Samuel_Tow

The two pictures above are from Darksiders, a game with a very... "Particular" sense of style and design. The reason I bring it up is because Darksiders designs almost all of its characters as very, very big and very, very chunky, and this is no better demonstrated by the two pics above, those of War's Chaoeseater sword and that pistol that I don't know the name of. I call it "the gun."

Why bring that up at all, you ask? Well, there has been an ongoing debate here in City of Heroes on the subject of "bigness" pretty much for as long as I can remember, predating even BABs thoughts on the subject. Zombra, when he was still here, used to have a jolly good time making fun of me for wanting to use BIG costume items, like the Large Robotic gloves, the Enforcer boots and so on, and would constantly mock my unceasing complaints that broadswords for women just weren't big enough. And yet when this comes up, a lot of people seem to feel that too large ANYTHING just wouldn't fit the game.

Historically, and I know the guy will hate me for bringing it up, BABs has expressed unwillingness to put in really big weapons into the game unless they had the proper animations to reflect such weapons' weight. After all, a big weapon swung around lightly feels like a flimsy prop more than like a lump of iron with a handle. I actually used to agree with this... To some extent. But the more I play games with a less... Compulsive outlook on my own tastes, the less inclined I am to agree with this, and for reasons very simple: It just looks awesome from where I'm standing.

Back to Darksiders, and the reason I brought it up: The game has balls, if I may say so. What other games would depict with some sense of moderation, Darksiders just drops on your screen in a fireball and screen shake. What other games would try to limit and make more believable, Darksiders makes almost grotesque. The game, for those unfamiliar, revolves around the player character War, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, involved in intrigues too complex to explain here, basically going around killing various flavours of demons, and some angels here and there just to show he doesn't take sides.

War is already a pretty big guy, about twice the height of an ordinary human, and bulky to an unnatural extent. On top of that, he wields a sword that's actually taller than he is, a handgun that's about as long as his forearm, and has a cloven gauntlet that, judging by the zombies running around, is twice the size of a man's chest just in itself. By all accounts, this should be ludicrous, and indeed many reviewers have described it as such. But then on the other hand, it is also completely glorious from where I'm standing.

In a way, popular culture in general and the City of Heroes community in particular have trained us to develop an almost compulsive feeling of... "Refined taste," I suppose. We aren't supposed to like dumb things, we aren't supposed to like simplistic concepts, we aren't supposed to like a six-year-old's view of masculinity. I don't know about other people, OK, but at least for me, that is the case. I've always been a fan of the simple, basic, unrefined concept of raw brute strength, but have always attempted to temper this desire in order to appear more... I don't know. Intelligent? But having played a few specific games recently and otherwise having been exposed to certain concepts, I'm slowly embracing the fact that I may well just be a dumb guy who likes dumb, simple entertainment. In fact, I'd sooner be the dumb guy having fun than the smart guy to whose ideals nothing ever measures up. And I've been both, so I know what I'm saying.

Darksiders was, in a sense, a cleansing experience for me, because I adored everything about that game, and realised I wanted to bring as much of that as I could in City of Heroes... Then I realised that I can't. There aren't any swords nearly big enough, with the possible exception of that one Rularuu's Bane which I've already used before. There aren't any glove options big enough, at least not in the way War's left hand is big - his has a large hand with large fingers, whereas our gloves all have relatively the same size hands with only bigger forearms, which isn't quite the same. The very concept of what War represents in terms of character design is something at, here in City of Heroes, is more or less considered bad artwork for lack of proportions and lack of artistic restraint. It also runs afoul of BABs problem with large weapons swung lightly, something I have grown to vehemently disagree with in the face of evidence from other games.

And it's not just swords and armour that "the bigness" concerns. At least for them I can make the argument that the bigger the melee weapon, the harder it hits. But this concerns all areas of design, more specifically that of guns. The pistols we have right now, for instance, are all fairly small, with all of ONE big variant - the match compensators, which are both low-res and low-poly models and are also untintable AND EVEN THEN aren't actually all that big. And this carries on to rifles, bows and so forth. The only really big rifle we have so far is the Redding Rail Rifle, and that's just long, not big. Techbot Alpha has gone on to suggest bigger cannons, and to that extent I'd agree, but I feel regular weapons too can receive implausibly big options already in them, just for the sake of being there.

I guess the point of all of this is, and to put it as a question: How do you feel about the concept of "bigness," as defined not just by absolute size, but by looking bulky and having out-of-scale big weapons? I suspect many people wouldn't care for such options, and that's just fine and dandy, but would you actually feel it detracts from the game to actually have such options? Would you feel it detracts from the game to have a sword that stands taller than you are, to have a handgun that's bigger and longer than most rifles? How do we, as a community, feel about this?

*edit*
Something that made me laugh out loud was the description of War, the second horseman of the apocalypse, from revelation:

I considered putting this in the All Things Art thread, but I actually think I want a bit more of a discussion on this topic and less so to make an actual suggestion, though that's also on the agenda. I'll be posting some pics, so if they end up stretching the horizontal, I'll probably have to split this into two post. Let's see:





Yeah, they stretch the horizontal. Give me, um... An hour to compose the rest of this in a separate post, please.

Something to note about going -1x3 or -1xAnthing:

1. You are going to get insulted for your difficulty choices and accused of farming pretty much half the time you so much as mention your difficulty settings in any form of complaint. I don't know why that is, but be prepared for it.

2. When the Incarnate system eventually rolls around, provided it's like it was in Going Rogue Beta, then enemies of level 49 (-1 to a level 50) will not drop the Incarnate Shards required to progress in the system. Only level 50 enemies will.

I say these things because I managed to catch an enormous amount of flack for just this reason in GR Beta when I complained Shards weren't dropping for a legitimate difficulty choice.

I wonder if people who clamour for "a new engine" actually have any practical concept of what that even means. I keep saying this over and over again, that even if we got "a new engine," nothing would change, because the old game would have to be re-exported into the new one. Not only will that not fix anything in and of itself, it will break some things.

Easy example: Play Half-Life, then play Half-Life: Source. Notice the difference? Me neither. Well, OK, let's be fair, there are four:

1. Ragdolls, for what that matters, exist in Source where the original had pre-animated corpses that blew up more often than not (something I still miss).

2. The "Tranquilliser" Crossbow pins people to walls instead of, uh... Tranquillising them, like the Rail Crossbow in Half-Life 2.

3. The floating barrels at the end of On A Rail and the start of Crush Depth have been replaced with the Half-Life 2 blue plastic drums.

4. The cliff face in Surface Tension has some degree of 3D background, where before it was all a 2D painted skybox.

The game's graphics are still as bad as they were in 1998, all the questionable level design is still there, all the low-poly models, all the low-res textures. Everything. There's a reason why Black Mesa: Source was started - because Valve's port of Half-Life to the source engine is, in a word, "***." No-one who isn't Blizzard will ever bother with putting a brand spankin' new engine in an old game, because that just means having to basically make the game over from scratch, and most people use that opportunity to make a sequel, if not a wholly unrelated new game.

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As far as "underwater" environments go, I'd go as far as to support an underwater city, as long as water is on the other side of a glass wall most of the time and no battle takes place actually IN the water. There's far too much potential ugliness that has no point in being solved.

I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm, in flap-jaw space, with the tuning fork, does a raw blink on Hiri-Kiri rock! I need scissors! 61! La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo! La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo! La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo! Your mission is to infiltrate the fortress Galuade, rescue the hostages and neutralize Metal Gear before its assembly is complete. Variety Level 13 Rescue Meryl, the 'Return of Genola.' Mind the gap. President Baker should be somewhere to the south of where you blasted through the wall. Hurry and save him before the terrorists discover his code. Kawanishi-Noseguchi, Kinunobebashi, Takiyama, Uguisunomori, Tsuzumigataki, Tada, Hirano, Ichinotorii, Uneno, Yamashita, Sasabe, Kofudai, Tokiwadai, Myoukenguchi.

Compound reply before I go to bed. Keep up on the quote authors, because I intend to do some serious quote editing.

To avoid large quotes, let me do this - on the subject of more skin:

I will break tradition with myself and disagree. One of the cool things about the ninja in Naruto is that a lot of the time, they look like ordinary people. A girl in a dress, a dude in slacks. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only if you actually look closer, you notice they're wearing chain mail under their clothes and they have suspicious puches on their belt and wait! What's that? A forehead protector with an insignia?

What I like about this one, especially the original, is she looks... Fairly normal, unless you look closely and notice the chain mail. In fact, I'd suggest you go Tights with the mesh pattern and go grey over black to imitate DENSE chain mail. I'll see if I can't come up with something of my own when I get back home.

However, I will say this - while I enjoy seeing ninja who have no real protection and rely mostly on their skill to protect them, having this lady dressed in chain mail under her clothes, rather than bare limbs, has a bit of appeal to it, and it's that kind of appeal she would need to stand out.

By the way - I would really suggest using the Martial Arts pack robes. They look significantly better.

Demos in general are incredibly sloppily handled in this game. Their biggest boasting feature is "they exist" and that's about it. At the very least, I'd like to see an interface for playing them back like an actual video and the ability to control at least the orientation of the camera.

Can we actually use dopelgangers in the Architect now? Been a while since I made anything.

Feel free

I agree with this idea completely. And considering I basically don't care about bases in the slightest yet still fully support this suggestion, that should say something about how good it is.

Technical cost aside, this idea has literally no downsides. I like it!