Serva_Obscura

I'm loving GW, and I don't normal like fantasy-anything (Well save Final Fantasy, when its in its Sci-fi phase)

Important to note that the reason GW has no subscription fee is because it's been designed from the ground up to be _very_ light on the servers. (as light as Diablo was their goal) hence the server/bandwidth costs and much lower.

I think the only things that Cryptic could poach from Areanet is that fantastic post process fuzz (A-la ICO) and perhaps some of their scenery guys because GW scenery is _gorgeous_

I honestly think that with a revised enviroment lighting system (the buildings are much to uniform in light tone) and a little post processing (when graphics cards mature a smige more) the COH engine could be top notch for a _long_ time.

Oh, Old thread went boom. I'm sorry if all our IC/OOC ranting is bothering you Gil. Maybe we should take a softer tone, Mea Culpa.

And you are right we do want our cake and eat it (without a 50% accuracy penalty as well) but I think you'll find that it's different players who want different things. The people playing the game (xp/powers/number crunching) want to know about the game, the people enjoying the setting (heroes/paragon city/backstory) want IC things that their heroes could read and not think "What does he mean PvP?". Different strokes... an all

Although its interesting that this article had a definate brief. I didn't realise you were told to simply explain the battle terminals, with that in mind its a well put together vehicle.

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Then it may please you to learn that L5R Third Edition is coming out in May and kicking d20 to the curb.

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Please me? PLEASE ME? all you need to do now is tell me they're switching 7thSea back and I may well need to change my trousers.

I have spare trousers at the ready and I await your reply

So I check the Dev digest this morning as see that there is a CoH TT RPG and CCG comming and I see AEG mentioned.

Oh my heart was aflutter

7th Sea and Lot5R were some of the best fantasy-historical RPG's I've ever played and although they seem to have gone over to the dark side recently (D20 *hock-spit*) The possibility of Roll and Keep CoH Was more joy that I'm used to on a dreary Wednesday.

Then I see that AEG is only involved in the CCG, I keep forgetting that AEG do CCG's too. I geek in almost every traditional field (Programming, Computer gaming, TT wargames, TT RPG, Fantasy art, Anime) but I've never understood the attraction of the CCG thing, I have a solid suspicion that the cards are coated in some kind of addictive contact drug.

But I will definatly be buying this RPG. I have no doubt it will be seriously cool.

I wonder if we'll get character updates like the Marvel RPG used to have containing the better lv50's that actually have background

So I check the Dev digest this morning as see that there is a CoH TT RPG and CCG comming and I see AEG mentioned.

Oh my heart was aflutter

7th Sea and Lot5R were some of the best fantasy-historical RPG's I've ever played and although they seem to have gone over to the dark side recently (D20 *hock-spit*) The possibility of Roll and Keep CoH Was more joy that I'm used to on a dreary Wednesday.

Then I see that AEG is only involved in the CCG, I keep forgetting that AEG do CCG's too. I geek it almost every traditional field (Programming, Computer gaming, TT wargames, TT RPG, Fantasy art, Anime) but I've never understood the attraction of the CCG thing, I have a solid suspicion that the cards are coated in some kind of addictive contact drug

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Render to texture really shouldn't be that bad - it's used massively in many other games (Lock On, HL2, Max Payne)

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None of the games you mention are Massive Multiplayer. I'm sure making renderings available to 250 in a zone is quite different than making it available to a single player.

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It's not that render to texture is _so_ much of a problem (that would simply double be texture/draw load on the client machine) But COH is designed to be in discreet zones, no movement data is sent from one zone to another. Hell they may even be on different machines (most likely) so getting one zone to beam _all_ its movement data to another zone would require massive re-writes in core data transmision areas of the codebase.

Which is not going to happen for something as unneccessary as a TV.

Viewing the battles will be done in "camera-mode" as has been said as it's the most sensible way of doing it.

Asking for a TV is kinda like being on a boat and saying "Hey you know what would be cool, if this boat could fly, after all, planes can fly so why cant you make the boat fly". If you want a flying boat it really needs to be designed in from the beginning.

*sigh*
If the engine supported portals:
1. You would need to load the arena inside texture/object set ever time you entered the city zone that contained an arena.
2. You would still not get a "TV" effect as perspective would still apply without dynamic object flattening (and that would nuke z-buffering) it would be more like a mirror (or hey, a portal)

Without portals you are looking at an animated texture thats fine in high-spec offline engines but with mmorpgs you'd need all the meshs/textures loaded (see #1) and have to locally render the whole scene to texture and _then_ render the rest of the game around you.

Also all of this would break data encapsulation of each zone (sending movement data across zones) requiring re-writes there.

So either way it's not gonig to happen

The most I think we could reasonable ask for is a hologram of the combatants is a stock pose, that shouldn't be too hard (and if they were 50ft holograms that might be quite cool)

The camera thing is simply going to be implimented as a avatar change on your character with combat limitations and special death rules. All much easier and more practical that the current crop of suggestions.

EDIT: On a finer review of the thread.... what Jarnis said.

One more thing.
As there are spawn rules for teams that differ from the spawn rules for solo players why on _earth_ can't we both be happy.

Statesman says that we shouldn't be able to take a boss solo. I disagree simply because it limits the type of villans I can fight which makes the game more dull and more repetitive. Why can't groups only ever spawn boss+1 and more/higher with more people, surely that would have the same effect for the groups?

Then again I'm happy to go an load up with inspirations, hell I generally save all mine for the end anyway. So I guess I'm cool with what States wants.

But hey why don't we split this up then, why can't:
1. Solo heroes solo 100% of the missions offered to them
2. Teams of heroes get something appropriate and adjustable for 100% of the missions offered to them.

I mean mission are non-quitable and often have linear arcs, why do solo players even get offered mission they shouldn't be able to do? It just jams up your mission list.

Hey how about have two links on the contact screen, "Do you have an missions for me" and "Do you have anything for my team and I" you could look at them both without being in a team but you can only take the second ones with at least two people.

That way solo players should never get stuck on team content unless they do it deliberatly.

Ok I'll put my money where my mouth is. I'm a software dev, if time and money is the only thing stopping you splitting the missions out, I'll do it. Give me the mission data and spawn info (yep all of it) and I'll split them into team and solo missions/arcs. I'll sign any NDA you stick in font of me, and do the work for free. I know the likelyhood of this happening is slim but at least I made the offer

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3. The missions are _single player content_ not group. The second you do them as a group you end up re-doing the same missions for different people which really hurts the "suspension of disbelief". If you like the story then it runs better when you ignore the rest of the players.


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This is completely mistaken. Missions are all the standard content and storyline for both teams and solo players. Other activities like task forces and trials or the extra-difficult content to give well coordinated groups and a planned activity that offers a very high level of challenge. As such they make up perhaps 1% of the team content and a fraction of a percent of all the content in the game.


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You missed my point entirely, there are two things here and you're mixing them up
1. Game mechanic
Missions should and do work wether you are in a team or not. I'm not talking about that
2. Story
The missions are fun for me because all that mindless bashing actually has some point to it. My hero is stopping a 5thC raid on the Crey or rescuing people from the DE. This facet of the gameplay only works _once_ in the life of the Hero, hence it is single player content as, if my Hero defeats Frostfire he sure as hell doesn't expect to have to do it again tomorrow and again the next day as his friends haven't done it yet. Even if Frostfire is escaping from jail my hero world expect some recognition for having beaten the living daylights out of him sometimes only a few hours before

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With this in mind it should immediately become apparent that being able to solo everything in the missions your contacts give you is horribly horribly broken for a team oriented environment like an MMO.

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This is different to my original point but I totally disagree with you, why can't your contact give single player mission to soloers and team missions to teams? what specifically is wrong with that?

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under no circumstances should you be able to solo everything your contacts give you.

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A bold statement, but with no foundation other than your own opinion

Ok, full disclosure:
I like COH as a game, I like MMO's in general. I like soloing a lot. I have nothing agaist teaming and sometimes I like it a lot.

So why do I think that "encouraging" teaming like this is a bad idea?

Think on these for a moment:
How much does a bad team annoy you? That would vary from experience to experience and person to person right?
Home much _more_ fun do you get teaming in COH compared to soloing
What is the ratio of bad team/good team ++fun events?
How much time do you have to play the game, how valuable is that time?
If you find a good group and run with those guys/girls would you feel obliged to turn up when they were playing?

For me, 99% of the time:
1. I really want to play this game, COH
2. I'm not going to risk blowing at least an hour with people who annoy me.
3. The missions are _single player content_ not group. The second you do them as a group you end up re-doing the same missions for different people which really hurts the "suspension of disbelief". If you like the story then it runs better when you ignore the rest of the players.
4. Requirement to do something I don't want to do often terminates what fun is available right there.

So I team with my RL friends when they're on (because I know them outside the game I feel no requirement to be online) and solo the rest of the time.

I've done the Frostfire arc/fight 5 times now. And thats just between two players. If you want to encourage teaming give different people _totally_ different content, that will make people want to team. To see what the other guy/girl is doing/getting.

E.G.
Friend: "Sure I'd love to team, but I pissed of 'Bone rictus' last week and he keeps escaping from jail and ambushing me, that might cause trouble. I should try and find his base and sort him out for good"
Me: "Really Who's 'Bone rictus'?"
Friend: 'Oh he's a Skull boss, but different from the rest. I'm not sure about his background yet but I think he was experimented on by Vazilok, he has some really odd power, and his minions are really freaky'
Me: "Cool, I'll help you with that"

See? right now there is very little variation in the minion/lt/boss mold for each villan group. Sometime the have... what... 4-10 lines of text and a name? Lets run through the variations that are "easy" to do:
1. Shaders changing the colour/texture of the outfits
2. Mix and match the anims more
3. Change the colour of the attacks.
4. Chain some short attacks to make more interesting ones.
5. More reactive flavour text.
6. Bosses that act like bosses and not minions-with-more-powers.
7. More scripted scenes like the ones on strigia isle, but in missions and randomise the stances so they aren't so similar.
8. More temp powers that arent based on normal powers (Purple healing lightening). Make sure all teammates get the powers.

And some things that would require a little more DB storage and coding
1. Have villan bosses remember players that fight them. as such appear in other mission arc as secondary characters.
2. Have villans taunt the player in a appropriate manner:
player was in the previous mission with this boss but did <10% total damage, "Ahhh _playername_ finally I have you all to myself I think you'll find this slightly more painfull without your friends to do your dirty work for you"
player was in the previous mission with this boss and took the most damage but still did very little damage "_playername_! so good to see you, I have missed the sound of my fist pounding on that empty head of yours"
etc etc

This is _imho_ the way to encourage teaming, carrot rather than stick.

Read Champions in the shop before you make a decision on it.
Some love it (as has been said here)
A rare few are indefferent to it
Most roleplayers I know hate it (myself included)
YMMV

Check out the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG, that was fast and fun.
I like WW's Aberrant but it's fairly locked to the setting, However with that system you do get "Adventure!" for the pulp (1930-1940) setting.

I kind of liked the old "Super World" system in a masocistic way (very point based like Champions)

Oh and IMHO never touch GURPS with a 20ft bargepole, I have yet to see a setting it does well (which is strange as many of the sourcebooks are really informative, the system just sucks)

Somewhere around here there were vids of the end of beta Rikiti invasion, withfootage of Rikiti Bosses/Lts and showing their power sets. I'll see if I can find it again.

Incidentally it was that very footage that made up my mind to sign up for the game

A Pic
http://www.cohportal.com/organisatio...ain/the_rikti/

Here's the video, thought this isn't where I found it last time
http://www.paragoncity.com/forum/arc...opic/2654.html
Ooops this isn't the one I remember, I'll look for the other later.