Samuel_Tow

That would actually also make sense of his comments about how he's still among us, but we can't see him. If the Dream Doctor lost the physical half of his, err... Being? Let's go with that. If he lost the physical half of his being, he would very much remain back on Earth as only a thought, existing in the purely technical sense, but non-existent for the purposes of interacting with anything in the physical world. A living memory in the most literal sense of the expression. He can see us, and he likely still has some power to interact with Rularuu, his counterpart, but he cannot interact with any of us. So, for us, he's been dead (or is that "gone?") for years, whereas he just shaved a part of his own being.

I love it!

The Shard NEEDS more work on it, and the Rikti Homeworld, though I'd completely forgotten about it, needs to be visited at some point. I'd even give it an entire zone, or at least a Cimerora-style mini-zone. I love the Rikti Base architecture, but that's all bunkers and military installations. I'd expect an entire Rikti world to be so vastly different and alien to our own that we would take a long time just to comprehend what is what and just what it is that we're looking at. And I don't mean in the sense of just weird architecture like Arachnos' quasi-fantasy, quasi-Combine strongholds, but in the sense that we don't know what anything is. Say, they don't use doors, buildings just sort of rearrange themselves around you to let you pass. Or you don't have buttons, you have to THINK machines into working. That sort of thing.

And, yeah Praetoria is an interesting place, as well. If they can manage to make it compelling and different enough for it to feel like a new experience, rather than just an evil Paragon City, that would probably cement the game's future in my eyes.

Like that, yes. And I wouldn't restrict it to full-body-only. I'd put options like this in all general costume categories, like aura gloves, aura boots, aura chest, aura head and so on. And if you want to be completely made of auras? Easy! Pick Aura everything and avoid using belts and shoulders. Or don't! Go all aura and use a belt, a chest plate and a pair of goggles. That'd be cool, too.

Or, heck, let's be creative and go the other way - metal helmet, metal boots, metal gloves, aura upper and lower body. Kind of like an elemental feeding into the "end effectors" of a power armour suit. I already have something a bit like this, with a character made of essentially raw meat coming out of a metal helmet.

I think that would open a LOT of possibilities.

After dynamic lighting, that would probably be my next big request. Flowing hair is the most direct, obvious request, but I'd actually want to see baggy clothes like robes and jackets also either somewhat animated or at least given some physics so they feel less like drain gutters and more like actual clothes. We have the subsystem to support things like this, after all.

But, mostly, hair and tails. The rest is secondary.

I say it's a cheat because you're having to game the system to overcome shoddy design and emulate good design. If you could bring C'Khelkah and Arons to the exit and have them leave (like the briefing suggests you should be able to), then bringing them to the door and leaving them IS the right way to go. As it stands, though, you have to cheat the AI into intentionally losing sight of you so they don't follow, thereby manually overriding the "Working As Intended" solution. Yes, I fully realise that the WAI solution is bad, but effectively hot-wiring the system to avoid it IS a cheat.

Of course, I'm not saying we should stop doing it. On the contrary, they should fix the mission so that that's the "correct" way to go.

I actually remember a documentary about cold war era spies, and what one of them explained he did to throw the KGB for a loop. Occasionally, he'd write some gibberish on a piece of paper, stick it in an envelope then walk into a random business and hand it to some random person with a wink and a nudge. This would then cause the KGB to panic, because they had no idea who this man was or how he was connected to a suspected American spy. Which is natural, because he wasn't. He was just some random, unfortunate individual who would they likely be pulled off the street and interrogated.

No, I don't like it, either.

In our world, though, especially with half the people having an "It's a Nemesis plot!" macro, actually doing something completely random and pointless IS a good idea for the Nemesis. As Crimson said about the Malta group - you do something, anything to them, and they'll construct all your conspiracy theories for you all by themselves. Someone once said that the best way to ensure people see a pattern in something is to hand them something that HAS no pattern. Then almost everyone is guaranteed to see a pattern in there somewhere.

Here's where I'm going to draw another parallel, this time with Dragonball Z (no jokes, please). Dragonball Z has, err... Well, literally God, who is a green space alien of tremendous power. To rid himself of evil, he actually splits his body in half. He regenerates, so he produces two distinct entities - the green God of Earth, and Piccolo Daimao, which translated from the language of MadeUpLand means "demon from another world." Essentially, this was a very powerful being (who gets reduced to a wimp in the next power-up, but oh well) who split himself in two in order to cleanse himself from evil.

Where the parallel with City of Heroes materialises is between the Dream Doctor and Rularuu the Ravager. If they are indeed counterparts, it's quite possible for them to be two parts of the same whole. We've already seen Rularuu depicted as a reality bender, and the Dream Doctor is strongly implied to be a dream bender, which could translate into bending the inner world - that of thought and self. As such, they COULD be painted as two halves of the same whole, and would explain what he means by shaving a part of himself off.

Of course, like most other things I've said here, this is completely baseless altogether, but it sounds neat, no?

Yeah, that's kind of what I had in mind when I was describing it. Raven's Mind is a LOT like the Storm Palace, only hers is more of a floating path, rather than a group of floating islands. Still, it's a good representation of what "the inside of a mind" would look like, both in terms of the shifting, floating ground and in terms of Raven interacting with her emotions. Now, Rularuu the Ravager himself has never been in the game, but we've seen pics of the model there is for him, and he looks like one of his aspect, only much taller. It is, therefore, an easy correlation between that and the Teen Titans episode - Rularuu looks like himself while his aspects look like exaggerated, colour-coded versions of himself.

It could work!

Here's the thing, though - that's a cheat. Mind you, I do it every time I can, but a mission shouldn't be coded such that you have to AVOID saving the people you're supposed to be saving. It's like the Lady Grey mission - with all those hideously strong Vanguard bosses, it's usually better to pull the spawns guarding her away, so that you rescue her, but don't get her to follow you. That spawns the bosses to defeat on your way out, which you can do without Lady Grey in tow, thereby keeping her out of harm's way. And since enemies won't attack NPCs that aren't attached to you, she's perfectly safe.

And your reward is pants!

Seriously, though, I agree with you completely, just as I agreed last time. Vaguard gear is too difficult to earn on EVERY character. Either it needs to be easier to get, or it needs to apply to all characters.

Granted, some games do get screwed up. Let's say when you find a new, better game, that does not make the old game bad. It's quite natural to move onto newer games as time moves on and to just get bored of old games through no fault of their own. Quitting an MMO isn't something to be ashamed of or something that needs to be justified.

There is a lot of that, yes. I must admit, this is exactly the way I feel about Diablo 2, though in that case, I'm not sure I ever enjoyed the game. Back then I played games out of habit, and it's bitten me many times here in City of Heroes when I catch myself doing things I don't want to just because I feel I "should."

More to point, there's likely another factor at play. When you find the next big thing you really like, it's often easy to look back at the old things and think "Man, I wish I were doing this all along!" This, however, is a pretty bad case of hindsight, because an old game that you've played inside and out is never going to beat the novelty of a new game you just started (provided it's good). It's simply not fair to think that, because you like this new one so much, the old one must have sucked. Far as I'm concerned, if you've stuck with a game for five years and you switch, you're really going to have to spend five years with another one before you can claim how much the previous one sucked so bad. Once the new becomes old and familiar, only then is it really fair to judge.

Generally, finding a game you want to play more does not automatically invalidate the game you came from or make it bad. It was good enough for you to pick it up and stick with it, so it's at least THAT good.

Actually, not all of them seem to be this long. I did the Justin Augustine TF a while back, and though we spent a lot of time wandering around the islands (I have my reveal power now, so that won't happen again) and we still completed it in 2 hours and 4 minutes, failing our 2-hour challenge. Given that last time I did Fattim the Kind's TF (some time January 2005) it took me 8 hours on the clock, I'd say most aren't that bad.

Lighting is, really, the big clincher for me. Dynamic lighting, more specifically. I don't need to see lens flairs, dynamic shadows or anything fancy. Just Tomb Raider 2 dynamic, coloured lights. And it's not just to add more LIGHT to the game, but also so we can add more DARKNESS.

Here's the thing - the darkest any area in the game can be is limited by how dark it can be while still letting you know where you're going. This is bad in two ways - firstly, dark places aren't really dark, they're more dim and secondly, the places that ARE dark (Sharkhead Island at night... Ugh!) are REALLY dark and you often have no idea if you're walking along a road or running against a building. With dynamic lights, you can let heroes bring their own light (have them self-illuminate the surroundings like in Diablo), which means both more and better lighting, as well as the ability to make REALLY dark places with the knowledge that we'll just illuminate them and still be able to see. In fact, you can give powers with a perception debuff a more powerful lighting effect, so that when you turn on, say, Minerals, you see better in the dark.

Those street lights would have a purpose, when we start surging with electricity, it would REALLY show, Vanessa DeVore's party can be even darker and more atmospheric, and even the D can be made darker. CoV at night can stay as dark as it is (it's already too frikkin' dark!) and we'll still be able to move around without tripping over the street curbs.

And, really, in a game with so much coloured lights as City of Heroes, how do we not have actual coloured lights? That alone would double the apparent quality of the graphics, in my opinion.

Of course, I suspect a LOT of this graphics update will have to do with actually optimising the engine. Multi-core support is already problematic (last I heard, the game couldn't utilize more than two cores, and even getting it there was a problem) and City of Heroes tends to lag more than it should, especially in specific locations. Optimizing the maps, themselves and culling excess geometry would probably go a long way. After all, there are two ways to up your graphics - make better graphics, or optimize the game so people can just up their settings.

I wouldn't expect any MAJOR changes to in-game models and maps, however, and I would definitely not expect a new engine. That sort of thing would simply require that all graphics be remade from scratch in the new engine, and that's just not doable. I WOULD be up for an overhaul of all age-old pieces to sharpen up their edges and to give them higher-res textures. Better hands and feet would probably be nice, though this goes more into extra costume pieces than graphical updates.

Generally, the biggest thing I would expect a graphical update to bring is better performance at CURRENT settings, and then maybe something else on top.

I tend to look at the aspects of Rularuu as I look at the Shadow Shard reflections - they are images of creatures that once lived or still live somewhere else, but there is no certainty that those images are the continuation of these creatures. In fact, it's very possible that they are constructs of Rularuu made to resemble these creatures, flanderizing one particular aspect of their personality and adopting it as an avatar of an aspect of Rularuu's own personality. For instance, if Faatim was an honest man with honour, in the mind of Rularuu he would turn into an incarnation of kindness, always trying to do good, save people and feel bad about all the wrong in the world. Or if Ruladak was a charismatic, stubborn individual, in Rularuu's mind he would be exaggerated into the personification of unyielding strength and fierce determination.

I mean, obviously, that's all just speculation, but I'm trying to see how far I can push the idea of "Shadow Shard as the mind of a god" and still make at least some sense. Of all the possibilities, this one I like the most because it's just so unusual for our game where everything ultimately falls into one big boss to beat up. I just enjoy that particular twist.

OK, now I feel really bad about this... Still, thank you for taking note.

The problem with the mission isn't really how it's designed, it's that the systems that handle that design are acting highly out-of-scale. The generators are too easy to break, their attackers are too hard to stop and the encounters trigger far too early. If the generators weren't so impossibly hard to keep alive, the mission would actually be pretty cool, because it's a nice mix of enemies and, much as people may hate them, those Mole Machines look really cool

On that note - I haven't done Black Scorpion's mole machines mission, but on the few occasions that I've beaten the "Get the News Out!" mission, I've actually stopped to fight the Mole Machines. All of them. Yes, fighting them is kind of tedious, but they look really cool, and I love how they look when they get damaged. My Stone Brute took I think something like 5-10 minutes per machine, and my Katana Scrapper took I think 2-3 minutes or thereabout. It's still a lot of time beating on inanimate objects, but those specific inanimate objects are actually cool to fight. Now CoT jail door crystals... Those make me MAD!

A Ghost Slaying Chainsaw, you say? I love it!

Oh, well. I stand corrected.

Here's the problem - they're not tradable, so even if you have thousands on one character, it doesn't help you any on another. Do people really have the full set of Vanguard armour on many of their characters? Because I have at least 15-20 in range of the pieces, and I don't think I have more than 10 pieces between them. I would be DEAD - literally dead in my swivel chair - if I tried to earn the full set for all of them. At this point, I've all but given up on that set and just make do with the Vanguard weapons where available.

I am very much FOR a reduction in cost and bundling of costume pieces.

*edit*
If you have 1000 Vanguard Merits, isn't that, like, two summons of the HVAS?

I want to comment on this bit of advice, because it IS sound advice. In my case, however, I was unable to even SEE the generators before they were destroyed, much less do anything to prevent them. I know where the first one is, so I rushed towards it first thing out the chopper. It took me exactly one jump to get to it, and it was destroyed by the time I got there. The rest just went downhill.

Personally, I'm fine with a wooden sword in Katana even if it doesn't have a visible sharpened edge. It's close enough to where I can look the other way and say "Eh, whatever." It still looks like a sword sufficiently well. It's no less odd than the rusty sword which doesn't have a blade at all. But that's where I draw the line - it has to resemble a sword, or cut and be handled like one.

Of all the responses I could thing to give to that, one above all seems to fit the best: No! Really?