Lets be slightly possitive: Brainstorming the future!

Let’s pretend that this is not the end, but a pause… a break in between what may as well be City of Heroes 2 in spirit.

If the game was to be redesigned tomorrow, not from scratch entirely but in a form that still can be recognized as City of Heroes, what would you do different? What list of features that are not possible in an issue-to-issue update would you like to see?


Since I’m starting this thread, here is a quick list of what I’d do different:

• No archetypes. This time around, you just get to pick a primary set and a secondary set.
• Your primary set will have to be an offensive selection (Melee, Assault, Ranged or Summon)
• Your secondary set will have to be a… different set: Buff/Debuff/Control/Armor
• Armors will entirely consist of passives. No more toggles for self-preservation.
• Mission contacts will all be indoors in “lobbies”. No longer will every single contact be out in the streets waiting for you under the sun. Now you get to meet them in their office, apartment, a parking lot, etc.
• Super Speed will be able to go run up walls, darnit!
• There will be a Character Spec pool selection. This will serve the basic idea of an inherent today and define many aspects of your build like how much damage you inflict and how strong are your defenses. It may grant a true scourge proc to all attacks, for instance, or a stealth toggle and double damage while stealthier.
• Weapon Redraw be darned, no weapon redraw in combat!
• Missions with plenty of doors and guards that must be defeated to advance (no more speed running to the end of the mission)
• No more advancement by grinding enemies. All rewards tied to mission competition.
• Alternative victory options (defeating a lt has a chance to make his minions to surrender, defeating a boss may make several lts and minions to surrender, etc.)
• Left/Right body part customization so I can create costumes like Two Face, or any other similar look out of any costume set pieces.
• Belly size!!! Why can we only be horizontally fat in this game anyways? Rigging, I know, but for the future game it should be kept in mind!

• Animated hair.

i dont think the game would be the same without ATs, not to mention HUGE balance concerns regarding tank mages if players picked armors + ranged sets

Any spiritual successor that we tried to set up would have to follow the design goal of "CoH, but better" - it would need to offer all the things that players like about CoH, but with a more modern engine, and even small changes from the CoH template would need to be handled very carefully.
The reason that people are so passionate about CoH is because it's CoH - if we were going to try and start up a spiritualk successor, then it'd have to offer them the same experience.

My basic wants would be simple:

1. High resolution, nice looking costumes
2. True powerset costumization (location, animation, FX, color)
3. More power pools for concepts (weapons, ESP, "spidey-sense")
4. FINGERS!
5. Shape-shifting in some form not available today
6. Asymmetric costumes
7. More detailed costumes (Shoulder, Upper Arm, Lower Arm, Hand, FINGERS!)

And that's about it. I really don't have a lot of qualms about the rest; I like the game as is. I do think I get more people to like the game with a few changes, but the above is what I would like to see.

Here's an example of a signature CoH feature that could quite easily be changed in any spiritual successor, even though it'd be a major change - war walls.
Removing them is a frequently made request, and the devs did the best they could in Praetoria within the current engine limits to give us the invisible walls between zones - but any spiritual successor to CoH would be using a much newer engine, giving the possibility of one single city zone - but would that remove too much of the CoH feeling for some players? What if we took a poll on it, and found a 60-40 split in favor of removing them? It's a clear majority, but what about the 40% who'd obviously regard war walls as an important part of the CoH experience?

This is just an example of the kind of stuff we'd be faced with in any attempt to make a spiritual successor to CoH - it wouldn't just be a group of player-developers deciding amongst themselves what, in their opinion, was and wasn't part of the CoH experience - it'd be a constant dialog between as many CoH fans as possible to try and create the best possible follow up to CoH - every single planned change would need to be polled and talked about to try and come up with a solution that pleased as many people as possible.

There is another thing to keep in mind with a "spiritual" sequel:

It wont be the same game. You cant sit down to just replicate everything. You actually will have to sit down and ask yourself what has to be replicated in order to keep the familiarity, and then what has to be completely different to avoid pitfalls we saw in the original game.

Also, under what I proposed above, we CAN have archetypes via the mentioned "style" pool (or whatever.) We would just have a much more open creation without doing the horrible mess that was nearly free for all creation in Champions Online.

One big thing that would have to try to be preserved is the ability to create characters that look familiar. Better models can come with similar capabilities and similar face structures. I think the first foul in Champions and DCUO is that you cant create a character that looks as sleek as in City of Heroes. All characters end up being too bulky facially.

Animation style is another thing that should stay very similar to what we have today.

From the ground up, what would I include that we don't have now, assuming it would be a very CoH-like game?


- Room for vehicles and vehicle aesthetic customization. I would include supergroup vehicles of at least 3 tiers of size in the design of supergroups and super base functionality. They would in theory function like the team transporter, but be more seamlessly integrated into the game. Perhaps they could offer things like in-zone storage and invention tables, or similar functionality in this hypothetical world.

- Include personal vehicles in the above, especially as a "premium pool" type thing. Make them fairly customizable, like a character costume. Anything we have now as a premium vanity travel power would/should be customizable.

- Room for FX sprite/particle expression customization for different types of fire/ice etc with power customization, not just casting animations and colors

- Player character sound fx customization. Simple library of footfalls grouped by character type: normal human, heavy, stealthy, metallic, elemental, mystical, etc. Second option to select your vocalization type which would cover grunts from damage dealt or jumping.

- Pet, drone & turret model customization.

- Stance customization. I liked this about CO--at least in concept.

- No war walls.

- Slightly less presence of standing army mobs--Arachnos and Longbow in particular.

- Dynamic contacts--not just folks that stand around but mini-interiors like a coffee shop where your contact comes and meets YOU at your table to give you a mission. Then you might meet them elsewhere later--down an alley?--where they come out of a mission door walk to you--dialogue starts. etc.

- Growth and shrinking. As premium pools. And an engine and maps that could handle this.

- 4 legged rig from launch.

- Kittens in a tree. Just because.

Were we starting from scratch scratch and diverging, I'd like to see environmental physics and material physics play a much larger role in strategy of the game. I'd like to see this then pushed with mini games and trials like "OMGSPEEDINGTRAINBRIDGEISOUT!!1!HOWDOWESAVEIT! ?!" (which coincidentally was one of my favorite games ever as a child.) Does the ice blaster fill the gap with new tracks? Does the gravity troller hold something in place? Do the muscle heroes attempt to slow the train by pulling from behind or pushing from in front? And not have these as scripted behaviors but much much more like some of the fledgling physics based never-the-same-game-twice type puzzler games that have come out a lot in the last few years.

I'm going to stay simple (somewhat) with this...

I'd love for this same game, with the city/zones being ENORMOUS (we can have faster travel and/or other options for quickly getting around to the different points, so no fears about it just being a slog).
Not just bigger and seamless zones either... but an environment that we can interact with a bit more, one that feels a little bit more lived-in. More places, buildings, nooks and crannies to explore, enjoy and interact with. Certainly real buildings with windows and doors and interiors.
I know none of this is actually simple and can be resource intensive... I'm just saying, take the same game and give it these types of advances and I'd be completely infatuated with the game. My personal tastes and interests, for sure.

Right along with the zones being larger and more detailed and involved...
They sky would not be the limit.
Seamless transitioning from the ground to the sky, through the clouds, to the upper atmospheres... to orbit, to outer space (add different planets in future expansions!).

Those are my two largest dreams.
I love just hopping on and playing this game, for the customization, the power options and the actual fighting gameplay. Add in this greater virtual experience and I'd seriously be in hero/villain heaven. hehe.

The major problem with removing war walls would be the edge of the city - there'd have to be something that would eventually stop the player from going past the limit of the playable zone space.

Open up the world so it's more than a city, an archipelago, and the alternate universe of that city.

Instead of the hard to understand body sliders we have now, sliders like in PSO2's character creator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiUmRujYUrA

Those sliders are so nice.

I think Archetypes are a good idea. They allow the game to be experienced in different ways, which increases replay value, and keeps everyone from moving towards the same murky middle.

As for everything else- I think a new City of Heroes would be a very different City of Heroes. The market has changed and I think players are getting tired of the same old level grind.

Inspired by GW2's weapon skill bar, I would say all powersets would need either a chaining tier 1 power (that leads to up to two or three in a short chain) and/or instantly recharging tier one power.
This could go a long way towards letting players feel more powerful off-the-bat.

I'd also probably want to make greater use of Underlings instead of henchmen, Lieutenants, and bosses. In pretty much all action centered genres, be it anime, movies, or comicbooks, heroes don't spend a lot of time fighting each mooks, often they end up being brought down in single hits.
Naturally, to balance this, underlings would also come in greater numbers. (Even if they would/should pop like balloons on one hit)

Now on the note of the War Walls, I actually don't mind them too much, but I would change them up a bit as follows:
-Different types of War Walls
The War Walls are way too uniform and neat for what they are and the circumstances of their construction, not to mention some areas of the city would have probably been considered important enough to merit putting up emergency forcefield projectors well before the Rikti, such as Brickstown, Terra Volta, and Atlas. Also, most of the War Walls are Rikti tech and even set up by the Rikti, so that should be reflected more in the designs of some of them.
Let's not forget these are, inadvertently, monuments to a bloody war, so neighborhoods would decorate them with photos of fallen loved ones, paint them to bring a bit of sun shine into their views.
Also, some walls might have been put up after the war, or built with such hurry or thrown together so fast they had to be modified/reinforced later.
This would give us about four types of walls; Rikti, During the War, Before the War, and makeshift/after the war, with the additional variations of Decorated and non-decorated. (And variations on the decorations that could have come).
I'd also propose that instead of walls for Croatoa, it's a thick, dense fog that sets in the further out you go and slows your character down before teleporting them back into the center of Salamanca. (Or, if possibly, the opposite edge of the zone)

-Knit the city together
Basically, remove the empty space between the war walls, either be expanding certain neighborhoods or flat out moving a few off to the right (by up to a few miles!)

-Not all zones would need walls
Yes, much as I don't mind them, I think a few zones should not have walls between them. like Skyway, since it's the highway hub, should have it's roads sprawl throughout the city in tunnels into the walls of other zones, but it's immediate surrounding zones are not interrupted.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

To add to the above:

wrestling and throwing your opponent. I know there was a rather large thread about it. That's the one mechanic that I've always seen in comic books, but not in the game.

Vehicles ... Yes we have the hoverboard. I mean something more "limited" for immersion, like say motorcycles. Animations for a touch of physics for turning around and catching air, damage if you land on an opponent, you lost it if you jump it into the water (and have to craft another one), giving another person a ride ... and the ability to use ranged damage.

When people talked about wanting a moon base zone, or outer space, I thought that a nice pvp mini game would be nice involving weightlessness, high knockback temp powers, and trying to shove an opposing team member into a goal ...

Sorry ... I'll stop now.

Hmmm... grab and toss mechanics would be epic in a game like this. Especially for content... more than damage, more than mez, just being grabbed by a giant monster and tossed flying would be epic.

To me, this does not look like positive thinking so much as using the situation to continue grousing about perceived problems with CoH that have characterized much of this board since the beginning.

I had no problems with CoH in recent years. Sure, I would have loved to see some development time spent updating AE and such like. But the reason I have been a stalwart subscriber, and usual day-one purchaser of significant market content, even in lean times when I can't even find time to really play, is not that it is about superheroes, or because I really care that much about the "lore." The CoH game is not for everyone. Some people want more of an action rpg, or worse, a high challenge team combat game. There are plenty of MMOs catering to that.

Just look at all the artists (or doodlers, if you don't want to grant the amateurs such a lofty title) in this relatively small community. CoH thrives on creativity. Even this thread is trying to throw creativity at the problem.

I don't really think in terms of sequels; particularly with MMOs. Success is not assured the same way as with some console title that does not demand a creative investment from players. Asheron's Call 2 died a crib death, while Asheron's Call is still chugging along, thirteen years long in the tooth (even with no "ultra mode" graphic overhaul in that time). Champions Online is not appealing to most of us here, even with some of the same minds trying to improve on what was learned here, it no longer serves the same audience. Further, trying to live up to ten years of constant development with a new product that is as rough and limited as CoH was in 2004 is gambling against the odds, no matter how superficially pretty and demanding of system resources the next engine might be.