Samuel_Tow
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*head explodes*
Do you know what I HAVEN'T used that I really seriously meant to? Staff Fighting. For any AT in any combination with anything. Does that sound like something "this character" could use? If so, that's actually a very solid grounding because Staff Fighting has a very specific "style" to it that assumes a very specific character and it comes with a very specific weapon selection that assumes a very specific technological level. Think we can work with this? -
I wanted to quote-answer, but there's too much to address, so let me see if I can freehand this.
There seems to have been a miscommunication about the level of intelligence of this creature. I meant for it to have started out stupid many centuries ago, but to be quite intelligent by this point. I really don't want to deal with a fool or a "fish out of water" sort of thing, like Wonder Woman not being able to pump gas or use credit cards. More, my quandary is between having this creature just simply intelligent in an academic sense, or outright genius to the point of using and creating advanced technology.
As a bit of a reference, I'm basing this very loosely off the character of Gar, the world's most intelligent orc from Arcanum. He lives in a museum and acts like an idiot, like "Gar smart! Gar can add two plus two is four!" When pressed, he admits it's all an act and he's actually quite smart and fluent, only putting up the act because racist visitors to the museum would freak out if they heard an orc speak intelligently. He was actually an orc born from completely human parents, he guesses because they had an orc in their family tree somewhere along the line. As such, he was raised like a human, educated and brought up well.
This is sort of the base level of intelligence I'm shooting for - someone who's smart and aware enough to discuss existentialist matters, to read, write and possibly even compose, but also someone who had to start from absolute zero and teach itself everything. The original source of the idea was actually what Pandora's Box does to the Trolls in SSA2.1, in how they start asking questions like "Why we want power?" and answer them like "Power mean we don't have to be afraid." or some such. That's how it starts, but I want to put this in this creature's backstory and start the character off as intelligent enough to be able to teach others. After all, that's why I'm making it a hero - it's smart enough to realise that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is pointless, and it only matters if you use it to achieve something greater.
I also think it could work as a neat allegory for the state of education decay in modern society when an ostensibly stupid creature could teach itself intelligence and then be smart enough to teach it to humans who should be smarter than this just by existing in a modern civilised society. And we all know human kind is not at all devoid of clueless fools
Anyway, that's the range of intelligence I'm shooting for - not impaired in any way and quite intelligent to start off. The question is if I want to go far enough to use intelligence as a power through the use of technology, since that changes the character drastically one way or the other.
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Infested Kerrigan is also not a bad idea for appearance, though I fear I might have already done that. Still, having something that's more inhuman than a basic orc or troll is not a bad idea. Someone suggested dinosaurs and that caught my attention, but I hope to not have to use the Monster heads. I already have a lizard, plus if I go with a female character, then those look TERRIBLE. Whoever did the scaling on those dropped the ball, because those heads are beyond too tiny.
Slight detour for a moment - after playing the AWFUL Blades of Time, I had a fleeting urge to make a dragon lady like the really badly done one in that game. I found myself failing at this since it's either "stock dragon" of all scales, dragon wings and dragon head or bust. That, and I kind of already have a lizard lady. The reason I dropped the dragon concept, though, is less because of the costume - I could have figured something out - and more because the concept I tried to use for the character, I'd already done almost word for word in a demonic-looking alien empress of my own from 2007, who even gave rise to what I consider to be my first serious story.
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When it comes to powersets, I've done everything for Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes so repeats are inevitable, I just worry about repeating whole combos. SS/Inv I've done TWICE, so that won't happen. I've done Sword and Shield twice, Axe and Shield twice and Mace and Shield only once. Basically, though, I have 50 characters, most of whom are Scrappers, Brutes or Stalkers, so even I don't remember what I've done with whom. Essentially, if I can find a powerset combo that I haven't done for this AT, I'll use it. Or if you can come up with a very good argument for why I'd be using a particular combo, I might do a repeat.
Here's the thing, though - I kind of want to go with something that's physical. You know, that whole shtick I went through with Xanta and her Incarnate power? Like that, but for powersets. I'd like to avoid using magic if at all possible, but technology is not out of the question. It might put the character a bit too close to my Marxist-Leninist elf who abandoned his magic monarchy to work as a mechanic for a socialist state, but I think it's the aspect of the rise of intelligence that keeps it just far enough away to be different.
I don't, however, have a problem with going with a Stalker. I wasn't planning on it originally, but you have a point - a "brute force" approach doesn't have to be literal. This thing could still be a clever stealth fighter. Even ostensibly unintelligent creatures by human measures can still be quite stealthy. After all, cats can't do long division, but they're great at sneaking up on small rodents in the dead of night. No reason I can't use that.
What else...
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Oh, yeah, gender: I REALLY don't want to go with something genderless. For some characters, this may work. For instance, my own Bodyshop is just an intelligent pile of cancerous tissue that can adopt any body shape, so it has one costume that's male, one that's female, one that's huge and so on. This, however, adds an extra layer of monstrosity and inhumanity that makes the character harder to sympathise with and write for, requiring the story to do more to make the character work. This, in turn, tends to usurp the central point about the rise of intelligence and the aspect about hard work. I've botched more than enough stories to know how easy it is to get bogged down in the setup for the story I want to tell and either never get around to the actual story or make it so contrived it becomes silly. That's why I'm trying to streamline the design of this concept so much.
Also, when I said making the character male or female would make a difference, I wasn't making a comment on genders in general. Rather, I'm going to try to use as much set precedent definition with this one so that I have to do as little as possible to characterise this creature. The point, as it were, is to make people ask themselves what they would do in this creature's place. What if one day you too lost the ability to read and understand your surroundings? Or, alternately, what if you really COULD be smarter and make a difference in the world? This is much easier to do with a more person-like creature than with a pile of dead leaves. Or a sentient cancer, for that matter, and I did consider rerolling Bodyshop as this
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Sadly, I'm still drawing a blank here. I guess a costume might help, maybe even just a face, or even just a gender. However, I just can't seem to make the switch from idea into reality. I'm leaning towards a female of some sort, possibly a Stalker since I have very few of those, possibly using technology of some sort... Bur I've done tech versions for all melee weapons. Well, except claws. I don't have a Claws Stalker, and the Mecca Armour set has a nice set of energy claws I could maybe possibly use.
That still leaves the question of race open, though. And I'd rather not do dragon/dinosaur, personally, since I kind of already have that, plus I'd want something smaller. Some kind of imp, maybe? Or an animal type creature? I don't know...
Either way, this is really giving me something to think about. Keep it coming, folks, it's helping!
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Quote:I should have been more specific - I don't get how "heroes" can feel anything distinctly different from "villains" when those are in-game concepts that define fictional characters incapable of independent thought. I know that it's describing players who play heroes, instead, but that's the type of "us vs. them" distinction I couldn't get even when City of Heroes and City of Villains were pretending to be different games. It's all one game and we're customers to all of it. What's bad for one player is bad for all players because all players are customers to the same content.Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
I think what he meant by that was, if heroes did something bad for once maybe now they get how villains feel doing good all the time. Doesn't fit the character, breaks immersion and enjoyment.
If villain content is actually co-op content is actually hero content that villains get to participate in out of pity - and it is - then that's bad not just for "villains" but it's bad for players in general because part of their service is sub par. If new content for heroes that is actually co-op content isn't up to scratch, that is a problem, too. That's bade for players in general, because not only are villains wrong, now so are heroes. That strikes me as the same kind of problem arguments that see players who perceive themselves as playing underperforming ATs (Blasters, let's say) relishing that another AT is having such a hard time with something that those who are playing it at the time are enraged.
Bad experiences are never a good thing for the game. If we should relish something, it should be highlighting the problem and pushing for a solution. The game sucking equally for everyone is not one such solution. The game sucking for as close to nobody as is reasonably possible is.
And that problem, by the way, is co-op content. I am sick and tired of co-op content. Instead of inventing a whole other side of the game so that they now have to create content fore three separate paths AND a new level range with Incarnates, the developers should have stuck with just heroes and just villains and divided work between those. Because with the current policy of co-op, villains are never going to get that all new zone to themselves like they've needed since I7, because a zone for JUST villains and NOT heroes is not going to happen. Universal content simply isn't. -
Quote:I still don't get this. I'm as disappointed with villain content of late as the next guy, but being happy that someone else is having as crappy time as my villains are strikes me as... Unproductive?Originally Posted by AkuTenshiiZero
Maybe now you know what it's felt like for villains all these years playing "co-op" content that was obviously written for heroes.
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That's not a bad idea, actually, and it reminds me of something I forgot to mention that I REALLY should have. It's just something of a rule of thumb of mine - I'd like to try to make this creature as inhuman and weird as I can while still retaining a humanoid and at least somewhat sympathetic look. To me, characters with fantastical alien magic backstories immediately lose a lot of their specialness when they look like humans, and this is a bias I developed from old sci-fi shows that made heavy use of "rubber forehead aliens." It's easier to just cast people and put some minor make-up on them, especially for older shows, than it is to use puppets or animatronics or even CGI that didn't exist for a lot of those.
A human character is kind of like a human face - we're all the same when you get right down to it, so I instead have to reach pretty far to make a human character truly unique. It's a lot easier to pull off with an alien-looking creature because no-one really has any preconceptions of how these should look, thus just the unique look is enough personality. I mean, check out my 13. She's a ridiculously simple design - all red robot with breasts - but because you don't see that many of them, THAT is a large part of her personality.
*edit*
I'm not sure how I feel about a "slave race," though. See, the thing is I want to work with something that's stupid naturally. When you start getting into the "great legacy" side of a story - and that's an awesome story, by the way - you sort of end up cheating, so to speak. All of a sudden, this character isn't learning through hard work and dedication, it's learning because it's simply unlocking its own lost potential. That's good for its own story, as I said, but for this one I really need someone whose potential is a dead-end street, thus this person can go above and beyond his or her own limit. It's what the story hinges on.
*edit*
And again, I reject nothing when I make these posts I greatly appreciate the insight, and you forced me to consider several angles I'd never even thought of.
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Quote:Like Blasters, how well Stalkers do really depends on the kind of missions they're asked to perform. This really isn't the case for most other ATs - a Brute can just muscle through most content, just with various degrees of difficulty. A Stalker, however, can and often does meet situations that disable a large part of the Stalkers' tools. The I22 Stalker Changes served to mitigate this a great deal by making Stalkers play less like... Well, less like Stalkers, but you can still feel the design just the same.Originally Posted by Bright
Sure, it CAN be done... I ought to know. I've gone through the whole Praetorian song and dance with three now... but at this point I really am convinced that the devs who designed First Ward had something against sneaky folk.
The problem with Stalkers and Blasters being so dependent on the missions they're running is that whoever's making these missions REALLY has no regard for who will be running it. That's why playing an AT which relies on specific circumstances to do really well is so tricky - mission designers just toss whatever they come up with at you and let you figure it out.
That's actually the side of "challenge" that bugs me the most - when it screws only some characters only some of the time, making for badly inconsistent difficulty. -
Quote:I think the problem here is sort of like a reverse uncanny valley. More interactivity is almost always good, but there's a "valley" where interactivity becomes too much, yet the game itself is not designed to be very interactive, so it comes off less like a feature and more like a bother. Conversations, for instance, are very cool for breaking up the monotony of endless fighting, but Graves and Twinshot showed us that when EVERY enemy you defeat drops down and wants to speak with you, it can start feeling like a bother.Originally Posted by Kirsten
All that said, we do have some minimal noncombat interaction, like conversation, and it'd be nice to expand upon that. It's just kind of sad that they were never able to work this in all those years ago, because I would've really liked to play it.
Right now, the "easy" way to go about a detective type skill is to mash the Tip and Inventions systems together. Certain detective skills would give you a higher chance to get "clues" from enemy defeats, other skills would let you get better "running theories" from police station computers and other skills yet would let you put all of those together to "craft" a mission, then go do it. It would be easy, but at the end of the day, it would also be a lot of bother just to essentially gate a single mission that, if tips are anything to go by, won't really be all that spectacular anyway.
The thing with interactivity is that people want it because they expect to be able to do things. However, when you turn interactivity into a gate, it becomes an annoyance. Consider contacts and their cell phones. It used to be that contacts would be hesitant to give their phones away to every costumed weirdo who dropped by, forcing people to walk to them and interact directly. That's more interactive, since it gives the contact a stronger sense of physical location, but people just felt it was a needless bother and asked to be able to skip straight for the cell phone.
For City of Heroes to do out-of-combat skills right, it would need to have an actual out-of-combat GAME, not just non-interactive downtime. I remember a rather abstract RPG where one player bragged to another for having won a verbal debate with an NPC in the game. On the outside, this seems like a silly thing to be impressed about, only the game makes it impressive by essentially using the same mechanics as it does for combat to depict verbal duels. You can use arguments like attacks, counter-arguments like defence and so forth. In other words, conversations were no longer just conversations, they were an actual game where actual character abilities came into play.
Right now in City of Heroes, combat is a game but NPC conversations and environment interactions are not. In order for non-combat skills to work, both environment interactions and NPC conversations need to be turned into games first.
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Let me go off the deep end for a moment. Imagine that in addition to my combat powersets, I were able to pick a "non-combat" one. Say I picked Verbal Prowess, a skill set meant to talk people into a corner and get them to do what you want just by sheer force of personality. It might consist of skills like:
Interrupt: While your enemy is using his "debate" autoattack, you can interrupt him and render him unable to argue for the next 10 seconds.
Browbeat: By pressing your adversary, you are able to shake his resolve and thus reduce the effectiveness of his counter-arguments.
Mock: By ridiculing your opponent, you cause his arguments to become more outlandish and harder to substantiate, thus making them less accurate.
Stubborn: When challenged, you just dig your heels and stand by your argument, thus reinforcing it and returning some of its "hit points."
Accuse: By questioning your enemy's motivations, you are able to redirect his efforts into justifying his existing arguments, reducing his offensive argumentative strength.
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I'm obviously pulling those straight out of my ***, but consider how an argument like this could work. It wouldn't even need voices since you don't know what the characters are saying. It's all abstractions. You can even have an argument between a single player and a whole group of enemies, where powers like "Shout" or "Soapbox" or "Shaming the Crowd" might come into play. All of a sudden, you can have a whole mission comprised of nothing but talking, and yet you'd still have what is ostensibly a GAME, and an RPG at that. You'd still have hit points by another name, attack strength, accuracy, defences and so forth. You could even have status effects like confusion, disorientation and so forth, and you can still mask it as an argument.
THAT is what I mean when I say it would need to be a game. And guess what - in a mission like that, this big hulking super-warrior your friend made who can rip tanks apart with his bare hands and is about as dense as rock? Totally useless, because he'd get browbeaten in a millisecond. Now just imagine how the TPN Trial would work with this mechanic. All of a sudden, you don't need these super soldiers, and you can benefit greatly from someone who can talk to the crowd and swing them around. Crowd stoning you? Have someone "Shame the Crowd" and then talk them down one by one while the rest of your team goes about punching psychics in the face.
This isn't impossible to do, and it would actually be kind of fun. But I have to think it is A LOT of work. -
Quote:Beladonna's mission is "simple," but it has more than a few instances of +++ Spawns, especially towards the end. I played it at x2 because any less than that and the IDF are a complete joke. I mean, seriously - three BCUs? Were you hoping I might trip over their mangled bodies and skin my elbow? However, at x2, the final mission had me fight through what must be around 8 spawns all set to twice that, consisting of a War Walker, two lieutenants - usually one who summons an Orb and one who deals psychic damage, and four minions. Most of those guys are considerably more resistant to giant swords than anything I'm likely to run across in Dark Astoria, and they deal quite a bit of damage and debuffs, too.Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
In fact, Belladonna's arc was also quite easy, the hard part being completing the optional story mission without causing the mapserver to explode.
One of the reasons I keep saying I'm not worried about Night Ward is I haven't run Night Ward yet, so I can't comment on that. However, I ran a basic repeatable mission from Ephram Sha the other day and a simple glowie spawned three medium-sized boss ambushes on me.
Honestly, I had the most fun in Dark Astoria when the game told me "OK, now go beat up Diabolique on the other end of the map. I promise I won't mess you until then." Sure enough, what followed was a whole mission of regular spawns in a relatively regular map with no ambushes, no "special" spawns and... OK, and one special hostage rescue. And I loved it. The difficulty was just where I'd wanted to set it, and it was quite enjoyable. I wish more missions could be like this. -
I killed probably an hour of Viking's time with this last night, but there's a certain character concept I've been sort of pondering for a while that I'm really stuck on in virtually every respect. I got kind of burned out on City of Heroes after running through Dark Astoria about four times in a row, so I tried playing other games... And they were all terrible! So, I'm back to City of Heroes and I really need something new to shake up the game for myself. Enter "this character" that I haven't even named yet. Let me describe "it" and see if you can help me make this a reality.
"This character" is a member of a race of creatures whose primary defining characteristic is that they're generally pretty stupid, but tough and VERY long-lived. They live in a world ruled by superstition, ritual and essentially clueless blundering, surviving on their hardy physique and thick heads more than anything else. At one point, these creatures received a gift of great power and knowledge, but while the others used their new power to wage war and conquer, this character instead took the time to marvel at the beauty of nature, to sample the fruits of culture and to generally try to understand the world, so that it doesn't seem as scary and confusing.
Unfortunately, the great power waned, and these creatures grew stupid once more. No longer able to comprehend, the world once more felt alien, nature looked ugly and culture seemed... Well, stupid and pointless. But the memories of those times remained with this creature. It may not have been able to understand why the sun rose every morning, but it remembered that this COULD be understood, at least. Having dealt with the pain of losing its great intelligence, this creature emerged with the gift of great wisdom, knowing that there was more to life than basic instinct and primal fear. It set out to learn, to experience and to define its own existence, aware of its low intelligence, and having accepted it.
With hard work and dedication, over many centuries of its long life, the creature studied, it learned, it contemplated and conversed, and eventually regained... If not the supernatural intelligence it had lost, then at the very least the perspective that had once inspired it so. In the end, the quest for knowledge gave way to a much less straightforward one - the quest to use this knowledge and in turn help others define their own place in life.
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Now, it might seem like I already have a character written and ready to go, but... That couldn't be farther from the truth. What I have is an idea, but I don't actually have a character to put it to AND I need to tread carefully so I don't end up remaking a character I already have. Here are some of the things I don't know or don't have about this character:
Gender: Serious question here - should this character be male or female? That actually puts the story in quite a different perspective depending on which direction I go, just because it's a lot easier to paint a man as a dumb brute without putting much thought into it.
Race/Appearance: I have no idea what this creature would actually look like. From speaking with Viking, we established that I want the creature to be organic, biological and to have been "born" in some way. I don't want to work with artificial intelligence or magical constructs because these put a whole extra layer of existentialist self-awareness questions that I don't want to get into as they'd dilute the "intelligence vs. wisdom" duality that I'm shooting for. I also don't want an "orc" or any other kind of "green skin" because I already have one of those. She's the face in my sig.
Level of intelligence: I'm not sure how intelligent I want to have this creature eventually become. Obviously, I don't want godlike omniscience, but where do I draw the line? Do I make the creature still stupid, just more self-aware, or do I reward its efforts and make it nevertheless highly intelligent enough to lead an intellectual debate? Make it into a scientist, possibly?
Brains vs. Brawn: How much of the creature's "power" do I want to come from the might side of things and how much should it stem from intelligence? Should I involve technology of some kind, or go more bestial?
Powers: Not a clue in the world, other than I want a Scrapper, a Brute, a Stalker or a Mastermind... Actually, scratch that. No Mastermind, just Scrapper, Brute or Stalker. And when that's done, what powers? I've done so much with these ATs that repeating myself is a real danger.
Appearance: What should this thing actually look like? Big? Small? Tough? Scrawny? I want to put it in clothes of some kind, but what kind? Regular contemporary, future sci fi, power armour, what? Should it have wings? A tail, maybe? Should it have a face with a mouth?
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Basically, I'm desperate on this one. My foray into "other games" was so depressingly negative that this is all I have left to save my desire to play games. I need a good idea because, at the end of the day, that's what I play for - good ideas I can make something out of. And if I can't make something out of this one soon, my head maw actually explode. I'm already hearing it tick. -
Quote:I honestly don't like this argument, because the game hasn't been easy since I18, possibly since I17 when Mercedes Sheldon started throwing in a boss with three boss ambushes, one of which had three boss ambushes of its own. I get the call for variety, but we're coming on... What, three years now since going Rogue? Two at the very least, and the game hasn't been "easy" for a while. When I go down the list of missions any of my heroes or villains can do, the only really easy ones I can think of date back to four years or more, and they're easy because there's nothing custom about them - just a warehouse of enemies with a boss at the end.Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Anyway Sam, I don't believe that City of Heroes should be giving Dark Souls a run for its difficulty or anything. What I want is simply variety. When the bulk of the solo content of a game has been as easy as it has here for so long, variety is pretty much going to mean increased challenge.
If this were just from this Issue or from the last, I could agree it's just variety. If it were just in Incarnate content, I could see it as the expectation that Incarnates will be stronger. But it's not. It's everywhere and in every instance of new content. I'm pretty certain that somewhere around the I16-I17 time frame, we swapped mission designers, and the new one fell in love with ambishes and huge spawns and lots of bosses. I don't mind variety, but "easy" is part of variety, too, and I kind of want to see more of that, as well. -
Quote:I caught that in the quote in question, which made it too late to fix. I was originally planning to say something like "an interesting story" but changed my word choice, forgetting to change the preposition in the process. Plus, I freely admit that I don't proof-read most of my forum posts. That and I have a habit of posting stories I've written before I proof-read them, only later updating them with proof-read versions of the same.Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Editor! Editor, where are you?!
I suspect that I might put more effort into it if I were getting paid for this, though. Or if I had an editor who gets paid to do that. I'd kill for one of those
Yeah, that was just stupid, but I assume it was simply a shortcut. Electric-themed Clockwork didn't exist in the 40s, but psychic ones did, so whoever designed the mission either figured "What the heck? We'll tell he unlocked his own psychic powers!" and threw them in anyway... Or just didn't know better. The Psychic Clockwork in Lady Grey's TF are an example of how to do an enemy powerup WRONG.Quote:Originally Posted by BViking
I would argue that it started with the Clockwork King breaking out the Psychic Clockwork in the Lady Grey Task Force.
Incidentally, you may be pleasantly surprised about just this subject in SSA2.1
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Quote:Aside from a scant few, most tilesets we have these days descend from the collection of such we had at launch. We have:Originally Posted by Leo_G
Curious, can anyone name the other map-types we have?
Offices: White and white old for heroes, brown and brown old for villains, yellow for Praetoria. That's whole tilesets, not just one-off custom maps.
Warehouses: Used to be whitish for heroes and brownish for villains, plus greenish for Praetorians. That and old versions of the same. Now all three tilesets use the same mis-mash of broken texture tiling that has places of green brick, places of white placer and places of brown stone.
Blue caves: This is the most egregious one. Not only are CoV caves the same but retextured, Council bases and Oranbegan ruins are adaptations of the same caves. The same rooms exist for the most part, but faction-specific geometry walls off part of it.
Pink caves: These may be worse. Those came out with I2, and since then they've had a number of reuses. They show up as Cimeroran caves with props and water, they show up as Snake caves with boulders and eggs, etc.
Blue labs: These show up proper, they show up as Portal Corp facilities with white paint and Longbow bases with a carbon fibre finish.
Sewers: There used to be green sewers for Paragon City and sort of desaturated greyish ones for villains, but now both sides use both types, plus we have the sewers of Mot with bloody red water in them.
Arachnoid caves: These are fairly new, first introduced with I7, but they're showing up now as Granite Caves in Dark Astoria. And they're confusing as all hell and the map doesn't correspond to the physical layout of the tunnels very well.
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Why office building reskins? They're the most versatile since they're the most elaborate and at the same time most rectangular, so they're easy to pass them off as everything and anything that doesn't require an organic or natural look to them. -
Quote:That's not entirely true. Sure, you can't control the number of ambushes... Even though that ought to be possible... But let's say for the sake of argument that you can't control the number of ambushes. You ought to still be able to control their size. In pre-Praetoria content, this was always the case, as an "ambush" was essentially a regular spawn with some special AI instructions. When the Architect came out, missions were allowed to set special spawns to be "easy," "medium" or "hard," which I believe just meant "xDifficulty," "xDifficulty+1" and "xDifficulty+2." I've observed these spawns, and from what it looks like, it seems that if I'm playing at +0x2, an easy spawn would show up as +0x2, a medium one would show up as +0x3 and a hard one as +0x4.Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
The difficulty slider is only relevant for old style blobs of enemies. The more complex encounters they're designing now are way beyond the scope of such a simplistic tool. There is no way for players who want an increased challenge to go to a difficulty contact and say "Yes, I'd like fourteen ambushes followed by three EBs, please!" To request that all new content be reducible to -1x1 in typical terms is to request that they never add anything more interesting than run of the mill spawns in differently skinned buildings. No thanks.
Now, maybe I'm misunderstanding basic mission design intent, but it seems to me like medium difficulty spawns and ambushes should be rare and hard ones special, and yet it feels like just about half of what I've fought in Dark Astoria and for Belladonna Vetrano has been hard spawns because I played at -1x2 and the spawns I saw looked more like -1x4. Having the Olympian show up with a hard spawn at the end of a Hero's Epic, that I can see. It's a signature fight and it's supposed to be damn hard. Plus, it's ONE fight, which is exactly where heavy use of inspirations is appropriate and where expending lots of time on complex, intricate and time-consuming strategies is justifiable. One tough fight per arc... Hell, one tough fight per mission, I can freely admit to enjoying. Sure, it can take a long time and tax me, but that's good to have, occasionally. That's why I'm not actually that concerned with the "four elite bosses fight" unless it's like Mender Tesseract's TF where the mission resets if you leave it.
My beef is with missions and arcs where every fight is like that, or at least over half of them are, and that's not just Incarnate content any more. This is sort of Praetoria, take two, and in more ways than one. When Going Rogue came out and we started commenting on the damn depressing storyline, people argued that "That's just Praetoria." And I'd have bought it, if the same damn depressing storylines hadn't started showing up on Primal Earth. Similarly, Praetoria was... If not the first, then one of the first places to use the absurd ambush spam in every mission, making players fight several times their chosen difficulty, not mention the considerably stronger low-level critters there. Again people argued that Praetoria is "hard mode," and I'd have bought it, except that sort of design has spread throughout all of the game's new content.
As for never being able to do anything "interesting" without making missions very hard... That's a very narrow definition of "interesting," consisting essentially of "ambushes" and "large spawns." If that's interesting to you, you can always make your spawns larger - that's what the difficulty settings are for. You'd think I could make mine smaller the same way, but that doesn't work like these. See, what I want isn't high or low difficulty, it's CONSISTENT difficulty. When a mission, an arc, a whole zone has a consistent difficulty level, then I can tweak my settings and adjust it to just the level I want. But that's not the case. If I drop my difficulty, then regular spawns become trivial and uninteresting. If I up it, then special spawns become nearly impossible. There's no longer any good balance point because enemy difficulty varies so much it makes difficulty settings irrelevant. To me, setting my difficulty so I'd fight four or five enemies simultaneously yet routinely being jumped by 20 enemies at a time or by multiple bosses is not terribly different from having a mission that can spawn enemies anywhere from -4 to +4 to the mission level. Just where the hell do you set your difficulty to with that?
If the game is to be made "interesting," then this has to be done within the context of the tools it gives to players. Arguing that it's too damn bad the game is too hard for some and they should get help is no better than arguing that if the game is too easy, just stop using enhancements and respec into a ****** build. And, yes, I've heard this argument used in all seriousness. -
To me, the reason this system was scrapped was the "out of combat" bit. Twist it how you may, City of Heroes is a combat game, a fighter if you will. Activities exist that aren't combat, yes, but they are either directly derived from the results of combat or (often AND) feed into combat anyway. Giving people things to do out of combat in a game that really wasn't built for it and supports shockingly few ways to interact with the environment aside from combat is a losing prospect in general.
That doesn't mean the system can't work, so much as I can see why they gave up on it. Either you have to massively revamp the game in order for it to include a myriad of non-combat activities where these non-combat skill can come into play, or it would end up, as it did, quite very boring. It's a lot like conversations when those came into being, in the sense that they're just buffers between clicking an NPC and receiving the next leg of the mission with pretty inconsequential differences between the different choices. Now, being inconsequential has allowed conversations to "stretch their legs" and do a very good cosmetic job, but an actual game system can't afford to do this.
For instance, in order for detective work to have a point, you'd need a game which accounted for forensic examinations, witness interviews, crime scene investigations and collaboration with law enforcement agencies and possibly street contacts. Say, like what you'd see in one of the zillion 3D CSI games. And that wouldn't be a bad game, nor indeed a bad game within a super hero MMO, but our game just isn't set up for this. All this would end up doing is add extra hoops to jump through just to get a mission so you can go punch people in the face anyway.
In a sense, the Inventions system is an admission of the above. It's a system that draws on combat for resources and produces items for combat as its output, with the amount of "gameplay" involved within the system itself restricted down to resource management. You don't need to have a particular skill, you don't need to perform a particular action or know a particular item of information. All you need is the right pieces and a workbench to slap them together on. It's a right fit for a game as simple as City of Heroes is, but I fear that's about as complex as a game system can be here, before it starts feeling like a cumbersome gate as opposed to an extension of gameplay.
There's always the possibility that new content moving forward will be made vastly more interactive to account for an actual out-of-combat skills system. However, the development team has been VERY bad about going back and fixing old stuff, and considering "old stuff" is the bulk of what we play, a new system just for the four or so story arcs in a new Issue would be hard to justify. -
Quote:The option exists, it's just not called "Tights." It's called "Full" and it's somewhere close to the middle of the list of options. No, I don't know why that is. Possibly a legacy quirk of costume part naming.Originally Posted by Kyriani
For Female Tops With Skin, There is no option in the Gloves section for "Tights".
There is "Tights Sleek" but no "Tights". The Sleek option doesn't match the regular tights and there is no "tights with skin sleek option"
We need a "Tights" option for gloves when using "Tops With Skin" -
Quote:That really hasn't been my experience with my Bots/FF, really. Aside from occasionally going into melee - which is where I spend most of my time anyway - Tobotics henchmen are some of the easier to manage since all tiers of them have mostly ranged attacks and very little real quirks. If anything, the Assault Bot causing massive scatter with those damn Incendiary Missiles is more irritating.Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Normal day in the life of a Bots/Traps MM -_- Which is exactly why I stopped bloody playing him.
That said, Masterminds have a whole other AI bug to deal with - NPCs are afraid of them. As soon as I lay down any debuff from Traps, enemies scatter, elite bosses take off running with Yakety Saks playing in the background and the enemy critter AI just breaks down completely. I had to chase down Roy Cooling's damn Hercules EB all over the seven seas before it went down. -
Quote:Oh, of course, this I agree with. I like concept of having an enemy faction's progression revolve around some kind of specialisation involving tradeoffs right up until the very end. Say you start meeting bigger monsters, but they're slower and lack magical ability. You also meed powerful mages, but they lack physical strength. That sort of thing. So the biggest lieutenants before the end boss are some kind of extreme example of creatures that shouldn't exist, that are barely kept alive just long enough to fight you, but they're damn strong! And then you reach the end boss, and he's a perfectly balanced, perfectly healthy ordinary guy who still has his mind, and he has all of the powers of his henchmen without any of the drawbacks. Oh. Crap!Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
I agree with this opinion, but that it should remain an exception rather than the norm or that there should always be some lore to back said opponent's exponential combat ability even if they don't physically appear that threatening.
To me, showing how greater and greater power takes a higher and higher toll on the mind and the body is a good way to show that power can't expand infinitely, and that the super enemies you're fighting are just about as strong as enemies can get. It's a hard limit. Then you throw a big bad for whom this limit doesn't apply, who controls this kind of power at base performance... And then you imply that if he put his back into it, he could go so far beyond it's scary, and you have the build for an awesome boss fight.
Showing that "this" is how strong your enemies can become and still pay a heavy cost for it, then showing someone who not only pays no cost at all, but doesn't even seem to be trying is, to me, the perfect build.
The androids were explained to have some kind of "infinite energy" device which essentially allowed them to generate unlimited amounts of power. The Sayins, for as powerful as they were, were still limited to the raw energy they could produce, the "power levels" that Scouters used to measure until Vegeta crushed them all in anger. To me, it was actually a lot more surprising to see Cell utterly dominated them as he did, considering they should have had "infinite energy." I don't know if that's an artefact of the dub or the subs or if the Dragonball Kai recut of the series added or subtracted something, but that's how I read it.Quote:Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
To follow the DBZ example - I could understand Cell's eventual power level because he started out fairly weak (relative to the main characters), but his unique body chemistry steadily adapted to fight opponents much stronger than himself from the outset WHILE he was absorbing other beings to further increase his power. However, seeing a bunch of Ki-less androids wipe the floor with Vegita and Trunks felt extremely rediculous considering that Trunks just put Freeza AND his Father down with almost no effort whatsoever not long before this happened. If memory serves, there was no Applied Phlebotinum or secret origin explaining their vast power which is precisely why this felt so absurd to me.
And, actually, bringing up the Cell saga is a good idea, because it shows the price one pays for excessive power. Trunks bulked up and produced so much muscle mass and energy he could have snapped Cell in half, but he became so heavy and awkward he could never even come close to landing a single punch. It was a novel concept in a show which had previously been all about raw power - you CAN have too much. It then became a question of not JUST how much power you can have, but how much you can have while still being fast enough to use it.
DBZ is a good example of a fictional universe where bigger isn't necessarily better. At least, it became one after Akira forgot about the "Great Ape" nonsense
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Quote:That's something that's been miffing me off a lot lately, especially in Dark Astoria. I tend to play at x2, as well, just because I enjoy fighting about five enemies at a time. And when the mission scripts actually let the game spawn that many... Surprise surprise! It's a lot of fun. Trouble is the game DOESN'T respect its spawning rules in Dark Astoria and keeps tossing what feels like x3 or x4 spawns at me when set at x2. So I went ahead and changed my difficulty settings to x1 to see what would happen. Sure enough the simple basic, appropriate spawns dropped down to three white minions, as is the case with x1. However, the "custom" spawns ALSO dropped down to x1, down from x4. Wait, what?Originally Posted by AkuTenshiiZero
I play on at least 2x players. I know my limits. But the level of my difficulty is inconsequential, because 2x in NW is much harder that 2x in any pre-GR, non-TF content. EBs are not something that you throw in every three missions. Even Bosses are not designed to be used like f***ing Zerglings. If I want the game to be harder, I'll make that decision. I run 2x because I like to have 5-6-man spawns with 1-2 LTs each, and it's worked out fine for years. Now running on 2x gets me multiple Bosses and EBs at once.
Let me lay this down on you. At x2, a special spawn will consist of a boss, two lieutenants and four minions. At x1, that same spawn will consist of a boss and a minion. Why? Why is it that I can move my difficulty slider just one notch and have my actual difficulty jump down four? What is the point of difficulty settings if the game routinely and commonly ignores them and difficulty fluctuates between them so wildly it's next to impossible to strike a balanced medium? Why must difficulty be SO inconsistent that you can never set it so it's fun all the time?
I don't want to fight difficult fights, so you'd think the answer would be to just drop my difficulty, right? Well, I also don't want to fight trivially easy, pointless fight, so the answer SHOULD be that I put my difficult somewhere in the middle between too easy and too hard. Wrong! No, see, no matter where I put my difficulty slider, a mission will always spawn enemies that are FAR too easy to be interesting enemies that are far too hard for me to enjoy the fight, and only occasionally spawn anything in-between when the stars align.
Once upon a time I asked for an option to disable "level drift" in the enemies I fight, such that all of them will show up at the level of the mission. I had my intelligence and skill questioned over this. I still want this, however, because what I want is consistent difficulty. I want to walk into a mission and face a string of enemies who are all just that good balance between too hard and too easy where they're exciting to fight. OF COURSE the development team can't guess where that balance point is for me. That's why they gave us difficulty settings, to find that balance for ourselves. And I found mine - it's +0x2. And then I walked into Dark Astoria and they took this away from me by making the enemies in my missions set at x2 range anywhere from x1 to x4, and in a couple of very irritating missions, go all the way up to x8. By myself. Well, by myself and NPCs who are of no real help after the first couple of fights.
I fought like a devil in that Cimeroran mission the first time I ran it, because I refused NPC help. I must have died 20 times easy, I took over two hours, but I beat it. Sheepishly, when I ran it the second time, I figured that I'd just take the help of NPCs, give up most of my reward but I'd at least make the mission fair and thus more fun to fight. Wrong! ... Wait, where'd Lex Luthor go? Anyway, no, that didn't happen, because I gave up my reward, my NPCs aggroed three spawns at once since I have no control over and then died, and I was left running my mission alone anyway. After resetting the mission for the third time, I managed to keep half of them alive until after the boss spawns, then they died to that CHARMING spawn with an elite boss, two bosses, four lieutenants and eleventy billion minions. And then I had to beat another one of those by myself, and then the aforementioned Romulus spawn, too.
I know it's an AFFRONT to certain people I have on ignore that I could play the game and have fun without being frustrated to my PANCAKE core. I know that the mere suggestion of making the game easier so that maybe I can actually enjoy it causes the monocles of some among us to pop out of their eye sockets as they choke on their tea, but that doesn't change what I want - I want a game which I can enjoy without being frustrated, and I want a difficulty setting that lets me do that. For quite a few missions in I22 and I23 content, such a difficulty setting does not exist, because difficulty settings no longer mean Jack Emmert. Content will routinely exceed its difficulty setting by multiple times, making me question why I'm even allowed to pick difficulty to begin with.
We have a difficulty setting system for a reason. Please respect it. If you HAVE to violate it, then please save it for only very rare special occasions.
*edit*
If you want a challenge, I can respect this. Set your difficulty to be challenging. But please don't try to set mine to be as challenging as yours. There's no need for this. -
Well, I just checked and, disappointingly, a custom Mastermind -> Traps -> Poison Trap still doesn't take custom colours for its poison gas cloud and a custom Mastermind -> Traps -> Forcefield Generator still casts a forcefield that characters step out of.
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Quote:Ironically enough, in the statement you're quoting, he offered to animate away the Mastermind henchmen AI problems of the timeOriginally Posted by Thirty-Seven
I fondly remember when BaB said something to the effect of "sure, let me just *animate* that problem away."
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Quote:Hmm... I guess that depends on what you expect out of the game. I've run a 7900GS, and this only works if I'm OK playing at 10-15 FPS in most places, around 8 in Grandville and around 1 in Atlas Park. It really wasn't until I got a GeForce 285 that I finally started seeing framerates in the 50s and 60s and I never looked back. I'd sooner have an uglier game that runs smoothly than a very pretty PowerPoint presentation masquerading as a game.Originally Posted by ketch
Huh. I'm running a 7900 GS too, but I've got things cracked way down. I only play in 1280 x 768. Turning on water effects was an absolute frame rate killer. Even with minimum graphic setting certain things, like the Dream Doctor's little dimension before the Magisterium trial, grind my frame rate to the teens.
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Incidentally, those "dead end" screenshots are quite interesting. The ones from Praetoria and the new Atlas Park look almost like they came right out of Homeworld 2, and they're just HORRID. Kings' Row, by contrast, looks pretty much like it does now, and looks considerably better at those very low settings. -
Masterminds are incredibly powerful, but they they have weaknesses which can make them completely ineffectual. Generally speaking, when content isn't too harsh or unforgiving (and doesn't have too much AoE), a Mastermind is easier and safer to play than most other ATs, and it can typically go farther on a much weaker build. The problem is they tend to run into a wall when they enter a specifically "challenging" situation, just because the henchmen are not that sturdy, and the developers like tossing lots of AoE on newer enemies.
I think the dilemma is best described in something I used to say about them: For the most part, you can forget you even have a secondary and be just fine. Trouble is, a Mastermind's secondary powerset is arguably their strongest power source. JUST the Henchmen are good for wiping out hordes of minions, but fight, say, the Woodsman who can take out 2/3 of your henchmen with a single tree stump and you start realising just how important and powerful support is, and how much it can turn a fight around on its head.
I don't think there's any one definitive answer to the question, but to say that Masterminds tend to be stronger in more situations than other ATs, but they also tend to be screwed in more situations than others, as well. -
Quote:It's part of my creative process, Leo. For me, it's very rarely a question of what to make, so much as a question of WHY I'm making it. I know you often accuse me of going through a long discussion and then doing what I was going to do anyway, thus having taken nothing from it, but this couldn't be farther from the truth. I enjoy these discussions because they give me a much firmer grasp on what I want, why I want it, how I can go about achieving it and how I can't, and generally a deeper insight into the character I'm talking about. I think so far, only Zombra ever really "got" that I honestly prefer people disagreeing with me on matters of character design and giving me arguments for why alternate paths are better. I really, really benefit from having someone question my writing, my storytelling and my decisions. Even if I don't go back on what I've picked, then at least I go away with a much stronger notion of why I picked it.Originally Posted by Leo_G
What I find funny is, you essentially go through 4 pages just to come to the conclusion of "She's using magic"...
There's no reason I can't do both. I simply don't want to tie that into the source of Xanta's powers. I don't want them to be the source of her abilities just because I prefer to see her as an independent, unaffiliated fighter who has friends, but not necessarily a pit crew. I am, as a point of fact, in the process of transferring those mystic smithing skills over to her so she can make her own armour, with Jonah serving as a sort of old mentor, rather than an active weapon-maker. Hell, I might even make him into his own hero one of these days, so again - there's no reason to not explore his story. I just don't want to use it as a large chunk of the backstory for another character.Quote:Originally Posted by Leo_G
I still think it would have been more interesting to explore the magic-smith character to broaden the main character's story. -
Quote:I have to both agree and disagree with this idea. Let me explain.Originally Posted by Sylph_Knight
Besides, the intended point was that the concept of exponential (or even incremental) statistical scaling without equal perceptive escalation scaling ruins the illusion of progress. Most people would not desire to start out fighting dragons only to ultimately reach level 20 and fight a mouse who is infinitely more powerful only because the DM said so. The Vorpal Rabbit of Monty Python was played out as a parody of this scenario, perhaps only without gaming as a consideration for the joke.
I agree completely that just bumping enemies' levels without making them visually and thematically more threatening is a big mistake, and it's a mistake our development team has done many times before. The level 54 Malta were a HUGE fumble, and dropping the Rikti down to show up in the teens is just bad. The Rikti are supposed to be this huge, planetary threat, their power armour soldiers being juggernauts unto themselves... Yet your Training-enhancement-using wimp of a level 10 character can take out one of their elite armoured soldiers. Why were we afraid of them, again?
A friend of mine once joked "Never judge a man by the colour of his name." and that phrase has stuck with me. I don't care to fight seemingly insignificant enemies attacking me with seemingly feeble attacks that nevertheless destroy me just because their names happen to display in purple. The problem of the "Level 50 Hellions" is a problem of the game as a whole, and it has come into play many times before. Even today, seeing basic Freakshow in the 50s as from the various Portal Corp missions despite them not really spawning past level 35 in the regular game is just baffling.
To this effect, the Pandora's Box enemies being powered-up versions of low-level critters, but now with a strange aura and a magical glow in their eyes and a brand new outlook on the world is exactly the right way to go. In fact, Dark Astoria before them was a great idea, too. It showed us how the Banished Pantheon and the Tsoo here are different from what they are in the rest of the city. They're bigger, meaner, more powerful and visibly more super-charged than they are anywhere else. You can tell that this is a whole different ballgame for them, and that's good!
However, I disagree with the notion that just because a person doesn't appear powerful outwardly, he shouldn't BE powerful in practice. One of my favourite bad guys in this game is Requiem, and I like him specifically because he's a relatively tiny guy who's nevertheless extremely powerful. I enjoy the Japanese concept of great powers in small packages, where the ideal is not simply having destructive abilities, but having them in a form that's convenient, mobile and compact. If, for instance, you had to choose between a Superman at Earth's end gun size weapon and a Noisy Cricket type weapon with the same destructive capacity, or indeed even more of it, then clearly the latter is the superior technology. Because you don't have to be Superman to carry it around and it has to be easier to aim.
Personally, I've always believed that an archvillain's minions should keep growing bigger and bigger as they become stronger, but the archvillain himself should still be small, demonstrating that not only is he as powerful as his most powerful lieutenants and then some, but he has that power, plus speed, agility and brains on top of it. A big bulky slow monster is a tradeoff of speed and mobility for strength and toughness. But if you could make that monster smaller and faster without losing any of its strength, you end up with something that's considerably more scary.
I get that size and apparent power are definitely good to have on stronger enemies, but I still feel THE strongest should not be the biggest. Essentially, I subscribe to the Vegeta principle. -
Quote:See, this I honestly hadn't thought of. Now that you've pointed it out to me... I'm not sure I prefer knowing that I can do this over not knowing. I've spent money on really stupid things in the past. I bought the Party Pack, after all. I'm still not really willing to pay to skip a tough fight, however.Originally Posted by Mazey
Or, to put it another way, lrn2buy.