TrueGentleman

It's not uniformly awkward (*cough*PolarExpress*cough*), but the examples from that trailer are all over the place. Some of it's smooth and lifelike, some of it's vaguely slow-motion, and some of it's as jerky as supermarionation. In particular, when one of the Thom(p)sons crashes into a lamppost, the animation looks especially stiff, as though trying to translate Herge's physical gags that work well in panels but don't suit lifelike animation.

Jamie Bell does sound like a good Tintin, although it's weird hearing the character speak with a clear English accent.

We don't have all the details yet about all the types of items being sold on the Paragon Store (or even what kind of access F2P and Premium players will have to Wentworth's/the Black Market). If we could, that would mean (indirect) conversion of real-world money to virtual currency. The devs probably don't want to open that particular brand of canned worms.

So, basically, we need the equivalent of a VIP lounge for an iTrial launching zone. Perhaps it's time to restore the old Paragon Dance Party?

Could you please cite the devs confirming that? It would be very helpful to have that spelled out unambiguously.

At the moment, the best breakdown on the Paragon Store I've seen is Ghost Falcon's clarification post. While that was very useful in giving examples of individual items on sale at the store, it didn't go so far as to draw directly equivalents to boost packs. The most it confirmed was that a Complete Magic Costume Set (from the $9.99 Magic Pack) would cost 400 points, i.e. $5 (presumably that covers both the male wizard/magician pieces and the female witch pieces, but that's unconfirmed.) At the currently announced exchange rate of 80 Paragon Points to the dollar, the full super booster should cost 800. Ghost Falcon, however, deferred: "At this time, the “Bonus Points” for the higher bundle purchases is still being determined."

And the point of an item shop is to encourage a la carte spending, which typically winds up being more than bundled packages. If the Paragon Store doesn't feature an equivalent of a booster bundle (i.e. thematic costumes, emotes, costume changes, and a temp power), then we'll know that the devs are embracing that model for all it's worth.

A Praetorian-style event with separate phases that culminates in a GM would be pretty sweet.

The imprint and creator-owned series are probably safe as long as the TP collections sell. Individual titles with characters who originated in the superhero universe, such as Animal Man, Shade, and Swamp Thing, are to be reincorporated into the mainstream DCU. John Constantine, though, is being split between soloing in Vertigo's Hellblazer series and team-ups in DC's magic-themed Justice League Dark. It'll probably be handwaved away with alternate universes, time travel, evil wizards, or somesuch bollocks.

I'll see your Captain America motorcycle helmet:


And raise you Riddler's VPL:


(Remember, kids, this is not amateur cosplay. These are paid SAG card-holding actors wearing professionally desgined and produced wardrobe costumes.)

Legends of the Superheroes makes that seem like a lost masterpiece by Mozart. Imagine combining the camp of the Adam West-Burt Ward Batman TV show with the seriousness of Hanna-Barbara's Superfriends animated children's program. You cannot look away!

At Wildstorm's apex, Ed Brubaker's Sleeper (including its prequel with Grifter) was nothing but grim grittiness on one hand, and on the other, Alan Moore's Judgment Day was a metacommentary on that whole sub-genre he helped launch with Watchmen. The "widescreen" Strormwatch/Authority, especially under Mark Millar, was gritty grimness writ large. Gen¹³ struck me as the shiny counterbalance to all that but not representative.

None of those G&G titles will be an easy tonal fit into DC's operatic/mythic cast, but that kind of problem isn't stopping the editors from reincorporating/retconning the Vertigo-titled characters into the DCU either. (Moore's going to be predictably furious at their treatment of John Constantine.)

As far as the CoH Freedom launch period goes, I'd wager that they will easily. I'd even go so far as gambling that that Freedom and Virtue will become inaccessible for most F2P players, i.e. de facto VIP servers thanks to "priority queuing", unless the devs are increasing server population thresholds after the Freedom stress tests. (Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about the initial F2P rush, but we'll see how it all shakes down afterward.)

While I'd be quite happy with new badges and accolades (I enjoy GM PUGs), this list, especially the last item, is what would attract more player interest these days.

The official announcement covers only "priority queuing" for VIP players, which typically means in F2P systems that subscribers are promoted ahead of F2Pers when logging on to a server. Since the idea of F2Pers actually getting booted off capacity servers has come up before in other threads, could you please cite a dev on this? (And if not, could a red name please clarify the issue?)

That would be a brilliant move in its simplicity. I have my doubts about its adoption, though.

The devs could be counting on F2Pers being able to have a shot at joining the largest population servers in order to intermingle with their communities (which, in the marketing department's highest hopes, would lead to their becoming P2Pers of some sort). And if access to those potentially overburdened servers is de facto "VIP only", then that's just another incentive to entice F2Pers to pay up.

The description of "Galaxy City's Last Stand" does say that we'll be able to see BAB "fighting {...} in the game", along with Sister Psyche. Unless that's in a cut-scene, though, the CoH engine doesn't seem to be built to include "baked in" outcomes. In either case, though, excluding players from affecting outcomes tends to break immersion, so dictating an automatic defeat for him might turn out to be less dramatic.

(Goodness knows BAB is missed here on the forums.)

The very opening title line implies you consider your potential interlocutors to be "bitter". Perhaps you sincerely believe that, and consider such a negative description merely "blunt". Even if that were so, you could hardly imagine that starting out a discussion by calling some of the more, shall we say, assertive members of the forums "bitter" would a neutral gambit. Following up by calling them out as "unhappy" and "angst-ridden" puts paid to the possibility of objectivity. For all your protestations of wanting to know about other people, the rest of the OP is crammed with the first person, littered with unspecified and unsupported examples, and lightly sprinkled with snarky hypotheses about what you consider proper attitudes.

A worthwhile discussion could have begun with a simple "Why are some players so passionate about the discussing the problems with a game they play regularly?" Now it's too late to complain about how you're only expressing your own opinions in a thread ostensibly about other peoples'.

Were that apology not drenched in sarcasm and misanthropy, it might be acceptable in an honest discussion.

Seriously? "Coy" is precisely what you are being about the unsubtle subtext of this thread.

Were your original post as ingenuous as this, it would not have opened with a leading question, attempted to frame the debate from the outset, and then supplied several of your own opinionated answers before any of the people you supposedly want to hear from could contribute.

And naturally you prefer to engage in this "blunt" discussion at the beginning of the weekend, when the mods are away.

I'm fairly astonished anyone would have responded other than facetiously, "Prankster".

Oh boy, if we could only tell you how much we hate the games we're not playing.








But, you know, forum rules forbid us from doing that.








So the only one we can officially complain about here is CoH.

It's better to burn out than fade away, as the saying goes. Whatever one may say about Lost's sixth and final season, the showrunners explicitly decided to end the show after a pre-determined run and avoid the X-Files's meandering approach to its mythology. Nine seasons wore out the latter's audience's taste for suspense and paranoia. Chris Carter even went on record to admit, "We lost our audience on the first episode {of the ninth season}. It's like the audience had gone away, and I didn't know how to find them."

(I still say that the writers strike of '08 damaged Lost more than any of the show's convoluted plot points. The bifurcated and abbreviated fourth season threw off the series's internal rhythm and disconnected it from its mainstream audience.)

It sounds like it was more concerned with futurology than the mechanics and/or repercussions of objects/people moving backward/forward in time. Incidentally, it postdates Gulliver's Travels (1726), a fantastical satire that has some science fiction tropes (e.g. the mad scientists of the flying island of Laputa).

This would be from the same marketing team that apparently thinks CoH Freedom "will redefine the online gaming industry"? I'd bet that instead, it the devs would be the ones trying to prevent the marketeer from over-hyping Issue 21.

DISCLAIMER: And all this snark has nothing to do with the fact that I'm not attending the con. Nothing whatsoever.

Nemesis just wants you to think that this was poorly worded advance copy that wasn't properly reviewed before posting on the web site. Wake up, super-sheeple!

So there's an as-yet unknown release for 2011 in addition to CoH Freedom?

"Exclusive revelations"? "Redefine the online game industry"? Are the devs going to reveal that Paragon Studios is in fact a real-life Nemesis plot?