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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, Champions Online is coming out pretty soon, but the lead developer is the same guy who developed City of Heroes, so don't expect major differences between the two. From what I've heard, a lot of the old disgruntled CoH players that went over there are hopping mad at how the game has turned out, since they left CoH to get away from the very conventions that are starting to show up in CO.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
But that's orthogonal to what I was saying there.
Isn't that Normal for Slashdot?