Slashman

Nail on the head!

I have actually always thought that instead of doing 1-3 in the Star Wars story, it would have been better for them to do Kyle Katarn's story from the Jedi Knight game series. It would certainly have been better than having to deal with Jar Jar Binks.

And slightly disturbing...

That's incorrect. There is no content which cannot be played by any player. COV and COX are fully available to every player.

Blueside content isn't locked from a player...it's locked from a character. Same with Redside content.

Co-op content may be lauded as the 'ultimate answer', but it really is just hero content. There isn't any question that you're doing something heroic nor even any hard choices to make which might be considered walking a fine line. Your villains are treated like long time pals by known hero characters, instead of being seen as unreliable, but necessary allies to the 'good' forces.

Co-op content isn't content for everyone...it's good content that villains can happen to play. Otherwise you certainly wouldn't play it. Since you get weak in knees at the mere thought of skirting the law.

It makes me wonder why the devs would even think that would be perfectly satisfying to a player who took the time to create an evil-themed character.

And we are putting you back on medication now...

I'd say that you may be a very odd human being(and I may be too). It takes very little for most people to be put off by something. To put it another way, it only takes one thing that rubs a certain part of most folks the wrong way for them to get annoyed with something.

In the type of society that we have to day, not getting what you want even just a little bit is often enough to make even grown people throw temper tantrums.

Getting back to the topic at hand though, is that what he's related is not that uncommon when people give their opinion of COX.

We often seem to forget that the parts of COX that are most lauded are the front loaded aspects of it. Character customization is achieved when you first make your toon. You spend your time getting the look and size of your avatar just right and now your powers as well...but then you have to step into the gameworld and play the game.

For some people, just being able to play the game with a character that looks just how you want and has the the exact type of powers you want is the major selling point, and will keep them going forever as long as they can keep customizing new toons or changing looks with each costume slot.

The reality is that people get more mileage out of different things.

Even if you could clone yourself a million times and go around the world punching every person who thought that COX reused the same interior warehouse maps too often and were put off the game by it, it wouldn't change the fact that there is a bit too much repetition in maps.

Going a step further though, is that I think that what people may be trying to say, and not doing it very well, is that there is no real variety in gameplay no matter what map you're on. A warehouse littered with crates, barrels and bits and pieces, offers no more real opportunity to change your combat strategy than if that warehouse were featureless and empty and those crates and barrels were represented by unidentifiable gray lumps.

Perhaps I'm being spoiled by the games that I'm playing these days, but I'm finding less and less reasons to fire up COX(and apparently more to post on the forums).

In the end, I personally think that there are areas that are very lacking in COX that more powersets, costume parts, pool power customization(if it ever comes) and new enemy groups won't fix. While those things haven't made me quit yet, I think that they are some of the things preventing people from coming back and definitely stopping new people from trying out the game due to word of mouth about things being too repetitive.

Perhaps you missed the whole 'tactical rpg' thing. And I'm not saying that we should use that control scheme for COX. Where in the heck did you get that idea? I'm talking about the expereince of the game as a whole. Its got a 90 metacritic score and was very popular.

I'm guessing you never played Dragon Age then? Because it has a similar implementation for combat(except for the AI scripting and auto attack).

My point is that for those of us who can actually 'stand' to play a tactical RPG, it very much nailed the look and feel of a superhero game.

Perhaps you are. And really, I guess there's nothing wrong with that. You probably get an entirely different kind of satisfaction from the maps and tilesets we have now. Or you probably just ignore them. Fine either way.

I will say that one of the things I have observed about game design(and so have most of the more successful developers), is that a good game is about creating a compelling experience.

Anyone who hasn't yet should pick up a copy of Freedom Force. It's like $5 on Steam and IMO is the template by which superhero games should be made. I find it amusing that Statesman would often reference this game when talking about superhero games but actually based so little of COX on it.

The game just works and flows well. It isn't overly complex...it's a tactical RPG at it's heart(somewhat akin to Dragon Age in combat execution). It's set in the 60s and has all the cheesy, overdramatized dialogue you'd expect from superheroes and villains of that era. But it is a really fun game.

Super powers work like you'd expect them to work. The environment is destructible and more importantly usable by both your heroes and their enemies. There isn't a huge variety of tilesets(it's set in the city), but what is there suits the look and feel of the game perfectly. Has all our travel powers too(flight, superspeed, teleportation, superjump and even tunneling).

In short, Irrational Games made a superhero game that captured what the average person associates with superheroes the most: Secret Identities, Cool Super Powers, Cool Origin Stories(cheesy but still cool), Rampant Destruction of Public Property, Real Civilian Reaction to Superheroes(i.e. screaming and running when someone teleports onto a crowded street), the ability to beat people with uprooted trees and lamp posts(yes...that's important ), and over-the-top villains that you love to hate and beat on.

They created a superhero experience. Which is really what people who try this game expect. Sure, people stay in spite of that because we are better than other MMOs in some very compelling ways, but in a lot of ways COX is a bait and switch. Promising a superhero experience, but delivering an MMO experience with superhero themes thrown in.

There's a reason this is wrong. Not because most MMOs don't boil down to that kind of thing, but because people also know that superheroes are about a lot more than beating things into a pulp.

And while we can't recreate the emotional tension one finds in a good superhero movie like The Dark Knight, heroes(and for that matter villains) are a lot more multidimensional than this game portrays.

There are several issues with the way the game is currently setup.

1) The reward system is based on the number of foes you can defeat. This is the first and biggest mistake. And while I agree that hindsight is 20/20, this hasn't even been looked at or tested with a different system. Enemies don't spawn based on your objective(s). They spawn and then your objectives are given additional enemy spawns. If you try to be efficient and complete only your objectives, your reward is so much less, that it's pretty pointless.

2) The only thing we use our powers for is to kill/arrest/destroy things. There is no manipulation of the environment to turn things in your favor, like you'd see heroes do in comics and movies. No way to use your powers/skills to turn enemy weapons against them or throw them into map wide disarray. The thing is that this is exactly the sort of thing that 'hero moments' are made of. Not methodically mowing down spawn after spawn in exactly the same way for hours on end.

3) There are absolutely no good missions that don't depend on you beating someone up. Even missions where you are supposed to go meet so-and-so for info contain a map full of enemies that make it impossible to tell what type of mission you're doing apart from reading the mission text. Again why? Because you can't get rewards apart from mowing down a large and unlikely number of foes in predictable, generic map X.

A lot of people come to COX thinking they will find a compelling superhero game. Instead they find a faster paced action MMO with a superhero theme and lots of character customization and a lack of some of the more annoying aspects of other MMOs. For some folks that's fine, as evidenced by the people who have stuck with the game, but for a lot of people, they feel that they have been cheated out of a richer experience. A lot of earlier reviews of COX have said the same thing: There should be more to this game. But that's been pointedly ignored time and again.

It's a shame because we have such a great setting and world to work with but use a single aspect of it to the exclusion of other things with a broader appeal.

Just how many hands and/or tentacles do you think his toon has anyway?

And that's fine. You're more the 'Golden Girl' type. My post wasn't about people who have some emotional reluctance about committing evil acts in a make-believe world. I'm talking about the people who have other issues with redside but have chosen to stick with it anyway. Or people who are new who might want to try redside and are told that it is better to go to blue because blue has so-and-so while red does not.

That would be a nice statistic...if it were true. There are a lot of people who play villains because you can't play those ATs on blue. If that restriction is removed and nothing is done to address the shortcomings of redside, why would those people continue to play there?

People complain about redside market. I think it's fine but there are apparently lots of market-focused players out there who can't stand waiting for a bid to come through.

Apart from that, there is the issue of redside not having gotten any new exclusive zones in forever. The issue of overuse of Longbow as the main enemy in too many of the story arcs and not enough use or background of other interesting enemy groups like Legacy Chain or the GoldBrickers.

There is the issue of not feeling like you, as a villain, are progressing in any way that does not involve Arachnos granting you your status. The issue of always being a lackey in just about every arc.

Add to all that the fact that a lot of people don't think that villains team and that people have problems with Grandville's graphical stress etc.

For a lot of people, choosing to be a hero is about blue side being more complete and convenient than red, as well as feeling like being a hero is more suitable for how this game is played. It's not about just choosing to play a good guy over a bad guy.

In my own SG we had to implement alternate days for red and blue side play because everyone just wanted to default to blue all the time because the opinion is that everything is just better on blue. Since COV came out, the devs have done nothing to continue to improve redside apart from access to co-op zones(which are equally available on blue) and AT tweaks(I do appreciate the fixes for stalkers and dominators).

This just seems like something that will push redside even further into the realm of being second place to blue.

I was hoping that as we neared GR release we would hear that they have been working on improving the new user experience for red and blue sides as well as doing things to bring more equality to the experiences on red and blue. Guess I was expecting too much.

Advertising far ahead isn't a bad thing. Except they really haven't done much advertising. But you know...their marketing department is totally awesome, bar none...

In terms of what they revealed(and have yet to reveal) is where I think the problem lies. When they announced GR, we really got nothing much more than a small tidbit. Then when they did Hero Con...we still didn't get too much that was a good indication of the kind of content GR would have.

To date, we mostly have info on powersets and a yet-to-be-clarified endgame system. No one is actually talking about how GR will play as compared to our current content. We still only have peripheral information.

I, for one, don't want to believe that they have revealed the very best stuff about GR as yet. Since what we know is mostly enemy types and powersets. I'll reserve final judgment until I get an idea of what content will be like...and if it will be the same old tired formula that we've had for the past 5 years.

In defense of your desktop, laptop and desktop components are actually quite different.

A Core 2 Duo in a laptop is NOT the same chip that sits in your desktop with a huge heatsink and fan plus a power supply fan and an nice big case for convection cooling to help it along. It's a scaled down processor. Likewise, laptop hard drives are generally 5400 RPM as opposed to 7200 for standard desktops and usually don't have quite as much cache RAM.

Also, the video cards used in laptops are different from their desktop counterpart in much the same way as I described above. Laptops are not great gaming systems when stood next to a desktop PC of equivalent specs. Most people just don't know that. Which is why I will never run games on a laptop.

Now your poor performance could be due to several other things besides just laptop vs. desktop differences...but you should never expect the same level of power from a laptop in general.

That's a very good point. I can't ever remember playing a game of orcs and elves when I was a kid. But superheroes? Totally.

I think that the fantasy genre of MMO is a staple because the first major MMOs were fantasy based i.e. Ultima Online and Everquest. Then they followed with Dark Age of Camelot. So yeah...in the end, people came to associate fantasy with MMOs.

I personally still don't think its all a matter of superheroes being a niche. I think that most people who are into comics and superheroes have not heard about COX and probably aren't the people who usually fall into the MMO demographic. If most of the people who were into superhero comics and cartoons played COX, we would have a very sizable player population. We simply haven't reached most of those people.

I wouldn't call WoW a bad game either. That it has a high concentration of idiots isn't something that the game itself can be faulted for. I do have my own beef with Blizzard because of what they chose to do(the usual 'safe' route) with the game. They could have made something that changed the face of MMOs completely. Instead they just regurgitated everything that's gone before and polished it so shiny that it blinds you.

I would, in fact, say that Blizzard's execution of WoW far surpasses COX is some key areas. A good example is how only now after almost 6 years of being told that we didn't need advancement beyond level 50, there is end game content coming with GR. I'm sure a bunch of people will argue that we aren't getting additional levels etc. But a play on words doesn't mean that with the Incarnate system we won't effectively be advancing our toons' abilities beyond what is capable at level 50.

Why be stubborn over something that could have bought more value to your game way before now? It's obvious from other MMOs that people don't like retiring their toons. And while you don't have to retire your level 50 toons in COX, currently there is nothing to advance them in power/status besides IOs. So yeah...we should have had end game content years ago.

I just read that panel. If that's all true, then I'm much more looking forward to GR and Issue 19...I guess GR will be issue 18.

Kinetic Melee!! I have had a toon in mind for something like that but could never make them due to energy melee not quite fitting the bill.

In any case...this sounds like good stuff. They just need to market this well now.

It's possible that I am selling it short. However, I always get a sense of 'natural' subscription decline being also about what's still being put into the game and how well the game itself is evolving.

I've always thought that an MMO is the sort of game that should gradually grow. Simply because it can change. When a normal single-player PC game is released, it won't usually change very significantly in terms of what it does and its scope. An MMO is something that can change and evolve.


Which is why I don't tend to see our numbers as simply a product of natural decline. Our issues basically started to squarely focus on throwing bones to the existing users and veterans and we stopped trying to appeal to new players. Consider how long it has taken us to even redo the new user experience to any degree. That's only coming with GR. I honestly think that both standard heroes and villains should get a new user experience as well...not just people buying GR.

The thing is that it's fine for the devs to think that they are making something awesome so we can just sit back and relax while small updates get pushed out. But during this waiting period, how many people are passing the game by due to us not truly having anything new in the game that's fun for all player levels?

I do remember this being the case. Most MMOs at the time were still fixed firmly on only doing boxed expansions.

Which is about the time some genius decided that 15 people were more than enough to keep developing a large MMO which just recently launched a new expansion, which itself needed some work done on it(and still does IMO).

I honestly think that those lean years are what kept us from growing(along with poor marketing) more than any 'natural' MMO decline.

Your dislike of EVE aside(and your bitterness about your lot in life), there was no PLEX when I was playing it. And it still had more players than COX. The GM scandal didn't surface til after I left...and no matter how much people speculate, there is no proof one way or another that it wasn't an isolated incident. For that matter, we have no idea how much that happens in any MMO.

Also, inflating your player numbers artificially doesn't equate to a real world increase in your bank account. Considering the hardware CCP constantly invests in to maintain its single shard world, the fact that it publishes it's own magazine, it's working on a console shooter to tie in with the EVE world and the size and quality of their expansions...I'd have to say that no matter how many free players they have...they most assuredly have more paying players than COX does.

In a very real sense, I think AE has hurt COX's reputation more than it helped. The initial publicity we got from actually having an option for user-made content was quickly overshadowed by the rampant farming and exploiting that went on shortly after it got released. It actually hurt a bit to hear people talking abut COX as a farming sim and autoleveler. More so since I couldn't really defend it. Since that is what it became for a while.

I think that probably the good thing to come out of all that is that people aren't looking at AE that much anymore outside the game. I don't really hear people refer to AE as a reason for playing or not playing COX much these days.

In truth, COX is mostly not referred to at all unless people are discussing Champions and comparing the two. Probably the best thing for this game now is to quickly get GR ready for the public. And marketing is essential. But apparently not to our marketing department...

Maybe I'm underestimating the impact customization has on MMOs. I'm as much an altaholic as the next guy. I have almost 3 servers full of toons. I spend a long time in the costume creator when I make a toon. I think a lot of people do.

The thing is that then you leave he costume creator and play the actual game. Does getting the perfect look for your toon actually make the playing of the game better?

COX's customization options have grown and grown. Now we have power customization as well. Was this at the expense of expansion of the core game? Perhaps I'm just getting jaded, but having the toon with exactly the powers I want, with the perfect look that I want and then I enter generic cave map 71635 is starting to feel a little empty.

I think the way to put it might be that my toon feels more real and complete than than the world he/she is inhabiting. And as our costume options and power options have advanced, it doesn't seem like the game has kept up. I keep thinking we'll finally get missions that feel more superheroish and have more to do in them than pound on randomly generated enemy spawns. I really hope GR brings some of this stuff when it comes. That's one of the reasons I'm looking to get more info on it before I preorder.

Except maybe those things don't matter as much to as many people as we'd like to believe. Now that's not to say I don't love our character creator and our travel powers(I'd like to see a few more, in fact.)

What I mean is that sometimes there is overemphasis on an element of a game that doesn't add quite as much to it(overall) as we would like to think.

I think it was either someone from Valve or Blizzard who said that in playtesting you need to watch what people do, not so much what they say about your game. If, in fact, character customization(cosmetic) and fast travel times were the major things that catapulted an MMO to the top and encouraged player retention, then COX should be a much bigger player in the MMO space.

Actually, the question was about making COX the TOP MMO...not simply better than WoW. Still an interesting question to discuss though.