The SSOOC System.

To me, the reason this system was scrapped was the "out of combat" bit. Twist it how you may, City of Heroes is a combat game, a fighter if you will. Activities exist that aren't combat, yes, but they are either directly derived from the results of combat or (often AND) feed into combat anyway. Giving people things to do out of combat in a game that really wasn't built for it and supports shockingly few ways to interact with the environment aside from combat is a losing prospect in general.

That doesn't mean the system can't work, so much as I can see why they gave up on it. Either you have to massively revamp the game in order for it to include a myriad of non-combat activities where these non-combat skill can come into play, or it would end up, as it did, quite very boring. It's a lot like conversations when those came into being, in the sense that they're just buffers between clicking an NPC and receiving the next leg of the mission with pretty inconsequential differences between the different choices. Now, being inconsequential has allowed conversations to "stretch their legs" and do a very good cosmetic job, but an actual game system can't afford to do this.

For instance, in order for detective work to have a point, you'd need a game which accounted for forensic examinations, witness interviews, crime scene investigations and collaboration with law enforcement agencies and possibly street contacts. Say, like what you'd see in one of the zillion 3D CSI games. And that wouldn't be a bad game, nor indeed a bad game within a super hero MMO, but our game just isn't set up for this. All this would end up doing is add extra hoops to jump through just to get a mission so you can go punch people in the face anyway.

In a sense, the Inventions system is an admission of the above. It's a system that draws on combat for resources and produces items for combat as its output, with the amount of "gameplay" involved within the system itself restricted down to resource management. You don't need to have a particular skill, you don't need to perform a particular action or know a particular item of information. All you need is the right pieces and a workbench to slap them together on. It's a right fit for a game as simple as City of Heroes is, but I fear that's about as complex as a game system can be here, before it starts feeling like a cumbersome gate as opposed to an extension of gameplay.

There's always the possibility that new content moving forward will be made vastly more interactive to account for an actual out-of-combat skills system. However, the development team has been VERY bad about going back and fixing old stuff, and considering "old stuff" is the bulk of what we play, a new system just for the four or so story arcs in a new Issue would be hard to justify.

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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.

You make a valid point, Sam. Several, actually.

I agree, this game is combat-oriented. The few times where we do get some noncombat interaction mostly amount to "Hey, hit this guy!" "Okay!", and the Devs are, like you said, a bit notorious for not revisiting old stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually had to devote an issue entirely to it, it might get so bad! (Hmm...Issue 40: Elbow Grease!)

All that said, we do have some minimal noncombat interaction, like conversation, and it'd be nice to expand upon that. It's just kind of sad that they were never able to work this in all those years ago, because I would've really liked to play it.

I agree, a non-combat basead skill system wouldn't work within the current design of CoH because if there were such a thing, each mission would need to be re-written to include all of the different ways it could be completed.

It would be an undertaking of enormous magnitude, one that I doubt the studio would have the resources available to achieve in a reasonable time. Not only that, but at this stage in the life of the game, rewiring how they game could be played to such an extent probably isn't feasable.

But that's not to say that creating an MMO with such possibilities is impossible. I don't agree with Goat that every player seeks efficiency in reward. If that were true, then you would only encounter players with a very small varience in AT/primary/secondary choice as players would gravitate towards those combinations that are most efficient at gaining reward. Not everyone is a farmer.

I wouldn't mind seeing a variation on a theme on this one, actually. I know a number of players who want to be the detective/espionage sort of character (my own included) and often feel frustrated that the game doesn't have a few more mechanics that support that sort of play, even though I acknowledge that first and foremost this is a combat game.

Now, admittedly I'm coming from a recently biased place, but Rocksteady's stunningly brilliant Arkham City brought a lot to the table in the sense of providing the player with not only one of the most elegant yet simple to learn combat systems I've ever seen in any game, but also encouraged thought and creativity when it came to said combat, along with detection and problem solving. Thugs with guns? Fight them this way. Thugs with shields? Fight them this way. But never once did I feel I was just solving problems with my fists.

A system where instead of 'beating up 15 Hellions to get information' could have a single Hellion in a group of Hellions that you need to get past for that information. Watching for a group of Warriors in a particular part of Talos Island could be aided with the right skill bonuses. The thing is, a system whereby those 'non-combat' abilities wouldn't be hard to implement and would give a player a feeling of having a more direct impact upon the story. The strength of Arkham City was that even though the story was linear, the methods of getting through it weren't.

I'd argue what's coming up in the Summer Blockbuster events are a good sign of that; note that the Casino Heist features almost totally non-combat abilities working in tandem.

DEVS. MORE OF THIS, PLEASE. If everything I read is true and the gap between console games and computer games are closing, then this has to be close to the time to seriously consider breaking that mold. If the Summer Blockbuster proves popular (and I think it will), then looking at the systems behind them, which at least in the Casino Heist portion of the event, could be a long-term investment.



S.

I'd rather they take the time to finish the systems that have in place, instead of opening up dev work on another new system, which they'll eventually abandon.

There is tremendous amounts of work that needs to be done with pvp, AE, and powers customization that I thnk any sort of SSOOC system shouldn't even be a blip on their radar until 2032.

Just saying.

kinda totally off topic but...

I see it mentioned a lot that War Witch has been a dev since the beginning, but wasn't she actually a admin assistant when she started? When did she become a dev?

I seem to remember her stating somewhere...she started as a secretary/admin assistant and worked her way up to dev...so that makes me wonder: When did she become a dev (like what issue).

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Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

She was a World Designer when I first saw her name mentioned as a Dev.

I know she was listed in the Credits for the release of the game in the Design block with Jack Emmert, Al Rivera, Sean Fish, Michael Lewis, Matt Miller and others.

Actually, I think Zwill said something to that effect.