SlickRiptide

Bon apetit, Paragons!

If you're a player in the Mountainview area and you stop by then make sure to post photos afterwards.

They can say very little. If you want to keep up with the bleeding edge, follow this thread at cohtitan: http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....,5093.240.html

Victoria Victrix aka Mercedes Lackey seems to be in touch with Brian Clayton and perhaps other bigwigs who occasionally drop a hint about things.

In the end, you have to "look for the best, expect the worst". It's no small thing to take over a studio and a game like this. It takes a lot of money, a lot of drive, and a willingness to assume more risk than a taco van selling to soldiers in the Rikti War Zone.

It's one thing to say that a game doesn't need a big subscriber base to be worth keeping online once it's made back it's initial investment. It's another entirely to be making that initial investment in a game that is already mature and in a steady state or gradual decline. The return on investment in that scenario is not nearly so clear cut.

No matter how angelic the angel, the game still has to be able to show that it can not just turn a profit but generate some growth and show some acceptable returns; somewhere in the 10%/year area. Otherwise, it just doesn't make sense to invest in it.

There's also no guarantee that an angel wouldn't decide to invest elsewhere in a couple of years and sell the studio or liquidate it at that time.

As for crowdsourcing, if you have $1000 then I hope you have 2000 friends who also have $1000 to invest. That's the kind of value you're going to be looking at just for the software, customer database, and IP; never mind reopening the studio (and that's probably undervaluing it all but NCSoft is in a cash crunch and might undersell it just to get a quick infusion).

We'll see what happens but the reality is that the odds are against the game's survival at this time. Still, heroes aren't really at their best until the odds are against them. I would not advise anyone to give up or stop trying. Just try and keep the stars out of your eyes.

It's not really a MMO. The Diablo comparisons seem to be spot-on. The gameplay videos could be Diablo or Torchlight, but with superheroes.

The primary point of the over-arching game is to create a collection of Marvel Heroes and then take them into generic sorts of missions like "Clean up Hell's Kitchen", at least from the look of things.

Gazillion also created Super Hero Squad Online, and if you account for the cartoony kid's orientation of it, that's essentially what you have already in that game. You collect heroes, you level them up, you play through instanced missions, solo or with your friends, and you use the rewards (or dollars) to buy upgrades and more instances to fight in.

From the standpoint of the overarching game that wraps around the combat instances, I'd expect it to be a lot like Guild Wars. The city zones are really just lobbies where you meet friends and form teams. It wouldn't matter that there would be twenty Spider Man characters running around in the lobby because you don't actually do anything in the city zone except manage your hero collection and form teams to run instances.

Superhero Squad has a built-in TCG that's kinda fun to play with. If Marvel Heroes incorporated an existing TCG like VS or Overpower into itself then I could probably be suckered into it even if the primary game wasn't really my cup of tea. There's no indication at the moment that such is the case, but Gazillion has already got the infrastructure to support it.

I'll be surprised if the most prominent rednames didn't have invitations for interviews within the first week.

Ah, true. I glance past that most of the time.

Well, the point still stands. Regardless whether the information is "here's how the game closes" or "here's how it moves to a new owner", expecting info about it this early is expecting it too soon.

and damn proud of it, Bookah!

While it's not a book, Red Tomax's website is a pretty comprehensive collection of the red and blue content. I'm not sure how much yellow content it has.

The wilderness of SWG changed over time, but there was always a wilderness to visit if that's what floated your boat. Being an explorer type myself, it's what kept the game alive for me in a lot of ways.

It was never possible to be completely self-sufficient, in that you would need healing at some point and that would eventually require medical facilities and/or entertainment facilities. As time went on and the game changed it became much easier to deal with those issues on your own and towards the end, those factors became nearly irrelevant, as healing was mostly replaced by buffing instead.

Training was something else that you had to deal with, though there was a unique mechanic in the beginning. You could get your training from other players. After the game remade itself into more of a classical class-based game, training became irrelevant.

In other words, as time went on, players became more and more self-sufficient, often to the point that certain classes that existed as support classes were frequently challenged as being superfluous. To their credit, the designers tried to deal with that problem and sort of succeeded.

As for the wilderness proper: In the beginning, you were in the wilderness the moment that you stepped outside of the hub cities. If you wanted to go somewhere, you walked. If you died, you cloned and walked back to your corpse. It was a challenge to hang out in the wilderness. You could spend your career out there, though, coming in only to sell whatever resources you had gathered to the crafters in town or out in the wilderness themselves. The developers deliberately put things out in the wilderness for explorers to find. There were "dungeons" and such, of course, but the sorts of things I mean are unique sights and "attractions" that would never be seen except by players who made the effort to visit the hard-to-find places on the planetary map.

As time passed, and player cities took root, much of the wilderness was replaced by urban sprawl on the civilized planets. As someone who had spent a great deal of time wandering the wilderness of Talos and Corellia it was a bit disappointing to come back after a couple of years and find the "hidden treasures" with towns plopped nearby and turned into, essentially, tourist traps. That's how things go in the real world, though, so it's not like it would be that surprising.

That was the civilized worlds. The adventure worlds, if you will, were almost entirely wilderness. The toughest did not allow player structures at all, though as the game aged, the restrictions were lifted to at least allow resource gathering machines to operate. On the adventure worlds, the "civilization" consisted of an outpost just big enough to contain a hospital, a cantina, a starship landing pad and a handful of NPC's to establish whether it was a scientific, military, smuggling or some other kind of outpost.

The wilderness on these worlds was deliberately made large and devoid of support systems besides those that you brought with you. Whether you were hunting, mining, exploring or doing something else (like leveling a Jedi out where bounty hunters would be unlikely to find him) you were on your own and you only went back into town (which generally meant not just "town" but flying to another planet entirely) when you absolutely had to do so to resupply or seek healing of wounds or fatigue.

Essentially, the wilderness existed as an option if you chose to exercise it. The advent of vehicles and mounts made it quite a bit less dangerous and more convenient to spend time there, but with very little in the way of instant travel it was always a commitment to do so and you went there looking for a particular kind of experience that you generally would not get in the cities and on the civilized planets.