Takin' A Break

eh, its healthier in the long run to take a rest so that you can come back, rather than bang your head against a wall till you come to hate the game entirely. in the long run, it should make you happy, people who take a break are implying that they are coming back. i have a feeling that in 2 weeks i'll be playing less coh, between mass effect 2, no more heroes 2, sands of destruction, , and tatsunoko versus capcom, i'm really not hurting for things to do, and that is if i get through my pile of shame, did i mention that i haven't finished oblivion and fallout 3 yet? breathing room is healthy for long term things like this. im paid till may'11 but resting is good.

Don't be sad - it's dedicated players recharging their batteries before GR goes live

you know man, maybe yes, maybe no. I'd be amazed and pretty darn ticked if there isnt more than 18 arcs in a boxed expansion, but i am not sure, its nice to say that a developer should be revamping old stuff, and i don't disagree with revamping things, particularly the shadow shard, but lets be realistic about how fast new content gets chewed up. we need mroe, no question, but big ideas expand the breadth of the game, gives you more things to do with every character. new content gets run through far faster than it can be created, and then what? saying you are bored indicates a break is the exact right thing for you, because new content would only hold you for a time, and then you'd likely be bored again. Issue 10 is often rightly praised as an amazing content release, with several arcs, but you know what? if memory serves me, threads appeared the night after open release that people were done with it, and were bored again, so fighting a battle of attrition with content is similar to emptying a lake with a kids bucket.

The chances of that happening ar close to zero - as in -5 or so

Same for me here. All the other MMOs suck, and I'm not saying that as a fanboy. I've tried a lot of them, and in almost every case quit within an hour of logging in. Lineage II held me a day, WoW I haven't actually tried but I've seen more of it than I want to and... Well, Champions Online I tried twice. Once lasted a day, the other time lasted two sessions of an hour each as I'd promised to give the game a chance and just couldn't. Combat there is TERRIBLE.

Hell, combat EVERYWHERE is terrible. I'm sick of auto-attacks, I'm sick of feeling as though I have no contact with the ground and fighting by, as Yhatzee put it "furiously waving my fists at the enemy until one of us falls down..." I hate every other MMO I've tried or so much as even seen. I've hated MMOs since I became aware of what the concept entailed, and City of Heroes is literally the ONLY one I can play, specifically because it's a lot NOT like the rest of them. Less not like them now than it used to be, regrettably, but still far and away not that kind of mess.

Offline games are still fare game, of course, if you'll pardon the pun, but fat lot of good they do me. Single-player games hold me for a day, at most two. Mass Effect lasted me three, I believe, but most other games... Nah. I got a lot out of Steam's sale, though most indie games. Braid I HATE WITH A PASSION and I beat it in a day, Trine I really like, but I've already beaten it before, so I beat it in a day, and Audiosurf I've played before, but I can't really play it for more than an hour a day, if that. I also got Advent Rising for sentimental reasons, but that's a day, as well. I could play through Half-Life: Source, 2, Episode One and Episode Two, and that'd take me three, probably four days, and I could play through the Sands of Time Trilogy, which, having memorised all three games, won't take me more than a couple of days, but even all that together isn't more than a couple of weeks, out of how many months?

I could probably play Dragon Age: Origins, as that's rumoured to take forever. But I won't. I HATE HATE HATE Baldur's Gate and everything it represents, I am DONE DONE DONE with Fantasy and I've honestly lost my taste for squad combat. I could deal with it if it were something as simple as Dungeon Siege, but Dungeon Siege 2 finally broke my back on the STUPID complexities of your typical Fantasy RPG. That, and I am beyond sick of sandbox games, and I am perfectly fine with a linear single-player game. Icewind Dale over Baldur's Gate, as it were. And besides, complex adventures are typically fun to play, but laborious to replay.

So I'm sticking to City of Heroes, even if I'm spending increasingly more time watching Linkara, Nostalgia Critic and Spoony reviews.

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.

You are dead to me.

You have failed - totally, utterly, and completely.
And should reincarnation exist, you'll also have failed all your future lives as well.

Well to be fair, Sam is not someone you'd go to for advice on games. He likes a lot of what most people don't(even people I'd consider as having reasonable taste) and he gets things from games that I certainly don't. Or at the very least I don't hold to be important.

I really could never figure out his thought process on games. Some stuff I totally agree with him on. Other stuff, I just shake my head and move on.

I really can't see how anyone could hate Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age(not with that kind of passion anyway)...but the fact that it's Samuel Tow is not surprising to me.

?!?!

You are not human.

I hear you, but what I'm asking for is slightly different.

For years now, I've been asking for someone to do continual monthly releases of new content. I've also been asking for changes to old content, like the elimination of the odious errands and hunts.

If the devs had started this policy back in 2005, the current content situation would be fantastic. If they would start it now, eventually the content situation would improve.

The problem is that we ALWAYS have to wait SEVERAL MONTHS for new content, and even then it is usually like only five or six arcs. And everyone plays those few arcs over and over, because it is so preferable to playing the older arcs, and then in about a month or two they get sick of the new stuff too.

I'd like to see the devs hire someone, or a few someones, to create new official content for monthly release. They could revamp old content, including the Cavern Trial, and they could create alternate TFs, like one or two new Posi TFs.

It would be great. And it is years late in getting started.

This would be in addition to the new development the devs are always working on, so not only would there be new content each month, but there would be big, new features released approximately twice yearly.

The monthly content would help keep players entertained while they wait for the next game update. And there's a lot of things you could do. You could have situations where a story begins in one month, and concludes in content released the next month. You could introduce new bosses and new foe groups. You could reveal some of the game's hidden backstory. That sort of thing.

Compare that to the present (and eternal) situation where players know that nothing much is going to happen for the next several months. They have nothing to look forward to doing in the intervening time, and people lose interest in stories like the "Coming Storm" because they take FOREVER to tell.

It seems to me that if you were releasing new content each month, you might retain a lot of these people and hear less grumbling.

I agree with and support these two statements. *goes back to playing Wolfenstein 3D* wheee! Shooting cartoonish Nazis in the face and knifing dogs that bleed ketchup is FUN!

Pretty simple, really. I hate sandbox games, and Baldur's Gate qualifies in a big way. It's a game that's less about... How should I put it? Less about watching a movie, and more about just plopping you down into a world to explore, be immersed in and learned about. And my response to that is "Who gives a crap? Lead me to my adventure!" Baldur's Gate's official storyline proceeds in what I remember to be about three distinct steps. Leave home, go to mines, go to Baldur's Gate, with "finish game" possibly counting as a fourth one. Everything else is, basically, "Go forth, ye hero, and explore." It's a line, in fact, from the middle of the map down to the bottom middle of the map up to the top middle of the map, and everything left and right of that is side quests. MILLIONS of side quests, to the point where I forgot what the hell it was that I was actually doing.

The only reason I hate Baldur's Gate and merely dislike Baldur's Gate 2 is that I actually played the former through to the end, whereas I wisely avoided the latter, knowing what it would be like. I don't so much hate the game itself, in that I don't want to kill the people who made it, as it is a good game for those who actually like this sort of thing, VERY UNLIKE ME, so it has its place and its merits. And had I had the kind of good sense I have now to just drop it like a hot potato the moment I realised it was wasting my time, I'd probably just "meh" at the original Baldur's Gate, but like Diablo 2, I made the mistake of forcing myself through, and I simply cannot forgive myself (or it) for the SHEER BOREDOM I had to endure. Ugh!

That's why I mentioned Baldur's Gate vs. Icewind Dale. Baldur's Gate is a wide-open sand box crammed full with so much stuff I don't give a crap about and isn't important to anything in any way, which is the kind of game that puts me to sleep. On the technical side, Icewind Dale IS THE SAME GAME right down to absolutely everything, but the way the story is delivered is a lot more interesting to me. The game gives me ONE and precisely ONE storyline to follow, with only a few minor side-quests that I'm going to accomplish as a matter of course anyway, it gives me a largely linear world that I can pretty much explore entirely and it has a quest log that never breaks multiple pages. I enjoyed this game very much, to the point where the trip to the Severed Hand and the fate of Laurel and his followers is one of THE iconic fictional concepts I admire, and that I have built several concepts over. Of course, I was never able to kill Belifeth, which kind of sours the experience, but narratively at least, it's the kind of game I enjoy.

Yes, I have weird tastes when it comes to games. So much I've been told. I enjoy focused stories, simpler gameplay, linear design and easy repeatability. Wide open sandboxes and games too complicated for me to want to bother for a second playthrough do not thrill me. I grew up on Captain Commando, Knights of the Round and the Sunset riders and, to be quite honest, that's still the kind of game I prefer to this day. Incidentally, that's exactly how I play City of Heroes, and incidentally, that's exactly how I CAN'T play any other MMO I've ever tried, because they all constantly bog me down with maintenance optimization, and their grinds aren't nearly as stylish.

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.

I did. I'd class it as one of THE best games ever made, and I HATE HATE HATE Bungiee for selling their souls to Microsoft and producing exclusively Halo games. Whether Halo is a good game or not isn't the question here (it's not), but the fact remains that Oni is practically the only fighter of its kind to institute meaningful and at least SOMEWHAT realistic hand-to-hand combat without going the Devil May Cry route of endless flashy combos. Oni requires a lot more on knowledge and precision, and a lot more on grappling than it does on just hitting things. That, and it's one of the very few games that had realistic, believable structures even when they were unrealistically unbelievable in nature, like the atmospheric processor. It's certainly the only game I can think of off-hand. I still hold TCTF HQ and the Government Records buildings as some of THE best levels in any game ever made.

Not only have game designers not taken note of this, but even its own creators kick it on the *** when Microsoft clubbed them over the head with a giant money bag. Who cares about support or development or sequels to Oni when they can be making Halo 3000? After all, it only makes them more money than the annual income of Belgium.

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.

You say "I'm bored with the entirety of the game, someone should change all the zones to something completely new", and when people tell you "that's not going to happen, why don't you play another game with completely new zones and characters to level?" you hold it up as some sort of failing with the game's development team?

Oh really? Which one?

Good one, i actually paged back up going "oh ****! did i?"

My work here is done.