MMOgrinder reviews City of Heroes
This is something I agree that other MMOs should learn fom City of Heroes. Not the travel powers specifically, but that ease of gathering affects willingness to do it.
Another big one in my mind that's often overlooked is the drop system. In City of Heroes, when loot drops, its yours; you got it. Other games go the "realistic" route of having the drop be a physical object that all team members have to decide ownership of, whether by rolling for it or just fighting over it. Can you imagine how different teaming would be if we all had to fight each other over who got the Very Rare drop in a trial, or who got to keep the purple Armageddon or Ragnarok drop? It's interesting that such subtle design differences have such a large impact on player experience and the desirability of teams. The fact that we can bring 8 players instead of 4 or 5 to a mission also IMO is a huge part of what allows the game to be so casual friendly. You rarely need a "perfect" person to fill any role because chances are any combo of 8 will seal most major issues. I find in CoH it takes less time to gather 8 players than most MMOs to gather 4, because everyone is so specialized and you can't burn a team slot on someone who isn't "ideal." |
Heck, the idea of progressive missions sounds great: I love them. But think about missions like the Praetorian one where you have to pick roses for Agent White. Those roses don't turn into blinkies *until* you get that mission. Suppose it had a prereq. You do the prereq, then invite a friend. Now, imagine if you saw and could click the blinkies, but he couldn't. Furthermore, because he can't click them, he can't make progress on that mission. So when you do, you get part B, and he doesn't, and then while he can still team with you, he's no longer getting credit for anything that happens (he gets XP and drops, but no mission credit).
That actually happens in unnamed lightsaber game. So much so I've been on many teams that invite someone and then backtrack specifically to let the new guy catch up, so they don't leave him behind, which means hunting the same things again, or redoing other tasks again for his benefit.
And sometimes you can't even see those task objectives highlighted anymore, so you either have to let him lead - even though he might be new and not exactly know how to do the tasks you just did efficiently - or you have to have memorized the tasks so you can lead him back to them.
By our standards, this isn't just hostile to teaming, this is a deliberate attempt to assassinate teaming. But that's what passes for teaming in other MMOs: its practically medieval by our standards. Its genuinely amazing how different casual teaming is in CoH compared to many other MMOs. Its actually easier to jump into our end game than it is to get onto any normal team in some MMOs.
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Other games seem to, or at least they used to, be designed around allowing players to spend the most time as possible accomplishing as little as the players would tolerate. In other words, a time sink.
When you bill someone for time, as is the case with monthly subs, this makes sense from a money making perspective. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer calls the sports tips 1-900 number, and the recording rambles very, very slowly. This is what some games essentially do by having your character slowly waddle across the landscape on fetch and deliver quests. Travel speed is a way of keeping players from blowing through content, leveling too fast and in short, doing too much and growing bored. CoH has thankfully avoided this approach to design for much of the game, and many of the parts they didn't originally have been removed or reworked over the years with QA changes. Hour for hour, still I think you can do more in CoH than in the 900lbs gorilla. Modern titles have gotten away from being as time-sinky too, so that just shows one way CoH was progressive. . |
When do we get sprint? lol
Answer: around level 15.
Gets better: you first get something resembling an actual travel power around level 30ish. And its a vehicle and you have to buy it. And its not cheap.
It takes somewhat longer to get to 30 there than here. So its not an insignificant amount of time without travel. If the devs did that to us the players would set fire to Zwillinger's hat while his head was still occupying it.
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By our standards, this isn't just hostile to teaming, this is a deliberate attempt to assassinate teaming. But that's what passes for teaming in other MMOs: its practically medieval by our standards. Its genuinely amazing how different casual teaming is in CoH compared to many other MMOs. Its actually easier to jump into our end game than it is to get onto any normal team in some MMOs.
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I 100% agree on this.
Originally Posted by Johnny Butane
This is what some games essentially do by having your character slowly waddle across the landscape on fetch and deliver quests. Travel speed is a way of keeping players from blowing through content, leveling too fast and in short, doing too much and growing bored.
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That's part of it. For a short time I was actually a not particularly successful volunteer developer for a pay-to-play MUD, and we had a lot of rules around travel. Although it was a text based game with "rooms" you could cross through instantly, we would put obstacles like ferries, gondolas, and other things you had to wait on into the game to slow players down intentionally.
One particular set of islands was only available by a boat that came around once an hour or so, and the ride to the islands took 30 to 45 minutes, longer if your boat was attacked by pirates and you didn't bother to or couldn't fight them off. Since this was a text based game, all these "boat rides" technically just consisted of entrances and exits that only were available every so often, along with flavor text to suggest you were traveling.
The stated reason for it was less to create time sinks specifically as it was to make the world feel large and like each zone feel like a distinct place. Part of our developer's handbook basically said we should limit teleportation and fast travel type powers because they can make the game world feel unconnected. Isolating a zone also tended to create the sense of seperate, distinct communities of players around the game world, a concept almost completely absent from most MMOs.
But sometimes the reason it takes so long to move around is just one or more of following (some of which applied to my previous engagement):
- lots of games brag about how "vast" they are in terms of geographic size/number of rooms, and players view this is a mark of quality
- many games oversize their zones on purpose to give players enough room to "hunt" outdoor enemies without tripping over each other
- multiple players within short distances of each other eats up more processing time and causes visual clutter, so efforts are made to spread them out (e.g. putting shops far away from each other)
- developers figure that powers that speed up players can be made available as perks or spells later
- open world PVP and instant travel do not mix well
Another big one in my mind that's often overlooked is the drop system. In City of Heroes, when loot drops, its yours; you got it. Other games go the "realistic" route of having the drop be a physical object that all team members have to decide ownership of, whether by rolling for it or just fighting over it. Can you imagine how different teaming would be if we all had to fight each other over who got the Very Rare drop in a trial, or who got to keep the purple Armageddon or Ragnarok drop? It's interesting that such subtle design differences have such a large impact on player experience and the desirability of teams.
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Our system is subtly but importantly different - stuff falls directly in people's inventories. You get what you get, and if you don't get the stuff you were shooting for, it's no-one's fault in particular. Sure, you might curse your luck, the RNG or the game's encounter design, but you don't feel contempt for your players. They didn't take anything from you. A lot of the time you don't even know what they got if they don't announce it. This fosters an atmosphere of camaraderie such that oftentimes if people get something you need that they don't, they'll outright offer to give it to you free of charge. I've had people hand me things they thought I could use and I've handed out things others needed that I would have simply sold on the Market.
I like how the whole collection of design decisions that make up City of Heroes conspire to create a game that gives you almost no sense of competition with any of your fellow players. No-one's taking anyone's stuff, no-one's beating anyone else and everyone's fighting for the same goal. When one player succeeds, it means success for all players involved. That's pretty much exactly the kind of atmosphere I really adore.
The stated reason for it was less to create time sinks specifically as it was to make the world feel large and like each zone feel like a distinct place. Part of our developer's handbook basically said we should limit teleportation and fast travel type powers because they can make the game world feel unconnected. Isolating a zone also tended to create the sense of seperate, distinct communities of players around the game world, a concept almost completely absent from most MMOs.
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I feel the reality is that not that many people get into games to experience the same kind of hardship that defines real life. I don't really have a problem with it, personally. Hell, look up an old game called Deus (NOT Deus Ex), which starts with your character robbed of all his possessions and kicked down a slope into an alien wilderness where he has to survive ala Robinson Crusoe. It's a good game (OK, it's a crappy game, but I appreciate the idea) and all, but it's really not a genre that's very popular. Which you can probably tell because you've never heard of this game, nor any others like it.
What you have to remember with a persistent open-world sandbox is that the game cannot exist without the meta-game. You CANNOT keep players immersed for anywhere near the duration that players are expected to play them. Sooner or later, you have to account what happens when players get bored and burn out, what happens when players replay the game a dozen times, what happens when the game ages greatly and so forth. From a game perspective, forced hardship builds immersion. From a meta-game perspective, it represents one more reason to resent the game once the the stars in the eyes of a brand new player have faded away.
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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The fact that we can bring 8 players instead of 4 or 5 to a mission also IMO is a huge part of what allows the game to be so casual friendly. You rarely need a "perfect" person to fill any role because chances are any combo of 8 will seal most major issues. I find in CoH it takes less time to gather 8 players than most MMOs to gather 4, because everyone is so specialized and you can't burn a team slot on someone who isn't "ideal."
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It has the potential to make it more fun, but it can also end up being "oops, forgot the mission settings were for +4 x8, lets drop it a bit"... which has happened to me more often than not when i team with some people.
On the flip side, pretty much every other single MMO doesnt scale according to the number of players in the party, and they generally only instance for dungeons and raids, so if someone cannot do a quest by themselves, add in another person and more often than not, the quest then becomes easy enough.
Swings and roundabouts, there is no perfect system out there.
I have seen players engage in outrage about how horrible it is to let people get mounts from level 1 in an MMO. OUTRAGE! How dare you let people do stuff without so much hassle?
I like CoH's travel model.
I have seen players engage in outrage about how horrible it is to let people get mounts from level 1 in an MMO. OUTRAGE! How dare you let people do stuff without so much hassle?
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![Big Grin](images/smilies/biggrin.gif)
I like CoH's travel model. |
All "modern" MMOs should emulate CoX's travel system. I can see why an old school sword n' sorcery game might want to keep the plodding travel pace, but anything that can reasonably have fast personal travel or a vehicle should have it, and as soon as possible.
As far as mission progression, I have seen games that allow "mission sharing" so people can catch up, but I still think having long missions chains is a bad idea.
Agua Man lvl 48 Water/Electric Blaster
![](http://www.siglaunch.com/sigs/any/1/7/9/9/2/4917992DeAqj.png)
"To die hating NCSoft for shutting down City of Heroes, that was Freedom."
![Frown](images/smilies/frown.gif)
All "modern" MMOs should emulate CoX's travel system. I can see why an old school sword n' sorcery game might want to keep the plodding travel pace, but anything that can reasonably have fast personal travel or a vehicle should have it, and as soon as possible.
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The thing with heroes in most movies, games and stories in general is that they're limited in some way, and usually in fairly trivial ways. You need to get to a city, but it's across the sea, so you need a ship. You need to get inside a catacomb, but the door is locked and you need a key. You have to dive to the bottom of the ocean, but you can't breath, so you need a submarine. This goes on and on. It's actually not so much the big powers that make me feel "godlike" so much as the little ones. Like being immune from disease or being able to fly or being able to breathe underwater or not needing to eat and sleep and so forth.
This, really, is where most Peasant MMOs lose me. They work so hard to make my life as a medieval adventurer as **** as it would have been if I were actually living in medieval Europe during the dark ages, only there really were dragons and wizards and undead, that the end result is a thousand niggling little humiliations that just turn me off of the experience. Why do I have to walk everywhere? Why do I have to use someone else's smithy? Why do I have to wear a particular kind of armour? Why is my character always smaller than my enemies? Why must I waste my time "mining" when that's not a glamorous adventurer's job? It's like they're less about a life of high adventures and glorious combat and more about the life of a peasant getting through the day.
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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simple rule: no game should feature "content" that they would not put in an advertising video. Not the montage version where you run for 1 second then pop-into a fight. But the here's what the game is really video of end to end.
if you won't advertise it, you know players won't like it - so don't include it.
simple rule: no game should feature "content" that they would not put in an advertising video. Not the montage version where you run for 1 second then pop-into a fight. But the here's what the game is really video of end to end.
if you won't advertise it, you know players won't like it - so don't include it. |
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Not sure that's 100% true. Scanner missions were considered a godsend to casual players and content farmers alike in that they were ways to informally team with people, level out of content gaps, or just do a few quick and dirty missions when time was limited. They are by design very simple (simplistic really) and not the sort of content I would hold up as representing our game well, but its a necessary evil of sorts that the players generally appreciate.
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I think it's less of not putting on a trailer directly and more of not minding if a reviewer brought it up in a review. Pretty much the difference between "hey, that game has a robust crafting system despite some quirks" and "whoa, mining for crafting materials takes HOURS dude".
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(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)
When you bill someone for time, as is the case with monthly subs, this makes sense from a money making perspective. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer calls the sports tips 1-900 number, and the recording rambles very, very slowly.
This is what some games essentially do by having your character slowly waddle across the landscape on fetch and deliver quests. Travel speed is a way of keeping players from blowing through content, leveling too fast and in short, doing too much and growing bored.
CoH has thankfully avoided this approach to design for much of the game, and many of the parts they didn't originally have been removed or reworked over the years with QA changes.
Hour for hour, still I think you can do more in CoH than in the 900lbs gorilla. Modern titles have gotten away from being as time-sinky too, so that just shows one way CoH was progressive.
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