Samuel_Tow

Yeah, that tends to apply in situations when we haven't been flat-out TOLD how hard something is. The Standard Code Rant applies in instances where we have to guess how hard or complicated something is to do. I'm not guessing here. It's a simple fact that adding extra tasks AND art is more resource-intensive than adding extra tasks alone. I'm really not going to get into all the developer commentary regarding this, but we have been told pretty much this several times over through the years. In fact, at one point someone (I think it was War Witch) said it in these exact words. They had to choose between altering the War Zone in any big way or making the new Rikti and Vanguard artwork, and they opted to leave the zone and pick the other option. This is what I'm asking happens with any other zones they revamp - they already have the zone artwork, so I'd rather they messed with making ADDITIONAL artowrk such as enemy models and tilesets, rather than remaking existing artwork that's just fine as it is.

"That's just you" is a weak argument, Rian, and you ought to know that by now. Unless you want to quote a statistical research you've done proving I'm in the minority and you're in the majority, kindly stop trying to speak for a silent majority that disagrees with me and agrees with you. If you have an actual argument for why the graphical side of Hazard zones is what's keeping people out, then I will gladly hear it, but until someone actually makes a point at explaining that THAT is a problem, I'm simply going to maintain that it doesn't need to be fixed.

Secondly, how can you still maintain that what happened to the War Zone and what happened to Faultline are in any way, shape or form alike? Faultline was remodelled completely, to the point where there is more new stuff than old stuff. The Rikti War zone WAS NOT. The only things that changed about it were closing the old door and putting helicopters on all of the old forts. They didn't do anything to the actual zone. It is now exactly as it was before with only a few VERY minor alterations. All they really changed was shifting spawns around and adding an additional underground component for the Vanguard base. That's it. And this is remarkably like what happened to the Hollows - enemies got shifted around, a vendor and a trainer were added and the entrance zones on both sides were changed up a bit.

So here's my argument which you just keep ignoring - what I want is EXACTLY what happened to the Rikti War Zone, and you CANNOT argue that that has not been a success and received overwhelming praise by the community. I see no reason why the same cannot happen to other Hazard zones, nor do I see a need for anything more than that to happen.

What, you mean like DOS attacks, click fraud, phishing sites, e-mail spam and that sort of thing?

As far as new sets goes, let's see...

Polearm melee.
Energy Blade melee.
Two-Handed hammer melee.
Dual Handguns Epic.
Forcefields defence set using graphics like the existing Forcefields.
A Gravity Blast set, a sort of cross between Gravity Control and Forcefields, but it's a Blast set.
Radiation melee set, possibly a Radiation defence set to go with it.
Some kind of Radiation manipulation set, while we're at it.
Archery epics of some kind.
A Light blast/manipulation/melee/defence set, possibly more.
Gadgets control set of some sort. We already have enough powers to put one together, in fact.

As far as proliferation goes, I am sad and disappointed that I've seen Broadsword asked for Tankers, but not Battle Axe and War Mace for Scrappers. Come on, guys!

You're still missing the key point here - changing a zone almost completely takes a lot of money and manhours from the level design team. Leaving the zone's geometry largely as is... Just doesn't. Since, as I see it, the problem with, say, Boomtown, isn't that the zone isn't "pretty" enough, but rather that there's nothing to actually DO there, it strikes me as a mistake to overfocus on making it look prettier. That's not the problem. The problem is that these zones no longer have a point, or any content to do in them, so people have no reason to go there. Addressing that will solve the problem, and do so on the cheap.

The developers once said that revamping an old zone takes as much work as creating a new one. Little wonder, since they said this in the wake of the Faultline revamp, which may as well have BEEN a new zone. But revamping an old zone doesn't HAVE to take as much effort, because it doesn't have to involve massive graphical changes. Whether I like them or not isn't relevant. I won't like them either way, but the point is that changing a zone's geometry costs art resources. Not changing it doesn't. Whether you change it or leave it the same, it doesn't matter, because that's not what'll get people in the zone, as the War Zone proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The old, uninhabited zones look just fine. Making them prettier will solve absolutely nothing. They suffer a lack of content, and content can be added without actually fiddling with zone geometry at all. That's what I'm saying. Don't waste their time fixing things that aren't broken when they can be fixing things that ARE on the cheap. Look at what happened to the Hollows. Look at what happened to the Rikti Crash Site. Significant zone improvement with almost no change to the actual zone's geometry.

Personally, if I had to choose between, say, a brand new Boomtown, or the old Boomtown, Pertez Park and Dark Astoria just with new contacts, I'd pick the latter without a second thought.

Well, an Assault/Defence character really wouldn't be designed to tank, so damage is pretty much what you'll want out of him. With enough of a gimmick inherent, such an AT could be made to do respectable damage, but yet not overshadow traditional melee ATs.

At least Arachnos Soldiers do indeed seem to get Blaster-size AoEs, on cursory examination, but I have to ask - where do they get status protection? I wasn't able to find that in their powersets. As well, where's all the survivability? Looking at Soldiers of Arachnos, the only thing that really qualifies is Tactical Training: Maneuvers, and that's barely 10% defence with not a lot of defence debuff resistance. I did spot a ranged-only defence buff somewhere, but if you go Bane, at least, you'll be in melee a lot of the time.

I did manage to spot some status protection, which I guess counts, but overall, I didn't see impressive amounts of defence or resistance, I didn't see any heals and I saw only partial status protection. They do have a lot of offensive benefits, but the numbers I saw don't even come up to a Shield Scrapper's levels, considering a Shield Scrapper isn't exactly the most survivable thing.

And, of course, an Epic AT that you have to get to 50 to have and still has its own design quirks is quite a bit different from, say, a Fire Blast/Willpower Blaster. And keep in mind that a Blaster has 1205 hit points at level 50, whereas an Arachnos Soldier has 1071. Soldiers of Arachnos do bridge the AT divide, but they are not quite the same as just giving ATs powersets they shouldn't have access to.

Um... What? Did you guys misunderstand me completely? Who said anything about not revamping old zones? All I said that they SHOULD revamp old zones without RUINING them. I'm not against the revamp of Faultline. I just feel they shouldn't have flooded the zone. They could have, instead, just stuck with bridges and ramps and elevators, they didn't have to flood the place. Like I said - they could have done to it what they did to the War Zone - alter a small section with new buildings and add a lot of missions, but not mess with the actual geography of the zone to such an extent. The place would have remained beautiful and they'd have saved up on their art budged by not remaking what is already good enough.

Same deal for Boomtown - I want to see the zone revamped, but I don't want to see the entirety of the rubble removed. Same for Dark Astoria - I want to see more done to the zone, but I don't want to see the fog go.

What am I not saying correctly? How does my wish to retain the LOOK of a zone translate into a wish to not update zones at all? I want to see the zones updated not by remaking the geography, but by giving players a reason to be there. The zones are good enough in terms of terrain. They don't need to be changed. What needs to be added is MISSIONS to do there. That's exactly what happened to the War Zone and no-one ever complained. I don't see why doing the same conservationist update to old zone is suddenly anathema.

I just realised what we're missing - a Factory tileset! You know, not just a room with shipping containers and crates in it, but a tileset comprised of rooms with large machines, pipes, catwalks and so forth. Even as recycled as the environments in Fallout 3 were, the factory locations were still a lot of fun. We desperately need factories in addition to warehouses.

I would agree with you, if ship maps didn't completely and utterly SUCK! Seriously, I can't stand those maps. They are completely and utterly uninteresting. They're just three or four large rectangular rooms with crates scattered about. No, thank you. I'd sooner have paradoxical warehouses than anything even resembling the current ship maps.

In fact, I'd like to see ship maps replaced with maps on cruise ships, with decks, corridors, rooms, bridges and so forth. Only a very few missions require you to be inside a cargo ship anyway.

I actually thought that giving boss Gunslingers some of the new Dual Handguns animations, but keeping lieutenant Gunslingers using the old ones would be a cheeky way to differentiate between the two.

The big problem with Blasters, and I agree with Arcana on this one, is massive, large-scale AoEs that can, on larger teams, multiply their output to sickening levels. Slash Blaster AoEs, and Blaster damage isn't actually all that spectacular. I mean, yes, it is a LOT, but it is not THAT much higher than everybody else's. A Blaster isn't really terribly more expedient at speed-killing a boss than a Scrapper is, and in fact a Blaster tends to have WORSE single-target damage than most Scrappers. Worse if the Blaster tries to stay at range to avoid getting caught in accidental AoEs.

It is therefore my assertion that an Assault/Defence AT could very well have a very high damage mod (not necessarily as high as a Blaster, but high nontheless) and decent defence and still not be very overpowered. Throw some kind of quirky inherent on top of that since that seems to be the new rock and roll, and you have something that could be quite very decent.

And again, an Assault (or Assault-like) set doesn't have to be a ranged-heavy set, which could bring this close to a Scrapper in terms of function.

Well, I don't really mind the current interface, but turning the Enhancements screen and the Tailor screen into actual windows will solve one of the ugliest graphical problems the game has - that it scales full-screen images. Unless you're playing on a 4x3 resolution (and chances are you're not), the game will try to stretch full-screen images and menus to fit, turning circles into ugly squashed ellipses. Ideally, I'd like to force the game to just centre these, rather than stretching them, but making them into windows would help, too.

Yeah, either get rid of those or let us opt OUT of them. Once a contact wants me to talk to Jim Temblor, ALL my contacts will insist I go visit him, even if I don't want to. This is, plain and simple, bad game design, because he isn't necessary. David Wincott is even LESS necessary. Kill those missions, or at least let those of us who've done them at least once to just skip them. They don't give rewards, anyway.

Personally, as far as I'm concerned, if I were on the fence like you describe, a new event would do nothing but chase me off. I hate events, I hate my game being ever so slightly interrupted, and if I'm on the verge, it's the little things that would get me to go. For instance, I got sick of the Winter Lord spam during the Winter event. I came into the event not caring about Winter Lords, and even though I tried to just not pay it any heed, by the end of the first day, I was already shouting "I don't care about your damn Winter Lords! Go to hell!" to myself. I imagine it would have outright SUCKED if I needed people for anything, seen as how they were all compulsively fighting giant snow men or skiing, but I was lucky enough to hate other people and keep to myself.

So... Optimism annoys you? Man, no wonder you're grumpy.

That's really what it comes down to. There is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to completely remove old content just out of spite. Yes, some of it is not very good. If anything, I'd like to see missions reviewed and their objectives reassessed, as outdoor defeat-alls with patrols thrown in makes me want to punch people, but by and large, I DO NOT WANT to see content go away to appease the gods of wanton chaos. I'm still sore about the 5th Column being taken out of the game, and that's with them back.

And another thing - can we not do massively destructive "revamps" of zones to the point where they may as well BE a new zone? What happened to Faultline is something I never want to see happen to another zone ever again. The reconstruction I'm fine with. The catwalks are all fine and dandy. The lifts are A-OK. But flooding the zone was just a jerk move that destroyed one of the very few truly monumental structures in the game - the Faultline dam wall - by flooding it with water up to about 3/4 of its original height. Dams are impressive. Probably some of the most impressive man-made structures in the world. Flooding the underside of one is just... I don't even know how to describe it without getting myself mod-smacked.

The best way to "revamp" zones is to add better tasks to them and MAYBE add to certain key locations. The Rikti Crash Site to Rikti War Zone transformation was ideal, for instance. The Vanguard base sprung up out of the aether, the old gate shut down and the hospital was boarded up and the Rikti shuttle got levelled up from an almost vertical orientation before, but the zone was not completely changed over. In fact, I recall War Witch explaining that they COULDN'T alter it much as the art team had to choose between massive zone alterations and... I don't remember what else. The Rikti tileset, I believe. Here's what scares me, though - they didn't do it because they couldn't, and if they were able to, they would have. And they SHOULDN'T! The zones themselves are pretty cool, they just need something to DO in them. OK, I can see plopping down a guarded reconstruction project in Boomtown here and there. I can even see turning a few areas into a reconstruction, it has plenty of rubble to go around. But trying to alter the zone in its absolute entirety would be a major mistake.

So's the continent of North America. Shall we beam that out of existence, too?

You're not gonna' get anything which qualifies as "Blast" paired up with Armour, but if we ask nicely enough, we may be able to get an Assault/Armour AT at some point.

I did. I'd class it as one of THE best games ever made, and I HATE HATE HATE Bungiee for selling their souls to Microsoft and producing exclusively Halo games. Whether Halo is a good game or not isn't the question here (it's not), but the fact remains that Oni is practically the only fighter of its kind to institute meaningful and at least SOMEWHAT realistic hand-to-hand combat without going the Devil May Cry route of endless flashy combos. Oni requires a lot more on knowledge and precision, and a lot more on grappling than it does on just hitting things. That, and it's one of the very few games that had realistic, believable structures even when they were unrealistically unbelievable in nature, like the atmospheric processor. It's certainly the only game I can think of off-hand. I still hold TCTF HQ and the Government Records buildings as some of THE best levels in any game ever made.

Not only have game designers not taken note of this, but even its own creators kick it on the *** when Microsoft clubbed them over the head with a giant money bag. Who cares about support or development or sequels to Oni when they can be making Halo 3000? After all, it only makes them more money than the annual income of Belgium.

Nothing of the sort. I've made multiple trips down to the base of the dam (which is now half a mile underwater...) and back again with nothing but Super Speed. One day I even had a friend of mine watch me just because I wanted to make a point that it was easily possible to get out. He was impressed enough to remember it to this day. But to me, that's nothing special. Follow the cracks, run through the enemies (Super Speed's stealth will keep you safe) and go back to the far North where you can get out. What's the problem?

Oh, and that's JUST super speed. No Swift, no Hurdle, no Combat Jumping. MA/Inv Scrapper with only two pool powers - Hasten and Super Speed, doing this at 16 when she was first allowed to enter.

Pretty simple, really. I hate sandbox games, and Baldur's Gate qualifies in a big way. It's a game that's less about... How should I put it? Less about watching a movie, and more about just plopping you down into a world to explore, be immersed in and learned about. And my response to that is "Who gives a crap? Lead me to my adventure!" Baldur's Gate's official storyline proceeds in what I remember to be about three distinct steps. Leave home, go to mines, go to Baldur's Gate, with "finish game" possibly counting as a fourth one. Everything else is, basically, "Go forth, ye hero, and explore." It's a line, in fact, from the middle of the map down to the bottom middle of the map up to the top middle of the map, and everything left and right of that is side quests. MILLIONS of side quests, to the point where I forgot what the hell it was that I was actually doing.

The only reason I hate Baldur's Gate and merely dislike Baldur's Gate 2 is that I actually played the former through to the end, whereas I wisely avoided the latter, knowing what it would be like. I don't so much hate the game itself, in that I don't want to kill the people who made it, as it is a good game for those who actually like this sort of thing, VERY UNLIKE ME, so it has its place and its merits. And had I had the kind of good sense I have now to just drop it like a hot potato the moment I realised it was wasting my time, I'd probably just "meh" at the original Baldur's Gate, but like Diablo 2, I made the mistake of forcing myself through, and I simply cannot forgive myself (or it) for the SHEER BOREDOM I had to endure. Ugh!

That's why I mentioned Baldur's Gate vs. Icewind Dale. Baldur's Gate is a wide-open sand box crammed full with so much stuff I don't give a crap about and isn't important to anything in any way, which is the kind of game that puts me to sleep. On the technical side, Icewind Dale IS THE SAME GAME right down to absolutely everything, but the way the story is delivered is a lot more interesting to me. The game gives me ONE and precisely ONE storyline to follow, with only a few minor side-quests that I'm going to accomplish as a matter of course anyway, it gives me a largely linear world that I can pretty much explore entirely and it has a quest log that never breaks multiple pages. I enjoyed this game very much, to the point where the trip to the Severed Hand and the fate of Laurel and his followers is one of THE iconic fictional concepts I admire, and that I have built several concepts over. Of course, I was never able to kill Belifeth, which kind of sours the experience, but narratively at least, it's the kind of game I enjoy.

Yes, I have weird tastes when it comes to games. So much I've been told. I enjoy focused stories, simpler gameplay, linear design and easy repeatability. Wide open sandboxes and games too complicated for me to want to bother for a second playthrough do not thrill me. I grew up on Captain Commando, Knights of the Round and the Sunset riders and, to be quite honest, that's still the kind of game I prefer to this day. Incidentally, that's exactly how I play City of Heroes, and incidentally, that's exactly how I CAN'T play any other MMO I've ever tried, because they all constantly bog me down with maintenance optimization, and their grinds aren't nearly as stylish.

For me, it was the actual claws as a concept that kept me away. There are a few things I consider "stupid" and that I have a hard time using, and in that lost, claws and super speed are at the top. Of course, I use and love both, but finding a concept where they can REALLY rock is very hard for me, and I just didn't have one that wasn't silly.

Ironically, I'm using the Legacy Claws anyway, as they're the only big claws on the female model. I love BABs and all, but when he caused weapons to scale DOWN with model, he killed a lot of the fun in weapon using, and he's still reluctant to give us large weapons.

Because this was quoted. I have an excuse to dredge it up. I have two things to say about this.

First and most important, those closed doors we see in office buildings are there to imply that there is more to the area, we just don't go there. For instance, where we find a corridor circling a large area of "blackness, there are doors to that to suggest this isn't a void, but rather it has rooms in it that we just don't go into. I don't really have a problem with that... Where it makes sense. Offices are a good example of it making sense. Warehouses... Not so much. They don't have any doors to suggest there may be other sections closed off. At most, they have cargo load doors to suggest there's a lorry parking spot OUTSIDE the building, which a review of the outside of any warehouse-holding building, there isn't.

And then there are Arachnos bases. Who the HELL thought any of that made sense? Why are their bases essentially see-through mesh corridors hanging on the inside of a black hole. Does it strike no-one as absurd that the apparent intended look was that Arachnos bases were built inside some kind of titanic, pitch-black chasm just... Floating in mid air? That kind of thing wouldn't make sense even as an alien construct, and it just serves to make Arachnos all the more goofy. They're SO adamant about being bad that they excavated the inside of the planet just so their bases could float in darkness. Ugh...

Secondly, I completely agree on the notion of logical design over "dungeon offices." With or without the out of doors, locations simply look better when they make sense. I refer to Oni when I talk about these things, because the game has buildings that ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE BUILDINGS, both on the inside and on the outside. That TCTF HQ you get to see from the outside? All of its internal space makes sense and actually fits snugly on the inside of what you see from down on the street. All, like, 10 floors of it, which is an amazing design. Even when you can't see the outside, even when you're underground, Oni's maps still manage to feel like real structures, rather than chaos architecture. And it's not even that hard to do. The University instance is a pretty good example. Instead of making odd-shaped rooms floating in blackness, just make rooms that fit together snug a are subdivided into smaller rooms within them. In fact, I wouldn't be terribly upset if each large office map were broken down to a grid of large squares, each as a predefined set of smaller rooms inside it.

Or, heck, take a cue from UFO: Enemy Unknown, AKA X-Com: UFO Defence. That gave you outside locations complete with buildings with realistic insides, and it gave you inside locations (like attacks on your base) that had what I described above - large sections or "facilities" as the game called them, formed into large square blocks, each subdivided into basically a corridor and a few rooms. It made the bases feel a lot more realistic, even though the process of making them was so simplistic. Simplistic enough, in fact, that they were made by the PLAYER in a Dune: Battle for Arakis sort of style.

I've heard tell that the buildings and instances in Going Rogue will "make sense," so I have my fingers crossed to see that.