So, about that CoH2...

Those games were made from the ground up to be moddable by anyone with enough time and know-how on purpose.

I get the impression that COX did not have this thought in mind when it was made. That is to say, it was not made in such a way as to allow easy changes to its core systems. An example being, that adding Power Customization took a lot of work. Conversely, there are plenty of Oblivion mods that not only customize spells and abilities, but created new ones from scratch and added things like dragon riding etc.

It seems that most MMOs back in the day were not made with easy upgrading in mind. That in itself, takes a lot of work. Someone has to make the tools and test them and it all adds to development costs. More modern MMOs should have sidestepped these mistakes(hopefully) and left ample room for easier alteration by game developers.

That said, the games you gave examples of are all single player RPGs. They don't have to deal with a gameworld populated by thousands of players at a time and balance internet latency with rendering performance across a variety of systems and hardware.

Oblivion and Fallout 3 are masterful examples of a flexible game design. You can pretty much find a mod that does anything you want for these games.

The engine used for the Neverwinter Nights and Witcher games is great, but limited as well. The Witcher 2 is being made with a new engine that allows for more dynamic combat that was impossible in the first game. I'm eagerly looking forward to it. Geralt is the closest thing to a fantasy version of James Bond that I have ever seen. So many women...so little time.

it isn't licensed, it's owned.

Cryptic got to keep their logo on the game, that's it.

The old stuff about it says licensed, but if they bought it in the meantime then ok.

Anyhow, the old blurb says specifically that they licensed the engine for future games

I think they would go DirectX all the way.

I like that.

And that.

Also, since it would be a whole new game, I WANT VEHICLES DAMNIT!

This isn't always escapable. Consider power customization. Because so many assets were not created to be tintable, power customization required basically recreating many of those art assets. So even when it comes to the "data" side of the game, there are pros and cons to starting from scratch and building incrementally.

Put it this way: its always cheaper to fix an old car than buy a new car, no matter how old the old car is. However, collectively, it can be more expensive to own an old car than buy a new car. It depends on whether you're looking at the short term or the long term.

Most of my knowledge of the literal game engine itself is inferred, but separate from game engine limitations CoH also has limitations in the entire constellation of development surrounding it. The powers system design tools has limitations, the mission editors have limitations, the animation system has really odd limitations. The thing about those limitations though is that the current dev team is used to them. If you gave them a whole bunch of newer, better, but radically different tools they'd actually slow down just from the learning curve. A new dev team using new tools designed for a new game would not have that problem, and could benefit much more from a radical new approach than the current team could some ways. The current team does better with incremental improvements over time that can be integrated into their current methodologies and skills.


The simple answer to the question "what can you do in a new game that you can't do in this game" is "make a new game." A new game with new rules, new design aesthetics, new look and feel. You can't change everything in this game even if you wanted to. You can in a new game.

Which is why I think wishing for "character porting" is likely to be fruitless. If COH2 had enough common ground to allow you to do that, it wouldn't be worth making. COH2 is only worth making if its so different from COH1 that its just not possible to move things over like that in any way except superficially (like saving a costume in COH1 and using it to make a new character on a different server).

There's really no sense in making a COH2 that could just as easily have been an expansion to COH1. But that's what you can do in COH2: make something that cannot, in any way, be connected to COH1 in anything except perhaps mythology.

And if you don't have character porting, I believe the devs would risk alienating the existing players of CoH1. As I rather vaguely recall, this is what happened with EQ?

If you're making a new game, you are looking to target new players, not existing ones except by coincidence. You can't port your World of Warcraft characters to Starcraft 2, because Blizzard couldn't care less. As is true with any new game. And yes, I know Starcraft 2 is not an MMO: that's part of the point.

The point to making a new game is not to pick up all the existing players and move them to a new platform. Its to make a new game. If you really are making a new game, backward compatibility should matter not at all. If backward compatibility means something to you, and you are targeting the existing COH1 playerbase, then stick to making COH1 expansions.

If I was the lead for COH2, I wouldn't be all that concerned about backward compatibility or pre-existing customers. In fact, I would probably not even name the game "COH2" at all if it was my choice. It implies a connection I would not be honoring.

If you want to improve COH1, you work on COH1 and improve COH1 for all COH1 players. If you want to make a new game entirely, you start from scratch, you take the lessons but not the baggage from the old game to help design a game around your own design concepts, and you don't look back. If you can't do that, you don't deserve to be in charge of making a new game.

While I agree with this, couldn't you "lift" items and concepts from City and use them as base constructs for your new game, adding polish and new items to strengthen your new IP? This seems to be the concern give new shinies with enough familiarity that players will try something new and stick to it.

I'm guessing the Mac version would still be able to be ported over, yeah?

Character porting didn't even dent the enthusiasm people had in the game.

EverQuest 2 had other interesting bumps. For one, they never tried to be a migration, but they did market it as a form of upgrade. For a long time players of EQ1 asked for a complete graphic overhaul, and the response was it would take as much work as making a new game, and if they were going to invest that amount of time, they may as well make a new game instead of just sugar-coat the old game (over the years that mentality changed, they have revamped a lot of the old EQ world, albeit it looks like an odd expressionist piece of art where you see 1998 polygonal art to your left, 2005 nice art to your right while fighting a 2009 high res monster.)

So EQ2's team ventured to do something entirely different, attempting to capitalize in the lore. I'd say EQ2 made 3 big mistakes:

1) They called it EverQuest 2
2) They marketed it to existing EverQuest players
3) They dished aside too much lore making the lore nearly unrecognizable.

So marketing directly and indirectly created expectations on the old EQ player-base that they were not intending to meet, and the ones that just loved the lore found the new Tabula Rasa nearly unrecognizable.

Over time they realized the way to make EQ2 live up to it's name was to dip back into the old lore, bathe itself in the atmospheric essence of the original EverQuest. That worked wonders. EverQuest resurrected classic zones like Kelethin, Neriak, the Desert of Ro and Kunark, between others, and they even made sure to make it all recognizable. It did give the game new live and made it an appealing world for those that grew tired of the aging mechanics of EQ1.

Asheron's Call 2 made the same mistake, only to the 10th power. Where at least EQ1 kept city names (if not looks) and every race that was popular in the original EQ, Asheron's Call 2 entirely rewrote everything to the point it only made sense to be picked up by some one entirely new to the game, yet many of these players would not pick the game simply because they thought they where jumping in the middle of something (2 denotes you missed in on the first game.)

Lineage 2 is a different beast. It's reason to success in the east is unknown to me, but here in the west it had much more to do with the fact that no one knew Lineage 1.

That aside: If its true that NCSoft is working on a new City of Heroes franchise game, I do hope they are doing so for other mediums (Consoles) and as entirely new systems. I fear if one company still think they can pull the sequel thing, it will be NCSoft, due to their success with Lineage.

NCSoft in-house games, Lineage and Aion are both DirectX games. I'd figure any new project they jump on will be DirectX.

That sort of marries you to Microsoft platforms.

IF they are working on a cross-platform console release then it could be done in OpenGL as well as DirectX. Other than rumors though, I never heard of NCSoft doing any console development.

At that point, though, it would still just be a console game and be unlikely to hit the Mac or PC.

Metropolis is in New York.

Off topic, but you know the one thing that always struck me as brilliantly artful about the DC universe was the Gotham/Metropolis duality. Both cities, at least when I really knew the comics, represented two very different faces of the same real world early 20th century American city.

Since the most recent Batman films were shot all over Chicago, I've seen postings where younger folks assert "no no, Gotham is Chicago." And I can see why that mistake is made with Chicago used as a set and the real world reputation it carries as a city governed by corruption. But NYC still refers to itself as Gotham here in real life. Never been a question in my mind regarding the analogue location for either of those two DC cities. For me, no matter what retconning or pet theories current fan bases push, both Gotham and Metropolis will remain the pithy schizophrenic portrait of New York City circa 1920-1970.

true enough, but the idea of a whole new game built from the ground up on the tech that is behind Praetoria (branching missions, zone glowies, disappearing contacts and the like) is pretty exciting to me.

In this hypothetical, I agree with arcana from the pov that green lighting a coh followup would be a more agreeable proposition to NCSoft financially if they believed there would be a net efficiency/cost improvement in Issue development.

They own the rights to the very best -build your own hero- game ever designed and implemented, which, at it's peak had only a niche sub base.
Could they improve on that, could they carry over the loyalty coh has engendered, could they recoup the production costs especially at a time when most economists are forecasting bears for 2011..

If I were sitting on a panel I'd be asking all these questions, and I'd be keenly interested in how that other hero mmo will do in their 1stQ.

Not if they were smart. OGL is the smarter, but less-hyped choice.