Samuel_Tow

I did address this before and I kind of want to do it again, but with an expansion.

For one... Not really. You can play an electric character with electric blasts AND melee attacks at the same time. I believe there are toggle powers which add elemental damage to all of your other attacks, though I can't speak for the visuals. And I'm not saying this by inference. I actually met a fellow City of Heroes player there who showed me a hybrid energy blaster martial artist whose fighting style looked AMAZING in action. I wouldn't have called it, but combining the two sets looked good. Good enough to make me want to see what Inna would have been like with those powers.

For another thing, a lot of City of Heroes' melee sets made almost no sense to me. I've gone over how silly I found the concept of "punching with darkness" and so on. Mind you, I'm not dising people who like it. I have numerous characters who do just that. But in a big way, I picked those characters because I wanted the element on a character who had status protection, not because I wanted melee. In fact, Inna herself, who is now an Energy/Will Brute, used to be an Energy/Energy Blaster. The thing is... I've tried to do it, and I can't visualise how someone would punch with energy in a way that doesn't involve shooting energy.

To a large extent, City of Heroes has trained us - trained ME - to look at super powers and costumes only a certain way. It was a very customizable, expansive game, but it had its limitations, and after eight years of working with it, I had stopped recognising that these limitations existed. That sort of familiarity makes adapting to a new game, no matter how good, excruciatingly difficult because... Well, it doesn't have the things you want, and you don't want to change what you were after.

I get that, and I'm not dismissing the problem, but I do believe a lot of the problems people have can be solved, so long as they're problems of concept. Can't really solve GAMEPLAY if you don't like

Look, I said I won't try the game but you aren't making that easy!

Well, like I said (here? elsewhere? I forget): If NCsoft want to give up on the Western market, then that's fine. I hope the Korean market can support them, because I'm not interested in their sloppy seconds.

That's part of my problem, actually. I just don't like public events on a personal opinion basis, and while some "heart quests" are decent, I just don't find many that I find interesting. Again, not a dis against the game, but I just don't like these kinds of quests. That's a problem I have with Champions Online, too. A lot of their content is meaningless "zone" missions like... For instance, "Prisoners have escaped from the prison and gathered at the construction site. Go and defeat 25 of them." "Oh, you're done? Great, we put some prisoners back in prison. Mission complete!" I'm left wondering where the STORY is in that. It's work, sure, but it has about as much plot as, say, me walking home from work. Sure, things happened in places all over my route - mostly lots of walking. But it's not something you'd write in a book or make a movie of, is what I'm saying.

Oh, wait! They did!

"Angrily" is the key word here. I happen to believe that the City of Heroes community is like one big family. We may not all support each other financially, but when the hammer drops, we can count on each other's support at least emotionally and symbolically. That's why I don't feel right to be criticising people who are only trying to show support because they didn't show MORE support. All that does is make them sorry they bothered, and we don't want to isolate ourselves.

Be diplomatic and understanding, is what I'm saying. And be positive, at least as much as you can.

I'm not communicating the problem properly. I'd buy one of those pirated "game compilation" CDs and of, say, 150 games, I'd be able to make, say, 20-30 work, and of those maybe two or three would actually be worth playing. I really need to dig out my friend's Лучшие Игры 100 and see if I can't get any of them to run. For any Crusader: No Regret or Lode Runner: The Legend Returns there are 98 crap games that I honestly can't even remember the titles of. Some don't run at all, some run and crash, some run with glitches, some just plain old suck and so forth.

Fallout 2 was HIDEOUS with bugs. Every so often, my car would disappear so I can't get into it, and I'd have to leave the zone and come back in again. I bought a battery for it so it'd run longer, but I couldn't install it because the game said I needed to install a battery. A quest became uncompletable because the part I was sent to retrieve, I stole by pickpocketing the person who had it. Suddenly, the person I was supposed to take it to didn't acknowledge I had the part and the person I stole it from wouldn't give me the conversation option to ask for it, even when I "pickpocketed" the part back on his person. And that game had ridiculous save file bloat. At first save files started small, mere KB in size. I only realised something was wrong when I ran out of hard drive space and realised the game's save files had bloated to over 30MB. Hell if I know why.

Or how about Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura? That game had numerous quests that could never end and, famously, the MAIN quest couldn't proceed if you took one of the perks the game offered you - "allergic to magic," which prevented you from equipping a magic medallion needed to progress the game. Combat was glitchy as hell.

Even decent games had a crap shot of running. For instance, the 1989 Prince of Persia game. I was running it on an EGA 16-colour monitor. The first three levels of "dungeon" worked just fine, but as soon as you stepped onto level 4, the "palace level," I saw a muddled mess of polygons that made playing the game impossible. The old 1996 NBA game wouldn't even run, and for half of my old DOS games, I had to run selective startup and turn off autoexec.bat items to free up enough EMS, even though I didn't know what that meant or what I was turning off. I STILL don't know what the hell I did to get that to run

Yes, games today launch with bugs and their release ethics aren't top notch, but at least they START. If you buy a game and it doesn't run on your PC at all, you can take it back, or at the very least you can be angry on the Internet and people will understand. When I bought a game back in 1994 and it didn't run, I just shrugged because half the games I had didn't run. These days, we expect games to work, we expect customer support and we expect patches. There was a time when patches didn't exist, customer support didn't exist and whether your game ran on your computer was luck of the draw. That we can get angry at a game not running today is a sign of significant improvement.

It's a lot like me going back to the original Diablo because Diablo 2 pissed me off so much, and realising the graphics are ****, all the weapons and armour sets look the same, combat is horrid and the game isn't nearly as good as I remember it. I strongly suggest you check FreeOldies or Abandonia and try some of your old favourite games. You just try getting anything made since 1994 to run AND have sound, then see how buggy those old games are. And I hope you know what your sound card's IRQ and DMA are, because I had to find that out by trial and error. And no, I don't mean this as a challenge - a lot of old games are still great and work with no issue in DOSBox. Hell, 1989''s Blockout will work even under windows with no issues, and it's a damn fun game. But trying to find an old game that's as good as you remember it AND actually runs is a sobering experience.

I didn't say "troll." I said "flame." A troll is someone who's posting just to be disruptive and cause problems. Someone who flames is a person who's just being unfair and overly aggressive.

I personally don't subscribe to the notion that just because something is true, you have to make a point to say it. Yes, the truth hurts. You know it hurts. So unless you're trying to hurt people showing support, why say it? Why not just stick to solidarity and accept that even if these people didn't do as much as they could have, they are still showing support?

The thing is... We chide NCsoft for shutting down City of Heroes not because it wasn't profitable, but because it could have been more profitable, yet at the same time we turn people away because while they're showing support, they could have shown more support. Again - what's done is done. What do we do from here?

Maybe that's changed, but when I played, it did feel badly unpolished. Animations for everything were jerky and clunky, I kept getting caught on random geometry and several cutscenes gave me camera angles from underneath a British Bobbie's backside. Chatacter creation was also very unrefined, without any real ability to make a character that doesn't look ugly. And I don't mean "bad graphics," I mean a person who simply isn't attractive to me.

Jumping animations were almost enough to make me drop the game on the spot, at least for women. They're THAT BAD. It looks like my character squats and turns into a marble statue that gets slingshotted into the air. It kind of reminds me of those early 1990s dawn-of-3D games with the crude animations where everyone's doing the robot, from before IK and keyframes were invented. It's just... Bad.

Yes, those are all little things, but they make the game feel unpolished, and when I'm trying a game for the first time, lots of niggling little things are enough to turn me off, since they're all I'm seeing. I would have dropped Darksiders 2 on the spot if I hadn't already paid 50 Euro for it, because its first impressions are the worst of any game I've played in the last 10 years.

The Secret World may be innovative and interesting, but it lacks in presentation, and it lacks BAD.

And that's the problem. Far too many games are designed like glorified D&D campaigns, and far too many developers are all too happy to do nothing more than recreate that. I wouldn't blame Tolkein for the large number of Fantasy RPGs and MMOs. I would blame D&D for setting such a strong RPG framework that even... What? 30? 40 years later? Even decades later, we can't look past it.

And the real kicker is... I don't like D&D. I never have. I don't want my RPGs to be like it. If anything, I want my RPGs to be more like Soul Reaver or Darksiders or, let's face it, the Legend of Zelda that both games take inspiration from. Basically, I'm tired of medieval life simulations with dragons thrown in, or alternatively medieval life simulations hosted in a sci-fi setting. And there are almost no games that do this. Eve might, but that's for people with a stronger constitution than me.

Bad analogy. It's more like an FPS player found a particularly good, borderline unfair camping spot from where he can score massive frags and so get massive progress towards his gear unlocks, while other people can't get to him easily. Half the point in a game is to find better ways to do things and gain things.

Actually, I have a better analogy still. It's like Shield Charge. It's not rocket science to figure out that Shield Charge deals nearly nuke-level damage over a very large AoE radius, for a relatively low cost, no crash and with a recharge of 90 seconds. So you bet that when I took it and used it, I fell in love with the power and used it as much as possible. I didn't know it was broken at the time. Sure, I figured it out after a week or so of using it that I was levelling up too fast, but by that point...

Or I have an even better one. From Launch to Issue 2, Devices -> Smoke Grenade had a 50% to-hit debuff that stacked with itself. The only Blaster I had ever played and my second character ever was an AR/Dev Blaster and you can bet I used the hell out of Smoke Grenade. My health was low, my damage wasn't that good, so when I found a power that kept me alive, why would I NOT use it? It took several months before I played another Blaster and realise that the others just... Aren't as good. I kept wondering what their version of Smoke Grenade was, until it transpired that no-one had a version of it. Slowly, I started to realise the power was broken... And here I thought I was just a great player. So when it got brought back to 5% debuff, non-stacking, I took it well - by that point, I'd realised it was a bug.

I got neither banned nor warned for using either power, and I used the hell out of them. Trying to present finding clever ways to playing as some kind of crime is disingenuous and actually quite insulting.

It doesn't matter if it's intentional. It's entrapment if you're complicit in presenting a person with a situation of entrapment. You're far too fast to condemn people, when all you end up doing is creating a situation where players are expendable. Who cares about those 3000 people who got banned when they have millions? Who cares about those couple dozen thousand City of Heroes players when they have many millions of players across their other games?

I mean, seriously, if that were the case, we'd have lost thousands of people over the Winter Lords event, wouldn't we? When you bungle your game, you patch your game to stop the exploit and, at most, take back what was gained from it. You don't punish people for using what the game provides them, because you're basically punishing people for finding a more efficient way to play.

I'm with Tenzhi on this one: There's nothing wrong with blocking, and using "console games" like a derogatory term is unfair. Champions really isn't an action game or a console game, and most enemies who have attacks worth blocking give you easily two, three, even four seconds of warning. What's more, the longer their warning is, the easier these attacks are to dodge, as your dodge chance gets multipled by the length of the attack's charge-up.

The biggest thing to remember about Champions blocking is you're not supposed to react to every attack an NPC throws at you. You're not supposed to block every punch and every pistol shot. In fact, you'll never get anything done if you do. Play it like CoH - stand and fight, take he damage and keep going. Only block when you start seeing "Freem!" nonsense pop up. Or if you're out of energy, since blocking returns energy for damage resisted.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing. It's why the Steam Greenlight is full of "challenging 8-bit retro platformers." I'm afraid I can't join you in that, though, Bubba. I have what I'd describe as "counter-nostalgia" - I tend to remember games of the past as being inferior to games of the future, largely because I will often go back and play them. I used to think that the Lost Vikings was a superior game to its predecessor... Until I found it on FreeOldies.com and remembered just how **** gaming at the time was. Occasionally, I'll go back to the Prince of Persia 2 and remember exactly why I never finished it - because it's bugged and not very good. Sure, it was better than everything at the time, but that doesn't make it good NOW.

About as far as my nostalgia will go is old Capcom Arcade games, like Marvel vs. Capcom and Knights of the Round, or old SNK gems like Metal Slug, but only up to the second or at most third game. Maybe older Blizzard titles, like Blackthorne. Possibly Commander Keen games. Maybe I won't see them as so damn difficult now that I'm not eight years old and actually speak English.

However, if we're talking about business models, I'd say today's MMOs are better than a lot of the crap we got back then. The 90s, especially, were rife with crap, rushed, bugged titles. Anyone remember Fallout 2 without any of the subsequent patches? These days, if you buy a game, you kind of expect it to work and not crash of its own volitions. Back in the 90s, when I bought a game, whether it worked or not was a crapshot. Sometimes I didn't have the right hardware, sometimes I didn't have the right software, sometimes I didn't have enough EMS or XMS or what have you. And that's just trying to run shovelware the calibre of Action 52, or trying to win unwinnable games like Rick Dangerous or Dangerous Dave.

I'm not a fan of selling games to me in little bitty pieces, but if City of Heroes showed me one thing, it makes for better customization and a greater chance I could get what I wanted. Since my tastes are naturally counter-popularity, that's not as easy as you'd think. I'm always looking for something "different," and it's much easier to find this in a weird DLC costume set than in a whole game's overriding thematic.

Be that as it may, flaming them for it does not help. What's done is done, and I'd rather focus on making things right. We need support, and alienating supporters just because we're bitter helps nobody. Besides, what can we ask those people to do NOW?

BioWare used to make fantastic games. And because we, their fans, are idiots, we didn't spot the decline early enough. So we bought Mass Effect 3 still on an emotional high from the last two games and judged it on that merit. And when you put it up against the other two games, Mass Effect 3 just doesn't live up. It's not JUST the ending. Like your basic soap opera love story, the ending is just the moment of heartbreak that makes you look back with objective eyes on all the thing you sighed and looked past up to that point. No planet exploration? **** characters that don't go anywhere and have no personality *coughvegacough* Sorry, this plague is killing me. Weaker and less interesting combat, fewer supporting characters and no personal missions?

I look back on Mass Effect 3 and realise that the most touching and heart-warming stories, including the one that actually made me cry... Were basically the capstone of stories told in the previous two games. Every single one of the new stories was pretty much garbage, ending in that crowning moment of suck that was the Protean. At first, I didn't get why he spoke with an accent, right up until I placed what his accent was - African. And I know, because I spent six months with a couple of African students in the UK back in 2007. So he's a stereotype - the African tribal warrior who puts skill and viciousness before society. It's almost like I'm watching a bad anime.

Mass Effect 3 crashed and burned long before the ending, but I'm a stupid guy who lets faith in a gaming company blind me to obvious flaws. Right up until the very end, I was giving the game a chance and believing this would all add up to something, brushing away awkward exposition and flat character moments. Then the "godchild" happened and I knew exactly what I was playing - bad fanfiction. That's all Mass Effect 3 is. The previous two games were built on a complex political structure, ancient grudges and vastly different cultures. Then in Mass Effect 3, it's all resolved so simply you'd have to wonder why it took the Reapers to do it. And then that **** at the end just sealed it - someone let go of the wheel and the writing went off the road, into a ditch and off a sheer cliff. The ending is not just ****, it serves to undermine everything that was good about the series, ruins the Reapers and, pre the "apology" DLC, completely discarded your actions in the game.

The only reason I can enjoy Mass Effect as a "thing" any more is to pretend Mass Effect 3 never happened and the story ended with Mass Effect 2's amazing ending. That game made me care for all of its characters, even girl fanservice character Thane Krios. At least unlike that barefoot elf ******* in Mass Effect 2, Thane was a nice guy. And no Liara. Her voice actress is terrible. Samara may have been weird, but at least she had a more convincing voice. I cared about Grunt, despite his lack of character. I cared about Jack, even if she's the kind of person I'd normally find insufferable. I REALLY cared about Legion as that sort of story is really up my alley. Hell, I might have cared about Thane Krios if the bulk of his character development weren't locked behind a romance path.

As for Dragon Age 2, I have only two things to say: I HAAATE Anders and I love Knight Commander Meredith. It's so rare to see a female character in a game who is strong, capable, authoritarian and charismatic without either being slutty or old. Sure, she was battynuggers crazy and evil, sure, but she was still by far the most impressive character in that game.

I checked out the Gameplay video and the whole thing just isn't clicking with me. Everyone has Earthworm Jim feet and general cartoon caricature physiques, and the whole world looks like World of Warcraft. I realise that it's a kind of "frontier" sci-fi, which means the game will mostly take place on "wilderness" planets, but it has an art style that's far too reminiscent of Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. It just doesn't work for me.

I'll keep an eye out for more videos of the game, but so far, what I'm seeing isn't selling me. Honestly, when it comes to sci-fi, that sort of story isn't what I'm looking for. It seems to me that the Star Wars prequels did more damage to the sci-fi over-genre than anything else, since those movies were basically fantasy with space ships, and now anything even vaguely like them passes for sci-fi, instead. When I think "sci-fi," I think Chronicles of Riddick and more Event Horizon, despite the latter having a distinctly space-magic theme. Or, as my headphones just played - Advent Rising.

Excluding City of Heroes and sticking to just MMOs, I'd like to see something that looks as different from Fantasy as Champions Online and yet plays as differently from Fantasy as Spiral Knights.

That's the heart of the problem, really. Sci-fi and contemporary MMOs will never catch on while they try to be D&D in a non-fantasy setting. It's why I have a problem with games marketing themselves as "PvP, auction house, crafting, gear, raids" rather than as a setting - because it shows a developer sat down and copied EQ as seen though WoW and then tossed a sci-fi skin over it, and sci-fi shouldn't work like that.

City of Heroes was revolutionary in this aspect, in that the developers sat down and said to each other "OK, not all super heroes make sense be based around gear, so how do we make a system that isn't about gear?" Sure, they still came up with something "like" gear, but the circumstances surrounding it were still quite different. To me, for a sci-fi MMO to work, it has to be based off a different framework from the ground up. It shouldn't be about exploring forest punctuated by towns in search of dungeons and kill quests. In this, City of Heroes also innovates, in that the entire game takes place in a city environment where the "town" is pretty much the entire in-game world, with various vendors scattered about and missions taking place all over. Star Wars, I think, also had a good idea when introducing the "Shmillennium Shmalcon" as Yahtzee calls it

Hell, if anything, I find Star Trek Online to be one of the more "different" and aptly sci-fi MMOs out there, revolving around ship management and crew management, rather than killing rats for rags. I'd probably play it if it weren't a licensed Star Trek property (not a fan), but it has a good idea. Hard Truck: Apocalypse is another great example of an RPG taking a weird turn, though not necessarily an MMO. In there, you drive a vehicle that ranges from small pickup truck to a huge heavy container truck, that you can buy mods and guns for. It's basically an RPG where your "character" is a truck, which is what I imagine Auto Assault might have been had it been given a chance. Stuff like that which makes me sit up and go "Wait, why haven't I thought of this before?" that makes MMOs and games in general great to my mind.