Samuel_Tow

You know, that's something that has always bothered me about City of Heroes - all of our original powers are done EXTREMELY on the cheap. By that I don't mean they were cheap or quick to make, but that they lack any sort of... Refinement to them. You point, emitter creates fireball, fireball flies. The end. And that's WITH the added spray of fire on impact from CoV. We didn't even have that before. By comparison, look at something as seemingly simple as the Necromancy upgrade. It's just a red cloud of mist, right? Wrong! Let's look at what it actually is.

First of all, it IS a cloud of mist, but unlike most other "moving cloud" powers, it's not just one emitter making a trail of sprites, it has several emitters moving around in a spiralling, zig-zagging pattern around each other, making the cloud a lot more elaborate and a lot more interesting. It's not just a fluffy cloud. It's magic! As well, the thing leaves a trail of bugs and beetles and worms on the ground, and they don't just stand around looking pretty (disgusting), they scurry about, each in their own way. The whole power's setup is so complex I've been unable to actually tell what any of the things involved in it is actually doing. THAT, to me, is an excellent power and how everything should me. It's not in-your-face flashy, but it is also incredibly detailed. Which stands to stark contrast with the Dark Blasts the very same set also has. Low-res bland-colour tendrils emitted in a line do not look impressive. Heck, I don't even think the tendrils sprites are even animated, but I could remember wrong.

I'm going to give you an example of what I mean - W.I.T.C.H. Specifically, the second season. There, chief protagonist Nerissa has a habit of using really flashy electricity, and it's flashy not due to big explosions or fanfare, but rather because of how much detail is put into it. It doesn't just shoot out of her hands, it always dose SOMETHING else. In one scene you see her hand flash so you can see the bones inside. In another scene the lightning she shoots strikes the ground a couple of times before whipping towards the target she meant to hit. It's not quite Avatar impressive in that it's not a flashy martial art, but the EFFECT is hugely detailed, and something I've always wanted to see in our game, at least as an alternate animation.

Easy example from in-game: Jacob's Ladder. Unlike most of the old powers, when you do that electricity travels down your arms until it reaches your fists, at which point you shoot the cone of electrical arcs. I'd LOVE to see something like that for older powersets, like fire travelling up your body when you're shooting Blazing Bolt. I would enjoy that.

This is something I've been saying for years - a game looking good doesn't come down to processing technology and graphics engine muscle, it comes down to a good artist and a good designer at the wheel. All the shiny shaders and high-poly models won't save a game where the art style is ugly and unappeaning, whereas a game with a good art style can get away with relatively poor graphics. That's why things like Oni and the Prince of Persia games still look good even so many years after their graphics became quite old, and Oni had "old" graphics the day it launched.

Anime is a good example, because I've always enjoyed anime, manga and anime-inspired games for their inspired character design and bold style. They don't always succeed, obviously, and I know they're not everyone's cup of team, but I can always respect art styles that "dare to be stupid" and still pull it off. Compared to Western media, cartoons, movies and games that rely more on generic costumes and telling actors apart by face and mannerisms, I'd pick anime every time. This is partly why I HATE the newer approach in Japanese media and games, where art styles become ever more realistic and bland, giving up the flair of of the old unique anime costumes and weapons.

I don't think faces rank very high in terms of what sells a character, unless that character has some kind of specific face-defining feature. A large scar, scary shiny glasses, half-closed eyes or so forth. But in animation as in 3D, it's incredibly hard to make a face that is convincingly different at a distance, and different in a meaningful yet natural way. Our faces are all different when you look at them up close, but at 10 paces, they all fall into one of, like, three categories or so, especially if you have your camera zoomed out a fair bit (I have mine at four wheel-rolls back).

Going back to anime, just about any series you see will have precisely ONE face, with characters differentiated by hairstyle, face accessories and clothes. That's to the point where you couldn't actually tell men from women without aid. Certain animes and mangas break from the traditional style, but even then, all of their faces are still the same, just all in the new style. About the only animes that have faces even remotely unique without aid are the ultra-realistic ones, like Ghost in the Shell 2, and that in itself breaks from anime tradition. I've seen very few more traditional animes where faces weren't interchangeable. Amusingly, the one that does that I can think of offhand is Slap Up Party: Arad Senki, an anime adaptation of the Dungeon Fighter Online game I complained about yesterday. The fighter woman there (which, by the way, I LOVE as a concept and as an execution) has one of the most distinct faces I've seen in anime, at least within the context of the show. Then again, the series takes HUGE liberties with style and proportions, so variety is at least guaranteed. Too bad it sucks...

While you probably expect me to say it, I'll say it anyway: Never has happened, and from how things look, never will happen. I LOVE Oranbega. It's probably the coolest tileset of them all. The only tilesets I actively hate are the tilesets I hated the first time I saw them, which are largely restricted to the pink caves and their derivatives, like the snake caves and the Cimeroran ruins. I disliked them from the first day I set foot in the Shadow Shard for their blandness and tubular design, and I dislike them now for the exact same reason.

You know what the funny thing is? I never stop being impressed. I have, for instance, a few characters I made expressly because of how their costumes looked, and every time I log them into the game, I can't stop giggling like an idiot, thinking "Man, I can't believe this is really happening!" I love these characters, and I can never get enough of them. EVER.

I don't get bored of good graphics. I can look at them day after day after day and the fine details and cool little touches will never stop impressing me. For instance, even to this day I still adore all the care an attention the Necromancy upgrade has put into it. All of those whirling, spinning red thingies, all the little scurrying worms and beetles... I love it!

May?

Arcana, you should know better than that. The human face is something that, absent our brain subsystem for recognising them, varies incredibly little. Face to face to face, the differences are minute. That's why people of one ethnicity often have trouble telling people of another ethnicity apart - our apparatus for distinguishing faces is best at distinguishing faces like ours and that we see every day, not so much faces of a subtly different structure. Telling which face someone is using in this game is outright inpossible at all but the closest range, essentially zooming into first person view and coming close to have a look.

Chest details, by comparison, are both much larger AND much more colourful and contrasting than faces. Let me put it this way - it's much easier to tell one face apart from the other in this game if that face has a large pair of coloured goggles, some kind of vibrant face paint, a large breather, a mask or something of this nature, than it is if it's just another face of a similar skin tone. They simply look too much alike.

Again, in the situations where you get to see your face in enough detail to tell facial animations apart, you don't have the opportunity to MAKE facial expressions. People make facial expressions in the heat of action, which is a bad time to be looking at faces, or in conversation with each other, which as of right now, we can't emulate short of just standing around.

And, as with all the recent suggestions of facial animation, I have to ask - do you honestly see it viable to animate ALL the existing faces, including the monstrous ones, including the mouthless and noseless ones, including the Roswell alien one, without removing any of them and while making it look good? Because I wouldn't turn my nose up at that for a second, believe me. I'd LOVE it. I just don't see it happening, because it isn't that big of a deal for what resources I envision it taking to achieve.

Interesting. I must have missed that. Let's hope that's new content and not just re-labelled old content. Then again, perhaps that's why the old arcs were re-labelled hero or villain? Food for thought...

Which also doesn't happen because, on the rare occasion you don't want to stab them in that same face for ninjaing your open-world objective, you're still looking at their backs as you face a common threat.

Face animations are good for one thing and one thing only - cutscenes. Since we have, like, five of them here and none feature closeups, I don't see the point. I'd much rather have the ability for my WHOLE HEAD to track whatever I have targeted, since that I can clearly see, or for my damn waist to articulate when I turn and my legs to step rather than slide, than for me to have facial expressions I'll never be close enough to see.

Having seen games with fingers, I'm not terribly impressed, but I'll give you that mittens are a bad idea. But faces? Even games that have full-fledged conversations an cutscenes don't give their actual gameplay models full-range facial expression. There's no reason to have it, both because you'll never see it from the back, and because you'll never see it even if you were looking for it.

Show of hands - who among you knew that Tomb Raider had changing face expressions?

The old Flares animation was only a smidgen more flashy, but it was much more silly than the one we have now (which is essentially a fire version of Power Bolt). The final pose was just silly, and looked like you were about to shoot flares straight up. Shooting them forward from that pose made Blasters look like someone trying to be scary, going "Ooga boog booga!" and shooting flares out of that pose. It was kind of flashy, just... Not in the right way. There's flashy cool and flashy embarrassing

But the quote you quoted which the stubborn forums didn't nest has a point. To me, a lot of the old Blast sets are boring. Point arm, shoot projectile, profit. Point both arms, hoot projectile, profit. They all use, like, 5 animations between them (OK, more than that, like a dozen by last counting, but the point remains) and all of our snipes bar Blazing Bolt use the same inappropriate animation. Proton Volley is just absurd with that animation. I can't really argue with the artistic direction after the fact, but I'd like to see more interesting animation alternatives added for them at some point. The one talked about in the quote I couldn't quote would be a very good idea.

One thing I want to say - look at all the old Blast powers and note one thing: they're all poses. Almost any flashy blast we have is a short, curt animation and a lot of posing. Flares was like this, snipes are like this, most of the Energy Blast powers are like this. We don't really have very many flashy ANIMATIONS, we just strike flashy poses. It's not problematic, in the sense that we're just so used to these powers that we don't notice it, but I will tell you one thing - when you DO see an animation that has been detailed and touched up, you can tell. The simple fact that I LOVE the single-shot handgun animation because of how much better the recoil is drawn out is example enough. Seriously, the old revolver powers are just silly, with a cartoony recoil with the gun going up into the sky. Guns recoil back more than they recoil up, and they recoil FAST. The Mastermind attacks have that. Old Hellion animations do not.

Why bring this up all of a sudden? Well, here's something of a revalation - look around movies and cartoons where you have elemental users and try to spot the techniques they use for controlling those elements. Pretty much nil. Fire users will will point and shoot, air users will wave a hand, earth users might do a lifting and thrusting motion. That's it. It isn't as apparent when you have nothing to compare against, but there is SOMETHING you can use for comparison: Avatar: The Last Airbender. In there, element benders use actual martial arts to form the basis of their bending fighting styles, which makes elementalist fights a LOT more impressive than I've seen them practically anywhere else. Even ranged fights with fire against earth, for instance, are transformed into martial arts duels, and if you're looking for "flashy," it just doesn't get more flashy than that.

Avatar is a very good example in what fluid, elaborate moves can look like in conjunction with elemental forces. It combines punches, kicks, spins and complicated motions with an element of the appropriate style, and the result is a very vivid, very engaging fighting scene time and time again. Coupled with quite a bit of imagination into what element using can actually achieve, I'd say it's a very good source of inspiration.

NONE of the old sets are flashy in the least. Katana is borderline, being both rather more tame and not exactly old, but practically NOTHING before Dual Blades has been flashy, fluid or indeed even fast at all. I'm not a big fan of Dual Blades (for reasons OTHER than animations), but I truly appreciate what it represents for the game - a fighting style that is more than just hack, slash, slice, whirl. That has its place, but it's not all we should constrain ourselves to.

I'm generally a "good enough" sort of person. If the graphics were good enough for me to play back in 2004, there's no reason they won't be good enough to play now. That said, I'm never going to say no to better graphics, provided my computer can run it.

When it comes to it, I can't play a game that doesn't look good. If it's an action game, I DEMAND good animations at the very least, and good graphics are important. City of Heroes is, for me, all based around how cool our characters look, so that's also incredibly important. I have to be honest, I've never been a fan of the actual underlying game system. It's certainly better than most other MMOs, but the thing I like the most about it is that I can override it for the most part and still play without too many problems.

We're probably opposites indeed. I play games solely because they look cool, with game systems only really serving to achieve that cool look. I can sustain a certain level of bad graphics for a very exciting game, but my limit is fairly low. Oni is about as far as I'd go, and even then the game is "bad" only in a purely technical sense. Between its amazing animations, decent models and well-hidden kinks in the engine, it actually LOOKS remarkably good.

Right. I argued for extra options. One of those was an extra custom weapon, the other an extra custom glove option. Read carefully, please, and tell me where I voted against extra options. Please, I'm interested to know. Because to the best of my memory, what I voted against was the notion that what we had was bad and needed to be changed. I don't agree it's bad. I believe it's good. I feel like this is what I'll be getting eventually, and I don't appreciate the prospect of having it yanked from under me.

But thank you for insulting me, anyway. It's the thought that counts, after all.

Goat, you are VASTLY underestimating the power of cosmetics. I know where you stand, more or less, so I can certainly see your position, but understand that "cosmetics" are pretty much the ONLY reason I play this game. Remove the cosmetics and I'd be gone without a second thought. More cosmetics are just going to get me more excited. Certainly more excited than Invasions, more task forces, more subsystems and so forth. About the only thing that could compare to cosmetics for me is story arcs, because I just enjoy the game's lore and stories.

But if I had to pick, cosmetics is the most important thing for me. Graphics, costumes, power customization, zones, enemy variety, location, location, location. That's what keeps me here. That, and the fact that "everything else" doesn't meddle in my cosmetics. The only reason I even look into this game's numbers at all is so that I can put cosmetics first and still build something that plays around them.

This is literally ALL I care about.

*edit*
This notion is part of the reason why Masters of Orion 3 is such utter garbage. It's essentially Spreadsheets: The Game. It has almost no graphics whatsoever, it's probably 95% interface windows. It's a game with almost no graphics, which is REALLY saying something in the context of the Masters of Orion games. I really, really hated that game.

I play games for the same reason I watch movies - because I like looking at something cool. Games just let me do cool things whereas movies just show me. I am not in the slightest interested in their underlying systems where knowledge of them isn't vital, and I wouldn't be bothered one bit if it weren't vital anywhere at all.

To me, graphics are the tools of creation and plot/gameplay the result of it. Without graphics, you don't have a game.

What, am I supposed to just bow down and agree with opinions I disagree with? Are we back to the old "It's my opinion so it can't be wrong." shtick? We don't have to all agree with each other. How does that equal "coming down" on someone?

Ugh!

Precisely.

That's if you want your Mastermind to play the tank. I don't want mine to do that. I want mine to solo, and there are a few things which can be problematic.[/url]

All CoT spawns for a wide range of levels have Behemoths, Having a Mastermind around them makes them a HUGE pain to fight, especially when they come out of Behemoth portals. Ghost Widow, Nosferatu and generally anyone who's Dark is hard to kill that way, as well.

AI is a crucial part of playing a Mastermind and isn't a crucial part of playing anything else. If it sucks, that's a problem for the Mastermind. A serious problem, in fact, given that your henchmen freak out on something as simple as Caltrops and can run through half the map.

I'm going to have to disagree here. Proper henchman management is what separates the good Masterminds from the bad ones. Good Masterminds will not grid-lock small doors and narrow hallways, will kill what's most deadly first, will know to send their melee henchmen in melee and keep their ranged henchmen away and will generally NOT be AFK.

I'm not saying Masterminds are bad. Far from it. But they do have their weaknesses and drawbacks.

I actually did see the Rain of Bullets power, as well. It's completely stupid, completely out of place, and COMPLETELY AWESOME! WANT!!!

See, this is where I stand. Powers need to be cool. They may not always be realistic, they may not always be perfectly all-encompassing, and they may not even make a lick of sense. This isn't as important as their being really, really cool. Dual Handguns is that, in spades. Far as I'm concerned, I couldn't ask for more.

I think my opinion of you just doubled

Any game ever which has shown dual pistols has been more flashy than what you were expecting. City of Heroes is going to be more flashy still, because it needs variety, and you don't get variety in "point and shoot." I don't want to see seven powers that are, essentially, you point the gun, you shoot the gun, that's it. Even when it comes to Masterminds their attacks grate, and they have only three.

Be as pessimistic as you want. I like Dual Handguns exactly as it is and I would be ANGRY if it were changed to anything less flashy.