Samuel_Tow

Titan Weapons has turned out to be my favourite set in the entire game, by far. I've been wishing for one for so long now I don't even remember when I first got the idea. Something like 2006 or 2007, at least. Creating a character with that set has revitalised the game for me to such an extent I can't stop myself from playing it, and the ideas I have for this just keep on coming and coming and coming.

Obviously, the set has some animation problems, but I hope the Paragon Studios animators will do the responsible thing and fix those some time soon. But aside from those timing issues, the animations are AMAZING. Yes, they clip with walls a lot, but that's just because of how big they are. They take up a lot of real estate, and that's a good thing.

Issues and "other" characters aside, however, what made this game great for me all over again was Xanta:



She is in danger of becoming my most favourite character I've ever made, and Titan Weapons is a big reason why this is.

Guys, there already is a scythe in the set. We're all aware of this, right?

Huh... Where does one go to buy a pedobear hat?

Is there any point to doing any mission at all, really?

Ironically enough, killing off the Statesman might be the smart move here, because he's pretty much the epitome of everything that's wrong with the Freedom Phalanx in general. The Statesman is the Mary Sue of City of Heroes. He's the greatest that ever was, the greatest there ever will be, he's the one that shows up as a level 54 AV when you rescue them, he's the one we'll never be greater than... And yet he has all of ONE appearance in the entire game.

Well, that's how he used to be. He's showed up a few more times and been brought down a bit, but the point is that these characters are the development team's babies. Almost every Lead Something has a red name named after one of them. Matt Miller created Positron himself, I believe. These guys are favoured, but like the Statesman, they never get any characterisation, and when they do, it's pretty much the worst comic book angle of a group of jerkasses who can't stand each other and have more character flaws than a parody of the game would.

We don't know much about these characters, and what we know about them is not endearing. Manticore kidnapped his future wife naked out of her bath tub and handed her over to Arachnos as part of some ridiculous Batman gambit. And yet we're supposed to care that these people could die? Meh. Kill 'em all. Get them out of the game and replace them with someone who has background to him in the actual game. Alexis was probably the best example of why this is a problem. Prior to her getting killed, I didn't even know she existed.

I don't like emotionally manipulative sensationalist storylines to begin with, yet it's somehow even worse when they involve characters that players have had no reason to care about.

I'm not sure pools would work very well because AT balance would likely force them to be weak. If you make these things into Epics, you have greater control over what each AT gets because it doesn't have to comply with the balance of any other AT but the one which gets it.

That said, pools/epics are just one way to go about this. It's entirely possible to go a different route. Perhaps by creating a new AT entirely. Speaking of which, I have a new idea about that:

I spent so long talking about Crey Eliminators and the "slow-walking minigun power armour guy" that I have to wonder if that's not a possible AT gimmick we can use. So, here's an AT that has an Assault primary, a proper defence secondary, but has the following gimmick:

To ever use its ranged attacks, this character has to be in Firing Mode, which slows the character down to Walk speed. Said character can still melee if enemies are in range, but if he wants to fire his minigun or rifle or what have you, he has to slow down and walk and fire. Essentially, the Team Fortress Heavy, come to think of it.

I'm sure this is broken or probably underpowered, but I also think it has the potential to at least be a meaningful thought experiment.

Here's the thing, from where I'm sitting: We just recently got done with a thread about gender parity in costume design and the representation of women in the game, but "prudishness" isn't what I thought we were asking for in it. I was one of the people "outraged" at the... "Unfair" costume allocation, but like many others, it wasn't what women got and how they were represented that bothered me, but rather what they DIDN'T get and how they WEREN'T represented that did. What they got isn't bad nor immoral.

I actually have a particular problem with people crying "porn" on pics of real or fictional women posing sexy. When we were talking about the animal pack, I posted a pic of a literal cow girl, and got at least one poster to scream "POOORN!!!" at me because she was sitting with her arms up over her head. At some point, I feel that we're being far too sensitive. We have "Suggestive Themes" right there in our rating banderole. That IS consistent with T for Teen, and I see nothing morally questionable about it.

Moreover, this speaks to me of people associating sexuality with pornography in a way that I can't imagine is very healthy. A girl posing, a girl in a skimpy outfit or a girl with large breasts is not something to be ashamed of or something to hide your children from. It is not, most of all, immoral, at least not from where I'm standing.

I'm sorry if I'm bumping my own thread, but I just realised what one of my original inspirations in City of Heroes was, and it just happens to be a non-squishy NPC with a big gun.

I'm talking about the Crey Eliminators. You know the ones. They're the Crey power armour soldiers who have cyan armour, a big backpack and a minigun. This is something I've wanted to have for years and years now, but the game simply doesn't permit it, because the powersets necessary to depict power armour and the powersets necessary to depict a minigun just don't occur in the same AT. Hence, my original thread.

But this gets me to thinking - the slow-moving power armour "heavy" is not a recent concept, nor a rare one. The original power armour minigun guy that inspired me when I was a kid are, of course, the Brotherhood of Steel soldiers. Thinking about it now, the Brotherhood soldiers from the original Fallout bear a probably not-coincidental resemblance to the Crey Eliminators I mentioned above. I think before even that were the trenchcoat-wearing, minigun-packing enforcers. More recently, there has been the Heavy from Team Fortress, and though he's not actually armoured, he's still damn tough to kill.

Time and again, the concept for the character with a big gun and big armour shows up, and it usually seems to be limited by its mobility, being heavy and all. And yet I've never been able to make that here. I mean, I can make a big Blaster, but I can never play that like I would a heavy - opening fire walking forward and breaking the enemy lines.

And that's just one thing I'd like to make

Looks like a box by her knees to me. Considering how petite the elf is in that pic, I imagine her crotch is about where her belt is. If you want something to be outraged by, look at how she's squeezing her breasts with her elbows.

Personally, I like this pic. It caught me off-guard when I got it in the mail just because it has nothing to do with City of Heroes, but eh. The game can use more pics like that. It looks like a playboy trace? Possibly. I see nothing wrong with that. The more naughty stuff we can slip into a T for Teen game, the better as far as I'm concerned.

Besides, having a sexy green lady is a step up from just having a sexy lady, as far as I'm concerned. At least that's different.

That's something the engine doesn't currently support, I'm afraid, so it's neither. You're talking about firing your powers out of a weapon, and weapons come with their own activation sequences that alter your basic run, jump and idle animations. All of the animation customization we've had so far has always stayed within the power's native activation sequence, and I'm pretty sure the tech to swap to a new one doesn't exist yet. I certainly don't know of any precedents.

That said, I'd like that, personally. This is one of those "last big things" that the game could still reach for, but which would probably be a hell and a half to make. In general, being able to fire non-weapon powers out of weapons, fire weapon powers out of your hands and fire one weapon's powers out of another weapon's type is a great idea that I will always support.

Incarnate Trials and the whole Incarnate system in general strike me as a case of wanting to eat your cake and have it, too. It's like the development team wanted something with no progression, like Inventions, where you're just doing "other" things and possibly spinning our wheels, all the while getting components to make something which doesn't fall into a linear sense of progression, yet at the same time they wanted some kind of progression where people would feel they're accomplishing something, getting stronger and being able to take on tougher challenges. The problem is you can't have it both ways, and if you try to have it both ways, you can't have it either way.

OF COURSE people will run the lowest-level Trials over and over again. When there's no rigid hierarchy to the Trials and people can progress just as much off BAF as they can off MOM, but MOM is harder (to please), then why NOT do what's easier? Why, indeed, not level up to 50, or at least all the way to 20, on nothing but DFB? This is the problem - if you let people rerun the easier, lower-level content yet gain progress to their high-level status, they will rerun it. Because it's easier, because it's faster, because they've done it.

As far as I'm concerned, every Incarnate slot should come with a level shift up to a total of 10, and each Incarnate task should have its own level shift that it gives to its enemies, and that includes the solo Incarnate path, as well. If you're playing with a (+3) level shift and you're (+1) Incarnate content, then you get reduced rewards at task completion and reduced rewards at enemy defeats, like like you would if you ran a level 1 mission at level 3 or a level 48 mission at level 50.

The problem is that they've designed their Incarnate content to be SO complex and SO time-intensive to create that they can only make one task per three months or so. Obviously, there isn't enough content to go around in order to "tier" it and lock people into a specific path of progression, but I consider that to be an error of methodology, not a problem of human resources. The fact of the matter is raids don't need to be this complex and they don't need to take this long to create. Hell, STORY ARCS don't need to be this complex. I would take an Issue which had 50 or 100 very basic "defeat boss and guards" missions provided they were written well, over one three-mission arc that includes every mechanic the game has to offer.

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Sideways from that is the question of progress. People have complained about long forced-teaming tasks because they don't have enough time to play them. Quaterfield and Moore come to mind. However, behind the problem of "not enough time" lies a much simpler room - these tasks can't be split or staggered, because the whole team must coordinate to do this. The problem, therefore, is not these tasks taking too long, but rather these tasks taking too long IN A SINGLE STRETCH. Personally, I feel that spreading these tasks into subtasks and letting people get progress that way would be far superior.

Think of how Portal 2 does it. The game has five large test tracks, each split down into eight or nine test chambers. Each player has his own record of which chambers from which tracks he's done, and he gets progress for any chamber he completes with any player, provided he hasn't completed it yet. So why can't we do that? Why can't our "trials" be broken down into multiple missions where any player joining a team at any stage will get credit for any of the missions he hasn't done yet? That's even better than how story arcs work, because for story arcs, you still have to run the story in order and you can't get credit for a stage you haven't reached yet. Sure, it might break continuity a bit, but it's not like "narrative" is a big part of these trials anyway.

Let's talk about TFs for a second. What if TFs could be broken down into different missions that you get credit for when you're on a team which completes them. If you leave the TF before the end, you retain credit for all missions that were in the TF. If you join another run of the same TF mid-way through, you retain credit for all missions that you did last time and start getting credit for all missions you didn't run. Then when you get to the end, you get a reward based on how many missions you have credit for.

So let's say a TF is 10 missions. You run 4 then leave. Then the next day, you join another run that's already on mission 6. You get to the end with credit for 8 out of 10 missions: 1-4, 6-10. You get 80% of the Merits.

This gets into the "granularity" of progress. If you can break progress down into micro units such that no matter how minuscule your action is, you still get SOME progress, then you can scale rewards based on participation. When your TF has just one monolithic reward at the end - like a component - you have to force people to be present all the way through, because you can either get it or not get it. You can't get half a component, or 63.173% of a component. When, on the other hand, your TF gives you 100 000 units (like TFs do with experience), then you very much can get half or 63 173 points of experience if you've run less of it.

Chance at drops, therefore, is a mechanic I hate. People often praise this game because they can log in, run a mission for 15 minutes, leave and feel like they've accomplished something. Well, I've logged in, played for 8 hours and not gotten a single Incarnate Shard. I earned NOTHING. When my play session may not as well have occurred, when playing the game was exactly like not playing the game, then I don't feel like I made progress. I feel like I wasted my time. And all because the development team can't make their minds up whether they want the Incarnate system to be a form of progression or a form of drops.

In my opinion, progress needs to be broken down into as fine a granularity as possible. ANY action, no matter how small or insignificant, should generate progress that I can see. It doesn't have to be a lot of progress, but it should be SOME progress nonetheless. As long as I can watch a bar rise or a number increase or a pie chart fill in, I know I'm making progress and I'm encouraged to do more of what's giving me progress. I know my time isn't wasted. It may not be used to its fullest, but it's not being WASTED.

I'm honestly not sure what the design specification behind the whole Incarnate system is, but I just it could be so much user friendly without necessarily taking any shorter a time to progress in it.