Is Skyway City ... superfluous?

I fail to see how the second sentence supports the first. He wasn't, I don't think, suggesting paths exclusive to certain types of characters, but paths that focused on certain themes of content that you could choose to follow. A science origin could go the magic/fantasy route ( Think X-Files type of storyline for the theme blend ), magic could go the scifi route ( Star Wars? ), etc.

yah, runners are the only ones who get hosed in Skyway.


/edit

also, just saw this on Twitter and thought immediately of Sam:

And even they're not THAT bad off. Not as bad as they are in some other places. Especially if they have Ninja/Beast Run, the Jump Pack, and/or Combat Jumping in conjunction with SS.

It's less of a pain than in the olden times, certainly.

the jump pack alone is usually enough to keep my speedsters out of trouble.

Dillo is a purpose-designed meme, so I'm not surprised he'd be popular. I've seen about as much talk about him as about "Freem!" which is about "not much" for both. It's also low-level content that everyone's likely to have run, on the side where most people play. Seriously speaking, there used to be a time when people's favourite character was Vivacious Verandi, but I don't know if anyone still plays that content any more.

Honestly, after the initial fad of saying "Hoorb!" subsided, I've barely heard anyone bring it up. To me, it's the "Kill Skuls!" of recent times - it's funny for a while, but it hardly depicts a clear favourite. To me, memes are a bit of a "cheap" way to get exposure for something. Because at the end of the day, all your base are belong to us.

"A choice" doesn't refer to a situation that offers equal options to everybody, not in this case. It refers to a situation that offers at least one option for everybody. I know full well that you don't like legacy content, and that's fine. I wouldn't dream of forcing you to play it. But why are you so intent on making me not play the content I want to play? Especially since I would quite literally pay actual money to play this. I am dead serious.

Goat, you're speaking with a guy who doesn't like Batman as a basic concept and whose TV viewing consists of 99% documentaries. I watch the Viasat Explorer, Viasat History, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, Discovery Science, the National Geographic Channel, Crime and Investigation and Zone Reality, and I don't watch anything else unless someone specifically comes and tells me there's something good on another of the channels. Occasionally I'll watch WWE Raw or Smackdown when I catch those airing, but it's incredibly rare that this happens since they air on channels I don't normally watch.

More specifically, I would most certainly watch that episode of "How It's Made" that describes the process for manufacturing pencils, which I've already seen, over the Dark Knight, which I have no intention of seeing. Nor do I have any intention of watching The Dark Knight Returns nor whatever they're calling the next one with Bane. I barely got to play Arkham Asylum a good two years after it came out, and it took me this long because it has Batman in it. In the end, it's not a bad game, but it's not exactly a great game because it has Batman in it. I can't bring myself to play Arkham City both because I'm tired of scavenger hunt sandboxes and because it has Batman in it. I'm not interested in Batman. I never was. The only reason I like Batman Forever is because Jim Carey as the Riddler and Tomme Lee Jones as Two-Face steal the show completely, and because... Well, fluorescent paint thug fights in dark alleyways. I like me some glow-in-the-dark costume designs.

Yeah, David Nakayama held the same view about legacy costume pieces, and that didn't come across well with players. You may find this "garbage" to be bad for the game, but I don't appreciate content I like being taken out because you think I'm better off playing what you like instead of playing what I like. Hide it from new players if you absolutely must, but this is content I paid for when I purchased City of Heroes all those many moons ago. I don't react well to having content I paid for removed from the game because someone else doesn't like it.

Because I can't possibly get tired of that? It's one, single mission that plays out the same every single time. And I'm not tired of "mission content," I'm tired of dialogues that intrude on my gameplay, I'm tired of unnecessary scripting and excessive ambushes, I'm tired of whole instances of nothing but one spawn to fight in them, I'm tired of enemies phasing into reality only AFTER I've accomplished a previous objective, requiring me to backtrack, I'm tired of cutsenes and all that sort of thing. But that's not "mission content." For many years, the game did just fine by having simple missions with simple objectives that budgeted their narrative at the beginning, end and clues.

That's still "mission content," and that's the kind of mission content I want to play more of. This content exists, but you're arguing that I shouldn't be able to run it, so that you can later argue that my tastes are aberrant and we can't make content for everybody so we can't make content for me. The content exists already, and I'm perfectly happy to play through it time and time again. I'll never get tired of Kings Row or Skyway City, and I refuse to lose something I like over your Jack Emmert vision of what the game should be about. No offence.

Yes, except I'm not making the argument you seem to think I'm making. I like the newest mission design because it most closely resembles the oldest mission design of the ones I've seen. What our writers have learned is how to write like Jack Emmert and Matt Miller did back in 2004. Only in that case, those guys wrote like this because they had no choice - the mission structure mandated it. Now that we have much greater mission writing tools, I was forced to sit through several Issues of the writers going berserk and employing every gimmick in the book till I was sick to my stomack of running new missions. Most of what they've learned is to tone it down and design missions like they used to be designed - with gameplay in mind first and foremost, and a story that doesn't try to usurp that, but instead seeks to give context to the gameplay.

I've described SSA1.7 as the least horrible of the SSA1s, because it is. Of all of the overbooked, overengineered, gimmick-ridden nonsense that is the SSA1, SSA1.7 is easily the least botched because for that, the mission designers simply stopped trying so damn hard and gave us basic, simple missions that we actually got to play through, as opposed to the "sit back and watch our scripts play out" attitude of the previous six. With SSA1.7, they finally realised we actually wanted to, you know, play the actual game, so they let us, and that's what makes the story least bad. It's still pretty bad because it's attached to the SSA1 and its text is horribly ridden with typos, but it's not that bad. With SSA2.1 not attached to a horrible story and offering abundant gameplay, it's almost like I'm back to 2004, except for the occasional "all talk" mission. And considering the arc is otherwise pretty good, those aren't that bad, especially since they allow all the talking to be condensed into a couple of specific instances, as opposed to strewn about the story so I'm tripping over it every five minutes.

Condescending sarcasm noted and appreciated.

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 seems that KR is going to get some kind of attention from the devs, so it's quite possible that the older content there could be shifted to Ouroboros and replaced with modern arcs using the more sophisticated post-GR storytelling style.

Actually, this idea appeals to me. We have destroyed zones like Boomtown and the Hollows, struggling zones like Faultline, but what about NEW construction? I'd like to see some of the swooping ramps mentioned up-thread by another poster combined with the idea of a new section of the city being built. Overlap some of the levels instead of making it duplicate Steel Canyon and throw in some new arcs written after the SSA #1. Maybe there's a thin spot in realities leading to Praetoria so their troops occasionally break through (like having a fire or troll rave event).

I'd rather see zones revamped if enough good ideas can be made for them. Barring that, put the earth-side moon transit area there to tease us until we get a Lunar Zone...

I probably should've gone with 'junk' over 'garbage'.

They still work, after a fashion, just not very attractively or well.

Between flashback-to-the-90's darkity dark dark writing that seems to be the point of the new storytelling style and extreme load times and low FPS I'd rather not have KR updated since it is a convenient place to let my video card recover from the revamped Atlas Park in that you can function there at level 5 if I don't feel like running the Hollows yet again.

This is largely the point I was getting at in my OP. Skyway exactly duplicates Steel's level range, and that, combined with the fact that Steel is easier to navigate and has more "essential" content, leads to Skyway being neglected by players (at least this player).

Maybe if the two zones level ranges were staggered a bit, and some of the "essential" content was added to Skyway, the zone would be more compelling.

I certainly don't want to see the zone destroyed, and simple geography prevents it being "merged" with Steel.

I'd make a slightly different comparison: The Dark Knight vs. Batman (1966). You might think the latter is hopelessly silly, campy, stupid, and/or best forgotten... but some people, sometimes, are in the mood to watch Adam West running around a pier trying vainly to get rid of a bomb. De gustibus non disputantum.

Also, I think you'd find either a bit tedious on the tenth alt, I mean viewing. That's (one thing) what Sam is trying to point out - even memorable characters and a good storyline can become as tiresome to play through, again, as "Go. Hunt. Kill 10 Skuls."

Options are good. Multiple paths are good. A single enforced path, even if gilded, will eventually become just a road to slog along.

(And on the topic of the main thread - if you've read "Faces of the City", you'll see that I think Skyway could use just a little more 70s urban-decay-vigilante flavor, and Talos more 80s shallow-glitz-and-neon. )

*shrug*
Games attract gamers, internet games attract internet gamers. I don't see working at appealing to a large part of your customer base as dirty pool, or lazy writing.

As long as it works, anyway- and Dillo worked.


I don't want to force anyone to play anything, but I don't think "new stuff, or legacy stuff" is a good choice to give new players who're fresh off the boat, so to speak. While I respect your affection for the old stuff, it doesn't give someone without CoH experience a good impression of what to expect from the rest of the game.

Back at launch I played through all of this stuff. It wasn't any better then than now, but it *was* indicative of the game experience I could expect at the higher levels (well, except for those potholes where you flat ran out of contacts and had to street sweep for a few levels).

So, sure, leave it in the game....but leave it in the game for archaeologists to discover if they feel like going digging. Or to use the city metaphor, have the off-ramp deposit new players on the clean, modern, well lit side of town and make them *find* the grubby, disreputable old neighborhoods on their own.


I don't mind Batman, although I do watch a ton of documentaries, but that wasn't my point- it was more along the lines of presenting an option between a modern cinematic production and a 1950's instructional film.
For most superhero game playing types, that's a choice that makes itself.

Of course you would, Sam....of course you would. =D

I agree they shouldn't remove existing content, at least not when they can just de-emphasize it.


I don't see any real connection between the new stuff you like and the old stuff you like. The writing is vastly better, the mechanics are much better & the flow is much better (not sending players off all over kingdom come for no reason).

I do agree that making the storytelling *less intrusive* (voice overs, cutscenes, etc) has improved recently, but that doesn't make the 'intrusive' missions look any worse compared to old content.

Haven't gotten to 7 yet, but I've grandly enjoyed every episode of the first SSA so far.

Your expectation that a large number of gamers are going to share you disgust for certain styles of writing & certain story mechanisms is misplaced.

Lots of players like "overbooked, overengineered, gimmick-ridden nonsense", at least as a break from the usual.

It's like taking in a summer popcorn movie- the nonsense & intrusive special effects are part of the sales pitch.


Sam, I'm not trying to insult you, it's just sarcasm is my natural mode of expression! =P

Personally, I absolutely love it when I find a restaurant untouched by time. A diner that hasn't been updated since the 60's, red vinyl booths, dim lighting, linoleum floors...or an old Chinese restaurant with a tiny upstairs & a dumwaiter.

So I understand the emotion even though I don't share it in this instance.

And there will always be people that like old, dilapidated places instead of new, shiny ones. Witness the nostalgia in some corners for the "old" Times Square of peep shows and hustlers over the current Disnefied corporatist chain store version.

Differen't strokes, as they say.
It doesn't hurt the game to leave the old stuff in, as long as the new stuff is front and center. I like the game to put its best foot forward, and your philosophical concerns about the underlying structure of the storytelling aside, modern content is much more appealing than the ancient stuff.

It's out of this world.

The duplicate level range and the fact that there's no good reason to go there except to run Synapse once for the accolade don't bother me that much. To me, the bigger problems are your #3, and one more:

4) It's pathologically ugly. It is Sharkhead Isle level ugly.

Honestly, I'd like to see them blow up Blyde Square in Steel Canyon and blow up all of Skyway City, to catch them up to the events of Ajax and Tin Mage II, and write whole new content to go with it. Move it or Boomtown to a different level range, maybe re-range Perez Park, and have an entire alternate leveling path that deals with disaster zones: say, Hollows to Perez Park to Boomtown to Skyway City to Crey's Folly.

It's not far off of how the zones were meant to be used. There's a very, very, very obsolete leveling path in City of Heroes just for people who only want to grind, what CoH used to call Hazard Zones: team sized spawns, no story contacts, just go from spawn to spawn to spawn killing things for XP, then move on to the next Hazard Zone. When they quadrupled the rewards for end-of-instance complete and halved the debt for death in instances, people stopped using the Hazard Zones altogether, making them all revamp bait.

But if they had it to do all over again, if they had nigh-infinite resources for rewriting content, I could make a case for having a fork in the content, right after the Atlas Park arcs: go this way to be a hero in disaster zones, dealing with monsters and whatever, or go this way to be a hero in civilization zones, fighting criminals and such.

But back to the main point: for the love of all holy gods, please never again make me deal with those awful looping incomprehensible pattern-less Bridges to Nowhere. Seriously, the whole art direction of Skyway City was revealed in a developer blog post before the game went live: as soon as they created a villain group called the Trolls, they decided they needed bridges to live under. Seriously? A whole 1.5 mile by .75 mile zone, that started (back then) before you could spec Fly or Superjump, just as one stupid art gag? Dumb. Get rid of it, please, replace it with something less dumb.

Does this explanation mean that you agree that the expression of history in the game has become untenably unwieldy? I'm not sure what the takeaway is supposed to be, otherwise, unless, GG, you've somehow acquired the notion that I've failed to grasp the time mechanics of the game despite having been around here for eight years...

No, I actually didn't intend to imply any such thing. I meant exactly what I said - The overworld exists for flavor and little else. That flavor is important to some players; less so to others.

For what it's worth, I agree with a lot of your points, Sam, but then again that's because I "grew up" with the old game the same as you did so it's what I think of as "the game".

People who yakk on about "City of Heroes 2" don't seem to realize that we're already playing "City of Heroes 2". We're not playing the same game that we played eight years ago except in the most general sense. That's why legacy content can be seen as a poor representation of the "real game" as I might take some rather large liberties to paraphrase Nethergoat's position to be.

The old content IS obsolete. The fact that a few people like it is not a recommendation except that people can get some variety if they desire to work their way up instead of power-level through Death From Below.

The developers purposely set it up this way. It's not as if they went through all that beta testing somehow remaining oblivious to the feedback about the speed of the lower level game, only to be blindsided and surprised when it went live and everyone leaped into the twenties and thirties. They made it this way on purpose. They intended to make King's Row and The Hollows effectively obsolete and they intended that primary path of advancement into the upper levels would lead through Steel Canyon and maybe through Faultline.

If you enjoy doing King's Row and taking your time, that's great. I enjoy it too, but the plain fact is that the appeal is to the old-timers. I would be unsurprised to learn that there are large numbers of post-Freedom players who have never set foot into King's Row outside of doing Montague Castanella's missions to cure the Lost. Those same people are focused on getting to the next mission door. They aren't focused on walking around the world and looking at things. They mostly don't know or care if they get ambushed. If they weren't already trained by other MMO's to follow the carrot to the next reward, the new streamlined version of CoH is teaching it to them.

I'm not calling for anything to be eliminated or changed. I'm merely commenting on that state of the game. I don't think that one way is "better" than the other, even though I enjoy the old game much more than most of what I've seen of the new game. (Admittedly, I still have to visit the new Dark Astoria.)

Obsolescence doesn't imply that anything should be done about the obsoleted content, unless it's a world-wide change that is designed to make the entire world relevant again. Otherwise, I'm perfectly fine with leaving the legacy content to the legacy players. I'm one of them, myself, after all and like you I'm not keen on seeing stuff I've grown attached to be destroyed in the name of questionable "progress".

That's my position in a nutshell.
Modern content is such a different thing from what we had at launch that it does amount to CoH 2. The stuff they added in the year I was away isn't even relatable to the stuff I remember playing back in the day.

Now I can see Sam's perspective, that he likes that old stuff and wants it around to revisit. That's fine, as long as new players have to dig around and discover it on their own.

What I'd really like, and have suggested in a half-joking way in other threads, is some sort of dislaimer/warning icon for the old 'legacy' contacts. So it's still there, but if a newer player stumbles across it they're informed that it's outmoded and does not reflect the current state of the game.

No need to disappear it entirely, just deemphasize it and slap on a warning label.

I started in October last year and I love Kings Row, so much so that I made Yuki a Kings Row native and the talk of revamping it (especially as a perma-night zone) now worries me. Really, as much as the thread talks about things existing for "flavor," what else is the game? Most of the missions amount to "run into building, beat up enemies and click stuff." The stuff that makes those missions come to life is the flavor. I just don't see anything gained by removing a zone from the game. The zone's there for people who like it, it's avoidable for people who don't like it, and a bigger game world with more to explore is always better than a smaller one with less exploration and freedom.

My favorite zone in the game was always Dark Astoria.
Discovering it had been re-made filled me with trepidation, which ended up being baseless- the "new" DA is true to the spirit of the original AND has content besides street sweeping team sized spawns. And "old" DA is available via Oro, should my fire blaster wish to relive his glory days of bombing spawns in Mot Cemetery.

So, I wouldn't get too worried.

We're likely working off different definitions of "obsolete," then. I'm not a native speaker, so my first encounter with the word was a Dexter's Lab episode where Dexter built himself a computer which proceeded to take over his lab, proclaiming: "X is obsolete, and all obsolete matter must be destroyed." in relation to everything and anything Dexter had built, including Dexter himself and even Dee Dee, who eventually broke the robot by insisting "Well, if you sound like Dexter and act like Dexter then you muuust be Dexter! See you later Dexter!" causing the Robot to insist that "Dexter is obsolete and must be destroyed!" at which point his own drones destroyed him.

Huh... Tangent.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with obsolete content, myself. I'm both a creature of habit and a creature of simplicity, if you can believe that, and I rather enjoy the uniformity and predictability of old content, rather minding the random-seeming nature of newer missions. As I've said before, an "organic" seeming world is great when you're first being introduced to it, but if you're going to go through a game over and over again like I have for the last eight years, then the type of gameplay which can become a "habit" and a "routine" is superior. I like to problem-solve occasionally, but if I'll be playing for hours and hours, I'd rather play something that doesn't tax me with new experiences too often. To me, it's easiest to reach a state of flow by something that I feel I'm in complete control of by virtue of being able to predict it.

New content is finally starting to get there by remembering to actually include gameplay along with the story and cutscenes, but honestly... I still wouldn't trust the developers to "rebuild" it all any more so than I'd trust them to make a literal City of Heroes 2. I worry what "lessons" they've learned and how those will reflect on the redone content. Jack Emmert left NCsoft claiming to have learned many lessons, yet he seems to have learned exactly the wrong ones. I've seen "City of Heroes" done right once before and wasn't exactly blown away. At this point, I'd rather not fix what ain't broke, because exactly what constitutes "improvement" isn't something I'm willing to take on blind faith.

Sure. I have no problem with that. I still own decade old games that people didn't like even when they were new, so I've no problem playing "condemned" content. In general, I don't try to have any sort of control over other players' habits. Don't mind them farming Wolves or farming the Architect or farming Winter Lords or whatever's the latest and fastest at the time. I care about what I get to experience. If that means putting a sticker on old content and taking it out of circulation, then so be it, so long as I can play it. In fact, I'd really like to see the old Faultline as an Echo. That place was pointless, but it was ten times as visually impressive as new Faultline. I thought the deep cracks and the AMAZINGLY huge dam wall were some of the best sights in the game.

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.

I'd support it as an installation in a Museum of Terrible Zone Design.

As would anyone else who tried completing one of those ridiculous 'hunt' missions on a super speedster...

To prove a point to a friend of mine, I took a Super Speeder to the base of the dam wall, at the far end of the Reservoir. I proceeded to race back to the zone entrance without taking a single point of damage within the span of about 30 seconds to a minute while making precisely one wrong turn, relying on the inherent stealth of Super Speed and the slow reaction time of unaggroed critters when moving through them quickly. If the zone existed, I'd take you to show you in person.

Faultline may have been a bit harsh against Super Speed back when we didn't have jump packs, flight packs, all manner of teleporters or the Reveal power, and even then it wasn't that much of a bother. All it took is taking a single trip through the cracks to see what's down there and beyond that, it was as simple as following the streets in Steel Canyon. Pick a crack, follow it through until you reach the shallow bits and just jump out.

When the revamp of Faultline was being discussed, I suggested building bridges across the cracks and setting down a large number of elevators to bring you back to the top layer. That should have been enough to help anyone who picked Super Speed yet lacked any real ability to use it outside endless flat ground. What I specifically DIDN'T want to see was the cracks filled in, because with that, the zone looks like every other zone in the game, most notably Founders' Falls. And not just because it borrows the same building design.

Faultline was one of the game's most beautiful zones and one of the few places where you could see REALLY big things in the city. The Rikti Crash Site used to have a really impressive array of "something," I think it was solar batteries, but that disappeared years ago. It used to have the very imposing Rikti Shuttle sitting at a very steep angle so it towered over the zone, but that's now been laid flat so you can have a Trial in it. Because, honestly, aside from the Faultline Dam wall, the only other truly massive structures in the game are the Chantry and the Storm Palace, and those even I can't defend for accessibility.

Speaking of botching "improvements" on zones, by far the WORST thing that could have happened to the Shadow Shard was to slap those co-out teleporters and call it "fixed." It's not fixed. Every time I go there, I find yet another geyser has started shooting off to the side, to the point where movement around the place is becoming impossible even for someone as patient about this as I am. But it's OK, because the zone is "fixed." You can take a teleporter to a blotch on the map. In the meantime, the Mole Points rot unused, a great concept forgotten and abandoned with actual story behind it, and the geysers continue to deteriorate every time the dev team mess with the game's physics parameters.

Like the Shadow Shard, I don't disagree that Faultline needed help with getting around. It could be problematic, it could be difficult, it could be annoying. But the "help" it received completely ruined the single most interesting and identifying feature of it. I don't want to see what happened to Faultline happen to Skyway City or any of the old zones as a means to "fix" them, because it's not a fix. It's changing the zone into a completely different, entirely new zone that just shares the same name. Take the skyways out of Skyway City and it literally becomes a clone of Steel Canyon, the same as what happened when Dark Astoria bugged and lost its fog.

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.