Samuel_Tow

Basically, just because you see three entries in server selection doesn't mean there are three machines running three different codebases. From how I understand it, Test servers all use the same machine and use only logical separation to divide themselves between the different shards.

And even if we assume that they are all different machines capable of being configured differently, no precedent exists to suggests that the game's framework is even capable of handling different code bases with the same client. After all, the login server will bounce you if your client version is wrong, and one would assume that different test servers would be running different versions.

Because we don't expect high-brow literature out of a super hero game, and I dare say some of us don't find that sort of thing compelling to begin with. The arcs set out to do one thing - give us choices and make it seem like we are driving events - and in this they succeed wonderfully. They're also written with enough characterisation for the people involved, as well as a steady hand, and I honestly don't WANT anything more than that.

What we haven't seen is the tails and the sword. Doesn't seem like there are any new monster heads, monster feet or monster arms. That alone is disappointing, but I guess they had an entirely different kind of mutation in mind.

That's actually what I meant. I don't remember if the Ninja Pack was on Test first, but I know the older packs didn't use to be. So, I'd say putting it on Test was the right thing to do.

And TechBot - I understand your frustration, but let's hope your Test server is not busy for the next Booster Pack. Sincerely.

City of Heroes suffers from an EXTREME case of story and gameplay segregation without actually HAVING to. The bulk of the game's content, which is still the old CoH content, basically consists of an intro, an outro and "beating stuff up" in the middle. Most missions can be solved by walking in, killing everything and clicking everything, hoping that whatever you were supposed to kill or click is one of the things you did.

Newer story arcs solve this to a great extent, but they still make the mistake of putting all narrative in the game's text boxes. One lost art of narrative is NPC Dialogue. Sometimes the narrative doesn't have to give you an answer right away, relying instead on NPCs to suggest what might be going on. Just as an example, on a mission to stop a CoT ritual to stop a demon, you could come upon a couple of mages talking about how they don't think the mystic in charge of the summoning is actually from the Circle, hinting at a plot point that may not develop for another several missions.

By and large, though, the BIGGEST problem City of Heroes suffers is dead air. Far too many missions, player- and developer-made, give you one or two objectives, yet plop you onto a huge map that has no narrative value, essentially requiring you to grind your way through the map to advance the story. I firmly believe that a good game with good storytelling should never let the player go more than 10-15 minutes without presenting SOMETHING interesting. It doesn't have to be clues or plot points. A talking patrol, a fight, a non-required glowie, an ambush, just SOMETHING. You should never let your players fall into the samey grind of going from spawn to spawn and having nothing to do but think about the fastest way to get 'er done.

In fact, that's one of the things that made the original Half-Life so good - it never got boring. Every now and then you'd see a scientist dragged into a vent, come upon a locked door someone on the other side had to let you through, meet an uncomplicated puzzle and so forth. That way, the game never felt boring, like you were just walking hallways and shooting aliens. City of Heroes can do with more of that. Like, say, the two Skulls in the high-level Vhaz mission that just wanted to know what was in the barrels. I LOVED that

This is actually why I get chills down my spine when people suggest that, in City of Heroes, everything should always be generic and our characters can never react to anything, lest it infringe on their concepts. Now, while I agree that we shouldn't be writing stories for any particular character type, like say... A mercenary whose biggest dream is to be an Arachnos fanboy! But at the same time, being given the choice between several different reactions, as the new arcs seem to, IS a very good thing.

Just as character powers can generally be broken down into several different archetypes, so can character personalities. Say, you could have tough, whiny, serious, goofy, insane, altruistic, self-interested and so forth. Just as power archetypes never really fit any particular character concept PERFECTLY, but I dare say that it's fairly easy to be "close enough." Mass Effect did a good job of it by presenting players with, generally, three different options - the pragmatic neutral option, the heroic paragon option and the dickish renegade option. You couldn't even pick WHAT Shepard said, only what his attitude was, but that was enough.

Especially in role-playing games, it's usually not a good idea to give characters FULL characterisation to the point where it feels like you're borrowing someone else's fanfic, but at the same time, characters should still have SOME character to them.

Dead Space's plot was... Weak, shall we say, and its delivery wasn't exactly top notch, even without the forced exposition. In fact, I have to wonder what there was so much to exposit, when all you really did most of the game was running around the ship activating subsystems. In fact, Spoony described it pretty well, and went something like:

You need to activate the engines. Oops! The engine room is sealed. You must turn on the power. Oops, you're missing a fuse. You need to get one from engineering. But oops! The door to engineering is locked. You must find explosive. But oops! You can't activate the explosives without the captan's key. But oops! The captain's body is in the morgue on the other end of the ship. Only the transport system doesn't work... Just layerd objectives one on top of another.

Dead Space would have been a much better game if it had stopped screwing me around doing menial tasks for a second and showed me some actual plot, instead of more and more corridors and hallways. I stopped being scared of hallways at the time Resident Evil 2 rolled out.

That's odd. I read up on VirtualDub, and it strikes me more as a video CAPTURING software, rather than a video EDITING software. It keeps talking about formats and capture devices and framerates and such, whereas I'm more interested in precise timing for the flow from one video into another. I'll have to give it a look, but it's... Odd.

*edit*
Yeah, having tried that, it's really not what I was looking for. Working with multiple video files on this is just... Murder. I'll see if I can find a copy of that old video I did to show you what I'm looking for.

*edit*
There we go! Here's my old Punchin' Dudley video. The timing on the video is quite a bit off, I suspect from Photobucket's recompression. I lost the original, so that's the only copy I have these days.

My hopes usually tend to fluctuate between "Yeah, right!" and "This is awesome!" a lot. I try to keep a realistic view on things, like when David agreed to consider a more muscular texture for women. I was psyched! Despite telling myself I wasn't likely to see anything come out of it in probably a year, I was still psyched because I had something to look forward to.

But then I made the mistake of being excited about the possibilities with the new Mutant pack, instead of being realistic and going off precedent. David's participation in community discussions had me convinced that they were finally homing in on the pulse of the community, and the various hints of cool stuff in the Monster pack convinced me that it HAD to be parts like we haven't gotten in a while.

Yeah, I should have seen that coming. My hope now is that they didn't include those in the pack because they're coming for free, either with Going Rogue or later down the line. But I don't know at this point. This pack was what could have told us "Hey! We're doing something different here. THIS is what Going Rogue will be like!" And while I have high hopes for the glowy parts, the art style leaves me cold. It's good, definitely. VERY good. But we have pieces like these all over the place. We don't need more of what we have a lot of. We need new stuff that opens up concepts that weren't available before.

Well, at least Booster Packs give us costumes at character creation that I don't have to do TFs or Merits grinds to unlock, so that's always nice. I much prefer to buy a bonus pack than have to do a TF twice ON EVERY CHARACTER.

It's possible to make attacks on the run, just not with the technique suggested. You can make pretty cool running attacks, that much is true, but you need to animate them specifically for the run style and direction they are used with.

What was suggested was to have separate animations for lower body and upper body, which by its very nature kills both running AND standing animations because for an attack to feel powerful and impressive, it needs to involve the entire body, not just a torso pivot-mounted on a chariot-like lower legs rig.

And even IF these animations were specifically reanimated to be done while running, I can guarantee they'd lock you in motion for their duration. You could probably do a jump-kick while running, but chances are you probably wouldn't be able to steer it. In a fighting game, them's the breaks. You miss, you stumble. Not quite as much here, with homing boulders.

Basically, it's a very large undertaking for a game which neither supports it mechanicall (we don't have any attacks that move us outside of teleportation ones) nor actually gives us the terrains to do this over, what with warehouses full of crates, overturned chairs, forklifts and pillars and such.

It's not a bad idea, and games have pulled it off. It's just hugely impractical in a game with this many unique animations.

Yeah. Semi-on-topic, what ruins Kheldians for me is their dependence on teaming. If it had to come down to one power, it would have to be Cosmic Balance. Because this is expected to have such a huge effect on Kheldian performance, their basic performance is... Let's say "underwhelming" and leave it at that.

Wait, isn't VirtualDub used for dubbing? I used to have that on a hard drive that fried at some point. Can it do things like splice video together?

Here's the thing, though - that's not always how it works out. OK, admittedly, AR is better at AoE than most, but there are two things that get in the way:

1. The easiest and most efficient way to leverage large-scale AoE is to scream "Wolverines!" and let rip. That's basically the only real way to deliver your full potential of AoE damage. Blasters, as I have been made PAINFULLY aware, just don't work well with that tactic because they don't have enough survivability to survive long enough to get all their AoEs out, or to survive what they get in return even if they do.

2. This comparison doesn't work well with certain Scrapper and Brute sets, specifically sets with additional damage and damage auras like Shield Defence, Fiery Aura, Spines, Claws, Battle Axe and so forth. Certain melee characters can deliver OBSCENE levels of AoE damage at pretty decent range that, even if they don't exactly exceed Blaster damage, do tend to come close.

I'm currently looking forward to an Axe/Shield Scrapper which should be... Kind of scary, actually, considering what my Sword/Shield Scrapper does.

Yeah, just... Don't bring Masterminds into this. We really don't want to bring developer attention to them, and they REALLY muddy the waters of expected performance Put it this way - even I'm not crazy enough to ask for Mastermind-level performance from... Pretty much anything that's not a Mastermind.

I honestly keep feeling like we're due for another video game crash at some point in the near future where companies end out making "so many ****** games that there are no ****** games left to make," to quote the Angry Video Game Nerd. I just don't see how the game industry can subsist on mediocre garbage indefinitely. Either someone will come up with something revolutionary, cash in big time and write their names in history like a few companies have, or developers will suddenly find themselves with a fringe market and no idea what happened.

I know it probably makes me a pariah to say this, but I never liked Baldur's Gate, or indeed Baldur's Gate 2. That style of storytelling just doesn't appeal to me. I've discussed the difference between a game being a story you play through vs. a game being a world you kind of exist in, and the latter is certainly a distinct unfavourite of mine. Baldur's Gate's actual storyline happens in four or five large steps, with lots of side missions beyond that, and I just don't like that framework. I don't WANT a wide, spanning world full of wonder and excitement for me to find. I'd much rather have a concise storyline that follows at least a tangible path from beginning to end, even if it's not a linear one.

This is why I like Mass Effect, and especially Mass Effect 2. In the sequel, you don't really have "a storyline," but you have story elements that each contributes to the end goal. You have several large storyline missions, and the rest is missions to get the different characters and then missions to gain the different characters' loyalty, all working towards the ultimate goal of attempting the final mission with as much preparation as you can muster. In Mass Effect 2, I never felt like I was just roaming around, waiting for something to happen, never felt like I was going into a location LOOKING for something to do.

If I had to judge what I preferred as writing, I'd take Mass Effect over Baldur's Gate without a second thought. I'd probably take Mass Effect 2 over most other RPGs, as well, simply because my protagonist speaks with a voice, has a personality and is capable of leading actual conversations, rather than exchanges of monologues.

There's a difference between phrasing your satisfaction as being glad YOU got something and being glad I DIDN'T get something. You chose the latter, which bugs me more than most things. Any time someone comes out and tries to tell me what SHOULDN'T be in the game for reasons of "because I say so" irks me like you couldn't believe.

Different people like different things. I get that. I can work with that. As long as we're all sticking to our guns and pushing for our desires, then everything is cool. It's when you cross the line and start trying to undermine my desire as a roundabout way of getting yours that I take slight.

By all means, be happy with what you got. But try not to laugh out loud that other people didn't get their wishes.

That... Is pretty much the sum of my experience with my AR/Dev, as well. One day, after struggling for my life and dealing what felt like barely any damage, I switched over to my Stone/Stone villainside. I don't know how it happened, but I managed to deliver a Seismic Smash to an enemy for easily twice the damage my Blaster had been doing with Sniper Rifle. And then I got to wondering - if my Brute can partially out-damage my Blaster AND have tons more survivability... Why am I playing Blasters, again?

This has been what has always bugged me about Blasters. Yes, they do the most damage in the game. But their damage has never been proportional to their survivability. They simply give up far, FAR more survivability than they get damage in return. I don't know what "deal" it is that this balance keeps to, but I feel like I'm getting ripped off.

Again - Blasters deal a lot of damage. I'm not denying it. But several other ATs do, as well, and don't face nearly as much peril.

Well, there is a solution to this - have better naming for your bonus packs. So far, we've had this problem nearly every time. The Cyborg pack was actually an android pack, the Natural pack was actually a Ninja pack and now the Mutation pack is actually a Prototype pack. While I have no problem with what the packs have (aside from the more minor comments), the naming issue still remains. I mean, think about it - if they released a Ninja Pack or an Android pack, would anyone actually complain they didn't get what was advertised?

The lessons to learn here are two-fold:

1. Try to name your packs as close to what they will have as you can. If you have a pack that includes, say, lots of plant details like vines, roots and flowers, then call it Super Booster: Plants, rather than Super Booster: Nature. It doesn't sound as impressive, but it tells us what is in there.

2. Always give previews of the packs. Let people see what's in them, let them play around with the costumes and THEN set it out for purchase. That way no-one gets to complain "I bought it and it's not what you said it was!" You had the option to see what it was before buying it.

The original post kind of jumps around, so I'm not entirely sure, but I believe the suggestion is to add another pattern layer to each costume piece so we could stack patterns on top of each other.

Now, I don't believe you need to worry about transparency, as the way this has always worked wherever I've seen it is basically on a stencil principle - the top pattern just overrides the bottom pattern in any place they overlap. I don't know what it would take for our system to be able to do this, but I agree with the general statement - this would allow a LOT more creativity in the long run.

An easy example of this is Need For Speed: Underground, where you could have I believe three layers of "vinyls," which looked to be pretty much the same kind of pattern we use here. I'd usually go with one full-body pattern, then lay two different flames overtop each other for a more elaborate effect, and it would look pretty dang cool. There's a LOT of potential for even better designs here if this were possible.

Personally, though, what I'd REALLY like to see is the technology to apply one texture over another based on a given pattern. For instance, say you want to apply Tech Crey over Lizard Skin using the Tanker pattern. That way, you would have the Tech Crey texture restricted to the shape of the Tanker pattern, and everything else would be lizard skin. The effect of this would be chest armour with fleshy arms sticking out the side. I'm sure this is a massive technical challenge, however.

You know what? At this point, I would be surprised. David has shown a LOT of foresight and creativity, so I had really high hopes. But seeing the complete lack of imagination that went into the Mutant pack just leaves me... I don't know. Cold? They had the opportunity and the excuse to do something really interesting, and instead they went with more of the same.

I want to hope that sooner or later the developers will remember there are costume categories that haven't been updated in FIVE YEARS and maybe throw in a costume piece or two, but at this point? I'm down from great expectations to "I'll believe it when I see it" mode. In fact, you know what? I'll go repeat that in the All Things Art thread just for good measure.

As far as the topic at hand, once again - any Monster Booster Pack has to have new items in ALL the monster categories. If it covers those bases, I honestly don't care what's actually in it.

I agree that not all packs came with full sets. The Cyborg back never came with a chest, and that was just ONE set. On the other hand, it came with a hat, an eye detail a mouth detail, three sets of shoulders, two sets of chest details and a full set with everything else but face and a chest.

The Mutant Pack comes with... About a set and a half, but lacks any chest piece, any mouth detail, any hair/hat/helmet detail, any belt and... Well, the things you'd have really expected, which were Monster Heads and Monster feet. Again, I'm not boiling my top because I didn't get what I wanted, so much as because... I don't get it. We had plenty of all of the stuff we got, and we got pretty much more of the same. What we DIDN'T have and what I thought the pack would be adding to... We didn't get, and by the looks of things, we won't get.

I guess my expectations were running along a train of thought that was completely backwards. I thought they'd start with "something monstrous and inhuman" and work back from there, but apparently they started with "something pretty much human but with stuff" and worked forward from that. So instead of getting something truly weird that kind of looked human, with monstrous heads and legs and arms, we got something that looks mostly human, with high heels, boob holes and pretty faces.

Not AT ALL what I was expecting.

Like I said, something. Even critical damage will do. Right now, the critical damage is... Not really all that much. Either more of it or a higher chance for it would be swell. A to-hit debuff for the duration of the auto fire would also be nice. Be a little safer for those four long seconds.