Slaunyeh

CoH does it best. *sniff*

Sure, but if it's realism we're going for, you should have to track down someone interested in Nexus Claws, instead of just selling them to the nearest baker.

I mean, I get the core idea of "trash loot". Really. It's much more realistic for a wolf to drop a 'wolf tooth' worth six coppers, than it is for the wolf to drop six coppers. But... that wolf also dropped a full set of magical platemail, so I think we're already beating 'realism' in the face with a shovel as it is.

To be fair, TOs dropping at level 30+ are vendor trash. Thankfully we got rid of that (mostly?)

I might have dozed off during that part of the movie, but I don't recall Luke heading into town to sell all the bantha ears and tusken raider gall bladders he'd been collecting in the Jundland Wastes.

Then again, I've also never seen a D&D group do this. Valuable stuff like magic items? Sure. Wolf teeth and troll phlegm? Not so much. I'm very happy I didn't play in the D&D group of the Developer who thought that was the norm.

I vaguely remember "really weird." It had a very... unique art style, as I recall.

If I wanted to point out qualities of GW2, I'd probably not use how many modern fantasy tropes it manages to encompass as an argument for originality. Steampunk and technomagic might have been 'woha, new!' in the days of Arcanum or Eberron. That was, what, 10 years ago. Today they are not exactly at the apex of creativity.

Heck, even WoW went the "lol everyone's a flesh robot!" route.

You know, I think I get what they are doing.

Here's what I'd do if I was Dr. Evil (or, more likely, Number Two): I'd take the $10 it takes to run CoH, and I would spend all of that on advertisement for GW2 (or any other game in my stable). Any advertising agency worth their salt should be able to churn out a couple of bucks worth of return investment. Voila, $12+ in the pocket.

(disclaimer: no accurate numbers were hurt in the writing of this post)

Also barring different colour combinations.

Do people with speech impediments really need another venue to be ostracised in? Type "NO" to voice communication! If we wanted to talk to someone, we'd not be sitting alone in front of my computer in the first place, thankyouverymuch.

There used to be something of a fantasy drought in games, literature, movies and whatnot, but the last 20 years or so have seen is virtually drowning in fantasy. I, for one, am pretty sick of it.

On the other hand, the few attempts at non-fantasy games haven't necessarily been very good. Or, for some reason, not managed to make much of a splash. I think one of the major challenges in non-fantasy games is that there are certain conveniences you expect from modern or sci-fi settings. Conveniences that are not necessarily compatible with more traditional MMO gameplay.

I can give an example from The Secret World (a game that I love dearly, but still manages to fall into this trap a bit): You start out in the game, on a small island off the coast of Maine that has, for some reason, been overrun by zombies. The atmosphere is fantastic. You're in this dark forest, and the woods are full of locals-turned-zombies. Very creepy. You are standing on this forest road, and your task is to find the nearby town of Kingsmouth and figure out just what the heck is going on. Along the road you find several vehicles, most in pretty decent condition. Their drivers have met unfortunate ends, but the vehicles themselves look fine.

My very first thought (trying to forget the "MMO traditions") is: I should be able to just grab one of the cars and drive into town. That gotta be much safer than walking. Obviously, you can't do that. But because it's a modern setting, you expect to be able to do something like it. Usually, this tends to be an issue of mobility. For some reason, most games seem to think than moving faster than a crawl is some kind of holy grail of gaming that should either be outright illegal, or, at the very least, reserved for very high level characters. Augh, I miss CoH already.

I think, for all intents and purposes, that most sci-fi themed games are really fantasy games with a sci-fi skin. There are a lot of challenges to overcome in a modern/sci-fi themed game if you want the game to not feel like a fantasy game. And I get the sense that most games aren't trying to overcome those challenges very hard. And, by now, we don't really expect them to either.

As a disclaimer, I haven't played that many non-fantasy MMOs, so I can't say if there's any out there that break the mold. I'm sure there are. I just haven't heard about them.

And when someone named themselves BATMANZ0R, they were changed into Generic123, and handed a rename token. They didn't get a 72-hour ban for being an idiot. That's not a slap on the wrist, that's a shovel to the face.

Now now, there's no reason to get nasty with people just because they enjoy another NCSoft title.

For all we know, NCSoft may never regret closing City of Heroes no matter what, and American_Knight's patronage could be staving off the axe between GW2's shoulder blades by a few days.

As an amusing anecdote, I never actually shared influence between my characters in CoH. Struggling a bit in the low levels, and eventually reaching a point where you're self-sufficient is, to me, a not insignificant portion of the game play.

Being able to afford anything right out the gate cheapens the experience for me. Even if using TOs 'till level 22 can suck on occasion.

This is pretty much how big corporations think. If you have 80 people on a project turning a one million dollar profit every year, that's one thing. But if those 80 people could be used elsewhere to turn a 10 million dollar profit, then it makes very little financial sense to keep the first project running.

Of course, in our case they closed down the first project and fired the 80 people, so "reallocation of resources" probably isn't the real purpose here.

Yeah, I got a notice it was ready for install last night, too. So I did!

As I mentioned further up thread, they fixed that issue.

The inventory management is pretty neat. And the shared bank is nice. I really wish each character also had their own individual bank though. I collect all kinds of stuff, like armour with neat skins I may transmute later, my lucky pistol, whatever. And that stuff... first, if I put it in my shared bank, it becomes a confusing mess (and it's already filled with those stupid tonics ). If I keep it in my backpack it takes up a lot of space, and I will probably end up selling it by accident at some point. This wasn't an issue in GW1 because it didn't have much in the ways of personalized gear. It is an issue in GW2 though. To me at least.

Finally, a pet peeve of mine that has no relation to the above: Vendor Trash. Grey, "useless" drops that servers no purpose but to be annoying and clog up your inventory 'till you have a chance to sell it to a vendor (usually the baker in Thunder Bluff for some reason ). In TOR, your companion could sell all useless loot automatically while you were out questing, meaning that Bioware acknowledged that trash items are dumb, but still felt it necessary to include it. It baffles me beyond words that GW2, the self-styled MMO Revolution, hasn't done anything more clever than this.

Hear hear. I still can't play the "mainstream" MMOs and their 'force everyone to play the same character' ways.

Oh yes, can't forget mace mastery.

If we're handing out combos for people to play, I'm calling dibs on TA/AR right now!

And yes, the staggering number of character builds (not to mention which powers to pick in any given set combination) is one of many things that no game comes close to competing with CoH on.

This is pretty much what I was trying to say earlier, when comparing the 'mute' protagonist in TSW to the fully voiced dialogues of TOR.

So yeah, this is pretty much exactly my issue with games that are too story driven. That's okay in certain genres where you're really supposed to play the role of a specific character. But in MMOs I want it to be my character if the game wants any hope of retaining me longer than it takes to play through the story ones.

Sued? You don't sue people who steal from you. You call the police.

To be fair, every race get two sets of three story hooks. And if you think those are bad, they only occupy the first 16 (-ish) levels. So it's not like your secret regret of never joining a circus will overshadow everything for 80 levels.

Well said. Also, it's possible to be critical of certain aspects of the game while still liking the game. Like, elsewhere, I was mumbling about really wishing you could use crafting materials directly from your bank without retrieving it first (which is just a minor convenience, but it'd be nice), and immediately everyone jumped on me like I was the Antichrist. And lo! This weekend, that's exactly what they added. Now, if only they would fix auto-attack for engineer kits.

I don't think GW2 is fantastic, but it's pretty good and I have to give ArenaNet props for fixing, and adding, stuff at the pace they are. I just wish they'd be less secretive about what they are adding (why is every NPC suddenly carrying sticks of butter?? )

This, starting around 1:04, is just one of several examples (such as roughly every cutscene in the game). I'm not going to dig them all up for you, or delete a character just so I can reroll and look for more examples. It's perfectly fine that it hasn't bothered you to the point of you even noticing, but just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean it's not there. And for someone who is bothered about it, it stands out.

On an unrelated note, I really like that water colour art style.

That's a really good series of games. Enjoy!