Samuel_Tow

I'm glad I'm not the only one bothered by this It really isn't that big a thig, but it's REALLY telling in Praetoria, especially, where so much is based around storyline, plot and NPC chatter. Speaking of which, sometimes it feels like NPC dialogue trees get delivered all in one go where it actually looks like they were designed to be back-and-forth between me and the contact. For an easy example, make a Resistance character and get introduced to Robert Flores. His introductory text screen contains something like six one-sentence paragraphs that don't flow into each other like a speech, but seem to be responding to off-screen cues that feel like they should be coming from your character.

You know what I'm talking about. You'll see a hostage guarded by a boss, and you KNOW they're supposed to be talking about something, only they're not. You inch closer, but still nothing. Finally, you decide "Screw it!" and just attack them. Then, within the same split second, boss and hostage spew forth a six-paragraph, intricate conversation which, because a single character can only hold two speech bubbles at a time, is completely unreadable in real time. So you get done with the fight and check out your NPC channel, only to find that the conversation was recorded out of order. It'd go like:

Hostage: I don't know what you're talking about!
Boss: Hero Name! Why are you here!
Boss: Tell me what the code is!
Minion: How did Hero Name find us?
Hostage: Hero name? Save me!
Minion: You better listen to the boss, or you're dead!

Ugh... Do I seriously care enough about random chatter to try and reverse-engineer that jumbled mess of an instant-bake conversation? Because I don't think so. And believe me, I try. I have been trying for a long time. This is not a new phenomenon. I didn't just run into this and go "Oh no you didn't! I'ma complain about this!" No. I've been wrestling with this problem pretty much since Scanner missions were introduced and bosses started having long conversations with hostages, which were invariably insta-delivered to my NPC tab all in one go.

And this isn't even the worst infodump like this. Sometimes, for completely the opposite reason of dialogues triggering too early, I'll enter into a mission and see - I kid you not - 20 lines of dialogue in my NPC tab. Why? Well, as I quickly figured out, 10 talking patrols spawned and delivered their dialogue AS SOON AS I ZONED IN. I can't be sure, but I don't think that's how it's supposed to work.

If at all possible, it's a good idea to NOT make your players hunt down what NPCs just said somewhere among their system messages. OK, I know I have a tab specifically dedicated to this, but I doubt most other people do. You don't get one by default and NPC chat is sort of smushed in-between combat messages, NPC defeats and to-hit rolls. And even if you were so inclined to have a tab devoted to NPC chat, what would you put in there? Know what mine has? The NPC channel and the channel. Yes, the channel. When you put it into a tab, it turns into Cutscene Captions, true, and that's what holds the messages you get on your earpiece in newer missions, but when it's still in the list of unselected channels, it displays as , as empty space without a name. The only reason I ever thought to add an empty space to my NPC tab was by a process of elimination, figuring that earpiece chatter couldn't be anywhere else, so it had to be in . Considering how many people I've had to tell to turn on Zowies on their maps these past few days, I dare say this is not good design.

And even if I go through all the trouble of setting up an NPC tab where everything gets recorded if I miss it and isn't jammed in with spam-heavy channels, what do I get? I get a channel which gets spammed with garbage as I move through a zone, where it's hard to tell when a conversation began and when it ended, and where rapid-fire conversations get recorded out of order anyway. But you know what's funny? When several conversations fire simultaneously, as it happens sometimes when you zone in, they get recorded intermixed with each other. I'd get one line from the first, a couple from the second, another line from the first, a line from a third conversation and so forth. Considering it's not uncommon for conversations to be had between NPCs of the same name (say, two Mad Freak Gunners in one patrol and two Mad Freak Gunners in another patrol), it's sometimes IMPOSSIBLE to tell who said what.

Considering how heavy on the plot Praetoria is and how much plot is delivered in NPC dialogue, this needs to be fixed. Yesterday. There's no excuse why I will walk into a building and hear three hostages go "Power Division? I never thought I'd be glad to see you!" several floors below me. Or, furthermore, as it happened now, where an alignment mission basically infodumped the entire plot of the mission on me as I fought the boss for the hostage. A Wolf Spider Huntsman, a Blood Widow and the hostage all delivered two speech bubbles each, two lines of text per speech bubble, all at the same time, all in a moment where I didn't have time to read large bodies of text either way. I gotta' be honest with you, when I saw around half my screen fill up with speech bubbles the way they were arranged, I suddenly felt a sharp insufficiency of interest to battle the game just so I could know what just happened.

I know this is not a big thing. I know this is not a game-breaking problem. I know most people don't even realise NPC chat exists. But it's one of a series of little problems that just keeps on bugging me and bugging me, because this happens every time an NPC opens its mouth. Every talking boss, every hostage, every patrol, every time I have to swap tabs and sqint at NPC names to figure out where each conversation begins and where it ends. And I'm rapidly losing will to care, which is a BAD BAD THING!

I fight Carnies because they're soft. By that I mean they're 20% weak to Lethal damage, and after facing countless "hard" targets with my swordsmen, axemen and so forth (that is, armoured targets), I enjoy attacking a few soft targets that don't take twenty hits to take down.

Of course, I do play with bosses turned off, in case anyone remembers my last year's rant, because it was countless Master Illusionists and Dark Ring Mistresses that caused me to do it.

I appreciate the base game for its liberating simplicity. Praetoria is great, but it's also incredibly heavy. Everything I do is complicated, morally ambiguous and with possibly severe consequences. Everything I do is a difficult choice of morality and ethics. The whole world is far too sterile on the outside and far too rotten on the inside. The whole place makes me uneasy to be in it, more so than the Rogue Isles, even.

In the old game, things are simple. I'm the good guy, they're the bad guys, I learn where they are and I kick their *****. It's that easy. I don't have to be aware of my own slipping morality, I don't have to worry that the people I work with are secretly lunatics, I don't have to worry about the horrible unintended consequences of my actions. I do have to worry about corrupt or robot officials, but those are just more villains I need to beat up. City of Heroes is being the good guy, the easy way. You're always right, the other guy is always wrong, and the only solution to anything is beating enough people up. It's liberating, in a way, which is quite ironic within the context of the switch from Praetoria to Paragon City, because I don't think that's how they intended it to feel.

For me, this was quite a ride. I dove right into Praetorian Earth the day this went live (that is, on Monday), and I did nothing but Praetorian content on that one character all the way up until late day Friday. Finally, I went through the long, heart-warming ordeal of saying goodbye to all the people I had helped, and I got ready to step through the portal. I'd gotten so accustomed to Praetoira that the old world of Primal Earth felt somehow distant, unknown and exciting. Once I crossed through the portal, where would I go? What would I see?

Well, I saw an empty warehouse, I stepped out, and I found myself in Talos Island. And instantly a feeling of nostalgia washed over me. "I am home!" The colours in Paragon City are more vibrant than those in Praetoria, where everything is mostly white or bright shades of other colours. The buildings were darker and more detailed, the rocks were browner, the Warriors more orange, and yes, even the grass was quite literally greener. I was done with all of the new and strange experiences, and now I was home. I knew where everything was without even looking at the map, I knew what contacts I could run without checking my contacts screen, I knew which shops were where... Yeah.

I am not sad to have left Praetoria behind. It's a great piece of content, but the old game has its charms.

Environment reflections suck, and have always sucked. I don't know who dropped the ball on this, but they're terrible. And I'll tell you why.

Almost everything buildings reflect is a cube map, which is the say pretty much the same thing as the sky box. It's a painted picture with buildings and streets on it that kind of looks like what's around the building, but it actually isn't. This is good for distant backgrounds, but because buildings don't reflect the actual geometry around them, it looks just sad. They'll reflect YOU, certainly, but they'll reflect you floating high in the air above bodies of water. Huh? That's because almost all cube maps are shot from high altitude to serve as reflections for high-rise buildings, so when you catch a reflection in a ground floor, such as in a shop window, it looks BAAAD. After I whined about it continuously, the Architect buildings started reflecting at least the STEPS leading up to them, but they still don't really reflect anything much. They're just not real-time reflections

What's also funny is the "ghost reflections" you'll see on other people's characters. For instance, I was issued a massive clockwork to help me in a mission. I ran ahead, it followed me and stood between my character and my camera. Then I realised that in the reflection on his back... There was a clockwork. The SAME clockwork. The clockwork was reflecting himself in full size on his own back. It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally caught it. The reflection "painted" on the clockwork is shot from where MY CHARACTER is standing, so the clockwork is reflecting what it would be reflecting if it were standing where I'm standing. So because there's a clockwork behind me, it reflected a clockwork behind it, despite the fact that that was one and the same thing.

Water reflections are far, far superior, because they're always real time. Why couldn't building reflections have been like that?

I've had to explain this probably half a dozen times already, and most of the time to people who really should know better. I wouldn't fault a new player for not seeing it. I'd fault the game's design for not having it enabled by default. And I know why.

Praetorian zones have three extra map markers than City of Heroes zones - Lounges, Precincts and Zowies. All three are disabled by default because they're not present in City of Heroes maps. In fact, moving from Praetoria to City of Heroes, you will find you suddenly lack those options entirely. Hence why I think someone just forgot to tag them.

This needs to be fixed.

Ugh, great, another one of these. A new expansion marketed to new players creating new accounts and being brand new to the experience contains low-level content. I am shocked an amazed.

Or to put it another way: An expansion that doesn't contain a level cap increase and more end game content, because clearly that's what it's all about and replayability can go to hell. Good. I'm sick and tired of the way MMOs handle themselves. I'd much rather take Praetoria over more end game raids. I ain't done the ones we have now, and I don't plan to.

And, yeah, it's 5 AM and my humour levels are rock bottom. I deal with it.

I won't go into nit-picking his review, as that guy came off as a bran new player and his new-player concerns are something we should be trying to address. Any constructive criticism like his was is worth keeping in mind.

And, in fact, I'm going to latch onto something he said. "Now, you've seen mobs get low on health and run in other games, but you've never seen it like THIS! Where is he going?" This sucks. It sucks from a new player perspective, and it doesn't get better with age. I've been here for six years, and every year I hate it more and more.

The "running enemies" mechanic needs to die in a fire. Today. I don't want to see it reduced, I don't want to see it contained. I want it GONE. There is absolutely, positively no benefit whatsoever to having enemies running away and having to be chased because your mission is a kill-all, or because they're par of the spawn guarding a hostage. This needs to go.

I don't see why anyone who ever used Shield Charge is surprised at this. It's like Smoke Grenade all over again. One use of this power slotted with just SOs ought to have told you "Hold on... Something's off kilter here!" When you're running around doing just about Blaster nuke damage at a quarter of the recharge and no crash, it ought to be obvious that the power ain't working like it ought to be working.

I have to echo the comments from before - it felt like cheating. I mean, sure, it's awesome to spawn-wipe once every, what, 60 seconds? Sure, it was cool. But when I start having someone remark about how much damage I'm doing ON EVERY TEAM I JOIN, I start to suspect shenanigans. And I was right to.

The power was broken. Simple as that.

I just realised we're missing something else:

The Reptillian skin for gloves under Monster gloves under Robotic Arm 3. I checked, and it's there everywhere else, including:

Robotic Arm 1 -> Monstrous gloves -> Reptilian (and Monstrous Fur) exit
Robotic Arm 2 -> Monstrous gloves -> Reptilian (and Monstrous Fur) exit
Robotic Arm 3 -> Smooth/Bare gloves -> Reptilian (and Monstrous Fur) exit

Robotic Arm 3 -> Monstrous gloves -> Reptilian (and Monstrous Fur) DO NOT EXIST. And they should

Know what I want an alternate animation for?

REST

That's right. Rest. The power. You know that semi-cool kneeling animation? Wouldn't it be cool if we had options? Like, say:

*Sprawled on the ground, huffing and puffing, exhausted. I mean, when I run out of breath, I tend to collapse, not just kind of kneel.

*Upright and posing. A more "dignified" way to rest. Think the current /em stancevillain2.

*Yoga on the ground, eating out of a picnic basket, or out of a duffel bag. Eating like a slob is optional. That's just how some people recover their energy.

*Floating in the air with swirling mystical energies. Some people need to meditate to regain their energies, after all.

*Hunched over, hands on knees, gasping for breath. You know what out-of-shape people look like when they run a mile? Like that.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Bug: The Mutant Booster Organic Sword's right hand grip on females is very misaligned.

Character model: Female.

Relevant powers: Anything from Dual Blades or Broadsword for any AT, no other powers active.

Bug description: When held in the right hand, the Organic Sword from the Mutant Super Booster Pack is not actually held in the right hand. Instead, it is held somewhere inside the right wrist. The actual sword appears to be positioned back from the gripping hand and and to the inside of the stance, appearing as thought it is lodged right at the base of the thumb. The right hand itself is gripping empty air.

This is evident with both Broadsword and Dual Blades, but ONLY for the right-hand weapon. When Dual Blades is used and the Organic Sword is positioned in the left hand, the grip appears just about normal. The sword still appears to be ever so slightly backwards from where the true grip is, but given the thickness of the hilt and how much it clips with the tiny female fist, it's within tolerance. However, the right hand grip is VERY misaligned, and VERY obviously so.

This is, furthermore, ONLY true of the Organic Sword. All other swords - the Legacy Broadsword, the Scimitar, the Kopesh, etc. - appear to be roughly in place. It is only the Organic Sword that is misplaced, and very obviously so in comparison to the other weapons.

I'm running the "I actually paid money for this?!?" card that is the X-Fi Xtreme Audo PCI Express, and I too have lost the option to enable 3D sound. I did, however, manage to "fudge" 3D sound by downloading and installing the Creative Console Launcher, which for some reason is NOT part of any drivers or packages for my card. It allowed me to enable Surround Sound using Stereo Surround (as opposed to Stereo Xpand, which sucks), and that has given me passable, moving surround sound.

I actually had the opposite problem to that of Bubba - rather than all sound being piped through my centre speaker, all sound was being pumped through my side speakers and much less from centre. I kind of fudged a solution to this by boosting my centre speaker's volume considerably, to a point where they evened out. I do not have Alchemy installed.

As a result, I have surround sound, but what I still lack with the inability to enable 3D sound in Options is the "doppler" effect that 3D sound has, which I'd grown accustomed to.

On the flip side, 3D sound has been total *** for some time for me. It had a VERY sharp falloff both in distance and off centre vision, such that I couldn't hear glowies at all unless I was 10 feet away from them and actually looking at them. With 3D sound as it is now, the massive falloff is gone, and actually reversed, such that I will hear sounds far away from me very loud off my surround speakers. For instance, I'll hear enemies moving around 50 feet behind me as though they were much closer, giving me a few unnecessary jump scares.

I'd still like to see proper 3D support returned to the game, however.