City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Discussion: Gaming Angels interviews Melissa Bianco

Beastyle

By Beastyle,
Posted on: 2011-04-18 09:55 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion

 

Posted

Gaming Angels has posted an in-depth interview with Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, highlighting her career at Paragon Studios. It's a fascinating look at everything from how Melissa got into gaming up to her role on the City of Heroes team. War Witch also elaborates on what's made City of Heroes successful for seven years running.

Head over to Gaming Angels and give the interview a read!

 

Posted

True enough... BUT,
Don't forget the miracle of the Google cache!
(That is, If you 're ok with just reading the text for now. Or wait till whenever they fix it = & maybe see some pics you've likely already seen, plus the regular bunch of banner ads.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.
"The U.S. is in no more danger of coming under Sharia law than it is the rules of Fight Club." - Will McAvoy.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Liquid View Post
I still think it's awesome that War Witch gradually worked her way over and up from Office Manager to Lead Designer.
It's almost like a...plot.

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

Posted

Quote:
We’ve gotten extremely valuable feedback from our players on some of our big ticket item systems such as super sidekicking, a lot of the content for Issue 19, the mentor project, merging the markets (loudly!), our trials, costume suggestions, powers suggestions, the Going Rogue system, and other really key features.
Heh this quote amused me

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Cardiff_Giant View Post
True enough... BUT,
Don't forget the miracle of the Google cache!
(That is, If you 're ok with just reading the text for now. Or wait till whenever they fix it = & maybe see some pics you've likely already seen, plus the regular bunch of banner ads.)
When I try, Google doesn't offer a cache for the actual interview, only their feed and front page.

Neither of which is remotely useful.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

 

Posted

It was a fluff interview for a fluff website.

Not saying it was bad by any stretches, just don't get hopes up for some hard hitting interview.

Which, I hasten to add, I would like to see once in a while from War Witch. The last couple have been too much fluff for my liking. Or conducting by people with their finger completely away from the pulse of the game

"I saw my advantage and took it. That's what heroes do." - Homer Simpson.

 

Posted

Wow, I thought I was the only one who remembered Noctropolis -- awesome game. Now I want to make a Stiletto homage who's battle-cry is "Don't look at me, you're the city's new hero."

99458: The Unbearable Being of Lightness
191775: How the Other Half Lives
My Webcomics

 

Posted

Quote:
When we first started, we were very “mad lib” with our mission and world population approach so that we could produce a lot of content. We had to. We had a ton of zones built and very little time to get them populated.

Over time, lessons had been learned and we couldn’t just slap a zone together and toss in some missions and hopefully they’d somehow come together. We began asking key questions: why did this zone exist, who’s telling the story, how is the world supporting that story, and what are we doing differently in our missions to tell it? Striga Isle was a turning point for us. Ever since, our entire methodology became about cohesion and lore.
Yes. Exactly.

Although I'd set the turning point earlier than that; you can see it, in game, even in the original issue 0 content. With most MMOs, you can spot the point at which the money ran out, and it's almost always in the highest-level zones: art becomes really repetitive, and story disappears, because the zone designers are slapping stuff together as fast as they can to catch up with the shipping schedule.

In City of Heroes, it obviously went the exact opposite direction. Atlas Park, Galaxy City, King's Row, Perez Park, Steel Canyon, Skyway City, Boomtown, and Faultline were obviously put together during the time period War Witch is talking about. When the zone designers got to the point where they were designing Talos Island and Independence Port and Dark Astoria, the world design still is random patchwork, like the earlier zones, but there's this sudden and obvious improvement in the writing ... which leads me to conclude that this is the point in the history of the game's development where they realized that they needed to go beyond the Ultima Online and Everquest 1 model of "never mind why, just wander around killing people and taking their stuff" and include more of the elements of single-player roleplaying computer game storytelling, to give people something to look forward to other than "gaining new powers" and "getting more stuff," namely, "finding out how this story ends."

And (as I know by now the developers are tired of my saying) almost all of those old, slapped-together zones are still there, and people still enter them, and still conclude, in their first month after buying the game, while making up their minds whether to subscribe or not, that the game's story-telling sucks. Unless they luck into choosing The Hollows for all of their level 5-15 experience and Faultline for all of their level 15-20 experience, who'd blame them? By War Witch's own admission, if they do any of the other content (not counting Praetoria, obviously), they're right.

City of Heroes desperately needs two things. The single most important thing it needs is a development tools upgrade of some kind, so it doesn't take so many hundreds or thousands of work-hours to redesign a zone and write its content. And then, once they have those tools, the first thing they need to do with them is to yank out the not-yet-redone level 5-20 zones by the roots and bring them up to modern CoH standards.