CoH2. Will it ever happen?

Based on the very large sample size that exists for MMO sequels, the best you can say is that MMO sequels are extremely unlikely at all.

Well, to be fair, its not entirely about graphics. gr already showed us they can make the graphics better, so its time consuming and expensive but possible in the existing game. what at least some of us think of with coh 2 is mechanics, the ability to throw objects and weaponize some objects (grab a light post and baseball swing a baddie), as well as the ability to grapple enemies, move while firing, climb on walls and maybe have a less binary mezz system. those are unlikely to happen in a way that would not be massively jarring for the game and would bulldoze a lot of cottages.

It would,however, also bring the game closer to representitive examples of the genre. so it is sad that coh is unlikely to be able to do these things, and competitors that do do them...dont do much else well, its really a case of wanting to take what is a good idea and seeing what our dev team can pull off with it. its likely to be far better than what their devs did with it.

The trouble comes when you consider that we can never really agree on what the "good" parts are and what the "bad" parts are about this game. Some people insist the game is too easy and we want more challenge, so that's a bad part. I like the game BECAUSE it's easy and lets me solo with a relatively slapdash build, so to me that's a good part. I consider an intricate and involved story to be one of the best parts about this game, yet others (chiefly Venture) talk as though nothing in the game's story is worth a crap so that sounds like a bad part.

In general, I agree with you that when you get "this game with all the good stuff kept and all the bad stuff removed" may well turn out something completely different from what people imagine it as. And I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the stuff we really like is at the same time really damaging to the game and the development team's ability to expand it.

And here are a few good examples:

It also showed me that "better" graphics don't necessarily make the game look better. The prevalence of reflective costume pieces that don't take colour well, the design theme shift towards more over-detailed "realistic" costume pieces and the HIDEOUS strain on my system are all factors that some days make me wish we hadn't made the game "prettier."

This is an idea I will always oppose under all circumstances, just because I've seen what it entails. I HATE it when animations are split between the lower and upper halves of a model because it makes them lose all feeling of weight behind them. It makes melee combat especially look like people fighting hand-to-hand while sitting down on wheeled swivel chairs that they roll around the battlefield. Human (and humanoid) posture while standing up involves the entire body. Kinetic firearms "kick," so a shooter must brace to combat recoil. That sort of thing. I've seen games that do combat on the move, and unless it's a FPS game where you can't see your feet, it has always looked horrible.

This is another thing that scares me. If by "the genre" you mean comic books, then I feel this is the worst thing that could happen to City of Heroes from a storytelling or aesthetic standpoint. Right now, the game has a very "anything goes" type of environment that's accommodating to comic book enthusiasts, but isn't alienating to people like me who don't really care much for comic books. In fact, back in 2004 when I was considering buying the game, one of my primary concerns was how true this game would be to comic books, because all I wanted was an RPG in a contemporary setting as opposed to a fantasy one. I didn't want a comic book. I've seen other games try to pull off being a "comic book game" and the results have been gravely disappointing.

If by "the genre" you mean MMOs, then that's even worse. I can deal with a game with a bad setting, but a game with annoying insufferable gameplay is much less likely to keep me around. I've often said I'm still with City of Heroes mostly because this is the MMO which has the least amount of annoying irritating **** that I have to deal with (less so with Incarnates forcing me mess with Inventions, but I guess it was too good to last before). Pretty much the last thing I want to see happen to City of Heroes is for it to become more like other MMOs, by which I mean more like WoW. In a day and age where MMOs are sold based on "has PvP, has crafting, has auction house, has loot, has raids, has guilds" rather than any part of its artistic vision, anything that's NOT like WoW or Lineage II (the two major frameworks these days), the more I'm likely to enjoy it. Too bad that aside from City of Heroes, I really haven't seen one like that.

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All of this is not to pick an argument, Rian, so much as to point out that we, as a community, will never be able to agree on what makes the game good and what makes it bad.

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.

Pretty much this.

I'd also argue that the "picking up things in the environment" thing that someone mentioned doesn't impress me. Other games have done it and it just hasn't been practical.

I'd rather time spent to make my powers look awesome.

It depends on how it's done. For instance, the old PSX game Fighting Force did it marvellously, mostly because the bulk of its combat revolved around finding pieces you could grab and hit people with. Punch a coke machine and grab the iron bars that fall out, then break them over people's heads. Punch it again and take the air compressor that comes out, smash that into someone's head. Punch it again and drink the cans that fall out for extra health. Or walk into a lift and notice there are four metal bars you can pull out from the railing, an emergency fire axe and a fire extinguisher. It was quite glorious

Champions Online, on the other hand, was a pretty bad example. That game gave you a ton of non-situational powers to use that were usually a lot easier to use and generally better than chucking sign posts and park benches at people. Plus, the whole act of throwing things just looked goofy. No flight arcs, no sense of weight, no sense of impact, always the same animation and everything explodes into nothingness.

In a game that's built around environment interaction, throwing things would work wonders, but it would also be limited to "categories" of things you can throw. In a game that isn't, though? Yikes!

Same for grappling, actually. The only way to grapple with enemies is to standardise their size and shape, and that just limits the game considerably. The most you could do is an ugly gorilla press pickup that rarely looks good.

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 want to chime in here.

Done well, environmental interaction and destruction creates new and interesting gameplay.

Imagine on a team an Ice Controller freezing an enemy in a block of ice and the Brute picking it up and throwing it at some more enemies.

Or lifting up a car with telekinesis, having the Fire Blaster light it up and then throwing it into a spawn where it explodes.

Imagine a Tanker picking up some machinery and using it up block an ambush from getting through a door.

Throwing cars and tossing people through walls (and getting knocked through walls) is what comic book super heroes are all about. Without the over the top action and destruction the combat will always be lacking.



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Done well, everything creates new and interesting gameplay. That's basically the definition of "done well" for a game design element.

Is it me or does everyone here other then me dislike Champions? Champions is an awesome MMO, you can make about any hero you can think of. You can be a Super Strength guy with a gun, fire blast, ice blast, force fields, there is all kinda of powers combos,
Then there is their awesome outs selection, you can have two different shoulder pad, arm/leg pads too.

Also their travel powers you can fight, Unlike CoH Rocket Board, and other non pool travel powers. I don't understand why poeple don't like Champions so much.


I never see poeple hating DC, and DC is HORRIBLE. If CoH never did an update from 2004 CoH would still be better then DC. While I am blabbering anyone know why on Facebook DC have 300K likes and CoH/CO don't even have 100K likes


I know I went off topic alittle :P Anyways I would LOVE a CoH 2 like I said.

Now see. If they made CoH2 and had updated graphics (without going cartoony like the other two superhero MMOs...like I said go with those Koren Style MMOs graphics...okay imo anyways)...added in things people have wanted. I'd have no problem rerolling my main into a new game.

Now see. I picked up CoH because I wanted the whole comic book superhero MMO that CoH advertised itself as and slowly moved away to being...city of superpowered whatever we can think up and mix together for a very non superhero setting MMO!

When I bought CoH that's what it was advertised as. No matter how much people say it isn't, CoH was advertised as a MMO to make Superheroes like the comic books.

Now it moved itself to Heroes of any kind! Because, well the players were doing that sense the beginning anyways. "Oh I need my realistic merc! Not a merc that's doing this and this because it just doesnt make sense in the real world"

Oh hey, I brought my D&D character into this modern setting! o.O Because elves and gnomes and dragons and what have you totally exist in the CoH World? O.O

I'm actually a lifetime subscriber of Champions Online. However, I know, and they know, that the totally free form thing they were aiming for wasn't just missed in beta, but in retrospect probably shouldn't have even been the target to the degree it was. It was devastating to the replayability of a game that launched with content that was initially both thin and full of progression gaps. Much like City of Heroes when it first launched.

Its obvious they didn't learn the lessons of City of Heroes, rather they attempted to make Champions Online everything they couldn't make City of Heroes. The assumption that every limit in this game is bad and any game without those limits would be better, turns out to be very obviously false.

.............HERESY!!!!! But, honestly, I'd rather they just do more to improve the existing game than waste years making a new version that may or may not catch on and actually be better.

That is interesting concept in making COH2. I dont think it will happen in the immediate future but anything is possible. I dont consider Freedom a sequel but a mere add on, like going rogue, the 20 odd issues, and COV. I wonder what a COH2 would be like and how they tackle the challenge of making a new game that is a sequel but yet different enough to be called a sequel, if they was ever to do it. I do like this game for it's relative casual friendly game play too. Probably why I stuck around so long.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

Precisely, the majority of my characters would not fit into a traditional Superhero setting, they wouldn't be completely out of place but they also wouldn't really fit. When I design characters in CoH I'm mostly designing characters for what is basically a near-future, high tech military Sci-Fi setting in an alternate reality where magic is just a different type of science.

It's the sort of story that interests me so it's the setting I design my characters to fit into. They work just fine in CoH though because the setting is flexible enough to support them.

It's not just you, but no, I believe not many people here liked Champions.

I view it as something with some good ideas that its designers either did not really know how to do right or that their design team lacked the resources to do right. It is very, very far from what I would consider an awesome MMO.

I don't have a main. I have a bunch of characters I play. Also, I don't make characters who meet a concept. I make characters' concept based on what AT/Primary/Secondary they are. The first point makes porting my existing characters to a new game impractical. The second point makes porting them into a new game that doesn't share extremely close mechanical similarity to this one impossible. I would have to start over in a new MMO.

CoH is my first and only MMO. That I liked it and played it so very long took a combination of things (some of which are not features of the game, such as a large number of real-life friends who started playing it with me) that are very, very unlikely to reappear in another game. Certainly a direct successor is obviously more likely to score as a viable replacement for me than any other game, but overall, I think the changes in other things mean it's very likely that when it someday shutters the servers, I will not replace it with another MMO, sequel or not. Getting where I am with CoH now represents a future time investment that I really probably could not afford to reinvest in a new game.

Well it all have to end at some point in time. But this being the only MMO that caught my attention, naturally if this games goes the way of the dodo, then so would me playing MMOs. When I first purchased this game I didnt even know it was an MMO and was hesitant even then to play it. Took about one year to give it a whirl and stuck around because I can team or I can solo. Other MMOs are either heavy team based or not very good. I think this game for me was a perfect median and probably wont get more of a perfect median than this or the sequel if it is still team based yet soloable. If the sequel takes away the solo aspect or disappear altogether then I'll probably will hang it up without looking back and the game or the other and future games will of course still go on for the intended target audience as it should.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

I like Champions (and still play now and again). I still recognize the game's many serious failings, though. Every game (yes, even this one) has things that can be considered serious failings to at least some players, after all, and when you're on the forums for a specific game, you will naturally tend to mostly encounter players that think $other_game has more numerous and/or more serious failings than $this_game. If they thought otherwise, they'd probably be posting in that game's forums rather than these forums.