Samuel_Tow

Out of the question. Absolutely out of the question. I REFUSE to play a game where the strongest characters belong to the players with the most disposable income. A game of "my wallet is bigger than your wallet" is not something I will pay money to play. I enjoy games because they're fair and relatively balanced. Sure, there are powergamers who will always be many times better than me, but I can accept that they simply are that good and that hardcore and deserve to be. I CANNOT accept the notion that people are better than me because they have more money in real life. It is plain and simple out of the question.

And then, there's the other side of the coin - once this becomes the benchmark, as it does in all games that use this model, it becomes a game of poverty. Because I don't want to shell out for perks, I'm always taking the hardest road everywhere, always taking longer to do everything and always suffering much harder difficulties, all because I wouldn't line the pockets of the developers some more. No, thank you. I pay my tax and I'm an equal citizen. I'm not a lower-class citizen because some Banker Cat is paying more.

I don't CARE what this does to the game, how it affects it or what profit it brings, because I won't be playing it to find out.

Jumping towards things isn't an option, as I'm constantly hovering.

But if I'm not going to be staying in melee, what use am I getting out of Blazing Aura, which is only a tick above melee range anyway? It's not going to give me any fast damage, of that I'm well aware, so the only way to make any real use of it is to stay in melee, which gets me killed. Also, I do try jousting when I can, but it always ends up with me trading attacks with the enemy. As mine activates while I'm out of range of him, his activates while he's out of range of me. I've eaten more than a few Thunder Strikes and Total Focuses that way.

That, and this is very different from playing melee on Energy Manipulation, which allowed me to dive in for fast, strong attacks and then dive back out. Lacking fast, strong melee attacks as is the case with Fire Manipulation, what is there to joust with? I mean, sure, Fire Sword isn't half bad, but just that on its own doesn't make for much of an offence and neither Fire Sword Circle nor Combustion are really all that good for jousting, between their slow animations and high reliance on positioning. And my damage auras are outright incompatible with jousting altogether, seen as how they need time in melee to do anything meaningful.

I've been asking for something like this for years. I like giving my characters names which look cool in print and sound impressive in descriptions. Inevitably, they end up being quite clunky to actually say in conversation, leading to "Good night, John Spartan. Be well." moments. I've always wanted to give my characters nicknames which would appear in character dialogue and NPC comments. Just something that sounds a bit easier on the ears than a full, complicated name.

About the only thing I'd get behind is giving more rewards for more enemies defeated. Everything else has the potential of making things really horrible. Punishing people for doing it faster is not a good idea, and giving vastly higher rewards for higher difficulty settings would simply ensure I never get to do a TF again. My characters plain SUCK at high difficulty settings, and I just know every TF team will want the maximum rewards. Kind of like how people keep thinking Invincible is the only difficulty setting for missions.

I actually have to partly agree on the part about Boomtown. It can be VERY monotonous. To a point, exploring it from the air gives you a greater appreciation of the scale of the zone and its unique topography, specifically when you find the location in Boomtown that the "flooded Boomtown" map has been taken from. It's on a VERY high plateau towards the middle of the zone, and it's actually pretty cool going there. But, yes, to a large extent, it IS monotonous.

But here's the thing - one man's wilderness is another man's wasteland. But there's no reason why BOTH can't be the same thing. In a way that's completely impractical, I actually ENJOY a wilderness. One thing not just this game, but EVERY game I've ever played has lacked is a sense of scale. I've complained about this before, but it always feels to me like the world is too small. Blue-side, I can kind of pretend it's more expansive by looking out the War Walls and imagining a sprawling city beyond, but red-side it's completely impossible. The only two islands that look even remotely realistically big are Cap Au Diable and Port Oaks, and only because they're the same island and have "generic" land in-between that we get to see and know it's there, but not explore and so waste developer hours making it interesting. It's just grassland, but it's THERE!

To a very large extent, the whole game feels like a city from Civilization - one square of land with a few tower blocks representing the ICON of a city, without actually BEING a city. Of course, Fallout 3 demonstrates the sheer limitations of open terrain quite clearly. The game is TINY in comparison to all the other Fallout games, being consigned to, essentially, a small section of a city and its suburbia. It's also CRAMMED with copy-pasted metro tunnels, reused buildings and lots of flat ground to walk across. It's also a PAIN to get around, even if you want to explore. "Say, these hills on the map look suspicious. I wonder what's over there." 15 minutes later, there's only the location of a mission you haven't taken and can't do anything there. Cue the cluster F-bomb.

A truly big world in the way I'm describing is outwardly impossible to make, at least given what I've seen of contemporary games. It's murder on the development team, it costs too much money and it's problematic for the players who don't enjoy exploring and trekking full time. As a one-off game specifically made for the exploration of the wondrous, such as, say, Aquaria, one of the best, most atmospheric games I've ever played. But even that can be a bit overwhelming to replay, knowing the SHEER SCALE of the world.

I'm well aware of the problems, folks. You don't have to keep reminding me. I still believe, however, that we can make zones, locations and missions FEEL more like wilderness and wasteland without BEING inconvenient wilderness and monotonous wasteland. It's a question of theme and design more so than a question of sheer volume or hardline limitations. For instance, shifting my reliance away from hospitals in the city and more on respawn points IN the mission is a big thing for me. The jails in some missions and the EMT trucks in Safeguard missions are a great addition, in my opinion. And, to boot, they're also convenient. In fact, I think it's really cool when the whole team wipes, we all get sent to jail and get to break out together. Oh, sure, there's debt, but there's little in the game that takes you away from your comfort zone of linear progression through the enemy ranks, so I'll take what I get.

I never meant to suggest that vast open tracts of land without enemies or useful objectives was a good idea. This isn't Deus (major points for anyone who knows what I'm talking about and, no, NOT Deus Ex). But, say, a zone STYLED as a wilderness would be really cool, with contacts restricted to the few controlled encampments. Like... The Shadow Shard! Only with an actually POINT to go there. With missions and arcs and interesting stories, not just "Oh, here are the zones! Play them!" Really, there's no reason why we can't have interesting story arcs AND have them take place in a location that looks and feels like a wilderness. In fact, I'd say Nerva's Primeva is a very good example of this.

This is solely about theme.

Back to front:

Something interesting occurred to me the other day, in regards to why I felt I wanted to make this thread and the topic behind it. As some of you may remember, I made a thread about my supposed inability to make characters in THIS world as a creative decision, and to a large extent I'm starting to feel like both topics are sort of interlinked with each other.

It is becoming obvious to me that a lot of posters here, I dare even say most, are on a different page from me when I say "exploration." I never really meant the act of going out in a wide-open world and looking for the hidden things in out-of-the-way locations. Obviously, that is a very legitimate interpretation of "exploration," but I simply lack a better word to describe it. However, view this in a context of someone who enjoys "elseworld" stories much more so than stories set in the here and now. As a matter of fact, that's one of the key reasons I dislike Fantasy settings. They have been done so many times they may as well be the here and now. No longer are they mysterious and wondrous and, dare I say it, even "fantastic." They're status quo.

When I say "exploration," to a large extent I mean something mid-way between hiking and visiting an "outworld" environment that isn't within the direct control of practically anyone. This doesn't have to be something as far removed from reality as the Shadow Shard, really. Things as simple as the sewers, the outskirts of town, even just basic cave complexes are interesting to me in this way. In fact, I really appreciated the old Hazard Zones DESPITE the fact that they were completely pointless and needless. Yes, the new Faultline is a lot better to play in, but with authorities spanning the entire thing, the lack of the deep, impressive cracks and with everything "in control," it is no longer as interesting to actually BE in.

It has always been my hope that the developers could reclaim these zones in terms of content, but NOT in terms of rebuilding them. I've seen a lot of suggestions to lift the fog in Dark Astoria or rebuild Boomtown and so forth. I'd rather that didn't happen. Give people reason to go there, by all means, but don't mess with the theme and feel of the environment. Heavens knows that most of the places we go to already are well within the control of authorities to a large extent, or at the very least consist of a village and outskirts. Take Croatoa, for instance. Yes, the small town is quite helpless, and there are plenty of hills and forests around, but at no point are you really out of sight of the town of Salmacia. Compare that to the Storm Palace, where you are so far down the deep end that not only is FBZ out of sight, but pretty much out of mind, as well.

What I want is a sewer that goes deeper and deeper and deeper, a forest that goes farther and farther and farther, an alien world that goes on and on and on. It doesn't even have to be that big in actual SIZE, so long as the FEEL of being far away from everything and everyone remains palpable.

Here's a theoretical framework, let's say for an elseworld location. You start off in a large, well-entrenched encampment where everything is safe and everyone is in control. You move out to a large, fortified outpost still with all amenities. But as you move farther and farther away, the outposts become smaller and less equipped, eventually being reduced to just a cave with some equipment and a couple of people hoping they aren't discovered. The Shadow Shard is a PERFECT place to make something like this. FBZ and its surroundings are well-entrenched, and the Cascades have a large, well-stocked Mole Point. Getting rid of the cop-out teleporters and replacing them with progressively smaller and less-equipped mole points would go a LONG way towards helping the feel of the zone. Instituting in-zone teleporters might not be a bad idea, as well. Not exactly island-to-island teleporters, but at least to a few select locations on the map might be cool.

Actually, one of the things I've always wanted to see has been an Oranbega-style underground zone similar to the sewer networkd, one which could span in-between the different high-level zones, even going up to the islands like that tunnel from Grandville to the Fab. I don't specifically want to be thrust into the wilderness and held there for long stretches of time and many, many missions, mind you. I tried that and I didn't like it. But as a change of pace, with missions thematically appropriate to being in a wilderness, that could actually be quite atmospheric.

Personally, asymmetry would do almost nothing for me. We already have a few asymmetrical options, like the Shoulder Cape, Gladiator Shoulders and the various one-arm robotic arms, and in five years I've used those a grand total of once. It just doesn't do it for me.

That said, I cannot argue against the ability to do so, as I fully agree it is a very good thing. I wouldn't go overboard with it, but being able to select gloves, boots and shoulders separately for left and right, as well as having the ability to mirror single-arm robotic arms is definitely something I want to see.

Personally, I always found the notion of holding a sword in one hand a gun in the other to just look plain absurd as a consistent fighting style, as it's usually the domain of forced combos. If we DID have a sword/gun combo, I'd much rather it be something more reminiscent of Devil May Cry, where you switch between weapons instantly (if Dante can do it, why can't I?), or a straight-up gunblade. In fact, I'd actually go for DUAL GUNBLADES as used in Oniblade (I'd link to X-Blades, the US version, but that has crappy videos on GameTrailers and the English voice-over sucks), though I can see how people might scream bloody murder over something like that.

Now, I realise this is kind of a vague question, so let me see if I can't break it down into something more specific. I've played with Fire Manipulation for some time, and at one point I may have had the illusion that I knew what I was doing, but after leaving this Blaster to rest for nearly a year, I rather doubt this. Fire Manipulation is one of these sets that seem odd on the AT they are for, and have a lot of what look to be eccentric powers that don't seem to jive with how the AT "wants" to be played. As such, let me ask four specific questions:

1. What is Blazing Aura for? On a Tank, Scrapper or Brute I can see this, but on a Blaster, having a damage aura seems remarkably silly. For a damage aura to have much use, it has to continuously damage enemies for some time. That, however, would mean that I have to continuously stay in melee with said enemies for some time, which pretty much guarantees they'll do more damage to me than I will to them. What use do I have for this power and what do I do with it?

2. What is Burn for? Were this a Fire Tanker back in 2004, I wouldn't even need to ask this question, but for a Blaster right now? The offensive capabilities of this power are more than questionable, with a 25 second recharge timer, no ability to slot for accuracy and the need to immobilise enemies inside the Burn patch. Better to just pop them in the face with something like Blaze, no? I could possibly see it as adefensive power to combat immobilization, but I'm not sure how much use that has if I haven't used it for that once up to this point.

3. What are Fire Sword Circle and Combustion for? Obviously, AoE attacks are pretty much what a Blaster does, but melee-based AoE attacks seem to be more of a liability than a boon, especially when both attacks are so infuriatingly slow, and for what looks to be really no reason. Combustion, especially, is just slow for the sake of being slow, or so it seems. What do I do with these powers without getting killed for it?

But most importantly:

4. What is Hot Feet for? I really can't make heads or tails of this power. Is it a damage aura? Isn't that what Blazing Aura is for? Is it a slow field. What use could I have for something like this? And why in hot hell does it cost so absurdly much? Over 1.0 endurance per second. What in the world could be worth that kind of cost? Just... What the hell, man? What the hell?

Any answers to any of the above, especially number 4, would be very appreciated.