CoH 2: Street Events

So on the car ride home from work last night I started thinking about some events that NPCs could do around the street to create the feeling of an active city instead of seeing a bunch of Rikti or DE standing around in the open muttering to themselves. Basicly these would be a few brief events associated with certain enemy groups. Most of these would never be able to be done in CoH and would need to be in CoH 2 but as it stands thats not the point of this thread. I'm asking YOU to come up with any awsome ideas for random street events.

With out further ado, here are mine...

Malta Operatives
How a Spy Car Shops
As you walk around Peregrine Island, occasionaly you will see limos drive around. Every so often a group of Malta will HALO drop onto the limo and hijack it. Two Tac Ops will bust through skylights on the limo, stopping it, while they're friends land nearby. After a little bit the limo will start to casually drive off. If a player attacks, the limo will speed off while the remaining Malta will atempt to hold off the player.

Special Delivery
Every so often you might notice a taxi or black 4-door car with a blinking light in the passenger seat. If the player gets close, the car will start beeping and explode. After which several Malta will come out of hiding to ambush the player.

In and Out
If you leave a few groups of Nemesis standing around alone, sometimes a Malta Blackhawk will land near the troops and drop off a squad who begins to fight with the Nemesis troops on guard.

Council
Display of Force or Compensating?
In Steel Canyon, the Council will put on Military Parades in the middle of the street. Lot's of troops and even vehicles (like BRDMs painted council colors) will be there. The parade will march for a bit but it won't stay organized for long. After a distance is reached PPD SWAT will show up and all hell breaks loose.

Fighting the 5th
An upgrade to the random battles between Council and the 5th Column, there are three possible battles to find. The first is several Council troops, a few with rocket launchers, attempting to take down a modern looking Panzerschreck with a troop escort. Second, a group of 5th and Council fighting and both sides call in ambushes. The 5th call in a troop carrier while the Council calls a helicopter with a sniper.

Nemesis
It's a Trap!
Sometimes when you see some of Nemesis's troops harassing a citizen, the citizen will be an automoton. When you rescue the citizen, it will either attack you, explode, or taser you and shut down. You will get ambushed shortly afterwards.

It's Also Trap!
In alleyways, you can see a bunch of Nemesis hanging around a broken Warhulk. When you get close the Warhulk will power up and say "FOOOOLED YOU!"

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CoH 2 has not been announced or and it seems unlikely to ever happen until CoH 1.0 is finished.

COH:Freedom, to me, seems to the beginning of what would be a "2.0."

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I like those ideas and have mentioned similiar in the past. Have you ever been in the Hollows and found the "stranded citizen"? Sometimes when you approach them, they thank you for the help, other times they trigger an ambush and call you a sucker.

I have also suggested the random spawning street contact. A citizen that calls out for help when you approach, and can be talked to like a regular contact, and they give you the equivalent of a tip mission. Someone stole their wallet, research papers, artifact, purse, whatever, or they saw some crime being commited... anyway, the bad guys ran into that building right over there!! (I even made a quick AE mission called "My Wallet!" as an example).

Or the long discussed "cat in a tree" make it a zone blinky with a little girl standing next to it crying about her cat. You click on it and she thanks you for the help and runs off.

Conversely the villains need mugging victims (and undercover agents who look like mugging victims), vandilization blinkies (puts a pre-set font of their name on a wall that lasts a while), random destrucable zone items- like in mayhems but just randomly in-zone, and of course most of your suggestions can apply to either side.

I think a lot of those can be done currently, maybe not as flamboyantly, but I think they're very possible. Instead of being dropped off in a chopper like you suggest, they come down from ropes like the Mercenaries MM's do, and such. I'd rather see them build more into this game than even think of a CoH2, and I think all of those are very possible.

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"I play characters. I have to have a very strong visual appearance, backstory, name, etc. to get involved with a character, otherwise I simply won't play it very long. I'm not an RPer by any stretch of the imagination, but character concept is very important for me."- Back Alley Brawler
I couldn't agree more.

These are neat ideas! Although personally, given how common purse-snatchers are in Paragon City, I'm amazed people still carry them...

Also, yay saving cats!

~Freitag

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Kevin Callanan
Community Specialist
Paragon Studios

This thread reminded me of a zone event idea I had a while ago; Hero and Villain incursions. I would hope/think that the shadow tech. would make it even easier (not saying easy) to accomplish.

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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....

Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!

Hmmm...

Explosive Cats.


That is all.

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"Don't you know dead is spelled m-e-n-t-a-l in CoH? - SapphireShot

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Kevin Callanan
Community Specialist
Paragon Studios

I'll see your shocked cat and raise you MANIACAL DOG!

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Main Hero: Chad Gulzow-Man (Victory) 50, 1396 Badges
Main Villain: Evil Gulzow-Man (Victory) 50, 1193 Badges
Mission Architect arcs: Doctor Brainstorm's An Experiment Gone Awry, Arc ID 2093

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I'm not talking about REAL cats.

Nemesis Automatons that LOOK like Cats.


I'm a Cat person. I know how evil them critters can be, and I certainly don't want one out to get me.

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"Don't you know dead is spelled m-e-n-t-a-l in CoH? - SapphireShot

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"I do so love taking a nice, well thought out character and putting them through hell. It's like tossing a Faberge Egg onto the stage during a Gallagher concert." - me

@Palador / @Rabid Unicorn

Some of mine...

• The heroes and villains we run into periodically in bank/mayhem missions? I'd occasionally like to see them go zooming across the zone and have them dash into the bank, and when you click on them, get messages like, "Sorry [PC NAME], but there's a robbery in progress and it's up to me to stop it!" (or villainside, "I got a bank to rob, kid, why not go steal a baby's candy or something more your level?")
• PEREZ PARK/THE HOLLOWS - "Gang War" - the warring factions in the zone are getting out of control, and the PPD/Longbow are being overrun. Intense pockets of fighting must be broken up for things to return to normal (mechanics - the Banners in the Deadly Apocalypse, but more than four occurrences).
• STRIGA/TALOS/IP and BOOMTOWN/STEEL - "Blitzkrieg" - the Council (Striga)/the Fifth (Boomtown) are making a massive push out of their constrained zones into Paragon City. Heroes must meet at certain zone points to slow them down. If the heroes beat them back, great - if not, the enemy makes inroads and appear in greater numbers further into the zone. If they make it all the way across, they start appearing in a random adjacent zone. To really make it annoying, major facilities in a besieged zone are shut down (stores, inspiration sellers, radio contacts) because of the Blitzkrieg.
• BRICKSTOWN - "Zig Breakout" - the Arachnos Flyer appears over Brickstown to 'break out' several villains. Heroes have to take out the Flyer before the Zig is overrun.
• EDEN - "Scorched Earth" - Longbow, with reluctant sanction from Freedom Corps, has decided to take back Eden using a Scorched Earth policy. In a reverse of the Firefighting missions in Steel, heroes actually START fires in Eden to bring the Devouring Earth under control.
• SHARKHEAD: "The Leviathan is stirring"... WAVES of Coralax or those things you fight in the Calystix the Shaper mission.
• INDEPENDENCE PORT: "Reactor Leak"... Radiation levels in Terra Volta are approaching dangerous levels - 8-man hero teams must head into the zone and plant 'restriction beacons' or somesuch simultaneously to forcefield off Terra Volta.
• ST. MARTIAL: "Carnival"... the Carnival of Shadows crop up EVERYWHERE and start wreaking havoc... in fact, go one step farther and have them start ambushing PCs in an attempt to "recruit" them by subdual.
• Any zone (hero or villain, but must have an AE building): "System Glitch"... the AE system malfunctions, and holograms of random enemy groups (including ones you might not normally see in a given zone) start spawning across the zone. Minimum two teams to fix the problem - 1 team to hunt down the holograms and 'deactivate' them, 1 team to 'fix' the AE system (a la the Hero Respec trial).

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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I like these ideas. I've been thinking for some time that CoH needs some mini-zone events.

For example, we had a halloween even recently in the spring. What the heck? Need some spring events.

One idea I had for a spring event is an attack by Devouring Earth. A classic superhero bit is to have a building enveloped by vines and mega-sized plant roots and such. Well we should do that. Take an existing building and do a version with vines and big roots and etc. Then it can work like a Fire in Steel Canyon. Devouring earth roam outside and have to be defeated. Defeat enough and you go inside the building to accomplish some task (like removing some of the creepers). This done enough times (by different teams) and the event is won.

Another good spring event I think is bank robberies. Spring is good weather and a good time for tourists; unfortunately some of those tourists are from the Rouges Isles, and they aren't civilians. Heroes have to defeat villains and minions out side a bank. Once enough are defeated, then they progress to then inside of the bank which is filled with mastermind minions of one flavor or another, and other villains too (brutes, corrs, doms, etc.) Heroes must take down the Villain Group Leader and his crew to stop the bank robbery.

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Orc&Pie No.53230 There is an orc, and somehow, he got a pie. And you are hungry.
www.repeat-offenders.net

Negaduck: I see you found the crumb. I knew you'd never notice the huge flag.

I'd settle for a slight revamp of the "Pizza Run" missions that have you just run around town to go drop a quarter in phone boxes. The whole "click a phone to get the next phone objective" is ... so Pre-Launch.

It would be a lot better if we clicked on the phone box and were given some instructions by our contact for something that needs to be DONE in the local area. Alternatively, we could have Phone Boxes in various zones acting as an "intermediary contact" on the path of finding out where a particular Mission Door is. Rather than zoning in and knowing exactly where the Mission Door is located ... you need to go to a(ny) Phone Box within the local area so as to receive the actual Mission Door location. That way your contact gives you a Zone to go to, and the Area/Region in that Zone you need to get to, in that Area/Region you go to a Phone Box to receive a phone call from your Contact who then gives you the exact Mission Door location.

You wouldn't want to do this for ALL missions ... but it would be an alternative structure to assigning Mission Doors than the one(s) we've got ... and it would be an alternative which encouraged more "travel" around our City Zones than we're presently prone to. You could even revive the "3 Tiers of Contact Friendliness" that we used to have back before every Contact started giving out their Cell Number after the first mission you completed for them.

In Tier 1 of Contact Friendliness, you'd have to go talk to them in person ... just like with a New Contact.

In Tier 2 of Contact Friendliness, you'd be able to talk to your Contact using any Public Phone Box anywhere.

In Tier 3 of Contact Friendliness, you'd be able to use your Cell Phone to call your Contact from any Outdoor Zone.

Bringing back a "limited" mid-stage of Contact Friendliness that revolves around Phone Boxes would also be an opportunity to work in Ambushes as part of a Story Arc when calling your Contact before/after completing a mission. Even better yet ... the Ambushes could *potentially* be coded as a Mob Spawn on the Move which isn't specifically aggroed onto specific Player(s) like they are now. Instead, they would simply be given a Run Path that leads from "somewhere" to "somewhere else" (usually Mission Doors on both ends) that just so happens to intersect with the location of the Phone Call Box. Set up about 5 Run Paths from Mission Door A to Mission Door B ... which just so happen to intersect with Phone Box C ... and you've got yourself an "instant Ambush" generator that can function as a "Wandering Encounter Generator" that generates random street encounters due to the presence and interaction of Players with features in the Zone Environment.



I mean ... come on! Those Phone Boxes have been there since Issue 0. It's about time they were made useful for something other than Delivering Pizza.

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