Tell me again we have War Walls?

If it's to keep the Rikti out, it's not working. Tear down the walls and open up Paragon City as one big zone!

X

Or keep them separate zones. Just take the War Walls down because the city skyline looks much better without them.

Why oh why have we no why?

Agreed. They just look stupid in my opinion.

If you dont know now, you'll never know!

Official reason is that: Yes, they can be shut down, but only the Rikti seem able to do it, and not even that often, and there are a lot of other groups that get held or are kept in check by the walls.

Unofficially, I agree, because one redside mayhem mission expressly points out that the flier just goes right over the war walls, and when half the population can fly or at least jump pretty damn high, it seems to invalidate the whole purpose.

Quote:

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.

The War Walls(tm) are an official Signature Character of CoH.
Like the Statesman who was a DEVs Character - a DEV that is long gone and tried to sell out the game multiple times, the War Walls(tm) are there because how cool it is to be a Signature Character.

You know, I actually don't mind the war walls, at least you know where they are unlike the Blue War Walls of the End of Reality in some missions. Those are far more annoying to me.

There is no war wall on one end of Talos and it runs into Peregrine.
I've run into that thing and zone accidentally during a Rikti Raid while fighting Drop Ships. What a pain if you zone and you can't get into the zone you came out of because it is now full and you foolishly zoned only because you didn't now where the line of "zoning" was!

I think any removal of the war walls to introduce Praetoria-style merging zones would only happen if they were planning to revamp the entire city, as the zones don't actually fit together - there's quite a bit of empty space between them, which would need to be filled.

It's a legacy from when the came was being built and first released. The War walls probably made a lot more sense in 2002-2004, from being created to release.

They are kind of ugly, but I think having them removed would take more work than just deleting them. The "city" on the other side of those walls is rather ugly, low res etc, something would need to be done with that, not to mention for the moment the zones aren't connected, there wouldj ust be an invisible blue wall in the place of the war walls, unless they connected the zones as they did in praetoria, and that would be a bit of work as well

So the answer, War Walls are a Legacy issue.

I think they could stand to turn off the horrible eye-sores that are the big glowy fences. Just have a barrier flare up briefly if you get too close to say 'Yes, theres still a barrier here'.
Just not one that makes my eyes want to scream.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

What do we do with Terra Volta? It's about 2-4x the size it should be when you consider it fits inside Independence port?

Personally, I'm tired of them. They are dated, ugly and stale. They were a device to keep poly counts low and one of the first of many in this particular game where any and all game mechanics are explained within the context of game world lore.

I get that philosophy. I get technically why they were needed back around release. I get why they haven't come down yet.

Sort of like revamping blueside legacy mission content, it's something that the devs have not deemed worthy of resource prioritization yet. Personally though, I'd love to see the only new content that blueside gets bet a wave of revampage--both missions and zones. Expand red. Expand yellow. But blue has plenty of volume 7 years in. Just give the original stuff, zones included, a new pass. At least IP is getting a battleship. That makes me happy.

The walls are annoying and ugly, but I put up with them knowing the reasons and backstory.

The only time I really would like them to be gone is when I take a screenshot and those glaring walls are in the background. Reducing the visible range sometimes removes them (depending on distance) but also messes with other backdrop effects, like street lights without the poles or smoke from a smokestack without the smokestack being visible.

It's really annoying if I'm telling a story, comic book fashion (pictures+words), of my character NOT actually in the City universe (e.g., a jungle girl, not that I've done that story, yet, just got 4 adventure ideas so far).

Why does Paragon City still have War Walls?

Time, Resources, and Money.

I've been over the basic timeline of recent City of Heroes Development... quite a few times: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...77&postcount=5 :: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...13&postcount=5

The important thing to remember is that Paragon Studios has limited resources. They cannot do everything the players wish, and somethings do take time to development and implement.

With that in mind, now for the history lesson. Way back when the game was created the developers needed a simple way to separate each zone, and the War Walls were a convenient method by which the zones could be broken up.

It wasn't until the Going Rogue development Cycle that the developers began working on what they called "Vista" tech. The "Vista" tech was a combination of several other changes including modifications to the spawn point, map generation, and skybox technologies. The end result of the vista tech enabled the developers to synch up maps and roughly position players spawn points in one map based on their exit point from a previous map.

Creating that end-result still takes a lot of time and art-resources. Case in point is the skyboxes themselves. As can be seen in these pictures there is a drastic difference between the quality of the rendered models used in the skybox and the live map:

Through the Loading Wall:






The Live Map:






As can be seen the skybox version of the map lacks many of fine details the live map has, despite similar distances from the point of rendering. The Skybox map also lacks reflective surfaces, a detail not required for the viewing disance.

Unfortunately there seems to be an assumption that the creation of a skybox map simply consists of loading up a map, maximizing the rendering viewpoint, then cutting off any map behind that viewpoint, and presto, new skybox. Skybox creation isn't that simple. One of the problems with a fully 3D skybox like those used in Praetoria is that they don't have to just be low-polygon and low detail. They also need to cut out certain data to begin with, detail that the user won't see due to the camera angle. Stuff like the poster on the other side of that wall likely wouldn't be in the skybox model:



Taking these details out saves on memory space and rendering. Details that don't need to be seen don't need to be rendered.

Bringing this back around to the War-Walled CoH maps, updating the original City of Heroes maps to use the "Vista" tech and remove the war-walls would be a massive undertaking of artwork generation. Ignoring Croatoa and Peregine Island, every single map would have to be skyboxed, something the developers can somewhat get away with not doing right now.

Then there is the space problem. Take a look at the map from the Good Versus Evil edition of the game:

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/_6gkPL0jmAKE/TV__wxmSzgI/AAAAAAAAKTk/j9zZKGWsof0/s400/Paragon_City_%28GvE%29.jpg

There's large swaths of space in the city that have nothing in them. In the case of Baumtown to Steel Canyon, entire major geographical features are completely ignored. Creating "Vista" tech skybox maps for these zones would require rendering and creating the artwork for each swath of land that is visible from any point within the existing zones.

Then there's the aforementioned problem with Terra Volta in Independence Port. Terra Volta's box is about 640 yards on each edge:





Inside of the box Terra Volta is about a mile deep and about 1.25 miles wide:



Independence Port is less than a mile wide:



So: to recap. Terra Volta is wider inside than Independence Port

Earlier somebody said something to the effect of "Make it a double zone like Faultline." Well, that isn't a solution. First of all, Faultline isn't a double zone. It's a single zone. There is no mid-map loading. There is even a nice solid tunnel with no doors connecting both parts of the map:



Implementing Terra Volta into IP as one zone or a "Vista" enabled zone would require massive changes to either one of them.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am NOT saying that this type of work cannot be done, or that it should not be done.

What I am saying is that upgrading CoH to the Vista tech and removing the war-walls is going to take a lot of work. Implementing that type of upgrade would likely be almost as art intensive as simply creating new zones from scratch.

At some point somebody is going to have to pay for Noble Savage and his crew to sit in a chair and draw the new artwork. At some point somebody is going to have to pay for The Box and The Television and their crews to work the engine and maps to implement the "Vista" zoning.

So whose going to pay for that work?

More importantly, when is that work going to be done?

One of the basic problems the game faces now is that such massive overhauls to Paragon City aren't going to draw in new subscribers. The type of player influenced by fancy graphical effects would have stopped into try Going Rogue. If they didn't like the game behind the graphics, they would have moved on.

By the same token, such massive overhauls to Paragon City aren't going to prevent current subscribers from leaving. Players here for the gameplay, the community, the events, and so on, aren't really going to be bothered or influenced by the War Walls or lack there-of. It'd be a bit like buying a Pagani Zonda, then sending it back because the side-mirrors were a bit too Elton John-ish. Insert stock line about screwed up priorities here.

Proposing that investors, in this case NCSoft, dump more money into developing an aspect of the existing game that won't drive any tangible returns... well.... that's the kind of thing that makes investors nervous. Such upgrades would only make sense if it would attract new subscribers... such as another retail box release.

For now then, the War Walls, such as they are, are likely to stay where they are.