Warehouse, office, warehouse, sewer, office, warehouse, warehouse, office, sewer
By
Afterimage,
Posted on: 2010-09-03 15:43 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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What a horrible idea. Getting rid of the old maps, will just lead to people complaining about the new maps that quicker.
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Originally Posted by TheJazMan
After 6 years they should retire ALL of those old maps and not add them ever again.
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Well Vets have been saying this for years. Unfortunately the devs just don't seem to see it as the same priority that the players do.
Even if it was just reskinning, a bit of variety would be great.
They could just open up the "Random Lab Maps" folder and rejiggle them a bit to give them better layouts and that would be great.
They could open up the "Random Warehouse Maps" folder and add some of the customized rooms.
I think my problem is that there seems to be no attempt to even address this flaw. If I worked at Paragon Studios, I would add many many more variations to the pool of maps used.
When you see some of the spectacular maps that are used for one off missions and then never used again, you really start to question why.
E.g: Circle of Thorns frost demons take over an office, why not use the Frostfire mission map? Why not make the Forstfire "frozen office" map an actual default template with about 20 iterations. Why not do the same for the offices on fire map, or the superdine office map, or the nightclub warehouse map, or make the freakshow warehouse map a whole template with 20 iterations of it. This is what I mean when I say it seems no attempt is made to rectify it. There is already a lot of resource there that is currently being underutilised.
/plugshisthread I had an idea that might help a little.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.
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I'm afraid I could not possibly disagree more with the points raised here.
I love instanced maps and I HATE HATE HATE street hunting. Absolutely despise it. Whenever the game chooses to make me do it, I either drop the mission (such as Security Chief hunts) or I hope to find enemies my level in groups my size, or otherwise "cheat" by picking on enemies -10 or more. Never in the history of this game have I ever enjoyed a mission which told me to go to a zone and kill a certain number of a certain enemy faction. Ever. I've tolerated it, sometimes, but I have never enjoyed it. Not ever.
Nor, for that matter, have I ever tolerated teams that decide to hunt outdoors. I HATED the Hydra craze in Perez Park. This was easily the WORST time in the game for me. There was no story, there was no context, there was no plot. It was basically as Yahtzee said: "Enemies over there. Kill they ***." If I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, then I do not care to do it. In fact, if the game had remained as primarily focused on the overworld as it used to be, I'd have quit back in 2004. Instead, I was able to flip all the ******** who blind-invited me the birdie and dive into an instance where no-one could bother me. That alone kept me coming back.
I hate the Architect, as well, but that's largely because I hate other people. I've done the best I could to try and enjoy the thing, but the missions in there just suck for the most part. I mean no offence to anyone in particular, but I am sick and tired of unfunny comedy and brutally difficult custom enemies. I'm tired of the no-plot, "go there, do that and come back to me" stories. I'm fed up of the useless, tired in-jokes and references. And I DO NOT WANT to take part in "elseworld" stories where I'm trapped in someone's fanfiction alternate universe full of all custom enemies and taking place on Mars or some such. And I did honestly try to make missions for the thing. However, the mission I made when the Architect launched has received less than 20 playthroughs up to this point, and is unlikely to receive any more. So, yeah. I'm not interested in busting my balls to make arcs no-one is ever going to play. And then I have to worry about experience percentages and precise power selection and ugh. No, thank you.
As far as instances being repetitive... Can't say I can complain. I've been coming back to the same warehouses, offices, blue caves, brown caves, pink caves, blue labs, Column labs, Council labs, Longbow bases and so on and so forth for... Years now. Some of them for over six years. I'm still not tired of them. I doubt it's possible for me to be tired of them. I'm the guy who played the Spawn version of Diablo when a friend of mine took back his game CD, and I played that for probably a year, replaying the first three levels of the Church crypts and then having the game reset on me. I played the full game for probably a year more, back before difficulties even existed, rerunning the whole sequence of Church -> Catacombs -> Cave -> Hell over and over and over and over again, to the point where I could quite each character's dialogue. When Sierra's bugged Diablo Hellfire came out, I replayed that, too. Time and time and time again, starting with the Bug Caves then Na'Krul's Cathedral, then back to the old missions. I still fondly remember those damn Blood Lords as some of the coolest enemies I've met in ANY game ever made. And I'd still play that game today, if only it weren't so technologically backwards these days.
I never got why people keep claiming "it's the same warehouse." It's not. There are at least 20 different layouts of warehouses, if not more. I suspect there are at least 50, if we consider all map sizes. Given that I cut my teeth on the original Diablo where all maps of all sizes were always randomly generated but always drawn from the same tilesets, I have never had a problem adjusting to City of Heroes. I care that the tileset looks good, which most of them do, and then in actual practice mostly care about the layout of the "level." Don't care if it's a warehouse, office or space station. I care where corridors go and how rooms are arranged. You can't play a game for 750 hours and expect your mind to NOT wander and for terrains to NOT blur together. It's a question of ensuring that the game is fun even the players get jaded, and it is for me, even six years after the fact.
And I wasn't disappointed when I went back from Praetoria to Paragon City. Instead, it felt like coming home to what I've always known and loved. Even after as little as a week spent in Praetoria, I still felt happy to come back. I mean, sure, Praetorian maps are cool (more so than their city zones), but they are not "better" than the old maps. They're different, certainly, and that's always good, but I can't say "The old maps suck! I don't want to go back to them!" In fact, the longer I haven't done something, the more I want to do it. After a week of yellow offices, I couldn't wait to go back to the white offices in Paragon City, and now that I'm back in the brown offices of the Rogue Isles, I'm happy once more.
Maybe it's just me, but this game is exactly how I like things done.
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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.
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Hmmmm, randomly generated maps... When I first started playing CoH, and new to everything, I actually thought that maybe the maps were randomly generated on the fly, like when you zoned in. I mean some of the rooms are the same, maybe slightly different, but each and every map of the same type uses the same room elements. Like office buildings always have the same x number of rooms used over and over. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I never got why people keep claiming "it's the same warehouse." It's not. There are at least 20 different layouts of warehouses, if not more. I suspect there are at least 50, if we consider all map sizes. Given that I cut my teeth on the original Diablo where all maps of all sizes were always randomly generated but always drawn from the same tilesets, I have never had a problem adjusting to City of Heroes. I care that the tileset looks good, which most of them do, and then in actual practice mostly care about the layout of the "level."
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What it looks like to me is that the devs had/have a tool that they can place rooms on to create a map. Then of course, once made, a map remains static to be used again and again. But what if they took this map creation tool and put it in the game, so that every office/warehouse/sewer you go to, when you walk in the front door, the map is randomly generated from these room elements? Then instead of having maybe 20 maps per tileset, you would have virtually an infinite number of possible maps. (And for the grognards out there, maybe have an option "Random Maps ON/OFF" in options.)
When I was new, I didn't know what would be around any given corner. But now that I can recognize the maps, I know what to expect where. But an on-the-fly map generation ability would extend the life of this game considerably, IMO. And it should be so easy to incorporate into the game. And then, after that, why not change the AE system to use either the canned maps or add a map creator so that players can create their own maps?
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I believe AO actually used randomly assembled maps. Largely, I suspect your view is correct, the map layouts all use the same components, but they are largely fixed. This is more so to prevent 'bad' things from happening or getting linked together.|
Originally Posted by NekoNeko
Hmmmm, randomly generated maps... When I first started playing CoH, and new to everything, I actually thought that maybe the maps were randomly generated on the fly, like when you zoned in. I mean some of the rooms are the same, maybe slightly different, but each and every map of the same type uses the same room elements. Like office buildings always have the same x number of rooms used over and over.
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That said, it still doesn't result in a reduction of it being the same. It just results in more randomness.
Art resources can be a useful method to create the illusion of variety, however, it's fairly short lived [and decidedly artificial]. The Freakshow warehouse maps come to mind here. And I suspect it also has the highest art cost short of new map-tiles themselves. And at the low-end, no one really notices [Crey Labs versus Portal Corp Lab for instance].
There's really more to it being 'different' than turning left instead of right [over-simplification mind you]. I suspect it mostly boils down to seeing the same backdrop [a common complaint right now with a certain over popular fantasy based mmo as well].
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The thing is, those maps would still be put together out of the same few tiles. And most people agree that it's not so much the overall map layout that's repetitive, it's the fact that when you take one look at each map tile, you already know where everything is.|
Originally Posted by NekoNeko
Hmmmm, randomly generated maps... When I first started playing CoH, and new to everything, I actually thought that maybe the maps were randomly generated on the fly, like when you zoned in. I mean some of the rooms are the same, maybe slightly different, but each and every map of the same type uses the same room elements. Like office buildings always have the same x number of rooms used over and over.
What it looks like to me is that the devs had/have a tool that they can place rooms on to create a map. Then of course, once made, a map remains static to be used again and again. But what if they took this map creation tool and put it in the game, so that every office/warehouse/sewer you go to, when you walk in the front door, the map is randomly generated from these room elements? Then instead of having maybe 20 maps per tileset, you would have virtually an infinite number of possible maps. (And for the grognards out there, maybe have an option "Random Maps ON/OFF" in options.) When I was new, I didn't know what would be around any given corner. But now that I can recognize the maps, I know what to expect where. But an on-the-fly map generation ability would extend the life of this game considerably, IMO. And it should be so easy to incorporate into the game. And then, after that, why not change the AE system to use either the canned maps or add a map creator so that players can create their own maps? |
Really "new" maps would need not just new ways of rearranging the map tiles, but all-new map geometry. Which someone would have to design, someone would have to model, it would have holes in it that need to be found and plugged... It is not at all a trivial undertaking.
Character index
The think is every map we have in the client must be duplicated to some extent up on the server.
One of the problems is each setting only has a dozen or so rooms that are identical in layout on each map. Sometimes we enter through the "other" door so it initially seems different but you quickly recognize each and know where every spawn is located. Sort of makes the tactics used, even soloing, rather boring after a while. At least patrols and ambushes spice it up a bit.
The outdoor missions are a lot of fun, either the unique ones or the subsection of a zone ones. Problem is I imagine they take a lot longer to create than simple connect a series of rooms interior maps.
This isn't Diablo II. I wish they had the tech to do random interior maps but I think it's beyond their abilities without impacting server performance.
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I, for one, wouldn't mind an issue devoted to new map elements, along with the addition of randomly generated maps and a map creator for AE. Because, yeah, I understand it's a huge undertaking. And when I first mentioned the randomly-generated map system, I assumed there would be new map elements as well, perhaps add twice as many as we have now. And also, make the "special" rooms to be a certain percentage (maybe like 5%, or maybe one per map) of the total per map. Sure, it would be a grand undertaking, but put a special team on it, and they could work on it for a few issues until it was ready to roll out. I definitely wouldn't mind dev team time being put forth towards improving the look of our beloved game. (Especially with it being a major complaint of the player base. Anything to keep players playing longer. (My blasters and scrappers love new pets. |
Originally Posted by Silver Gale
The thing is, those maps would still be put together out of the same few tiles. And most people agree that it's not so much the overall map layout that's repetitive, it's the fact that when you take one look at each map tile, you already know where everything is.
Really "new" maps would need not just new ways of rearranging the map tiles, but all-new map geometry. Which someone would have to design, someone would have to model, it would have holes in it that need to be found and plugged... It is not at all a trivial undertaking. |
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This is very valid. I'm not sure how to include more outdoor maps in a randomly-generated map system short of just creating them the way they always have and adding them in. (Maybe add in a x by y area of an already existing zone? Hmm, the forest ("park"?) zones would be problematic (maybe use Perez Park?), but as it is, we only really have one "forest-like" zone now. Isn't the map the "War Wall Defender" mission uses part of Talos Island or something?)|
Originally Posted by Father Xmas
The outdoor missions are a lot of fun, either the unique ones or the subsection of a zone ones. Problem is I imagine they take a lot longer to create than simple connect a series of rooms interior maps.
This isn't Diablo II. I wish they had the tech to do random interior maps but I think it's beyond their abilities without impacting server performance. |
As for resources, yeah. I'm not a big hardware tech person; if they simply cannot do it, then they can't. The tech has advanced pretty far since the original roll-out of CoH (look at UM), though. But admit it, it would be cool if they could swing it now.
I agree with the OP, completely, in regards to the same old map over and over. After 6 years they should retire ALL of those old maps and not add them ever again.
I know it's work but I would rather see a bunch of new mission maps added over more zones. Once Praetoria is completed then just focus on new maps and retire all of the old ones. The new lab maps, as noted earlier, are starting to kill me now!
I also see a lack of epic looks/maps out there. No new planets or planet destroyers to beat. They really need to add something epic. IMO, they have some amazing parts to this game and I hope the new lead Dev makes more 'to do' things than Pos did.