If YOU Were In On The Planning of CoH2 What Would YOU Do Differently?
By
Anti_Proton,
Posted on: 2011-08-26 17:31 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Expouding on this a little.. |
Originally Posted by ThePill
Two words: Apes. Dinosaurs.
Figure a way to get them in-game, as enemies as well as a set of ape heads for the ape-inclined players to run with. |
Praetoria, being an alternate Earth, could work for this. Jurassik Park could have become a real amusement in that Earth with Hamidon wars releasing the dinosaurs, whether purposely or not.
I want to play a jungle-based character (see avatar
) so more woods/jungle areas in a variety of zones would work (Perez and Eden just doesn't cover enough levels).Another option could have been a university professor (both sides) that was able to get a limited access time portal and sends volunteers on missions... which leads me to..
Have more spot contacts with missions, like university professers at the university, store clerks having a short mission arc...
and the editor is flaking on me so that's it for anow.
Player Add ons
Moving fabrics for costumes.
Moving hair.
More scales.
Asymmetric options (can be linked if you only want to set once).
Diminishing returns, leading to immunity, on both debuffs (particularly -defense, which is rampant, and -tohit) and Status Effects (not being able to play/react is frustrating, not fun or challenging) applied to Player Characters.
In the same theme, some of the debuff values are just ridiculous. Getting -60% defense or tohit from being hit once is absurd. The debuff values need to be normalized and scaled better.
Keep origins but get rid of the origin specific enhancers. Do we really need 25 different of each type of enhancer to potentially drop?
Devs would post more if they could say "hi!" without people whining because they wanted them to say "hello".
-Nethergoat
** Villains in Paragon City. Make separates of the Paragon City zones with villain missions and NPC heroes trying to stop you. Put NPC villains in hero side zones.
** Wait for archetypes. Players don't choose an archetype right away, but wait until they've gotten their feet wet before training into specialized skills (melee, ranged, defense, control, buff, summon).
** Megapowersets. Instead of having "fire blast" and "fiery melee" and "fiery aura" and "fire control" and "thermal radiation", just have "fire". Of course players will be more effective if they choose powers that fit the archetype they've trained into.
** Instanced PVP: One hero, one villain, one bank. Or jewelry store. Or high-tech lab. Or political target. Or teams of heroes and villains.
AE Arcs: #10482 N00b Rescue Duty, #164100 The Four Treasures of the Tuatha De Dannan
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Though I agree with you (I've messed up the multi-traits system in other games) if the traits were limited to the AT in specific, without giving the player to assign points in throwaway stats, it could work. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I'm sorry to break one of the OP rules, but I really, really hate the Strength/Dexterity/Vitality mechanics that plague so many RPGs. For the most part, any given class benefits the most from one or two of these (whether you intentionally design it that way or not) and putting points in the others just makes me gimp myself. I've gimped myself in so many games already... Diablo 1 and 2, the various D&D and aD&D games, Hellgate: London and so on.
This sort of system is made to foster some kind of in-between customization where players can pick a mid-point between two traditional classes, and that's what it ends up doing even if that's not what it's intended to do. The problem is that this intermediate point is usually just not very good and creates weak jacks of all trades. |
For example, have just one melee AT, and let the traits be speed, defense, and offense. All stuff that they need. Focusing on defense would yield a tank, focusing on offense would lean more towards stalker, with brutes/tanks being in the middle range.
Likewise, blasters, defenders, dominators, and corruptors can be rolled up into a ranged AT, with focus on damage/debuff/control.
1. Costume creator:
Mostly "back-end" work, so pieces could be added, swapped, organized, new categories added without breaking a slew of existing costumes. If I start out Day 0 with Face 3, Glasses/Visor 7, Face Paint 6, I should be able to add faces, visors, head categories, etc. and still come back to that character 10 issues later, go to the tailor and see *no* change.
2. Models:
Set them to be easily exportable (either for out-of-game use, website use, or in-game for things like base decorations - "This is how the SG uniform looks!") Plan to have an excess of anchor points that we'll "never use" - because we probably WILL use them sometime in the future when someone has an idea ("Thigh pads? CLipboard for a pilot? Holster? Leg sheath for a knife? Awesome, add them to these points!")
3. Costume continuity:
Make sure there are defined points where top and bottom patterns will "match" even if not part of the same set. From thin to thick stripes, basically. So we don't have "jagged" areas we have to hide with a belt, or parts that don't match up with anything but their own pieces.
4. Worldwide Reach.
Start in the cities, sure. First issue, start cleaning up. Then move outward every 2-3 issues, pushing the story forward to explain *why* you're suddenly able to go to Europe. Or Egypt. Or the space station.
5. Consistent and evolving lore.
No more "So much unused potential!" - that shouldn't last for more than 1-2 issues to build up interest. Lore would be codified - so that, yes, X zone DID have this happen in 1956. And you have to find out why it's happening again today. And the contact that existed in X issue goes away, or changes. Epic ATs would still exist to focus more on specific areas of lore for their backstory "hook," letting the people interested in certain stuff delve more deeply into it either as, or (optionally) tied in with them.
6. The world reacts to you.
I don't (just) mean with the phasing they're doign in I21. There's a taste of it in Khelds spawning Voids and Quantums, though I can see the arguments for making them spawn more sensibly. But - bring Origin into it. Have mysterious figures try to apprehend your Mutant-based character, or try to steal the tech of your Tech based... and find out it's a part of Crey, for instance. Some sort of involvement for you *as you.* And have them change as you level and finish story arcs, changing frequency or who is after you (and why.) Or just have groups try an occasional "revenge hit." Or... have one give up to you and you get to try to turn them around, having them become available as an occasional "sidekick" (summoned pet) and eventually hero (or villain) in their own right.
1. A greater variety of environments. Not necessarily alien worlds, simply more locations with different climates and overall aesthetics similar to real world neighborhoods and ethnic enclaves. Also a more a sparing use of mazes of twisty little tunnels, all alike.
2. Hire Arcanaville to consult on powers and combat system design and balancing. She's had some great insights into powers and combat system balance and design; including some that have been incorporated into the current game.
3. Expand on and refine the current game rather than actually creating a new game from scratch. That is to say keep the current setting and lore, and the current core engine, and the basic archetype structure. Just revamp the combat and powers portions of the system. This would still be a major recoding of much of the game, but most of the existing assets and code would be modified and/or reused rather than starting from scratch.
4. Make sure the core game systems are more flexible and easy to expand/modify.
Mind you, much of this has already been happening with the current game anyway, but it's what i'd do.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
Obviously my first priority would be to give the characters fingers!
Uber Talgrim - level 50 emp/dark defender
Uber Rod - level 50 dark melee/regen scrapper
Rod Valdr - level 50 invuln/SS tanker
Talgrim - level 50 ninja/dark mastermind
OMG!! Please add these costume designs now!
More magma.
Destructible environments!
"Samual_Tow - Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here."
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Let me put it this way: If we had only one melee AT and had to customize it into Tanks, Scrappers, Brutes or Stalkers with these stats, I'd like to see it done this way:|
Originally Posted by Tormentoso
For example, have just one melee AT, and let the traits be speed, defense, and offense. All stuff that they need. Focusing on defense would yield a tank, focusing on offense would lean more towards stalker, with brutes/tanks being in the middle range.
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You have a choice between Damage, Survivability and Stealth, and you can pick only two options, or the same option twice. No points, no stats, no maths. Just direct, large-step discrete choices.
To me, the larger the steps and the more monolothic and unique the choices are in a game (and the few of them there are), the easier it is to play without having to alt-tab and figure stuff out.
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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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1. Make every zone have a theme, and have a corresponding set of arcs that fit that theme. ( i.e. Faultline, Croatoa )
2. Make radio missions fit the theme of the zone.
3. Make every door in the zone unique and open into its own unique map.
The decision to make each zone just a collection of random doors into random maps was a poor one.
4. Make AE fully functional, so that you can do everything a Dev can do
with an arc.
5. Player housing ( personal secret bases that dont require a SG )
6. Revamp the base editor ( and forget the notion that it has anything to do with PVP - too many restrictions that come with that )
131430 Starfare: First Contact
178774 Tales of Croatoa: A Rose By Any Other Name ( 2009 MA Best In-Canon Arc ) ( 2009 Player Awards - Best Serious Arc )
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I understand what you are aiming for, and I understand. Like you, I don't really like number crunching and min/maxing. I build my characters based on what is fun to play, optimization is second to that.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Let me put it this way: If we had only one melee AT and had to customize it into Tanks, Scrappers, Brutes or Stalkers with these stats, I'd like to see it done this way:
You have a choice between Damage, Survivability and Stealth, and you can pick only two options, or the same option twice. No points, no stats, no maths. Just direct, large-step discrete choices. To me, the larger the steps and the more monolothic and unique the choices are in a game (and the few of them there are), the easier it is to play without having to alt-tab and figure stuff out. |
One drawback to these "large step" approaches though is that the larger the step, the less unique each character is. Perhaps, as a compromise, it could be designed with quick and simple choices that you describe, with an optional "advanced" mode that allows you to do a more fine tuned character if that is your choice.
- Garielle
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Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme
I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".
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I don't know. This probably flies in the face of good game design (to say nothing of good sense) but I really don't much care to have my characters different from those of other people, mechanically speaking. And honestly, speaking of right now... I can't tell how my characters are actually different. I pair my Scrapper with another Scrapper, and all I can tell is we hit things and they fall down at more or less the same speed, speaking of average build (as opposed to Inventions/Incarnate monsters). Now, that's probably just me being dense and not being able to tell the difference, which will probably be blatantly obvious and very big if I sat down to run some basic statistics, but that's kind of the point - I can't "feel" the difference. It's not obvious.|
Originally Posted by Garielle
One drawback to these "large step" approaches though is that the larger the step, the less unique each character is. Perhaps, as a compromise, it could be designed with quick and simple choices that you describe, with an optional "advanced" mode that allows you to do a more fine tuned character if that is your choice.
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My idea game has always been one where redundancy of effects doesn't exist and powers come wholesale, not in little upgradable bits. You can either jump or you can't. You can either climb or you can't. You can either knock enemies off their feet or you can't. Think Soul Reaver and how Raziel gained skills. This might limit the diversity of characters somewhat, but it would make the difference between the different characters so much greater.
What really bugs me about pretty much all RPGs I've ever played is this "babysteps" approach. Nothing you do has an immediate, obvious benefit, because everything you take brings just a small benefit. It isn't until you stack all these benefits as a complex system that a difference emerges, but even then the gradual process may still make you blind to it. .5% here, 1.5% there, 1% from that other place and it only starts making a difference when you get, say, 10 of those, making up numbers as I go - that's exactly what I DON'T like.
To be honest, I've always been much more a fan of games that give players basic tools of game interaction and make the game rely more on what the player does and how well he plays, rather than what stats he brings to the battlefield. And for all the talk of "tactics" we've had in City of Heroes, it's still primarily a stat-based game.
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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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Nerf healing.
All of it. Regen, self-heals, team heals, inspirations, set bonuses, everything.
I've felt this way for years, but never really said it.
It could be done proportionally, I think, in such a way that it wouldn't really hurt any one character proportionally more than the others -- in a world of rare, weak healing, even a lesser empath would still be a godsend.
Damage, of course, would be nerfed commensurately, according to some kind of carefully-worked-out formula.
Why? Several reasons.
Healing is un-dramatic and antithetical to the idea of struggle and sacrifice. In the movies and comic books, the heroes always, as far as I can recall, always get beaten down and hurt/damaged/weakened, then struggle on despite their wounds and pain. They don't go ZING and fix everything every 15 seconds. We don't love Wolverine because he's instantly better after getting hurt -- we love him because he drags himself over to the big bad guy, bleeding and gritting his teeth in agony, and still gets the job done.
Healing makes it hard to defeat/kill players -- SO hard that the eventual solution in every game I've seen is to make damage so freaking huge and fast that the characters go down before the players can react -- because if they can react, they can fix almost anything. This is, again, totally counter to our dramatic stories, in which the heroes press on, injured or weakened, and are slowly driven to take more and more desperate risks. In what stories does the hero instantly fall so fast the reader sits there, stunned, and the tale is over?
Real life, maybe. But these are larger-than-life characters...this is a comic book, not the Battle of the Somme* or Cold Harbor**.
* Almost 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded in the first 20 minutes or so of the attack
** 10,000 killed and wounded -- one historian estimates 7,000 fell in the first 8 minutes
Like any other player, I'm used to making sure my life and other resources are topped off at each pause in the action. But that occurs pretty much only in games -- not in fiction, fantasy, or real life.
It's much more interesting to have to decide whether to press on when injured, at partial capacity, or understrength. It's more dramatic AND more realistic.
I'm not sure the numbers I would use, but I would want the game to have less healing available less often, and I would threaten players with more gradual defeat, where they had more choice over how much to press their luck, where they had time to worry -- to turn back or to reject the safe course and press on in the face of difficulty and increasing danger.
There would still be Regeneration and Willpower and Empathy and all the rest; they'd still be the kings of healing...compared to other sets. They just wouldn't fix everything almost immediately and keep everyone topped off all the time.
Less one-shotting. If I can gradually wear down any player, any powerset, there's not so much need for gigantic attacks that will shred squishies, in an effort to even try to threaten the Tankers. Tankers will still outlast the others, even still ignore some threats, but it won't be quite so stark a difference.
It's more interesting when the players have to weigh the risk and have time to decide, even time to sweat, to dread, instead of instantly falling over and saying, "Dammit! I couldn't even react." It's more heroic (or more impressive villainy) to persist despite wounds and pain and win in the end, than to always be at absolute peak strength, freshly rebooted, every few moments.
Nerf healing!
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
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This.|
Originally Posted by Chris_Zuercher
** Megapowersets. Instead of having "fire blast" and "fiery melee" and "fiery aura" and "fire control" and "thermal radiation", just have "fire". Of course players will be more effective if they choose powers that fit the archetype they've trained into.
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One of the things I LOVE about COH is how different it is from "standard" MMOs, but one of the few thinghs i HATE about COH is how differen is from "standard" MMOs.
Adding in APPs to the game was a godsend, and havnig thema vailable earlier in the game (i21 yay!) is even better. But still... I could never understand why, my psi/psi blaster, or mind controller is soooo susceptible to psychic attacks. Like they trained their whole lives on how to use their powers without figuring out how to defend yourself? /facepalm.
CoH2: First thing I would do is remove hunts as viable missions from contacts.
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
Rikti War would have still happened for me but they would have been severely drained and hampered as we were. So: no side would ever want to go to war with the other ever again.
All zones would have been rebuilt about a year later: there are so many super strength and gravity powered characters that would have made such quick reconstruction make sense.
Nemesis wouldn't have so many damn plots that you forget what his central goal even is.
http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-anim.php
Can't come up with a name? Click the link!
Can't come up with a name? Click the link!
I would plan on an ISO download of the client or something to get some people jumpstarted on getting the client installed, THEN force an update on it's first install so it's properly patched up.
Regardless of whether the game is updated or not, getting 3G of data from scratch, frankly, sucks a LOT.
The Updater isn't always a great idea, IMO, but that's just me.
/thinkin' of the others.
//I myself haven't ever had issues with the downloading from scratch, but so many do...
August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012
CoH has been modified a lot over the years, and there's not much reason it shouldn't continue to be modified. I think that CoH 2 is really only necessary for doing things that would break CoH. One example would be the character models. Making any change there would break the looks of existing characters which will upset players. The character models and textures are an old looking part of the game, and CoH 2 will allow better looking, more customisable characters.
Apart from this and some other minor things I think that updating CoH would be a good way to go. But of course if CoH 2 is created then we'll need all new story lines.
If I had my choice of a feature it would be to have citizens on the street give missions and mission arcs. Have them recognise the hero and mention their personal problems (which could run very deep, into all sorts of villain groups).
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Hello holy trinity.|
Originally Posted by Sailboat
Nerf healing.
All of it. Regen, self-heals, team heals, inspirations, set bonuses, everything. I've felt this way for years, but never really said it. It could be done proportionally, I think, in such a way that it wouldn't really hurt any one character proportionally more than the others -- in a world of rare, weak healing, even a lesser empath would still be a godsend. |
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| It's much more interesting to have to decide whether to press on when injured, at partial capacity, or understrength. It's more dramatic AND more realistic. |
Open-source client. Yes, I said it 
Take customization of the game to a whole new level. Of course, release a 'vanilla' client that anyone can use and works perfectly fine. But one-up the competition's "customizable interface" with customizing everything.
Designing the API would be a pain, esp. when considering protecting users (login couldn't be customizable, to protect from keyloggers), protecting fairness (don't want the customized client to see invisible people for you in PvP, for example), and preventing botting. But it would certainly be an original innovation.
http://www.fimfiction.net/story/36641/My-Little-Exalt
Never implement Architect Entertainment.
Or at least limit it to a named boss encounter with regular enemies.
And if it had to be implemented again, ensure a resource for 'policing' it and a more bureaucratic way of loading arcs to the system.
History has shown us that people, as a mass group, aren't morally responsible for holding back on the 'fast levelling, drops etc etc for little or no threat '.
I hope CoH2 doesn't come to pass. It would just be CO or DCUO then. We got history right here.
There's something very every character to do.
High strength? You're needed to batter down doors, pull levers long since rusted shut and general be big guy about town.
High Dexterity? Usually means your a class which spots and disarms traps, picks locks on doors and chests.
High Wisdom or Intelligence? The world has wizards and clerics in it besides you, they've put up barriers to keep either you OUT or something else IN, you're required to open them.
High Charisma? You can usually get certain NPCs to do what you want without having to kick the schmitzel out of them first and get lower priced goods from vendors.
Each 'build' will, during an adventure series, have something that only they can unlock while other things that they can't. One adventure, in order to turn off all the traps actually requires a party to have a person with 18+ in each of those stats or you just power through the traps and get to work.
There's stuff beyond simply hitting things, though that is a big part of it, there's always something for you to do and all of it is optional OR just makes things easier, you don't have to disarm traps if you can time it right to dodge inbetween the swinging blades.
Badge Earned: Wing Clipper
A real showstopper!