Samuel_Tow

Playing in a sandbox is a lot like writing fanfiction - one day, word of god can simply render your entire fictional universe addon contradictory, and there's nothing you can do about it. While that's an accepted risk, I feel a good sandbox should be weary of doing this for no reason whatsoever, especially with the full knowledge that it's going to happen. It's one thing to change Positron's Tron stripes from blue to green, not knowing that Blue Stripe Man's entire origin is that he was born of the Positron's Blue Stripes. That's unpredictable and just the nature of giving people the freedom of thought. It's quite another to somehow miss the masses of people having large, repeated discussions about the meaning of Origins and citing many, many examples of bending origins to fit concepts. This has been all over the forums for as long as I've been here, and I'm sure it was a "thing" on the pre-beta forums before me.

If Paragon Studios so wanted, they could ret-con the whole game to explain how My Little Pony characters created the world and our player characters and then limit our colour spectrum to pink, blue and yellow... But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to do this. Obviously, when I made many of my characters, I assumed their origin wasn't Bronie - and that IS an assumption, albeit a reasonable one - so if that happens, I'll really have no-one but myself to blame for not having My Little Pony characters on my roster. That doesn't mean I won't have a leg to stand on in arguing that such a thing is needlessly restrictive, and in a game which was much more open-ended before.

The basic point is that while people writing fanfiction in a sandbox are indeed flying by the seat of their pants, the developers of said sandbox aren't necessarily free to change whatever they want, whenever they want and for any reason they fancy. They could, but that doesn't mean they should. Moreover, in a lot of cases, they don't even have to. The Well of the Furies could have been handled differently, been drawn up as a less invasive force, and the result would still have been achieved. That is, of course, assuming stifling creative freedom wasn't the actual point, but I don't like to think that it was.

It would. If being taken over by the well and controlled resulted in a crowning moment of awesome when I cast it out... I can deal with it, even if it's not exactly to-concept. If it comes to a cool end, I can gloss over many of the shortcomings along the way.

You're right, I misspoke. It's one of the very few things we've been consistently not allowed to have. The list is rather a bit larger than I made it out to be. Integrated shoulders, skirts below the knee, multiple cape rigs, jackets for women and more... I just mean that the integrated shoulders piece is one that has always been flatly refused to us.

There is a way, as I hear it - Trials. However, Dark Astoria is the only solo Incarnate path that's worth a crap, and that requires you to have unlocked your Alpha slot just to participate in it, so that out doesn't exist if I don't want to raid-grind... Or be force-fed Praetoria. Besides, telling me to just ignore the content is just a clear admission that the content is not good. I still keep a quote from Matt Miller directed at my dislike of red electricity when Electric Melee for Brutes first came out saying that "You don't have to use it if you don't like it." That's just not a very good design practice when you're trying to design things people are supposed to want to use.

City of Heroes' story used to be one of its selling points. That time after time, player after player is advised to simply ignore it is a bad thing.

You still need to unlock the Alpha Slot to engage into it, and the only solo way to do this is vial Mender Ramiel's arc. And even if I didn't do it, the Well is still involved with the storyline to the best of my understanding. And again - if we CAN turn our backs on something that can apparently control people who draw from its power, then THAT would make for a compelling storyline I'd like to experience, as opposed to ignoring.

So, his level is Architect Entertainment, or in other words, "go play with your toys." It seems to fit

All of Praetoria is also linked with the Well, and how we make Incarnate progress is through Praetoria, at least at this point. Tyrant is the Well's champion and his iTrial allies have been boosted by his power to be god mode sues. I suppose you could make Incarnate progress by taking down Malta and Council and so on, but that's really not the Incarnate STORYLINE.

I just mean that the Rikti have more in common with humans than Stardiver does. At least they have organs and tissues and brains, whereas Star is essentially an animate statue powered by condensed solar energy. And she LOOKS like it, too. I can understand seeing someone like Spock and saying "You, human!" It'd make sense - he kind of looks like one. It's quite another thing to look at Vger and conclude that this giant space ship clad in an energy cloud MUST be just an oddly-shaped man, to quote Taz the Announcer.

I could have told you as much even without spoilers (which I haven't even seen yet) just from the arrogant, presumptuous "I'm right and everyone else is stupid and wrong" approach he foists on us through his letters. Maybe I'm just a contrary kind of guy, but the more someone tells me how I'm destined to be his ally and how I should be smart and be his ally, the more I want to hand his letters to Mender Silos and go "Here, does this help?"

Of course, of course. Spanky is one of Rick Dakan's old "story seeds," and he and his team went through a lot of trouble to keep everything consistent behind the scenes. My point, though, was that by keeping him consistent yet vague, it left the door open for the character to be interpreted in a variety of ways, as well as for the writers to ret-con him on the down-low. If we never knew the truth to begin with, then it's not a ret-con, at least not on the same calibre as claiming "everything you thought was wrong."

More than anything, my point is that even if you know that everything comes down to the same root cause, you don't have to explicitly define it if you want players to have some creative freedom. It's true that Incarnates, the Well and so forth have been with us since probably Rick Dakan, but for the longest time, they weren't a problem because their definition was vague and as such never got in the way.

"Suck at writing epic" is a harsh but fair appraisal, I should say. "Epic" in general seems to be badly misunderstood, or perhaps badly misused. There seems to be this idea that "epic" just means a zillion people in the same place, and while that may have been its original literal meaning, that doesn't necessarily make for a good story or, more crucially, for a good BIG story.

In my eyes, an epic story is one where the antagonists are put over strong, but the protagonists are put over even stronger. A clash of the titans, if you will. It is a story that does not end in a whimper or a fade, but one where two major forces are built up, praised up and eventually slammed together in a spectacular showdown.

The crucial element here is that both sides need to be threatening, respectable and impressive, and that's simply not what's happening, at least outside of Dark Astoria. We're taking turns between demeaning the players and then demeaning the NPCs until it feels less like an epic clash of the titans and more like a parking lot brawl between two drunk bums.

I've actually tried writing crossovers, but in the case of my attempts, the writers I crossed over with were still alive and active and thus available for consults. I couldn't imagine trying to use other people's characters without their direct input since I just KNOW people who care about what they write are quite particular about how their characters are presented.

At the very least, crossovers need to be written with a great deal of respect for the source material. That's another writer's work you're wiping your feet on, and a certain amount of respect needs to be shown. And killing off said other writer's characters for no reason other than because you needed a shock death is to respect what an angle grinder is to tickling.

It's an anagram of Lord Nemesis. That was just an attempt to save us all a spoiler that Ramiel pretty much spoils anyway.

That would be a clever way to salvage the story without having to claim it was all a dream or something equally desperate. All of a sudden, it turns out the Well was not sentient at all, just a source of power, and what was talking to us and using us was "don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain."

Wait, what was I saying again?

Seriously, though - think about it. Imagine for a moment some kind of semi-sentient cosmic parasite which has the will to exist, but no power to manifest. Now imagine if such a thing has managed to latch onto the Well, this abstract source of power. Because it is not worthy, it cannot act on its own, but because it is a parasite, it can infect others and manifest through them. It offers its power to those who are ambitious enough to take it without asking questions, but its power is tainted, corrupted. The parasite lives inside the well and by spreading its power, it poisons the champions who draw from it, and thus controls them.

Yes, it's a nasty, unpleasant storyline especially for those who've already binged on the Well's juice, but consider the larger implication for a moment - if there's a sentient being behind the well which is itself not all-powerful, then this being can be defeated and removed, and the well can once again be "purified" and left as a source of pure inspiration with no thought to poison it. Yes, it means we've been drinking parasites all this time, but that can be cured. If it CAN be cured, then the storyline still leaves the door open to possibility, and it does so without actually contradicting itself in any way that I can think of off-hand. Hell, this thing can even be said to be playing the Batallion for fools. It has the power to be all-knowing and all-seeing, after all.

Yeah... Been there, done that, and the results are... Not pretty. A while ago I was determined to paint nearly all of my heroes as being part of the same broader organisation for... No real reason whatsoever, and for a while it looked like it was working. Then I gained a bit of perspective and I realised the kind of mental gymnastic required to force every concept through the same hole, as it were. In the years since, I've been slowly freeing my older characters from this bond by simply taking out unnecessary mention of this organisation from their backstories, and this has been incredibly liberating. All of a sudden, these characters are free to have much more believable relationships which are not driven by the need to put character A in situation B at time C because the plot said so.

Moreover, this is one of the benefits of having a large consistent persistent world - you can imply that certain results are all derived from the same common cause as a mere allusion without having to say it, and thus let your players draw their own conclusions. There are, for instance, rumours that Mayor Spanky made a deal with the devil and that brought much of Paragon City's success, but I haven't seen this specifically confirmed everywhere. That never really comes up, but if it did... Who's to say it wasn't the Circle of Thorns that he made a pact with? Or maybe the Banished Pantheon? Or maybe neither, maybe the Insert Name of Vengeance were involved. It's loose enough to be subject to interpretation and at the same time... It really doesn't matter, so it realistically COULD be any of the above.

The real irony to much of City of Heroes' storytelling is that the writers seem aware that they need to pander to our egos and let us win by punching out Cthulu, and they do this on a very superficial level. For instance, when you run the Maria Jenkins arc, every NPC you team with will tell you "This is YOUR story. I'm just here to help. I promise I will not steal your glory. This is not my fight. I will not overshadow you. You are awesome, and probably more awesome than me. This is your story. Now please stop complaining about it!" to the point where it actually makes me feel bad to read it, like we raised such a stink that the writers were left shellshocked and scrambling to praise us on pain of death.

But that's still just superficial pandering, with the broad strokes stories still paining our characters are the minuscule underlings caught in a big fish game run by the signature NPCs. They are still the movers and shakers, theirs are the high adventures and the moments of glory. We're just a face in the crowd, praised out of one side of the narrative's mouth and sullied out the other. There seems to be this profound disconnect between storyline presentation and storyline intent. The writers seem to genuinely want to put us over strong and make us appear big and powerful, yet they also seem to genuinely fail to comprehend that their basic story structure is simply not conducive to that.

In short, just being told we're awesome isn't enough when the events that make up the story treat us like... Decidedly not awesome. Being told I'm godline doesn't matter when the writers intend for me to be stoned to death by ordinary people, as it were.

And then there's this. Thank you for putting a smile on my face

If you've paid attention to what we can and can't have, the one thing that consistently ticks the "can't have nice things" list is what Champions Online described as "integrated shoulders. That is to say, what we can't have are costume pieces which integrate a chest piece, a shoulder piece and a collar piece all in one item. The PPD Hard Suits had that and we couldn't have it. Enforcer was the closest we could get. The IDF have that and we can't have it. The Legacy Chain have the same integrated shoulders piece, and we can't have that, either.

I'm not sure why that is, but this has been consistent throughout the game's development and consistent between a number of artists. Maybe it has to do with clipping, maybe it has to do with animations, maybe it has to do with model parity, I don't know. However, if you look through the game's history, that's the one thing we've never been allowed to have. And, incidentally, that's really the only one thing that the Legacy Chain have which is unique to them, aside from at most a couple of hats.

This thread is not the only place I've seen this sentiment given. I've seen it given all over the forums and, furthermore, it's an excuse to not try and make better content because... Really, who cares? If people don't like it, they won't play it. Remeber PvP? Yeah, we didn't play it.

But again - that's the same mentality given to people unhappy with City of Heroes back in 2004 and 2005, and the subscriber numbers tanked, and tanked hard. I'm not saying the two are necessarily related, but I AM saying that you're not a member of such an overwhelming majority as you think, and Trial participation is not such a static guarantee.

A couple of points:

First of all, no, not all villains care enough about the world. A number of mine seek to destroy it anyway, and a number of others can simply pick up and leave if they so fancied. Moreover, the departure blurb talks about building up a power base and challenging Tyrant, not begging heroes for help.

Secondly, just how many times are villains going to be asked to do hero work "for their own good?" They do that against the Rikti, they do that against Romulus, they do that against the Coming Storm, they do that against Praetorian Earth and now they're doing that against Mot. When are villains going to be allowed to do villain stuff IN NEW CONTENT? Specifically, when are they going to be allowed to be villains in end game content against cosmic threats?

Do you realise what the game is saying? "You're allowed to be evil when you're playing in the playpen, but when the real threat comes, you have to be a hero because otherwise you'll die." It's the same story five times over and it's getting old, to say nothing of demeaning. At this point, I'd say just let Tyrant invade and we'll worry about it late. It might make for a more interesting story.

David, I have a question: Are you implying you're going to create new Tights With Skin costumes for males and females that include actual geometry or overlapped textures to give the tights some volume, thus not making any more "patterns over bare skin," or are you referring to not wanting to create any more old-style tights with patterns over them?

If it's the former, then... Good on ya! If you can pull that off, I'd use it!

If you're referring to the latter... I have to disagree. Vehemently. I know you've expressed the desire for more photorealism, in previous threads, but creases and crinkles are one thing I never want to see in Tights. Ever. Creases and crinkles are a special effects failure, they're the result of movie-makers being unable to get tights to stick to the skin. That's BAD, and I don't want to see it in this game.

When given the choice, I will ALWAYS pick animation, be it 2D or 3D over live action, because things are impossible to pull off with "non-real" animation methods that live action simply can't replicate. You can pull off a convincing Superman costume with CGI, but as soon as you put a guy in that, you start seeing his package, you start seeing where the costume doesn't fit quite right, you start seeing it stretch and deform and it starts looking like a guy cosplaying as Superman, rather than Superman himself.

Creases and crinkles of ANY magnitude, regardless of their subtlety, would instantly remove any use I might have had for tights at all.

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On a separate note, allow me to offer the following examples of what I've used tights to depict:





That base smooth texture is useful for a lot more than depicting people dressed in spandex. It would make no sense for my girl made of slime to have fabric folds on her body, and the female Fur texture still uses the brown-tinted skin belly that makes it impossible to use for white fur, as it makes the animal look like it's shedding.

So that way I can refuse it because I do not want the thing.

In other words, his level is a frown face with eyebrows?

Yeah, my first reaction to hearing it's a co-op zone was to complain about this very thing, but they do have separate contacts I think for the entire story arc. I believe the only thing left that's problematic from a storyline perspective is that heroes and villains can't attack each other, but given that this would entail PvP, have no problem with it.

However... Would it have been that much of a problem if heroes and villains got different instances of the same zone like they do with Ouroboros?

You're referring to the Surviving Eight recap video that was posted recently, I believe. There, he describes Positron as very intelligent naturally, very tough because he "has armour" and also very powerful at the same time. The feedback I saw off this was something along the lines of "Oh, he has armour, does he? My Rad/Rad Defender has armour. Can he be tough, too?"

I'm not actually saying that makes Positron a Mary Sue or not (I'm actually thinking not), but it does kind of rub it in our faces that signature NPCs can have blasts, support powers AND armour while we can't.

I was discussing something like this with a friend of mine last night - that putting words in our mouths. He was lamenting how his character, into whose personality, mannerisms and philosophy he's put a lot of work into, would never tell the dead to just shut up and get to the point. "You LISTEN to the dead." was I believe his exact quite. This brought up my own problem in getting Stardiver from the above post through the levels, as she out-and-out can't speak.

I've discussed this with a few other people and have come to the belief that "dialogue trees" would work much better if they described actions, as opposed to putting words in our mouths. For instance, a dialogue option that said simply "Threaten $target." would be far superior to a dialogue option that says "Do you have any idea the kind of pain I could inflict on you?" The former, while terse, is broad enough to where you can claim your character said anything you wanted, from brutish, guttural grunts to eloquent, elaborate threats to disgusting, sexual advances, and it's a one-size-fits-all solution. The latter, by contrast, is very specific to a selection of characters that may not fit every kind of character who's likely to threaten.

Now, obviously, choosing to play an entirely MUTE character who communicates entirely through emoticons like O_o and ^_^ and P_P and U_U and so forth is a step too far and occasionally I'm going to have to go through some dialogues just as a necessary evil, but the thing is... The old Launch arcs kind of sort of work for a character who doesn't speak, because they don't make my characters speak. Contacts seem to infer you communicated some kind of information, but the game never depicts you doing this. It's the equivalent of clicking Use on Barney and having him say "Hey, catch me later. I'll buy you a beer." It works.

Dark Astoria, from what I've seen, is fairly inoffensive in regard to dialogue trees if you ignore the optional prompts for extra information, and a SIGNIFICANT improvement from the empty-headed jock we're forced to play in Dr. Graves arcs, so that might be an acceptable compromise, but I'll have to see more of it to say for certain.

You've just stumbled onto something that really ticks me off about City of Heroes storytelling - it treats us all as human. Sure, it tries to be coy about it and not say the word, but it treats us like creatures that are human in all but name. Dr. Graves' research claims that we are susceptible to mental control (um... Automaton?), when we are depowered we lose our ability to fly and go intangible, whereas my ghosts would lose the ability to become corporeal and interact with the physical world and so forth.

But I think the most funny instance I saw recently was in the Cape Mission in Hero 1's memorial. I entered the room with the capsule, and the Rikti Scout who has stolen the letter looked at this and exclaimed "Human: Too late!" Human... Really? Really... You look at THIS and you get the urge to call it human? Dude, that thing's more alien than you are... And YOU are a human, too!

I get that it's not easy to write a story arc for a "generic insert your name her and alignment here" character, but much of the old story arcs manage to do that just fine. In fact, I manage to do that just fine in real life. I know a fair number of people that I've met in City of Heroes, and for most of these, I know nothing but a global name. I don't know if the person is American, I don't know if the person is an adult or a child, I don't know if the person is a man or a woman, and I usually feel too awkward to just ask out of the blue, so I speak with these people in ways that simply avoid making me say things in which the information I don't have would be relevant. If I can do this in casual, real-time, off-the-cuffs conversation, then surely you can plan a story to avoid relying on variables ahead of time.

This is what pisses me off about Pandora's Box, the Origin of Powers and the Well of the Furies - they represent an enforced communal origin for no narrative benefit, with its only reason to exist being that it's somewhat more convenient to write if you have fewer variables to worry about. And it just hurts the game's overall story.

This is like the old "If you don't like it, then quit!" arguments of 2004 and 2005. They're a good way to shut up your opposition in a forum argument, but they're very BAD at actually keeping the game afloat. Yes, our solution is to just not run this Trial. Surprise! That's exactly what people are doing, leaving the development team's time, effort and investment worthless and pointless. "Just don't run it!" is not a solution, and I can bet you dollars to doughnuts that most of the people who say this wouldn't be that happy if we actually took their advise. Because then we'll be wondering why nobody runs this content.

The fact that villains don't care about the public opinion of Praetoria. Leaving Praetorian Earth for the Rogue Isles has an explanation to the effect of "Who cares about saving Praetoria and stopping the war? You can build your own power base, gather an army of minions, and when Cole finally does come, you'll beat him down, too!" The Praetorian iTrials are hero content that villains are allowed to participate in with the same old excuse of "greater threat." It comes off as feeling like villains are working a nine-to-five as heroes so that they can afford the opportunity to be actual villains.

And I would get up and walk away. Moreover, this game has no DM, it has no set group of players I have to kowtow to and I get to choose what I do, when I do it and why I do it. You're arguing against easily the game's greatest strength - that we're able to make our own characters that guest-star in someone else's campaign setting.

City of Heroes is not D&D in more than just plot and settings. The game "City of Heroes" is not D&D, does not play like D&D and is not beholden to D&D traditions.

Should I try to compromise, I might as well log out and go home. This game is worthless - and I mean that in all seriousness - if I can't play my own characters in it. If I wanted to play whatever the setting dictated I should play, there are better games out there for it. My collection of Steam games is large enough to provide a wide variety of character types to choose from, taking part in games designed to fit them precisely.

I'm not interested in "compromising" my vision and "bending my knee" to anyone else's concept. It's my way or the highway, and the simple fact is that up to a couple of years ago, the game was much more accepting of this, especially on the hero side. City of Heroes' greatest strength is that it promotes imagination and creativity, rather than forcing you into a rigid narrative like every other MMO does.

No, it won't. "Slow and steady" counts in years, and that's not acceptable. Not even close. And that has nothing to do with RP. Time sinks of this magnitude are simply not acceptable.

Go for it. It can't hurt. Fix up the pattern mask resolution while you're at it. I'm all for this.

As far as my vote goes, I HAAATE that sort of realism in graphics design. Folds and crinkles in costumes exist because you can't get material to stick to the skin in real life like you can in drawing, but since we're not in real life, we can go with the "idealised" look. I hate folds and crinkles with a passion.

In other words, more stuff like the Defence set. I like it, that's a good set. Only I'd like to see these look like a uniform fabric. Defence looks like it has chain mail under the armpits. And if you go with this variant, I'd shoot for making the overall fabric uniform so that more patterns can be applied to it that don't look "off."

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Other random stuff:
*Face masks that are actually ON the face, rather than painted under the eyebrows, but keep the old ones.
*Better pattern mask resolution. The old ones are pixellated and misaligned.
*Fabric designs that work with many patterns are better than fabric designs that only work with one.
*If possible, some way to pick skin texture and tights texture separately, so we can have tights over reptilian scales, for instance.

If we want to be strict with the gameplay explanation, that's not possible. Skulls spawn from level 1 to level 15, and that's not an artificial limitation. There simply aren't Skull NPCs made for levels higher than that, and to spawn them higher would take work. I'm pretty sure the TPN civilians - that particular brand - don't spawn below level 54, and certainly don't spawn below level 50. The game simply won't allow that sort of pairing.

What you say has a grain of truth to it, though - IF those Citizens were level 12, then they wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem, and it would make sense. I'd still tag them as level 1 and use them as AoE suppression, of course, but that's just me. The point is that "Level 50 Citizen" is an oxymoron of gameplay and story segregation. Whenever you're designing content that calls one of these, you need to step back and ask yourself what it is that you're really doing.

"Level 50 Hellions" was a line a Forum poster said to me in 2005 when I expressed how my character was doing well against Marauder's faction, and it was a derogatory term used to express how weak Marauder's minions are in terms of gameplay, regardless of what they may be said to be in their descriptions. They're not QUITE Level 50 Hellions, as they do have a few more attacks, but the point remains - some enemies make sense for some level ranges, but not for others. If an enemy shows up in a level range, it needs to make sense within the context of other things that show up in that level range, and Civilians simply do not.

Again I bring up Crey. One could argue that a "Level 50 Scientist" is stupid and that such a person with no armour and no real weapons would be meat on the table for any decent hero. And the powers team seem to agree, since past level 45, no unarmoured humans show up at all. Everything is power armour tanks, as it should be. THAT is the right kind of presentation. If it doesn't make sense for something to spawn at level 50, then replace it with something that does make sense or otherwise fix it so it makes more sense.

Grissam?