre-IO's. Post IO's however the gearing of your Hero/Villain was far more rewarding and impactful in COX, but the complex parts of gearing were not even required to do well in 95% of the game. You could stick to SO's or even better simple recipe IO's and be effective and capable. You could try and wring every ounce of power out by going deep and getting many IO recipes to max your stats, or you could just lay up and frankenslot for acc/dmg/recharge/endurance with minimal effort. (or the equivalent for non-damage abilities obviously).
CO gear never had that flexibility, impact, fun, ease, etc.
Role vs Dual Build:CO wins easily. When it comes to switching roles easily on the fly CO definitely excels. With a reasonable build you could tilt yourself quickly in the direction of the role that was needed with the utmost of ease. While COX had dual builds it was way more complex, way more limited, and required alot of investment even if it had a more radical effect.
LFG system: COX had the LFG system that I believe every MMORPG since should have built upon and used. I have never used another system that made it easier for me to find group members or find a group to join in a selective and proactive fashion. Instant joins are nice, but honestly then you have little control over your experience which takes away from the experience as both a leader and a member.
They could have used a few more tweaks to better separate out the results, but the information available was fantastic and with a text macro I could find new members appropriate to our group or find an appropriate group very quickly and very easily. The global friends list just made this that much more delicious.
Global Friends list: COX wins easily. Having the option of friend specific characters or friending someone's entire account was awesome. You could friend someone once and then keep track of them and talk to them regardless of server. This helped alot with the social and teamwork side of things.
Obviously, friend responsibly.
Mission Architect vs Nemisis: COX wins hands down. Mission Architect was a great addition to the game that assisted in playing well told and involving stories as well as of course farming exp if one wished. The ticket system was an awesome currency alternative. The only real problem it had is that it needed a much better presentation in a more streamlined setup with categories to separate out different stories and farming.
Story: COX always had a stronger story from start to finish, this gap only widened as the game got older and more polished. During the last 2-3 years the story telling went up yet another notch, as did the atmosphere of the zones.
Zone Atmosphere: TIE. Both games started out with a modest amount of zone variety and atmosphere and improved in time. I feel the final year or two of COX catapulted COX ahead in that category but most of it's life those new awesome zones were not there.
UI:TIE Both games had a clean and effective UI.
Graphics:TIE This is an area CO really should have wiped the floor with COX considering it was 5 years later and Gen 2, however while it looked better over on textures COX had hands down more magnificent and well realized particle effects that approached cinematic good guys vs evil levels on Ultra with full teams.
To be honest I wasn't even aware of this on my old computer (10 years old at this point) I played COX on as recently as 3 years ago on low settings. But I got my new computer and set things to Ultra and found I was useless for about 2 hours because I was stunned by the sheer amount of beautiful particle effects going off. It made a big impression on me. CO effectively presents it's particle effects but not near to the same degree.
I was tempted to give the win to COX here, but when not fighting and just looked at models and zones CO really does look overall better.
For the biggest battle of this list though, I start a new post, combat is the biggest reason that COX wins the better design.
I'm mostly in line with it, but have a couple things to add.
CoH, from issue 7 on, had a surprisingly consistent dev team. Yes, there was some turnover, but nothing like what we've seen here. There were spillover effects: CoH's team was really, really good at figuring out what the players really wanted, not just what they said they did; the game was polished with a solid development schedule.
Cryptic just can't help itself when it comes to raiding CO for talent, and that kills any sense of attachment we have with the devs ... and kills consistency and vision.
This post on combat is going to be long, there is alot to talk about:
COMBAT:COX wins hands down, yes I said it.
There are specific things that CO does better in a combat sense than COX does, including making Assault Rifle feel satisfying...which COX never did, however COX does well across the board and does many things CO simply does a bad job at. So lets break it down.
Cooldowns vs Charges/Maintains/energy builders:COX for most power sets and character designs.
Now don't get me wrong I like charges and maintains but CO went way overboard with it. Charges and maintains fit certain sets like munitions and power armor very well. However even though it works for other powers like the elemental blast sets and melee they don't work near as well and detract from the experience via lack of variety and overuse.
In COX you chose powers based on effect and cooldown and you could build to manipulate both to your will. You could choose to rely on a few powers or a large variety of powers. Powers serving the same purpose usually didn't step on each others toes because the artificial scarcity of cooldowns combined the the ability to tailor your build how you wish meant that more was almost always better. More AOE damage, more buffs, more debuffs, more defense.
In CO if you had a good single target charge or maintain attack then you had to have a really good reason to use another one. Even then it was normally just to apply a debuff, gain a buff, or do a combo. Many times there is not a really good reason to use another power than your best attack the vast majority of the time.
I believe CO could have done better if it had a better variety of power effects. Including more clicks and cooldowns to throw in more variety and give you a greater pool of truly useful and meaningful power choices. Otherwise for instance why would I want shotgun, submachine gun, hand grenade, rocket launcher, and gatling gun, lead tempest, and mini mines? All serve the purpose of AOE damage and overlap each other, I'll most likely only want to use 1, maybe 2. A couple are just downright outclassed by the other choices as well. This is only pulling from a single power set!! The problem multiplies with additional power sets like the compatibly themed Gadgeteering power set and it's AOE attacks. Single target attacks suffer the same fate.
Aggro management:COX wins hands down. Aggro management is a real thing in COX with real impact that is clear and easy to understand and yet has a fair amount of depth to it since the aggro cap was put into place. It adds to the game and the teamwork involved.
CO aggro management is more complicated but much less reliable and is regarded as bad or a mystery even by an extremely large amount of CO players.
Support abilities!!39835COX has hands down the best framework for playing a support build ever played in an MMORPG. Support builds are not specifically needed, but they are varied and powerful. Buff and debuffs make real differences, it's not just about the healing. Crowd control and tanking also makes real differences. Healing makes a real difference. Some Archetypes specialize in the ability to contribute support, but with the right power sets any Archetype can add additional support into the pile, sometimes of significant levels.
CO support abilities are in general far weaker and much more limited in variety and scope. They are also far less interesting in general to play and receive. Ultimately there are a few auras, much weaker CC that is easily broken, and mostly just healing.
Teamwork:COX wins hands down. COX has a great setup for teaming. All the classes work well together and the team makeup is very forgiving. IO's made this even better and from IO's on any team makeup could pretty much accomplish anything except the hardest encounters. In general you tried to balance your damage and your support/tanking, but in a pinch you could complete even difficult missions in a pinch with a hodgepodge group provided they were decent.
CO teamwork never really seemed to click. Most of the time people just all seemed to solo on their own and if an encounter/alert/Comic Series was difficult you just prayed you had someone who could tank it and/or outheal it. Ironically if you were not min/maxed these people you hoped for normally did comparable damage to you WHILE tanking/healing like a boss. While the vast majority of players would have problems from time to time these players could solo the missions with ease like an old school fire tanker in COX back in the days before they rebalanced power levels.
Solo:CO hands down. While COX had a much better teaming experience CO had a much better solo experience. You could solo easily as any theme in the game, though honestly you usually ended up taking the same core powers that enabled this. COX could accomplish this as well, but not with all classes. A couple classes were left in the cold in that respect, Corruptors and Defenders. Thus COX loses.
Freeform vs "In Stone" Power Sets:TIE. Wait, stop throwing things at me, hear me out. Freeform makes a much better mixed hero. You can create anything your imagination comes up with. However you pay a price for this. Each individual power means less and is much more standardized. Also, the ability to make themed heros in CO simply do not compare to the ability to make themed heros in COX.
So yes, you could make the heros with a mix of various things far better than COX, however COX could make say...a fire hero far better than CO. You could Tank, support, control, deal major damage at range, and deal major melee damage with fire. You could fully satisfy each role using only fire. This is simply not possible in CO, not anywhere close to that level, variety, or quality. Just as the same is true for a mixed hero in COX.
Furthermore having set powersets for set archetypes combined with cooldowns allowed COX power sets to have unique attributes to them and a variety of unique powers you used in combination with each other for beautiful and free flowing effect. Even in the cases that CO could match or exceed your effectiveness at a themed role the maintained/charged style made it feel far less fluid and more stilted with far less variety.
Different strokes for different folks.
Enemies:COX wins hands down. Many things here could be easily argued either way and tie such as enemy design, progression, variety, and quality. However what cannot be argued is that COH is focused around you taking on packs of villains while CO is focused around you generally taking on much lesser amounts.
Superpowered individuals constantly fighting only a few opponents just don't feel as super or heroic as those fighting packs or even small hordes of opponents. The challenge level is similar, but the feeling is far different. To make matters worse CO rewards you very poorly for defeated foes, whereas COX rewards you pretty well for defeared foes.
Inspirations:COX wins hands down. Inspirations were a much appreciated part of combat. If you ran into a tough/bad spawn or got unexpected adds they could turn the tables. If you could handle the mission but not quite the boss they would enable you to finish the mission. Yet they were in short enough supply you couldn't unduly cheese the system.
In CO if you get in those situations you are prolly dead. Just plain badly dead. Adds you can do something about (most times) bad spawns and a boss just past your ability to handle is rough without calling in help and that isn't always an option....or desired if you wish to solo.
Pets:COX wins by a laughable margin. I'm sorry, I like the concepts of pets in CO, I like the themes, They are cool and I like that you can have em in swarms. But they are super weak and in no way do they compare to masterminds or controller pets. Not in their wonly AI, wonky controls, or their ability to die at a remarkable pace while doing low damage outside of using them as a group. This is penalty of the freeform system of course.
Masterminds set a standard for a pet class that still hasn't been met since. While they might have handled their level content easily as well they had much larger issues with higher levels than a standard hero/villain, and this balanced them in groups.
Variety:COX wins hands down. For all it's freeform goodness CO loses to COX in terms of variety. COX has a plethora of unique and visually different powers that do a variety of things for each role/archetype. Each power set has a theme and variety of powers that work together well.
CO tends to feel very samish in power effect and simply doesn't have either the visual or effect variety COX does. This is neccesary to keep the power levels of each individual power in check for it's freeform nature. It is also because so many powers are maintain and charge.
Energy builders vs Power Bar:COX by a nose. Both are mechanics that accomplish the same thing. However CO energy builds make your hero feel less powerful and sometimes (like munitions) just feel completely out of place. Why would I pull out a pistol and shoot several times so I can shoot my Assault Rifle some more? With elemental powers you can make sense of it to some degree but other powers just make a jarring shift in your combat, and often.
Visual appearance in combat: COX wins, but only due to superior power customization/visuals. While CO powers are normally pretty cut and dry or simple in their effects COX powers are extravagantly detailed and varied. Thanks to a lucky accident the power customization took this to entirely new levels by allowing you to change the colors of your powers a rather large range on two different levels in each of the varied powers.
The exception here is some of the melee powers. CO actually looks a good bit better in the melee area in many respects. However this is also mainly on the old melee power sets as the newer power sets achieved CO level of animation and fuilidity for the most part.
End Game:I LOL at the thought of end game for both games. COX got an end game way too late in it's cycle to be touted and CO, well, you guys know about CO's end game haha.
PVP: See above. Though honestly CO wins due to Zombie Apocalypse as broken as PVP was .
Well I hope that put combat in a bit more of a design perspective and less of a subjective perspective. Let me now what you think and be nice . I still like both games, COX just had better framework in many areas CO lacked in and managed to be competitive in most areas CO was good at.
Patches: When NCsoft took over patches from there on were good and added alot to the game. Once a framework was in place (yes ED was needed folks) each new patch successively rolled out a new issue and new power sets, and new zones, and new...STUFF that people loved and were excited about.
Truly Paragon Studios excelled at their improvement of the COX game.
CO, well, CO has always made folks feel like things might happen but seems to mostly just disappoint in their updates.
It's a good analysis. I don't agree with all of it, but at least you lay out the arguments!
I don't agree wrt travel powers. Travel powers in CO feel WAY more fun. Ooze tunneling! Scarab tunneling!
Hover/flight in CoX is just... meh.
But CoX teleport is a lot more sensible.
I agree about the grouping, though. That's one of the biggest gameplay wtf about CO is how poorly it embraces group play as a general rule (Alerts and other items have to specifically rig things to require groups).
I don't agree wrt story and graphics, and think this is going to have to be a subjective assessment. Esthetically, yeah, some of the CoX stuff has more character. (faces, as I've previously mentioned)
But CoX looked _dated_. Very dated. Heck, even CO looks dated, sometimes, and it's way better.
(And I ran CoX in Ultra with all the new bells and whistles. It still looked 10+ years old to me)
Story... um. People go on about how well-written CoX's story is and how silly CO is in comparison, but me, it's all goofy superheroes stuff. It all had high and low points, sometimes absurd.
CO has more explicitly humorous notes in it, but... it's a genre of folks flying around in tights and peacefully arresting people with lightning.
Maybe I'm not the right kind of fan, but picking nits about which is 'more serious' looks ABSURD.
I think CoX edges out CO, but it entirely comes down to the fact CoX got active support and CO's support has been minimal. The developments toward the end of CoX, sadly, looks like they could have buried CO's advantages (power coloration/emanation, variant power animations, more powersets, etc.)
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
I need to step in here for a moment. Unfortunately, one of the rules that all the PWE forums work under is that we minimize/don't allow discussion of other games.
I've been wrestling for a bit with how to handle this one. Up until now, Project Phoenix / City of Titans has been a hypothetical game; now, through a year of work, the Titans folks have built something concrete enough to be called a game. Their hard work does them credit, it's very impressive to see it at the point of getting funded. The fact that City of Titans is a realized project, though, means I have to treat it as another game.
That being said, I don't want to shut down discussion on this, or discussion of CoX overall. But for the main page of the forums, it's important that the discussion be focused on Champions specifically. As such, I've made a new off-topic section, and moved this thread into it.
The new off-topic section is a sub-forum of General Discussion, so it'll be easy to reach. This section will be for discussion of things like City of Titans, but also anything that isn't really Champs-related. It can also be a good place for threads that've morphed into being more fun than on-topic -- I don't want to shut down conversations about food, but the General Discussion isn't really the place for that. An off-topic section is a good place for them to continue.
I think this'll work well for the boards as a whole, but I'd welcome feedback in PMs. Fly high, heroes.
Just because I want to chime in. And I really hope a Dev reads this.
CO has two things over CoX.
The character creator. And by this I mean 'more options'. I'm not even going to say the quality of the design, because a significant portion of CO's costumes look pretty stupid to me. OMG LOL PUMPKIN HEDZ AND GLOWING RUDOLF NOZE isn't what I call a 'cool' option for a superhero game, nor are the overabundance of fantasy costumes. That's just my opinion, but a few people agree. But while CO has CoX beat, CO still has less detail.
The combat. CO's combat is way faster than CoX's was. It's also completely imbalanced and there's no point in exploring other builds except out of boredom, because with freeform- anyone can do it all. No one should be able to solo 95% of an MMORPG.
That's it. Those two things. And you can't even give it full credit. Sure, say 'graphics'. We're comparing a game that had more players after 8 years subscribed than CO likely ever did. So graphics aren't really a factor. I can make you some purty pictures with a flash player if that's a selling point.
CoX had a writing team that made CO look stupid. Which isn't hard, because CO's writing is flat-out dumb as hell. Don't 'Silver Age' me, this isn't 'Silver Age Champions'. And the Silver Age wasn't that stupid (but it was close), and you'd be stupid to market a Silver Age game considering most people who play video games don't know a damned thing about the Silver Age unless they read it on Wikipedia.It's a Superhero game that honestly feels less like a comic book and more like a parody. I honestly feel like the people who wrote for CO didn't like comics, and instead of good writing- they just went for unfunny, uninspired, and flat-out bad pop culture jokes to float us through. I can't even blame people for doing alerts to get to level 40, because the writing in this game is embarassing.
So before you start praising CO as 'better' than CoX, remember- the Devs were active throughout the entirety of CoX. And new things came out constantly. And it had way more players.
Sure, it's gone. But God help CO if it comes back, because the roles will flip and we'll be migrating.
Edited since I realized I could have PMed TT about this move. Yes, I'm asking him to move Off Topic elsewhere if not at the bottom of the page instead of at the top.
hmm. I have played both quite a bit. Ultimately I chose CO over CoX, though. As for which is better, it's all a matter of opinion, really. I don't think you're going to convince a big CO fan that CoX is/was better, or vice versa.
I need to step in here for a moment. Unfortunately, one of the rules that all the PWE forums work under is that we minimize/don't allow discussion of other games.
I've been wrestling for a bit with how to handle this one. Up until now, Project Phoenix / City of Titans has been a hypothetical game; now, through a year of work, the Titans folks have built something concrete enough to be called a game. Their hard work does them credit, it's very impressive to see it at the point of getting funded. The fact that City of Titans is a realized project, though, means I have to treat it as another game.
That being said, I don't want to shut down discussion on this, or discussion of CoX overall. But for the main page of the forums, it's important that the discussion be focused on Champions specifically. As such, I've made a new off-topic section, and moved this thread into it.
The new off-topic section is a sub-forum of General Discussion, so it'll be easy to reach. This section will be for discussion of things like City of Titans, but also anything that isn't really Champs-related. It can also be a good place for threads that've morphed into being more fun than on-topic -- I don't want to shut down conversations about food, but the General Discussion isn't really the place for that. An off-topic section is a good place for them to continue.
I think this'll work well for the boards as a whole, but I'd welcome feedback in PMs. Fly high, heroes.
-TrailTurtle
Thank you for your consideration and foresight of some of the times to come.
The combat. CO's combat is way faster than CoX's was.
CO has a faster TTK (time to kill) so combat is certainly faster in that way, however thanks to charges and maintains the APM (Actions Per Minute) can actually be slower many times. Depends on the builds and powersets involved though from both sides.
I greatly enjoyed CoX back in the day but deployments kept me from being with it for more than a few months at a time. Kinda forgot about it after a while. Then I saw a segment on XPlay with Bill Roper talking about Cryptic's new superhero game. Followed it, joined the beta and I'm still here. I did briefly experience CoX shortly before it went F2P when I picked up Going Rogue and finally managed to unlock and enjoy the Elite archetypes like Wolf Spiders and War Shades. After the conversion I didn't really get into it having lost the ability to play most of the characters I had.
It was a great game and I'm bummed it's gone but I'm happy with CO. I'll give CoT a try if it ever ends up seeing the light of day. In the meantime, I've got what I want.
Forgot a few important things, will be editing them into their respective posts.
Global Friends list:COX wins easily. Having the option of friend specific characters or friending someone's entire account was awesome. You could friend someone once and then keep track of them and talk to them regardless of server. This helped alot with the social and teamwork side of things.
Obviously, friend responsibly.
Inspirations:COX wins hands down. Inspirations were a much appreciated part of combat. If you ran into a tough/bad spawn or got unexpected adds they could turn the tables. If you could handle the mission but not quite the boss they would enable you to finish the mission. Yet they were in short enough supply you couldn't unduly cheese the system.
In CO if you get in those situations you are prolly dead. Just plain badly dead. Adds you can do something about (most times) bad spawns and a boss just past your ability to handle is rough without calling in help and that isn't always an option....or desired if you wish to solo.
Pets:COX wins by a laughable margin. I'm sorry, I like the concepts of pets in CO, I like the themes, They are cool and I like that you can have em in swarms. But they are super weak and in no way do they compare to masterminds or controller pets. Not in their wonly AI, wonky controls, or their ability to die at a remarkable pace while doing low damage outside of using them as a group. This is penalty of the freeform system of course.
Masterminds set a standard for a pet class that still hasn't been met since. While they might have handled their level content easily as well they had much larger issues with higher levels than a standard hero/villain, and this balanced them in groups.
A note: I'm not saying that one game is better or not for everyone, I'm saying one game has a more complete/polished/quality overall package. Things that you might not care about are there for people that are not of your opinion, things that you do care about are still taken care of well. That kind of thing.
I got the feeling, leading up to CoV, that Cryptic wished it had more refined options for managing balance in CoH (and we eventually saw a disastrous rolled out for PvP in i13 that, indeed, had many tweakable items for balance that ended up being ... unbalanced).
Fast forward to CO, and Cryptic created a mind boggling power system with many, many components that could be tweaked. But the system was so complex it defied attempts to actually create balance.
FWIW, I think TSW pulled off the flexible build system better than CO, but lacks customization on how those powers look.
Edit: oddly, the utter lack of balance doesn't seem to be a big deal in CO, perhaps because, as someone else mentioned, "teaming" in CO has usually meant "a bunch of people soloing near each other." CO doesn't seem to be as hyper-competitive in terms of builds / dps / healing output as most MMOs.
CoX had a writing team that made CO look stupid. Which isn't hard, because CO's writing is flat-out dumb as hell. Don't 'Silver Age' me, this isn't 'Silver Age Champions'. And the Silver Age wasn't that stupid (but it was close), and you'd be stupid to market a Silver Age game considering most people who play video games don't know a damned thing about the Silver Age unless they read it on Wikipedia.It's a Superhero game that honestly feels less like a comic book and more like a parody. I honestly feel like the people who wrote for CO didn't like comics, and instead of good writing- they just went for unfunny, uninspired, and flat-out bad pop culture jokes to float us through. I can't even blame people for doing alerts to get to level 40, because the writing in this game is embarassing.
I disagree with this. The adventure packs in my opinion have pretty decent writing behind them (Whiteout is the only exception since it's more or less a rip-off of the movie The Thing). I feel the same about Vibora Bay Apocalypse and a few of the lairs. Granted the pop culture references are arguably overdone, but I think it's a little harsh to say that CO's writing is flat-out "dumb as hell".
So before you start praising CO as 'better' than CoX, remember- the Devs were active throughout the entirety of CoX. And new things came out constantly. And it had way more players.
New things don't really matter if a player considers CoX's mechanics to be less enjoyable compared to CO's or due to other factors. I consider CO's gameplay mechanics to be better than CoX's with its emphasis on fixed archetypes, power cooldowns and a much slower pace of combat, so CO will always be a better game to me than CoX in that aspect.
Also, having to wait more than 10 levels to get my first travel power in CoX? I sure as heck don't miss that at all.
In fact, it wasn't until CO was being close to release that Paragon Studios started coming out with huge updates like Mission Architect and Power Colorization (something that they have claimed was impossible to do with the game's engine prior). It doesn't take a genius to see that these things were done because CO introduced the incentive for CoX to remain competitive.
Sure, it's gone. But God help CO if it comes back, because the roles will flip and we'll be migrating.
NCsoft has a history of leaving their closed-down games to remain closed-down for good, with no intention of selling the IPs of those games off. I'm not counting on CoX ever making a return at all.
I don't get why people call Whiteout a 'ripoff.'
It's called an homage.
I mean, as it is, there are vast differences between how Whiteout plays out and The Thing.
I think it's brilliant, myself.
But I think most complaints about the writing are pretty much everything _else_. While I think people are making a big deal over 'more episodic/less hooked together sometimes silly plots' vs. 'several arcs that loosely relate,' I can at least understand why people see them differently.
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
I disagree with this. The adventure packs in my opinion have pretty decent writing behind them (Whiteout is the only exception since it's more or less a rip-off of the movie The Thing). I feel the same about Vibora Bay Apocalypse and a few of the lairs. Granted the pop culture references are arguably overdone, but I think it's a little harsh to say that CO's writing is flat-out "dumb as hell".
Yeah, I think Cyber knows those are good stories. But that's only a small minority of the existing content. The rest of the writing in this game is indeed just plain, flat-out stuuuupid. Most of the time there isn't any plot or reason to the mission content. As someone illustrated earlier, it's mostly "fetch me bear asses" stuff.
Yeah, I think Cyber knows those are good stories. But that's only a small minority of the existing content. The rest of the writing in this game is indeed just plain, flat-out stuuuupid. Most of the time there isn't any plot or reason to the mission content. As someone illustrated earlier, it's mostly "fetch me bear asses" stuff.
Yes at the end of the day, that's all they really are: Defeat/fetch/use X number of Y missions. That concept has always been the staple of MMORPGs in general for progression. I don't see that as being something negative. Even a "revolutionary" game like Guild Wars 2 that boasts about breaking away from the traditional MMORPG still uses that concept.
You and I must be playing a different game to claim that there isn't any plot or reason for those missions. They're all (at least mostly) relevant to the superhero theme and there's at least logical rationale behind the NPCs asking you for help in doing them.
You want an example of what I'd consider really flat-out stupid? A mission that involves Foxbat asking you to look for his misplaced love letter to Sapphire, or helping Defender send a box of chocolates to Witchcraft because he just doesn't have the time, or helping Microman get out of a jar that he accidentally got himself stuck inside of. Those would be flat-out stupid. I could go on with more examples but I'm sure you get the idea of where I'm coming from.
Would I say that the story arcs in CO are of better or similar quality to CoX? Perhaps not, but it's something entirely else to claim that they're "dumb as hell" or "flat-out stupid".
Then again, you're speaking to someone who doesn't consider deep, intricate storytelling to be an important point when it comes to MMORPGs compared to other aspects of MMORPGs that I consider a whole lot more important.
Yeah, I think Cyber knows those are good stories. But that's only a small minority of the existing content. The rest of the writing in this game is indeed just plain, flat-out stuuuupid. Most of the time there isn't any plot or reason to the mission content. As someone illustrated earlier, it's mostly "fetch me bear asses" stuff.
I have to disagree. I like the general writing in this game. It's not the best but it certainly is not the worst. To act like CoX had some grand writing is reaching. That said, it's obvious that some of the missions aren't meant to be serious, which is nice. The references to various things was a nice touch as well. At the end it's all relative because too many times I rolled my eyes at CoX storylines. I don't find myself doing that with CO that often.
You want an example of what I'd consider really flat-out stupid? A mission that involves Foxbat asking you to look for his misplaced love letter to Sapphire, or helping Defender send a box of chocolates to Witchcraft because he just doesn't have the time, or helping Microman get out of a jar that he accidentally got himself stuck inside of. Those would be flat-out stupid. I could go on with more examples but I'm sure you get the idea of where I'm coming from.
Those honestly seem like a reference to the silly gags some comic stories used to pull in the past. I thought those were funny.
That said, I'm glad to see this has turned into another CoX vs Co thread. I always enjoy those.
"I tried to look at that page but saw only inane comments."
Yes at the end of the day, that's all they really are: Defeat/fetch/use X number of Y missions. That concept has always been the staple of MMORPGs in general for progression. I don't see that as being something negative. Even a "revolutionary" game like Guild Wars 2 that boasts about breaking away from the traditional MMORPG still uses that concept.
You and I must be playing a different game to claim that there isn't any plot or reason for those missions. They're all (at least mostly) relevant to the superhero theme and there's at least logical rationale behind the NPCs asking you for help in doing them.
Or you don't know what a plot is. It's what ties a story together... it is the glue.
Even superhero stuff has a plot. Superman comics don't just have him flying around and beating guys up. There's an actual story, like Lex Luthor implementing a plan to use Metallo as a distraction while his agents go around stealing equipment for a new invention. Each step of the way could be a mission in its own right.
In CO, we have a bunch of bear butt hunting tasks, a lot of them that don't seem to tie together all that well if at all. Tell me, for example, what does helping a scientist develop mind control over Irradiates have to do with stopping the Irradiates from launching a missile against Project Greenskin for Talisman? Absolutely nothing! It's just a bunch of odd jobs with no connection!
And why does Talisman want to destroy Project Greenskin? Is it just because she's eeeevil? How is it even remotely related the Kings of Edom looking for the Basilisk Orb in Canada? It's mentioned, but it doesn't make any sense on what the connection is supposed to be.
I need to step in here for a moment. Unfortunately, one of the rules that all the PWE forums work under is that we minimize/don't allow discussion of other games.
I've been wrestling for a bit with how to handle this one. Up until now, Project Phoenix / City of Titans has been a hypothetical game; now, through a year of work, the Titans folks have built something concrete enough to be called a game. Their hard work does them credit, it's very impressive to see it at the point of getting funded. The fact that City of Titans is a realized project, though, means I have to treat it as another game.
That being said, I don't want to shut down discussion on this, or discussion of CoX overall. But for the main page of the forums, it's important that the discussion be focused on Champions specifically. As such, I've made a new off-topic section, and moved this thread into it.
The new off-topic section is a sub-forum of General Discussion, so it'll be easy to reach. This section will be for discussion of things like City of Titans, but also anything that isn't really Champs-related. It can also be a good place for threads that've morphed into being more fun than on-topic -- I don't want to shut down conversations about food, but the General Discussion isn't really the place for that. An off-topic section is a good place for them to continue.
I think this'll work well for the boards as a whole, but I'd welcome feedback in PMs. Fly high, heroes.
-TrailTurtle
Interesting. I think it's a good move. I just hope it's a while before we betray your trust and make it get deleted.
I disagree with this. The adventure packs in my opinion have pretty decent writing behind them (Whiteout is the only exception since it's more or less a rip-off of the movie The Thing). I feel the same about Vibora Bay Apocalypse and a few of the lairs. Granted the pop culture references are arguably overdone, but I think it's a little harsh to say that CO's writing is flat-out "dumb as hell".
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the normal game story, which is pretty lacking, I'd wager we could all agree the adventure packs have pretty nice stories :P. I certainly enjoyed them.
New things don't really matter if a player considers CoX's mechanics to be less enjoyable compared to CO's or due to other factors. I consider CO's gameplay mechanics to be better than CoX's with its emphasis on fixed archetypes, power cooldowns and a much slower pace of combat, so CO will always be a better game to me than CoX in that aspect.
I agree with your stance on that but honestly this entire statement says "you don't care about things you're not interested in. That's really not a meaningful statement in any regard or context.
Also, having to wait more than 10 levels to get my first travel power in CoX? I sure as heck don't miss that at all.
I think we all agree with you there, too bad it was baked into the game before Paragon Studios took over. Hard coding at the core of the game is almost impossible to fix without breaking everything.
In fact, it wasn't until CO was being close to release that Paragon Studios started coming out with huge updates like Mission Architect and Power Colorization (something that they have claimed was impossible to do with the game's engine prior). It doesn't take a genius to see that these things were done because CO introduced the incentive for CoX to remain competitive.
Paragon Studios quite simply put more effort into the game that Cryptic did, it's as simple as that. I remember the change well and I was astonished by the support they gave the game. They didn't claim it was impossible, they claimed it would take a monumental amount of effort.
If it was so easy to do then surely Cryptic would have done it before? Curious enough every single one of those quotes originated BEFORE Cryptic sold COX.
Lets be fair NCsoft purchased COX November 6th, 2007. CO released Sept 1st 2009. So the first post Crytpic issue was "Midnight Hour". This is the major things accomplished between acquisition and the release of CO (Pay attention):
New Magic and Mythology Zones
Arachnos Widow and Spider Archetypes
Started "Powerset proliferation" (sharing powersets between other Archetypes)
Shield powerset
Pain domination powerset (Evil Empathy)
Dual builds
Mac Support
Mission Architect
Costume change emotes
Power Customization (Released 14 days after CO launched)
More epic powerset choices
Sidekicking vastly improved
20% increase to low level experience
Greatly improved the difficulty adjustment system.
Look, this isn't COX/CO when I'm dealing with this post. This is about good dev support that any game would be glad to receive. They did a remarkable amount of work and added tons of things that people had been asking for, many times since launch. They started this from the moment they got clearance from the new bosses.
Admit it, you'd be ecstatic to see that sort of list from 5 updates to CO. They did a good job working hard for 2 years and should be praised. Paragon Studios had talented and committed devs, which kind of makes you wonder when talent like that is left behind and suddenly accomplishes ALOT.
Maybe the devs at Cryptic just couldn't put their hearts behind COX because it wasn't the game they set out to create, and so they left it to do this. But if so why didn't CO receive that kind of TLC? Did they run out of funding to accomplish that?
Regardless, I think they made the right decision. Paragon Studios were the right people to develop COX and they led it into a glorious shining future cut short only by the greed and cruelty of NCsoft. Cryptic was meanwhile left free to make the game they wanted to from the start. I just wish they had supported it better.
I think we all agree with you there, too bad it was baked into the game before Paragon Studios took over. Hard coding at the core of the game is almost impossible to fix without breaking everything.
Are you sure that's true? Because before the end, they changed it (I can't remember if it was a Vet Reward or they gave it to everyone when they gave everyone the Fitness Pool for "free" or a combo of the two) to a lot earlier. Anything they could do for one/some, they could do for all if they wished.
Even superhero stuff has a plot. Superman comics don't just have him flying around and beating guys up. There's an actual story, like Lex Luthor implementing a plan to use Metallo as a distraction while his agents go around stealing equipment for a new invention. Each step of the way could be a mission in its own right.
Except random things can and do happen along the way in comics. A proper story will have random things occurring while the plot is in effect. despite it being a comic, it's pretty silly to think that nothing id going on in the city except the plot at hand. In comics though, for the sake of time and pages, since they are trying to cram as much as they can into a story, the other stuff that goes on, like the few dozen people Superman saves from burning buildings or the broken dams he has to fix or what have you is sacrificed. We only assume this is going on because Superman says so or we have an issue here and there devoted to reminding people that Superman does all these things. With a game, it's harder to show this because we see this occurring in real time. With CO, the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that is what is being conveyed by all the different things going down at one time.
It reminds me of the first few issues of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis with how some things are going down. That said, the lore tends to string things together pretty well and makes for a good read.
"I tried to look at that page but saw only inane comments."
Waitaminnit - is someone seriously claiming that CoH didn't suffer from "collect ten bear asses" missions? Because the last one I took before terminal boredom set in involved finding a certain number of a certain kind of flower in an ornamental flowerbed...
"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!"
I have to disagree. I like the general writing in this game. It's not the best but it certainly is not the worst. To act like CoX had some grand writing is reaching. That said, it's obvious that some of the missions aren't meant to be serious, which is nice. The references to various things was a nice touch as well. At the end it's all relative because too many times I rolled my eyes at CoX storylines. I don't find myself doing that with CO that often.
I don't think you've checked out a good portion of COX arcs, the high rated Mission Architect Arcs, or pretty much ANYTHING added the last 2 years of that games life. They really upped the story telling and atmosphere considerably in those last 2 years. Though ironically my favorite story was "Night Calls the Weaver" from the MA and was created by a player.
The only thing memorable I have from CO is Foxbat, who I love lol, and adventure packs (which are good). So much of the rest of it was just forgettable. I mean yes, I chuckled the at the first few references like Lost and such but the constant pop-culture references inserted with the subtlety of a Jackhammer to the skull got old quick.
I don't think you've checked out a good portion of COX arcs
Except I did. Then again, having played through with different characters may be why I view it as I do. The stories just weren't that great. I will give the game credit for it's scope. The zones felt so large but beyond that, with the nostalgia goggles off, I wonder why I stayed with that game as long as I did. Maybe Shewolf had a point from a few pages back. I was in a guild that I ran with and stayed because of my friends. Beyond that, I can't imagine why I would have stayed there.
The only thing memorable I have from CO is Foxbat, who I love lol, and adventure packs (which are good). So much of the rest of it was just forgettable. I mean yes, I chuckled the at the first few references like Lost and such but the constant pop-culture references inserted with the subtlety of a Jackhammer to the skull got old quick.
Really made me want to kill more skullz.
To each their own I guess. I personally love the Vibora Bay Apocalypse arc. The Lemuria quests and mini-arcs are actually pretty good as well just for the story alone. It's a shame that people seem to hate the place (though in some ways I can understand).
"I tried to look at that page but saw only inane comments."
Waitaminnit - is someone seriously claiming that CoH didn't suffer from "collect ten bear asses" missions? Because the last one I took before terminal boredom set in involved finding a certain number of a certain kind of flower in an ornamental flowerbed...
It was "collect ten bear asses WHILE WALKING" until they had Champs show them the way of "Waiting til level 14 for travel powers is absurd." It wasn't until City was in its death spiral that they fixed that. And then it looks like it was too late.
Hey I'll admit, now I'm just cheerleading because the game I like still has a pulse and I'm around folk who share the sentiment. /happydance
If it has the depth of writing that Coh did AND lets me create a character (as in really get to micromanage, CO has spoiled me here) that I enjoy, I'd spend buckets of money on it in a heartbeat. That being said; A kickstarter MMO? Is there any precedence for this? Frankly sounds like a lofty well intentioned goal that won't ever see the light of day.
Comments
I would think about it, since this game doesn't want to add anything I want. So for me, i am done giving my money to this game. I stay for RP.
If it looks like CoT could actually suceed, I would give them my money, but I dont think it will go anywhere.
Shields (I had an ex-Lost hero with a manhole cover and a firefighter axe in a stained hoodie. He was AWESOME)
Plant powers. Energy powers. Faces with actual character.
An active dev team with an aggressive development schedule.
A UGC system (however flawed).
God, if we only had that stuff in CO.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
I like this one because it's nice in my mouth.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I just tried that stuff for the first time two weeks ago trying to see what the hype was. My wife, OTOH, was super excited about it and crushed me with the knowledge that it was around when she was in college. I thought it was new...as in the last two years new. So sad.
My Amazon author page
How to build a freeform character...the Kenpo way
Demon Keypo's Building Guide
Freeform Builds Directory (Last updated: 04/23/2016)
Serving since September, 2009 / 65 Characters, 63 Level 40's
(Or ham and gruyere, if you want savory and oh god I'm hungry)
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
I still have never tried the stuff. It just looks kind of evil.
For myself, I find my favorite healing "power" is Regeneration. I have trouble keeping track of my health bar and my energy bar and the health of my opponent(s) and which power I'm using next - with Regeneration, if I miss the health bar for a few scans, it's okay, it'll probably refill shortly anyway. (I ran Honey Badger up to lvl 16 before the end of the Destroid Invasion, and I had to pop a heal on him exactly twice - and one of those was before he got Regeneration.)
So, you see, which heal is "best" depends entirely on your playstyle. Regen works best for me; I don't have it on all my FF toons only because it doesn't always fit. (Star Knight, for instance, is focused entirely on his laser sword - I only gave him Invulnerability because he needed it, and because I could handwave that his alien costume had a skinfield generator built in. And Dr. Destiny uses Night Warrior as a passive because it's his invisibility spell.)
Also, if you just absolutely need a good burst heal, take all those MCPD and PRIMUS Recognition Points you're probably building up without using (you are playing the missions as well, right?), go to the Recog Building, and buy yourself some Healing Patches. (HOT Bots are, as the name implies, Heal Over Time, and the magical version, as I understand it, requires that you pay back some of your borrowed health later.) You can also buy them for Resources from Karneeki the Great, at one end of the curved awning in RenCen.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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Seriously, that stuff is rich as Bill Gates, thick as Dennis Rodman's skull, and possibly the best sandwich spread or toast topping on the planet.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Oh it's evil alright. It made me crave the stuff despite how badly it makes my teeth hurt.
Well, yes. And a Toyota Camry will get you to the grocery store and back. But if you have the keys to a Porsche Boxster...
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
It has many of the health qualities of cake frosting, too.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Paragon had an undisclosed project under full development using CoH's engine -- most of the studio was working on it.
The implication from Posi and WW is that the studio as a whole was profitable, even while supporting the second title's team (something like 50 developers). NCSoft seems to believe that the studio as a whole was slightly unprofitable, perhaps using a different accounting scheme. But the difference between the two positions was likely not very large.
The takeaway, however, is that CoH was earning enough money to support the development of a second title. A very, very rough guide of what it takes to support a professional employee (including salary) is 2 X base pay. Let's say 50 people at $35,000 X 2, about $3.5M. That really doesn't seem out of line with CoH's revenue being in the neighbourhood of $10M a year. Someone even has a chart, http://evilasahobby.com/2012/02/19/how-many-players-did-city-of-heroes-villains-have-after-launching-freedom/
All that said ... $10M US is a rounding error when it comes to NCSoft's balance sheet.
Salted butter is a sleeper. Looks plain on the outside but it's got a big block under the hood.
Burgers are great, but steak is the best.
I mean... just look at that.
Thanks, cows. MMPPFFFFFF.
Lets try to take this from a design perspective from step 1 so we can get this argument done. So lets follow a general progression order of coverage from creation to max level. But lets also keep in mind the expectations for CO should be higher. It was a gen 2 MMORPG made 5 years later by the designers of the COX, it SHOULD be doing most everything better because it has better core foundation tech and infrastructure to build on.
Character Creator: TIE. I find the two games generally tied on this. Each had strong points like distinctive faces, better costume texttures, way better power customization, auras, and overall more plentiful options for COX and yet CO had many things COX didn't like plentiful back options, stances, and moods. COX had a better organized costume UI, but lets be honest both games could have used more streamlining in that regard.
So yes, this is a tie. In all honesty what any future game should aim for is to take the best of both Character Creators and streamline it as much as possible.
New Character experience: CO wins this one. In COX making a new character was a little slow as you tried to get far enough along to really fight in an interesting fashion. This is not a matter of feeling powerful, it's a matter of combat not flowing well at these levels. They should have given you more starter powers for each power set or something IMO. Most new characters didn't get fluid until level 6, 10, 12, 18 or even 22. Story lines didn't come out really until like level 6-8. You didn't start with a travel power and actually had to sacrifice a power to choose one, which sucks. This improved greatly when F2P changes were made, but it didn't eliminate it and it bears mentioning. Mission Architect also improved the early level progression GREATLY, however you should never have to go out of your way to fix that kind of problem, that's bad design.
Meanwhile CO starts you out swinging and feeling super. You drop into the fray vs bad guys and can immediately start feeling heroic and awesome. You are also well capable of handling your own at these levels easily, which is not always the case in COH before you hit certain level/power milestones.
Power Progression: COX wins this hands down. In COX you start as the equivalent of an absolute rookie, fighting the basic street thugs of Paragon City and work your way up the power ladder as you level until you are fighting threats to the world instead of purse snatchers.
The power of your hero follows suite with this, steadily progressing from a equal match to a LT and a few minions to a point where you can handle a boss, multiple LT's, and a small swarm of minions on your own. It feels absolutely super and gives a real feel of power progression that is supported by both character power level, enemy selection, enemy lore, and story. The only real mar on this is the lack of fluidity of play in the early levels.
CO has a nearly flat power curve. You start out the game TROUNCING enemies and you try and maintain gear and power selection to maintain these levels of power. It isn't until select points in your character build that you spike in power randomly (depending on build). While you can end up more powerful than you started it is not nearly to the degree and feel as it was in COX for nearly all builds. Min/max builds can be an exception.
The story and enemies follow suite and you are fighting world destroying threats from very low levels. While this does make the beginning feel a little more epic, it robs a great deal of "growth" and progression from your character and the games story.
Movement Powers: Advantage COX. I want to start off by saying that CO had many movement powers COX simply didn't because it's restrictive power pool system which was coded too deeply into the game to fix (ahhh, legacy code). A system that also cost you power choices to achieve them, which sucked.
However, I give the advantage clearly to COX because it was just plain way more satisfying to move through the world of COX with travel powers than it was in the world of CO. I read many conversations in CO in game echoing this sentiment. COX made traveling a joy and feel both fun and terribly fast (even when it would take you a few minutes to reach a destination). CO's travel powers just don't have the same impact on the player on a "awesome level" :P. Further hampering this is the fact that CO travel powers start out pretty slow. Baseline travel powers in CO felt about the same speed and sprint + swiftness in COX.
Furthermore CO did technically have many more options for fly poses, ways you could fly, run poses, movement powers like tunneling and grappling, etc. But a good portion of these were pay and many were way less useful indoors, or outdoors. COX travel powers were useful everywhere. One last note: COX did teleportation very close to right, CO made you turn into a fast moving cloud :x.
Gear: Advantage COX. Even though the power upgrade system of CO was fairly simple, nice, and streamlined the gear system was extremely loot based. COX managed to implement gear in a way that was far less invasive and required less management but was still very meaningful.
This was true to some extent pre-IO's. Post IO's however the gearing of your Hero/Villain was far more rewarding and impactful in COX, but the complex parts of gearing were not even required to do well in 95% of the game. You could stick to SO's or even better simple recipe IO's and be effective and capable. You could try and wring every ounce of power out by going deep and getting many IO recipes to max your stats, or you could just lay up and frankenslot for acc/dmg/recharge/endurance with minimal effort. (or the equivalent for non-damage abilities obviously).
CO gear never had that flexibility, impact, fun, ease, etc.
Role vs Dual Build: CO wins easily. When it comes to switching roles easily on the fly CO definitely excels. With a reasonable build you could tilt yourself quickly in the direction of the role that was needed with the utmost of ease. While COX had dual builds it was way more complex, way more limited, and required alot of investment even if it had a more radical effect.
LFG system: COX had the LFG system that I believe every MMORPG since should have built upon and used. I have never used another system that made it easier for me to find group members or find a group to join in a selective and proactive fashion. Instant joins are nice, but honestly then you have little control over your experience which takes away from the experience as both a leader and a member.
They could have used a few more tweaks to better separate out the results, but the information available was fantastic and with a text macro I could find new members appropriate to our group or find an appropriate group very quickly and very easily. The global friends list just made this that much more delicious.
Global Friends list: COX wins easily. Having the option of friend specific characters or friending someone's entire account was awesome. You could friend someone once and then keep track of them and talk to them regardless of server. This helped alot with the social and teamwork side of things.
Obviously, friend responsibly.
Mission Architect vs Nemisis: COX wins hands down. Mission Architect was a great addition to the game that assisted in playing well told and involving stories as well as of course farming exp if one wished. The ticket system was an awesome currency alternative. The only real problem it had is that it needed a much better presentation in a more streamlined setup with categories to separate out different stories and farming.
Story: COX always had a stronger story from start to finish, this gap only widened as the game got older and more polished. During the last 2-3 years the story telling went up yet another notch, as did the atmosphere of the zones.
Zone Atmosphere: TIE. Both games started out with a modest amount of zone variety and atmosphere and improved in time. I feel the final year or two of COX catapulted COX ahead in that category but most of it's life those new awesome zones were not there.
UI: TIE Both games had a clean and effective UI.
Graphics: TIE This is an area CO really should have wiped the floor with COX considering it was 5 years later and Gen 2, however while it looked better over on textures COX had hands down more magnificent and well realized particle effects that approached cinematic good guys vs evil levels on Ultra with full teams.
To be honest I wasn't even aware of this on my old computer (10 years old at this point) I played COX on as recently as 3 years ago on low settings. But I got my new computer and set things to Ultra and found I was useless for about 2 hours because I was stunned by the sheer amount of beautiful particle effects going off. It made a big impression on me. CO effectively presents it's particle effects but not near to the same degree.
I was tempted to give the win to COX here, but when not fighting and just looked at models and zones CO really does look overall better.
For the biggest battle of this list though, I start a new post, combat is the biggest reason that COX wins the better design.
Edit: Added Global Friends List.
I'm mostly in line with it, but have a couple things to add.
CoH, from issue 7 on, had a surprisingly consistent dev team. Yes, there was some turnover, but nothing like what we've seen here. There were spillover effects: CoH's team was really, really good at figuring out what the players really wanted, not just what they said they did; the game was polished with a solid development schedule.
Cryptic just can't help itself when it comes to raiding CO for talent, and that kills any sense of attachment we have with the devs ... and kills consistency and vision.
D'oh! Yeah, my bad, completely missed the "shut down" part. Sorry. :redface:
Getting a head of steam is rarely my friend.
FEAR THE HAZELNUT!!!! :eek:
And, eh, it's not horrible, but I still prefer peanut butter.
COMBAT: COX wins hands down, yes I said it.
There are specific things that CO does better in a combat sense than COX does, including making Assault Rifle feel satisfying...which COX never did, however COX does well across the board and does many things CO simply does a bad job at. So lets break it down.
Cooldowns vs Charges/Maintains/energy builders: COX for most power sets and character designs.
Now don't get me wrong I like charges and maintains but CO went way overboard with it. Charges and maintains fit certain sets like munitions and power armor very well. However even though it works for other powers like the elemental blast sets and melee they don't work near as well and detract from the experience via lack of variety and overuse.
In COX you chose powers based on effect and cooldown and you could build to manipulate both to your will. You could choose to rely on a few powers or a large variety of powers. Powers serving the same purpose usually didn't step on each others toes because the artificial scarcity of cooldowns combined the the ability to tailor your build how you wish meant that more was almost always better. More AOE damage, more buffs, more debuffs, more defense.
In CO if you had a good single target charge or maintain attack then you had to have a really good reason to use another one. Even then it was normally just to apply a debuff, gain a buff, or do a combo. Many times there is not a really good reason to use another power than your best attack the vast majority of the time.
I believe CO could have done better if it had a better variety of power effects. Including more clicks and cooldowns to throw in more variety and give you a greater pool of truly useful and meaningful power choices. Otherwise for instance why would I want shotgun, submachine gun, hand grenade, rocket launcher, and gatling gun, lead tempest, and mini mines? All serve the purpose of AOE damage and overlap each other, I'll most likely only want to use 1, maybe 2. A couple are just downright outclassed by the other choices as well. This is only pulling from a single power set!! The problem multiplies with additional power sets like the compatibly themed Gadgeteering power set and it's AOE attacks. Single target attacks suffer the same fate.
Aggro management: COX wins hands down. Aggro management is a real thing in COX with real impact that is clear and easy to understand and yet has a fair amount of depth to it since the aggro cap was put into place. It adds to the game and the teamwork involved.
CO aggro management is more complicated but much less reliable and is regarded as bad or a mystery even by an extremely large amount of CO players.
Support abilities!!39835 COX has hands down the best framework for playing a support build ever played in an MMORPG. Support builds are not specifically needed, but they are varied and powerful. Buff and debuffs make real differences, it's not just about the healing. Crowd control and tanking also makes real differences. Healing makes a real difference. Some Archetypes specialize in the ability to contribute support, but with the right power sets any Archetype can add additional support into the pile, sometimes of significant levels.
CO support abilities are in general far weaker and much more limited in variety and scope. They are also far less interesting in general to play and receive. Ultimately there are a few auras, much weaker CC that is easily broken, and mostly just healing.
Teamwork: COX wins hands down. COX has a great setup for teaming. All the classes work well together and the team makeup is very forgiving. IO's made this even better and from IO's on any team makeup could pretty much accomplish anything except the hardest encounters. In general you tried to balance your damage and your support/tanking, but in a pinch you could complete even difficult missions in a pinch with a hodgepodge group provided they were decent.
CO teamwork never really seemed to click. Most of the time people just all seemed to solo on their own and if an encounter/alert/Comic Series was difficult you just prayed you had someone who could tank it and/or outheal it. Ironically if you were not min/maxed these people you hoped for normally did comparable damage to you WHILE tanking/healing like a boss. While the vast majority of players would have problems from time to time these players could solo the missions with ease like an old school fire tanker in COX back in the days before they rebalanced power levels.
Solo: CO hands down. While COX had a much better teaming experience CO had a much better solo experience. You could solo easily as any theme in the game, though honestly you usually ended up taking the same core powers that enabled this. COX could accomplish this as well, but not with all classes. A couple classes were left in the cold in that respect, Corruptors and Defenders. Thus COX loses.
Freeform vs "In Stone" Power Sets: TIE. Wait, stop throwing things at me, hear me out. Freeform makes a much better mixed hero. You can create anything your imagination comes up with. However you pay a price for this. Each individual power means less and is much more standardized. Also, the ability to make themed heros in CO simply do not compare to the ability to make themed heros in COX.
So yes, you could make the heros with a mix of various things far better than COX, however COX could make say...a fire hero far better than CO. You could Tank, support, control, deal major damage at range, and deal major melee damage with fire. You could fully satisfy each role using only fire. This is simply not possible in CO, not anywhere close to that level, variety, or quality. Just as the same is true for a mixed hero in COX.
Furthermore having set powersets for set archetypes combined with cooldowns allowed COX power sets to have unique attributes to them and a variety of unique powers you used in combination with each other for beautiful and free flowing effect. Even in the cases that CO could match or exceed your effectiveness at a themed role the maintained/charged style made it feel far less fluid and more stilted with far less variety.
Different strokes for different folks.
Enemies: COX wins hands down. Many things here could be easily argued either way and tie such as enemy design, progression, variety, and quality. However what cannot be argued is that COH is focused around you taking on packs of villains while CO is focused around you generally taking on much lesser amounts.
Superpowered individuals constantly fighting only a few opponents just don't feel as super or heroic as those fighting packs or even small hordes of opponents. The challenge level is similar, but the feeling is far different. To make matters worse CO rewards you very poorly for defeated foes, whereas COX rewards you pretty well for defeared foes.
Inspirations: COX wins hands down. Inspirations were a much appreciated part of combat. If you ran into a tough/bad spawn or got unexpected adds they could turn the tables. If you could handle the mission but not quite the boss they would enable you to finish the mission. Yet they were in short enough supply you couldn't unduly cheese the system.
In CO if you get in those situations you are prolly dead. Just plain badly dead. Adds you can do something about (most times) bad spawns and a boss just past your ability to handle is rough without calling in help and that isn't always an option....or desired if you wish to solo.
Pets: COX wins by a laughable margin. I'm sorry, I like the concepts of pets in CO, I like the themes, They are cool and I like that you can have em in swarms. But they are super weak and in no way do they compare to masterminds or controller pets. Not in their wonly AI, wonky controls, or their ability to die at a remarkable pace while doing low damage outside of using them as a group. This is penalty of the freeform system of course.
Masterminds set a standard for a pet class that still hasn't been met since. While they might have handled their level content easily as well they had much larger issues with higher levels than a standard hero/villain, and this balanced them in groups.
Variety: COX wins hands down. For all it's freeform goodness CO loses to COX in terms of variety. COX has a plethora of unique and visually different powers that do a variety of things for each role/archetype. Each power set has a theme and variety of powers that work together well.
CO tends to feel very samish in power effect and simply doesn't have either the visual or effect variety COX does. This is neccesary to keep the power levels of each individual power in check for it's freeform nature. It is also because so many powers are maintain and charge.
Energy builders vs Power Bar: COX by a nose. Both are mechanics that accomplish the same thing. However CO energy builds make your hero feel less powerful and sometimes (like munitions) just feel completely out of place. Why would I pull out a pistol and shoot several times so I can shoot my Assault Rifle some more? With elemental powers you can make sense of it to some degree but other powers just make a jarring shift in your combat, and often.
Visual appearance in combat: COX wins, but only due to superior power customization/visuals. While CO powers are normally pretty cut and dry or simple in their effects COX powers are extravagantly detailed and varied. Thanks to a lucky accident the power customization took this to entirely new levels by allowing you to change the colors of your powers a rather large range on two different levels in each of the varied powers.
The exception here is some of the melee powers. CO actually looks a good bit better in the melee area in many respects. However this is also mainly on the old melee power sets as the newer power sets achieved CO level of animation and fuilidity for the most part.
End Game: I LOL at the thought of end game for both games. COX got an end game way too late in it's cycle to be touted and CO, well, you guys know about CO's end game haha.
PVP: See above. Though honestly CO wins due to Zombie Apocalypse as broken as PVP was
Well I hope that put combat in a bit more of a design perspective and less of a subjective perspective. Let me now what you think and be nice
Edit: Added Inspirations and Pets.
Patches: When NCsoft took over patches from there on were good and added alot to the game. Once a framework was in place (yes ED was needed folks) each new patch successively rolled out a new issue and new power sets, and new zones, and new...STUFF that people loved and were excited about.
Truly Paragon Studios excelled at their improvement of the COX game.
CO, well, CO has always made folks feel like things might happen but seems to mostly just disappoint in their updates.
...Also everything is better with cheese. Miracle food man.
Deliciously nutritious!
I don't agree wrt travel powers. Travel powers in CO feel WAY more fun. Ooze tunneling! Scarab tunneling!
Hover/flight in CoX is just... meh.
But CoX teleport is a lot more sensible.
I agree about the grouping, though. That's one of the biggest gameplay wtf about CO is how poorly it embraces group play as a general rule (Alerts and other items have to specifically rig things to require groups).
I don't agree wrt story and graphics, and think this is going to have to be a subjective assessment. Esthetically, yeah, some of the CoX stuff has more character. (faces, as I've previously mentioned)
But CoX looked _dated_. Very dated. Heck, even CO looks dated, sometimes, and it's way better.
(And I ran CoX in Ultra with all the new bells and whistles. It still looked 10+ years old to me)
Story... um. People go on about how well-written CoX's story is and how silly CO is in comparison, but me, it's all goofy superheroes stuff. It all had high and low points, sometimes absurd.
CO has more explicitly humorous notes in it, but... it's a genre of folks flying around in tights and peacefully arresting people with lightning.
Maybe I'm not the right kind of fan, but picking nits about which is 'more serious' looks ABSURD.
I think CoX edges out CO, but it entirely comes down to the fact CoX got active support and CO's support has been minimal. The developments toward the end of CoX, sadly, looks like they could have buried CO's advantages (power coloration/emanation, variant power animations, more powersets, etc.)
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
I need to step in here for a moment. Unfortunately, one of the rules that all the PWE forums work under is that we minimize/don't allow discussion of other games.
I've been wrestling for a bit with how to handle this one. Up until now, Project Phoenix / City of Titans has been a hypothetical game; now, through a year of work, the Titans folks have built something concrete enough to be called a game. Their hard work does them credit, it's very impressive to see it at the point of getting funded. The fact that City of Titans is a realized project, though, means I have to treat it as another game.
That being said, I don't want to shut down discussion on this, or discussion of CoX overall. But for the main page of the forums, it's important that the discussion be focused on Champions specifically. As such, I've made a new off-topic section, and moved this thread into it.
The new off-topic section is a sub-forum of General Discussion, so it'll be easy to reach. This section will be for discussion of things like City of Titans, but also anything that isn't really Champs-related. It can also be a good place for threads that've morphed into being more fun than on-topic -- I don't want to shut down conversations about food, but the General Discussion isn't really the place for that. An off-topic section is a good place for them to continue.
I think this'll work well for the boards as a whole, but I'd welcome feedback in PMs. Fly high, heroes.
-TrailTurtle
CO has two things over CoX.
The character creator. And by this I mean 'more options'. I'm not even going to say the quality of the design, because a significant portion of CO's costumes look pretty stupid to me. OMG LOL PUMPKIN HEDZ AND GLOWING RUDOLF NOZE isn't what I call a 'cool' option for a superhero game, nor are the overabundance of fantasy costumes. That's just my opinion, but a few people agree. But while CO has CoX beat, CO still has less detail.
The combat. CO's combat is way faster than CoX's was. It's also completely imbalanced and there's no point in exploring other builds except out of boredom, because with freeform- anyone can do it all. No one should be able to solo 95% of an MMORPG.
That's it. Those two things. And you can't even give it full credit. Sure, say 'graphics'. We're comparing a game that had more players after 8 years subscribed than CO likely ever did. So graphics aren't really a factor. I can make you some purty pictures with a flash player if that's a selling point.
CoX had a writing team that made CO look stupid. Which isn't hard, because CO's writing is flat-out dumb as hell. Don't 'Silver Age' me, this isn't 'Silver Age Champions'. And the Silver Age wasn't that stupid (but it was close), and you'd be stupid to market a Silver Age game considering most people who play video games don't know a damned thing about the Silver Age unless they read it on Wikipedia.It's a Superhero game that honestly feels less like a comic book and more like a parody. I honestly feel like the people who wrote for CO didn't like comics, and instead of good writing- they just went for unfunny, uninspired, and flat-out bad pop culture jokes to float us through. I can't even blame people for doing alerts to get to level 40, because the writing in this game is embarassing.
So before you start praising CO as 'better' than CoX, remember- the Devs were active throughout the entirety of CoX. And new things came out constantly. And it had way more players.
Sure, it's gone. But God help CO if it comes back, because the roles will flip and we'll be migrating.
Thanks!
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Thank you for your consideration and foresight of some of the times to come.
CO has a faster TTK (time to kill) so combat is certainly faster in that way, however thanks to charges and maintains the APM (Actions Per Minute) can actually be slower many times. Depends on the builds and powersets involved though from both sides.
It was a great game and I'm bummed it's gone but I'm happy with CO. I'll give CoT a try if it ever ends up seeing the light of day. In the meantime, I've got what I want.
Global Friends list: COX wins easily. Having the option of friend specific characters or friending someone's entire account was awesome. You could friend someone once and then keep track of them and talk to them regardless of server. This helped alot with the social and teamwork side of things.
Obviously, friend responsibly.
Inspirations: COX wins hands down. Inspirations were a much appreciated part of combat. If you ran into a tough/bad spawn or got unexpected adds they could turn the tables. If you could handle the mission but not quite the boss they would enable you to finish the mission. Yet they were in short enough supply you couldn't unduly cheese the system.
In CO if you get in those situations you are prolly dead. Just plain badly dead. Adds you can do something about (most times) bad spawns and a boss just past your ability to handle is rough without calling in help and that isn't always an option....or desired if you wish to solo.
Pets: COX wins by a laughable margin. I'm sorry, I like the concepts of pets in CO, I like the themes, They are cool and I like that you can have em in swarms. But they are super weak and in no way do they compare to masterminds or controller pets. Not in their wonly AI, wonky controls, or their ability to die at a remarkable pace while doing low damage outside of using them as a group. This is penalty of the freeform system of course.
Masterminds set a standard for a pet class that still hasn't been met since. While they might have handled their level content easily as well they had much larger issues with higher levels than a standard hero/villain, and this balanced them in groups.
A note: I'm not saying that one game is better or not for everyone, I'm saying one game has a more complete/polished/quality overall package. Things that you might not care about are there for people that are not of your opinion, things that you do care about are still taken care of well. That kind of thing.
I got the feeling, leading up to CoV, that Cryptic wished it had more refined options for managing balance in CoH (and we eventually saw a disastrous rolled out for PvP in i13 that, indeed, had many tweakable items for balance that ended up being ... unbalanced).
Fast forward to CO, and Cryptic created a mind boggling power system with many, many components that could be tweaked. But the system was so complex it defied attempts to actually create balance.
FWIW, I think TSW pulled off the flexible build system better than CO, but lacks customization on how those powers look.
Edit: oddly, the utter lack of balance doesn't seem to be a big deal in CO, perhaps because, as someone else mentioned, "teaming" in CO has usually meant "a bunch of people soloing near each other." CO doesn't seem to be as hyper-competitive in terms of builds / dps / healing output as most MMOs.
I disagree with this. The adventure packs in my opinion have pretty decent writing behind them (Whiteout is the only exception since it's more or less a rip-off of the movie The Thing). I feel the same about Vibora Bay Apocalypse and a few of the lairs. Granted the pop culture references are arguably overdone, but I think it's a little harsh to say that CO's writing is flat-out "dumb as hell".
New things don't really matter if a player considers CoX's mechanics to be less enjoyable compared to CO's or due to other factors. I consider CO's gameplay mechanics to be better than CoX's with its emphasis on fixed archetypes, power cooldowns and a much slower pace of combat, so CO will always be a better game to me than CoX in that aspect.
Also, having to wait more than 10 levels to get my first travel power in CoX? I sure as heck don't miss that at all.
In fact, it wasn't until CO was being close to release that Paragon Studios started coming out with huge updates like Mission Architect and Power Colorization (something that they have claimed was impossible to do with the game's engine prior). It doesn't take a genius to see that these things were done because CO introduced the incentive for CoX to remain competitive.
NCsoft has a history of leaving their closed-down games to remain closed-down for good, with no intention of selling the IPs of those games off. I'm not counting on CoX ever making a return at all.
It's called an homage.
I mean, as it is, there are vast differences between how Whiteout plays out and The Thing.
I think it's brilliant, myself.
But I think most complaints about the writing are pretty much everything _else_. While I think people are making a big deal over 'more episodic/less hooked together sometimes silly plots' vs. 'several arcs that loosely relate,' I can at least understand why people see them differently.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/The+exception+proves+the+rule
Yeah, I think Cyber knows those are good stories. But that's only a small minority of the existing content. The rest of the writing in this game is indeed just plain, flat-out stuuuupid. Most of the time there isn't any plot or reason to the mission content. As someone illustrated earlier, it's mostly "fetch me bear asses" stuff.
Yes at the end of the day, that's all they really are: Defeat/fetch/use X number of Y missions. That concept has always been the staple of MMORPGs in general for progression. I don't see that as being something negative. Even a "revolutionary" game like Guild Wars 2 that boasts about breaking away from the traditional MMORPG still uses that concept.
You and I must be playing a different game to claim that there isn't any plot or reason for those missions. They're all (at least mostly) relevant to the superhero theme and there's at least logical rationale behind the NPCs asking you for help in doing them.
You want an example of what I'd consider really flat-out stupid? A mission that involves Foxbat asking you to look for his misplaced love letter to Sapphire, or helping Defender send a box of chocolates to Witchcraft because he just doesn't have the time, or helping Microman get out of a jar that he accidentally got himself stuck inside of. Those would be flat-out stupid. I could go on with more examples but I'm sure you get the idea of where I'm coming from.
Would I say that the story arcs in CO are of better or similar quality to CoX? Perhaps not, but it's something entirely else to claim that they're "dumb as hell" or "flat-out stupid".
Then again, you're speaking to someone who doesn't consider deep, intricate storytelling to be an important point when it comes to MMORPGs compared to other aspects of MMORPGs that I consider a whole lot more important.
I have to disagree. I like the general writing in this game. It's not the best but it certainly is not the worst. To act like CoX had some grand writing is reaching. That said, it's obvious that some of the missions aren't meant to be serious, which is nice. The references to various things was a nice touch as well. At the end it's all relative because too many times I rolled my eyes at CoX storylines. I don't find myself doing that with CO that often.
Those honestly seem like a reference to the silly gags some comic stories used to pull in the past. I thought those were funny.
That said, I'm glad to see this has turned into another CoX vs Co thread. I always enjoy those.
Or you don't know what a plot is. It's what ties a story together... it is the glue.
Even superhero stuff has a plot. Superman comics don't just have him flying around and beating guys up. There's an actual story, like Lex Luthor implementing a plan to use Metallo as a distraction while his agents go around stealing equipment for a new invention. Each step of the way could be a mission in its own right.
In CO, we have a bunch of bear butt hunting tasks, a lot of them that don't seem to tie together all that well if at all. Tell me, for example, what does helping a scientist develop mind control over Irradiates have to do with stopping the Irradiates from launching a missile against Project Greenskin for Talisman? Absolutely nothing! It's just a bunch of odd jobs with no connection!
And why does Talisman want to destroy Project Greenskin? Is it just because she's eeeevil? How is it even remotely related the Kings of Edom looking for the Basilisk Orb in Canada? It's mentioned, but it doesn't make any sense on what the connection is supposed to be.
It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Interesting. I think it's a good move. I just hope it's a while before we betray your trust and make it get deleted.
I'm pretty sure he was talking about the normal game story, which is pretty lacking, I'd wager we could all agree the adventure packs have pretty nice stories :P. I certainly enjoyed them.
I agree with your stance on that but honestly this entire statement says "you don't care about things you're not interested in. That's really not a meaningful statement in any regard or context.
I think we all agree with you there, too bad it was baked into the game before Paragon Studios took over. Hard coding at the core of the game is almost impossible to fix without breaking everything.
Paragon Studios quite simply put more effort into the game that Cryptic did, it's as simple as that. I remember the change well and I was astonished by the support they gave the game. They didn't claim it was impossible, they claimed it would take a monumental amount of effort.
http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Power_Customization
If it was so easy to do then surely Cryptic would have done it before? Curious enough every single one of those quotes originated BEFORE Cryptic sold COX.
Lets be fair NCsoft purchased COX November 6th, 2007. CO released Sept 1st 2009. So the first post Crytpic issue was "Midnight Hour". This is the major things accomplished between acquisition and the release of CO (Pay attention):
New Magic and Mythology Zones
Arachnos Widow and Spider Archetypes
Started "Powerset proliferation" (sharing powersets between other Archetypes)
Shield powerset
Pain domination powerset (Evil Empathy)
Dual builds
Mac Support
Mission Architect
Costume change emotes
Power Customization (Released 14 days after CO launched)
More epic powerset choices
Sidekicking vastly improved
20% increase to low level experience
Greatly improved the difficulty adjustment system.
Look, this isn't COX/CO when I'm dealing with this post. This is about good dev support that any game would be glad to receive. They did a remarkable amount of work and added tons of things that people had been asking for, many times since launch. They started this from the moment they got clearance from the new bosses.
Admit it, you'd be ecstatic to see that sort of list from 5 updates to CO. They did a good job working hard for 2 years and should be praised. Paragon Studios had talented and committed devs, which kind of makes you wonder when talent like that is left behind and suddenly accomplishes ALOT.
Maybe the devs at Cryptic just couldn't put their hearts behind COX because it wasn't the game they set out to create, and so they left it to do this. But if so why didn't CO receive that kind of TLC? Did they run out of funding to accomplish that?
Regardless, I think they made the right decision. Paragon Studios were the right people to develop COX and they led it into a glorious shining future cut short only by the greed and cruelty of NCsoft. Cryptic was meanwhile left free to make the game they wanted to from the start. I just wish they had supported it better.
Are you sure that's true? Because before the end, they changed it (I can't remember if it was a Vet Reward or they gave it to everyone when they gave everyone the Fitness Pool for "free" or a combo of the two) to a lot earlier. Anything they could do for one/some, they could do for all if they wished.
Except random things can and do happen along the way in comics. A proper story will have random things occurring while the plot is in effect. despite it being a comic, it's pretty silly to think that nothing id going on in the city except the plot at hand. In comics though, for the sake of time and pages, since they are trying to cram as much as they can into a story, the other stuff that goes on, like the few dozen people Superman saves from burning buildings or the broken dams he has to fix or what have you is sacrificed. We only assume this is going on because Superman says so or we have an issue here and there devoted to reminding people that Superman does all these things. With a game, it's harder to show this because we see this occurring in real time. With CO, the world is going to hell in a hand basket and that is what is being conveyed by all the different things going down at one time.
It reminds me of the first few issues of Grant Morrison's Final Crisis with how some things are going down. That said, the lore tends to string things together pretty well and makes for a good read.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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I don't think you've checked out a good portion of COX arcs, the high rated Mission Architect Arcs, or pretty much ANYTHING added the last 2 years of that games life. They really upped the story telling and atmosphere considerably in those last 2 years. Though ironically my favorite story was "Night Calls the Weaver" from the MA and was created by a player.
The only thing memorable I have from CO is Foxbat, who I love lol, and adventure packs (which are good). So much of the rest of it was just forgettable. I mean yes, I chuckled the at the first few references like Lost and such but the constant pop-culture references inserted with the subtlety of a Jackhammer to the skull got old quick.
Really made me want to kill more skullz.
Part of the problem since December, 2012.
Except I did. Then again, having played through with different characters may be why I view it as I do. The stories just weren't that great. I will give the game credit for it's scope. The zones felt so large but beyond that, with the nostalgia goggles off, I wonder why I stayed with that game as long as I did. Maybe Shewolf had a point from a few pages back. I was in a guild that I ran with and stayed because of my friends. Beyond that, I can't imagine why I would have stayed there.
To each their own I guess. I personally love the Vibora Bay Apocalypse arc. The Lemuria quests and mini-arcs are actually pretty good as well just for the story alone. It's a shame that people seem to hate the place (though in some ways I can understand).
It was "collect ten bear asses WHILE WALKING" until they had Champs show them the way of "Waiting til level 14 for travel powers is absurd." It wasn't until City was in its death spiral that they fixed that. And then it looks like it was too late.
Hey I'll admit, now I'm just cheerleading because the game I like still has a pulse and I'm around folk who share the sentiment. /happydance