Samuel_Tow

I got about all the information I could have hoped for, and more, in fact. I got answers to my questions, and I got a somewhat confirmation that what I wanted to achieve was unlikely, but not so outlandish as to be stupid in a fictional story. I also got a pretty good insight into the armed forces structure and chain of command, which ought to serve me well in the future. All in all, a pure treasure trove

See, this is why I love our forums even when people try to trash-talk about them. We have our drama and we have our quarrels, but the mere fact that I can ask a question like this and have answers forthcoming in spades is just amazingly cool.

See, this I can get behind. Let's go with a ham-fisted approach and out-and-out disable powers while swimming and just use water for travelling. That I can deal with. No powers, nothing to specifically remind me it's make-pretend. In fact, without powers to worry about, I wouldn't really mind an infinite air supply. That in itself (though it is kind of wonky) isn't really a problem I can't see past. It's that and the OTHER problems that do me in.

Provided they can make a convincing underwater environment and we only swim through it, not fight in it, then I'd be all for such a zone. Ambience and animations are still a problem, of course, but my primary problem - Storm Summoning underwater and so on - doesn't exist. So... Go for it

Frankly, that'd work for me. It KILLS me that the only way to get a trenchcoat is via veteran reward. It's a trenchcoat. It's not a valuable resource, and it's certainly not SPECIAL. It ought to be available to everybody. Let's concede that we have to give the veterans SOMETHING, so give them an even BETTER trenchcoat. Perhaps one with more ornaments, or a buttoned-up one, or just something that's more fancy than "just a trenchcoat." The idea is to not put specific clothing/costume TYPES behind veteran rewards, because we get to the point of silliness where you need dozens of months of veteran status in order to own a pair of decent shorts on a guy.

Wings are a bit iffy, because you're locking the two most iconic types of wings under a veteran reward, but then you can still get "wings in general" even without being a veteran at all. You just don't get bird/bat wings, but the ones you do get come close.

Generally, if we HAVE to have costumes as veteran rewards, they ought to be something special in as a bit of a bragging rights reward in a category that already exists without them, not the category, itself.

I know I'm laughing.

Lack of a Playstation would prevent me from verifying that. And why is it that I never hear anything about a Metal Gear Solid 3? Did it jump from 2 to 4?

English isn't my first language, either

They key point that keeps being used intermittently here is "to you" that I bolded in the quote. It's important, because that's essentially the linchpin of this entire debate. It's common practice in war, and even in everyday life, to vilify your enemies and try to present their position as objectively wrong, so that you can have a justification for why you are right and they are wrong. When it comes to acts of violence and war, it's kind of past the "agree to disagree" phase, and if you're going to be KILLING someone, you might as well try and make it seem like they really deserved it.

But the key to writing a good story with a convincing moral ambiguity is to not side the reader (or, indeed, side yourself as a writer) with one side and try to present their subjective view of the world as an objective truth in that world. City of Heroes generally sides with the heroes, presenting their views of the world as the correct ones, so their enemies are evil villains, and a lot of the time unashamedly so. Good on them - it's a large part of what makes super hero interesting. Morality is relatively clear, and where it isn't, it's at least possible to be set straight in the end.

Going Rogue is sort of the other side of super hero comics, the side where morality is never really clear and the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets. There are no easy answers and no clear heroes and villains, just different people fighting for what they believe in. Some may be painted as better and others as worse, but the key here is that they all have a point and they all have a reason to fight. The narrative doesn't give you a ready answer as to whose morality is true and whose is false, because that's the whole point of the expansion - uncertain morality that can easily lead a hero astray and a villain into the path of good. Right and wrong are subjective in Praetoria.

Of course, if we want to have any sort of meaningful side-changing system, we NEED to have a basis in absolute morality, so Praetoria's grey and grey morality system will likely end up being judged by Paragon City's and the Rogue Isles' black and white morality system, and while it will offer you a greater degree of freedom of self-definition, it won't exactly allow you to redefine what is good and what is bad. I've no doubt that the resistance will be presented as the good guys and the Loyalists as the bad guys, but I also have no doubt that they'll be constantly crossing the line into each other's moral territory, leading the player to having to think for himself and not just blindly follow contacts in whatever they say.

As an interesting example, people say that all missions in CoH are goody-goody, but that isn't necessarily true. Plenty of missions have you going out of your way to break into Crey property without a warrant, and your contacts routinely have you roam around and beat up Crey agents doing business which is officially completely legitimate. In fact, at one point Countess Crey actually gets a warrant out for your arrest. But because the plot says so, you're still a paragon of justice even though you just broke into a private property, beat up a bunch of people without cause and attacked a legitimate business on nothing more than a hunch. We're heroes, damn it! Nothing we do is wrong, because the game doesn't have a way to make it meaningful.

But it will.

I actually stopped trying to figure out anything past Metal Gear Solid, because it doesn't seem like anyone has been taking the game seriously from Metal Gear Solid 2 onwards.

Let me oppose the "you need a challenge to make the game fun" and leave it at that.

As well, some of the cheats listed didn't really make the game easier, such as having all costume unlocks. It just makes it a tad cooler and how it should have been without actually giving you a meaningful advantage.

I disagree. If we consider fiction as a cross-section of the many, many events life has to offer, then I simply choose to pick my fiction from the selection of events that end in upper endings. Even if you expect the good guys to always win and the bad guys to always lose, a well-written story can still have you on the edge of your seat all the way through. If you want a good example, try Oban: Star Racers. It has a good balance between downer and upper without being ultimately depressing. It might give you a new understanding of Gaussian's arc and why all these characters have the antics they do.

In order for happy endings to have meaning, downer endings are required. They just don't have to happen on camera in the story a the end.

Umbral makes a good point. Ice gets chipped away blow by blow until you break through it to get to the person inside. Forcefields are routinely pierced completely without affecting the integrity of the field or its ability to deflect attacks afterwards. In order for a field to work as damage absorption, you'd need to explain why it doesn't allow any damage through and degrades slowly as it takes hits, which is completely uncharacteristic of forcefields in this game.

Like this, yes. We already have the power in the game. Forcefields grant it. I'd like to have a personal-use power like it that doesn't reduce me to only affecting myself.

See, there is a big problem with this notion of, essentially, walking along the bottom and using powers in water as though you're using them in air. In real life, you can tell you're underwater because you can feel the water with your body, because you can sense the drag of it and because you can feel how differently sound and shockwaves travel through it. In a movie or in a game, even when you actually shoot underwater, it's often hard to TELL it's water and not just air. As a direct example, a lot of those shots of submarines from the outside in movies aren't in water at all. They're in air, illuminated by a blue light and shot in relative slow motion. If you stick players running along the bottom and using their powers as they would in air, then you have nothing to actually show us that we are in water, other than the mission's word for it. And even if the mission tells me it's water, when I can see it's a blue cave, I'm not going to be impressed.

If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably not a buffalo even if the tag on its cage says so.

Here's the thing - movies and games that feature significant underwater sections are rare. You'd be hard-pressed to find more underwater movies than you can count on one hand. Offhand, I can only think of four - The Abyss, Deep Star Six, Leviathan and The Sphere. As far as games with large underwater components go, these are rare, and even more rarely done well. Water is done well in Tomb Raider. Less well in WoW. About the only game with any major emphasis on underwater environments is Aquaria.

In movies, it's often hard to tell which shot is supposed to be underwater and which is supposed to be in air unless you rely on secondary cues. Underwater, people's hair drifts rather than hanging down, lighter objects float around, actions are slowed down and cumbersome, heavier objects feel lighter and sounds are muted and booming. It's the ambience and effects of water on people and their abilities that demonstrates what is water and what is tint-lighted air. That's what I've been saying all along - you can have an underwater environment that looks anything other than silly unless you add sufficient ambience, and BABs has already spoken on how likely the amount of work needed to add that level of ambience would take.

As that screenshot we already saw demonstrates, just sticking people underwater isn't enough to make them feel like they're underwater when the game lacks ANYTHING to add underwater ambience to it.

On the other hand, here's something that I WOULD like to see - visible bottoms! I am SICK SICK SICK of the "floor" we have under every major body of water in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Remember how Arbiter Sands' submarine pen has a real, visible bottom? That's what I want for the oceans in the game. I believe the Going Rogue graphics settings can limit visibility in water, so I don't expect to see the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but I'd like to feel like our coastlines at least HAVE a bottom, and not just this fugly uniform floor all around. I don't need to be able to swim down to the bottom, just see that it's there.

P.S. And, yes - underwater bases with glass windows looking out into the ocean, pretty please! As many of those windows as we can get!

Personally, the only reward I want out of playing a great game is having a great game to play, and the only reward I want out of playing a great game very long is a game I can play very long and not get bored. That's about the extent of what I want out of my games. Being recognised is cool, certainly, but I not something I specifically want. Having been recognised in-game a couple of times for playing characters I've talked about on the forums is more than I'd have hoped for.

I want a great game. The more the people the game is great for, the better. I want everyone to have fun RIGHT NOW. I can have fun right now, because I have all the vet rewards up to 60 months, so it's not like I don't want to wait. But because I, myself, can circumvent this limitation, it doesn't mean I want other people to have to wait for their costumes. Since we're not talking about a limited stock, I'd want nothing better than for every player to have access to the same things I do.

I simply derive no pleasure from other people not having things I do.

It's generally bad form to make "all they really need" arguments when it comes to the animations system, that's why I talk about this as a distant possibility. I went on about this at length in the past, but there is one key, crucial part missing - the ability to switch summoned weapon class. Right now, weapon powers always use a weapon, and non-weapon powers never do. Weapon powers unlock an extra costume slot, that for the weapon, and any power from a weapon powerset calls the same weapon.

Granted, the Spines customization seems to indicate that you can vary weapons between powers, causing redraw, but I'm not exactly sure what the relationship between spines ans weapons is, so I don't want to guess.

Basically, what you would need to do in order to accomplish this holy grail of power customization, is invent a way for powersets to have not just one class of weapon attributed to them, but allow you to select between several classes, and limit customization options to those weapons only. I've not seen precedent of that existing in the game, so I have to assume it isn't doable (or at least hasn't been done) yet. We can alter animation, we can alter effect, but I've seen no solid evidence that we can alter weapons via the powers system, as they are inherently a costume item.

Possibly as a last resort. I've done that in a few games with hideous time sinks, like MegaMan X8's metals grind. But in a player-driven economy, that wouldn't really work, and it'd probably mean I'd have to get into inventions sets. A definite last resort.

Have considered that, honestly, but I wouldn't do it. Game balance is a precarious thing, and I wouldn't want to step outside its bounds. I don't enjoy the mess that's lead to.

This one without a second though. I've never felt ANYTHING should be unlockable, so if I could use a cheat to dump it all in character creation, I'd do this without even thinking about it.

Her name is Konoko.

Personally, I HATE the mittens, but having seen Arachnos Soldier hands, I'm not all that impressed with them, either. Having fingers is one thing, and I've argued for it, but without animating them in a meaningful way, they don't look good. In fact, one of THE key problems I had with the Champions Online visual style was the fingers. Not that they HAD them, but that their hands didn't make good fists with them. They'd leave room between the fingers in a grab and not close the hand properly. With our mittens, you just fold them and you get a balled-up fist.

Fingers are one of the hardest parts of the human body to get right visually, and a lot of both game designers and artists have utterly failed at it. Fingers and toes just never seem to come out right, for some reason, toes especially since most artists just avoid having to show them. A game with good finger animation can look incredible, but a game with BAD finger animation can actually look terrible even if the graphics are otherwise good.

I'm not sure if I'd insist on separate, separately animated fingers, but there is ONE thing I'd really like to see - fingers with indented gaps between them. Right now, fingers are represented by black lines drawn on the texture of the mittens, which are otherwise smooth top and bottom. What I want to see is for the gaps between the fingers to be represented not by a black line, but by a gap in the mesh where the gaps between the fingers should be, with possibly separate finger tips. A lot like how the Monster gloves are, in fact.

That, and I'd like to see bare feet that look like human feet, not like something on borrow from Tomb Raider 2.

Downer endings are not fun, that's the sum total of my argument. If the heroes are going to struggle against incredible odds and fail, then I just wasted an hour and a half watching a pointless, meaningless movie. It's like a plot point introduced, developed throughout an entire story, and then it comes to absolutely nothing. My usual reaction is "All of the work for this?"

It's realistic, it may even be dramatic, but it's not something I want to see. Heroes struggling against impossible odds lose by default. That isn't interesting. Exceptions are interesting, and them winning is the exception. That most movies are built around the unlikely exceptions in fiction doesn't change that fact.

Note, this is my opinion and preference. Nothing more.

Crap! I knew I was forgetting something! Thank, Morac!

P.S. I'm completely serious.

I think I love you

That's a large part of what I had in mind for my own Major, actually. Less command of many men (less so during the time when she's actually in the army) and more special operations via a rather unique set of personal skills. I do like the notion that a job which requires a certain exposure to classified information, but still needs someone to chopper in and kick *** might go to a Major and a small squad of cannon fodder.

Incidentally, what rank does Solid Snake hold? Does he have a rank at all?

On the matter of Colonels, I actually found a couple of interesting examples. One is the Colonel from Predator, whom I didn't know was a colonel, but who acts more like a Corporal or a Sergeant despite his rank. The way he acts is a lot more in-line with what I had in mind for my own Colonel, but I'm not sure if that isn't just done to boost Arnie's badassitude.

The other is the Colonel from Akira, who seems to act a lot more like a commander and, in fact, seems to act more like a General. I'm not sure whether that's because he's warmongering enough to stage a coup and seize authority beyond his rank, or if it's just a post-apocalyptic Japan thing where the whole country has just one Colonel with armies and armies behind his back. The way he acts is pretty much the polar opposite to what I had in mind.

You know what? I think the Stargate example is probably as close as it gets to what I was shooting for. I've only ever seen the movie, but am I to understand Curt Russell was a Colonel in it? I think I remember him being called that, but it's been, what, 10 years since I last saw it?

Point is, due to the extenuating circumstances of having to use nuclear weapons and the general importance of the mission, a Colonel was put in charge of what looked like no more than a squad of soldiers, which from what I've seen here ought to be the charge of a Sergeant. However, because his task required some serious command authority, they stuck a particularly badass Colonel as a field combatant and went with that. That's sort of what I had in mind.

Put it like this - I have a special operative who generally has NO men under his command simply by virtue of the kind of work he does. I know "lone wolf" operatives who go out into the jungle on their own probably aren't common in real life military forces, but they're common in games and movies and that's sort of what I went with. However, because of the sensitive nature of his work and the great importance of his missions, he needs to be able to assume command when necessary, hence he is given a high rank (and in my case an equivalent rank, like what Red Alert's Tanya had).

From what I've read so far, the above doesn't seem at all likely to happen in a real-world army, but what I want to know is is it even POSSIBLE? I know that movies misappropriate what high-ranking officers and agents mean, via authority equals asskicking, but I also realise this is fiction divorcing from fact in a big way. But can this work the other way? I've already been told that specialists like doctors get a high-ish rank, but how about a truly high one, like Colonel or Major for someone who is, for all intents and purposes, a field operative with no actual command to speak of?

P.S. I think I found sort of what I was looking for by following my own link: Colonel Badass I apologise for diverging from reality so much.

That sort of thing is more or less the holy grail of power customization, in my eyes. The ability to pick to use different weapon classes (such as bow or crossbow), as well as weapons for inherently weaponless sets, like Fire Blast. I'm not positive it's even possible (no developer has ever commented on that), but it's probably the last big thing left in terms of functionality before my imagination runs out on more things to do with customization.

You know, I think I finally realised where my major disconnect is taking place and why I keep asking odd questions and failing to grasp simple questions. I'm sort of trying to shoehorn realism into unrealistic fiction, and in so doing sort of straddling the line. And it's not comfortable.

When you say "commanding their troops," I know exactly what you mean - find cover, contact HQ and get to work organising things. What a proper commander should be doing while the men tasked with actual combat go about doing their own jobs. This is realistic, but it isn't exactly how things would go in a largely detached fictional scenario.

In a fictional scenario, even if people aren't super-human, they're so badass they may as well be, so a commander's proper means of leading his man would probably be to shout a lot and kill things like a pro to "inspire" them. In anything other than a historical movie, that's how things get solved - everybody grabs a gun and you they either pull back or shoot everything dead. Think Predator and how the soldiers dealt with the enemy village.

I do think I see what you mean, though, and I think it's time for me to see how I can weave reality into made-up fiction. And it's also time to go to bed, as I need to be at work in 7 hours...