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City of Heroes Purchased By NCsoft
Rock, Paper, Shotgun comments on the big news from late last night: NCsoft has announced that it has purchased City of Heroes/Villains from Cryptic Studios, the Massive game's original developer. Everyone on the team has been offered a new position with the newly formed NCsoft NorCal studio, and many of them have accepted. As far as the players are concerned, NCsoft only intends for them to see freebies as a result of this deal: "Now back to you, the players. You are the lifeblood of our game. In celebration of our new studio and our exciting plans, and in order to thank you for the fantastic community that you have built, we are pleased to announce the following: All players with City of Heroes retail accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn't previously have access to "the other side" will find that they do now. Just log in to check it out! After the launch of Issue 11: A Stitch in Time this Fall, we are removing Debt from all characters and giving you a fresh start ... Also after the launch of Issue 11, all Supergroups will receive an additional 20,000 Prestige per Supergroup member."
Chalk this up to stupidity but I always assumed it was NCSoft for both because of adverts from NCSoft portraying the two together.
I've had a CoV account a while back and stopped playing... I may have to start again if all this is more than a rumor.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I have no experience with either, but allowing access to both cities is a great move. Forgiving debts, giving away points, etc not so much. Smart players will exploit this and just run up debts. Dumb players won't, either because of misplaced ethics or because they don't know how to read.
Maybe it's not the same, but in the games I play online, I hate to see this kind of virtual pandering.
To be exact, all but one member of the dev team are moving to NCSoft
The reason everyone plays WOW and not COH/COV is critical mass. People play WOW because people play WOW. I stopped playing COV because no one else was playing and it was impossible to find anyone to group with.
I've got to say that I'm kind of worried. One of the best things about CoH is that the developers seem to focus a lot on what the players want. There have been several instances of major changes being brought to the game simply on player request, and it's greatly appreciated. I'll be kind of upset if NCSoft abandons this policy in favor of their plan to "aggressively develop and expand the franchise."
Gamertag: WyleType
Debt was already capped, so you're not getting that much. Plus for everyone who was at level 50, debt had no effect whatsoever, so, you know, why bother?
And running an xp debt on purpose is a bad idea anyway.
1. It means running up a lot of death, which means a lot of running back to your corpse instead of doing quests and killing NPCs. Plus, it's demoralizing for most people. It's associated with a failure, no matter how minor.
2. Until NCSoft forgives it, you'll get half xp, as the other half goes to paying back the debt.
Planning to faceplant lots just so NCSoft will forgive it, umm, sounds like just about the dumbest thing one could do. You could just finish the quest the old fashioned way in that time, and get more xp in the process.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I found tons to group with. Had a lvl 50 hero and lvl 50 villain. Don't know your problem. As for critical mass, by your logic everyone in the world should be Islamic since thats the most popular religion. Critical mass explains mob mentallity, not the reason why people purchase a product; thats called a monopoly... like iPods and Microsoft. And last that I heard of, WoW was NOT a monopoly.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
As opposed to go into dungeon, kill 100 rats, level, go into another dungeon, kill 100 larger rats and level... all so you can get to level 1000 in order to go into the Dungeon Of Fat Loot with 50 other people to kill the Uber Rat Of Doom?
:).
This is a MMOG we're talking about here
I would never have thought that is what they were talking about. Thanks everyone.
Still, not sure how that would really help anyone. Bad players will likely still be bad players.
Chalk that one up to another Linux Fanboy who doesn't understand simple concepts. Vista bombed? Right.
I mean, was it just that NCSoft offered unrefuseably large piles of cash?
I met & interviewed Jack Emmert at E3 the year before CoH released - if there's anyone who was developing a game as a labor of love, it was him. He was almost a caricature of the Simpsons' comic book guy, but it was in a charming way because he was so genuine. I agree with his characterization of comic books as 'modern day mythology' and while I can't quite yet personally consider them quite 'literature', there are some fantastic stories being told.
It was such a product of his particular personality and desire, I'm curious what it would have taken to get him to relinquish creative control.
-Styopa
Yes, yes, I know nitpicking at the details is a national sport on Slashdot, but take a pause and think about it a bit. You get to run back to the mission, if you want to continue it, and to roughly where you were when you faceplanted. Because, you know, you have to continue from there. Same thing, whether there's a corpse on the ground or not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you consider actual sales, it is bombing.
I'm talking people purposefully buying it, not getting it with a new computer whether they like it or not, or getting a free copy from their school or any of a myriad number of ways that MS has artificially inflated the sales figures on Vista.
I can not back this up with numbers, as number are very hard to get on this subject; the only things available are fuzzy percentages.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Yeah, I just switched to running a new iMac (having been a PC/Windows user since my 286 back in 1989 or so), and I am sure not looking back. However, while I wish that more games supported the Mac natively (and I expect they will as the platform has some real growth now it seems), it doesn't mean you can't play the old games. Bootcamp and a copy of WinXP SP2 ensure that when I want a gaming fix, I can get it pretty easily, then its back to the MacOSX side for serious computer use.
MacOSX is such a superior computing experience, I honestly wish I had switched years ago.
I really wish someone would break Microsoft's stranglehold on gaming, but until then I can continue to dualboot as required.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I bought it. Just because most people are on the anti-microsoft bandwagon doesn't mean there is any value to their statements.
I really hope this helps expand the audience for this game in some manner. It deserves more exposure in my opinion. I have always thought of this as one of the best designed games I have ever seen. Cryptic just seemed to do everything right for the most part. The game has always represented top quality design and development for me.
Sure, its a niche market, its not for everyone, and its got a narrow focus. I admit its limits. But in my opinion no other MMORPG out there (past or present) can hold a candle to COH/COV for the quality of the group combat experience. I am part of a group of folks who regularly revisit the game for months at a time, and its usually because we are unable to find the same addictive high quality group combat experience in other games. The next great hope is Pirates of the Burning Sea, which has some great potential,
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Heh. The debt badges don't work that way. They don't count debt incurred, they count debt repaid. So if you were after that badge, heh, being forgiven of 300-500k xp in one fell swoop is going to just move you a bit further away from the badge. Now you'll have to go faceplant a few times to get that badge back.
So, hmm, nope, I still don't see that as too abusable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My "supergroup" and I left CoH a long time ago. Why?
... AND we were still having a blast!
... from level 1 to 50 were all suddenly useless. All the planning and effort to tweak builds, respec builds and come out with something of 'heroic' proportions were deemed 'too powerful' and the system was changed to what we were told was "How the devs originally wanted it" .... only a year and a half after the initial release. We didn't even get a thanks for beta testing for them (oh, and paying for it too).
Because we no longer felt heroic. We had run every taskforce (Including the first from that portal realm - 11 HOUR MARATHON), done everything - we knew the game, constantly created new characters
The characters we had planned out
Suddenly, we were no longer in the "City of Heroes" - we were in the "City of Mediocrity" as the devs continued to tune down the classes so no one could feel like an epic hero anymore.
Which really defeats the purpose of the game.
I stopped playing CoH for the same reason. I got tired of keeping a second "gaming" Windows PC up to date with reasonable parts and software, and just starting using my home Mac full-time. Any game popular enough to matter gets ported anyway these days. That CoH isn't ported says more about CoH than it does about the Mac, IMHO.
E pluribus unum
The 'Crisis of Infinite Nerfs' was years ago. I was upset too -- quit the game for two years. Came back this summer after I heard that 1.) The nerfs were mitigated with the new invention system (which apparently was always the plan, they just didn't think to release the two at the same time), and 2.) Statesman was no longer with the game.
That's right -- Statesman no longer worked with City of Heroes/Villains, and he was no longer driving the game toward the Lineage PvP template that he admired so much. Positron was lead developer, and he prefers PvE games and more importantly *heroes*. The devs have spent the last year or two asking the players for what they want and then implementing those requests. The game is much, much improved and well-cared-for now than it was when the global nerfs descended years ago.
And with the latest news, it looks like it's going to remain in good hands. You might want to swing by and give the hero biz another try, see how you like it now.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
Actually, it's even funnier. COH and COV are the same game. Whether you have "both" installed, or only one of them, you run the exact same executable, use the exact same resource files, and connect to the exact same servers, and your stuff is saved in the exact same database.
The only difference between COH, COV or both, was your account. If the account says you only paid for COV, then their server will only let you play on the COV side. But, again, you already had both.
And yeah, "both" were published by NCSoft.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Eh, you've got a good point. It's *not* the same game as it was. Heroes can be made almost as powerful as they used to be, but it takes more effort and some loot. But it's not the same.
I don't play my old characters anymore, because of how they were affected by the nerfs. I made new characters, who feel very powerful under the new rules. I think they've made a lot of progress and improvements on the game, but you're right that for some people, some actions in the past will never be forgotten nor forgiven.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
I pretty much value my statements.
I'm curious, which version did you buy? was there any primary underlying reason? I have heard a couple of reasons I can't argue with, like better integrated tablet PC support and a requirement for robust DRM (long story).
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
It's been a while since I played and I can't really be bothered to go into the nitty gritty, but essentially, they changed the way that enhancements affect a character's powers.
Unlike WoW, the only real 'drops' in CoX are enhancements - tokens that you can drop into the six slots that can be created (one at a time, at level-up time) in every power in order to improve its effectiveness. Enhancements do things like boost attack damage and accuracy, increase the rate at which powers recharge, reduce the amount of energy ('Stamina', IIRC) they use, and so on. This verisimilitude of enhancements, slots and powers is one of the games strengths, IMO.
Pre-nerf, enhancements were straight multipliers -- one damage meant an attack did Damage x N, two meant Damage x 2N, and so on, all the way to six. You could mix enhancements, of course -- four damage and two accuracy in an attack, for example -- but it was personal preference.
As with any MMORPG, this lead to ideal 'builds' and certain tricks were possible. For example, six recharge enhancements in the 'Hasten' power (which itself increased the recharge time of certain powers) created 'Permahasten' -- the Hasten power that normally had a down-time between uses would instead be permanently active.
The change alluded to by the previous poster was Enhanced Diversification (ED), which was introduced under the guise of creating more varied characters by de-emphasising ideal 'builds'. How so? With ED, if you 'slotted' up to three enhancements of the same type in a power, you still got the standard multiplier effect, but more use than three and the gains were drastically reduced. So, it was pointless to six-slot enhancements of the same time -- 'enhanced diversity'. This meant the end of Permahasten and other (what were arguably) exploits.
The big complaint was that this wasn't a device to improve gameplay, but a massive nerf and it upset lots of players. It doesn't really seem like that big a deal now, but then there are only about 50 people playing in the UK*.
*Source: Out of my ass.
On the official forums, the moderators have stated that they're going to tell exactly when the debt eradication will happen, as in a time and date. They have explicitly said that one of the purposes of doing so is specifically so day/night/whatever before, people can do something they're not really used to being able to do because it's a PITA to work off the debt: go out and go nuts.
Want to take on the hardest über-mission that people normally don't work on because they know that they'll spend the next few hours wallowing their way out of debt? Go for it, because tomorrow, you get a free pass.
Also, as has been pointed out, it's not like you can rack up a week's worth of debt in the game. Most of the time, it's paid off within an hour or so at most. Sometimes, I've had it worked completely off by the end of the very mission in which I accrued it. I can't think of a way this can be exploited; at worst, you might be able to save yourself a few hour's effort.
And yes, Typoman was my character...
Did you only play at 3:00am on a low-population server or something? Whenever I'm around, there are plenty of other people. Hell, half of the complaints on the official forums are people griping about all of the broadcast clutter and blind invites.
1. Google for the so called "ED" or "Enhancement Diversification".
In a nutshell, the game already been nerfed twice in a row, especially the tanks and a smaller nerf to regen. (Regens had been nerfed in each patch since I1, so we were already used to that.)
And by "nerf" I don't mean the small tweaks you see on WoW. CoH under Statesman had never discovered fine tweaks. The COH kind of balance tweaks were the kind where one class went from God Mode to nobody, and another class was buffed into being God Mode. The game for example started as City Of Blasters (as a devices blaster could make themselves just 5% short of invulnerable to any enemy) and had become City Of Fire Tankers by I4. (Fire tankers were the "squishiest" kind of tank, as damage mitigation went, but even they could solo a mission instanced for 8 people.) That's the kind of massive balance changes that happened in COH.
The last two ones had been rather severe, and this time noone was buffed, it was rather all nerf and no carrot. Still it was accepted among (A) promises from Statesman that this is absolutely the last big change to the game, and (B) people grudgingly realizing that the balance _had_ been crap. So, anyway, the promise from Cryptic was that this is the last big change, the game is finally working as intended, everyone can relax, respec their chars to deal with it, and enjoy the game. Fine.
Then out of nowhere came the "ED". It's hard to explain it to a non-COH-player without explaining all the game system, but let's just say that _everyone_, every single class, lost up to 1/3 of all they could previously do. Fire blasters suddenly did 2/3 of their previous damage, healers could heal 2/3 as well as before, tanks had their armour class reduced to 2/3, etc. It was across the board. Every single power that you could previously enhance to 300% of base value, now went only up to 196% or so of base.
Due to game mechanics as well, for some the effects were more dramatic than it would seem. For example for a tank, going from 80% damage mitigation to 60% damage mitigation means taking twice the damage. The maths isn't exactly linear there.
In some cases, because of former synergies, the losses were even bigger. E.g., a healer that previously relied on permanent hasten, now also had lost that reduction in time between heals, because, well, with the new changes hasten no longer could be made permanent.
Because the change was so uniformly applied across the board, with no regards to who actually needed it, and who was already at the pain limit, some classes lost a lot more than others. E.g., every single class that was based on defense instead of damage reduction, suddenly became useless. Ice tanks and SR scrappers could even be killed by minions. Again, because game maths worked against those. Cryptic took almost a year IIRC to fix defense after that fuck-up.
And best of all was the justification for it. Statesman got that idea from playing a Gameboy game. No, seriously. It wasn't based on some analysis of what actually happens in the game and what players want, it was Statesman playing with his GBA and thinking, "gee, I like it more when fights take longer." Hence, let's nerf everyone to make them take more time to kill an enemy.
Don't get me wrong, it was possible to adapt to the game after the ED. But it did leave a bitter aftertaste in many people's mouths anyway. And for some it was the straw that broke the camel's back.
2. Well, I don't know how to say it nicely, so I might as well not even try: keep the "{{citation needed}}" trolling where it belongs, on Wikipedia.
Now I'm not telling you to believe everything blindly, quite the contrary. But I'm saying to do your own fucking googling. It's not writing a reference for posterity, it's just a fucking message in a thread that will scroll off the main page in a day. Give it a week and noone will even remember that it ever existed. So if you think anyone will spend half a day researching and cross-referencing the bibliography -- by which time, the thread will already be at most visible in that small list on the right -- then I suspect that either you haven't put much thought into it, or some brain damage may be involved.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Home Premium. And it was all based on one single article that I read a while ago, detailing the architecture plans/updates to Vista. I've lost the link however so I can't give many more details. I had also used some Beta/RC versions and I'd grown towards the OS enough that I chose it over Linux. It might help that I'm not an average user, but a developer and I play no games on the PC. So performance issues are less important to me.
Where is that WoW native Linux client? Oh yeah, there isn't one.
City of Heroes is built on OpenGL also, go figure. However, the graphics aren't the only thing to a game client does, and the non-graphics part of City of Heroes is built for Windows only. This wasn't a malicious decision, it was a practical one. NCsoft isn't as big as Blizzard, it never has been. Hopefully, as demand for the game grows, they'll be able to go back and capture some of the Mac and Linux markets as well. I'm pushing on NCsoft for this to happen, hopefully we'll get their ear.
For the record, NCsoft does not support City of Heroes on Vista. They say they are working on it, I'm sure they'll get around to it eventually, and by all reports, it mostly works fine on Vista, but it's not like NCsoft are a bunch of Microsoft sycophants.
Going back to the ALL platforms thing again, maybe you overlooked that City of Heroes/Villains is an officially supported Cedega application? You know, just like World of Warcraft?
I run it on Linux using Wine.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
You're forgetting something about perma-Hasten. (And before I get started: this is coming from someone who never used it, just to be different from the cookie-cutter builds.)
Perma-hasten wasn't an exploit. It was the officially allowed possibility, with Cryptic's blessing.
As the game was launched, you could make Hasten permanent with IIRC 2 SOs. Or maybe 3? I can't really remember. At any rate, you could not only make it "perma", you could have it stack with itself most the time.
Statesman seemed to be genuinely surprised that this was possible. Like many other powers (remember the City Of Blasters smoke grenades for example?) noone at Cryptic had done the maths. What happened with which powers on SOs, was a genuine surprise to them.
So as a sort of compromise, Statesman accepted that, yeah, perma-Hasten is a useful thing and will remain available, but it's only fair to need 6 slots for that. So the maths were changed to produce just that result. Officially, and with Cryptic's blessing. It was _not_ an exploit, any way you want to slice it.
Which just made the sudden U-turn in ED more baffling. They painted some things as evil exploits, that previously they treated as just normal tweaks allowed by the game.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Actually, it says more about the fact that there aren't enough Macs to make it worthwhile for [most] MMOGs to maintain two separate versions of their software...and Boot Camp gives them further disincentive.
I see a few attempts at explaining were tried, but without giving you a full understanding.
The giant nerf spoken of was called Enhancement Diversification. While it's common to state that this was a hard cap of 3 enhancements per power, it's far more subtle than that. What they did was add in a bell curve of diminishing returns for enhancements, with it starting to be noticeable around 75%. So, say you slot in 2 33% enhancements, you get the full 66%. Slot in a third, you get 93%. But, slot in 3 25% enhancements you get 74%. You can slot in more, but with diminishing returns each time. In and of itself, it hurt a lot of people.
But, now with Invention Origin enhancements, you now get buffs that more than compensate. So I am in agreement with others, that the two should have been introduced together, but still, they're here now. What IO's do is that if you slot sets in, that is enhancements designed around each other (same name) give extra bonuses that are independent of the individual power's bonus. So, say you slot 4 powers each with a set that gives a bonus of 10% to damage, you'd have a 40% damage bonus on-top-of your normal attack enhancements. Pretty slick design if I do say so myself. It does promote more diversity as well, as bonuses can be achieved through millions of combos. It also downgrades the flavor of the month builds that previously dominated the game.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I played City of Heroes for a couple of years, from a few months after initial launch up until shortly after the launch of City of Villains. I experimented with a few alternate characters but I had reached level 45 with my main; 5 levels below the level 50 cap.
I got into the game on the recommendation of my brother and another friend of ours. I played Everquest years earlier for a few months, shortly after the first expansion. The demanding nature of that game, including the reliance on grouping burned me out quickly. What attracted me to CoH was the ability to solo and lack of reliance on gear. It was kind of like a socialist MMO.
What really hooked me was the pace of combat. The game gets really exciting during a fight; I don't think there's been another MMO yet that matches the pace of that game. It's as close to direct, active control as I've seen thus far. Apparently a new powerset is being introduced which even allows for combos.
Additionally, a lone hero could face a group of upwards of 5 foes and emerge victorious, depending on the class. It was fun to jump into the midst of some villains and beat the hell out of them all. So in that regard, it was a very satisfying game.
The pace of leveling was fairly quick but, like all other MMOs it still had considerable grind. And that's really where things broke down. There was nothing else to do but fight. Every single thing in the game revolve around beating up badguys. There were conditions for some missions, like clicking on glowing items, but even then it required getting past hordes of villains. Story was presented in dialog boxes; at the time there were no cutscenes. Alternative skills, comparable to blacksmithing in fantasy MMOs were finally introduced a few months ago. This was after years of promising they were coming soon.
Apparently the skill system was completely redesigned at least 3 times over because it was deemed to not be fun enough. I haven't played what was finally implemented but from what I've read I'm not impressed. It looks like it's merely an adaptation of the supergroup base item building feature.
The character customization is excellent, and probably still surpasses what's available in most other MMOs. Beyond that, however, there's only one way to improve a character. And that's through enhancements which is comparable to stats for other games. Basically, enemies "drop" these enhancements which are then applied to a character's powers. So a player can boost damage, or the power's secondary debuff effect. That was all well and good until the developers decided they didn't want people focusing on a single aspect of any given power. So, every power has 5 slots, if I remember correctly, but using more than two slots for the same boost was essentially a waste. This was supposed to encourage enhancement diversity but I think it resulted in standard ideal templates for specific powers.
There was also the incessant complaining by those who had chosen classes that were less effective solo who felt it was unfair that other classes could solo so effective. Nevermind the fact that the best solo builds weren't always well-suited for groups. So a lot of work went into addressing that with mixed results and to, I feel, the general detriment of the game.
Another problem I came to find with the game was the excessive reliance on templates for environmental design. Basically, upon entering a zone the first time a player had a good sense for how the rest of the zone looked. And many of those features were reused in most other zones. So where other MMOs have a varied and dynamic landscape City of Hero's was a bit contrived. It was tiring running through the same laboratory with a random, nonsensical layout for the 5th time in a few hours. Despite that, the art style was great. It was a lot of fun traveling amongst those skyscrapers. The game simply could have benefited from more variety.
One thing that was good about CoH/CoV was how Cryptic has maintained a close relationship with the players. They've n
I was extremely happy when the system was changed (commonly referred to as "Enhancement Diversification" among the players). Before that happened, the Tank archetypes were invincible. It was common practice to create what were known as "burn" tankers, which were tanks that could absorb an infinite amount of damage without consequence and that would deal out massive amounts of damage with their auras. Other variations on powersets provided similar characteristics.
If you were on a team with a burn tank, your job was to stand back and watch. If you interfered, your team would get angry with you and might even kick you from the team. So that's what most missions were, one or two tanks rounding up and dispatching hundreds of enemies at a time, and six or seven other team members standing around watching. On several teams I joined, the other players wouldn't even bother leaving the mission entrance area. Why bother if you're just going to stand around and watch anyway?
It was power-levelpalozza, and it was extremely tedious and boring.
Nowadays, the developers have gone to great lengths to ensure that every member of the team, no matter what archetype, can contribute. That is a Good Thing(TM).
Unless, of course, you enjoy playing games in "god mode," in which it kind of sucks that there exists the prospect that you might (gasp!) actually get defeated once in a while!
The risk is what makes the game fun and worthwhile. Even Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite. I guess that makes him no longer the "Man of Steel," but the "Man of Mediocrity." Still, if he were literally invulnerable to everything, as so-called "heroes" were before enhancement diversification, it wouldn't be fun reading four pages of "...aaaaaand he thumps them on the head, so now they're in jail" in every single issue.
Bzzt, wrong. Look at some of the early comics, and super-heroes were just that: unassailable gods with perfect morals.
Superman, for example, started with no vulnerability whatsoever. The whole "kryptonite" thing was invented as a tongue-in-cheek explanation when they had to skip an episode or two for the radio version later, for example because the actor was on vacation. And even there it wasn't actually used _in_ any story line. Superman didn't have to battle anyone wielding kryptonite at that point.
Mind you, if you're going to say that that's not (necessarily) much fun in a game, we can even aggree quickly.
But that's a limitation of video games, not a limitation of super-heroes. Literary or comic book characters can be as god-like as the author wants, and still be fun and popular.
Heck, you don't even have to look only at superhero comics. Take Terry Prattchett's Diskworld books, for example. Cohen the barbarian is, for example, so good at dodging that in Interesting Times he even dodges a cannonball from a gun that got teleported right in front of him and fired. Rincewind is comically incompetent except he always ends up on top, even if by sheer luck and without fully realizing what he's done. The witches are just short of god-like in their own right, and can pretty much get what they want even from Death himself. Wossname the monk learned from yetis how to "save and reload" IRL, so he just comes back after being beheaded. Etc, etc, etc. Almost every single major character in those books has some kind of super-power that makes him completely invincible and unstoppable, even by the whole freakin' army of China (or the DW equivalent of it.)
Does that make the books any less fun to read? Nope.
Think action movies. Rambo can stand tall with a machinegun in front of a whole tank division, or get in a pissing... err... shooting contest with a gunship and come out on top. Jedi in SW movies are just about gods that can only kill each other. But they're way out of the league of mortal soldiers or drones, even when those are in brigade-sized formations and with AT-AT and air support. Etc.
And you know what? I dare say that that's actually good character design. People want to be told a nice story where the hero overcomes everything, and everything ends with a happy ending.
Not many people want to be told a tale where the hero thought he could fly circles around the Death Star, but the laws of firepower always beat the rules of literature. Or not many want to be told the story of the guy who thought he could jump in front of the enemy company with a pistol, and was riddled with bullets before he even finished the clip. Those are depressing stories of failure. They're not fun.
We want to be told stories where one determined guy changes the world for the better, and nothing whatsoever can stay in his way. Not one where he fails in the first 15 minutes.
But, again, I can see how that doesn't translate into a fun video game. We just have to accept that it's simply different media, with different rules.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Twenty million recent macs in use leaves plenty of market for a playerbase larger than nearly any game ever sees.
Boot Camp, however, changes pretty much nothing. Most people who choose macs are very much choosing to not use Windows. Giving them a new way to run the exact OS they don't want to run does not appeal to very many of them.
Even a moron understands that.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
But a big part of the reason behind that critical mass is that Blizzard has chosen to make WoW available to twenty million people that Cryptic has mysteriously chosen to ignore.
I had to send links to articles to about 5 different people talking about how they could return their Dells and get XP installed and they said they were planning on doing it that weekend.
Another guy I knew had the 90% bandwidth throttling problem and couldn't figure out what was going on and when I asked if he was streaming media at the same time as surfing the internet he said yeah and I explained the issue. He got so mad and said 'why would they do that? Thats so stupid!'
They lost touch with the consumer and now they are paying the price.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Dude, I've run CoH on Linux using Cedega. There are no "glitches," it runs perfectly well. Like I said, it's officially supported by Cedega, just like World of Warcraft. The only thing that I would consider a glitch is that some of the higher-end graphics rendering functions, such as depth-of-field effects and such, don't work because the video driver that Cedega reports to the app claims to not have those capabilities (even if the card does).
The game not only works, it is actually a lot faster running on Cedega on Linux than on Windows. The time to zone is cut by two or three seconds at least, sometimes a lot more.
And because you obviously missed it the first time, I'll put it in bold letters this time: City of Heroes uses OpenGL to render its graphics. I don't know how much clearer I can make it.
Well, they did introduce new content -- City of Villains. The fact that people who enjoyed playing Heroes might not want to play villains was apparently lost on Mr. Emmert. It is not lost on the new management, who has been creating nothing but hero content ever since (Faultline, the Hive, and the RWZ have all been revamped to high praise.)
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
NCsoft plans to install it on Friday and just play like, all weekend.
How many of your "twenty million" are interested in City of Heroes/Villains? How many would buy the game and then maintain a subscription? How much would it cost to develop and maintain the OSX client? What would be even more interesting: How many of your "twenty million" are Mac Minis with minimal gaming capability, and how many are truly new Mac users as opposed to Mac users who buy every upgrade?
I simply don't believe that large publishers (and NCSoft has become a large publisher) ignore the Mac userbase. I believe that they are well aware of the numbers and would create an OSX client if it was in their fiscal interest to do so. One of the biggest games of all time is Half-Life 2, which is already on multiple platforms. Yet, Source/Steam is still not available for OSX. Is that because Valve is stupid or could it be because that while they know they could sell the game to OSX users they've decided the advantages of creating a native OSX version of their software would provide minimal returns?
So glad I don't play this anymore. A part of me was pissed that I bought both versions, now they are just giving the other side away for free. I'd play again if they gave everyone a free month if they already owned COV and COH.
Perhaps a slightly lower percentage of those mac users are interested in games as a whole, but there are also fewer games competing for their attention. I don't think hard numbers exist, but my feeling is that the latter more than offsets the former, and the availability per-platform-user for a given game manufacturer is actually higher for mac users than Windows users.
Twenty million is around the number of macs in use now that are newer than City of Heroes itself; the total number of macs currently in use is a bit higher. It seems reasonable to assume that any machine that was brand new when the game was released would be able to run it acceptably.
My suspicion is that their developers have a very strong bent toward one set of technologies. An authoritarian decree from management that one embrace a different set of technologies is incredibly hard to enforce if the actual geeks-at-keyboards have religion that runs contrary to it.
I'm certainly not suggesting a vast conspiracy, but I think that the behaviours of businesses can often be less rational than you imply. "This is the right decision because it's the decision people make" has a dangerously circular aspect to it.
There are plenty of Macs to make the market profitable for game developers, if the game is a success to start with. There are really several types of games:
As for BootCamp, it does not really impact the market. So few people use it that it does not really figure into things. Heck most people can't even install Windows on a regular PC. The market for Mac computers is 8% of the US market these days, almost all of which is in home use instead of business, and which sells to the higher end buyers with disposable income. They also have fewer titles to choose from. A guestimate projection for a mainstream game would be you could expect to sell 1/5 as many copies on the Mac as you do for the PC version. Do you suppose the cost of porting a game to the Mac or developing it with reusable code in the first place (which you'll want to do anyway to make future games easier) is more than 1/5 the cost of developing a game from scratch?
As a final note, compatibility with the Mac is also a significant selling point for PC games. I know of more than one instance where a dozen friends all bought a Mac compatible game instead of the competition because they wanted to play together and one or more of them had a Mac (especially when that one is the cute co-ed studying graphic design).
I should mention here that I am not at all against the idea of creating OSX-compatible versions of PC games. I'd be particularly happy if this became the norm with MMOGs since when I play one, I'd like there to be as many players in my community as possible. I believe, though, that there are good reasons to eschew OSX in the gaming area, not the least of which is Apple's lack of encouragement. Microsoft has DirectX which has clearly won over the game development community. If Apple would create and support something similar for OSX, it would probably entice developers to do more multi-platform work. As it is, there's an implied (and sometimes stated) disdain from Apple regarding games that can't help but turn developers away from the platform.
Sidekicking/exemplaring is undoubtedly the best feature of CoX. I played World of Warcraft this past summer, and thanks to my addictive personality I was constantly outleveling my friends and having to start new characters if I wanted to play with them. Every time I did, I wished that I could just say "exemplar me" and play with them using my favorite character. Ironically, in CoX it's actually a lot more fun creating additional characters thanks to the customization available in terms of powers and appearance. There are definitely things that I really like about World of Warcraft, and on the whole it's always going to be a larger game than CoX ("duh"), but the fun factor of the latter is higher for me.
I've been with City of Heroes since open beta 3.5 years ago (just missed the closed beta). I've seen several posts here on /. saying basically "Been to CoH, didn't like it, left the game" and I'd like to say a little about how the game has matured since then.
Today's CoX (so abbreviated since both City of Heroes and City of Villains is really the same game) has changed massively during those 3.5 years. There's City of Villains, 2 years old as of last week, which nearly doubled the number of playable archetypes (think classes). There's tons of new zones (over 30 now) to play in. There's different mission types - rescuing hostages, destroying or defending the urban landscape - than the original "beat up all the bad guys". And there's Inventions, which is the CoX crafting system, a fairly new system that's still growing.
Bad things have happened too. Enhancement Diversification, unfortunately abbreviated ED, upset a lot of people by basically capping the amount by which you could improve your powers. Just over 2 years ago, there was a massive nerf to defense that made melee archetypes much squishier. And plenty of the little nerfs that every MMORPG gets along the way.
One thing that has not changed in the entire 3.5 years is the dedication of the CoX team to the community. The faces have changed - we've had several community representatives, the original lead designers for both CoH and CoV are gone - but the team has continued and has been very open with us about how the game is doing and their plans. Sure, they don't tell us everything, just as I wouldn't tell my clients everything about how I run my consulting business - but they're very open with everything they're allowed to share. And we get new updates (called issues) typically once every 3 months or so, which is great for keeping the game fresh even for us old-timers.
Another thing that continues to grow is the player community. Sites like http://www.paragonwiki.com/, http://www.cohtitan.com/, http://coh.redtomax.com/data/ and http://www.badge-hunter.com/ are continually adding more support for players.
This NCSoft acquisition is a good thing for the game, in my opinion. The developers will no longer have to worry about two masters (Cryptic and NCSoft) - even when both your bosses are in agreement, red tape can cause problems, much less when they don't agree. That issue is gone. NCSoft has shown their commitment to maintaining the game through their offers of employment to practically the entire development and support team, as well as the creation of the NorCal studio. Personally I won't get much out of the in-game gifts, but it says a lot about NCSoft that they're reaching out to the community in this way.
Skip Franklin
It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black. -- despair.com
And did you ever wonder why those modern comics with weak and morally ambiguous heroes only sell a tiny fraction of what comics used to sell? Why now it's regarded as a weird geek hobby, when it used to be entertainment for the masses?
Now I'm not saying that's the only factor, or even the main one, but the fact remains: millions of people were buying every issue of those comics with god-mode heroes. At the very least, it wasn't that major a turn off.
And conversely, switching to dubious heroes that half the time you're not even sure if they're any better than the villains, sure didn't seem to make them much more popular. At best they traded one market segment for another.
Yes, and equally you know from the start that he won't get killed, and he'll have some gadget or ace up the sleeve for any situation. You want it to look like it would be certain death for the average monkey on the street, but your super-hero is super enough to not break a sweat over it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Are you seriously saying that the only reason WoW has millions of users is because it can be played on all platforms and using OpenGL instead of directx?
You sir, are a loon.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I play CoX on on my MacBook Pro using Boot Camp. It runs great and is lots of fun. WoW always felt more like work, you just couldn't play it in 20-30 minute chunks. That was the main reason I dumped my WoW account. With CoX, you can actually accomplish something in a spare half hour.
Co[HV] runs just peachy with BootCamp, even on the meagre GMA950 integrated video on the low-end machines. Once Parallels and/or VMWare get hardware 3D acceleration worked out, it'll be awesome.
I'm hoping the move to NCSoft will add some QA/testing muscle to the development team. The Co[HV] client has always been a bit iffy on ATI video cards (pretty sure that's a potential market of more than 20 million) and it really doesn't run well on Vista (another large potential market).
I'd really like to see them add a Mac client; porting to another platform always flushes out bugs, and adding one full-time Mac developer wouldn't impact their revenue very much.
- chrish
And with the advent of i9, there's recipes and invention salvage that can be used to craft enhancements, temp powers (Ethereal Shift, Gabriel's Hammer, and the St. Louis Slammer for example). The best drops though, in my opinion, are recipes for various costume pieces, such as these for example:
Dragon Wings
Cherubic Wings
Insect Wings
Faerie Wings
Burned Wings
Bat Wings
Winged Boots
Rocket Boots
There's also two other wing recipes (Bone Wings and Tech Wings), and the Piston Boots recipe. But those aren't shown here because none of my characters use them.
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