Have to admit it . . . GW2 may replace COH for me

Stay out of the thread I'm enjoying and there's much less chance of that. I don't care much for you and your "burn the furriners!" attitude either.

For the record? I bought GW2 well before the PS shutdown, and as a digital copy, it was un-returnable.

I have enjoyed it since the day after CoH was announced it was closing its doors. Lots fo stuff to do. I guess my experience is made better by the fact i have a good group of people to play with. I will miss my superheroes but Guild Wars 2 is doing a job filling my gaming desire.

It's true. Haunt and I have been duoing games since we met in COH 8 years ago, and we were lucky enough to bump into a fantastic RP guild last week. I've never felt so comfortable with a group of people so quickly in my life <3

Why are you betraying CoH by reading these clearly subversive threads? Shouldn't you be out there doing something non-traitorous?

The funny thing is, if you go to his recent posts, MOST of them are in this thread.

Yeah it's pretty fun. My wife plays a berserker and I play an engineer... but this isn't about the bedroom...

OHWAITAMINUTE...

Quality posts. I will miss this.

Hmm, did I miss this? What's the (rough) level of the quest?

I didn't use to need to, because City of Heroes was pretty good about not pigeon-holing me into a "role." You can always tell stories without assuming anything but the broadest aspects of a character, and even those you don't so much need to "assume" as just create stories to account for. In the Architect, I created a villainous story centred around opportunistic behaviour, but I didn't tell the villain what he wanted or why he was doing it, instead choosing the present mission briefings as simply actions that make sense. And if the player found them to not make sense, sell - quit out of the story and stick the McGuffin up a sheep. That's a perfectly logical outcome, too.

Here's the thing - I don't want a half-way job. If I'm going to be playing someone else's character, then don't kick sand in my eyes. Give me a selection of pre-made characters, tell me what they are and I'll experience their stories. Probably even find inspiration for my own. But if they're going to be my own, then let me pick basic aspects like... Motivation, personality, dreams and so forth. It's this half-and-half that really turns me off in Guild Wars 2. My character isn't truly my own, so I can't use the stories I want to tell to engage me... But it's not really the game's, either, because it doesn't have that much story for said character. There is some, but it's tangential to what I'll be doing for the most part, which is "heart quests." Hopefully not the one about washing cows and pulling weeds.

The result is a generic character that I can't make my own, but that the game doesn't run away with, either. I'm not given a character I want emulate, and I'm not given a character I can craft, which is pretty much the two larger hooks I have for practically any game gone with the wind. Even Star Trek - that takes part in a very stringent fictional universe - let me play an "Alien." Sure, I'm still beholden to Starfleet command and their ideals and hierarchies and suchforth, but the CHARACTER inside the uniform is still mine and I can pick what she things and why she does things.

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 tried it, but it didn't grab me. I like the Art Style ten times more than brown Diablo 3, but the gameplay bugs me in much the same ways, sadly. I guess I just don't "click" with this sort of game any more. I left not knowing exactly what I wasn't getting, but clearly knowing I wasn't getting something.

The visual designs are decent, though. I especially like the more techy parts, especially the magazine-operated pistols The "cannons" are severely disappointing, though. I'd have wanted something with a long barrel like a howitzer (or the Harkonnen), but they went for a more "bombard" look. Same for the "shotgonne." Where's my precision rifle from Torchlight? I like shotguns, sure, but I like rifles, too.

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.

16 - it's in the your dad was a hero and left you a bequest and you have to find the key quest-series.

Here's the wiki entry (spoilers, if you plan NOT to play a charr through... but serious, this is effing HILARIOUS when you watch it play out)

I guess that makes me curious what games are grabbing you that you recommend to us.

May I recommend Heroes of might and magic to you Samuel, the new expansion pack came out today and also Heroes of might and magic 6 also came out, although it is only download, which is why some people may have missed it.

X-Com:- Enemy unknown and Bloodbowl:-Chaos Edition come's out next week which I also recommend.

October the 3rd is also the start of closed Beta for Marvel MMO although you do need to apply on their website to stand a chance of getting an invite.

Pretty spoilt for choice at the moment, should keep me going for a while.

Thanks Feycat.

Augh! How many times are they going to make me buy the same game?? Stupid Cyanide.

(And, for the record, we're currently at three).

Didn't you already ask me that, like, a week ago?

Right now, Star Trek Online, if I haven't gushed about it enough in other threads. It's not City of Heroes, certainly, but it's a high-quality game with actually a much more interesting backstory than I ever gave Star Trek credit for. I've never been a "trekkie" so I know pretty much nothing aside from Internet memes and what I saw from the scant few episodes of Next Generation that local TV showed, which I remember being creative, plus the V'ger movie, I forget which one it is.

Again, it's not City of Heroes, but it gives me a similar sense of creation and exploration, but made even more "personal" by having an entire crew to manage. Sure, my bridge officers are from the established races, but I can fully customize them in therms of appearance and even write a full story for each one. Just as an example:

Tala, my XO and tactical officer, was my first acquisition from the tutorial, who chose to join me from another ship I rescued. She has a skill that fires a salvo of proton torpedos that deal HIDEOUS damage, and it's so good I've grown to rely on that attack and, by extension, on Tala herself. She's the "aggressor" on my ship and the one who's the first to jump in combat, and the only one who chose to come with me, rather than being assigned to me. I'm in the process of finalising a story for her, of how she rose through the ranks on her fierce combat abilities and fiery personality. I even redid her appearance (within the confines of her race) to make her stand out from my other Andarian, the ship's sole engineer for a long time.

It reminds me of Mass Effect, to some extent, actually, and brings me back to my childhood of playing Icewind Dale and Dungeon Siege, when I could manage an entire party of mutually-complementing characters, instead of lone wolf heroes. I haven't had the chance to explore an inter-personal team dynamic in years because most games ask me to play only a single character, and I have a rule of never making my play time "dependent" on other people. But if I could have a whole team under my command, then I WILL make specialists with crippling holes in their abilities, such that they cover each other, because I'll know they'll always be available to play.

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Also, X-COM: Enemy Unknown. I put off buying that game because it costs an arm and a leg, but I always knew I couldn't escape it. I own the game on Steam right now and I'm looking forward to October 11th. Firaxis released a small and very crap demo that's basically the tutorial where you're restricted to moving characters in the order the game tells you and having them do what the game needs them to do, with only half of one mission being open for ME to play as I want... And it's GLORIOUS! I love it.

I played UFO: Enemy Unknown, I played X-COM: Terror from the Deep, I played UFO: Aftermath and Aftershock... I loved those games at the time, I really did. UFO is one of my fondest childhood memories, even though I didn't really speak English at the time (oops!). The remake blows them out of the water! Sure, it's not an exact remake of the original, but then neither were Aftershock/Aftermath, but so what? It's a BETTER game. Like with the Phoenix City initiative over on the Titan Network, getting a shot at a brand new game in the spirit of the old one intrigues me.

Because let's face it - the X-COM/UFO games of the past were great, but they were FILLED with annoying ****. The time unit mental math bugged the hell out of me. Can I go there AND turn around AND shoot? OK, if I make another step, will I be able to look around the corner? Cover? Pfft! Why would I take cover? If my soldier is hiding around a corner, he can't fire, and he's blocking line of sight of the others, and an alien will always cut the corner anyway. Oh, I got a new ship that can carry 26 people? Now my turns will take 15 minutes each. For ****'s sake! The remake's demo is horrible, and even then I had more fun in that half of one mission than I've had in YEARS in any tactical game. The last one I remember entertaining me this much was Fallout Tactics, and even that wasn't very good, plus it turned into a tactless shooter from about where the robots show up.

Oh, and I also played Apocalypse and Interceptor, but I try to pretend I never did. I never played Enforcer or the previous more recent FPS remake, and I'm not sorry. I never got to play Afterlight - by the time I learned it existed, my video card was TOO GOOD for the game, and it rendered garbage artefact textures.

I did play and enjoy UFO: Extraterrestrials, but that's basically a point-for-point copy of X-COM with the names switched around, and it showed me a very basic fact of gaming history - just because a game is good, it doesn't mean it should be copied exactly. For all the fun times I had in Extraterrestrials, it simply served to remind me of all the annoying busywork **** that served only to sour my experience with the originals. The zillions of people I have to stream out of a transport one by one, the horrible cover system, the heedless micromanagement and so forth. It's still a good game, but it's a game that belongs in the 90s, not the 00s. It even looks like a 90s.

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Honourable mention goes to a very old game: Aquaria. My WinAMP decided to remind me of this as I was posting the above by playing Lost to the Waves. Aquaria is easily one of my favourite games of all time, and it's an indie title basically made by all of two people. It's a game of exploration, immersion and atmosphere, with an inspired plot and about decent visuals. Aquaria is basically MADE for me... Or rather, my tastes were shaped around Aquaria. The game has had this much of an impact in what I like as fiction, from my fascination with small character rosters, contemplative narrative and deeper themes underlying a fairly simple exterior. Almost every design I've made since... God, 2007? Every one can trace at least an aspect or two back to Aquaria.

If you want games I like, play Aquaria. I encourage everyone to give it a try. It's very cheap on Steam, and it's worth every penny for the artistry and emotion alone. I have NEVER played another game that made me care so much about the environment, and it's a strong contestant for by far the BEST musical score of any game I've played. The creators moved on to other things, but last I saw, Alec Holowka - the composer and I believe programmer - on Aquaria was still hanging around the forums. He was a pretty cool guy as I remember, and I respect him for his work. Frankly, it's a cryin' shame Aquaria is not more popular than it is. It's a great game.

That's enough games for now.

Ah, and that. Heroes of Might and Magic is one of my favourite long-running series, believe it or not. I never played the original - it was before my time - but I played all the games from HOMM 2 onward. The second game was great, but HOMM 3 was much better. CONSIDERABLY better artwork with much the same very solid system. HOMM 4 was complete garbage and I plead with anyone who will listen - do not buy that game! HOMM 5, especially Tribes of the East, is by FAR my favourite. It looks gorgeous even now, and has what I consider to be the series' best art design, with even a couple of designs I've actually tried to emulate intermittently.

The only trouble with HOMM5 is I'm not very good at the actual game and get bored easily when I start losing. Not good at splitting my forces between multiple heroes and chasing other heroes around the map. I mostly tend to play it in Hot Seat with a friend of mine (same one who owns Guild Wars 2), but he comes over very rarely and we both tire pretty quickly. Plus, running HOMM 5 in non-stretch aspect ratio on my 16x9 is a pain in the ***. The game DOES offer 16x9 resolutions, but it simply stretches its graphics and looks horrible. I had to mess with its CFG files to force it to play in a window, which would retain its own dimensions, with I think the highest I could run being 1440x1050, which fits on a 1920x1080 monitor.

HOMM 6, on the other hand, I just didn't like. I don't remember what it was about the gameplay that turned me off, but it just looks bad, to be perfectly honest. Maybe they've added this since then, but when I played, it didn't have ANY close-up city view, which is... What, 3/4 of the reason I play anyway? That, and I just hated the character designs. They're drawn up in HD, sure, but their actual designs just don't click with me. And if I can't stand to look at a game, I can't play it regardless of its gameplay, which really was never why I came to HOMM for, anyway. To me, HOMM 6 is basically the HOMM 4 of the new age - a game with decent graphics draped over really bad art design and bad gameplay all around. Personally, I stick to Tribes of the East. Even with lower graphics, it still looks better and inspires more.

*edit*
I hope that disputes the "Sam hates everything!" rumours I've been hearing

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.

Nope, just shows you are a picky one, and just like one of us in reality.

Hmm... I'll try to remember that.

Are you me? I completely agree on everything. What server do you play on out of curiosity? Would be cool if there was an official CoH refugee server, I'm currently enjoying my 30s sylvari elementalist on Blackgate.

I'm on Tarnished Coast, which is the unofficial RP server.

Haunt and I found out last night that a good chunk of our RP guild (that we met in GW2, not one we moved with) play/played COH and we all had a good "raise your glass and talk about the good old days" convo, with a side of "which call to action we've done to help save it."

You can join guilds cross-server, can't you?

You can, but the influence you gain is tied to the server. So each server would have its own distinct guild improvements, you couldn't use the same guild bank, etc...