More "Lego" pieces!

I've thought about this a lot and I think that one thing that would really freshen up the game would be to have zillions more "lego" pieces to the architecture.

When I got bored with CoX a few years ago, a big part of it was because I sort of knew all the map layouts by heart, I knew where the mobs would be in all the missions, there were no surprises. It wasn't so much the fact that it was the umpteenth office mission. The fact that missions are in bunch of archetypal "city real estate" or in typical caves and mines, isn't so much of a problem for me (although of course some creeping variation there would be nice too - a cinema perhaps, or a school now and then), it's more the sameyness of the "pieces" that make up the map layouts (abstracting away from tilesets). I didn't know what the technical term is so I've called them "lego pieces".

I have it in my mind that this must be a bit easier than making up new tilesets and new types of indoor mission space - just extend what's there by having more randomness in the missions that exist, with more different-shaped offices, warehouses, etc - they can have the same "clutter", but just have more different shapes.

I thought about this: how about consulting a professional architect to look at the problem of designing building spaces that can "click together" in lots of different ways? (Lol, maybe you guys already did that, but I'm just freewheelin' here )

I've always thought the two biggest design problems a superhero MMO faces are the psychological shrinkage of the game world due to on-demand travel powers, and the necessity to have absolutely tons of content to offset the fact that superheros, to be played well, as the dream of power that they are, of necessity must blast through content pretty quickly. This suggestion is meant to alleviate the latter problem a bit, with something that might be relatively easy to do and retrofit.

Another way of looking at it - when soloing or teaming, the thing of it is you get into a "flow" state, so a rhythm of familiarity plus occasional challenge is the best. Throwing in a shape of room or corridor that the player has never seen before occasionally, would be good for this.

While the notion of creating stock tileset pieces that "the player has never seen" is completely out of the question (you see them all within a month), I very much agree that more tileset pieces would be grand, as well as a few new map configurations. Currently, maps exist as text files with I don't know what on them, but each "random" map is actually one from a not very long list of static maps that have been manually pre-arranged. I'm not sure how much work assembling new configurations is, but more of those would definitely help.

As for tileset pieces, they did add a LOT of those a couple of years ago. New office building rooms, new warehouse rooms... It was great! For the first time in a long while, I was finding new locations and actually exploring a bit. And the variety those added has really livened up the place. More of those would be really quite dandy, and for all tilesets, not just offices and warehouses.

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.

An advantage of the current design is that certain mission objective and ambushes can be designed precisely when there is a static map. The bad thing is that it's boring as you said.

I tried another MMO that has randomly generated map. My feeling is that it looks like a maze and quite disorienting. While no two instanced maps are identical, I think I can still get bored with the "lego" pieces and a little sick with the meandering pathway within the mission as the pieces are randomly put together.

Nevertheless, I hope that something can be done about the static mission layout. I like the tileset changes in the past. I don't know why they don't do it now.

more tilesets would always be nice:

houses

mueseums (I get tired of going to a museum to protect it and find myself either in a warehouse or an office building with no displays)

schools

malls

hospitals that aren't abandoned

and even if you don't do that, yeah, new tiles would be wonderful

You know, a quick fix for new tilesets without really having to produce new tilesets would be just to slap the tiles in the old graphics proggie and swap the colors a bit. Like I am about sick to death of the burnt orange carpet theme for Offices. Hasnt anybody heard of slate blue, or I would even go for the old 70's throwback avocado carpet; howabout a deep purple pile? Change the paint on the walls too and you instantly have dozens of new color configurations to work with. Just let the RNG do it's job populating the missions with new colors.

I am a firm believer in the Standard Code Rant, but this has got to be a magnitude easier to do than to come up with and implement whole new tilesets. At least it would be a stop gap measure, and you would be surprised what a simple color change would do to the same old maps.