Where did the game go wrong?

I need the blue king, Dark horse and top cow ones. EDITED.

Lack of any consistent form of advertising. That I can think of off the top of my head, they released blurbs for major releases like CoV, and GR had ads in Marvel and DC comics for a week or two. Freedom might of had something, but I can't even remember at this point. But there wasn't much of anything else in between those to let people know the game was still there.

The other thing would be two of those major releases. Mission Architect was touted as this awesome tool that would allow players to create endless content. It was released, and then the exploits started popping up. And they Dev response indicated that they draaaaaaaaaassssstttically underestimated the "farmer" mindset. So MA got nerfed. Then another exploit popped up. Then MA got nerfed again. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the Fire Farms apparently created such specialized farming characters that Devs didn't care anymore. So what happened to the tool that would allow for endless content? The rewards system was reworked to the point that the MA buildings became ghost towns. Sure hardcore story oriented gamers still made some great stuff, but on the whole, MA ended up being ignored by the bulk of the playerbase.

And then there's GR. I still think it's some of the best writing and story-mechanics I've ever seen in a video game. But the problem with Praetoria proper is...was...whatever, that it's basically a glorified tutorial. It wasn't designed to rush through, and while it made leveling 1-20 enjoyable solo, veeeeeery few players want to do that in a MMO.

good luck D.B.B.

Going Rogue mission structure is interesting if you also look at the mission structure of City of Heroes and City of Villains. There is a definite evolutionary feel.

City of Heroes was designed back in early 2000s and it's mission structure was influenced by the popular MMOs before it (Evercrack). Missions had a large time sink component to them. Talk to contact, go to other zone, return to contact, go back to other zone. A number of these time sink missions fall into the "Kill 10 rats" trope and until you became familiar to where these "rats" lived, it was a lot of exploration on foot. I will also assume that the Level 14 minimum for our travel powers were an extension of the "mount" trope that only higher level players get to cut down on travel time. Contacts had miscellaneous missions and occasional story arcs. When you out leveled them they refer you to the next contact up the chain.

City of Villains had a different mission structure. While it still retained the "Kill 10 rats" trope, at least the 10 rats were in the same zone as your contact. Also going to one zone per level range rather than two concentrated the population, which they needed to do after they made instanced missions the preferred way to get XP. Also once you got out of the beginner's zone, the way contacts and missions worked was very different. The Newspaper/Heist mechanism would unlock a contact that only had story arc missions. These contacts may introduce you to other contacts when you outleveled them or you may have to use the Newspaper/Heist method again.

Going Rogue decided to emphasize the story arcs. Had one of four paths you could follow, based on decision points in key stories. Besides altering which missions were available to you it also altered what you saw in the world around you. It was a way to engage the player in the story, however for the kill all/earn XP/level crowd who never cared about story per se, it forced them to pay attention if they wanted to do certain content. We saw elements of this mission/contact structure moved over into CoH and CoV when Freedom came out.

Now the problems I saw with the Going Rogue edition. First, your first character had to be made in Praetoria. I can understand why the devs made that decision. You had access to all of the powersets, all the zones were designed with the new spiffier graphics upgrade and the previously mentioned mission structure. Each of those had a downside once you left Praetoria for Paragon or the Rogue Isles.

The obvious being the graphical quality of the zones dropped off noticeably. It's like buying an attractive old house with a renovated modern first floor only to discover the upper floors haven't been.

Then there's the flip side about upgraded graphics, you needed some reasonably modern hardware to enjoy those enhanced visual settings. Not a problem for a dedicated FPSer or massive solo RPG player but the casual gamer with a $500 laptop with Intel graphics or a desktop with a Dx9 class card couldn't enjoy them. By 2010 it was tougher and tougher to convince someone to pay $15 a month to access a game, the notion that they needed to upgrade their hardware to properly enjoy the new look was out of reach for some people and could discourage them from staying around. No one wants to be left behind.

Of course the other major problem with being kicked out of Praetoria at Level 20 was the very different mission/contact mechanisms. Someone who started out with CoH or CoV, by Level 20 they grok want they needed to do, where to go, what zone was next but a newly minted players fresh from Praetoria, it, like the graphics, was a major change. At least the devs got the bewildering feel of being dropped into a familiar but different parallel world right.

The very different mission mechanism and look between Going Rogue and Paragon/Rogue Isles caused players who have been conditioned how the game works to relearn. Everyone became newbs again. Nobody likes being a newb.

And I still haven't talked about the critter groups between the parallel worlds. Learning how to fight in Praetoria made groups in CoH/CoV seem easy and players use to fighting at increased difficulty in CoH/CoV got their head handed to them repeatedly if they weren't careful in GR.

So for new players, GR had a bit of a bait and switch feel while experienced CoH/CoV players had to adjust to more difficult enemy groups and different mission mechanism. While the technology was a step forward and the missions became more interesting for those who like story content, it felt like a different game that was trying to mimic the original.