We need more exploration

You know, I've seen a lot of discussions about the merits of travel powers, the banes of cross-zone travelling, the benefit of having all missions in the same zone and close by and so on and so forth. I've always been of the opinion that these travel powers spoil us a little too much, myself, but as always that's subject to debate. However, I did something yesterday that I hadn't done in a while, and it reminded me of one of the biggest things I miss in City of Heroes.

Yesterday, my level 39 Broadsword/Shield Defence Scrapper got the infamous Hunt 50 Rikti in Abandoned Sewers missions. I've wised up over the years, so I hopped off to the Atlas Park entrance to the Abandoned Sewer Network and proceeded to trounce 50 con -3 Rikti in the span of maybe 10 minutes and returned to the exit. However, before I left, I got another mission from my contact, one in Brickstown. I though... You know, instead of zoning to Atlas, I could go to Steel Canyon and take the Green Line from there.

Think about that for a second: I went from the Atlas Park entrance of the Abandoned Sewer Network all the way through Underworld to the Steel Canyon. Linearly, they are about half a mile apart, but because of how the sewers are structured, I ended up zig-zagging through the network and covering probably three times the distance. And as you know, the sewers are too narrow to avoid enemies (or avoid aggro, anyway), so I ended up fighting everything along the way.

And it was awesome!

I started off at the Atlas side, fighting level 36 Hydra and Rikti. Those fights were easy, but since every spawn I fought had at least two bosses, not THAT easy. This went on until I hit a sewer junction. I knew I had to go through Underworld, so I took the turn in there, and right away I hit upon a huge spawn of Rikti with a Chief Mentalist and a Chief Soldier plus about a dozen Infantry. Shield-Charging into them imploded the minions, but by the time I realised the bosses were, in fact, level 39, I was already in trouble. I came out victorious, of course, but this was only a taste of things to come. See, the things in Underworld are quite a bit higher in level 38-39 and thereabout.

Underworld was a slog, but at least I was getting decent experience, levelling up to 40 along the way, which made things rather a bit easier. The Rikti bosses' resistance to my damage type was annoying, but it was generally smooth sailings. I even passed by the Hydra Trial gate, and I still get all tingly when I see it. Mad as it may be, the Hydra Trial is still one of the coolest ones in the game. I couldn't partake in it, obviously, but it was nice knowing that was now at the DEEPEST part in the city, looking up at my waypoint at the Steel Canyon exit so high up above. This marked the midpoint of my adventure, as every incline from there on out was up instead of down.

Coming out of Underworld, things began to take an unpleasant turn. The Rikti spawns began to give way to Circle of Thorns spawns, sometimes consisting entirely of level 38-39 Death Mages, up to three or four of them. Death Mages aren't resistant to my damage type, but they heal each other, stack debuffs on me and are generally a pain to fight. Still I pushed through, ever onward even though my objective seemed to never get any closer.

Then I hit another junction, this one splitting off into Boomtown and Steel Canyon. I knew from out-of-game sources that the Steel Canyon sector was a red zone, so I was a little apprehensive, but I'd done well up until then. How could it get any worse? Well, spawn after spawn of there or four level 40 Death Mages (I didn't even know 40s spawned there at all) slowed my progressed, hurt me badly and depleted my inspirations. Luckily, bosses being as drop-heavy as they are, they tended to replenish the inspirations I lost with large ones, which then got eaten up in the next fight with four Death Mages.

But I kept moving ever upward, ever onward, and finally my goal seemed to be within reach. I'd even started seeing Hydra again, and some Rikti, as well, and levels eased off into the 38-39 range again. And then, right at the last choke point before the final exit, a nasty spawn of four Death Mages, two Spectral Demons and a few Air Thorn Casters stood in my way, the final obstacle. That was a nasty fight, but I managed to take them out and proceed, emerging into Steel Canyon beaten, tired and with my Inspirations, Enhancements, Salvage and Recipes full, as well as with having gone from a quarter to level 40 into a good bit over a third into the level.

The whole experience took me around two hours, so about as long as a run-of-the-mill TF. The rewards weren't all that great, though they did earn me 6-7 million on the market just selling them. I didn't get too much experience, but I got enough to help make things possible. Crucially, I hadn't died once, not a single time, and that's with me having taken on spawn after spawn after spawn of multiple bosses. I no longer feel that Shield Defence is a weak set, and I have a new-found appreciation of my lovely Scrapper.

I gotta' say, looking back on this past year... That has got to be one of THE most fun, coolest, most amazingly entertaining things I've done, easily trumping ITFs and just about any team I've been on. More than anything, the atmosphere was incredibly appropriate. Deep into the bowels of the sewers, I was alone, far from home, far from the amenities of the city far above. No vendors, no hospitals, no transpiration. So deep below, no-one could even come to help me. And there was no-one to call to, as well. I was the only person in the entire sewers complex. I remembered the sewers for the most part. The maps are just taken from sewer instances and cobbled together, but it was still really cool to explore them. The tangible sense of going down, deeper and deeper and deeper was quite a novel experience.

Look, I've gotten used to the amenities of modern-day City of Heroes. I've gotten used to the trains, the teleporters, the shortcuts and alternate dimensions, the ability to drop any mission I wanted. And if anything was ever really hard, I could just ask for help and have it dealt with. But here, alone in the sewers, I had none of that. I couldn't override the dangers and challenges, I couldn't just hand-wave the hardship and I most certainly couldn't get anyone to come do it for me. I was by myself in a place that is about as wild and unexplored as any place in the city, and I pulled through. That sort of satisfaction just isn't replicable by anything short of exploring the far reaches of the Shadow Shard. That remote, desolate feeling of being in a place where you were LITERALLY alone and far away from civilization, where there were no easy ways and simple solutions, is just something I've always felt the game was missing.

In our day and age of grinding missions without having to leave the room and people hissing at the thought of changing zones like a vampire at a cross, it just seems the game is missing something. I guess I could just call it "exploration," but the problem is that the game has become a little too much about the destination and a little too little about the journey. All that matters is XP/min, Inf gained, number of drops, merits and so on and so forth. The less done to get them, the better. Less travel, less fighting, less work, less game. I just committed two hours of my life towards achieving NOTHING, and yet the reward for doing so easily trumped the millions I earned doing it and the experience it gave me. Even I occasionally have moments I catch myself playing this game for prizes. But yesterday, I played the game for fun in a way I hadn't done in over a year.

And I'm not sure I'll be able to replicate that again any time soon.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

We have plenty of exploration, it's that all of it is entirely optional, as it damn well should be. Next time you feel like doing this, try exploring the northern end of the Rikti War Zone, dodging the pylon fire and fighting swarms of level 54 Rikti, and you'll be able to really appreciate the damage the giant mothership did when it crashed.

Or visit the three little islands north of Talos Island. Not just to get to your mission door and back out, but look around a bit. Admire the rock formations, see if you can find a nice place for a quiet beach picnic, rescue some citizens from Circle of Thorns (and watch them walk right back into the "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" doors...).

There's a fire hydrant in Brickstown which is in the middle of the street (actually floating *above* the street, at around sidewalk-height). See if you can find it! Hint: start on the side furthest from the zone entrance.

And, of course, if you have at least one badge-collecting character, you're going to end up visiting various interesting corners to find Exploration badges and History plaques.

Yeah, but the point is it's not just things to SEE. All of those are hidden little places just slightly out of the way. Even the Rikti War Zone's mothersip site isn't that far away from civilization, especially considering you can just super-jump around it and out of harm's way.

I mean more a sort of wilderness that's "out there" and not as part of this big, sprawling city, in the way the Shadow Shard is. Of course, devoting entire zones to this has been proven to be a mistake, as seen from the popularity of places like Eden, Terra Volta and, yes, the Abandoned Sewers. And, in fact, as seen in Champions Online - large stretches of no-man's land are cute as a concept, but grow boring pretty quickly, especially when the game takes you up and down the damn thing all the time.

But, on a certain level, I do want to see travel as the actual OBJECTIVE of a taste sometimes. Not merely as an inconvenience suffered in the process of getting to the actual objective, but as the objective, itself. I've gone on the record before as suggesting instances that disable travel powers and the only objective of which is "get to the other end." In fact, if I went into making an actual suggestion, I'd probably work this on a system of checkpoints and respawn points and so forth, but I still see some potential in this. After all, as long as you're moving through a map and killing stuff, you may as well do so with the objective of getting somewhere.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Cross the Shadow Shard on foot without using the mole points. That should entertain you for a few months until Going Rogue hits.

(okay, so it only takes in the hours-ish range last time we tried it as a footrace, but still)

The problem, Sam, is that the experience you're talking about is a deeply personal one that's difficult to design for. I've grown to despise the Bartle Scale over the years, but there's a reason that Explorer is always the smallest percentage on it. The people who enjoy that experience are few in number and those who enjoy REPEATING the experience even fewer. In fact, it's one of those "sovereign experience" kind of things, where you CAN'T really experience it more than once with the same level of enjoyment.

The much maligned Star Wars Galaxies designed the entire game around this type of thing in the beginning. Fast travel existed, but the usage of it was limited to X times per hour. The shuttle arrived every ten minutes and different shuttles were on different schedules. If your goal was to get from point A to point B then, like as not, setting out cross-country was going to be the least boring usage of your time, and while you traveled you'd fight things, sample for resources, see the sights, and experience the greater world.

That was the idea, anyway. In reality, people are so goal-oriented and so danger-averse (which made some sense in SWG where many PC's had jobs like Dancer or Chef and were deliberately designed to be non-combatants) that the most of the players just sat twiddling their thumbs at the shuttles and complaining about the wait times.

It's unfortunate from a game design standpoint that the greatest value of the "wilderness" comes from that moment where a player is standing at the edge of his normal routine and she decides out of the blue, "I'm going to do something different today."

The value of the experience is in the novelty of it. It's really difficult to design that into an encounter on purpose, especially since you know up-front that it's a one-off experience.

The value of your trip through the sewers was that you set out into the unknown, relatively speaking, made a deliberate decision to extend your stay there, and then made it a goal to complete the trip in spite of the fact that it became progressively more challenging as you went along AND you could have left at any time by using a teleporter or the mediporter.

Essentially, you made up your own mission and then saw it through, even if it didn't really seem like that's what you were doing at the time.

To replicate that experience, a game designer would need to do more than simply start you at point A, direct you to point B, and supress all of your travel powers on the slog in between. That's because it WOULD be a slog, due to the fact that your motivations would be impersonal (completing the task for XP/etc...) as opposed to personal (testing your endurance, seeing new things, finishing a challenge that you assigned to yourself).

If you could figure out how to motivate players to repeatedly "make up their own missions" in this fashion and feel both satisfied and rewarded by it, then you would have hit the Holy Grail of game design - a system where ALL content is "player designed" by dint of being driven entirely by the player motivations instead of being "canned" adventures created by the game's developers.

When so many players, maybe the majority, are driven by simple Pavlovian needs/desires, that's a big goal to try and reach. It's not even guaranteed that it would change the game that much, given that a lot of people LIKE killing ten rats to get 100 XP and 5 gold pieces and doing it over and over and over, slot-machine style.

Very early on in my life playing CoH I decided to have a look around the city. At the time my highest level alt was Heart Attack as per my forum name. He was just a baby level 9 with stealth, no travel power and I had no idea what I was doing really. It was before any of the TPs, bases didn't exist, oub wasn't there (not that I could have used it at lvl 9) and vet powers didn't exist.

I started in Atlas and decided to head into Steel, I used my stealth to sneak through the area aiming for a shop in the northern part of the map. As I got close I realised it was Icon (in those days shops showed only as shops whatever their type). Had a look inside and came out. I then headed for the nearby Paragon Dance club (now long gone and replaced by Pocket D) all the while dodging high level mobs (high to a lvl 9 thats it).

I passed through The dance club for the first ond only time, it was empty and exited into IP (the exit was to the east of TV). Then I stealthed my way to the Kings door and passed through Kings into Skyway.

Once in skyway a aimed for a shop in the middle and once there was thrilled to find they sold higher TOs than I'd ever seen before. From that shop I headed south aiming for the Talos door.

Once in Talos I headed for the nearest shop and found even higher level TO's wow. I stealthed my way around the corned and found a shop which sold DO's amd SO's, the first time I'd see or even heared of either of them (no auction house in those days).

I left myself in that shop. 4 hours of stealthing high level zones, earning nothing, killing nothing and not having done a single mission left me really happy from the joy of exploring. The only thing I got was a badge I stumbled on behind a shop in Skyway and in those days you didn't get XP for badges.

So I agree we need more exploration.

The tunnels under Grandville and Faultline come close to that type of feeling for me. Faultline in particular as you stumble upon buried super group bases and groups of arachnos working to dig them out. Then you get to a point and you are on the other side of the war wall.

Fantastic OP, Sam; a great read.

I love exploring.

That's why I spend as much of my time in the Shadow Shard as possible.

And I never use flight, why? The vents are way faster! I love vent hopping, it's SO fun!

Sam, I'm glad you seen the light and embraced farming as a fun alternative to 'real' gameplay.
Oh wait, you call it "exploration". =)


I remember waaaaay back when I first started playing some friends and I went into the sewers for the first time. We were all "OMG what is this crazy place?" and spent the evening happily fighting ghosts and demon lords and whatnot, stuff my low level characters strenuously avoid nowadays.

It's neat that you're still got that sense of discovery about an area most players wouldn't go near if you paid them.

We do actually have a great unexplored wilderness, it's called the Suburbs!

I think it's a combination of two problems. One is the "point A to point B" nature many people have and to be honest this really can't be changed. Though you could argue that in some ways it can be prevented. Players who are used to playing one way will probably stick with it so actually supporting different styles of play should be the goal. The other is the static nature of things. MMOs are surprisingly NON-interactive in some ways and players can easily become jaded to their surroundings. Developers should make some tweaks to thing over time to keep them fresh.

I gotta agree completely. I've posted a few videos of really neat places I've found in CoH (some of which take the magic of Demo Editing to get to), but this game is really lacking them, IMO.


The Shadow Shard is massive, yet it's so sparse that there's really not that much there (the face, the chair, and a couple other things... over FOUR massive zones! that's all!)... not to mention the zones are nearly COMPLETELY lacking content (no story arcs outside the task forces! what the hell!) as well as using the early CoH technologies (so it's basically completely static... with a few mobs doing an animation... but otherwise everyone just standing around in groups like they've got nothing better to do!).

There's lots of ways the devs could expand on the whole exploration aspect of CoH (Cimerora, IMO, is pretty nice in this regard, although it's small), and most of the newer content has been moving in this direction (whether intentionally, or simply as a side effect of having better tools to work with)... I wouldn't be surprised if the Praetorian zones have lots of little things to explore... I would also really like if eventually we got a majorly revamped Shadow Shard (it'd make the Faultline revamp look like nothing!), it seems like the ultimate story for CoH, yet so far it's hardly been explorered at all (I guess the Devs could just be saving it as a final, massive trump card...).


And yes, I'm just rambling now.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

I agree.

The thing that I had the most fun with way back when I tried Ragnarok Online was just going as far as I could to explore as many zones as possible and see where the limits of the world were. There was mystery to it and I got a rush going from empty remote zone to empty remote zone, to see weird ruins and things.

Travel should be easy, and exploration is not particularly replayable, but what they CAN do to improve exploration is add more things like the grandville undercity or faultline's tunnels.

I would like for example a labyrinth at cimerora with giant monsters hidden within, that roam the caves so you have to search. With GM merits there is some incentive anyway.

Great read.

Whenever I hit a new zone for the first time I was always aware that it would never be as new for me again as it would be for the next few hours, and I'd make a point of taking the long way. The random door placements of radio/newspaper missions would often lead me into areas way above my level, but it was always fun trying to get there, and seeing the sights along the way.

I've got a lot of fun memories of those occassions. Getting through Aeon City at level 13 took hours (I was new, and barely understood the con system, so the significance of most of the enemies being red and purple was lost on me...); all four story arcs of the Hollows, start to finish, without so much as a raptor pack; going to Nerva at level 26 and getting a door mission in Thorn Isle (I got as far as Agincourt before I gave up on that one...)

I think my favourite was my first time in Faultline, with a level 15 scrapper (fresh from the Hollows) I didn't know then that you don't need to be introduced to Jim Temblor, and the third radio mission I picked up was in the Arachnos base in the dam. I still have no idea how I managed to get in and out of there alive.