Rant about Caves

I take it you hate doors, too? You know the ones - in offices and sewers, where only one person can fit through at a time? Personally, I far prefer that over the cavernous "huts" they have in World of Warcraft, where people apparently build their houses with 30-foot ceilings and log truces five feet across.

Masterminds can be a problem in caves if you don't have a good set of binds, admittedly, and why the developers didn't provide players with decent controls I'll never know.

But I have to disagree on camera controls. You camera only ever gets "pinched" if you let it. Use mouse look and your camera will never be "stuck" again. Mine hasn't been in years, and I'm far from uniquely skilled.

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 disagree, I think you can make things normal but still interesting. You just have to realize that the labyrinthine nature needs to come from the villains who are raiding/held up in a place and not it's inherent design.
For example, consider some of the examples I gave for different means of climbing the floors of a building instead of just the standard elevator alone earlier in this thread:

In this effect, you gain a layer of complexity by finding different means to climb levels, the idea being that when you start going up one way, the badguys will do something to halt your progress going up further.
Then you could throw in destroyable (or in rare cases, indestructible barricades) either with portable force/repulsion field generators from the black market, desks, chairs, cubicle walls, and ripped off doors piled up and nailed together in crude barriers, and even portable defensive turrets to deter people from going a certain path.
Now while not adding complexity to a map's navigation I did post an idea to make generic maps like warehouses and so forth have a bit more flavor.
With all of these things, I think it would be possible to make realistic office buildings seem like quite a setting worthy of an epic battle.

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.

So you'd think. What sucks to fight in sucks to fight in, and I assure you that if you hate running cave missions, you'll hate running cave missions to defend your base.

In theory, choke points should be a boon to heroes whose numbers are often small and a killing field to NPCs, who spawn in large numbers. And they are, for the most part, only that doesn't make people like them any more.

I'm not back up over my own points. I still love caves and feel that they are some of the more interesting terrain, and that's coming from me running a Mastermind through them RIGHT NOW. But if you hate cave missions, then you'll hate all applications of cave missions.

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.

Nope, I actually like doors in missions, like the office maps. Calls for some new strategy, either pulling out, or a charge to get everyone IN. It's also easy to see all the time.

While the wow-analogy does make sense, it's not game-technical sense. This game (and wow) are both based on third-perspective view. Everything is adapted to that, from graphical effects, to control and character speed, etc. Everything except cave-maps that is. When we get "squashed", and either have the camera jumping around, or go to first person to avoid that, we leave the intended game play.

With standard group size of 8, plus pets, and taking into account that this game (compared to wow) has higher speeds, more teleporting, a lot more enemies and more blinding special effects - tight caves are problem. With no strategic overview over the situation, we are venturing outside what would be considered "intended game play", I'm pretty sure. I sure don't enjoy it as much, and I think there's a fairly good reason no game trailers ever show a fight in a narrow cave tunnel - because the end result is just blind chaotic mayhem.

You have to admit that's a funny choice of words: "cavernous". All I asked for was for the caves to be... well, cavernous. I have absolutely no problem with offices and sewers. They have more than enough space to provide me with a proper situational overview.

I don't hate cave maps just specific "rooms". Mostly Council/5th Column cuz it's frustrating ferreting out all the hidden NPC's. But I still wish I could put them in my base. So many places to hide and set traps for for attackers with base defenses.

And the decorative items in the Council bases are so much cooler than the crap we have in our base editor.

While I'll agree with you that caves make this worse, this is precisely what my experience of ANY 8-man team on ANY map is. Stick eight heroes fighting 8-man spawns in the Construct if you will, and you'll still get nothing more than a huge clusterhug. The way enemy numbers scale up or, alternately, the way my cognition scales down with enemy numbers, means that any team over about... Three becomes chaotic and impossible to appraise strategically. I've no idea how people led Hamidon raids.

On the one hand, I agree with you. Having larger caverns with occasional tights spots would be ideal. In theory. In practice, what that materialised as was pink caves (also known as Troll or Shadow Shard caves), which are the single most boring tileset in the entire game, bar none. Arachnos maps, at least, have that weird alien design to them, but pink caves are just unremarkable. It's like being sat in a railroad tunnel and be told your mission was to go from one end to the other. Yeah, it'd be cool once, but every other time it's just more featureless tunnels. And they ARE featureless. It feels like the entire tileset has, like, ten pieces to it - corridor, curved corridor, dead end corridor, large round room and two different intersections, with exactly one turn.

I don't dislike pink caves because they're wider. I dislike pink caves because they suck. For all I bash on them, their remakings are, at the very least, decent. And also incredibly rare. Snake caves are VERY detailed, but they show up in all of a dozen missions, and Cimeroran caves aren't half bad (though still bland), but they only really show up in Cimerora and a few Midnighter missions. There are exceptions, but they're rare.

They're like ship maps. Each ship map consists of two or three giant holds with containers in different arrangements. Maybe if I were dockworker, I might be able to feel they were more different, but to my eyes, it's one big square hold after another, and to boot, it feels like there are a total of five hold sections, if that, with the first and last always being the same. Always.

For some reason, at one point the developers decided to do what WoW did (or so it seems) and cram the game full of humongous chambers and ginormous, high-ceiling corridors, and the result is... Bland beyond description. Convenience at the cost of artistic depredation and decay is not a good tradeoff.

You are not the only one. I grew up on things like Tomb Raider and the Prince of Persia, I enjoy complicated terrain that needs to be navigated, as opposed to the standard MMO fare of outdoor flatlands. Nothing bores me more than endless plains and forests, and that's a large part of what has turned me off practically every MMO I've ever played. City of Heroes' indoor instancing is a strong contender for the biggest reason I'm still here.

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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