Johnny_Butane

It's not an important detail, but it's a simple one. If an editor overlooked Bruce Wayne being blonde in an issue, he'd be in hot water. It's a question of consistency and polish.

No. When it's in a thread created for players to ask canon questions and the writers of said canon to answer them, you should be able to take the responses as canon.

See, that's my point. It's clearly not getting that quality control if it's deviating from what Hero 1 or Manticore had set down as canon. Like I said, it's understandable but that still doesn't make it a good thing.


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No harm done.

It wasn't intended to be read as taking issue with it. On a personal level, I prefer the lore of the comics or novels to what ended up in game in a faw cases, but on the whole I like the game's lore very much, even the stuff I like the least.

The only thing I'm critical of is canonical dissonance because of what I perceive as a bits of sloppiness. Example:

What color is Marcus Cole's hair?

Recently, Hero 1 gives it as blonde. We don't know if he got that from the lore docs or pulled it out of his head that day.

But:

-The old cinematic depicts him as dark haired.
-The screen shots of his 1930's look are dark haired.
-The cover of the Web of Arachnos novel has him dark haired as well.

However, these are old and could easily have been based on lore that was rewritten since. What around newer stuff?

-The CoH comic series from Top Cow is relatively newer. In it, he's shown to be either blonde or with light brown hair, the lighting and coloring leaves it questionable.

-Even more recent than that however, is the Going Rogue web site which states clearly in his bio that Tyrant, who is the Marcus Cole of Praetoria, has brown hair. The concept art for Tyrant also shows him with brown hair.

There's no reason to presume at this point he would have a different hair color than the main universe's Marcus Cole. He could, and there may be a story-driven reason for that difference, but there's no reason to presume at this point.

So we're left with Hero 1 who's in charge of the story and lore saying one thing, and (assuming Tyrant goes into game matching that concept art) the game contradicting him for maybe no reason other than confusion.

That is the only kind of thing I'm critical of; canonical dissonance because somewhere along the line, someone didn't check a simple fact. I'm more than willing cut some slack because I know the sheer amount of writing that must have been done for GR, but it doesn't make it any less annoying.


[EDIT] I just thought of checking Reichsman in game, who is also Marcus Cole. He too has brown hair.



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That is exactly what I said in the post. The game is the only true canonical source. It even supersedes the devs' internal lore docs (or what's in their heads) because those don't always match up with what's in game. In cases where the game doesn't cover something yet, it's safe to defer to the comic or novels until it does appear in game.


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I'm a lore junky. I've got a list as long as my arm of stuff in the game that contradicts facts as given by Hero 1 and Manticore. I've got an even longer list of stuff in the game that contradicts the novels and the comic series. If there's nothing in game about it, I defer to the comic series then the novel because they are the most recent. When something is added to the game that contracts those sources, the game takes precedence.

The only way to rationalize it at all is to just accept that when new stuff comes out that contradicts facts that were established before, the retcon becomes the real lore, even when that goes against the devs' lore bible. Whatever makes it into the game simply wipes over anything said before, even if they maintain it's supposed to be otherwise after the fact.


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I think that distills the problem with building/zone design nicely. The city is a shell of almost nothing but office buildings and warehouses. It lacks things a city needs for people to live in it. There's a sterile feeling. Blyde Square is barren compared to Times Square. A major junction like that should have large advertising screens, tons of NPCs milling around. There's a lack of clutter and life.

The city also lacks landmarks that should be there. Much like the Cyrus Thompson statue before it was added, there are things one would expect to see around town that are no place to be seen; Justin (Manticore) Sinclair's mansion, the Freedom Phalanx's current HQ, the Paragon Times building, the Cyrus Thompson rec center, etc.


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Word.
Is a copy of Bodypaint3d too expensive to fix this?


It'll never happen, but I say it should have gone back to the hollow/wireframe look with Ultra Mode. See near the very end for what the Atlas globe "used" to look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7gEFiN9CkI



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Nor are the devs. So it's nice and square all around.



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Kill ten-thousand gray enemies from various groups and get a badge that says "Incarnate".

That's the punchline.

"See? Now don't you feel more powerful? You're one-shotting your foes and they can't even touch you!"




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Some people don't see anything wrong with that. They think people who enjoy the company of others deserve more than people who don't.

I missed the part on the subscription page where soloists enjoy a smaller subscription fee because they get less content. While all content can be done by teams, there's special content set aside for teams, but not special content only solo players can do. That would be a silly and unacceptable use of resources, but the opposite bias is acceptable? It shouldn't be.

-I'm for content that encourages teaming by increased rate or earning rewards. Having an XP/Inf/drop bonus for teams, yes.

-I'm half way on content that requires "loose teaming" like Rikti mothership raids, GM battles in public areas.

-I'm 100% against forced "team only" content in any form. I don't think TFs are the best way to tell a story, or enjoy the game for that matter. Content I'm not allowed to experience solo, no.

Beyond simple preference for other people's company or not, there's also conceptual and character expression issues. Not every hero is a "joiner" and a lot of the kind of content that's currently reserved for only groups, like fighting giant monsters and robots (Kronos, Babbage I'm looking at you), is valid "solo content" in comics for many super heroes (and while I'm sure some builds could maybe solo a GM, in comics it's not a question of outlier power sets and broken builds).



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Things have gotten better. Before reward merits though, you pretty much had to team or work much harder to get drops or enough Inf to bid on stuff. Given the fickle nature of the market then and now, I think more people are utilizing IOs since than advent of merits than before.

I expect that if the Incarnate content is too hard and too WoW-raidy, it'll be rejected by most of the players. Honestly, do you see people lined up to run STFs every night? Hami raids and simply not done as frequently as you see with similar stuff in WoW. Players here like casual, and they have no problem rejecting what they don't like.

The problem is that when that is the case, it'll be a while before it gets fixed. The turn-around time in fixing content people don't like is abysmal. Positron TF, 'nuff said.
TFs and raids NEVER get tested properly before going live. They can't be. Most of them are popular while they're new, but you can't judge staying power on Test. One would have expected the STF to be very popular, yet I'll wager Statesman is standing alone on his little boat right now on most of the servers.

If the Incarnate system is too hard or annoying, it won't get fixed until after it's been live for a while (if at all) and the damage is done. The devs say they aim high in terms of difficulty and then ratchet it down from there. But like I said, by that time the damage is done. First impressions are utterly important. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for them to ratchet the i15 TF down to a point where people want to run it, instead of just running an ITF, which admittedly is much less of a headache to organize and get people interested in doing.


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I disagree. I think that you will be practically forced to team for the Incarnate system/content. Every end game system has this to a degree, and most heavily favour forced teaming. As solo-friendly as CoH is, not all of of that was by design; a lot of stuff the devs really didn't want people soloing.

I think it will be possible in theory to earn your Incarnate levels or whatever solo, but they'll make it impractical or annoyingly hard to do so. I anticipate at best something like Rikti mothership raids where technically you don't have to be teamed, but you'll still need a bunch of other people to show up.

That's what I honestly expect. I don't like it but I'm trying to think of it like an epic quest:

The hero descending into the underworld to retrieve great power in order to save the day.
After all... Hell, as they say, is other people.


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I'm guessing a lot of gimmick fights like we've seen recently with the STF, ITF, and the i15 TF/SF. I expect to be forced to team because most engame content tends to shun soloists and I wouldn't be surprised if there's grinding involved.


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Prometheus, who was a Titan.


Back before Ouroboros we were discussing Incarnates and the same idea for an Incarnates only realm came up. With Ouroboros and the Midnight club, I think such a zone would make less of an impact now.

Another idea was Incarnate/Divine Inspirations. These would be very potent inspirations that would last 30 minutes or so. They would only drop for Incarnates, couldn't be bought or sold by anyone, but could be given to a regular character by an Incarnate.


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I think you are reading too much into it. "End Game" is a loaded term. I mean, in other MMOs, how much "End Game" content became "late-mid game" content when they raised the level cap or expandend in another direction. End Game sounds like you're giving up.

Regarding Incarnate content, I'm game for whatever they have up their sleeves. I have many 50s who've been 50 for years, and I'm dying for something to do with them.


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More like the other way around, according to the Web of Arachnos novel. People who drank from the Well became the inspiration for the Greeks' mythology. The Furies were three sisters who drank from it and became legends in their own time and began the myth.

The Well was simply a natural spring that ran under an artifact, the Box. The Box, being the basis for the Pandora myth, was of unknown origin and may or may not have been sentient. Its purpose was to collect humanity's creative energy and store it. The last people to interact with the Box before Recluse and Statesman found it had left the lid open slightly, letting some of the energy seep out. Cole and Richter threw off the lid and that sudden, massive release of energy kicked off the modern heroic age.

So going from the novel, the "divine power" from the Well was the distilled collected creative energy and drive of humanity, collected over a couple millennia. The subtext I read into it was that humanity creates their own gods and that it's us that gives them power.

The Well simply gives you a concentrated dose of the power from the Box. Statesman is Zeus because the same energy flows through him as flowed through the ancient person who came to identify himself as Zeus. The point made in the novel is that everything is cyclical. Eventually the current heroic age will fade as the Box slowly collects the energy back into itself. Super heroes will become the new myths until in the distant future someone finds the box and starts the whole thing over.

Of course, the devs are not above retconning anything. They've already started to change the story slightly with the whole "power web" thing and the Origin of Power stuff.



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This was something I PMed Castle about in CB. He said pretty much what he said here; that they only fixed something that was broken. He didn't seem too concerned with the Engineers. So, I second that the Engineers get looked at.


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Positron has said before the content you'll have to run to unlock Incarnate levels/slots/whatever will be much more difficult than most of the current content. I would expect more TFs/Trials with gimmick AV fights at least to the order of the STF and i15 TFs, if not more annoying.


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I think for some things, a lot of it would have to be done by hand. There's a reason those figure prints take a month or more to create. I wouldn't mind one bit hypothetically being able to bring the geometry into Max to see what I could do using it's smoothing and geometry tools. One could hypothetically send a link to an exported .OBJ to my PM box.

There's also the question of, artistically, where does one draw the line at smoothing. If you look at a figure like this one: http://cf.figureprints.com/media/photo084.jpg
They left the shoulder armor and his pony tail relatively unsmoothed and "low poly" looking. The character's who are holding mugs are still holding six-sided cylinders. It's clear they've added geometry to areas that needed it for the printing process, but left the look from the game intact. In the case of your model, I think that would include keeping the point on the skirt, if you see what I'm saying.

What would players expect? Myself, I'd want the integrity of the character maintained as much as possible, warts and all. That means blocky mitten hands and putting up with the limitations of the animation skeleton causing odd deformation like in the skirt. I think it would have to be a point of discussion where the dev's and players' desired level of quality would be and what exactly they value, accuracy, speed or pure aesthetics or a combination of only two.

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UVW mapping is a non-consideration. Models come out of the fabrication device the color of the material used. It's up to an artist to paint them by hand at that point. That's how Figure Prints does it.

I considered what it would take to craft a figure of one of my CoX toons, just as an experiment. Without any dev support, it would require a 3d screen ripper; a piece of software that, like taking a 2d screenshot, grabs the 3d data on your screen and dumps it to a file that can be brought into 3d Studio Max or Maya. The legalities of such software is up for debate, but it would capture the character's pose and costume at the same time. After bringing it in to Max, it would likely require some tweaking as well as shrink-wrapping or boolean operations to make it a mesh shell.

After that it would be a matter of contacting a local place that offers 3d printing services and have them output the model for me. Then I'd bring it to some friends of mine who've done work for Games Workshop and get them to paint it.

That's all in theory of course. 3D ripping software as mentioned above is likely in violation of the EULA Rules.
However, working with the devs one wouldn't have to resort to such methods. The devs could in theory create piece of software that's like the offline costume editor that used to be floating around, but with the ability read saved costume files, play emotes and spit out .OBJs.

Maybe some day.

I've got limited experience with 3d printing so I've decided to chime in here. Most 3d printing software comes with a function to shrink wrap an optimized mesh around a model if it's not a solid shell. Besides that, it's quite doable within a standard 3d package like Max or Maya with a number of methods.

This is no more a hurdle than it is for WoW models. Like CoX Models, they're not solid geometry either and http://www.figureprints.com/ is offering such a service.

That's true, but for the most part the color/texture of a model would done by an artist interpreting what he sees on the 3d model in game. There's bound to be some adaptation decay, how much depends on their skill and technique.

Auras simply can't be done, but I think the majority of people would understand that.

I'd say it's doable today. Figure Prints is doing so right now with Blizzard.

Maybe they'd be interested in working something out for CoX if you guys contacted them. Maybe not. My point is, they got around the same obstacles you listed.

For some reason I thought they had Smoke at 41.

Ok, well Smoke or FlashFire then.


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