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City of Heroes Going Rogue With New Expansion
NCSoft has announced a major expansion to City of Heroes, titled Going Rogue, which they say will "blur the line between heroes and villains." It is set in Praetoria, a parallel universe governed by an evil version of Statesman, the game's lead hero. As part of a new alignment system, "hero characters can become villains and vice versa, enabling hero archetypes to cross over to the Rogue Isles and villain archetypes to experience Paragon City." Brian Clayton of Paragon Studios said, "For years, players could choose between playing as a hero or a villain. Now we will present a third, malleable path where players can be affected by the results of their actions."
Good to see the game continuing to grow and change. They've come a long way from a studio that, in 2006, was cut down to just 15 people maintaining the game.
And like most good ideas it depends on implementation. If the path to Good from Bad and vice versa are nontrivial actions then this stands to add a significant amount of replayablity to characters and personal attachment to a character.
A well thought out quest path that leads to the opposite faction with good story lines, moderately difficult to difficult quests, and tangible rewards can make this a tremendous addition to the game.
If NCSoft has made the path back and forth a toggle switch then it becomes just another piece of fluff that adds little or nothing to the actual game istelf.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
This is why this game has been chugging along for so long, great updates and a strong player-base.
Disregard that, I suck CoX?
Well, we've had front page stories about most other MMOs so far. I certainly remember articles speculating about Wrath Of The Lich King, back before when that was released. And articles about how WAR is adding a whole two classes... copied and renamed from other races. And then about how it's merging servers. Or about how Eve, after years of ignoring individual players if they don't happen to be some dev's best buddies, now is letting players elect a council. (Which it will likely still ignore, but now it gives players something to do and somewhere to argue with each other, instead of pestering the devs.) Etc.
It's the games section. What did you really think goes there?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I've played since issue 3. The game for the most part has lost the magic and a lot of the player base. I've had to move my characters to Freedom because my server once full of people a year ago I'd be lucky to meet 3 other people in the zone.
If you are new to the game then you will enjoy but the game for the most part is just a variation of the same theme.
- Rescue a hostage
- Kill everything
- Kill a boss
- Click a glowie
- Defend an object
after that there are finite set of maps (Mission in an office you know it is going to be the same layout, no randomness at all)
There are some arcs that are nicely done but after the Nth time of doing the same kind of mission with the same map layout it gets very very tedious.
The recent addition for players to create their own content is refreshing sometimes but again it is the same formula over and over.
The only thing that added the random element to it was PvP. But the population as a majority prefer to live in their own protected bubbles. To the point where they will complain they even have to do a mission in a PvP zone.
This looks like a step to creating a full on PvP server (which is badly needed).
If you look at successful MMO's out there, you will find there is a level of conflict or forced interaction to reach a common goal. Or the players impact the environment permently.
This is sorely missing from CoX (exception being Task Forces, which are no longer needed except for the badge).
If anything the game is good example why you shouldn't give your playerbase everything they want. Previously you had to work with your character to build it, team, swap IOs/etc. Now with any character by the time I can slot level 25 IO's (one days play) you don't need cash anymore. Got to level 25 where my character is fully slotted and doesn't need any boosts unless I come across them. With that made 3 million influence. Don't need anything else to hit 50 (even other players).
While I do play COH and like it, I don't see it as that special in that aspect.
For example WoW also released a lot of individual instances, story arcs, etc, for free in between the two expansion packs. E.g., the endgame content in both the original game and BC was released as such free patches, and even WOTLK has just seen for example Ulduar released as such a free patch. Just because they don't call them "issues" or make a big fuss about it, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Furthermore, 14 issues sounds a bit vague. Exactly how much content is an issue? Well, it ranged from whole areas to little more than bugfixes or rebalances being called issues.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Had some lag issues, but they seem to resolve quickly when away from large concentrations of player characters (100+, typically).
I think I might get a subscription. EVE is good, but hard work. Sometimes I just want to blast something for a laugh.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
The first thing I thought after seeing the headline was "Good! Another 20 years and they'll go Nethack" :-)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20060522&mode=classic
I was wondering when they were going to annex Joehio.
Reminds me of something, I'll get it in a moment...
Do you get villages of minions to torture, or do you have to be satisfied with PKs?
When City of Heroes(Villains) (CoX) was first launched, it was absolutely the only super-hero MMO out there, and as such filled a niche that wasn't being satisfied by anything else at the time. It was a good game in that it worked fairly well, was fun to play and had some interesting storylines to play through. However, in my opinion, there isn't any real depth to the game unless you're *really* into the stories and want to experience every single last one of them, despite many of them being essentially the same with just different enemy groups inserted into the various spots. City of Villains is more or less just "City of slightly naughty superbeings who have more sinister looking zones (because reds and blacks and gray skies = evil, while bright colors and blue skies = good!) but ultimately do exactly the same stuff that heroes do."
Now there is the DC Universe MMO coming out as well as Champions Online set to launch in a couple of months - will simply allowing players to switch the zones they play in really be enough to handle competition from new games that have better technology and (in the DC case at least) iconic characters?
The general consensus among people I know who play is that the ability to switch alignments should have been something that was the focus of a free "issue" rather than an expansion, and the next expansion should have been something along the lines of a massive graphics engine update and "World of Heroes" that would allow for "epic" (vastly more powerful) characters.
I played CoH since launch until somewhere after CoV was launched, and still do play from time to time - it's not a bad game, I just don't know that letting people switch alignment is going to be enough to keep people playing in the face of the new shiny, ESPECIALLY if the new shiny is even halfway decent.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The problem is that that's not what the devs wanted to do. If their vision had been "screw this, we'll let players skip as many levels as they want", I can respect that. After all, the Death Knights in WoW start directly at level 55 out of 80 levels.
But it gets funny reading some Positron statement in COH where he complains about the players abusing the mission designer as power-levelling, and promises punishments to everyone who made farming missions and/or everyone who used them. And reminding everyone that it was really intended for players to make deep and meaningful story arcs, and expects it to be used that way. Now _that_ is funny.
What did he expect there to happen?
That does not sound to me like he's treating players as adults. It's
A) as usual, implementing stuff without any forethought and then being thoroughly surprised that it doesn't work as expected
B) then treating players like children who need to be threatened into doing things the way you want them to do it, instead of the way that your game allows and rewards
And I especially would like you to roll the latter around in your head. As a general rule of thumb, each game gets the players and behaviours that it rewards. If a game rewards farming it gets farmers, if it rewards all out PvP it gets mostly PvP-ers, and if it rewards being a ultra-competitive dick it gets ultra-competitive dicks, etc. If nothing else, because anyone who wanted something radically different in a game, gets the hint that he'll always be a second class citizen and leaves. And everyone who was ambivalent gets the idea that action A is more rewarding than action B, and learns to do A more than B.
It's not just about COH, btw. E.g., if in WoW you see mostly soloing from levels 1 to 79, it's because that's the kind of thing that offers the most bang-per-buck (or reward per effort) within the constraints of that game's design.
It's really that simple.
And any designer who ends up threatening players for using game mechanic A instead of game mechanic B, in my book he's incompetent. Either sit back and let players use what works, or fix your own god damned game so option A isn't that rewarding. Or have the forethought to not implement it in the first place, if it's that predictable that it will be abused in ways you don't like.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The New Mission Architect stuff has totally renewed my interest in this game. I've designed two missions now:
"Dorothy is Dangerous" a Wizard of OZ themed map where munchkins and flying monkeys protect Dorothy, the Tin Man, ect.... as your team tries to take them out as a favor to the wicked witch...
And "Judgment" where ten Arch villains, each with very different abilities, are on the same map, and your team (or solo) tries to arrest the hell out of them. I've had only two people send me messages where they have successfuly Soloed the ten trials of Judgment. Both said they loved it.
The last issue (i14) released the Mission Architect.
The game itself already had over a thousand mission arcs, plus randomly generated missions from certain contacts as well as radio missions.
Now, with the MA, you have access to effectively unlimited content. In the first month alone, they surpassed 100,000 (one hundred thousand) mission arcs generated by the player base.
Granted, some of these were exploits and farms, which have since been nerfed. But the point still stands. If you want lots of content. It's there.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Quantity doesn't say anything about quality. If my hypothetical restaurant boasted 100 different recipes on the menu, but they're all minor variations of the same cheeseburger, you're not going to think it's the most diverse food around.
What I'm trying to say is that in COH
A) all missions are one of:
- kill NPC and everyone else in the same room
- click on glowie
- rescue hostage
- kill everyone on map
- defend an object
And I don't mean at a conceptual level (as in, both Deadmines and Ulduar involve killing an end-boss in WoW), but they're all a map full of NPC groups and you have to do largely the same thing yet again on a different map. But what makes it worse is:
B) maps aren't very different. Like in the old Daggerfall, maps are made of a small number of huge and easily recognizable chunks, that are just interconnected in different ways. So for example it's very easy to recognize that you're in the same 4-level cavern room you've already seen a gazillion times before, or that you're in the exact same lobby with an overpass, or in the same 4-way warehouse junction.
Once you recognize that, you don't just know the exact architecture and have seen it before. (As in, at the level of, "oh, around that corner are the cubicles and around that other corner is a ramp up.") After a while you also know exactly where the enemies can spawn and around which corners you should be careful.
In WoW terms, for whoever is more familiar with that, think how memorable the cave with the ship was in the Deadmines when you saw it the first time as a newbie. Now think if it were reused in a thousand other dungeons, and you're seeing the same bloody room again from level 1 to level 80. Because it's reused again and again and again.
Just saying that it's a lot of missions is kind of misleading, when you run into such copied and pasted rooms over and over again.
And even worse...
C) The number of different combinations of those pieces is also rather limited. So not just the chunks of some maps can be what you've already seen before, but the whole bloody map can be an exact duplicate of something you've already played a hundred times.
And sometimes it's as if they don't even try to hide it at all. In fact as if they try to rub your nose in it.
E.g., I can think of one teen-level task force where three missions in a row are identical. As in, you do the exact same map, with the exact same layout, and the exact same enemies, 3 times in a row. It's just placed in different buildings around the city, but it's the same mission again. What was the purpose of _that_? Just to make sure I know it's a copy-and-paste time sink?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the game as a whole sucks or anything. That's a matter of personal tastes, anyway. But saying that it has lots of content is IMHO highly misleading, since actually it's very little content copied and pasted over and over again. Repetition doesn't really make it more content.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I played CoX for a month, and I had a lot of fun. Sure, everything is instanced (and what isn't is horribly annoying) but I had fun. It has a very friendly feel, and I love super heroes. Problem is its also very, very lazy. Take the aforementioned task forces. It is widely acknowledged - by positron himself in fact - that the first one is nothing but horrible suffering and pain. I went through it with my Warbringer. Wow was he right. But they don't intend to fix it. Or the mission that's taken from the short lived comic, with the giant spider that when "destroyed" reveals the psychic inside . . . only in the game, it explodes. and turns into the same spider. See, they wanted it to look right, but they wanted it to be released more. This is left and right in the game. Laziness by the developers. The sideways skirt glitch was cute, though.
You know, the one where Statesman and his Cryptic crew leave NCSoft to start their rival game.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
There's still people playing this? Ever since the motorcycle (MOTORCYCLE!!!) was introduced in WoW's Lich King expansion, the only viable MMO is EVE Online.
Having heroes or villains be able to swap sides is a cool idea - one I had about 10 minutes after they announced City of Villains 3 years ago or whatever. To call that one feature a major expansion (ok, to be fair, it sounds like they are building new zones and things into this expasion too, and probably lots of other stuff as well), but really, switching sides seems like a minor feature at best, and something they should have had in the game a long time ago.
The actually *really* interesting feature which CoX introduced recently (although I haven't had a chance to play the game since they released it), is Architect. Architect allows players to create missions, story bosses to go with those missions, etc. User-generated content in an MMO - I'm not sure, but I don't think there are any other MMOs which allow user generated content. They should win an industry award just for having the balls to try that.
Sort of, yes and no.
Yes, there is a lot of duplicated geometry in WoW too, and I should know, I've played both games more than some would consider healthy.
No, the overal feeling isn't the same. As the general feeling goes, in WoW sometimes you're in a cave, sometimes you're in the woods, sometimes you're on some snow-covered mountain, and sometimes you're in a fort, etc.... There's some copied stuff, but on the whole there's a _lot_ of content anyway. Even if you see some of it twice or thrice, there is nevertheless lots of different stuff.
In COH everything is instanced, and everything is made of the same very small number of chunks. You'll see each chunk not just twice, nor even just a dozen times in different places, you'll see the same lobby literally a few _thousand_ times in different missions. It's hard not to start noticing that it's the same map again, even if you actively tried to not notice it.
The thing that comes to mind about COH is an Evil Inc comic strip where villains call to rent some warehouse for their fight with the hero, only to be told it's only available on Saturday after 6 PM because other villains rented it the rest of the week. That's the sensation I get with COH's maps. I'm doing the same warehouse again, only this time it's with Tsoo in it, and last time it was with Freakshow in it. But otherwise it's not just the same, but the enemy groups are in the same places, the boss is in the same big room and the glowie is under the stairs again. It's as if literally someone owns half a dozen warehouses, maybe half a dozen office buildings, a couple of research-themed buildings, etc, and the various groups just rent one of them for their showdown after the previous gang is done with it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I still think City of Heroes/Villains has, by far, the best fighting system of any MMO. It's the closest any game has come to real-time action. It's engaging and can be a lot of fun.
When I was playing there were a handful of interesting storylines and entertaining missions. However, virtually every single mission consistent of entering one of a handful of environments and beating the crap out of every enemy contained within. While it's very entertaining taking on 5 or more enemies at the same time it does get old after doing so for the hundredth time.
I haven't played in a couple of years, and I managed to get my main character up to level 45, the cap being 50. But I just lost interested in continuing because by that point I had seen nearly everything the game had to offer anyway. I've followed updates to some extent over the years and haven't found them to offer much in the way of compelling content.
I would have liked to have seen them build out existing plot lines further. And I think they've focused a bit too heavily on player interaction over providing more content. I think what they've done is great, but the core gameplay really needs more variety.
That's very insightful and informative, and I'm not going to argue against that. But that's orthogonal to what I was saying there. All that I was... debating was the whole "oh, we're getting so much free content" idea. I've seen at least as much free content added in WoW too, and a bunch of other games for that matter. That's all I'm saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't see that as much of a saving grace, since most of those "exploits" were simply broken design to start with, not some obscure buffer overflow bug.
It's, if you will, simply a rerun of the self-stackable Hasten way back at game launch, or of the "City Of Blasters" smoke grenade exploit, or of the other of many _foreseeable_ problems that the COH team implemented without stopping and _thinking_ first.
They seem to just plough ahead and implement something that sounds cool, and only later discover whether it works or not. There doesn't seem to be any step where they sit down and do the maths first, or when they ask themselves "ok, if I were an evil bastard, how could I exploit this?"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's just skirting the real problem. The problem isn't whether you have a particular power like Psychic Shockwave. The problem is whether you're having fun against enemies your own level.
And the teen levels in COH just plain old aren't fun for 95% or so of the builds. They're a stupid grind towards when you'll finally have enough endurance to both use your attacks and your defenses, or not run out of endurance before the current group of enemies is dead.
E.g., on my MA/SR scrapper, my problem wasn't that I don't have Eagle's Claw or Elude yet. My problem was that it felt like I'm The Amazing Asthmatic Guy. Even the few attacks I had, drained my endurance to zero in no time, and turning on any defenses doubly so. And then I'd get to twiddle thumbs until Rest recharges. To add insult to injury, before SOs and enough slots, those defenses did buggerall anyway.
My impression is that the COH team just didn't understand what character progression is about. The difference between level 1 and level 50 shouldn't be that between "suck" and "rule." Both should rule against enemies their own level. That level difference should just say that at level 1 I'm not going to go run up to a level 50 NPC and punch it in the face. But against enemies the same level, a level 1 or a level 15 or a level 50 should do just fine.
And since we're at comparing to WoW, there's no point in WoW where I experienced the same "gotta grind until I can start having fun" ranges. My mage at level 15 had enough mana to run at a comfortable and fun pace through level 15 enemies. Unlike my blasters on COH at level 15. (I.e., before Stamina at level 20.) My paladin at level 15 didn't have to do choices like "do I use my aura or do I attack?" because the game just wasn't designed around the idea that anything you do at low level should drop your stamina bar like a lead anvil. My warrior at level 15 generated just enough rage to use his special attacks at a comfortable rate, which is more than I can say for most of my scrappers on COH. Etc.
And then you have whole maps full of enemies which just make those problems worse. For no other reason than that some incompetent designer thought that if you already badly lack endurance at teen levels, it would be fun to give you enemies which actively drain stamina. (See, all those Mu guys in COV missions, for example.)
A game just has no reason to be designed as a progression from "suck" to "finally fun" to "rule." Those levels should just move the range of enemies which you're supposed to have fun with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I picked up CoX at Biglots for $4. It even included a free month. I installed it and used the free week or so they give you when you sign in. It just wasn't very compelling. It looked nice enough, but I couldn't really get interested in it. I may use the free month sometime if I am really bored. I'm sure I'll get $4 worth of gameplay out of it.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Well, if it wasn't for the trolls, this place wouldn't be half as interesting. So, thank you indeed.
Now, got any more GNU/Stallman fanfic?