-
Posts
1961 -
Joined
-
I don't know what I'd do with a Mad Max costume set but it certainly is intriguing. The idea of "studded" tire armor is attractive in a weird way.
-
If it was DirectX I could use IZ3D to play in anaglyph stereo mode. That would make me happy.
-
It's a reasonable guess about the statue but I'm unaware of any official lore that confirms that the statue is Peregrine, or what it is that she might have done to deserve a statue.
-
Quote:The real problem is not that the task force was so very uncharacteristically and inconsistently (yeah, that word again) written as a Legion of Doom scenario - It's that someone in upper management thought it was a good idea and gave it the green light.Basically the Taskforce got such a huge slating that the guy who wrote it, never did anything else at Paragon Studios after that...he quietly just disappeared, it actually took players to discover that he had left Paragon Studios IIRC.
People point to Matt's statements about being not beholden to the existing lore, but before he ever made any such statements, this task force was the first really big example of those attitudes at the studio. It wasn't just that the writer either didn't know or didn't care or both - It's that the people above him also didn't know or didn't care.
I try my best to forget that it even exists. -
Quote:Something like that would be a logical extension of the Hero->Incarnate->Ascendent progression, but I think it would take a different studio to create it because it would be, as you say, more of a single player RTS type of game. If they created a link between the two game styles, it might make for an interesting adjunct to the existing game.A superhero game that I would like to play is "Universe Of Heroes" consisting of a character creator like this one, an entire galaxy or universe to travel and explore in like Spore, and civilizations that you could destroy, become their god, protect, whatever. I am imagining more of a single player game than an MMO. Not really a COH2, but as mentioned, I would hate to leave what I have here unless I could take it with me and if I could take it with me it really wouldn't be much better than we currently have here since it would be cursed by all the baggage.
The "baggage" is the big reason why there won't be a CoH2 as such. A sequel has to be more than just "the current game only cleaned up and built on a stronger foundation". It really has to be a radically new game to make it worthwhile. The only way I could see it happening is if they decided to take a stab at creating a completely skills-based game that dispensed with archetypes, much like the original vision for the game. Just rehashing this game with a "better" game engine isn't a good enough reason to make a sequel. -
The only way that a sequel game makes any sense is if you can guarantee the investors that the game will open up a new market or that it has a guaranteed pre-existing market.
World of Warcraft is one such "guaranteed market" game. Everyone who ever bought a Warcraft game was ready and willing to try World of Warcraft, and most of them had never played a MMO before. WoW hit both of the selling points and it hit them hard.
Guild Wars 2 is another such game. Everyone who plays Guild Wars will buy Guild Wars 2, because it follows the same "pay once, play forever" model and it is a true persistent world MMO where Guild Wars is a series of matchmaking lobbies strung together to give the appearance of a MMO. It will make sense to continue to play both games depending upon mood, especially with the Hall of Monuments to connect the two games together. It will be sort of like if Freedom Force had been the original game and City of Heroes as we know it today had launched as Freedom Force 2. Playing one game would not remove the incentive to play the other, and in fact with judicious planning one game might CREATE incentive to play the other.
City of Heroes is currently NOT a game where you could guarantee either that every existing CoH player would invest in a sequel or that the proposed sequel would appeal to some segment of the market that previously had not invested into the MMO hobby. A sequel to City of Heroes would only achieve traction by cannibalizing and ultimately sinking City of Heroes.
On the plus side, our game engine is not a static thing. The phasing tech currently in place in Atlas Park is a great example of that. The game engine grows and changes just like the world. Our game is full of features now that six years ago were "impossible without an overhaul of the game engine" and therefore never going to happen. The cottage rule notwithstanding, the studio has more or less established that "never going to happen" means "it won't happen until we get a clever designer to figure out how to make it happen and we have buy-in from corporate to invest in the time and development requirements."
The upshot is that the upgrades get incorporated into CoH instead of being collected and inserted into a new game. From the standpoint of 2004, the current game is so far removed from what we played back then that it IS what people used to propose as their dream "CoH2" game. -
Quote:Where did you get that idea?So then the consensus is that the game will continue on for a few more years, slip into maintenance mode and fade away, the IP will gather dust and that will be the end?
As long as the game is profitable, development will continue. I've never understood this idea that some people have that anything "old" necessarily will eventually just die. We're talking games, not puppies, and MMO's in particular tend to find a steady state level of subscriptions and stay there forever unless they somehow become horribly out of date. Even with that, EQ and Ultima Online are still around and still getting new content. I've never played Meridian 59 or some of that vintage of game but some of them are still around also.
Why does a "CoH2" have to be a new game? A few years ago, it was "impossible" to do player programmed stories, power customizations, and modern high-rez graphics. Heck, Water Blast was a powerset that was "never going to happen". All of those things are here now, because the devs continue to improve and update the game and the game engine. Sure, it would be nice if the foundation could be rebuilt, but making a new game to get that is a proven money-loser.
As long as CoH continues to generate a healthy profit, it will continue to live and grow. Heck, NCSoft has already shut down lots of their MMO properties that were failing to support themselves, even some high profile games. They've continued to invest in this game. That says something about it and it's staying power. It also says something about NCSoft's corporate policy - If CoH fails to the point of going into "maintenance mode" and fading away, it will likely be shut down long before the fading away point became a possibility.
If you're not turning a profit and there's not reasonable expectation of turning one in the near future, then you're gone. CoH2 won't even be a possibility. -
Of the games that I know of that produced "sequels", all of them ended up cannibalizing and splitting the existing player base of the parent game. It's the same reason that City of Villains tanked, when it was launched as a separate game from City of Heroes. It didn't generate much new business, it mainly just fractured the blue player base.
Sequels are not a viable way to build on a franchise, at least if past history is any judge. Not that it's preventing SOE from trying it yet again, but their biggest expansion of their Norrath IP was not from the spinoff MMO's but from the console RTS game "Champions of Norrath". I've thought at various times that Paragon Studios might benefit from licensing a console game based on their IP but not a MMO or even strictly a RPG. What that game would be I'd have no idea, though with the various CoH ripoffs on Facebook it seems that there's a viable market there for City of Heroes on the social networking platform.
Nethergoat has the right of it - We are already playing "CoH2". We were playing it even before Freedom launched, really. Freedom just put a kind of official imprimatur on it. -
Quote:I presume that I don't have to explain what I did there.As I said before, the word is so vague that the only difference between saying "that story's good" and "I like that story" is that the former might fool someone into thinking you've actually bothered to make an attempt at analysing the story before spouting your mouth off. In the context of writing, it's nothing but a buzz word with no real meaning of it's own at all.
There are classes of words that are useful despite being somewhat vague by themselves. If someone really wants to know what's "good" or "inconsistent" then they can ask. More often than not, the person who wrote those words already made the detailed analysis previously in the thread. In other cases, the person is referring to eight years of accumulated writing and is giving an impression of the whole thing. Nobody is going to give a detailed critique every single time they mention something. If people want details (and as you see from the many of the responses, the respondents would prefer that the "usual suspects" not expand on their opinions) they'll ask for them.
If I'm criticizing a particular task force, then sure; I'd give details about the problems. If I was talking about that same task force a year later, I'd be less inclined to do so. If I was referring to the entire history of Paragon City, I'd probably just wave at that portion and say "it's ____" and go on to whatever my actual point at the time is.
"Good" is just as meaningless and useless as "inconsistent" or "boring" or "exciting" but it doesn't stop anyone using those words as if they have some top-level, mutually-agreed upon meaning instead of being entirely personal and subjective in meaning.
It's a losing battle to insist that everyone who writes criticism (positive or negative) does it in a detailed and thoughtful manner. Most people don't have that much investment in their opinions and many times they're just reaffirming opinions that they are already well known to carry.
Rather than insist that everyone should be a literary critic when discussing these things (and let me just forestall the knee-jerk response that you didn't actually say that since we both can see that you didn't say those precise words; you just insisted that vague is "bad" and precision is "good" which amounts to the same thing in my mind) it's better to ask for some elucidation on any particular thing that you find to be "fuzzy" about someone's opinion on something.
If you're going to insist that only quantifiable things can really be "inconsistent" and even then they should be called something else then I can only nod my head, say "Okay, sure" and go on using "inconsistent" or "good" or whatever other vague but generally accepted words I use, for their generally accepted purposes. -
Quote:I'm right there with you. I think the studio just considers them superfluous these days. Their schtick is that they are the natural origin villains; the guys who are literally warriors because they train and hone their skills without benefit of super powers. That's about all they ever amounted to in terms of the game. They're just the "Talos Island Gang".Giving these guys more to their faction and more to their individual stories than JUST a Greek myth name would be a good first step.
After eight years, they're still getting their butts handed to them by the Freakshow in all of the street battles. In every other zone, the developers split the street conflicts evenly between the warring factions, but in Talos Island, for some reason the Warriors are portrayed as the losers in all of the battles and they're even given really wimpy, lame dialog to boot. Nobody seems to care to fix it. Given that, I conclude that nobody at the studio has any kind of investment in them. -
Quote:As much as I love the Warriors, I'm afraid that the answer for them is that they are a joke with a background tacked on. As a European, Sam, you might not be familiar with the 1979 film _The Warriors_. (That IMDB plot synopsis is a little off - there is nothing in the film to suggest that it takes place in a dystopian future. The power of an otherwise semi-cheesy flick is that it takes place in the present day.)What are these guys about and where can we find depth about them?
Really, almost all of the original Launch enemy groups can stand to be explored a little more and given a little more depth. And I'd love to see that.
The Warriors in the game are very clearly modeled after the titular gang of the film. The rest of it is tacked on background to justify having them there and calling themselves "The Warriors".
Someone really liked that film - The gang chatter of the game is full of quotes from the film. "I like doing stuff like that", for instance, which makes perfect sense if you've seen the film, as does "Come out and plaaay!" ( I haven't seen that one in a long time.)
It's not a big stretch to imagine that the gang depictions in the film went a long ways towards contributing to the visual conceptions of gangs like the Skulls and the Hellions. I've often wished that there was a Baseball Furies style of gang in the game, heh.
In short, I am fully behind the fulfillment of your wish but would be unsurprised to learn that they don't really have much of a back-story beyond a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" to fans of the film. -
Oh?
Is there a different way to interpret the above statement? -
Quote:I will disagree with this in principle because so much of the game is already based on world mythology that nobody would normally know anything about, from Adamastor to Norumbega (Oranbega) to Jack-in-Irons (though the Irish/European stuff is admittedly more widely familiar than the non-European stuff.)Sadly, most of the other cultures you mentioned besides Egyptian are so unknown to the average American that making references to them would be kinda pointless, because nobody would get it.
I personally believe that the strong mythical foundation of the game is one of the reasons for its initial and continued success. It set the world apart from being a simple generic super hero setting and the mythological trappings gave at least the appearance of a kind of depth to the factions that they otherwise might not have had.
The game would only benefit from having more content related to classic mythology of any sort. Heck, getting back to the Well, it was really the initial description of it as it related to Pandora's Box and to the idea that the Greek Heroes of Old were the original "super heroes" that made the Well interesting. The current version of the Well - Not so interesting, IMO. -
Quote:So, he's trying to emanitize the eschaton?Well, why else would he be able to break his time-tether, and why would he be able to consistently trump and fool his enemies unless he knew the full extent of their potential by being the one who provides it!? He's just been doing the whole "villainous mastermind" schtick to spur more heroes to live up to their potentials, thus increasing his power by increasing their legends!! It's a foolproof theory!
-
As a magazine, Cracked sucked eggs. As a website/blog, it is comedy gold. I still have to shake my head in wonder at it, sometimes.
-
-
I have a feeling that .Viridian. and his fellow rednames must have a drinking game that they play whenever new content is released that's based around player reaction to that content. I'm sure that many of the rules tie into the reactions of well-known commentators and their comments along with the general reaction of the forum readership.
BTW, thanks for popping out of the woodwork Mr. .Viridian. Always encouraging to see a bit of evidence that the colorful names are aware of what's going on out here in player-land. -
If I believed that anybody actually suffered more than a couple of seconds of ennui over my opinions about the game, I might try to regulate my expression of those opinions slightly more than I already do.
This sort of thread is spitting into the wind. You did make your feelings known and those feelings are noted.
You should note, though, that the loudest complainers are also willing to hand out compliments when they are deserved. Yes, even Venture, oblique as some of those compliments might be. -
Quote:Precisely. All of that prior lore is summarized inside the game in book form.They started with Warcraft lore before WoW launched, and they have more people continuing to write lore than Paragon Studios would have in their entire building on take your child to work day.
Our studio has a "story bible" which contains much the same sort of world lore within its pages. Most of it is probably as not as thoroughly developed as that other game's past history but is that really a reason for NONE of it to be accessible inside the game?
I have to think that even if they only put a single summer intern to the task each year that the past eight years would have been plenty of time for most of it to have been typed up and formatted and fleshed out and inserted into the game.
The fact that a forum thread like the Canon Fodder thread can exist or that I could write Manticore or Arctic Sun or Hero One or (apparently) Protean and get answers means that there are answers to be had.
They just don't want to give them to us and for the life of me I can't understand why. Well, I DO understand: the whole straight jacket thing, which is my point - other games don't seem to feel that their lore is a straight jacket. They feel that it adds value.
Why does our studio treat player access to the lore as a liability? -
Here's what I REALLY want to know:
Why is it that the 800-lb Gorilla Game has a back story even richer than that of Paragon City, and they don't just publish all of it inside the game but they award you "badges" for finding and reading it all? How is it that they are able to continue publishing new material without constraint, yet our studio is somehow put into a straight jacket if they so much as jot down a piece of historical info, let alone incorporate it into the game where anyone who wished to could find it? -
Quote:Going strictly from the way the company is presented in the back story, it is a private company that nevertheless offers access to outside help when a situation requires it.So I've finally played through a few missions involving Portal Corporation, I've read through the notes about the organization over at Paragonwiki and I've read through the history pages on the official site but, I'm still unclear about Portal Corp. legal status.
Is it only a private business? The history seems to suggest that. Ms. Webb, the wife of the deceased Dr. Webb, sued the other major shareholders for controlling interest in the company in 1998
But realistically--which I know is silly to expect in a game about superheroes--this seems very odd to me.
The Rikti, Axis America, Preatorian Earth and others all demonstrate the threat multiversal invasion and immigration poses. You'd figure the Federal Government or the UN would step in and regulate this technology, treating it in a similar manner to aviation, territorial waters and shipping, radio frequencies or space travel.
You'd figure there'd be customs inspectors or military bases or, better still, a dedicated group of supers that do almost nothing else but watch for signs of multiversal invasion. (Although I know this is exactly what the UN's Vanguard group does.)
Is Portal Corporation purely a private business?
Or is really more like a government/private consortium consisting of lots of abstract university research, some military research and some commercial R&D of useful spinoff technologies but mostly a lot of justifiably paranoid governmental or intergovernmental control? And is that just the Vanguard Arm of the UN?
I ask before I'm doing a little research before I try my hands at writing some fiction here.
Yes, in the real world a technology like that of Portal Corp. would be regulated and probably kept top secret, but in the real world you wouldn't deputize a meta-human and let them run around town in spandex beating up on anyone labelled as "bad guy". -
I would think that being a Crey Corp "employee" would yield many opportunities for traveling from white to grey to black and back again, morally speaking. Lots of stories that could be told from the standpoint of being a cog in the Crey machine to being the person calling the shots on projects of questionable ethics and even more questionable morality, and then there's the whole story of the Countess that can intertwine your character's story to whatever degree is interesting.
-
It's not the elevator, it's the city fire code that assumes you are being chased by a flaming entity of some sort and requires you to lose it before you can escape the burning building.
-
Quote:The current lore seems to be that the Well connects all humankind in all dimensions. This includes the Rikti. They are attached to our Well whether they like it or are aware of it.Lastly, on the thoughts of the Rikti and their 'Well'... I'm not so sure they really 'killed it off'. The Well of Furies strikes me as something that would exist whether it's people acknowledge its presence or not.
It's possible that the Rikti DID make themselves or their connection to the Well unpalatable. Their "allergy" to magic and loss of inherent magical ability (including the loss of their Gods) could be ascribed to an alteration in their racial connection to the Well. The method is mostly irrelevant - Maybe the magicians themselves acted when they realized the nature of Battalion.
The effect is that they erased the Magic Origin, amputating it if you will, and cauterizing the "wound" to prevent any future congress with magical energies and effects.
That damaged their connection to the Well just enough that it made them or It indigestible and turned Magic into something mythical and incomprehensible.
That's one way to tie the whole thing together and make the Rikti a possible ally against Battalion when it finally arrives. -
I'd second that and consider whether Fighting pool makes any sense given the changes being proposed to it (which would be down the road somewhere so maybe not a real character-building concern right now).
You's also want the wolf pet and coyote travel power if you don't already have them.