Necrotron

Oh my GOD, this thread still exists?!

And I'll never play it.

WHAT the-?!

Now there's a twist.

Signed with my blood.

Jesus christ. But... there's an issue in beta, more in development, codes being given away... and suddenly this? Out of nowhere?

...I need time. This has been a part of my life for eight years.

Oh man, I'm in deep dish pizza now.

The old updater was not written with Windows UAC security in mind. (Yes, you can rename it to fix that, but us EU chumps couldn't do that.) This means a crash in CoH would be more likely to explode your computer, because it would always run with admin rights. The NCSoft Launcher is designed for the 21st century, only invokes UAC when needed, and doesn't launch games with admin rights. That way, if CoH dies, it has more restricted access and won't kill something important.

Like when (another game) overwrote an important system file and stopped your PC from booting entirely.

If you have a mouse that changes mutton layouts on a game-by-game basis, you were out of luck if CoH was in admin mode. Admin programs (CoH with the old updater) are unreadable by non-admin programs (your mouse driver), it's sort of the whole point of admin rights in general.

Also, the NCSoft Launcher updates all clients at once. Live, test, beta. It also isn't trigger-happy with file verification; back in 'day, if CoH crashed for any reason, the updater would painstakingly verify all files before letting you proceed.


Oh, and one more thing. Of all the things to complain about these days, this is a dealbreaker?

I'm missing a bunch of paragon reward tokens. It was already like pulling teeth to get my veteran rewards sorted out, but credit where credit is due, they were by handy support personnel. If celestial armor is to be cycled out, I'd like an advance warning.

Normal mapping is a superb technology. It allows a low poly model (like the faces in CoH) to look like a high poly model. But when your first reaction is "OH MY GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR FAAAAAAAAACE", you're doing it wrong.

No, really. As much as the graphic artist in me is happy that the devs are getting these neat new toys to play with, I still recoil away from these faces. I kinda got used to the Victorian faces, but the Vampire face looks like a god damn wax model. Totally unnatural and too shiny. I believe we've managed to fall into the uncanny valley here. Which is a damn good achievement given how static, low-res and low-poly the faces have been.

What the dickens is this thread doing here?

Complaining about not being able to use your mains until stage 4 is finished is silly given you used to have to wait until the entire game was downloaded to do anything.

Everyone who touched the first ward needs a raise.

This zone is so consistent, so well told, so beautiful and so rich that I can't believe this is the same game where I used to kill skuls.

That this all goes on while the Seed of Hamidon groans overhead menacingly amongst such well-realised destruction makes this the best content I've seen in an MMO.

(FPARN)

Oh, and that raise is contingent on Katie Douglas cropping up in a later arc. You must do this. UNDER PAIN OF DEATH.

I ran both on a Vigilante. What's that make me? Schizophrenic?

Hm.

Y'know, I guess that's the whole point. Heroism is (supposed to be) its own reward. Villainy gets you shinies.

5/10 on the tutorial is harsh, but I see where you're coming from.

Twinshot and Graves were added in to serve as continuing tutorials, explaining enhancements, sidekicking, supergroups and other gubbins. But they're flawed. For one, nobody explains conning. What the hell?

On the bright side, the extremely quick tutorial sure makes repeat visits more pleasant.


You're right about task forces being long winded. Something that the game can never actually tell you is that there are two kinds of content: the old, and the new.

The Old: Story arcs that consist of dull Defeat Alls strung together, interrupted by a few Defeat X of Y, all to get a better idea of what is going on. After ten missions like this, you may face a named boss. If you're lucky.

See, these missions were created with the overall goal of setting up 400 hours worth of content. Not good content, just lots of it. Paragon City is littered with content like this. It was never fun seven years ago, but we stuck with it because the combat itself was fun enough that we didn't mind blasting through hordes of faceless enemies. That said, the playerbase has much higher standards now.

The most egregious example of this sort of 'content' is, as mentioned, Dr. Q's task force. Though I'm loathe to call it content, like I'm loathe to call a moldy communion wafer food.

But Issue 21 has shown what the devs are doing to remedy the situation. Rather than re-work or improve the aging arcs, they're bombing them with napalm. Then, they replace them with...

The New: Punchy, short and to the point. Missions are chock full of unique mechanics, your contacts are fleshed out, the odd decision and dialog tree is included, and there is a good deal of in-mission exposition. There are twists and turns, betrayals and sacrifices, and you actually care about the outcome.

They've been adding content like this for a long while, but now they're renovating the core of the game, redside and blueside.

Praetoria has four entirely separate tracks of content that stretch from level 1 to 20, all of which is most definitely New. The First Ward is 20-30 and has content so awesome I can scarcely believe this is the same game. Issue 17 and Issue 18 added in four new arcs in the 20-30 range, all of which are superb. The endgame taskforces are of a much more reasonable length, taking just over an hour to do on reasonable teams.

The Positron Task Force was once so Old it hurt, as it used to be two task forces, but was merged into one when it was realized that a single task force contact could only give out task force. This has been remedied, and not only is the Posi TF now split into two but both halves have been trimmed, dieted, re-written and infused with unique stuff.

Edit: IF I MADE THIS SHORTER I'D BE FPARN WAAARGGH RAEG MURDER

The heroside arc is quite muddy and unfocused, and only the ending cutscene saves it. The villainside arc is all kinds of neat. There's a thing you do at the end which I'm STILL grinning over.

If I knew how to hide text for spoilers I'd say where the exit was.

What I WILL say that is while the heroside arc was okay, the VILLAIN arc was... villain-tastic. It's broadly the same story, but... y'know, just go run it. Then you'll know what I'm talking about.

I haven't felt that villainous in this game for a long time.

I never believed Twinshot to be the mole. She exuded self sacrifice and regret. But the arc still kept me guessing.

During the final radio conversation between Proton and Twinshot, I assumed that Proton was somehow working with the Praetorians to prevent his nightmare future. Okay, sure. But the very minute that Maelstrom said "Tilman's work is not easily undone", everything snapped into place and I yelled at the sky.

TIILMAAAAAAAAN

For perspective, I did this arc after the First Ward chain. I shan't ruin the story of that here but suffice to say that Twinshot's arc is the straw that broke the camel's back. That woman is... all kinds of despicable.

Oh yes. Friggin' finally.

I'm afraid the PhysX that City of Heroes uses is highly old and outdated. It doesn't recognise geforces as PhysX cards, no matter how hard you try. Even then, it doesn't use it enough to stress your CPU.

Everyone is slamming the drivers, but it may be as simple as an incorrect setting. Open up your catalyst control center, go to Gaming > 3D Application Settings, and tick "Use application settings" under SMOOTHVISION HD:Anti-aliasing.

Okay well, alt-tabbing after enabling ultra mode resulted in a VERY hard crash, for which a reset was required. But then I can alt tab now to type this. Unsure what happened there.