Samuel_Tow

If by "no different from City of Heroes" you mean "completely different from City of Heroes," then yes.

I want instanced missions that tell a story. I don't want overworld tasks that exist for the sake of having something to do. I would sooner play an MMO that's all instances than an MMO that has few if any instances at all. I don't need (or want) to see other people in the game world, and Angry Joe's touted "social" side of overworld questing doesn't make me feel more social. It makes me feel more irritated that other people are stepping in on my game time.

I'm by far at my most sociable in City of Heroes, when I'm by myself in an instance and I'm not forced to interact with other people. That's, really, the only time I ever feel like I WANT to interact with them - when they're not in my face.

World of Tanks, Champions Online, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time/Warrior Within/The Two Thrones/Forgotten Sands/2008, Warhammer 40 000: Space Marine, Torchlight 2, Left 4 Dead 2, X-Com: Enemy Unknown (the remake), Castle Story, Darksiders: Rise of War/Death Rides, Spiral Knights, the Broken Sword trilogy (bought, never launched) and that's just the stuff I own on Steam or have installed right now.

Steam Greenlight launched recently, and it's already showing me several games I want to see happen, such as Minewars 2081, and they're offering sequel to the amazing but underappreciated Natural Selection Half-Life mod. At some point, I'll get around to Max Payne, maybe Arkham City and even Prototype 2 if I'm feeling really bored.

I'm not left without a game in the absence of City of Heroes. What I'm left without is a standby, but I can work something out. If I stick out for City of Heroes, it's for the sake of Paragon Studios and because it's a damn good game, not because I'm lost without it. I have options and I STILL want City of Heroes more than any of them.

Hah! A man after my own heart. I'd love that, as well. Didn't even think of it

Yup. I never wanted an MMO to begin with, nor all the time-sing busywork garbage that comes with it. Many people have, over the years, told me to "go back to playing single-player games," forcing me to explain to them that I would if a single-player version of City of Heroes existed.

So if a single-player version of City of Heroes existed, then yes, I would very much play that and enjoy it greatly.

That's what killed me about the quests, too. I played as a Norn, and almost all of my quests constituted "Go to this idol and do menial tasks to worship the animal of the idol." Tasks went from relatively interesting like raiding a monster mine to save kidnapped lion cubs to the mundane of killing invading critters, to the downright bizzarre like catching fish and feeding it to bear cubs. The story behind them? Erm... I'm honouring the animal spirits. That's about it.

Once upon a time, I chided City of Villains - and chided it severely - for having what passes for stories that's actually nothing but time-wasting busy-work. You need look no farther than Angelo Vendetti or Lorenz Ansaldo or the ******* Shadowy Figure. Their stories come out of nowhere, go nowhere and accomplish nothing. They "reward" me with "money" by telling me I've been rewarded by money, but they reward ME - the player - with jack ****. Money, loot, experience... Yeah, being rewarded with numbers is nice, I guess, but consider what classic City of Heroes story arcs reward me with: Story!

A mission reveals that the Skulls are working for the Family, selling drugs to the Trolls. Another mission reveals that the Clockwork King's minions aren't robots at all, but psychically-controlled puppets. Another mission still shows me that Requiem is a hypocrite who pretends to rule the 5th Column with ideology, but is just after power in the end. These are rewards which flesh out the world and give me reason to care. They stem from the game's bountiful lore, they add to that lore and they bring me more of the story such that I have something to care about. I CARE that 50 years ago, America drafted its super heroes, and the shadowy conspiracy that stood behind this "Might For Right" act. I care that Nemesis punked the Freedom Phalanx back in 2002 when he never actually left and spent years building up his armies.

I don't care that the bear spirit's cubs are fed and its shamen are lying in a bloody puddle. I don't care that random rampaging minotaurs are no longer rampaging, despite seeing them off in the distance rampaging away. It's busywork. And it's busywork that never ends. I can clear out an instance and feel satisfied. I can't clear out the overworld because it has to account for other people, so I can never SEE myself accomplishing anything. Sure, the major "personal storyline" quests are top notch, but that's not the bulk of what I spend my time doing.

I considered doing this, but at the time I was told you can't bind anything to the left mouse button. If I could have, I would have.

I think it looks different from what you'd see just about anywhere, what with the flying billboards and the alien mothership in the river. Making the Secret World's combat bearable would have gone a long way towards helping me give it a fair chance, but I can't play a game I can't play.

Incidentally, I tried circle-strafing, but I was mostly fighting a line of slow-moving zombies. Strafing around one put me in the clutches of another. Backing away from them seemed more effective.

You know... Now that the game doesn't FORCE me there, I don't think I'd be AS turned off by Canada and the Desert. As with City of Heroes, I do appreciate the occasional theme divergence. I'm just gobsmacked that Jack Emmert took this desire for variety as meaning people didn't want a city setting, so he moved the game out to the wilderness. Millennium City is solid enough to carry a game. If I move away from it, that's fine, provided at least part of the game still takes place there.

I don't know if you should sub on YouTube since the home for his reviews is either on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or on The Angry Joe Show, but you really should follow his work. Angry Joe is one of the few Internet critics out there who does what he can to be fair, informative and honest in his reviews. When he does do gimmicks and overacting, it always goes hand-in-hand with a broader point he's trying to make. If you want to know about a game, watch his reviews. Few do it better.

Actually, the first thing I did was join a channel called "CoX," which had a lot of pretty active and very friendly people in it. Granted, I didn't go to Champions Online for the teaming, but I found the people in that channel to be awesome just the same. If you decide to give it another shot, I'd start there.

Not generally, but yes - an MMO taking place entirely in a civilised area IS something I'd play... It's something I'm playing right now I don't know if Deus Ex would be it, though, just because I dislike the Deus Ex "Bladerunner" story, but yes, something like that would be good for me. A somewhat contemporary world, but pushed into the future with sci-fi technology, with society buckling under the strain of adapting to a new way of life. That I would play, provided the story isn't too restrictive.

I don't, no. I try to have an economy of replies just so I don't spend hours replying, and things I wanted to say either go as side notes on other comments or get dropped out entirely. I'm left with the impression that I addressed your post indirectly, but per chance I simply forgot, let me explain:

I like Final Fantasy not because of the fantasy elements in it, but because it's ostensibly a sci-fi world that has fantasy elements in it. Consider the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within movie. That takes place on a high-tech, post-apocalyptic future of Earth where people live in megacities surrounded by forcefields, travel around in Star Craft dropships, wear Brotherhood of Steel power armour and fire mock Aliens pulse rifles. It's "fantasy" to the extent that the enemies are the spirits of dead aliens, fallen to earth as a piece of their dead planet crashed into ours. It's a sci-fi movie with a semi-fantasy storyline, but it doesn't take place in a Fantasy setting of enchanted forests and ancient wizards and mystical creatures. It's a spinoff from a contemporary world.

I like Arcanum not because it has magic and elves and dwarves in it, but more because it plays itself as a deconstruction of the genre, and that's pretty much the ONLY "deconstruction" I've ever enjoyed. Have you actually played the game? Arcanum isn't a Fantasy game with Steampunk technology. Arcanum is a Victorian era industrial revolution game with Fantasy elements thrown into it. It plays on the clash of the old with the new, depicting an emerging modern world driven by commerce, engineering and industry encroaching onto the rural, more "natural" world of the past. It's a clash of cultures and is deeply rooted not just in magic and technology, but in how human society evolves between ages of its development. Arcanum works because it uses Fantasy tropes in a world that really isn't built for Fantasy themes, aside from a few pockets of more traditional mysticism that only serve to highlight the rapid changes.

In both of these games, Fantasy exists as only one element, added for contrast to a world of a much different central theme. Guild Wars is a world with a central theme of Fantasy that just happens to have elements of a dissimilar theme, but electric rifles and steampunk technology don't detract from a Fantasy setting being what it is. Guild Wars 2 is a Fantasy game, and that simply is a theme which interests me less and less the more of these get made. Personal preference, simply.

My apologies. I didn't mess with either race much because I find them both unrepentantly ugly. That's not a value judgemet, I just don't like their art style. Sure, I've made "weird" characters in City of Heroes, and plenty of them, but I've always tried to incorporate some degree of "verisimilitude" into them that let my brain still perceive them as "people." This works with Humans, obviously, as well as Norn who are just larger humans. It works with the Silvari as it's fairly trivial to "fix" their faces to appear more "identifiable," but this isn't the case with the other races. I tried, failed and move on. Since liking the character I'm playing as is crucial for my enjoyment, even if I do go back to that game, I still won't get into their respective storylines.

Yes, it is. That's how MMOs and RPGs have been made for years now, and I'd just like to see one done differently. I'd like to see one with water that isn't wet, so to speak. I'm just tired of MMOs sending me out into "terrain" to do "quest" as a basic framework for the game. For all its quirks, City of Heroes did stray from this formula. It didn't send me to "terrain," it sent me into instances - and there's a massive difference.

I never got into MMOs much because I never really enjoyed the whole "persistent world" thing. For as much as I badmouth Guild Wars 2, I DO like the original Guild Wars' largely instanced world, with only towns serving as hubs. That, at least, is different.

As well, urban terrain is - to me - far more interesting than a forest or a desert or a mountain or a cave. It is, because it's man-made. At this point, I've seen nature in games. I've seen the hell out of it. It doesn't matter how well you do it by now, I've seen nature. Settings that AREN'T nature interest me far more so.

It pissed me off because it was a click-n-kill game masquerading as an action game. Sure, your character's orientation matters, but you're still mouse-pointing and tab-targeting for the majority of your skills. Sure, the game gives you an action-game-style "basic attack" (mine was shooting pistols), but it binds that to my 1 key. I control with WASDF, with my pinky on A, my ring finger on W, my middle finger on D and my index finger on F. To press 1, I need to let go of my movement controls, but to survive, I need to shoot at zombies while backpedalling away from them, which in turn requires me to tie my fingers in a knot. If I could do what ACTUAL action games do and mind my attack key to the left mouse button so I can shoot AND move at the same time since the game asks me to, then I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it. Turns out I can't bind stuff to the left mouse button, or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it.

Tera did action combat right, specifically by putting my attack on the left mouse button, my block/dodge on the right mouse button and letting me define my combos so that I could, if I so chose, never press a number key. THEN action combat is actually action. What the Secret World does is why I hate the new "challenging" bosses in City of Heroes - because it makes the game feel cumbersome and it makes my fingers hurt.

You wouldn't believe how delighted I was by this. I took the bait and tried Champions Online today, just to see what the "level-10-locked" costume pieces were like. Getting out of the tutorial and NOT tossed into a forest or a desert is why I kept playing past that. I've tried Champions Online intermittently over the years, and every time I've stopped when I left the tutorial. Tossing me into Canada or "the desert" just threw me out of the game and I simply didn't go back. At least Millennium City looks different from what you'd see in most MMOs.

What constitutes having the rug pulled under us isn't that the game ends, but rather how little warning we got. People will relish in "I told you so!" because they were seeing low numbers or something, but the development team was excited about the game, weaving long-term plans and insisting the game was profitable. It's the sheer surprise at the game being discontinued for what feels like corporate politics that pisses me off, personally. If the game were a ghost town with barely any upkeep or development and THEN it shut down, I'd simply say I saw it coming and move on. But the game shut down mere hours after a coffee talk teasing future content. That's just... Wrong.

I'm right there with you. Radical thinking like this is not just unpleasant to me, it's outright scary. It tells me people are willing to hurt innocents just because of their affiliation, and that's something I can ever agree with.

Not what I said though. Or maybe it is, I lost track of the source post, but not what I meant, let's say. I'm not saying the Secret World is about shooting zombies in forests. I'm saying that's the first thing it asked me to do after coming out of the tutorial. That's not passing judgement on the game so much as saying that, even when it's NOT about forests, developers still don't feel comfortable unless they at least start in a forest.

Truth be told, Solomon Island more reminds me of Dead Island than anything else (horrid character models included), which is a fair bit more unique than your average run-of-the-mill forest fantasy. Honestly, I have nothing against the Solomon Island setting. It has a nice mix if rural town, forested countryside and shoreline area, plus the storylines - when they show up - aren't half bad. It's just that when I got tossed into a forest and run into an honest-to-God cowboy in a tent, I rolled my eyes. Hard.

Shooting monsters in a subway you say? Yeah, I actually wanted to do more of that, personally.

I tried the game in the very last open beta weekend right before launch. I got talked into it, and decided to see if this was worth spending money on. The answer is... No, not really. The general idea isn't bad, but I hate the graphics, the character creator and ESPECIALLY the combat system. If it were F2P? Sure, I'd give it a shot, but not for $50. I just really, really didn't like the combat system, and if I hate the bulk of what I'm doing in a game, I can't play it. That, and missions which ask me to go on the Internet to solve them don't sit well with me.

Yeah, that part of my problem with it - I just don't like the character I'm asked to play. I didn't like how she looked and I didn't like how she behaved. That's the big problem with "story-driven" games. If I don't like the story, I don't like the game, and the Secret World's story is kind of very specific. City of Heroes was partially story-driven, sure, but I could pick the story. If I didn't like the one I'm offered, I could always pick another. I really don't get why more MMOs don't do that.

Consider that CoH had no overarching story. You were plopped down into a persistent world and given options of stories to pursue. That way, you could pick from a variety of plots that take part in this fictional world. So many games after it try to introduce a "main" storyline with "side quests" and I don't get why that is. Having a "main" storyline railroads your writing into a very narrow path. It's good for a single-player game, but why does it have to be in an MMO? Sure, it's probably going to be fun to play through someone else's view of my character once, but I make alts. How many times am I expected to play through the "main" story?

To me, a good MMO should work like the Mission Architect - you have a collection of stories that you can take on, and you pick the one you're interested in. These stories can reference each other and be sequels of each other, but none of them are "main." Really, having an overarching plot is what detracts from both City of Villains and Going Rogue. If I don't like being Recluse's flunkie or caught up in a war, I'm pretty much not going to get much out of either side. And it doesn't have to be like that. 2004's City of Heroes got it right, and we've been "fixing" it ever since.

I don't know... When I saw the trailer, I REALLY liked the relatively sci-fi setting and I very, very much enjoyed a game with non-human protagonists... But that bunny lady just pissed me the hell off. She's like a walking fetish reel, and I just CANNOT stand those horrid, pointy-toe thigh-high high-heel boots she's wearing. I'd get it if she always flew or if she were magic somehow, but she's running in those things. And on loose sand and dirt. Ugh!

I can't say whether the game will be good or bad, honestly. I just didn't like the trailer much.

You keep missing my point. I don't want Guild Wars 2 because I don't want a Fantasy game. I don't care what you do to a Fantasy game, it'll simply not be one I want. Arcanum and Final Fantasy are about as far as I'm willing to stretch it, but even then I'm more interested in the non-fantasy elements. Guild Wars 2 is a Fantasy game, and that's not something I want to play. That was never something I wanted to play. Me, I'm a fan of the old StarCraft game and its thematic world, especially that original trailer that turned into its intro. You can do a lot of stuff with Fantasy, but none of what you describe interests me much. ESPECIALLY none of what I saw the first few hours of gameplay. Maybe I just didn't pick the right race, but the Norn world looks like I'm playing Rune with better graphics.

Like Asura's Wrath? OK, I'll remember that. Sorry about my faulty memory. I just never messed with them. I mostly messed with the Norn and the Silvari. Didn't really mess with humans, the... Asura and the big cat people.

Shooting zombies in a forest is about as far as I got into it. The combat system in that game REALLY pissed me off so I didn't see much of it. And my comment wasn't so much that the Secret World is Fantasy as it was that I just can't get away from forests, it seems. Even in games that shouldn't be about that. Hell, even Champions Online, in its infinite wisdom, decided that cities are passée and booted people off to either a forest or a desert right out of the tutorial. I hear that's changed, and I will not miss either of those environments. At least a city-scape overworld looks a little less like everything I've ever seen ever than a forest or a desert.

To be fair, I only put people on ignore if they said something offensive (had a few there for racist or homophobic remarks) or if it seemed that there was no way in hell we'd ever see eye to eye and bickering was just going to leave us both bitter. I did clean out my Ignore list when the news hit... And proceeded to fill it right back up with completely different people who took it upon themselves to attack others for varying reasons.

But no, I never hated the community. I know I've said a few times that "the biggest problem with this game is other people," but that's more a reference to a simple phenomenon: There wasn't a problem I had with the game which couldn't be made worse when I bought it to the forums and people took it upon themselves to tell me how stupid and wrong I am for having that problem. In either case, it's never "the community" that was at fault, just specific people. Lo and behold, when I put a few "specific people" on ignore, I stopped having problems almost altogether.

I care for the community, Tenzhi. Aside from small groups of friends, this is the only place I know where I can bring small, esoteric ideas and count on people to take them seriously and help me discuss them with civility. The nature of villainy between glamorous and disgusting evil, the quirks of writing characters who come off as friends, the nature of wanting our characters to be narratively unique vs. wanting them to be part of a group and so on. Many of these tangents had relatively little to do with the actual game and more with the community that had built up around it, and I respect our community greatly... Even when people are telling me I have an anti-social disorder or that "people like me" are why Americans can't have nice things. Or, famously, Golden Girl telling me I'm gay. I laughed my *** off at that one, and am currently looking for a replacement. Not having one makes sitting down awkward.

Honestly, even if the game went away, I'd still come to the forums. If those particular ones went away with the game, I'd keep coming to wherever the community moved to. Unleashed? The Titan Network? Wherever. I like our community, simple as that.

I asked what Prometheus gave mankind that Ermeeth didn't give mankind first. Ermeeth, apprentice to Tielekku, is the one who taught mankind the art of magic, which Tielekku felt should be only the realm of the gods. With Magic, humans could match the gods in power and create great empires. It is because of magic that the nation of Oranbega first came into existence 14 000 years ago. Judging by all of those Fire Thorn Casters, it seems to me like people wouldn't have had much need for someone to specifically teach them fire as separate from their magical abilities.

Why I ask this is that Ermeeth already WAS the City of Heroes Prometheus, and bring in a literal Prometheus just feel like telling the same story twice, not to mention that it puts the two gods' gifts in competition. The best I could guess is this goes is this goes along the lines of the Incarnate re-write where the source of super powers became abstract and the story tried to explain people being smart as them having some link to a source of potential. I guess you could argue that Prometheus gave humans "potential," but it just seems to me that Ermeeth got there first.

I haven't tried it. Between the "expanded universe" and the prequels, the Star Wars universe no longer holds any interest to me.

*edit*
I mean, yeah, it's sci-fi... Kind of. It's sci-fi fantasy, which would normally be a good idea, but games built on pre-existing franchises really don't work for me. I'd sooner pick Guild Wars over that, honestly.

Honestly? A non-fantasy setting. That's not a fair thing to say in commentary to a fantasy game, yes, but I'm really just done with fantasy. Have been for 15 years at this point.

If I had to compromise, I'd say Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. It's still Fantasy, for the most part, but it's industrial revolution fantasy that pits magic(k?) against steam technology, and develops a whole world mythology around the ways technology and magic interfere with each other. It's still elves and orcs and dwarves, but it's an unusual, and at this point pretty unique take on fantasy.

Or if I want to be ambitious, a Final Fantasy VII type world. That setting is basically a Fantasy, with large open fields, magical creatures and even gods, to some extent, but it's also dotted with high-tech cities and comprises a story revolving people finding a way to harness the souls of the dead via "Mako" reactors, thus wrapping both magic and technology into a seamless whole. You don't see that too often, even in other Final Fantasy games, and ESPECIALLY in the Final Fantasy MMOs.

Or Warhammer 40K, I guess, but I hear that turned into a single-player game.

What the hell did I miss in that coffee talk and can I please see that part?

Not necessarily. Yes, companies want to make money, but most have at least some regard as to HOW they do it. If NCsoft discovered that delivering pizzas brought in more money, they wouldn't sack their entire development staff and start trying to hire pizza chefs.

Corporations care about money, but they also realise that this money has to come from the public, hence why image matters. That's why boycots don't work where whining tends to. Boycotting a large corporation is almost pointless unless you have millions of people at your side - which we don't. However, you very much CAN hurt a corporation's image with bad press, and given the nature of the Internet, that CAN sting.

All of this doesn't necessarily apply to NCsoft, of course. At this point, they don't seem to give a toss about what the West thinks of them since they apparently don't want that market. By extension, I've never gotten the impression that Korean players give two rats about American titles, by and large, considering how American titles tend to bomb in Korea. So, yeah, NCsoft may not be as concerned with its image. I can't say.

Well... Yes and no. Everyone who gets into an MMO has to realise that the game will "end" sooner or later. We all accepted this years ago. It's the suddenness of the news, as well as the perceived irrationality of it that contribute so much to the feeling of shock and anger. If we'd seen this coming a mile away, I'm sure many more would have made their peace with the game and accepted it, but we all thought things were going swell. The developers were releasing teasers right up until they got fired.

It's when the end comes as a shock that people get pissed off the most, I think. And that kind of shock does little to endear the company responsible.