Add Weather Effect in the Game

rikti leader post: humor-feeling ---none found in poster


lol was making a funny

That would satisfy the /e crouch people on the Steel Canyon rooftops

Turkeys.

"I didn't know they couldn't fly!!"

Nope. Try again.

Quite possibly the funniest tv episode ever.

d

Oh, great, so now even the city acknowledges that Controllers get more mileage out of Defender sets than Defenders do?

NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HATES DEFENDERS!

Nah, quite the opposite... Wayward Controllers have simply taken their powers to a place they can be appreciated.

Yeah I thought it might be worthwhile to quote War Witch directly on the subject (from a massively.com interview: City of Heroes "Ask a Dev": Melissa Bianco Answers Your Questions by Dana Massey, 5 Oct 2007 10:55 am).

"Master0: Also will you ever introduce weather to create a more realistic environment?

War Witch: Ah weather. Yes, that's been brought up a few times.

So the short answer is 'no'. At the end of the day, we try to implement a system that has a lot of impact in terms of content and playability. Weather, for all intents and purposes, is an aesthetic that doesn't (ultimately) give the player anything to 'do'. (Well, except maybe slip and slide and not see well when it's snowing or hailing. I'm not knocking slipping and sliding. I love our chalet!!)

So this is my personal opinion. Your mileage may vary.

So while it gives a type of 'realism' to a game, sometimes 'realism' just plain sucks. I'm not naming names, but I was playing a game a few years back and I was in this zone and it started to rain. The sky grew dark and it really started to come down. When I first experienced this, I was like, "Wow! That's so cool! It's raining!" So I sat there and enjoyed the rain. Then it went away, the sun came out, and I went about my business. A few hours later, it rained again. I was trying to find a particular NPC and all I could see was dark skies and there was little visibility. Since I had no overhead map, I wandered around aimlessly, unable to find a thing.

So then it felt real, all right. I basically had to stop playing and wait for it to end, the visibility was so low. Yes, it was immersive. Yes, it was realistic. I didn't like it at all. After that, any time it would rain, I'd go rummage through the fridge or surf the web because I knew that it was pretty much a waste of my time to try and find anything until I could 'see' again. Even weather modifiers would drive me nuts (like, it's raining - therefore your accuracy goes down; earthquake - you're stuck! etc.) Unless I build a game called Weather Pattern, it's not really going to be high on my list to fight for in terms of implementation."

Duh...Role-Playing Justificators on the city payroll.

With enough cheese, yes. Funny thing is, all those Grav/ provide a constant wormhole to Wisconsin.

Yay! Weather a la Propel/Double Fusion!

"Man, this snow sucks"

"Snow? What snow? It's sunny in-game right now!"

"What do you mean you two? It's raining enough the store windows have TVs showing flood warnings!"

FIFY

Thanks for finding this interview. I remembered the why by not the who said it.

Recently I went back to my first MMO, Dark Age of Camelot. I was tooling about with my incredibly slow run speed when something happened. I'm so used to environment changes meaning something that I was mildly disturbed before I remembered - it rains in Albion. Then I was okay. Wow, I kinda miss weather happening.

I have to set aside my unnatural devotion to War Witch right now so I don't feel bad about disagreeing with her. We do have an overhead map so not being able to see far isn't the horror it can be in other games. And surely there's a darkness setting somewhere between sunshine and Dark Astoria metafog? Heck, it doesn't even need to be as dark as night - which is still bright enough to get around.

However, I can absolutely appreciate the desire to make weather in Paragon mean something beyond just an aesthetic change. I would love to have weather changes have some impact on how some things work on the street. I can - and do - supplant my desire for weather with the knowledge that if it does get done in Paragon that it'll be something as cool and amazing as free flowing capes were. (If we can all remember our amazement then.)

tl;dr version: Just my version of Wag of the Finger and a Tip of the Hat.

You've never seen WKRP I take it?

The nope try again is because the quote is wrong. It was...

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!!!

I loved that show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FXSnoy71Q4

But as you can see Tempus is right about the quote.

I understand the developers' logic about weather. There are, as far as I can tell, two ways to implement weather:

1. Weather has no effect on gameplay.
2. Weather has an effect on gameplay.

In scenario 1, weather is a low-priority fix compared to... new zones, new enemies, new missions, new mission objectives, new powers, new scripting, new animations, new anything. It is a "special effect" that entirely lacks content.

In scenario 2, you are potentially creating the situation where weather inhibits gameplay. We can't do the Task Force right now because it's raining. We have to wait to defeat the Ghost Ship because it's too cold. We can't go talk to the contact because there's ducks falling from the sky.

Look, I know how annoying it is to be trying to get your Jetpack in Kings Row when the Rikti suddenly invade. You're level 6, you can't fly, you've got to run to every mission, you've got spawns to fight en route, you're trying to keep your team together and you can't stop to wait, and if you get killed you have to start over at the hospital. It's a whole lot of no fun, if you're trying to achieve something else while a Rikti Raid is happening. And at that level, there's really nowhere else to go. No alternative.

Now imagine that in every zone, all the time. It seems like you'd end up waiting around a lot. Waiting for the sun to come out.

Jeez. If I wanted to wait for the sun to come out, so I could go play, I'd do that in the real world.

I WANT TO SEE THIS NAO! *dies laughing*

yeah i agree with you, some rain/thunderstorm and wind blowing leaves would be nice.. and i don't think there would be lag they added snow for winter games and its fine.

No, they never added snow in the air. For the duration of the winter event the first year it was run (notice that it wasn't run this way again) they replaced the zone bg's basically, they didn't ADD anything. And yes, it would lag.