Coh 2001

If it had exactly the same content it would be CoH... not CoH2

I suspect that it would be a very different expereince to this game.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Which is precisely the problem. A number of people keep going in and out of the game, always hoping that it would change SOMEHOW and become much more like what they actually want. A number of other people, and I count myself among these, like the game pretty much exactly as it is, and massive changes, revisions and innovations only serve to detract and degrade what made the game good.

This is subjective, obviously, but you're never going to be able to sell a brand new experience to the exact same players. That's why Blizzard have been remaking Warcraft for, what? 20 years now? That's why they remade every MMO ever made, too. And they were smart to. It's made them more money than most countries' annual budgets.

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.

It is a pretty good engine, just look at some screenshots from Star Trek Online. It never ceases to amaze me that CO and STO use the same engine, because STO looks light years better than CO in every way.

This. As said before, the engine could be the best one ever made capable of pushing out hyper-realistic vistas or beautifully surreal scenes, but unless you have good art direction to take advantage, your game can still look like crap.

Technically(and I mean that as "from a technical perspective" not in a semantic way) CO has good graphics. But aesthetically, to me it looks terrible.

On the other hand, to me, STO looks both technically and aesthetically really good (some ugly ship designs notwithstanding(I'm looking at you Envoy!)). It may have some slowdowns in some places (asteroid-heavy scenes with AA on for instance) but it looks great.

On the other side of the coin, WoW's graphics are technically pretty simple and blocky, but I love the art direction. So to me it looks great even with its simplistic graphics.

We have great art direction here, even if some parts of the game are no longer technically up-to-date. Ultra Mode helped but not completely. But the game still looks great to me.

Back on topic: I'd love to see the rest of that article if you can find it. I love old stuff like that, obsolete designs and such.

Well like you I'm happy with the game. If there ever is a CoH2 (and I can't see that coming for a long time) then I'll probably be playing that in my dotage too - but I don't expect (or want) a total replacement

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

oh i have it right here....but its mothers day and I wont hear the end of it if it try to use the PC...gtg gonna get yelled at

SOE did this with EverQuest and EverQuest 2. Both games are still running, even though EQ2 has a larger population than original EQ. i've played both, and honestly prefered 2 (yay new engine and graphics). i would expect (possibly wrongly though) that if there were to be a CoH2 it would progress the story line dramatically (as in happened in backstory) and start us out in an evolved (plotline wise) Paragon City/Rogue Isles. Then there would be no need to end original CoH as its a diffferent continuity from the new game.

I think the first mjor lore change would be that we'd managed to defeat Rikti attacks enough to allow the city to be almost totally rebuilt, with the war walls being taken down - that'd allow them to make Paragon City either into one huge city zone, or to make it several zones where you'd cross between them at any point.

But you can pull it off better than most.

You know, I don't care what's in City of Heroes 2 if I can play both games for the same subscription fee. At that point, I wouldn't really complain. I might grumble if they cut support to the original, but then I've been saying for years that I'd play the game even if it added nothing new, and sooner or later I'll have to put my money where my mouth is. Literally.

Again, as long as we don't lose this game, then adding another game to the bundle can only be a plus. I have to wonder if the studio can afford that, though.

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 don't see why saying you like the visuals of Champions Online would be unpopular here. I believe everyone will agree that their graphics engine is better, objectively speaking. What some of us HATEHATEHATE is the art style in the game, and since that's a matter of taste and not absolutism, I see no reason to argue. I mean, I hate the game, but I also hate Big Brother, and plenty of people LOOOVE that pile of fetid garbage.

Ahem... Excuse me.

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.

Such as?

Anything that can import our data and have it work in a similar way isn't CoH2: its CoH 1.5. And there's no reason whatsoever to expend all the resources necessary to rewrite the game from the ground up just to get a CoH 1.5. I find it difficult to believe this would even be a viable option in jest.

If you want basically the same game as CoH 1.0 but with improvements, you just add them to the current game; cf: Ultra Mode. If you're going to start making an entirely new game, it will be an entirely new game.

Why you make a new game is to (hopefully) fix the mistakes of the past, and try new things that are incompatible with the current game. The old game keeps running for people who like those mistakes of the past and aren't interested in new things that are incompatible with the current game.


There's so many things that would basically wreck any attempt to seriously import us into a new game without essentially making up some arbitrary conversion (no different than attempting to recreate a CoH character in CO). I think its extremely unlikely the enhancement structure of CoH1 would survive into a sequel. It would probably be an invention system, but a totally different one. So slotting is gone. Without the exact same mechanics for endurance and recharge, many powers in many powersets would require major overhaul. I would expect any CoH sequel to have either linear or diminshing returns on things like damage mitigation and offense, analogous to (but algorithmicly different than) CO, which also radically changes many things. I suspect the entire Defense/Accuracy situation would be completely rethought, which would make sets like SR, EA, and FF require total overhaul.

And these are changes that are both highly likely *and* automatically torpedo character porting even if the devs thought character porting would even be a good idea. If they decide to start monkeying with powerset progression and power tiering, its all over.


You should probably assume that any game that looks like this one, only better, will actually *be* this one, only better, with game improvements over time. Any sequel they decide to make will be totally different, and mostly incompatible, because its those very incompatibilities that are the driving force for wanting to make a sequel in the first place. Heck, for all we know the devs are looking at those early Alphas and thinking they want a second chance to make that, which would be totally incompatible with this game just on its face.

That dev diaries link is as dead as the dodo.

There's a relatively limited amount of things that can be used for objectives: interact with a glowie (defend, destroy, or click), rescue/capture someone, and defeat enemies. I could be wrong, but as far as I know those are the three types of mission objectives allowed to us.

When I said this, I was referencing someone else who said "the mission objectives are the same thing dressed in different cloths." I for one enjoy the creative ways that said "cloths" are being used, but we are still limited to certain types of fabric. Presumably, a new engine would expand the types of fabric people could use. I don't know how, or what else people would want or think of as objectives, but that's not for me to figure out.

There's also "talk to someone" (or something). Fedex missions to contacts are basically this, but there's also the option for "failure", which so far is basically just "go back one dialogue screen and try again". We see this in the arcs to get into the Midnighter Club with a password. However, I accept that this can be seen as a variation of "click glowie".

There's also "escape mission instance", where the "glowie" to be clicked (eventually) is the mission door.

Also, putting out fires, which falls under "defeat enemies", since we're "defeating" the "fire" critter using a special temp power (or ice attacks); this could be expanded to, say, "clean up the toxic sludge with this special spray chemical".

I can't think of very many kinds of objectives that couldn't be added to this game in much less time than rewriting it from scratch would take. Mission objectives are a part of the mission scripting system, and the mission scripting system is probably extensible in ways that might be time consuming, but likely non-disruptive to the rest of the game.

That's not to say they would be easy to add. Just that it would be easier to add than rewriting the entire game engine would be.

Or "smash the rubble to rescue the trapped citizens" - which is something I'd really like to see.

This is probably less a problem with the actual game engine, and more a limitation of the mission design tools. A trapped civilian under rubble is essentially a destructible object with a passive power that targets an entity with a power that forces it to play a lie-down animation on every pulse. Destroying the object causes it to immediately despawn and release the civilian from the prone animation.

Those enemies playing dead until attacked are in essence the same game mechanical thing as a trapped civilian, with just different release details (I am oversimplifying a bit the geometry issues associated with placing rubble over victims in ways that are not nonsensical and won't be oddly affected by the physics engine).


It may not even be a limitation of technology at all, and more the mission designers haven't gotten to making missions that require that sort of objective yet.

I suspect you can skip the "two entities" approach and just have the civilian lie down and run a power which animates him lying down with a boulder over him similar to how Rock Armour puts rocks on us. We already have objects that change shape when attacked, such as the various Mayhem vehicles and those rock spire things Vernon has you fight. Oh, and the special portal in one of Malice's missions.

I agree that it's likely a case of them just not having gotten around to needing that sort of thing. Be nice to have in one of the Hellion Fires events, especially if we start being able to go inside.

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 could do that, but the two entity approach seems safer in terms of making the boulder itself being a separate entity subject to the physics engine, a separate bounding box, and a separate targeting location. You open the door to options like potentially pushing the boulder off the target instead of being forced to destroy it (moving it far enough away from the trapped entity could have the same effect of removing the "trap" buff by moving it out of range).

Of course pushing an actual boulder that is sitting on a trapped civilian would probably turn them into a skid mark, but then again shooting a fireball at it is probably equally unhelpful to the typical trapped person.