Samuel_Tow

Something I want to emphasise here is that I really don't want to make defeat more unpleasant, and I really don't want to make people afraid of being defeated. That we really aren't in this game is one of the major reasons I like it.

However, I do think that we could perhaps make defeat MEAN more, without specifically making it SUCK more. Jails, as I said, are a good start. They prevent you from having a fresh start, and at the same time save you a trip, which is both good and bad, but it still introduces a complication to defeat.

Moreover, City of Heroes tries to sideline defeat, like "it didn't really happen." You go down, but the game doesn't really acknowledge that. It just lets you teleport to the hospital and pick up where you left off. By being sent to a jail, the game will acknowledge that you were defeated and let you continue the story AFTER your defeat, rather than just backing you up a few frames before it and restarting the fight.

In a sense, it's the difference between a game which embraces player defeat and includes that into gameplay, vs. a game which ignores player defeat and just forces you to quick-load your last quick-save when you go down, which is what City of Heroes does, hand-wave narrative notwithstanding. It's kind of like the Happy Video Game Nerd's review of Nightshade, a game where you don't have lives, but are instead captured and put into James Bond like traps every time you go down, forcing you to escape from them. Go down enough times, though, and you're put in a trap you can't escape from.

This is more about storytelling than it is about game design, though. The only way to make people really fear dying is to make dying suck, but that just makes the game stressful to play, which is a bad thing. Hence why games and gameplay can rarely achieve this kind of dramatic tension, but at least a story can be written so that THAT can feel dramatic.

For instance, for all its faults, I got that feeling from Dead Space 2. This is a cruel, nasty, sinister game that has historically had no problem with disembowling, vivisecting and exploding sympathetic characters on camera, to the point where we're pretty sure that Isaac is the only one who's going to survive. So being given a support character I actually liked in Mass Effect 2 was REALLY heavy, because I knew - I KNEW - that the game had no qualms about having some guy flip his **** and gouge her eye out with a screwdriver. (SPOILERS: That actually happens, but she survives to kick his *** and makes it out alive, making Dead Space 2 AWESOME!)

As a final note, I point you to perhaps what is the darkest, heaviest episode of the PowerPuff Girls - Speed Demons. In a show that's ostensibly about lighthearted comedy and zany antics, this episode is the kind of story you scare your children with. To me, this is sort of the feeling I get in Recluse's Time After Time arc... Only it's completely ruined because I always have a safe line back to home base.

In fact, you know what I liked about the Shadow Shard even what back when? The fact that it felt like we were all alone in the wilderness, away from people, away from help, away from the support of a safe base of operations. Deep down the rabbit hole, as it were. Of course, the game can't suck, so you can't be stuck on the butt end of nowhere, never able to go back, or stuck in a post-apocalyptic future and unable to go back until you're done. But there is still a sense of danger and drama in the air when you're out and away from the safety of the city and the help of your friends.

I remember doing an Abandoned Sewers run with Zamuel after our Abandoned Sewers Trial, going from the centre out through the Boomtown exit. We knew we could not afford to fall, because if you fall, you go back to the entrance and you can easily step out that way. Scary not because dying would be BAD, but rather because it would be the easy way out and ruin the run.

I believe the problem with giant monsters is how range to a target is calculated, though I could be wrong. As far as I know, range to a target is counted from one specific point at the centre of the entity. A bigger entity would have some amount of offset, so that it would seem like distance was calculated from its surface, not from its core (and so that you didn't have to be INSIDE its body to reach melee range of it).

This becomes problematic when the entity is long and spindly like Rularuu the Ravager is, or has and off-centre centre like the Jade Spider. This is because these leave no good middle ground. You're either able to hit the air between their legs or around them and score melee hits, or otherwise unable to hit their limbs, as is the case with the Jade Spider.

On the flip side, Arachnos Subs do not seem to obey the same rules. If you'll notice, they're big, long and spindly, but you can melee them along their entire length, and if you blast them, you'll note your character will switch what he targets as you move along. Sometimes he'll shoot the conning tower, sometimes the entry sewer grate, sometimes he'll shoot farther back. I'm not sure how this is achieved, but I suspect this technique is only usable on static objects, as it appears to involve tagging multiple entities spaded out along the length of the sub, all tied to the same hit points pool.

All of that said, yeah, sure, I wouldn't mind more giant monsters. I'd still like to see some of them show up as EBs in higher level missions, though. Like the Kronos Titan, Baphomet, Psychic Babbage and so on.

I promise that this will be the last esoteric thread I make for some time.

For a while now - and I mean many years - I've been trying to figure out what makes for a dramatic story, with respect to combat and warfare. I've watched many movies, played many games and read many stories, and I could never quite pin down why some stories made me believe the drama they were conveying and made me "feel" it much more than others, even though most of the stories I'm thinking about are inherently good. And I think I finally know what that is.

A good dramatic story centres around danger. More specifically, the feeling that the protagonists (whom we care about and want to see win) are in direct, immediate danger, and that if they make a mistake, they are going to suffer serious consequences. What determines whether a story will work for me or not, however, is if that story only informs us of that danger and possibly shows the danger onto third parties, or whether that story goes ahead and actually administers real, palpable and even final damage onto said protagonists.

A story that I can point to as a dramatic failure is - and keep in mind I actually like this movie - the story of the Expendables. For the amount of action, bravado and violence that movie displayed, it became very evident very soon that none of the protagonists were going to die or get seriously hurt, and that took a lot away from the drama. That's not to say that I need to see people die to believe it (I don't believe in the Countdown approach), but rather that the fact these people never suffered any meaningful damage "trained" me to simply expect that they never would. Few stories switch tone half-way through, and of those even fewer work.

To break habit, I won't talk about SRMTHFG! and instead pick Oban: Star Racers as a good dramatic story. This is a series which starts off the protagonists on a bad foot, and essentially carries them that way the whole way through, to the point where I was trained to expect the worst in every situation and fear the worst, as well. When I realised the story was not just prepared to go there, but in fact all too willing, the danger felt a lot more real.

The point of this entire contemplation, as posted here and not elsewhere, is to feed back into why I've struggled to find certain stories in City of Heroes dramatically compelling, and indeed why I fail to find so very many of them as "epic." By the nature of the game, and for the need to be fair to everybody, we can only ever face informed danger, but very rarely will we ever face actual damage, at least such that cannot be repaired by backing off and trying again. It's understandable why this is - it would suck to play in a persistent world otherwise. And I'm probably one of the staunchest detractors of failable missions as a concept.

However, I have picked up people's stories of what they found to be "epic" over the years, both from people I know and from people I've seen here on the forums. They usually involve a Scrapper rising to the occasion and cleaning hose when the entire rest of the team is down, saving the day from the brink of defeat or a Defender joining a team which was struggling for their lives and bringing unbelievable victory with his support. And in almost all instances I've personally seen these stories, people have told of situations where actual damage had been suffered by their team, and they were personally responsible for turning that around.

This may come off as idle contemplation, but at least I have an answer for why I so very rarely find team gameplay to be "epic" or "dramatic." Fun, sure. Engaging, of course. But fun and engaging in the same way Pac Man would be - it's a cool game. Narratively, however, team games have always taken away from that feeling of epicness, because the only way I can feel a situation is truly dramatic is for the game to hurt the players, and hurt them bad. And that's generally something game designers try to avoid as a common experience, simply because while it may be fun for the hero, it rarely is for the victims.

The closest I've found to a game that pulls this off is L4D2, and only because that game's built in AI has the tendency to grief its own players, and even in that game it's been frustrating far more often that it's been amazing. Yes, it's amazing to rescue your entire team from a Tank, but not nearly as amazing to be the one laying on his back, yelling "Can somebody give me a hand here? I can't do this alone!"

In a way, I just can't buy a story where the protagonists always suffering serious damage by the skin of their teeth all the time. It breeds a belief that nothing bad can ever happen, and that even when things look bad, something will happen to turn things around. Personally, I'm much more impressed with stories that do allow the unthinkable to happen and then ask the protagonists "Now what do you do?" Because, to me, protagonist magnanimous in victory is still less impressive than a protagonist tenacious in defeat.

I think the hatred for Praetorian Earth in general is a bit exaggerated, as it really is a pretty cool setting. However, the over-saturation is something that I do agree on. It's not that we have too much Praetoria, it's that we have too much Praetoria all at once, and to the exclusion of everything else. Since I18, the only non-Praetorian content we've gotten has been the Vincent Ross arc.

This smacks of classic expansionitis to me. You launch a new expansion, and suddenly everything is about that, all the best stuff is there, all the new development is for that and it's involved in every facet of the old game. It's like how I6 and I7 made practically everything about Arachnos and Longbow, a legacy which still haunts us even to this day, as good vs. evil confrontations always devolve into Longbow vs. Arachnos confrontation. And now it's Longbow and Arachnos vs. Praetoria.

Balancing the Praetorian storyline with other new content NOT related to it would ease the tension by a great deal.

It's such a shame that BABs left the company. He had such a passion for animation and, among other things, the removal of redraw from all weapon powers in cases when a weapon attack could be executed, but still leaving it in in instances where an attack couldn't happen, letting us draw weapons if we wanted to still.

This would have been an amazing change but, like additional Dual Pistols models, it looks like his leaving killed it dead.

Is it usable without the Launcher, then?

This is a bit of a dilemma for me, in that I want to make a new Mastermind, but I'm not sure a set exists that works for this. For those of you who don't like long posts, my concept is simple: The Mastermind needs to be the leader of an invasion force of LIVING aliens, be they human or inhuman, who look futuristic enough to believe.

I've always found Masterminds to have a very broad theme selection, but it just occurs to me that we really don't have any futuristic/sci-fi Masterminds if you discount Robotics. We have plenty of magical ones (Zombies, Demons, Ninja) and plenty of natural-looking ones (Thugs, Mercs, Ninja), but the only futuristic set we have is Robotics, and I'm honestly tired or recycling that. But what else can I use?

Here's what I need to make: I have a character - we'll call him Cedric - who leads a large space empire, who has conquered many worlds before, and has now set his eyes on Earth. I want to create a Mastermind to serve as his commander-in-chief, who will lead Cedric's forces. The trick is that this yet-to-be-named Mastermind is a psychic, leading said forces via mind control, kind of like what Paxton Fettel had going with the Replica Soldiers. This means that the soldiers have to be alive in some way, and perhaps even human-looking, so that they can be mind-controlled.

However, the problem is that I really don't have access to a set that looks like soldiers from space. I've already used Robotics MORE than enough times, so I want something else, but there isn't much left aside from that. Ninja are not acceptable, and Demons and Zombies look a bit too magical for my purposes. We're essentially left with Thugs and Mercs, and Thugs just look too disorganised and freakisth to pass for an army.

I want to use Mercs, myself, but they look so... Contemporary. You have the standard helmet-wearing foot soldiers, the SWAT dudes and the ridiculous Vietnam era Arnold Schwarzenegger musclebound commando, but this does not look like a galactic invasion force. It looks like Reb Brown's Robowar.

So what can I do about this? What justifications and excuses can I think up to justify any of the possible solutions? Can this even work?

The "wisp aura incentive" is a new aura that's unlocked for using the NCsoft launcher, hence why it's called "incentive." I don't think it's unlocked on Live, but I could be wrong.

Congratulations. May you have at least 1000 more

That's pretty much what I'm saying, Liquid - let's focus on the thread's topic and stop trying to decide who has the right to post what where.