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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."
I Love CoX... much better gameplay and mature community than many other MMORPG (at least on the european servers). I also appreciate much the fact that my subscription fee goes to pay new issues that are regularly made available to me without additional charges (14 issues released with a lot of additional content to the game in 5 years and counting...) Way to go NCSoft, I wish you did not suck so much at advertising that game...
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.
That's only true if you want to play that way. Which not everyone did. And just so we're clear, there have been folks who managed to do 1 - 50 in 10 or 12 hours with regular "farm mission" content made by the developers.
The main problem I have with the Mission Designer is that everyone does the same thing over and over. I like some of the user created missions. Some of them are really well done or very funny, but not everyone I play with wants to read the clues or stop for the enemy speeches.
But then, at some point, it's also nice to have a three-hour path to level 25 or so, to not have to wait for a particular character to mature. For experienced players, I'm fine with not having to slog through 30 or 40 hours of play to get a Dominator or Controller (characters that are hard to solo) to the point where they have enough tools to be effective for high-level play. Some CoX players, like me, have been in the game for every bit of five years, and we know what we're giving up with that trivialized content. If the mechanic exists to make some of those things easily skipped, at least treat us like adults and let us, the players, decide if we want to or not.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I like CoH but it is pretty anemic on content compared to other games, which is fine for what it is. It's about dinking around making new characters and then trying it all over again. But there is far more content in one expansion for the major MMO of your choice than in the entire Heroes game from start to finish, and it's not 900 different versions of the Tech building or the Office building with herds of enemies plopped in by the computer. Plus they still get pretty much the same amount of additional content patched in the interim.
The gameplay is a big draw for me. The one thing I wish they'd do is put in more bosses with interesting mechanics -- i.e. special attacks that require heroes to get out of the way, things like the Hollows trial where you need to split up to activate things simultaneously, etc. Apart from three or four fights in both sides of the entire game the deepest strategy is point the "boss" away from the rest of the team. In a game with as many mobility powers as CoH you can do sooo much better.
Unfortunately, what Parent posted here is 100% correct. And unfortunately, what he posted is also largely correct of the "custom" Mission Architect missions. The only thing you can actually do with MA is create your own custom baddies and baddie groups. Oh, and write the dialog... which is very important, because everyone always reads that, right? Not only can you not create your own maps, you can't even place the baddies or items yourself. (Besides the vague options of "front", "back", or "middle" of the map.) You're also limited to exactly the same objectives that have already been used in a gazillion other missions. For instance, I would have loved to create an arc of missions that sees you rescue someone in the first mission, have them "help" you in the second mission, only to betray you and turn rogue halfway through, along with a few other groups of seeming "good" guys in the first part of the second map. But no, you can't even do that.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
There's a difference between being a signature character and having an impact on the world, and there are a lot of things that can be done to let the players feel like they're having an impact on the game world. I don't accept that MMO worlds need to remain more or less static - I actually think that's largely a relic of the initial constraints on the genre coupled with a lack of effort on developing non-static game worlds; there have been several games that actually do let players change things fairly dramatically.
WoW did it by having "phases" in various zones. You go into a zone and there's a big undead war going on. You complete a few quests and the way you see the zone is a bit different - maybe the undead are being pushed back (or advancing). You complete a few more quests, or maybe the big quest in that zone, and now you have an area that's been completely remade. This is pretty basic - the player doesn't get to choose what happens, but their actions have an effect that is permanent and noticeable to them.
Star Wars: Galaxies did it by having the entire economy be player driven and allowing player cities to be created. None of my characters became as iconic as Luke or Leia, but I became very well known as an armorsmith and merchant, and at one point had a veritable army of players working for/with me to help me provide wares for half my server.
MU*S did it by letting players create areas and zones once they'd "beaten" the game by hitting the maximum level. Players could make new zones and submit them for inclusion in the main game on many MU*S. Some setups made it so that the player could create stuff from the very beginning. Granted, the much smaller playerbase made it feasible to do this, but I don't think it's an intractable problem. Second Life does this, reasonably well, though there are some problems there, too, as is well known by anyone familiar with the game.
Those earlier games have shown that it's possible to do it (kinda, sorta) - I don't think it's unreasonable to think that the future evolution of the genre will have opportunities for players to be able to actually have an impact on the game world.
As to the size of the CoX world, the problem is partly massively fast travel speeds, yes, but also that it's just so bland. The art direction of the zones in these games is less than inspired. I understand that people are in a city, but really - there are ways to make the city look interesting. I live in Chicago and have for the last 30+ years of my life, and yet I continually find interesting buildings and structures - I refuse to believe that a super-hero city has to be as dull as CoX's world has become. I don't care how big the game world is if it's nothing but the same uninspired looking office buildings, warehouses and really poorly rendered "parks."
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.