The Last Resort: A New Game
By
Combat,
Posted on: 2012-09-04 11:39 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
The framework for this is is already being worked on as an absolute last ditch attempt to continue in a superhero universe if NCSoft refuses to make any compromises at all and holds on to the CoH IP.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
A: What made CoH great, and how can we use those factors to make a new game even greater?
One thing about CoH is that the world wasn't a pre-established licensed product, like the DC or Marvel Universes. It allowed the developers to take the story where they needed it. It also gave players a feeling with their characters that they were important in the world, and not just cannon fodder for Superman. Unfortunately, not having these licenses also brought problems in the form of look alike characters, but I think that was handled at least adequately.
CoH was also a relatively uncluttered world - rather, I should say Paragon City was... I didn't like the Rogue Isles because the outdoor areas there seemed much more difficult to navigate because of the clutter.
Teaming was also handled well, I thought, as opposed to some of the other MMOs today. (TOR only allows 4 characters on a team - Operations aside - and companions take up team slots. So if you want to have three other friends on a team, you can't have your companions along.)
B: What problems did CoH have that prevented it from having more success, and what solutions do you propose? (Try and make sure the solutions aren't worse than the problem!)
I think the Incarnate system was... difficult to grasp, at least for me. And since my family relies on me to be in the know about the game and its systems... well, we didn't do too much Incarnate stuff. I think a better tutorial that doesn't spew pages of text at you and walks you through the process, providing options and brief explanations - in terms that we have used throughout the game - would make it easier.
The sudden proliferation of various forms of merits could have been done better as well... Influence/Infamy/Information was appropriate, and reward merits was good... but then you have Prestige for the bases, Astral Merits, Empyrean Merits... Too many different kinds. And too confusing. Consolidating the rewards into fewer categories would be much better.
If we are going to include wishful items here, then I'd like to include a Personal Nemesis system of some kind. You could actually opt out of it at character creation, if you don't want to deal with it. You could design your own nemesis, or have it randomly generated. From time to time, in each level range, a mobile contact would find you and give you a nemesis mission. Ultimately, you could work your way up to level 50, but you wouldn't ding until you ran one last mission to "defeat" your nemesis in some grand scheme.. maybe a huge fight on top of the globe in Atlas or something.
Anyway... my two inf...
Test Subject 42 - lvl 50 Sp/DA Scrapper
Oku No Te - lvl 50 MA/SR Scrapper
Borg Master - lvl 24 Bots/traps MM
Pinnacle
Nyghtfyre - lvl 50 DM/SR Scrapper
Champion
While I'm hoping they'll be able to save Paragon, my hopes are not high. I've signed petitions and sent letters and whatnot, but...
See, I'm thinking this is proabably the best alternative. Have TonyV and the Titan Network team up with whoever from Paragon wants to join in (hopefully all of them) and start a kickstarter around the project: Titan City. The money they would pull in from the emotional investment at this point would likely be huge. Hopefully huge enough to get the project rolling, and keep those people in jobs!
Most importantly, it'd be an independent company with no 'big business' getting in the way.
It'll be smaller in scope then City of Heroes currently is at start, obviously. However, we know what these people have done, and what they can bring to a new game. Moreover, they know what we expect, and with time and the love they poured into Paragon, can eventually fulfil those expectations. May take another eight years to get to something like we have now, but that's a game I'd be willing to invest the time and money into to see grow.
Basically, if they don't want the people at Paragon Studios, we do! Let's hire them to make the game that'll honor and surpass City of Heroes for us!
"I play characters. I have to have a very strong visual appearance, backstory, name, etc. to get involved with a character, otherwise I simply won't play it very long. I'm not an RPer by any stretch of the imagination, but character concept is very important for me."- Back Alley Brawler
I couldn't agree more.
I disagree almost entirely with everything past the "Costuming" section.
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Can you specify?|
Originally Posted by Feycat
I disagree almost entirely with everything past the "Costuming" section.
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Do you think CoH2 should have the same sort of chat system? (as in, a highly developed one)
Do you feel that slow animations and rooting are not bad for the game?
Do you think larger "Giant Monsters" would not be a thematic improvement?
Or are you mostly against the suggestions I made regarding enhancements?
TW/Elec Optimization
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I think enhancements are fine they way they are. The only thing I'd drop is TOs, and change the level spread on DOs, but there are many people in this game who NEVER wanted anything to do with the IO system and played the game quite happily on SOs. Letting people play the game the way they want is a cornerstone of what made COH work. |
Originally Posted by Combat
Can you specify?
Do you think CoH2 should have the same sort of chat system? (as in, a highly developed one) Do you feel that slow animations and rooting are not bad for the game? Do you think larger "Giant Monsters" would not be a thematic improvement? Or are you mostly against the suggestions I made regarding enhancements? |
In-game group finders kill community. Making it so you click a button and are auto-joined to a bunch of strangers in the instance of your choice completely destroys any group dynamic. This is true of the other games that have implemented it, and is even true of our own event finder. The making of even a token effort to TALK TO other people, join a group by responding to someone looking for peeps, join an SG to have people to group with, etc, BUILDS community.
The chat system in COH, the multiple custom channels and globals, was and is awesome and should be maintained, but outside channels? No thanks.
Over-scale all the enemies and it would pale pretty quickly. Rare giant monsters like Jack and the Monster Island were great, but I wouldn't want them overused, they'd become tedious.
Another key part of the whoel structure of CoH was the way anything beyond the basic game was always optional - IOs, Incanrate system, PvP, bases, AE, SGs, aution house and so on - even the entire misison system could be ignored if the player chose to street sweep.
Any spiritual successor to CoH would need to have nothing that players had to do if they didn't want to.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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I think you misconstruing what I meant by the enhancement changes. Essentially, basic IOs would BE SOs. Of course, I probably should have said something like "and basic IOs will also have a chance to drop as SOs." The idea behind those suggested changes was that the current system for the original enhancements is clunky and annoying, and I don't think it is necessary to have either level-gated or origin-gated enhancements in the game. |
Originally Posted by Feycat
I think enhancements are fine they way they are. The only thing I'd drop is TOs, and change the level spread on DOs, but there are many people in this game who NEVER wanted anything to do with the IO system and played the game quite happily on SOs. Letting people play the game the way they want is a cornerstone of what made COH work.
In-game group finders kill community. Making it so you click a button and are auto-joined to a bunch of strangers in the instance of your choice completely destroys any group dynamic. This is true of the other games that have implemented it, and is even true of our own event finder. The making of even a token effort to TALK TO other people, join a group by responding to someone looking for peeps, join an SG to have people to group with, etc, BUILDS community. The chat system in COH, the multiple custom channels and globals, was and is awesome and should be maintained, but outside channels? No thanks. Over-scale all the enemies and it would pale pretty quickly. Rare giant monsters like Jack and the Monster Island were great, but I wouldn't want them overused, they'd become tedious. |
In other words, I'm not trying to force people into the IO system, but trying to stop people from being forced into the annoyances of the SO system. Under the new system, there would be no need for a TO/DO/SO divide, so people wouldn't have to radically change their slotting. Of course, the suggestion for the slots could be seen as forcing the players to play in a specific way, so it is something I'd be fine without.
On the LFG feature, I'll respectively disagree. I simply have not found great value in sending "LFT, Level 18 Defender" before getting invited to a group, and I find that the simpler it is to easy, the greater the social interaction.
TW/Elec Optimization
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One thing: mission system and its interaction with teaming. It's not JUST the 8-person team rather than the industry-standard of 4-5. It's also:|
Originally Posted by Combat
A: What made CoH great, and how can we use those factors to make a new game even greater?
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- mission scales to teams automatically
- sidekicking allows you to participate almost no matter what level the rest of the team is
- you get rewarded for teaming as if you had the mission yourself even if you don't have it
- the team leader can easily see what missions are available from the entire team and set focus on one
- the rest of the team sees the objectives clearly in the navigation window and on the map
That is CoHs greatest strength! Almost all other MMOs out there use the industry standard single-player-mission-with-a-share-button system, where you're screwed if you're on the wrong level or in the wrong place of the arc or the mission wasn't written to be shareable. Often, you have to wait for a spawn or object to reset and re-killed/clicked by you for you to get credit for something your team mate clicked on/defeated.
It's not the team limit that's the problem of the other games. It's the fact that their mission systems are single player CRPG mission systems with a chat and a Share button tacked on to it.
Still @Shadow Kitty
"I became Archvillain before Statesman nerfed himself!"
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Happen to know if anyone's considered working on conceptualizing a "New City" yet beyond building a new game engine?|
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The framework for this is is already being worked on as an absolute last ditch attempt to continue in a superhero universe if NCSoft refuses to make any compromises at all and holds on to the CoH IP.
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While Concept-Art isn't necessarily my current forte, I've put together some minor plans against the idea of a "CoH-esque" city concept, and up until right this second, I haven't really thought about it since. Would be something to throw my hat into if things go that route; and I'm sure there might be a few other artists that could be dredged up that have concept-experience.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again. |
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Nothing's been decided at all - the name "Phoenix City" seems to be quite a popular choice for the city, though - both for the idea of rising from the ashes, and for keeping the "PC" shortening.|
Originally Posted by John_Printemps
Happen to know if anyone's considered working on conceptualizing a "New City" yet beyond building a new game engine?
While Concept-Art isn't necessarily my current forte, I've put together some minor plans against the idea of a "CoH-esque" city concept, and up until right this second, I haven't really thought about it since. Would be something to throw my hat into if things go that route; and I'm sure there might be a few other artists that could be dredged up that have concept-experience. |
As the game would be meant to be a home from home, the city layout would very likely follow the current Paragon City layout, with a few changes, especially if it was designed to have no war walls.
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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Yes. While it "hopefully" will amount to nothing, it would be great to see the community step up. I'm no artist (believe me), but I can imagine game systems and judge the game from my own viewpoints; it would be awesome to see some concepts for a new game. Heck, that was certainly part of the process to create CoH1!
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Originally Posted by John_Printemps
Happen to know if anyone's considered working on conceptualizing a "New City" yet beyond building a new game engine?
While Concept-Art isn't necessarily my current forte, I've put together some minor plans against the idea of a "CoH-esque" city concept, and up until right this second, I haven't really thought about it since. Would be something to throw my hat into if things go that route; and I'm sure there might be a few other artists that could be dredged up that have concept-experience. |
TW/Elec Optimization
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While I understand the nature of wanting to keep "PC", personally...not feeling Phoenix City. On the other hand, that brought to mind an incredible idea for altering "Atlas Park" into "Prometheus [Park]", with a statue on one knee lifting a giant orb filled with fire to the sky. |
Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Nothing's been decided at all - the name "Phoenix City" seems to be quite a popular choice for the city, though - both for the idea of rising from the ashes, and for keeping the "PC" shortening.
As the game would be meant to be a home from home, the city layout would very likely follow the current Paragon City layout, with a few changes, especially if it was designed to have no war walls. |
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Originally Posted by Combat
Yes. While it "hopefully" will amount to nothing, it would be great to see the community step up. I'm no artist (believe me), but I can imagine game systems and judge the game from my own viewpoints; it would be awesome to see some concepts for a new game. Heck, that was certainly part of the process to create CoH1!
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Warning: crazy space limit reached. Please delete some crazy and try again. |
Champions Online with CoH content would be perfect for me. Champions Online I think personally had CoH 8 year old costume creation system beat.
It was obvious over the years the CO costumes where more modular and could be developed very fast compared to CoH. It just seems like anytime they spoke about costumes ( they meaning CoH ) they made it sound how difficult it was to do something. Again understandable being how old the system was.
But sadly CO lacked any content. You were pigeon holed into Snow or desert then the big city.
The new CoH should go along the lines of what they have now. But introduce a way to choose what you want your powers to come from. You want energy blast from your hands. I want it from my chest, someone else might want it from a wand or a staff. You want your energy blast to be old school. I want mine to wavy lines spiraling out towards the enemy. Thus I could make my a magical Energy Blast and your is standard superhero style.
Then what could be done is introduce new colors and patterns but the powers stay the same.
The fighting should be more fluid as well. I think CO has that as well. You can move and shoot.
PvP should be totally different power sets and affects. Learn what issues CO has with Teleport in PvP and don't run into that problem.
1. Why Soft Cap is Important : http://dechskaison.blogspot.com/2011...important.html
2. Limits: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Limits
3. Attack Mechanics: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Attack_Mechanics
4. Rule of Five: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Rule_o...e_Law_of_Fives
Right now, the community's focus should be to restore CoH. TonyV and the guys at Titan Network are doing an amazing job, so please fully support them. But they fail to either acquire the IP or get the game sold to another company, we need to have a plan B (or C, D, etc.). That plan B should be a new game with all of the wonders of Paragon City and the benefits of 8+ years of development. As far as I'm concerned, there a few absolutely essential keys to making a new game work:
Backstory:
Hire good writers, perhaps those that worked on CoH, before we even conceive of actually putting the game into action. Believe or not, but CoH actually had a tremendously well thought-out backstory, and each individual group had a ton of background before they were ever put in the game. Before we could put our characters into the new universe, we need to create that universe.
However, one of the great things about CoH was that it didn't force-feed you its story and allowed you to work within your own creative realm, to an extent (EATs, Incarnates being the exception). The important difference is that the story AROUND our character can be fully realized (aka, the contacts, missions, enemies, maps), but the story should never dictate what the character does or how they were created.
Comic book stories are great because they are both adaptable and simple enough for the same basic storyline to be used many times. For instance, a new game could include a lot of the basic enemy types found in CoH:
Street gangs
Alien invaders
Nazis
Evil Corporations
All of those gangs could take inspiration from their counterparts, both in comics and from CoH.
Costumization:
In my mind, any new game needs to learn a few lessons from its predecessors, and the first thing it needs to learn from CoH is costumization. The minimum I personally would accept from a new superhero game would be:
And that is just from costumes. Simply put, a new game should be explicitly designed around those options, so it should be easier to put in than the shoehorned method we've had to employ to add stuff to this game. Of course, I'd also like a difficulty slider, and base building/mission building options like we have in CoH.
Social Networking
And I don't mean Facebook or Twitter. Simply put, one of the joys of CoH is the ease of getting into groups and talking with your friends. I think that an improved team-finding interface would be great, along with a fixed version of the Team-Up Teleporter. How awesome would it be to log into a MMO, click "LFG," and automatically get connected and teleport to a group LFM?
Teaming aside, CoH's successor needs to learn from CoH's chat system. At some point, I think we got over saturated with chat channels, but I believe that over saturation is infinitely preferable to under saturation. We needs /tell, /team, /local, /supergroup, /lfg, /friend, and /global channels at a minimum (arguably supergroup channels could work better as an automatically created global channel, but that's another argument), along with all the game chat channels like NPC talk and combat logs. Perhaps even adding a chat channel that connected to Twitter would be a good idea, letting you talk to friends outside the game while playing (wouldn't that be a good way to bring people in?)
Combat
CoH had pluses and minuses when it came to combat, and a new game should learn from its failures as well as its successes. A lot of gamers felt that CoH was slow and/or cumbersome, and I think it really boiled down to two factors: Slow animations, and rooting. I think that slow animations (Total Focus, I'm looking at you) are mostly a by product of the early developers underestimating the importance of animation time. Regardless, I think the real difference we could make would be the elimination of rooting from animations (or really, the creation of a system that didn't require rooting). In CoH, the odds of that happening are slim to none due to the tremendous amount of work it would require, but a new game could be designed around faster combat.
However, I think CoH definitely had some things decidedly right when it comes to combat. The ability of a level 50 character to face more enemies than a level 1 character creates a much better since of power progression than most MMOs on the market, and generally the game had a more kinetic sense of combat than most MMOs. The priority shouldn't be on creating a traditional MMO structure, but a proto-CoH system that emphasized steam-rolling and the feeling of power. Additionally, the holy trinity should not be a part of this game, because it doesn't have any background from a comic-book prospective.
I do believe, however, that the scale can be improved. CoH had a clumsy system that prevented excessively large or small enemies (very large enemies would be impossible to target with melee attacks), and I think that sort of limited it from a superhero prospective. The one thing I missed from the game was the ability to attack a skyscraper tall giant robot, and a new game designed from the ground up should recognize this. No offense, Babbage, but most CoH GMs aren't really scaled up enough to make suitably intimidating. However, scale works the other way as well, and I'd like to see larger numbers of creatures as well. Sure, it is nice to beat up 16 creatures at once, but it feels like you hit a wall when a team is forced to face the same number of enemies as a single player.
Non-Combat Systems
CoH at Issue 0 basically had no out of combat systems. A new game launching with that impairment would fall on its face. Therefore, some sort of OOC development should exist, though it certainly should not be of the form found in most fantasy MMOs. I think that a system like our enhancement system would work best, though I would suggest the following to make it easier to understand (all terms based off CoH enhancements):
1. Change the way leveling adds slots:
Basically, we get slots before we need them, because of the way enhancements work. Instead of alternating between powers and slots, simply give each power the same number of slots, somewhat equivalent to a 5-slotted power now. That way, new players are not confused by having to learn both the enhancement system and how to slot powers effectively.
2. Remove TOs/DOs/SOs
This may sound like blasphemy, but I think they are not necessary and are basically just annoying. I believe the original reason for the degradation of these enhancements was to simulate the wearing of equipment in fantasy MMOs, but ultimately I don't think it is necessary in the modern game. Also, the idea of origin specific enhancements is another "innovation" that I believe can be attributed to the earlier MMOs (basically, class-specific enhancements).
3. Replace those enhancements with Basic IOs
So now we simply have two types of IOs, basic and set, along with the possibility of special enhancements like HOs or ATOs. Because basic IOs will officially take the place of the earlier system, and because of the annoying clutter they cause now, I propose a couple changes to the way they function:
a. Ability to craft Basic IOs anywhere
b. Removal of salvage cost from Basic IOs
c. Remove cap limit on Basic IO recipes
d. Separate Basic IOs from Set IOs (to prevent clutter)
4. Remove levels from enhancements
This goes with #2. In order to simplify the game, we remove the individually leveled enhancements, though enhancements would still have minimum and maximum ranges. This would eliminate unnecessary extra enhancements and clutter on things like the marketplace.
Other than those 4 things, the basic systems CoH has in place are probably fine. Sets will be familiar to anyone who has ever played an MMO, and the market will make sure that a player economy exists from day one. Badges and other achievements would be nice to have at launch as well (perhaps integrate badges into the planned OOC system that Inventions were supposed to be).
Misc.
The other common complaint I've heard about CoH is that it seems desolate, because everyone is constantly separated in an instanced mission. This seems to be easy to solve, but needs to be done in such a manner so as not to make CoH feel like the average fantasy game still running on pre-2000 style missions (Go Hunt X number of Y).
I believe that the best way to do this is to create a very interactive world, giving players reasons to leave their missions. There are two easy ways to do this: Instant missions from non-contacts, and large numbers of zone events (A Giant Monster is attacking Atlas Park!). By the first, I mean adding small things to CoH from the people walking around, for example "Help, Fluffy is stuck in a tree!" The balance is finding making it so that these smaller missions are both rewarding, and aren't constant enough to be annoying. Other examples of this type of mission would be:
"Stuck that robber before he gets away from the police!"
"Defeat the robbers around the armored car!" (or for villains "Take advantage of the situation to steal from the car!")
"Save the people from the fire!"
Basically, if we have to create a new game, let's do it right. These are just suggestions, not a concrete blueprint, and I think having a well thought out backup plan is absolutely critical. In your replies, please try and think about these questions:
A: What made CoH great, and how can we use those factors to make a new game even greater?
B: What problems did CoH have that prevented it from having more success, and what solutions do you propose? (Try and make sure the solutions aren't worse than the problem!)
Again, I'd just like to say that the playerbase should be focused on keeping CoH alive, but if that is impossible, we need to at least keep the lessons we learned from it alive.
TW/Elec Optimization