Is Skyway City ... superfluous?
City of Heroes isn't exactly better-looking or even all that much more varied, but it has more and larger zones with doors popping up in all manner of locations so that I'm not looking at the exact same locations all the time. It doesn't have to look better so long as it looks even slightly different.
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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Worse of all, it seems to be the most egregious practitioner of Sam's "three door" accusation, as I seem to recall using the same cave or warehouse door three times in a row each on separate occasions. That said, it does get kudos for Potter's Field being one of the more visually interesting graveyards in the game.
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Sharkhead Island is not a BAD zone, strictly speaking. It has a lot of variety to it. It has that Freakshow fort, small as it is, that you never really get to see if you move from mission to mission. It has that prison-looking building that's apparently the residence of Kirk Kage, of which you'll see about as much as that fort in Port Oaks. There's Villa Requin that, if you didn't look on your map, you wouldn't know it even existed. Potter's Field gets used for a few Oranbega maps so that's good, but most of the time you're either going to the Hell Forge somewhere, going to that one beach on the North side or going to Potter's Field, with the only thing you'll see of the Hell Forge being mostly it from the air as you leap over it to get to the other side.
Granted, Sharkhead does have a few missions in a few unorthodox locations, but almost the whole time, you'll be charting a polygon between three or four doors, going past the same few buildings and seeing only a small fraction of the island. Even at its best, Sharkhead isn't that diverse. It's just brown and black and more black. But even then, what the game takes you to see isn't even a third of it. Not only is this bad in that it makes the zone seem smaller, it's bad because it teaches you to follow specific paths and that REALLY shouldn't happen.
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Personally, I feel the zone could gain a MAJOR facelift by doing just a few very simple things:
1. Make Kirk Cage's residence pretty. The guy is a rich man exploiting the poor to work in his mines, so make him LOOK rich. Raise the exterior barb wire wall to twice the current height, then paint the building inside white, set up an exterior pool on the roof, with a lounge chair and a little garden. This would be the perfect visual metaphor to show both the disproportionate distribution of wealth when one man can live in what is effectively a five-star hotel while his workers live in meagre hovels just outside his front gate. It would also demonstrate the hollow nature of such an existence when you realise this luxury requires a 20-foot wall and an army of dirty guards in order to exist.
2. Clean up Villa Requin. This is supposed to be the refuge of the rich and powerful of the Family, yet it looks like a slum. Grey roads wind around grey buildings with grey roofs on a grey island and the only "elegance" you see is the occasional hedge row. It looks like a dirty, depressing part of town that only looks good because the rest of Sharkhead Island is considerably worse. I get that part of City of Villain's "moral lesson" was that even the best of villainy was still worse than the worst of heroism, hence why rich villains live in bad homes and good people live in a bright and sunny city. But come on, now. Put some colour into it, put in a few gardens, maybe a walled-off pool, maybe a few tennis courts. Make it look like people go there to live the high life that you can't find in the mining town on Sharkhead proper.
Doing both of these would give enough visual contrast to Sharkhead Island such that it doesn't feel like a square mile of the same thing over and over again, I think. It's the juxtaposition of nice and rotten that does a much better job of depicting a corrupt state than just having everything be black and grey and brown.
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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Easy enough to fix, just have some sort of new big-bad come in and take root there, kind of like what they did with DA..
Like maybe the Battalion.. They could come in, thrash the place, and try to set up a forward operating base. The 40-50 Heroes could then scramble to reclaim it. Through the use of Phasing Tech, it could slowly return to "Oldschool/rebuilt" Skyway as you progress through the arcs. |
The DA revamp kept the character of the zone because it grew out of the situation that was already there - a creepy, horror-themed mide level zone with evil cultists worshipping an imprisoned god became a creepy, horror-themed high level zone with evil cultists worshipping a released god - the devs just too the exisiting lore of the zone and progressed it to a point where it'd turn the place into a 50+ zone - but that's much harder to do in Skyway, where the lore is almost totally about streel level crime and the gangs involved in it.
Just about the only opening really is the Lost/Rikti angle, but there's already a whole high level zone devoted to the Rikti, plus plenty of them on PI, so making another zone where they're the enemies for higher level players might seem too similar.
@Golden Girl
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I think Skyway needs a revamp, but not removal. As has been pointed out, there are several contacts and access points there that are largely integral to the content now.
@bpphantom
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I agree, a revamp might be in order for Skyway. Maybe boost the level range, make it all a response to the events of the Sutter TF perhaps? Not totally ruined, but large damaged areas, where you might even fight Sky raiders or remnant IDF via a contact.
Heck, have the Sky Raiders trying to build some kind of base there, taking advantage of the madness. i dunno.
it does need something though.
And I can't see how Skyway City is difficult for anyone without Fly, considering that both Super Jump and Teleport make light work of the zone and Super Speed is well fast enough to be able to look for ramps going up, even when there aren't direct routes under the bridges. The only way the zone could be a problem is if you tried to play it without a travel power, in which case I direct you to Independence Port for how much fun THAT is.
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There are some interesting ideas here, though I question whether they'd make it into the game in its current incarnation. So many good ideas, by both players and developers, are difficult to retrofit into an existing design.
Also, this thread makes me want to write up my "if the players had written the game backstory" idea.
EDIT: Why does "a Chinatown for the Tsoo" come up in every single suggestion for a zone revamp? Not that it's a bad idea (it's a pretty good one, in fact), but some places, such as Skyway City, seem like odd places to add something like that in.
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Ugh, no. It doesn't need consolidation or being hit with meteors, thanks. And I don't see how it's difficult to navigate, to be honest. (And far easier than most redside zones.)
As far as what's in skyway? - Access to faultline - Access to Bloody Bay - Tsoo arcs (Cho Ge, Kong Bao, can never remember the other guy) - Synapse - Troll raves ... just off the top of my head. Basically Steel deals with Clockwork, Council and Outcasts, Skyway ends up as Lost, Trolls and Tsoo. Could some of the content use updating? Sure. Consolidating, no. |
I know what your saying Bill but a lot of that could be fixed/ moved or whatever.
access to Faultline .. Its been HOW many issues now since they started to rebuild Overbrook? If the tunnel disappears simple add it as a stop on the train lines
Access to Bloody Bay .. Okay all this requires really is a heliport placed anywhere in another zone. I never quite understood how they determined where the entrances to the PvP zones went anyway Reculse Victory (the highest level PvP zone) is in Atlas (the lowest level PvE zone) .. so just move Bloody Bay to say Talos or IP and keep it close to the train station so no one DIES trying to get there. Or here's an idea .. move the entrance to Warburg to say Talos or even Brickstown and place the entrance to Bloody Bay in King's Row.
Synapse ... There is no TF conact in King's Row so why not just move him there?
The Tsoo arc contacts could easily be consolidated into ONE contact that can be added to Steel Canyon.
Not exactly sure what to do with the Troll Raves but I'm sure they could find someplace for those .. off the top of my head how about moving them to Boomtown and MAYBE give someone a reason to want to go there other than for badges or when a TF or mission arc forces them to.
As for the Lost, Tsoo and Trolls .. Skyway is not the only zone we see those in. The Lost show up in KR, Perez, Faultline and Terra Volta. The Tsoo are present is Steel, IP, Talos, the old DA and now high level ones appear in the new DA. The Trolls are in the Hollows and could easily be added to say Kings Row or even Atlas Park.
I started out on COV and moved to COH later and one of the biggest differences i had to get accustomed to was the huge number of zones. Let's face in before the destroyed Galaxy we had almost 2 of everything PLUS the hazard zones. And like you I started back before scanner missions and safeguards allowed us to get a raptor pack . we RAN everywhere until level 14. I also dealt with countless contacts that never seemed to have a single mission that was actually in the SAME zone they were standing in. You'd get a mission from someone in Steel and have to run to Skyway or Atlas or Perez Park and then when you finished you had to run ALL the way back so they could send you off and running again. My favorite was the ones that gave me missions, as a 12 or 13 level, that forced me to head into Skyway and the Land of the Lost .. You know where the 18 and 19 levels hang out. Run into a Lost boss and in a heartbeat your asleep and then one shotted.
The fact is that Skyway simply doesn't have as many draws as Steel and unless someone is forming a Synapse TF or passing through on a mission for some story arc or task Force .. the place is almost as empty as Boomtown.
We have ONE low level zone now in Atlas 2-5 or 6. Then one zone, King's row, to deal with 5-14 level stuff. So why do we need Two zones to cover 10-20? Maybe while they are at it they can update the Synapse TF as well.. Its the only one left that is THAT long and has THAT many defeat alls. LOL
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There are two questions in this topic, really.
The question of inconvenience is pretty well covered by Chase. The zone was designed at a time when the model for MMO's was Everquest. It was taken for granted that players would do their leveling outdoors and explore the zones, overcoming the unique challenges posed by each zone. I've mentioned many times in the past that in the initial version of CoH, the instanced stories were considered to be window dressing, with insignificant mission completion bonuses. The game took place outdoors, where you would group up and street sweep to do serious leveling. The obstacle course of Skyway City was intended to offer all players a feeling of achievement at having "defeated" the terrain and to offer explorer-types the feeling of accomplishment that comes from finding cool, out-of-the-way things that players on rails to mission doors would never see.
That changed, obviously, which brings me to the second question or topic here, the question of obsolence.
The question of obsolesence is city-wide. It isn't restricted to Skyway. Most of the blue side is basically superfluous nowadays due to eight years of changes in the way the game is played and design decisions intended to deliberately speed up the lower-level game and move people into the middle and upper tiers. It's no secret that the game is an altaholics dream. I don't have references now,but I can recall red names stating in the past that something like 70% of the existing player characters were below level 30, when talking about what levels to develop content for. (I actually think the level was much lower than level 30, but since I don't have a quote to reference, I'm erring on the side of caution.) With an actual end-game now, the current design encourages people to get well on the road to engaging with that end-game or at least get out of Atlas Park and into the mid-game.
Who really bothers with Crey's Folly or Eden or Boomtown or Terra Volta? You want to talk about presenting a challenge to a non-aerial hero, then Terra Volta makes Skyway look like a cake walk.
Does anybody even really bother with Brickstown or Founder's Falls beyond the travel time required to move across them to a mission door?
It's not that Skyway is obsolete or that Boomtown is obsolete. It's that the outdoors is obsolete and the game below level 25 is obsolete. They exist almost entirely for flavor and nothing else.
I'd actually like to see a 'smaller' version of Skyway done, with part of it wrecked like it looks at the end of the Sutter Task Force. Tightening up the zone might not be a bad idea (not unlike what got discussed at the Pummit for Independence Port).
Michelle
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Personally, I think that what "City of" really needs at this point is a Cataclysm-style of makeover where "zones" are disposed of entirely and the city is one big explorable world where only Atlas Park is specialized for a particular level range or type of content. The game is becoming less and less able to adequately support the whole "the timeline advances as you level up" model of the original game, as evidenced every time some new content is added that conflicts with the existing content or, worse, changes the existing content in some fashion that is either ludicrous or jarring in comparison to what existed prior.
I think the sampling of opinions in this thread backs up what I'm always telling developers at any company where I work: when trying to decide between options for design, always give the users both and allow them to choose.
Some folks want to get to 50 as fast as possible. Others (and I'm with this group) enjoy the lower levels as well...and we don't want to have to follow the same path with every character. *cough*currentnewstartingexperience*cough*
My vote would be to keep the zone in its current level range, but perhaps do something more interesting with it a la Zombie Man's suggestion.
I certainly don't want even fewer options for non-express levelling.
_redside_ content please.
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Hew in drag baby
Personally, I think that what "City of" really needs at this point is a Cataclysm-style of makeover where "zones" are disposed of entirely and the city is one big explorable world where only Atlas Park is specialized for a particular level range or type of content. The game is becoming less and less able to adequately support the whole "the timeline advances as you level up" model of the original game, as evidenced every time some new content is added that conflicts with the existing content or, worse, changes the existing content in some fashion that is either ludicrous or jarring in comparison to what existed prior.
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The issue of zones and their usefulness (or lack thereof) is really a separate issue from this, though, as you imply, a revamp of zones or the whole "zone" concept could help with the content issue.
I see a potential problem, though, aside from people's disliking such a huge change: can the game system support a zoneless world? Or is that something better saved for Paragon Studios' next MMO? (Personally, I have no idea.)
"Bombarding the CoH/V fora with verbosity since January, 2006"
Djinniman, level 50 inv/fire tanker, on Victory
-and 40 others on various servers
A CoH Comic: Kid Eros in "One Light"
This isn't a hint that Skyway is getting revamped in an upcoming Issue, just that we're not above doing things like rethinking level ranges for a zone, if it can be justified.
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Yay! Zwillinger just verified that King's Row, Skyway, and Boomtown are getting revamped into Vigilante/Rogue zones!!!
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One thing that is starting to get old (imo) is when we get a new zone that was obviously written for heroes, and then the text is written in such a way as to shoehorn in non-heroes, giving them the same missions, goals, etc. Obviously this means less work for the devs, but I still think it would be nice if non-heroes were given some consideration other than the occasional minor text change. At least one other MMO gives both sides access to the same zones, but gives each side something different and alignment-appropriate to do in that zone. So the devs there don't have to make 2 zones, but it still plays differently depending on your alignment. That's a compromise I would love to see here.
Yay! Zwillinger just verified that King's Row, Skyway, and Boomtown are getting revamped into Vigilante/Rogue zones!!!
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Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)
I'd welcome a storyline that didn't include alien or supernatural big bads - move the Family into Skyway (there's already deserted neighbourhoods and drugs) and let us battle organised crime
Does anybody even really bother with Brickstown or Founder's Falls beyond the travel time required to move across them to a mission door?
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On the other hand, until a couple weeks ago I had never taken a character into the Hive at all and I haven't had one in the Hollows since a few months after it was released.
Things I hate: Anime. PvP. Lying MMO Developers. Outleveling content. Manga. ED. Comic Store Employees. Anime.
On the other hand, until a couple weeks ago I had never taken a character into the Hive at all and I haven't had one in the Hollows since a few months after it was released. |
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Personally, I think that what "City of" really needs at this point is a Cataclysm-style of makeover where "zones" are disposed of entirely and the city is one big explorable world where only Atlas Park is specialized for a particular level range or type of content. The game is becoming less and less able to adequately support the whole "the timeline advances as you level up" model of the original game, as evidenced every time some new content is added that conflicts with the existing content or, worse, changes the existing content in some fashion that is either ludicrous or jarring in comparison to what existed prior.
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There's te 1-50 normal content, which mostly sticks to the level = time passed idea.
Then there's the Incarnate content, which is at the cutting edge of the meta-story, and follows a release date = time passed idea - the newest bit of Incarnate content is always the most recent part of the story, and the most up to date situation in the game world.
And then there are the SSAs, which also follow a release date = time passed idea, so that the episodes can use whichever level range suits them best, meaning that we get situations like SSA1.7 being 40-50, but then it drops back to 30-50 for SSA2.1, which makes it possible for a newer player who's still leveling up to be able to access the aftermath of "Who Will Die" before they can actually access the end of "who Will Die".
The difference between the SSA timeline and the Incarnate timeline seems to be that the SSAs are used to update the game world, and then become "historical" once the changes are made, which puts them outside the normal 1-50 timeline, while the Incarnate timeline simply extends the meta-story past 50.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
I like to run and jump on the expressways and bridges but that's about it lol. Maybe tighten it up..throw a University there and a WW and it will be used twice as much as it is now.
I think that blueside has way to many zones anyway and red has to few.
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