Kitsune Knight

No, no! The person you were replying to was saying the main character is always just a blessed idiot, and I was pointing out how the example you gave is massively not a case of one.

Some do come up with the craziest abilities (maybe anime could come up with a non-lame version of aqua man!).

Or to kill all the Japanese...

Lady Gaga? Isn't she one of the Egyptian Gods?

Solve it the same way TV/Radio did decades ago: Received Pronunciation (UK) or General American (US). Pretty much anyone that understands English will likely understand General American, since it's spoken so widely.

Nothing says you have to cater to everyone, anyways. Try and do as many people as possible, but you don't need voice overs for Esperanto.

Text to speech. It even works for ASCII art!

Those are pretty much all very similar styles of shows (hell, Naruto and Bleach are both by the same publisher), which are a very specific sub grouping of animes (of the ones I've watched any of- Akira, Bleach, and Naruto, I found all to be extremely boring and tedious). Bleach, Dragonball, and Naruto are specifically targeted towards young boys, so that's why they largely revolve around the male characters and yada yada yada.


It would sort of be like making judgements about american animated shows after having seen only Family Guy, American Dad, and the Cleveland Show. While all three (more so the left side than right...) are quite popular, they certainly aren't representative of animated american shows in general (throw in the other Fox cartoons that are generally shown along side those if you want). Same if you'd just watched the Adult Swim (remember back when they made new episodes of The Venture Brothers? ) shows. Or any other block.

Bit of a broken record player here, but it's simply a medium. And hell, even Japan's live action stuff can be strange as hell.

That's certainly not an example of a Blessed Idiot! Lelouch even said that gaining his power didn't cause him to walk down the path he did, it merely let him start much sooner (then again, Lelouch seems to also have the same power Nemesis has for plots within plots).

You said: How can it be about how TOR did it, when you knew it would be bad when they said 'completely voice acted'? And that it's not fine for one where you pay a monthly sub?

Voice Overs can't be done for CoH, because they'd have to retroactively add it to ~10 years worth of content, and people have already been using various 'voices' in their heads for various people (it's one of the reasons people always rage whenever a book is turned into a movie), so regardless of how good the voice actors were, people wouldn't be happy due to different expectations.

Again, I'm talking about in general for MMOs, while you keep trying to say 'Well, it didn't work for TOR!'. From the sound of it, TOR had lots of problems that was related entirely to their implementation. Again, I don't give a crap how TOR did it, because it's just an implementation. Any complaints that are specific to TOR aren't specific to voice overs, which, again, is what you said was bad for games where you pay a monthly sub.

Not so much 'helping' as 'not letting him intentionally do it wrong'. The Doctor likes it having quirks. No matter how badly it causes things to go.

Nemesis would be the type that would go back through time to raise an army to fight himself.


Hell, I already theorize that 'Lord Nemesis' is actually the older version (older than Silos). Originally, Silos came back from the far future, trying to figure out a way to stop what goes horribly wrong... but despite all his efforts to raise an army, the supers of earth are simply unprepared. No matter how many times he sent heroes forwards and backwards, it wasn't enough.

And what causes Incarnates (and others) to grow in power more than anything else? Conflict. It's the whole reason we had so much effort put into curb-stomping Praetoria. To gain more power. But even that wasn't enough (assuming that happened in the original Silos line)... So he chose the option that would make history loathe him. He went back even further, this time on his own, leaving behind the title of 'Mender'. This time, he became Lord Nemesis. He would give the heroes of the world their greatest challenges. The goal of his plots weren't for the plots themselves to succeed, but to force the supers to expand their abilities through horrific trials.

And then, by the time the Battalion arrives, maybe Primal Earth will actually be strong enough to stand up against them. Hell, he even brought the Rikti into the picture... singlehandedly. They fought back the Battalion once, maybe they'll work with us to do it a second time.


Of course, it being Nemesis, the Battalion is probably Nemesis as well... but from when? Did Nemesis first wipe out all reality leading the Battalion... and then grow bored, so came back to stop himself... and then go back again to simply terrorize Earth?

How would they slow down you're gameplay? You're acting as if everything will be replaced with cut scenes... unskippable cutscenes at that (sadly, CoH still hasn't figured out how to do that... but being unskippable isn't an intrinsic attribute of cutscenes, just the current CoH implementation).

(the claim that THEY would slow down your computer is absurd to an extreme)

That means the dialog is already uninteresting to begin with. I don't see why them being voiced over would have anything to do with that.

Why? I have a strong feeling you're assuming a specific implementation of voice overs, not voice overs in general.

So is the text. You can just skip that, so why wouldn't you the voice over as well?


I don't find any of your reasons even slightly compelling. Also, of the four you gave, three of them should apply equally well to any single player game as to an MMO, which you explicitly said was 'fine' wrt voice overs.

They can't exactly charge more, now can they?

Over-reliant? I'd say quite the opposite. It's the only way in game currently that other people besides the mission owner get a chance to see the, you know, story. Anyone on team can click to reach the mission text, but that damn dialog clears every time someone changes zones (even between two zones you're not in), making it horribly difficult to read it. Plus, you can't see the mission completion dialog, nor the arc completion dialog.

It's such a bad situation that, wanting to actually have a chance to experience the story lines, I consider my only option to be soloing it. I soloed through all of First Ward and Night Ward to actually get to read the stuff and see what was going on.

I'm quite glad that for the NPCs one person talks to in missions (which bring up the dialog box) that in newer content they'll 'say' a shorter version on the NPC dialog channel. Certainly a major improvement.


As for the 'skipping was a day 1 addition for TOR'... well, duh. That was just a major bungling on the part of BioWare that most every other game has already done without issue, regardless of whether they're voiced or not (CoH still doesn't let you skip cut scenes... but the devs nearly never use them).

It seems that people are saying that voice overs are bad because TOR got it wrong, not because voice overs are bad. I'd say STO also got it wrong, by only doing them randomly. The big important top military guy's mission brief isn't voiced over... but this random chump that wants some crappy side missions that is just filler is? Yeah, nice job screwing it up (maybe they get better in the late game... but honestly, free is too expensive for that game). If you're going to do them, do them throughout (which is why I don't like the voice overs in the new tutorial... I like them, but when 100% of the rest of the game has zero voice overs? It's simply misleading and confusing few new players).

(I also wasn't asking/interested in technical challenges with voice overs, but why they're a bad fit from the player's perspective, and only on MMOs)

Hamjet!

Would you mind elaborating on why voice overs are an intrinsically bad thing for an MMO? It'd certainly be nice if the mid-mission caption or NPC dialog was voiced over in this game, since it can be a bit frustrating to focus on the battle and ALSO trying to read the bubbles (I end up having to have a box open just for Captions + NPC dialog... but even that can scroll past way too fast at times!).

That reply wasn't directed at you two, more so just framing it in that context if he was specifically referring to just players as the two of you said. It just seems like it'd be a pointless/unnecessary comment in that context, since it applies equally to whether you're talking about 'anime' or 'western super heroes'. Same with the T comment.

How's that different than if you were making a super hero game, though? Super Heroes have a massive range of abilities, from 'stupid teenager that largely doesn't feel anything' (Kick ***) to... well, god-like beings.

You'll have quite a huge challenge on your hands if you're making an MMO where the power progression of Kick *** can be followed for one player, while, say, Iron Man for another. They don't even overlap in power levels. So obviously you'll have to sort of create a standard progression arc for players to follow (if you're damn creative and can come up with an alternative working system, you might actually be able to create a WoW-killer... if you don't screw everything else up).

Are you forgetting someone? Someone that you know... eats entire dimensions?

Hell, it's not like 'planet destroyer' is even unique to anime or anything.


But the power creep you're talking about happens just as much in western super hero comics... it's just that those authors will just make the character magically forget the abilities 5 minutes later most of the time (I don't follow any enough to point out any examples where they just keep getting more powerful, but I'm sure they exist). Anime/manga writers (that do that... most don't) just choose to throw a bigger rock at them the next time.

Of course, barring the Dragonball universe, I don't think I could name another one where characters have that level of power (with or without help).

There's a Staff Weapons pack coming soon.

It's a necro. The thread originally was posted when they first came out. Nothing to see here.

You just ruined my dreams!



(I'd totally by this set!)

Japanese comic books / "graphic novels" (which ever term you prefer). Since 'anime' refers specifically to animated items (although regularly used to mean the style used in anime).

If CoH came several years later and didn't pull a CO, it could have. It's really just a limitation of graphics in that era that made it harder to achieve photorealism. Personally, I don't find CoH to have a 'cartoon' look at all, but that's probably because when you say 'cartoon' you're meaning 'not photo-realistic'... you may or may not include things that are overtly CGI (i.e. super shiny) into the cartoon category or into its own.

Blame crappy translators and dubbers for that (I've never heard of the original version ever having that issue). You'll generally find a far better job for stuff done more recently. Hell, even groups like Team Four Star, which are redubbing existing shows without any access to source material do a pretty damn good job with the lip sync (they're best known for Dragonball Z Abridged), and they aren't being paid or anything for their work. There's quite a number of other people doing it all on their own that did a better job than most 'professionals' used to do.

You can be in them. You just can't pay rent, so if you want the base, you'll either need to have a very minimal one, or have someone else pay the upkeep for you.

How about we frame it another way: Paragon is so nice that they're not trying to screw over people that are playing as Premium players by gimping them. They've listened to feedback from the players, and have adjusted things accordingly. For a huge number of us, being VIP is still a far better deal than being Preem.

How about fighting against tyranny and oppression?


With the white, I count five colors.

For any that left, enough others have taken their place. Regardless of how good a game is, eventually people will drift away. It doesn't matter, people leave.

If you're not aware, NCSoft is not a company that keeps a failing game around MMO around for long. Look no further than their own track record for shutting down ones that didn't make the cut. And then, look at CoH. If CoH was still struggling even after going with the hybrid model, it'd quite likely would be on NCSoft's chopping block by now... but it's not, quite the opposite. The hybrid model has been a huge success, both financially and popularly with the playerbase. We get more when we stop subscribing. We get more when we subscribe. And, we have more options to go above and beyond just our subscription.