Samuel_Tow

Funny story: Back a few years ago, Dr. Zeus was making a fan video for the game, and recruited me as a voice actor for Captain Mako. He even said he liked the accent. I don't believe that was ever finished, or if it was, I didn't hear about it. Pity, he seemed pretty good at this.

Not only are they unheard of, decent voice actors can single-handedly MAKE a game. Take, for instance, the Soul Reaver series - a series of games with sub-standard gameplay and a story that's so outlandish it's actually difficult to follow, let alone take seriously. Yet Michael Bell's Raziel, Simon Tempelton's Kain and Tony Jay's Kain simply sell the game just on their own sheer talent. As a matter of fact, very much anything Michael Bell voices instantly becomes cool, even absurd characters like Johnny Quest's Ezekiel Rage. And despite no-one ever having played Advent Rising, I still keep bringing it back, because Michael Bell just steals the spotlight every time he speaks up as Enorym, despite how ridiculous that character looks.

On the flip side, BAD voice acting can KILL a game. I've had more than a few point-and-click adventures that I simply shut down and deleted from off my hard drive because I couldn't stand to listen to the damn protagonist. One of them was a non-English production where the lead actress REALLY tried her best to manage, but she had such a thick, grating (though natural) accent that I just couldn't imagine myself playing the whole game like that. And Resident Evil clones (as well as the original series) REALLY suffer from this a lot of the time, though luckily characters there don't spend a lot of time talking.

I really wish something more were done with them. They're anarchistic monsters and cold-blooded killers, the kind who would break into a family home and murder everybody just for laughs and a bottle of gin. Far as I'm concerned, we should HATE them, not find them adorable. Do people forget about Mike Swartzwald, and how they out and out killed him and intended to slaughter everyone in the building just to cover it up? That arc is very much their shining moment, AND it has an interesting idea for Dreck that seems to lead into a plot which never existed.

I'd like to see the Freakshow represented a little less quirky and cute and a little more like the cut-throats they actually are.

Boris the Russion is stupid, offensive and completely unrealistic. It's like watching a Cold War cartoon or some such. Dimitri Krilov, on the other hand, is actually very well done. Sure, he lapses into the occasional bout of stupid accent, but by and large his language is plagued by mistranslations which are actually quite common for Russians and Slaves in general speaking English. That's less an accent and more just poor grasp of the language, and in a very natural way. Him I like, even if occasionally he comes off as more "stupid" than "Russian."

That doesn't reflect my experience at all. I have a level 50 Martial Arts/Invulnerability Scrapper, and of ALL the Scrappers I have, she's the one who farts around with enemies the longest and the one who always seems to hit the weakest. My Katana or Broadsword Scrappers so much as sneeze and spawns dissolve, my Claws Scrapper presses home the attack and enemies melt away in mere moments and even my gosh-dang DARK Scrapper smites things into non-existence. My Martial Arts Scrappers, though... They just kick and kick and kick and kick.

Granted, I've had a Shield Scrapper, and I know how much that helps, between Shield Charge and Against All Odds, the damage is obscene, especially with a high-damage primary. But that's Shield Defence, not Martial Arts.

Aside from the horrid cost, are you sure that can ship to here without costing me an arm and a leg in shipping, getting lost in the mail or taking 6 months to travel half-way around the world? My mother mailed a package to the US yesterday, and that in itself cost more than the equivalent of $15.

Basically, for me it comes down to visuals. If something is intended to be instantaneous, if it's not instant, then it's not instantaneous, now is it? The reason I even bothered with this is because I got a good look at the Alchemist's teleport in Torchlight, which is about as instantaneous as it gets. When you cast it, you disappear in a big flash of light and reappear in a big flash of light somewhere else. The thing, though, is that as the light is flashing on you to disappear, simultaneously with that the light is flashing where you'll appear. There is no delay between starting the power and appearing at your destination. The disappearance and appearance aren't staggered, they are simultaneous. It's not after you're done disappearing, THEN you start to appear. You disappear and appear at the same time.

I don't really want this power for its utility. I envision it being handy, but that's not why I want it. I want it because I want an INSTANT teleport. Not quick, not almost instant. INSTANT. To the frame instant. I want a teleport that's "blink" and you're there. Not gesture, posture, flash, appear, hover a while and THEN you're there. I want it to be as fast as stepping through a CoT portal.

Put it this way - all I've said about MMO innovation goes very much counter to pretty much everything I've said over the past five years. I'm trying to make sense and explain how that is possible without making me a hypocrite.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind playing City of Heroes until the end of time. Even if the game added nothing from this point forward, I'd still feel the same way. I like THIS GAME and I don't really need it to change in order to keep my interest. I wouldn't refuse change and addition, but my subscription doesn't hinge on Paragon Studios keeping up with me. It pretty much hinges on them not taking away what I already have, which is terribly unlikely.

But on the other hand, I wouldn't even consider buying City of Heroes 2 unless it had MASSIVE innovations and something to truly tear me away from this game. Why would I pay for a new game that isn't at all different from the one I'm playing now? An object at rest wants to stay at rest. I won't just roll downhill to the newest possible MMO. I'm going to stay exactly where I am unless another MMO can actually muster enough pull to shift me over to it, and I'll probably set roots there, in turn.

However, in a very big way, I feel that MMOs trying to appeal to EVERYBODY is what makes them so dull at the end of the day, and what makes them all follow the same mould. It's as if MMO designers feel that no-one should ever be able to say "Nah, this game just isn't for me." And players treat them the same way, like it's a CRIME that there's nothing in the game you like. Over the years, I've had to tell many people that, you know, it's OK that you don't like the game. It is what it is, and if it doesn't have anything you actually like, then quitting it IS the right thing to do. You don't need to hate it for it, and you're not going to be branded a traitor. Everyone picks and plays the games they like, and no MMO could ever hope to please EVERYBODY.

In fact, the more multi-faceted an MMO is, the less good it actually becomes. There's innovation and depth, and then there's lack of focus. To a large extent, I actually feel awkward when I walk into a game wanting only a small portion of it, with the bulk of the game designed "for somebody else." It's true for City of Heroes, as well. Once upon a time, it felt like the entire game was designed for me. For me, personally. That's what it felt like. Now... Now it feels like half the game was designed for someone else, and I'm paying half a subscription fee to support someone else's idea of fun. Call me egoistical, but that thought doesn't thrill me. I'm not up in arms about it, but it IS unpleasant.

Basically, it comes down to my disbelief in the need for a "more complete game experience." I no longer believe in the theory of the one game to rule them all, one game to find them, one game to bring them all together and in the genre bind them. I just don't believe it'll happen. That doesn't mean I'd be against people trying and, hell, innovative ways to bring the different aspects together in a seamless way would actually be GOOD. But by the same token, I'd rather prefer innovation that actually works to improve the focus of the game, rather than spreading tendrils out into other game types.

I realise I'm not the only person playing this game, and I'm fairly certain my playstyle and preferences are aberrant. But then, I can't really speak for other people, or indeed speak from a standpoint of what's good for other people, or for the game as a whole. I know what I like, and I express that. It's up to the powers that be to balance that against all the other people speaking their own preferences. If it were up to me, the game would be very different, but probably nowhere near as successful, so I've no illusions I know better than the people in charge, or that my preferences are the only right ones.

On the one hand, sticking to the status quo and re-releasing old games over and over again is a doomed venture. Sooner or later the bubble will burst. But on the other hand, change for the sake of change and features for the sake of having more features is not a better solution. Games that lack focus, at least in my opinion, lack any real draw. I'm emotional with my games. I start them to have fun, and if I leave with a big grin on my face and good memories in my head, that was a successful night of gaming. But a game that's sort of there and you can kind of just go around doing stuff in it... That doesn't work for me. I need to have a purpose and a point, or it's all just aimless wandering around.

Basically put, I'd rather play a game that does one or two things very well, than play a game that does a thousand things kind of OK. If a game with a strong focus isn't for me, then oh, well. But if it is, it's AMAZING. A game that has a zillion diluted focuses is probably going to have something for me, but that's unlikely to move me enough to so much as even smirk.

When it comes to innovation, "just innovation" is as bad as "no innovation." Making games BETTER is the idea, not just making them DIFFERENT. Different is not necessarily better. Nor, for that matter, is bigger, more expansive or more diverse. This brings us back to quality. A high-quality game is good even if it's restrictive. A low-quality game isn't good pretty much ever. This is where MMOs suffer the most - developers lose themselves in creating an expansive world with zillions of different activities, and yet none of those activities ultimately ends up being of high quality. They're all sort of meh, there mostly so they can be in the feature list.

I guess my point is as much about innovation as much as it is about quality, though I didn't realise that until it was pointed out to me. I chastise game developers for shoving in the exact same elements in every MMO and justify that with innovation, but the truth is those elements suck big time, which is a large part of my problem with them. I suppose if you could have a game that has all the old elements, but they were actually GOOD, that would count as innovation, as well. And that's pretty much what Blizzard's entire business model is centred around - all the things people expect, only this time they're actually good. Half the reason I dislike the "list" of MMO clichés is because I expect them to suck, especially if they're listed in name only, so I say I want something else, hoping that that won't suck as much. But I'll gladly take something OLD if it were done right for a change.

Easy example - I HATE player-drive economies, because they're nothing more than a lot of busywork. I actually kind of like the economy here. Our Market interface is easy to use (even if it's fat) and actually buying and selling doesn't take almost any work at all. No searching for bargains, no researching the price lists, limited-time offers. Basically, you sell for as much as you're willing to sell for and you buy for as much as you're willing to pay. Sure, yeah, if you want to "marketeer," you can do that, too, but the system doesn't require it. To me, that's a market done right, and in my eyes, that IS an innovation. No need to reinvent the wheel if you can just make a better wheel.

It didn't have subtitles on mine, but maybe I had them turned off. It's not a good enough movie to watch twice, so I'm unwilling to check. Either way, I liked it better without subtitles.

The voice and voice actor were good. The generic evil mastermind metallic echo and voice effects were not. I've always much preferred an actual VOICE that sounded evil or menacing, over a voice that's been edited to sound evil and menacing. A person speaking in unaltered voice has a much better control of inflection, impetus and overall speech techniques than a person who's heavily modulated. Just think back to Mark Hamil's Joker and the other villains he's played and you'll know what I mean.

I didn't try to choke them, just shut them up This usually happens to me when I hear someone who CANNOT speak English trying to say a complicated sentence and getting every single word wrong. This just... Ugh! That isn't even an accent, that's TORTURE!

Dialects within the same language are rather different from accents from a DIFFERENT language, though. A language may have many dialects, some so abstractly different that they may as well BE a different language, but none of them have the connotations that the person is from a different country. For instance, a "Southern Gentleman" may speak English that is grating to many people's ears (or not, but for the sake of the example, let's say it is), but that still paints him as an English speaker, just from a different English-speaking place. But if you give a person English with a French accent, you're immediately painting "the Frenchman." If he is indeed French and speaking English as a foreign language, I can deal with that (even though the fake accents have nothing to do with reality), but if that "Frenchman" is supposed to be speaking HIS OWN language, it makes no sense that he'd have an accent.

Yeah... I can see a magical or technological translator not being perfect, but I'd expect such a device to be unable to translate language accurately (like the Rikti-to-English translator), rather than strike a comically bad French or German accent. That's the big thing for me - aside from being horrible, fake accents aren't used to represent inaccuracy, but more so to represent STEREOTYPE. And even when these stereotypes aren't insulting, and even when they're JUSTIFIED by technobabble, they're still stereotypes and still a terrible thing to put in. Why fake accents when you can have people speak proper English and just say it's really actually Cantonese?

I don't mind the slang, really. What I mind is making fun of the Rikti, which is something of a recurring trend with the War Zone and the Midnighters' arc and... Actually, pretty much any place they have dialogue outside of Division: Line. It's like what happened to the Freakshow. They started out as a quirky, yet deadly serious gang who commit wanton murder, murder for hire, gang violence and who are generally a real, pressing threat. Somewhere along the way, their "crimes" got downgraded to vandalism, bullying and pirated TV, and they got ret-conned into metal-armed clowns who are only there for us to laugh at. Their sinister, malicious nature and the actual, horrible consequences of their actions are constantly downplayed or ignored so we can laugh at their antics. In the process, this has completely destroyed what could have been a really cool group by making them the butt of every joke.

Same for the Rikti. Once upon a time, they were a major threat and a huge mystery that you uncovered little by little. They were scary, because it felt like they could not be reasoned with. You could talk, but they would ignore you, and they would never talk to you. It seemed like all they wanted was to see us all dead and they were not interested in even bargaining with us. Back then, they were cool and scary. They've been turned into quirky chatterboxes now, and that just takes so much away from their mystery and their sinister nature. The "Nette: Sup" is just the final nail in the coffin, after which I'm not sure I'll ever be able to take them seriously again. Their FEEL is what suffers here. And if it were once or twice, I could see it, but every damn Rikti feels the need to broadcast his thoughts out loud.

If there is one faction who shouldn't have ANY dialogue at all, but for a few brief encounters, is the Rikti. They simply should not speak outside of extraordinary circumstances. To be honest, I feel the same about the Devouring Earth. Why are trees and rocks talking to me? Devoured I could sort of see, but the trees have neither the intelligence nor the VOICE BOX to speak. They're mindless monsters, and it'd serve them better if they didn't hold conversations with each other. I'd actually say the same about the Soldiers of Rularuu, but their trademark speech is just too precious to give up. "Hunt. Kill. Rularuu."

More than that - why are they using these translators to speak with each other? It's like if I speak English and another Bulgarian speaks English, we won't just spontaneously break into an English conversation so that the English-only speaker listening in can understand us. I'll speak Bulgarian, and if he can't understand, well tough. This is something which also really bothers me in movies. An illegal Russian immigrant is in the hospital, and his criminal brother comes to visit him. Would you think they'd speak in Russian, being that that's their native language? No, of course not! They both speak in English with a fake Russian accent. Because... That happens, right? Or the Yakuza boss speaking to his first lieutenant will speak in English, despite there being no reason for him to do so.

Really, as far as the Rikti go, just don't have them speak to each other. I have, as of yet, heard NOTHING from a Rikti-to-Rikti conversation that was actually important, so all that does is break my sense of immersion. It's like watching two people try to communicate in a language neither of them actually speaks.

To be fair, I prefer subtitles and I feel the same way. With the advent of digital video, I'm often finding myself rewinding or pausing movies so I can read a complicated, long subtitle, or so I can see an action stunt I missed. Granted, a lot of the time that's because whoever timed the subtitles was complete idiot, giving me 5 nanoseconds to read two lines of text, but occasionally, with conversations during action-heavy sequences (anime is notorious for this), it is a serious distraction.

On the other hand, I still prefer subtitles over dubs. Actually GOOD dubs are rare, and dubs better than the original almost don't exist unless a movie or series was recorded in multiple languages by its creators. For instance, Oban: Star Racers came out in English, French and Japanese, each with a separate voice talent crew, each directed by original director. Those rare instances aside, dubs tend to take far too much away from the dynamics of the original, and more often than not cause dub voice actors to act like idiots to match the quirkiness that comes naturally to the original voice actors. Part of the reason Naruto constantly says "Believe it!" is because Junko Takeyuchi constantly adds "dattebayo" to the ends of a lot of what he says. It means absolutely nothing, but it's her quirk that the English dub chose to represent by "Believe it!"

I actually CANNOT STAND dubs even in my own language. Now, I'm biassed, since I clearly understand English well enough, so the translation holds exactly no merit for me, but even dubs from languages I don't understand irritate me. Our voice actors are good in what they do, but most of them are comedians with lots of impressions, so when they dub, say, Shrek, they devolve into something like 10-year-olds doing bad impressions of vaguely famous people. And I recently saw this FlashForward series, where one of the dub actors just made me laugh out loud every time I heard him speak. He sounded like how people sound when they pretend to be acting badly, that stilted, unbelievably corny speech. And I can't keep a straight face while listening to the guy. It's a serious series, yet I'm constantly making fun of that dub actor. He is that bad.

Simply put, I've rarely, RARELY heard a good dub of anything at all, and I don't believe I've ever heard a dub better than the original. Ironically, I liked the 4Kids dub and adaptation of Shaman King, because all the voice actors are actually pretty good. Yes, even Rio, the resident stupid accent guy, and even the offensively British Tao family. They're all good actors, but the "adaptation" just butchered the show itself. Watching it in its original incarnation, the story is only barely the same.

And you know what the worst part is? Dub quality always sucks, at least here. Dub translators are NOT talented, producing Bulgarian phrases that I need to translate back into English word-for-word before I can understand them. Guys! You don't translate language by translating each word individually! You translate language by comprehending it, then reproducing the meaning in your own language. I shouldn't be reading Bulgarian with English grammar, sentence structure and the occasional mistranslated word. I actually saw the word for "manager" translated as something which could only mean the head of a "menagerie," which is more like a zoo. And the intent was to address the manager of a software development firm O.o

From everything I've seen, the Rikti can't speak at all. They don't have mouths, and all their native communication is psychic in nature. They do seem to have voice synthesisers, but their thought patterns are so radically different (less different the more of their dialogue we get, as it seems like whoever's writing it is getting closer and closer to English grammar with the articles removed) that they end up speaking only barely coherently, but it's there. The Mark 3 translator that makes Buddika... Sorry, Bu'Dekka sound like a ditz appears to be both a voice synthesiser AND automatic translator, but the one most Rikti use seems to just dump their thoughts into audio with no interpretation.

On that note, it's incredibly jarring and out of character to hear Rikti speaking to each other. In fact, I believe it is a capital mistake to have them to do that. Back in the day, the Rikti were silent. They didn't say anything, they didn't taunt, they didn't leave clues. From level 30 where you start seeing them, all the way up in the upper 30s to possibly lower 40s, you don't actually hear a single Rikti speak AT ALL. When you finally do get a bit of dialogue, it comes as a shock and it's interesting. Back in the day, the Rikti had this strange, alien feel to them, where they look sort of humanoid, but they're completely hostile and you have NO way to communicate with them. If you see any Rikti, you're in trouble. In fact, they were so obscure, monolithic and silent that the Division: Line revalation came to me like a bolt of the blue. "Hey, an insight into the Rikti! I don't know ANYTHING about them!"

Now... "Bomb preparation: Schedule: Inquiry." "Excitement containment: Suggested." "Plan comes together: I love it." "Mua: Ha: Ha." Ugh... They took what was an almost completely alien enemy, and they turned them into jokes. "Nette: Sup." Really? REALLY?!? They were cool, badass aliens that kept their moth shut and their fingers on the trigger, whom you couldn't reason or bargain with. The ultimate threat that Earth has ever faced. And now they're almost worse off than the Freakshow, in that almost no-one can ever take them seriously.

Frankly, I know the Rikti can talk. I still wish they didn't. That scene where you rescue Buddeka from the other Rikti Chief Soldier? That one shouldn't have had any dialogue at all. They should have just had the aliens looking at each other and occasionally gesturing. They're aliens. They're speaking their own language that not only can you not understand, but you can't even PERCEIVE. The inability to speak with them or hear their own speech is part of what made them scary. We really should stop treating them like chatterboxes. Rikti bosses don't need to taunt, Rikti ambushes don't need to announce themselves, Rikti patrols don't have to chatter. It's what made them scary, and it's slowly being trampled completely.

Well, aside from the fact that R2D2 is apparently a jerk and a foul-mouth, I actually rather liked the concept. Unfortunately, it's sort of ruined by C3PO repeating his lines anyway. "What do you mean 'what transmission?' He's our new master, show him!" and a lot of "R2D2 says that." It was a good idea, but it seems Lucas was too afraid we wouldn't know what R2 was saying, and he didn't want to put in subtitles like with everyone else.

On the other hand, Han Solo and Chewbacca are exactly what I had in mind. "Grhuuurh!" "Yeah, tell me about it." "Ghurruh-urr!" "Hey, you watch your mouth!" I don't remember the exact lines, but Chewy has no subtitles and Han doesn't seem to feel the need to repeat his lines in the "so you're saying that" style.

On the flip side, there's something like Coco from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, who only ever says "coco" over and over again, yet everyone understands her. Giving her impossible insights is something of a running joke in the show, such that "Coco. Cocococ coco, cococo cocococococo, co-coco co." "Wow... Coco, I had no idea it was like that. This changes everything." It's funny the first few times, but when they run the joke into the ground (as they do with every joke on that show), it becomes annoying, because Coco is sort of like a Deus Ex Machina. She can achieve world peace just by saying "coco" over and over, because apparently her words hold some kind of moving message we just can't hear. In fact, I'm pretty sure she DOES achieve world peace at least once in exactly this way.

But when they're not using that running joke, it's back to good old "so you're saying that." It's all over the place. "Cococo!" "So you're saying you're afraid of flying?" Ugh! Make up your mind, damn it! Do you want us guessing what she said, or are you going to repeat! This schizophrenic back-and-forth is irritating!

But, yeah. District 9 with the bugs and Han Solo with Chewbacca are about the only instances of decent one-sided dialogue I can think of. I've probably heard a few instances of one-sided phone conversations, but those are usually played for mystery, because the movie wants to HIDE what the other guy said or who he is. It's like movie makers are afraid to leave people guessing what the person on the other end of the line said, even if it DOESN'T FRIKKIN' MATTER! So either it's revealed later or it's narrated. Ugh... We're not idiots. If we have enough context, we can guess the parts that matter and ignore the parts that don't.

In fact, I've made it a point to observe MY end of the line when I speak over the phone, especially over a cell phone. I'm not averse to speaking in public, but I make sure that my end of the conversation is ambiguous enough that no-one listening to me has any idea what I'm talking about.

You mean in text? I hate them for the sole reason that they make things hard to impossible to read. Part of it has to do with the fact that different people pronounce things differently, and not always by the book, and part of it has to do with how word recognition works in the brain, which for goes by word shape, rather than supposed sound. If the word doesn't "look" right, it makes reading it really difficult.

OK, this is my favourite out-of-context quote of the day, and it's going straight in my scrapbook. Thanks

Very good point. Most of these activities that you mentioned, as well as the ones I talked about, are things that can really only be done by one person at a time, and generally only by that particular specialist. You can't really look over the shoulder of your locksmith and help him pick the lock. That's not how it works. So while he's picking the lock, the rest of the team is playing pattycake. Bad design right there.

Combat, on the other hand, is something everyone can help with all at the same time, which doesn't require one person to do something while the others wait. Well, unless you're devices, but that philosophy's faults have been discussed at length. Basically, if one player's skills unlock some kind of out-of-combat shortcut, chances are the rest of the team will have to sit on their hands, or the ulocking will be instant, killing a lot of the point. Do we really want a door that only, say, Stalkers can click on to open?

The point of this isn't to just have the person on the team. As with all game systems, you want that person to be useful by DOING stuff, not just by being on the team. But on the flip side, you don't want to give that person so much to do that the rest of the team has to sit around and wait. It's a careful balancing act, and I'm not sure this is impossible, but I can safely say that it's not trivial.

Of course, the other approach is the Lost Vikings setup, where people can combine their skills to pass by locations they would have had to go around, by, say, having a Tanker hold a gate open while a Controller slips through and holds the counterweight in place such that it doesn't close. Just for instance. But then the complexity and specific nature of these make them highly unlikely to be seen on a larger scale.

Nevertheless, why don't we have buttons that open doors? This is such a gaming classic!

That's one thing I liked about the Star Wars sequels (which isn't as big in the prequels, because people forgot how to read between Episode 6 and Episode 1, apparently) were the one-sided dialogues, with captions for the alien language. One thing I've always HATED in movies was when characters would narrate dialogue we can't hear or understand. Like a character talking on the phone would be like:

"Yes. You're saying if I don't get the TPS report done on time I'm fired? OK, sir, I'll get it done on time. What? And I can't take any breaks? Oh, but... And you're confiscating my key to the executive restroom? But, sir... OK, I understand. I won't leave my cubicle."

Who talks like that?!? Yes, it's a phone conversation. I'm not SUPPOSED to know what the other guy is saying! If it's THAT important, play the messages in the movie and leave a conversation that an actual, thinking human being would have over the phone. Not, you know, some kind of designated narrator, like in the oldest of comic books where random pedestrians would narrate super hero events to anyone who's willing to listen.

But what I REALLY loved was the conversations with the aliens in District 9. The aliens speak in a language that's completely incomprehensible to the audience, and they have NO SUBTITLES for any of them. Some people seem to speak their language, and the aliens seem to understand English, which leads to very one-sided conversations with a lot of missing information, but they at least FEEL like conversation.

A REALLY cool example of this, come to think of it, is from Ben 10. Six-Six and Vulcan (just roll with it, please) are doing... Something. Six-Six, an alien with a completely incomprehensible language, says something that sounds like a series of clicks and growls. Vulcan responds "Well it'd go faster if you helped out!" That just had me laughing out loud both in how well it came out and how natural it sounded for how absurd the circumstances were. And I don't mind that in my movies or games.

I hate power effects that just sort of happen with no way for me to predict them. Even if they're powerful effects and they do a lot, when I'm not in control of when they happen, they aren't satisfying. Even setting aside the fact that, a lot of the time, these effects end up playing in situations where they'd be completely useless (critical hit Brawl, critical hit when the enemy has 1 hit point left, etc.), they're still just unsatisfying. Yes, some of the time, I'm awesome. All the rest of the time, I'm not, and I have no way to save my awesomness for when I actually need it.

Put it like this - if I have a weak effect that I can rely on, I know that I have that effect. When I spot a situation where I can use this effect to its fullest potential, I jump at the opportunity. When I have an effect I can't predict, I just ignore it and hope it happens, occasionally. I've no way to direct it, so I've no way to ensure I actually get any use out of it. Maybe Thunder Kick can really stun a boss in one shot. Fat load of good that does me when it only ever seems to fire on minions. Like Criticals, without control, it just doesn't do much for you.

And here's the thing even with Criticals - they're nice, but Scrappers are designed to work WITHOUT them. As such, everyone is safe to ignore Criticals even exist, because they're not propping up the AT. Yes, occasionally you do score that awesome Build Up + Head Splitter Critical that makes you feel like you almost split the world in half, but most of the time it fires on lowly minions or enemies low on health, or doesn't fire at all. It's total contribution is actually pretty negligible.

That actually sounds pretty good. This gives me the ability to prioritise targets and attack the one which poses the biggest threat first. Be it a boss, a lieutenant or a particularly nasty type of minion, this might actually help a lot. For instance, one of THE worst enemies for my Claws/Regen Scrapper (below 30) were Warriors Hewers, because they dealt SO MUCH damage, they would always outpace my regeneration and healing by a wide margin. Being able to slap a couple of debuffs on them in the process would help a great deal.

Granted, a lot of things aren't in our control as it is, biggest of all accuracy. My own views on a guaranteed chance to miss aside (note: I dislike it), I'm just saying I don't want to make even MORE things random than we already have. Accuracy I can deal with, because at least you can slot for accuracy, seek to-hit buffs and apply defence debuffs. A "proc" secondary effect with a chance to occur is completely out of my hands. I can't improve the chance, and I can't rely on it.

In general, some randomness is expected. Even in games where everything is in the player's hands, circumstances always present a certain degree of unpredictable, sheer chance. But while I can deal with unpredictability in deliver, it REALLY irks me when I face unpredictability in effect. In other words, I can handle missing, but I can't handle hitting and having no effect if my attack will actually work. It's chance compounded upon chance, and it's a bad mechanic when you can't actually rely on your attacks to work even if you do everything within your power to enhance them.

To each his own. I picked up City of Heroes because it looked like a good game and DESPITE it being a super hero game, not BECAUSE of it. I'm not terribly concerned, myself, with what's actually expected of super heroes, or for that matter what's expected of MMOs. I'm mostly concerned about having a good, decent game. And I do. It's a fighting game, from where I'm standing, but then that's really good enough for me. Marvel Super Heroes was a fighting game... Very much a fighting game, yet that was one of the better games ever made with the Marvel characters.

This goes back to the old argument about "depth," which in turn probably goes back to "what makes an MMO." Personally, I don't see depth as a necessary prerequisite of any MMO, or indeed any RPG. As a matter of fact, what passes for depth all too often interferes with the actual gameplay of the game, and I've never been above just playing the heck out of a simple, shallow, fun game. That's why I fell in love with Torchlight as much as I did.

Is that what makes an MMO? Depth, things to do outside of combat, an accurate representation of the source material and so forth? I recently spent a lot of time talking about "just a good game," and really, MMO or otherwise, this is what I look for. I don't expect any one game to have everything, and if an MMO opts to be combat only or even just combat mostly, that's fine. Combat is good enough and, to be completely honest, the more they muddy the waters with out of combat activities, the less I actually like the overall game.

I'm REALLY the wrong guy to talk to about this. I never actually liked comic books, so a game which screams "super hero" would be a serious turnoff for me. I HATE that "cheesy silver age dialogue" and all the concepts that come with it. If I have to be quite honest, that's a big reason I highly doubt I'll ever take another look at Champions Online. All the camp and the cheesy just grate on my nerves. If that's what it means to be closet to comic books, then let them have it. I'm happy with THIS game exactly because it does not follow the comic book genre too closely.

I read the whole thread, but I want to focus on this quote in particular, because it's very much exactly what I was getting at. Ideally, I WOULD prefer subtitles over dubs, but that wasn't really my point. More, I meant accents to denote nationality vs. NO accents at all, proper English. The complaint above is something I kept hearing as a complaint levelled against the next-gen Prince of Persia - the Prince (who wasn't a prince) sounded nothing like what someone from that time period should sound like. "These trousers were nuu!"

Then again... WHAT time period? It's never said, and as far as I can tell, the whole thing takes place in a completely alternate time line. And even if it WERE ancient Persia (or wherever, it's not specified), he wouldn't be able to speak English AT ALL, partly because he's half the world away from the British Empire, and partly because the English he was speaking wouldn't exist for, like, hundreds of years, accented or not accented.

Here's my biggest beef - accents are a horrible cop-out. We're already making a leap of logic by giving these people who have no business knowing or speaking English the ability to do so. But here's the thing - we're passing off English as their PRIMARY language. We're saying "OK, this guy is speaking Arabic, but since you probably don't, we'll have him speaking in English and just pretend it's Arabic, OK?" But that's the big thing - accents don't happen in people speaking their native language. You could make an argument about dialects, I guess, but a person growing up speaking his own language does not have an accent. People speaking a FOREIGN language have accents, because they speak another language with the pronunciation of their own language.

For instance, I can't speak proper English as the book says. I mean, I do my best, but I just out and out CAN'T. Spending 6 months in the UK back in 2007 gave me a bit of a leg up on certain more common words, but by and large I just can't get a lot of sounds right. "R," in fact, is the BIGGEST thing Slav language speakers can't get right, because ours is just hard and always the same in every word. So I speak English with an accent, obviously, and quite a thick one, at that. But I don't speak Bulgarian with an accent, because that's what I grew up speaking. As a native speaker, I obviously use a lot more jargon and shorthand than the literary language really calls for, but I don't have anything which could be considered an accent.

And yet if I were turned into a movie character for English-speaking audiences, chances are I'd be depicted speaking English with a Russian accent, even though my command of my native language would be... I don't want to say perfect, but let's say "not accented." Again, like in Allo' Allo'. Everyone in the show actually speaks English (and are British actors), but when characters speak "English," they speak with a British accents, while the Germans speak German as English with a German accent and the French speak French as English with a French accent. OK, I get that - we need to differentiate between the languages. But when a game or movie takes place ENTIRELY in the same language, why even put accents in there? Are the stereotypes THAT important?

Look at things from the other side - The Road to El Dorado. The two Spanish louts who serve as protagonists end up in South America and run across a... Mayan? Incan? Native, at any rate, city - the city of El Dorado. I've no idea what the people there spoke, but it wasn't English. Nor, for that matter, did Spanish from that age speak modern-day English, either. Yet everyone is able to understand each other and everyone speaks fluent English. As long as you're going to ignore the language barrier, why not go all the way and just use a decent language?

I have to say this one more time, I FRIKKIN' HATE FAKE ACCENTS!!! There is no way I can overstate this. I CANNOT stand overacted, grating, culturally and ethnically stereotypical fake accents. I've turned off good movies over a bad accent. I've grabbed people's throats over a bad accent IN REAL LIFE. REAL accents I can deal with, partly because I understand the reality of it, and partly because I'm happy to see they didn't have an American fake it. But real accents only really apply to people speaking a foreign language. People supposed to be speaking their own language really have no business having an accent.

It's kind of like it says in the trope: Mexicans speaking English will sound like Speedy Gonzalez. French speaking English will sound like Pierre LePew. Germans speaking English will say a lot of "Ja!" and "Nein!" British speaking THEIR OWN DAMN LANGUAGE will always sound "jolly good." But Aliens speaking English will sound like your average American, and no-one will bat an eye. Is it because there aren't any stereotypes about what an alien (who isn't wearing a green Roman helmet) should sound like, so they opt for least offensive to the ears?

I'm sorry I'm ranting about this so much, but this is the BIGGEST problem I have with any media that has voiced speech. At least movie dubs tend to ignore nationality, so for instance anime dubs have English speakers speaking English like English speakers without trying to invent an accent that never existed. Even when a Japanese character is supposed to have a Japanese dialect, they replace that with an American dialect (usually Deep South for some odd reason). It's only when a work is produced in not-really-foreign-language that the fake accents really come into effect.

And, to be a bit more on topic, I LOVED LOVED LOVED the I11 Ouroboros trailer. Loved it! I don't know who they got to voice Mender Silos, but that man did an outstanding job. A strong voice, clear speech, commanding presence, and someone wrote him a pretty cool script. The characters in the CoV promo trailer aren't bad, either, though the Darth Vader with metallic echo voice on Recluse is a bit cliché. And with little to no voices in the game, we avoid every character sounding like Xardas (damn Gothic II). I've yet to see what BioWare do with the Star Wars MMO, because they promise big. But in general, I'm just worried about voice acting in City of Heroes specifically, because I can GUARANTEE it would easily DOUBLE the silliness we already have, and for a humourless git like me, that's be horrid.

I know this is some kind of irony, but check out what this link netted me:

You're telling me! Welcome to the story of my life. And the damn PlayNC store STILL insists on defaulting me to EU versions of CoH merchandise, even though they're completely incompatible with the version of the game I actually own. Ugh...

They became almost non-existent after the change, but the question you should be asking is is this BECAUSE of the change, or does it merely coincide with it. I can tell you for a fact that all the hypocrites who claimed they were into the raiding for the "fun" of it and absolutely, positively not for the rewards would have jumped ship if nothing happened to the raid at all, once equivalent or BETTER rewards became more easily available elsewhere.

Yeah, yeah, I know some people did indeed enjoy the event for the event's sake. I dare say the BULK of the people arguing against the old reduction to the power of Hamidon enhancements were either fooling themselves or fooling us when they said this, however. Time and again I've heard the argument that something is SO MUCH FUN, yet the second something turns out to give better rewards, and the "fun" becomes a "grind" even though not a lot actually changed.

This brings up a good point. In City of Heroes, and indeed in most MMOs, practically our only interaction with the environment is via killing stuff. Our powers kill stuff, protect us so we can kill stuff, buff us so we can kill stuff better, debuffs stuff so it can't kill us before we kill it, control stuff so it doesn't fight back while we kill it, or are completely cosmetic. Granted, travel powers sort of count as something else, but by and large, killing stuff is the point of the game. As a matter of fact, SKIPPING fights is actually bad for you.

Much as I hate the D&D system to its core, it had an interesting idea with its selection of traps, hidden doors and locked chests and locations. On the one hand, it REALLY sucked when you lacked the ability to disarm/spot/unlock, but on the other hand it gave parties with these characters more options. Instead of going down into the guard room and killing all the guards to get the key to the vault, your Rogue could simply pick the lock and get you the loot all the faster. Or, in a staggering feat of sideways design, you could rig the generator under the Children of the Cathedral's cathedral to explode, bypassing the final boss entirely.

One of the big problems with MMOs in general is that they ARE combat, and as such non-combat characters are completely useless. The only way a character can help his team is by helping them in combat, and a character who can't help in combat in any way is dead weight. Never you mind that this character would be invaluable in an actual story, such as opening doors, finding secret tunnels, reading coded texts, reading minds and so forth.

Now, I'm probably the first person to say that City of Heroes is a combat game, and well it should be. Frankly, I'm not in the slightest bothered by our lack to contribute by any means outside of killing things. Even if we could, I'd still pick a Scrapper and just walk through the front lines. But it's this over-reliance on combat in MMOs that leads to the "tank/healer/damage dealer" trinity which is so absurd in this day and age. And I gotta' tell you, I'd laugh my *** off at the tank, healer, damage dealer optimised team that suffers for not taking along a locksmith or an engineer.

Really, though, that's outside the scope of most MMOs. It's more something like what you'd find in MDK 2, where you had three characters, each with his distinct gameplay. Max, the four-armed dog's gameplay was shoot-em-up action with lots of guns, bombs, explosives and carnage. The Doc's approach was radically different - puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles, plus a nuclear toaster firing nuclear toast, exploding nuclear bagels and homing loafs of nuclear bread. Kurt's gameplay was somewhere inbetween, with some shooting, a lot of sniping and, acrobatics and (some) stealth.

It's like the old D&D thought experiment - a Warrior, a Mage and a Thief need to get through a room full of zombies, past a locked door and into a locked chest, get the treasure and get out alive. MMOs basically follow the Warrior's path in practice almost every time.

And herein lies the difference between something you can rely on and something you can't. Thunder Kick's stun is so insignificantly unlikely to help, that you play as though it doesn't exist and if it does trigger, you just shrug your shoulders. The knockback on Crane Kick and Dragon's Tail, on the other hand, is consistently more reliable, so you grow to expect it and rely on it to trigger. You may or may not NEED it, but you EXPECT it.

Basically, that's what it comes down to for me - getting a feel for what my character can do and a feel for what I can expect to achieve when I use my powers. Wildcard powers that could do a lot or do almost nothing at all do NOT sit well with me.