Starsman
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:I will also say I pushed for that a lot. Never finished. I still was pushing for single target damage improvement.Originally Posted by Aett_Thorn
Tundara and I waged a three-year war to get Ice Melee fixed.
Many went a bit "you overdoing it" when I proposed foot stomp level damage for Frozen Aura. We got it.
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Quote:Oh... you are evil? Oh well... then im done. I'm not cryign over evil people....Originally Posted by Black Pebble
Because we're evil! Eeeeeviiiiill!!!
...
...oh darn who am I kidding...
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Quote:How did this gimp the game? It was impossible to lower range to negative levels, and the duration was very short. You were only able to use it practically against 5 foes at a time, so never able to force a full spawn to follow you.Originally Posted by kokuryu_EU
This actually gimped the game a bit much, making somethings a nonsense, too easy, any fool can do it. I was surprised it was put in. EU players could tell that there would be exploits to be had and now there is.
In PvP, it was actually a good counter to ranged sets (everything should have a counter in PvP) -
No Mac client.
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Hmmm... grab and toss mechanics would be epic in a game like this. Especially for content... more than damage, more than mez, just being grabbed by a giant monster and tossed flying would be epic.
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Quote:I think you have shown us you can do that for years. Shame we will not be able to witness if you can do it for over a decade.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Don't worry, NC Legal can't make me talk. Actually, they can make me talk, but they will quickly regret asking me to talk. I can do that continuously for months without running out of topics.
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Quote:During the development of Champions, i recall hearing a lot the Cryptic Engine 2.0 monicker being tossed around. A google search brings up this name up quite a bit.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
As far as I'm aware, CO is essentially an entire new engine, and STO runs on it. As far as I'm aware, its design aesthetic has more in common with the aborted MUO engine than the CoH engine, although I don't know if they were allowed to simply reuse the code from that project either (they couldn't really reuse art assets).
Mind you, it CAN be a total rewrite, but I don't think it's that drastic. If you dig into the Champions Online file structure, you will find an extremely familiar Piggs file directory, only the extension is renamed to hogg. The format is not the exactly same (at least not the file header,) but oppening both apps bin.x files will reveal they still are rather similar.
Sure, the entire core engine may have been rewritten from scratch, but seems to me everything points at a non-insignifcant amount of code being shared between both versions. Perhaps another reason to add to your licensing post. -
Quote:Do we explain with any in-game lore thing why we cant fly higher than X?Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The major problem with removing war walls would be the edge of the city - there'd have to be something that would eventually stop the player from going past the limit of the playable zone space.
We can have boundaries without an in-game justification. They can be far into the sea or non-populated land. You can slowly expand the game with updates and push back those invisible walls. -
Quote:I was talking to my best friend about this whole deal this weekend. I was telling him how I was not going to ever give another penny to NCSoft. Guess what he did in return? Keep trying to convince me to buy Guild Wars 2.Originally Posted by St_Angelius
An estimated 9 million players is a small number? And 54 million poeple is still a small number???
scource? Well, before you ask... Here
This is our pain. We can try to convince others, but you will never manage to make others to feel the way we feel. Ever. Best you can do is add a bit of skepticism in some one that never cared for NCSoft titles before, but it's going to be very very hard for you to actually change the heart of some one that gets hyped by marketing of a new title just due to how we feel about this betrayal. -
There is another thing to keep in mind with a "spiritual" sequel:
It wont be the same game. You cant sit down to just replicate everything. You actually will have to sit down and ask yourself what has to be replicated in order to keep the familiarity, and then what has to be completely different to avoid pitfalls we saw in the original game.
Also, under what I proposed above, we CAN have archetypes via the mentioned "style" pool (or whatever.) We would just have a much more open creation without doing the horrible mess that was nearly free for all creation in Champions Online.
One big thing that would have to try to be preserved is the ability to create characters that look familiar. Better models can come with similar capabilities and similar face structures. I think the first foul in Champions and DCUO is that you cant create a character that looks as sleek as in City of Heroes. All characters end up being too bulky facially.
Animation style is another thing that should stay very similar to what we have today. -
Quote:... you talking the graphic shaders. You don't even need a new engine to add shaders.Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
No it isn't. It was a whole new engine, using cel shading. It shares nothing, code wise, with the spaghetti'd mess that is the CoH engine.
The server/client code for Champions, STO and CoH is the same at the core, with many evolutions on each paths after the forks.
But shading, thats just a small text file you pass to the engine along with the material so OpenGL knows how to draw the object on screen. -
Quote:That can be balanced in other ways (like adding more distinction between melee and ranged attacks.)Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
i dont think the game would be the same without ATs, not to mention HUGE balance concerns regarding tank mages if players picked armors + ranged sets
An example that I took from a chat with Arcanaville is having ranged sets have an "ideal range". Too up close and either they are easily interrupted or deal way less damage (making melee sets always do superior damage at melee range.)
As for tankmage... lets admit it: thats what this game is about. For the exception of blasters, we all have been tank mages forever. -
Lets pretend that this is not the end, but a pause a break in between what may as well be City of Heroes 2 in spirit.
If the game was to be redesigned tomorrow, not from scratch entirely but in a form that still can be recognized as City of Heroes, what would you do different? What list of features that are not possible in an issue-to-issue update would you like to see?
Since Im starting this thread, here is a quick list of what Id do different:- No archetypes. This time around, you just get to pick a primary set and a secondary set.
- Your primary set will have to be an offensive selection (Melee, Assault, Ranged or Summon)
- Your secondary set will have to be a different set: Buff/Debuff/Control/Armor
- Armors will entirely consist of passives. No more toggles for self-preservation.
- Mission contacts will all be indoors in lobbies. No longer will every single contact be out in the streets waiting for you under the sun. Now you get to meet them in their office, apartment, a parking lot, etc.
- Super Speed will be able to go run up walls, darnit!
- There will be a Character Spec pool selection. This will serve the basic idea of an inherent today and define many aspects of your build like how much damage you inflict and how strong are your defenses. It may grant a true scourge proc to all attacks, for instance, or a stealth toggle and double damage while stealthier.
- Weapon Redraw be darned, no weapon redraw in combat!
- Missions with plenty of doors and guards that must be defeated to advance (no more speed running to the end of the mission)
- No more advancement by grinding enemies. All rewards tied to mission competition.
- Alternative victory options (defeating a lt has a chance to make his minions to surrender, defeating a boss may make several lts and minions to surrender, etc.)
- Left/Right body part customization so I can create costumes like Two Face, or any other similar look out of any costume set pieces.
- Belly size!!! Why can we only be horizontally fat in this game anyways? Rigging, I know, but for the future game it should be kept in mind!
- Animated hair.
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Quote:Champions is CoH engine, upgraded. Call it V2. CoH is running a fork of that, since it keept being improved over the years.Originally Posted by FloatingFatMan
STO uses the same engine as Champions. Only CoH uses the CoH game engine. Cryptics other games all use the new engine they wrote for CO.
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Quote:If they didnt care about losing the "small" City of Heroes player base, it's very likely they dont care and actually expect to lose the CoH player base.Originally Posted by Brillig
I doubt PWE was hurt very much. Just like I doubt the NCSoft boycott is going to have a noticeable impact.
Usually this kind of announcement comes with an apologetic email to the players, granting them access to some other new game or title they want to lure players into. Think they did sent a lot of players from Tabula Rasa to Aion when they shut down the studio. I still have not received an email from NCSoft luring me to any other title. Thats enough to make me think they dont care about us as players at all. -
Quote:That is not news. That just confirms that the other project Paragon Studios was working on was very likely running on the same engine. Star Trek Online also runs on the same engine, and it's nothing like CoH or Champions.Originally Posted by Combat
Hmm, what sort of second game would use the CoH engine? Fair bet that CoH2 was the project in development. Of course, with the studio fired it might never come to fruition, but I think it is a reasonable assumption that CoH2 exists in some unfinished form.
Edit to add:
The real question is how far along that second project was. If the project was far along to a point where it was able to be sold, then there is a chance for Paragon Studios to be aquired by some one that may be interested in the project. That may, by proxie, save CoH. -
Quote:A day after the rumor came up, I stopped believing in it. At first I ate it up because it made sense... well... Not logical sense... but we are all angry. It's just human nature to want to point fingers at someone or something. It's the way we think. Many here have over the years villanized Cryptic for some historical reasons, many silly but that does not change things. So it was easy to swallow the bull waste.Originally Posted by Tic-Toc
Cross-post:
Ironically, Champions Online celebrated its 3rd year anniversary today and we had a quick company-wide meeting that where last Friday's bombshell about City of Heroes/Paragon came up.
During Q&A time with Jack, I pont-blank asked him if there was any truth to the rumors about expired licensing agreement with Cryptic's COH engine. He was taken aback about this, unaware of such rumors going around. His response was that NCSoft has the license to use the CoH engine "in perpituity" for both "City of Heroes/City of Villains" as well as a 2nd game.
I asked him if there was going to be any official response to this rumor concerning Cryptic/PWE and it's not something we plan on doing. We obviously can't be aware of or comment on every rumor floating around on the internet he wasn't sure of what they could say about this particular scenario if they wanted to.
So whatever reasons NCSoft had for shuttering Paragon, it had absolutely nothing to do with the IP, which they own, or the engine, which they had a license to use indefinitely.
That's about all I can do to quell this rumor. Take it as you will.
Again, thoughts go out to all my friends, former co-workers, and recent friendly rivals who've been released into the wild. I hope to see many of them here in the halls of Cryptic very soon. :P
Now may I ask you, old friend: Did you ask him on our behalf if he would be willing to re-adopt his old baby?
Yes, I'm desperate, if a begger had a banner "will convince some one to buy CoH for booze" I'd buy him a giant crate of Bacardi on the spot. -
A bug I used to take advantage off was to adjust the camera just in the right angle on an indoor map, to have the entire map vanish and see just floors and blackness. I also was able to see the location of every single glowie and enemy.
Was still possible recently, but not reliable because the camera somehow learned to snap back in fast. With all the changes to things like map marker after every enemy was dead, though, it was rarely something I cared to exploit in the last couple years. When the game was full of timed missions that required me to find a glowie though that bug was extremely valuable. -
One unexpected side effect of all this...
I cant look at an Excel spreadsheet now without getting misty-eyed.
If you know my post history you may have an idea how much I worked on Excel while posting on these forums... -
While there's life there's hope, and only the dead have none.
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Quote:Best approach would be to just run a bootcamp to restart into windows and natively.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
For the Mac users I'm wondering if its enough to install the client in Fusion or Parallels to do the export. It doesn't really matter how fast the client runs at that point, so even if the result is laggy or jumpy the important thing is if the Titan export tool works in the virtualized environment, you'll have your data.
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Quote:The market does not have to be rebuilt, just detached from their current backend, attached to the new one and adjust prices to reflect the new business model, it's harder than I oversimplify here but does not have to be a full rebuilding of the store system.Originally Posted by SlickRiptide
1) The NCSoft master accounts have to be "detached" and the existing game accounts have to be ported to SOE's master account system. Anyone who does not have a station ID (which is likely to be 90% or more) would have to have one assigned or would have to register at station.com and then reconnect their old CoH account(s) to the new master account. This would probably entail new user ID's and passwords all around. It would almost make more sense to just relaunch the game and make everyone start over; it would certainly be much more clean and viable from the new publisher's point of view.
2) The market has to be rebuilt from scratch. SOE, Funcom, EA, whoever they are, they all have their own virtual currencies. The one out here for SOE is that they already have some experience in this area with Pirates of the Burning Sea. When they converted PotBS to freemium, they didn't replace their currency with Station Cash, they built an interface where you convert your Station Cash to "writs" (some hand-waving here, PotBS has a slightly unorthodox kind of "currency") and then use the "writs" as currency. It's possible that they might choose to do similarly, and write an interface to convert Station Cash to Paragon Points. Considering the deficiencies of the Paragon Market, I'd rather see it just remade from whole cloth, frankly.
3) Billing would have to go through the new publisher's billing process and that's likely to be entirely different from NCSoft's and to also be non-trivial to interface to.
4) The new publisher will have their own server farms, their own operating systems, and their own support services. It's possible that they would just take over whatever contract NCSoft has with their current providers but unlikely. There would be some potentially major porting issues involved, just in things like producing status and usage reports that are used by the new company that were done differently or not at all by the previous company.
Other than that, most things are true but don't have to happen overnight. The monthly billing has to change hands quickly but after that point, the game can be transitioned slowly into the new servers and login system.
In addition SOE has a cross-game chat system that will likely be required in the game at some point. -
Quote:From what he has said in public over the years, i don't think you will ever find an MMO publisher's CEO that loves MMOs more than Smedley does.Originally Posted by EvilGeko
but Smedley isn't evil.
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Wow... My first post is from September 8, 2004... we about to reach that anniversary date! 8 years later come next saturday!
Post is:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/searc...rchid=39314267
Forgive the horrible grammar and spelling. English is not my first language and I have learned better in the past 8 years... still suck though.
Anyways... I was apparently proposing Gauntlet. Not sure if anyone else proposed it before me, I don't recall it being implemented or acknowledged from my suggestion... but it came to be nearly exactly as I proposed.
I did a followup post a couple hours later on what I still think would be the ideal form of crowd control via aggro in a game like this: you hit a lieutenant, his minions will turn to you attempting to help him. You hit a boss, his lieutenants and minions turn to you attempting to help him and so on. Basically an aggro system via hierarchy that can only be activated by tankers. -
Quote:If the reason for the shutdown was the 6 million dollar loss, then shareholders will never allow for a generous offer to be ignored.Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
I guess thats the thing. there is not much rational reason to not allow it. throwing it in the trash gets them negligible money(maybe sell the office furniture and computers) or get paid and give it up. From my non professional viewpoint it would be needlessly spiteful not to sell rather than scrap.
If my suspicions are right, NCSoft is in dire need for money to continue operations through this quarter.
As for Paragon Studios other project, SoE has a history of snatching those too. They did it with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes when Microsoft dumped them.