Samuel_Tow

You know... JUST that would go a long way towards making the game much less head-slappingly silly. I've lost count of all the times when I'm on official Arachnos business sent to save an Arachnos base from hostile incursion, and I have to fight EVERY DAMN ARACHNOS SOLDIER ON THE WAY THERE! Why? They hired me, why do I have to kill their guards to get there? I know there are a ton of crap excuses for it, but come on now!

Just imagine this: Arachnos soldiers in the overworld would never attack you, either at all or unless you walked to, like, within five feet of them. You can walk around their forts without a problem as long as you don't approach them, you can walk the streets without them attacking you, and basically they wouldn't be just like the Skulls and the Snakes. Of course, if you SHOOT them, they'll shoot you back, but they wouldn't attack you on sight for no reason.

This is actually technically possible. You know how everyone in Safeguard missions has a large aggro radius? So make Arachnos soldiers in the overworld have a very small aggro radius, like 2-5 feet. You basically have to bump into one for him to give you trouble.

That'd actually make them feel a lot like the Combine soldiers in Half-Life 2. They do sit around looking for people to harass, but they won't chase Gordon on sight, at least not on first. But if you approach one, he'll give you a thwack on the head without a second thought. That's what I want Arachnos soldiers to be - hostile and dangerous, but not petty enough to chase every villain minding his own business.

Yeah, I have something like that, myself. It's the one story I've written that a fair number of people have refused to read unless I promised them that there was something not depressing in it. Err... this one, to be precise. I wanted to experiment with turning a really nasty bad guy into a hero via epiphany and redemption, and I think I did well for myself, but his villainy is definitely about a 9.

Right. CAN'T toss Serum at your team-mates. My bad.

I know. The thing is, I have it set to x4, and what I'm seeing is NOT x4. It's between nothing and x2 at a stretch. That's at long distance. At close distance, it actually looks like MORE than x4.

Here's the thing - I was looking at an extremely jagged light post in St. Martial the other day, think to myself that antialising wasn't working. Turning Ambient Occlusion OFF actually made that fairly-distant pole look a LOT better, at the cost of occlusion shading. I'm still trying to figure out if I want distance smoothness more than shadows I'm finding I barely see.

Vault doors already solve one of these problems. Despite being attackable targets, vault doors are not auto-selectable in any of the default ways. Tab-targeting will skip over them and pressing an attack with no target selected will ignore them. The same ought to be applied to walls. Of course, it means we'll have to have SOME visual cue to let players know they can break a wall, but the old Duke Nukem 3D "cracks means breakable" ought to suffice.

As far as accidentally breaking into another spawn... I actually like that prospect

Intangibility currently allows you to walk through cell doors. I don't know if it works on vault doors, but I would assume so. As I envision breakable walls working the same way as breakable doors, it ought to.

The way I see it, these clicks would be endurance-bound, not recharge-bound. They'd be many times permanent out the box (say, 10s recharge, 5m duration), but would be limited by a high endurance cost, say 10-20 per click. This way, under low-damage conditions, your armour pieces would protect you without much endurance expended, just like how Regeneration doesn't have to use its clicks much. However, under high-damage conditions, cost would increase RAPIDLY as your armours get broken again and again and you're having to pay a pretty penny for regenerating them.

In some way, this would actually play a lot like a Mastermind. A Mastermind generally doesn't pay anything for the use of his henchmen or the resistance benefit they provide. He doesn't need to run toggles to maintain the henchmen's existence, he just needs to summon them one and upgrade them twice, and then never do ANYTHING to them for the next 28 hour (99999s) or until the henchmen get killed. Realistically speaking, they WILL get killed before their ridiculously long timer runs out, which puts the Mastermind behind the 8-ball, having to pay a significant cost to recover a fallen henchman and reupgrade him. Typically, a henchmen tier costs 20 points to summon and 90 points to upgrade (45 points per henchman). All three tiers cost a total of around 150 points, sans reduction. Even if summons recharged instantly, you CANNOT resummon and reupgrade too many times per battle because you will simply run yourself dry.

Now, a Mastermind who's so cool he never loses henchmen will have almost no use for endurance whatsoever. A Mastermind in the thick of it losing henchmen left and right will have the kind of endurance drain that no other AT can even dream about, and I know this for a fact. I've always said that a Mastermind is only, solely and completely endurance-bound. Give a Mastermind enough endurance and he's unstoppable. Run a Mastermind out of endurance and he's crippled.

This is what I envision for this Armour set. Armours can be repaired quickly whenever they break, but each time they break, they take a SERIOUS toll to pull back up. Lose your armour enough times and you simply run out of endurance to keep recovering it. This is a lot like a toggle, only it's a toggle which costs more under heavy fire than it does standing around. As such, it will provide better performance when it's not really needed and worse performance when you push it to the max, which I feel is just the nature of the beast.

Wow, Shubbie! I'd forgotten about how much I loved your rants.

Sorry, that was a misunderstanding on my part. I extrapolated on the idea to extremes in the form of the total zone destruction idea where you'd land in a nice city zone and transform it into Boomtown. I assumed this was what you were referring to, and that kind of complete and utter destruction just wouldn't look right in a specific, iconic location. I have nothing against taking out a building or two in iconic locations, just nothing terribly major.

At the same time, I DO want to see a mission that has you go into a city area and, to quote evil Coop, "Destroy everything!" Not that good Coop doesn't do that all the time... Basically, it'd be like what Tobias Hansen leaves behind after leaving a hostile Venezuelan army outpost, e.i. nothing. Walk into an area, tear down every building, then go home.

I guess heroes can have the inverse mission of chasing out villains from a bunch of locations in a Boomtown style area, making room for construction workers and, by the time they leave, leaving behind a fully built-up city zone. Be a pretty heroic and satisfying thing to do.

If you have to ask that question, my friend, then I cannot give you a good answer, I'm afraid.

Vernon's a good example (although a comedic one, which I'm not a fan of), in that he's always looks up to you, but he always has a plan. He does tell you what to do, but in the most practical sense, he's actually helping you do something really cool that he's completely incapable of doing on his own. He respects your work, he hails you as the big guy and basically sticks to doing his science and not sticking his nose into your methodology. With Vernon, he's the little guy working hard to help out and you're the big guy strutting his stuff and doing major deeds.

Personally, that's the kind of evil I'm most appreciative of. It's not vile enough to make me question whether I want to keep playing, but it's more than villainous enough to make me feel like the antagonist of the story. And at the end of the day, I'd say that's the point.

Now just imagine buying something for, say, 200 million... 9999 at a time

Go to hell. Unless you want to find a direct quote where I said you didn't have the right to complain, which you won't because I still have my short-term memory, then kindly think before you post and avoid putting words in other people's mouths.

And while we're on the subject of quoting, could you kindly quote where you were promised a working game NOW when you bought a pre-purchase for an expansion that's not due for months. Because I have serious doubts you're going to find that. Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning are part of Going Rogue. Their being released early is a perk. Treat it as such.

Look, dude. You can complain all you want, but don't be a dick about it. Because despite not trying to be, YOU ARE. You exaggerate, you insult, you're rude, you're crass, you're inconsiderate and you're basically ventilating your moth. You don't like the new Issue. WE GET IT! Now answer me this - are you not going to be satisfied until the rest of us are miserable and bitter as you are? Because that's the only thing you're achieving here. I hope you're proud of yourself.

I don't think it makes sense for us to topple the Atlas statue five times a day. Pay phones, bus stops, parking metres, those are all things few people notice when they run about in the streets. I honestly can't tell you if I've ever seen all the crates in Mayhem missions in the "real" locations at all. They just don't register for me. Crates and such may as well not be there, but landmark buildings really aren't something I'd feel should be broken repeatedly.

Since Mayhem missions are already slated to be about robbing a bank set in an iconic location, I don't think they're the right fit for this. I'd more look at some kind of "demolition" mission that sends you into one of those "jumbled" outdoor maps that looks like it's in Paragon City, but isn't part of any place you can visit. It's "in the city," just not where anyone can see it, which means we can destroy it to our hearts' content.

Oh... Dang, and I got excited for nothing...

I'm not against the idea itself, but I feel that the concept of "punching a building until it falls down" is a bit... Unwieldy. Perhaps allowing us to enter the building and smash its supports would be a good alternative. That is, of course, unless you want the sort of Red Faction: Guerilla meets Katamari Damacy sort of utter destruction of everything, which might not be a bad idea...

But NOT in landmark locations, and probably not in Mayhem missions, either.

That said, I can actually see a mission that started out all nice and shiny and then got progressively less and less shiny as you broke things, sort of how the world in the original Dungeon Keeper gets more and more crappy the more lands you take, and not just the lands, themselves and not just as you take them. You could start off a generic nice city location and end up with... Well, Boomtown.

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On that note, here's something that I've wanted to see for a while - breakable walls inside instanced missions. We already have the technology in the form of breakable doors, like the ones that keep us inside jail cells on maps with jails. What I'm suggesting is to make a part of the wall act like "a door" that is fitted into a corresponding hole in the wall that's not breakable. That way, we can attack the breakable section of wall and punch through. Even if the technology is not ideal, I'm sure the concept would fire up many people's imaginations.

I specifically took Kick on one of my villains so that I could kick over trash cans in style Of course, I also use it to "Little pig! Little pig let me in!" vault doors.

Oh, that's the same guy? OK, things make sense now.