Wait, why Tank, Healer, Damage Dealer?

The biggest lesson not learned I think is the open power system.

They tried to do it with CoH, but it created so many problems that they decided it wouldn't be feasible. It would make it too easy to create tankmages or create gimped toons. So they went with a class system. Open power system doesn't work; noted.

Then the first thing they do with CO is create an open power system and plow through all the issues associated with it. As Arc pointed out, it just creates one class. To prevent people from making tankmages (they still do, just not as overpowered as you might think), the choices you make don't change your overall ability as much. You can't heavily build for defense. Pretty much everyone has the same defense. So deviating from "tankmage" is pointless. The only logical build is "ranged Scrapper." And while you can do other stuff, there's really no reason to.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

I don't think you can pin this on Roper. I think the dev team was struggling with the consequences of the pseudo-open system they were expousing long before he got there. The discussion that swirled around "Frameworks" seems instructive. First, it didn't seem clear the devs themselves had a solid idea of what they were thinking there - or had conflicting opinions between themselves. Second, whatever it was originally it changed shape as arguments built around some of the concepts behind them. Finally, we ended up getting basically *nothing* like what was originally described: instead "frameworks" became the dewey decimal system of categorizing powers, with 2% prerequisite tiers added on top.

The current CO system, as I perceive it, is the CoH system with both archetypes *and* enhancements removed. You can pick whatever powersets you want, and whatever powers you want in them, but you have minimal control over your slotting of those powers. And for me personally, that is its biggest failing in terms of being a Champions inspired game. Champions allowed two different kinds of orthogonally balanced customization: you could take a different mix of powers, and you could customize those powers in interesting ways. I think the former is at least possible to some degree in CO, but the latter is not to a high enough degree to be interesting.


Since we're playing fantasy game design, one thing I would do differently than either CO or CoX is I would focus more attention on character development. Both games treat character development as if we were a bag of powers, and development involves filling the bag. I think a better way to do this would be to consider this a three-stage process. In stage one, you decide what you can do. In stage two, you decide how well you can do it overall. In stage three, you decide to specialize in certain things to add focus to the character.

A big knock on both games to some degree is that it takes too long to "realize" your character concept. I think one way to address that is to give all the conceptual choices to the players very early on. In fact, I would present all of them by the time they left the tutorial (if the tutorial was long enough). So if you want the ability to supercharge offense at the expense of defense, you get to choose that ability early. If you want to fly, to buff others, to become temporarily invulnerable - all those types of general options would be made available to the character early on.

But they would be relatively weak versions of those abilities. As you level, the opportunity would arise to improve those general abilities in either general or specific ways. In other words, rather than the slotting progression we have now, I'd allow players to just plain increase their damage across the board if they wanted to, but at lower amounts than boosting individual attacks. Rather than build up from being able to block melee, then block ranged, then block AoE, SR would be able to block all three, but weakly, and then build up their general defense to all, or divert more attention to building up melee defense.

In the end game, I would allow players to take certain abilities and specialize in them in ways unavailable to generalists, no matter how much they buff those powers during the mid game. Maybe you could increase the firing rate (in cast time) of your basic attacks, or you could use certain powers free of its normal restrictions. Perhaps while personal force field was up force bolts were reduced in strength normally, but in the end game you could specialize in attacking while those shields were up. That sort of thing.

In a sense, you'd be picking your archetype in the beginning through fundamental character ability choices, then you'd be leveling sort of the way we do now in CoX but with more general options for enhancement, and then in the end game you'd start to get power advantages vaguely like in CO.

In general I like this, and it's very fitting for the super hero genre (you don't get new powers, you just get better at using the ones you have). The problem as I see it is the learning curve, if you start off with 20+ powers you've got to learn to use them all at once rather than starting with a handful and increasing the number at a steady rate means you have a few levels to play around with a new power before the next power comes along. Now it's entirely possible that I'm underestimating the abilities of the game playing public but I do know that in the few games I've played where I started off with everything I found it very hard to effectively use it all.

The solution I'd use would be a hybrid of it where you start with basic powers and as you level up you learn new powers which are thematically related to the original power that represent you learning new tricks. Maybe make the sets three deep that way you start out knowing 6-8 powers which then expands to 18-24 over the course of your career.

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.

That's why I was careful to say "options" rather than "powers." I don't expect people to have all 24 powers in the tutorial. I only expect them to have a choice of powers that encapsulates most of the viable combat options in the game. So ranged damage-dealing would be represented, but that doesn't mean you'll have every single ranged attack from the start. You'd just have enough of them to make the choice of being a ranged gunslinger a viable option. Conversely, if you want to be a blapper, there'd be enough melee options to make that choice viable. But that doesn't mean you'd necessarily have thunderstrike at level 1.

That's actually one of the things that bugs me a little also. Its clear Nova is balanced around being enhanced, but that means you get it at 32, then you get to actually *use* it at level 33. It doesn't actually mature until level 34.

That doesn't mean I agree with everyone's assessment of what is worthless and what is worthwhile. But that's one of the reasons behind my thinking towards general vs specific enhancement. If you *want* to enhance a particular attack's damage, you can, but the *option* exists to enhance your across the board damage, which will affect any attack you acquire in the future.

I'm not sure exactly *how* I would do that. I'm not sure "player-wide enhancements" are quite the right way. Its just a hypothetical thought at the moment.

I was going to bring up the same point. In the low levels, anything you get is pretty much ready to go out the gate, as everything else you have barely has a couple of slots and they're filled with barely meaningful enhancements, so the gulf isn't that big. By the 30s, though, you have a lot of your powers well-slotted, to the point of brand new ones being practically not worth the time and cost until you enhance them, which tends to take anywhere from next level to several levels down the line, circumstances depending. That really bugs me, because it gives me a cool new power... Except it doesn't. Ugh!

I could dig that, given a hypothetical new game system where this won't shift a carefully-selected balance point by a wide margin. If there's an aspect of classical computer RPGs that I always enjoyed, it was the ability to take what is essentially static powers that improved your performance. I realise that kind of comes down to "Strength/Dexterity/Magic/Vitality," but the problem with these is that one stat controls a bunch of things, not all of them well-documented, not all of them actually desired, and not all of them applying to a lot of your abilities. Having the ability to, instead, increase my own base damage via some kind of AT mod enhancement, to go back to City of Heroes, is both a directed, specific improvement only to something I want (and so, presumably, less costly than an improvement to something I want AND something I don't) and a good way to form specialisation.

Again, I kind of enjoy the game land-locking me into specialisations to some degree, because I don't trust myself enough as a player to sacrifice damage for defence, say, but the system sounds decent even despite that fact.

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.