"Traversal" missions?

Speaking of which, I think I am the only person that likes the HUGE map with a tower in the middle that is filled with clockworks. It gives me that nice feeling of accomplishment when I clear it.

And Samuel, since we are bloth playing on Victory I would be happily group with you and explore the abandoned sewers or the Shadow Shard doing some of Hammonds missions.

Well, I wouldn't want to go as far as corpse runs But for all the convenience City of Heroes has over a classic MMO, I'd still like to see at least one or two dungeon crawls done proper. The Eden Trial is a good start, I suppose, but I'd like more of that, and not timed (and not a Trial ), preferably. A few existing missions work like dungeon crawls, actually, but again - I'd like to see more. I'd especially like to see a dungeon crawl that took me through several kinds of terrain.

Saw we start in an office building where something is happening, and it turns out there's a hole leading into a network of caves. When we clear the caves, they descend down into an old sewer system. That sewer system descends into an old crypt, which then descends into an old abandoned mine, and we eventually end up at an uncharted section of Oranbega. That could make for a huge map, yes, but I'd play it.

Actually, one of my favourite missions is the CoV one where we fight Lilithu with a ghost trap on hand. It's a fairly large Oranbega instance with a prison on the far side which forces you to walk out instead of just hitting Exit. One time I played it, I beat Lilithu who was right at the entrance, but her cronies took me down and I spawned in the prison deep inside. The rest of my missions was me fighting my way back out to the surface. I died a few times, but all that did was send me back to the prison which I controlled. I had fun, at least

I agree. That's a really cool map just because there's so much there to clear, but it's still an orderly location. I actually like all of the large outdoor city and industrial maps. Anything I can split down into separate blocks and tackle in an orderly fashion excites me. It's the nature outdoor maps which I actually hate because there's no good way to segment them down into smaller sections.

Sure! Shoot me a global friends request at @Samuel Tow and we can I just need to get my Titan Weapons Brute up to Abandoned Sewers level.

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.

It would be so cool if we could get the Eden map as an zone or instance that you can play when you feel like it, or something similiar if they want to keep the map for the trial unique.

Sounds cool and I actually like the idea because you don't know what to expect and where it takes you.

I am living in Europe though, so not sure if this works during the week, but shouldn't be a problem on weekends.

The Char I am currently playing is a 40 Brute, but I don't mind exemplaring at all.
Btw. I remember you were doing a cow char, is this the one? Because I got that image of a cow wielding a giant something in my head

I like sweeping the outdoor maps too. It's rare that I don't clear one. Maybe Ghost Falcon's mission if I'm on a character with knockback, or the outdoor Croatoa map with all the hills (melee + hills + flying witches = I start to get testy...).

The Perez map I typically go forward, then sweep in a clockwise arc, then clean up in the forest last. The map with the island in the NW (Talos?) I will usually head north until I hit the top of the map, head west until I'm past the rock formation, then head back south, then make one more pass up the coast. I'll then clear the island.

What would really be needed for really long missions is the ability to save part way through. Crashing and losing all prgress when you are almost done would be very annoying, as would just not having time to complete one. In effect, thats basically what Task Forces are.

The other very important thing is for making something like this: You can't turn travel powers or stealth off. They are intrinsic parts of the character, so no saying "Sorry, Invisible Woman, being invisible makes this too easy so you can't use your powers here"

Doubly good in my opinion! Except the times I actually got STUCK in one of the Perez mazes, the special gloom environment effects when you got deep enough into the forest is also something maps should have more often! The deeper you get inside a cave, the darker it becomes, not exactly last mission of Dr. Quaterfield dark, but enough to give the impression you're in pretty damn deep.

Atmosphere is pretty important actually, a some of the map saminess stems from the fact that whether the office is still in use or abandoned, it's just as well-lit as the rest of them. Some abandoned variant office/warehouses and caves need some darkness or field-of-vision reduction. It's the next best thing to do if you don't want to adjust every map to use Ultra mode sun-casting shadows from light sources.

No, not this one. This is Xanta, my giant green swordswoman. I'll try to get a "modded" screenshot of her with the muscular skin on when I figure out which client on what machine had that. The one you're thinking of - my "literal cow girl" is Mary-Beth, my biker cow. She's only a Mace Brute, but her mace is quite big. I'll think about making her Titan Weapons, but not quite yet.

Croatora's maps are annoying to me because they're essentially fields. It's very hard to break them down into sections, and trying to tackle a huge map all at once is so daunting as to be unfun. I usually try to break them down by terrain features, like "I will take this hill from where it starts to where it clips with the next hill." or "This section between the lake shore and the line between those boulders and then from that wooded area to the continuation of this cliff is one section. I'll handle that first." It's not as comfortable, however.

That one actually splits itself. You have three hills in an L formation, so each hill is its own "block," plus the fourth quarter in the L is another block. Then you have the block that's between the line of where you start to the hills straight ahead and the war wall to the right and the hills ahead and the blue wall behind, one block at the beach near the hills, one block for the offset island and one more for "everything else." I have that one down pretty well It's just a lot of open ground, though, which is a bit of a pain for combat.

Of course. As I said, the mole points concept is a good idea. In fact, you know what I'd like to see? A Task Force that's not split up into multiple missions, but is actually one giant instance pretty much the size of a separate zone. In fact, I wouldn't mind it if a TF was essentially an instance of an entire zone, with many objectives popping up around it as we accomplished them. Like, say, an instance of the Abandoned Sewer Network, where you had to reach various places to do various things in them. Or like an instance such as I described before that's a linear series of different tilesets.

If you die, you go back to the start, but you can always warp back to the latest "mole point." If such a mission worked like an Ouro TF or an SSA - which is to say it's a one-man doable TF - then this instance could persist beyond play sessions even for a single player, thus saving progress. While the instance itself may reset and thus repopulate with enemies, you would always be able to go back to your latest objective and your latest mole point. I'd LOVE that.

That's easy enough, actually, if you pick your objectives right. A large map with a single objective in it is just begging to be stealthed, but a large map with many objectives scattered throughout it just has to be taken one step at a time. Or if scattered objectives seems too chaotic, then the map could be populated by chained objectives, where players have to go from one to the other to the next and so forth. One of the reasons people stealth missions is because most only have one objective at the end and everything before that is seen as an obstacle. But pepper objectives all throughout, link them in a chain and slap a defeat-counter before each one shows up similar to the "Defeat 300 Spartans!" one in the ITF, and you have a mechanism that has to be played out step by step without physically blocking people's movement powers.

The Hive is a very beautiful zone, actually. I went there once a long time ago, just to see what the zone looked like, but it's so hard to get around. Everything is a Monster and everything that isn't is a souped-up Swarm that's all over the place. These things hounded me the entire time until I just dove into the Hamidon jello for an instakill to get away from them. The zone is pretty cool, though. It's pretty unique and not just a veritable copy of another like Dark Astoria without the fog is.

I actually really like the Hazard and Trial zones we have in the game. Terra Volta has been one of my long-time favourites. Yeah, it's kind of pointless and yeah, it's kind of wasted space, but you know what? It's pretty BECAUSE it's such wasted space. It's a huge, sprawling industrial complex that still takes my breath away to this day. City of Villains brought us an economy of small things, where everything is miniature and crammed in the same map as everything else to the point where there's little reason to explore. When every part of the map is a monolithic whole, you can pretty much see what it's about from the air high above. Something like Terra Volta, on the other hand, pretty much is a few square miles of industrial complex, so what's actually happening at ground level becomes more important. I would personally love to see a TF in an instance of Terra Volta where we had 20 or 30 different objectives in different parts of the map.

Maybe that's just me having played a sandbox game lately, and maybe City of Heroes really isn't shooting for a sandbox type of game despite having an overworld, but I honestly do miss the act of getting places being meaningful, and I do miss the time when places were big and monolithic. Having five different zones crammed together into the same island is just... It feels like the developers were saving space more than it feels like a realistic city, and that takes me out of the experience.

Heh, why not? So long as that comes with an actual map that shows the actual paths through the trees, I'd be all for it. Have a new tileset that's ALL paths through the trees with no clearings or open air spaces. In fact, I'd go the extra mile and do it like Eden, where the forest has engulfed a city, so you occasionally run into buildings smack-dab in the middle of the forest, or you see pieces of intersections with traffic lights still attached, or city vehicles buried in the undergrowth. That could make for a really cool tileset.

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.

When DC started their "New 52" Thing, our local name for the mysterious lady in purple was Carmen SanDiego.

I'm sure you could even be as vague as "Lady in Purple" and players would get the reference and it would not be suable.

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.