Rethinking the MMO: How I would do CoH2

This x1000. It’s something that’s always bugged me about City of Heroes: It uses Default MMO Open World Design.

That’s where open space that isn’t used for shopping or training is filled with loitering XP-sacks. Whether they’re orcs or boars or Hellions, they serve the important purpose of waiting for somebody important to come along and kill them, so that they can be reincarnated five minutes later as exactly the same thing. This is just how MMOs are designed because this is how they’re designed.

CoH handles this better than most MMOs. For one, open-world spawns seem to have some kind of purpose and life. They’re out there to steal a purse (eventually), or preach to their adherents, or act out the messy Nazi vs. Discount Nazi grudge match. Their chatter is what gives zones a lot of their life (and I bet everybody has a favorite Hellions or Skulls line). Also, because of travel powers and a shortage of Kill Ten Rats quests, open-world enemies are much less irritating in CoH. If you’ve played fantasy MMOs, or Champions Online, you’ve probably had an unpleasant experience where you had to fight your way to a quest objective one spawn at a time, and then discovered that all of those enemies had respawned, so you’d have to fight them a second time on the way back to the questgiver. In CoH, pretty much the only time you get this feeling is when you’re trying to get to a mission door in Perez Park. Other than that, you can skip the intervening swarms of enemies and get right to the start of your mission.

But street spawns still have one glaring problem: They’re ridiculous. Paragon City is carpeted in criminals. There are tens of thousands of them, and no matter how many times you clear them out, they’ll be back in minutes. When contacts do give you Kill Ten Skulls missions, they basically want you to show the baddies who’s in charge, not to actually make things better in any meaningful way. Fortunately, the villains never successfully make things worse, either, but it’s still pretty demoralizing if you approach it from any standpoint other than “this is just how MMOs are designed.”

So how do you design it differently? You have to create big open city zones because flying is awesome. If you create these zones but don’t include anything to do in them, then they feel dead and boring. So how do you add challenge to the open world without turning it into an absurd Villain Preserve?

I was thinking “open Safeguard missions.” Every so often a neighborhood goes under siege. If nobody does anything about it, criminals or monsters will take over the area, drive out civilians, and generally make the place look like Kings Row. A lone hero who comes in can clean up parts of the neighborhood, finish a side mission here or there, and generally street-sweep indefinitely. If more heroes show up, they can split up to put out fires (literally and figuratively), or team up to take on the leaders of the flare-up. Once enough enemies have been beaten, the neighborhood goes back to normal, and heroes can either move on to the next crisis or hang around to roleplay being Saviors of the Gish (or whatever).

My biggest problem with the idea is that it’s complicated. Getting the frequency and intensity of neighborhood attacks right would take a lot of fine-tuning. If you could pull it off, though, it would make the open world feel much more compelling. I’m sure some players would love the sense of being meaningful defenders of the streets, and if it were balanced right, it would be as viable a leveling path as clearing out warehouse after warehouse of slightly-used gangsters.

TLDR: Zone events good! Mob-pastures bad!

I actually liked what they did in Praetoria with this. It might still have to many mob-pastures (I like that word), but large parts are free of it. Instead there are these events you can trigger. Kill the two guards in front of the Mob building and they come out of the woodwork in swarms. Interact with the protest and all hell breaks loose.

I liked how Praetoria was designed, the multiple factions in one zone, the events, no tunnels/trams/ferries to go from one zone to the other. I think it would have made a much better starting zone design than Atlas Park or Mercy Island, especially Mercy Island. I also liked that you had interaction with the big names from the start, not just after level 40 or so.

If they did it like they did in GW2, they wouldn't give you trouble.

Sure, when you enter a low level area you, and your base stats, get scaled to that level, but your gear doesn't. And you keep all your powers they you've unlocked.

A level 6 Boar isn't much of a challenge to my 80, but it isn't an utter joke like a grey con Hellion versus a level 50. It's a much easier fight than when I also was level 6 to be sure, and demonstrates I've grown in power, but it keeps a certain level of threat and thus a certain level of reward can still be given.

Which to me makes more sense. If a tommygun wielded by a guy in Independence Port can't really hurt me AT ALL, why would it in Peregrine Island? If anti aircraft cannons in Striga can't scratch me, why would any conventional firearm that Malta carries?

Of course, where both games drop the ball is that they don't always have the enemies graduate from tommyguns in the high levels. CoH had it's rock slinging Praetorian citizens, and GW2 has it's rusty shovel swinging zombies.



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