Samuel_Tow

Well, it IS "different," but I sadly hate everything about it. Not a fan of "conspiracy" storylines, I hate the combat mechanics and I haven't seen much in the way of customization. Plus, despite having a meaty video card, I too was getting graphical slowdowns. Plus, it reminded me a lot of Hellgate London.

That said, at least in terms of style and settings, the Secret World is different. It still lacks CoH's wide-spread instancing as far as I've seen, though. That's a bigger thing than I've ever given it credit for.

Oh, yeah, and Blade and Soul, I forgot about that one. The game that a bunch of developers quit in the middle of making and went to form a company of their own that made Tera, which seems to have beaten Blade and Soul so hard I can't actually find almost any news about the latter, nor almost any screenshots. And I'm told it's another Korean grindfest MMO in a forest, and it doesn't have the "fighting game like" combat the old-old trailers seem to suggest.

I obviously don't know enough about the game to hold an opinion, but nothing I've seen or heard about it has convinced me it's interesting. That's the same feeling I had before Champions Online launched.

Well, I've looked for a "private" server, but something about CoH's server structure hampers this, since I've never found one. Maybe there was never much of a will since we are, even at the best of times, a niche community that might get a boost of motivation after the fact. I kind of sort of hope it happens, what with me willing to pay full price for a new game just to play this one in offline mode.

I guess my only other hope is that someone wises up and buys the property to revive it, like what happened to Hellgate London, even if that took... What, a year? If we're lucky, it would be someone like SOE or, heaven help me, even EA, who are never too proud to support suck every last penny off a game so long as it's generating revenue at all.

I guess that's the big problem with the "publisher" model of gaming of today - it's not a question of a game being popular, so much as how it fits into a corporate over-structure. Which is good for the corporation, I guess, but not so good if all I want out of the corporation is that one game. And I know I might sound just bitter when I say this, like "NCsoft shut down my game! I hate them!" but it's the truth: I really have no interest in any of their other games. I don't want "in a forest" fantasy. Lineage II and Aion are both trash - Korean grindfest MMOs of the purest form, and even Guild Wars 2 has utterly failed to impress me, trotting me around a forest for five hours straight with nary a hint of storyline but "Go explore and do whatever you run across!"

Yeah, I'll be doing the same in the comic weeks. Probably even the coming weekend. All things considered, those are what I'll miss the most, because no other game can really support my menagerie of weird and wonderful characters.

I keep wondering if there isn't something we can do. I joked around with a friend of mine about "Kickstarter!" though I know that's not realistic, but isn't there something that can be done? Petitioning a corporation probably won't work, but I keep thinking there has to be some way for us to vote with our money. Just can't imagine what it might be.

You'll find all of us as angry as you are, if this is true. The game was not doing well, and why this is happening is as perplexing to us as, I assume, it is to the development team who just yesterday were excited about the new stuff they had for us which will now never go Live.

You'd think they'd at least look into making some kind of offline mode for the game and re-selling this to us for extra money. You'd be surprised how many people would buy that, though I've heard the City of Heroes server structure is too complicated. That's coming from people trying to host a "private server."

Incidentally, I've had a cat go out like this, so I know what you mean. Not pleasant.

I'm not there yet, though. For now, I'm just confused. I'd like to have someone from NCsoft at least pass a message through Paragon Studios so we know what happened. Otherwise, all we can take away from this is another EA or UBI stunt based on "business reasons." I can't imagine that'll be very good publicity unless they can put a face on the faceless corporation. Which, being a faceless corporation, I rather doubt they'll do.

I mean no offence when I say this, but did you actually read my post before responding? I ask because we're basically saying the same things. I want to see more options and more versions of those pieces. Colouring differences tend to come down to colour masks, so there's no reason we can't have multiple version of each item. Have you noticed how a lot of the newer items have N/A in their pattern section? Why not include those there. Say I pick the IDF boots, and I get to pick between what they are now, and a different patter that has the whole boot coloured primary and the glow coloured secondary. You get to keep what you have, I get an extra option.

Really, pattern swaps should be one of the less work-intensive parts of making and tweaking costume pieces. And if they had an official feedback thread, I'd say the same there.

Huh... Weird. I though the merge was intended to remove those differences so that one CS and management team could manage all players. I guess the system may not be as flexible.

So, if I make a new City of Heroes account now... Will that be NA or EU?

It doesn't offend me, it's simply wrong. If anything, it should offend you because it's a straw man, but that's your own deal.

No, I'm not arguing for realism, else I wouldn't have brought up Superman. I'm arguing for believability. Those are not the same things. I can believe that a man can run faster than a speeding bullet and jump tall buildings in a single leap. I know that's impossible, but within the realm of super heroes, I can believe it. I can believe that a man whose key power is invulnerability can be shot with an 88 anti-tank howitzer and not suffer serious damage. I know it's not possible, but within the world of super heroes, I can believe it.

I can't believe that a man is shot in the chest with a shotgun and walks it off unless the story has a specific explanation for why this happens, and the more characters you come up with that have that specific explanation, the weaker it becomes. It's the same reason why hospital reclimators in City of Heroes make dramatic storytelling impossible and why the story ignores them so often. Because if the story didn't ignore them, then Sister Psyche would never have died from an arrow to the chest. She would have been teleported to the hospital and insta-healed.

"Real" and "gritty" are not the same thing, either. Most "gritty realism" games, movies and otherwise stories are hugely unreal. SSA1 in nearly its entirety is gritty, but it's in no way realistic because it deals with super heroes. "Realism" is a technical term while "grit" is a stylistic one. Realism is a question of technicalities and details, whereas grit is a broader storytelling concept. A "gritty" story is pretty much the opposite of a romantic one - it's a story where good doesn't win because it's doing the right thing, people die, hearts are broken and the plot bends over backwards for the sake of shocking plot twists and unpleasant plot developments.

Bible Black in all its incarnations is a "gritty" story, but it's nothing at all like a "real" one, for a variety of reasons.

It's not arbitrary at all. You simply choose to label it as such. I don't want to assume why that is - whether you have such character or what - but you can't play an "unpowered" character in this game's higher levels unless you do a radical mental reimagining of what's actually taking place on the screen. I'm not saying you can't do it, I'm saying you have to take significant liberties with the material you're working with.

Yes, I am. There's nothing wrong with a character who refuses to kill. It's actually quite admirable, though it can get tedious if the story keeps bringing the problem up. However, characters who refuse to kill don't tend to arm themselves with lethal weapons, and it's those that do which I don't buy. It's a sci-fi magical fantasy world of super heroes. If you don't want to kill people, you don't arm yourself with knives, guns and grenades. You pick a sonic rifle or sleep gas or something else that's more appropriate.

What I take issue with is a character who wields a lethal weapon for the sole purpose of wounding and never going for a kill shot. That's just taking a square peg and hammering it into a round hole.

When I talk about what's unbelievable for people to survive, I tend to go for the extreme, such as close-range shotgun blasts to the chest, high-explosive rockets to the face, sustained heavy machine gun fire, being dropped off a 40-storey building and such. You don't tend to walk away from those unless you have some kind of meta-human power which protects you. To some extent, body armour can stop low-velocity shotgun pellets, I agree, but look at the crap our characters go through. The Kronos Titan, for instance, can hit you with a barrage of high-explosive, incendiary missiles as big as you are, and those things tend to fly super-sonic.

I know people are tough, but they are not indestructible, and the end game REALLY raises the stakes of what we suffer.

When are you going to grasp that "it's just your opinion" is not an argument that works on me? I mean, I take no issue with trying it on me. Go ahead. But it's not going to work.

And unless the narrative has an explanation for it, I don't buy it. It's like Will Smith's power in Wild Wild West to survive increasingly ridiculous falls, on Indiana Jones' power to survive a mid-air plane ditch in a rubber dingy or a nuclear explosion in a fridge. I don't buy these for a dollar, but the movies they show up in are so out-of-step with reality I pretty much don't try to question them. But it doesn't mean I don't stop to tell myself that... This really shouldn't work like that.

People can kill each other with their bare, unpowered hands. They can do it accidentally even. You can be knocked unconscious and fall on someone smaller than you a certain way and smother them to death.

No, I'm really not. Care to carry on this thoughtful argument line?

Then you'd do well to check your reading glasses. I don't question how any of my characters "arrest" people with a rifle or a sword, because I don't give a rifle or a sword to a character who wouldn't use them for their intended purpose. If I had qualms about doing so, I wouldn't give them a rifle or a sword. How do you "arrest" someone by impaling him through the chest with a sharp length of bone? Well... You don't. You just impaled him through the chest. Either he's now dead since you pierced his heart, or the magic of hospital reclimators teleported him away and healed his wounds with fairy dust and crushed unicorn horns.

What I'm saying is that this argument doesn't need to exist unless you're deliberately bending the rules of what guns, swords and fire do. And if you're bending the rules, the onus is on YOU to explain it. And you can really only use the same explanation a couple of times before it starts dragging the whole fictional universe it's part of down a hole. You can have one person in the world armed with a magic no-kill gun. You can probably have another who's sort of linked to the first. But once you make guns with bullets that blow large holes in people without killing them, I start to not buy it.

Superman's no-killing policy is just fine. Batman's no-killing policy is also just fine. The two of them put together are about enough, however, since that aspect of their characters, slightly unbelievable though it may be, is a big part of what makes the two unique. They're non-killers in a world full of killers. That's a powerful statement. Creating a whole world full of non-killers, however, to the point where people claim any character who actually kills isn't a hero (and I've had that said to me on these very forums) just lose any impact that decision might have had. It's hard to buy and it really serves no purpose.

Ruronic Kenshin hitting people with the dull side of the blade, I can buy. It's his thing. The whole Samurai class hitting people with the dull of the blade, however, would make me question why their swords are even sharp to begin with.

You can't, and I'm pretty sure you were around when BABs explained this. In his own words, the power sequencer requires SOMETHING to play when a weapon is drawn. He tried simply removing weapon draw animations and the sequencer started doing very undesirable things. BABs did not specify, but I've seen evidence of what he might be referring to. Titan Weapons Whirling Smash, when used with momentum, will not play its draw animation at all. You will simply spin around with the sword showing up in your hands instantaneously. However, the hit effects and damage dealt are timed to draw+animation, so ALL of this will happen with a considerable delay, usually after you've done your fast follow-up attack. That's not acceptable behaviour.

BABs did quite a bit of work "removing" redraw so that the game worked exactly like you're suggesting. However, he ran into showstopping bugs with Shield Defence + Right-Handed Weapon, and left the company before he could find a solution. No-one has picked up his work since he left, and according to him, there was a lot of work to do and a lot of problems to figure out.

Moreover, what you're asking for is impossible for weapon sets for the simple fact that weapon customization is power-independent, at least for the most part. A weapon is a costume element that exists on the character at all time, it's just invisible when it's not "drawn." You only have one slot for a weapon per powerset, and you can't be given 9 weapons to customize any more so than you can be given 9 helmets to customize. That's just how the combat system works. There were problems with characters having too many custom weapons back in the day, when pistols Mastermind unlocked the Mace epic, so if three weapons was close to too much, 9 weapons ought to be over the line, especially since you then have to figure out what to do with Munitions Mastery.

You COULD argue that this could just be done like Claws, but you're still running into a problem - picking dissimilar claw models from power customization still introduces redraw between in-set attacks, it's just very short for Claws so it doesn't matter. Moreover, because it's power customization handling the claws, it means you can't customize their effects, meaning your "toxins" are always a dark green. You'll note how newer sets like Titan Weapons and Staff Fighting have customization both for the weapon AND the power effects. This is what you'd lose if you made weapons power customization. Having the weapon be a costume element and the actual power a visual effect grants better customization.

I'm not against the heart of your idea, honestly. I just don't think it's consistent with what the game can do and how it's set up.

You're wrong. You can already place Trip Mines and Time Bombs while hovering near the ground, so long as you're not moving. You don't need to detoggle anything. This doesn't require some obscure new tech to accomplish, the game already has the capacity to do this. All that needs to be done is for whatever is the case with Time Bomb and Trip Mine to be done with the likes of Burn and Poison Trap.

Or, you know, let's cut to the chase and just make those short-range reticle-based powers so you can set them down at a range of... Say 7 feet, which is basic melee range. That means you can set them down while you're in the air even if you're not EXACTLY near the ground, and it means you can set them around corners without showing your face to the enemy. Considering how impractical setting traps is these days, that's hardly a major advantage, and would serve to help Traps greatly, considering the set lacks Cloaking Device.

If that's the "point" you inferred from what I wrote, then you inferred wrong. I'm merely saying that if you don't want to involve killing in your story, it becomes more and more cumbersome to do so the more your story goes into territory where that's unavoidable. It's like making a war movie where no-one gets killed - you could, but you can pretty much only make one movie like this since THAT will be the point of the movie.

Basically, if you give your character bladed claws or a gun, then NOT having him use those for what they're designed just makes the story awkward. And again, you can - Fox Kids did it with the X-Men, and it got very silly very fast. I can see Superman not wanting to kill since his powers aren't naturally destructive, sure. Not unless he wants to make them so. But I draw the line when a man with a gun only aims for limb shots or a man with fire powers only uses "healing fire" or sucks the oxygen out of the air or something.

If you want a hero to not kill, you need to take care to give him powers that aren't imminently lethal. If you DO give him lethal powers but have him only ever use "the blunt edge of the sword," then I'm not going to buy that.

I'm not advocating "gritty realism." I'm advocating less "I'm arresting them with shotgun blasts!" arguing.

New geos won't solve the problem of customizing leg length to a greater extent. You really can't mess with the legs to any great extent because they're central to the animations system, and not just kicks and such. Longer-than-normal legs already cause emote flubs, specifically with the female "sitchair1" emote, where the ankle is bent at the wrong spot on a long leg. All this would do is alter the length of the legs, but not our ability to customize them.

And really, if that's the cost, I'd rather keep the long legs we have now. One of the BIGGEST problems I have about character design in most games these days is short, stubby legs that make the torso look elongated. Sure, our legs aren't realistic, but then neither are our wings or our jetpacks.

I never bought that, personally. Unless you want to go with video game logic of people getting shot with a rifle just losing hit points (or the DBZ logic of people being exploded losing "energy") rather than suffering internal and external injuries, you're just hamstringing your action. Look at the 90s Fox cartoon X-Men - you had a Wolverine who had these badass claws, which he never got to use because... Well, he'd draw blood and sever heads otherwise. So he mostly kicked people with his claws out.

As far as I'm concerned, if you create a story involving deadly weapons and cosmic powers, trying to come up with "creative" solutions to keep your characters from killing people is just hamstringing your narrative. Sure, if you make the story ABOUT that, you can pull it off, but really... How many stories about that do we really need?

I agree with this. I'm a pretty big fan of symmetry, myself. The left-handed chainsword doesn't have to be a mirror image, just so long as the engine is facing out like the right-handed one. Typically, dual-wielded weapons we have access to are symmetrical left-to-right, so they look identical in both hands. Being that the chainswords are lopsided, I really do thing the left one should be flipped around.