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Sidestep
May 16, 2012

Someone talk to me about Sentinel. I don't recall this being an option way back.

Is it just blaster with scrapper secondaries? I was always a fan of the willpower secondary and if that means I can do some cowboy dressup, dual revolver, doesnt die when sneezed at vigilante action; well, I am more excited now than when I found out this crawled back from then dead.

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HPanda
Sep 5, 2008

Sidestep posted:

Someone talk to me about Sentinel. I don't recall this being an option way back.

Is it just blaster with scrapper secondaries? I was always a fan of the willpower secondary and if that means I can do some cowboy dressup, dual revolver, doesnt die when sneezed at vigilante action; well, I am more excited now than when I found out this crawled back from then dead.

It's the pet project class of the Homecoming devs. The general consensus is that the class is pretty cool if maybe slightly undertuned, but there's some potential there. Their gimmick of lowering resistance is interesting for teams, but their damage numbers are perhaps a little lower than they should be.

Mystic Mongol
Jan 5, 2007

Your life's been thrown in disarray already--I wouldn't want you to feel pressured.


College Slice

Sidestep posted:

Someone talk to me about Sentinel.

Is it just blaster with scrapper secondaries?

Basically! It was added in the period the game was run in secret, by the fan admins.

Sentinels are considered slightly undertuned (don't do enough damage, aren't actually all that survivable) but if you want is a blaster that doesn't die when you look at it, well, there ya go.

(Play corruptor instead)

(Or play sentinels, they're basically fine, you didn't want to top the DPS charts anyway, they're not real)

Abroham Lincoln
Sep 19, 2011

Note to self: This one's the good one



Sidestep posted:

Someone talk to me about Sentinel. I don't recall this being an option way back.

Is it just blaster with scrapper secondaries? I was always a fan of the willpower secondary and if that means I can do some cowboy dressup, dual revolver, doesnt die when sneezed at vigilante action; well, I am more excited now than when I found out this crawled back from then dead.

Pretty much. They have lower damage than Blasters but higher than Corruptors (somewhere around a Dominator's ranged damage) and their defense values are slightly worse than a Scrapper or Brute's, with a fairly low HP total as well.

The AT mechanic is building a bar and using your 1st or 2nd attack to debuff your target or heal yourself and restore endurance. All the attacks naturally debuff resists by a slight amount, too.

It's a little underpowered at the moment, but it's due for a revamp on its inherent mechanic and some numbers tuning soon-ish. The upside is that the blast and defense sets got slight redesigns when they were ported from other ATs, and are probably the most well-rounded variants of the sets. For instance, their blast sets don't have snipes, but all their stun/sleep/hold powers instead have very high damage and are actually useful.

Sidestep
May 16, 2012

How are the Score / Homecoming teams about updates and considered changes?

I haven't had much of a chance to play beyond messing with the creator for an hour or so. The notes I was looking at seem like they are doing a pretty solid job for a fan project. I didnt see any major changes in the i25 notes that worried me and the fixes looked to be well considered and tested.

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Kheldarn posted:

Give him the Rainbow Path Aura.

I gave him pixie sparkles instead. :sparkles:


Nothing really special about Highschool Crush. Both her and HVN are the provided costume set with a few tweaks. I didn't like the gloves and boots the ninja started with, for instance.


I am, however, really happy with Enigmon. He used to be wearing Bio Armor shoulders and boots before I found the Ascension belt and was like "Those holographic sigils are awesome, let's put more on." He also had the lantern back piece, but that was really distracting so I swapped it for a cape.


Ven Hao is your basic kung fu man, except he shoots out a lot of ice instead.


And Animal CTRL, being the first character I built, is fairly plain. I couldn't really find any decent pieces that said specifically "robot dogcatcher," so he's just generically robotic. He's very short, in Beast Run stance he comes up to about a wolf's shoulder.


Also, I made this costume, but I have no idea what build or name to give it. I have like half of a description just kinda boggling at this Roman robot, maybe it was built by committee or focus group or something.

Dareon fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Jul 2, 2019

HPanda
Sep 5, 2008

Dareon posted:


Also, I made this costume, but I have no idea what build or name to give it. I have like half of a description just kinda boggling at this Roman robot, maybe it was built by committee or focus group or something.

Bobius Fexx

I AM THE MOON
Dec 21, 2012

Merilan posted:

omg they can just straight up be Pawns. "Heroes travel in packs, Arisen!" "They love Kinetics!"

It seems all roads lead to Atlas Park

Abroham Lincoln
Sep 19, 2011

Note to self: This one's the good one



Sidestep posted:

How are the Score / Homecoming teams about updates and considered changes?

I haven't had much of a chance to play beyond messing with the creator for an hour or so. The notes I was looking at seem like they are doing a pretty solid job for a fan project. I didnt see any major changes in the i25 notes that worried me and the fixes looked to be well considered and tested.

So far they've had some minor patches for bug fixes and unfucking some face textures and power effects, and have been working on some balance changes in the interim. They seem competent if not a little slow? But that could also just be them taking the feedback more seriously.

HPanda
Sep 5, 2008
I'd honestly be fine with them just throwing up the original code and saying have fun, so continuing on at whatever pace they want is great by me.

Sidestep
May 16, 2012

Cool, seems like things are pretty solid then.

Is anyone still on the goon server? The discord and PS thread seem a little quiet.

I have a character on Indomitable that hopefully i will have a bit of time to log into before the holiday weekend. Goonsquad is the global channel, right?

Harrow
Jun 30, 2012

It seems like the vast majority of us are on Indomitable, and yeah, goonsquad is the channel. It's a little quiet right now since the new FFXIV expansion just dropped, but a few of us in the FFXIV FC chat were already talking about being excited to go back to CoH once we get our FFXIV fill.

CoH is just a real special game. Nothing else quite like it.

VoidTek
Jul 30, 2002

HAPPYELF WAS RIGHT
I play on Everlasting instead of Indom because I greatly prefer the bonkers insanity of RP servers (it's actually a bit tamer than I was expecting, but I also stay out of Pocket D) but the last week or so seems to have slowed down in general, probably due to both a major content release in WoW and a new expansion for FFXIV. Usually populated enough that you should at least be able to find a group at any hours.

clone on the phone
Aug 5, 2003

Levels 1-50 felt like a superhero for the most part, and now with tier 3 incarnates in all my slots I feel like an unstoppable god

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

I made another one. I was thinking about tropes from early comic eras, and there was the noir detective and the Junior Space Ranger floating into my mind, so I combined the two. I only regret you can't put a regular backpack on over a trenchcoat. Pistols/Traps, which is already proving to be a face-beating good time in early missions. Still, more reason to group up now.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

spectralent posted:

Much shittier; villain zones all look so samey and miserable.

You can kind of see how villain zones went wrong, as they were a response to how zones shook out heroside. Once they had a more functional idea of what City of Heroes actually was, Hazard/Trial Zones were basically worthless* so for CoV they tried to compress everything down into 6-7 zones instead of a massive sprawl. So you had this weird blend of standard city zone, hazard zone dangers, and also a weird emphasis on zone events that never really went anywhere and felt more like something they could hype on the back of the box. All filtered through the obnoxious "bad guys naturally live in squalor and industrial zones" aesthetic.

There's no like, overriding stakes or goal or score waiting at the end of anything you do villainside. Imagine if the Casino Heist in the Summer Blockbuster Event was actually a piece of villain content about "for realsies" robbing the Golden Giza, something you worked up to over the course of the zone? Sharkhead is the absolute nadir of this IMO where 99% of its content is about A) the plight of the Scrapyarders (why should I care?) and B) building up how they're basically stripmining an elder god for profit. But before Vincent Ross came along your character was always firmly on the periphery of it and at best you were hired, by Arachnos of course, to go punch said elder god in the eye and then promptly forget about it. KIRK CAGE, THE BOSS OF THE MINING CONSORTIUM, NEVER EVEN APPEARS IN THE GAME ARHAHKFKJSFHKSFHSKFS

Praetoria did a far, far better job of nailing that sort of condensed design and giving player characters sensible motivations for existing in that world. Whether you wanted to preserve the pretty, sparkling utopia or tear it down to reveal the grime underneath, you had some kind of forward movement to work towards and the art design supports both approaches.

*As an aside, please take the time to go check out Echo: Faultline sometime. I can understand why they made it more sane to navigate, but holy poo poo the scale of the original zone is insane and genuinely scary at times. Same thing for Terra Volta. I still have no loving clue why they thought the game was going to be so busy and huge that they needed these crazy out-of-scale zones to support the population, but now they're actually kind of cool to go back to because they're so out of place.

spectralent posted:

Oh, no, more, there's a bit where the devs talk about how Oranbega would emerge underneath Perez, and be given UN protections as a sovereign nation.

The Rogue Isles is merely somehow in a state of open war without any explicit superpower backing that's somehow not getting bombed.

It's made even more insane because Warburg exists. An island entirely focused on producing and launching ICBMs that is, ostensibly, not controlled by even Recluse but instead a rogue Arachnos marshal.

The whole "are we at war with Arachnos" thing is a huge lore snarl because apparently Longbow's invasion of the Isles is legitimately illegal (this is why their base is in Nerva, because it's not actually part of the Isles proper...please don't ever actually look at a map of how the Rogue Isles are laid out because you'll blow a gasket when you try to reconcile those two facts), but also Arachnos flies over to gently caress up Paragon all the time so???

Frankly Arachnos as a whole is just plain frustrating because for every 1 mildly interesting idea they added 2 parts goofy Cobra-style bullshit. Plus you cannot convince me that the entire enterprise isn't just Recluse being a jilted lover and trying to catch Statesman's attention again.

I might end up doing a deep dive on Arachnos at some point for funsies and see if I can piece together just what the hell is going on there.

PoptartsNinja posted:

CoV makes a lot more sense when you realize the villains are Lord Recluse, Captain Mako, Ghost Widow, Lightning Edgelord, and Hug Scorpion.

Uh, excuse me, Scirocco is no edgelord. He is clearly a goth. :colbert:

Meanwhile Anti-Matter is an incel.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Jul 2, 2019

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

John Murdoch posted:

Frankly Arachnos as a whole is just plain frustrating because for every 1 mildly interesting idea they added 2 parts goofy Cobra-style bullshit. Plus you cannot convince me that the entire enterprise isn't just Recluse being a jilted lover and trying to catch Statesman's attention again.

I think you may be undervaluing the amount of goofy Cobra-style bullshit in Arachnos, but what do I know, I'm just an ominous floating orb zombie that throws sick people off rooftops.

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

LordSaturn posted:

you guys love to talk poo poo about redside but there's goon teams over there regularly. newspapers are fun, bank robberies are better than safeguards, and the contacts are uniformly more interesting than blueside. say what you will about Peter Themari, at least he's got an ethos

Newspapers were fun but the police scanner missions were narratively better and both got supplanted heavily by tips (which they really should've just kept adding more of). Contacts are mixed; some of them are fantastic, while a whole lot of them you're basically just a mercenary or hired muscle and the "what kind of villain are you?" thing is really obvious. Themari is a pretty good one where there's an actual scheme, at least, but Golden Roller's from the same level range and is literally "do some breaking and entering and legbreaking for a made man", and overall, none of the arcs lead up to anything. There's little cameos, but, for instance, in CoH you do lots of clockwork missions from 1-20 and cap it off with the Synapse TF and you'll be foiling evil schemes and working up to taking down the archvillain behind it all. I think the only thing that neatly ties up to that is Sharkhead.

And why should it? You're a villain, you've got plans of your own, you don't care about catching true masterminds! But it's part of the narrative issues CoV has.

Individually, CoV has a bunch of great arcs, but overall CoV doesn't make a fantastically cohesive experience IMO, and there's a few weird gaps.

usenet celeb 1992
Jun 1, 2000

he thought quoting borges would make him popular

John Murdoch posted:

I still have no loving clue why they thought the game was going to be so busy and huge that they needed these crazy out-of-scale zones to support the population

Because, around launch and for maybe 6 months after, it was. Server populations were at their absolute peak, zones were busy, and street sweeping in hazard zones remained the favored method of fast leveling for quite a while until missions got beefed up and more interesting zone-based arcs like Striga were implemented.

It was a valid approach given the state of the game at the time but that population didn't last, and it's likely a consequence, at least in part, of so much dev time and effort needing to be spread across so many zones, leading to the perception that things were static and stagnating. The devs knew they needed to scale back to focus on really fleshing out zones and making them more dynamic, but perhaps it was an error to do it (at first) by adding even more zones rather than revamping the unused old zones as they eventually did.

OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart

Sidestep posted:

Someone talk to me about Sentinel. I don't recall this being an option way back.

Is it just blaster with scrapper secondaries? I was always a fan of the willpower secondary and if that means I can do some cowboy dressup, dual revolver, doesnt die when sneezed at vigilante action; well, I am more excited now than when I found out this crawled back from then dead.

I have a 41 Elec/Elec Sentinel which is damned fun and tends to play in the middle of everything since the range is so short and has a AOE that goes off regularly.
And is very survivable. Also have a 38 Beam/Bio that plays a little more ranged but the range is still quite short, but once again, very survivable.

On the other hand I started an ice/ice that seemed a little weak, and has sat in its teens for awhile and doubt I will play again without some changes.

In general, Sentinels do lesser damage without any team abilities. Simply being able to live longer. Which is a good thing, I have survived situations that a blaster even with its new changes never could.
But just know that a pubbie team looking a for a damage dealer isnt going to pick you.
That said, a goon team will always take you.

BuhamutZeo
Jun 1, 2011
So from day 1 of live I played a Gun/Gadget blaster. My go-to tactic was to go stealth, find the boss halfway through the dungeon while my team cleared adds. I'd then proceed to stack proximity mines on top of the boss. When my party arrived I'd then put down a time bomb and step back. I'm sure it wasn't optimal but it always made me giddy to chunk a boss's health right as the fight began. I can still do this, right? :ohdear:

MechaCrash
Jan 1, 2013

usenet celeb 1992 posted:

Because, around launch and for maybe 6 months after, it was. Server populations were at their absolute peak, zones were busy, and street sweeping in hazard zones remained the favored method of fast leveling for quite a while until missions got beefed up and more interesting zone-based arcs like Striga were implemented.

It was a valid approach given the state of the game at the time but that population didn't last, and it's likely a consequence, at least in part, of so much dev time and effort needing to be spread across so many zones, leading to the perception that things were static and stagnating. The devs knew they needed to scale back to focus on really fleshing out zones and making them more dynamic, but perhaps it was an error to do it (at first) by adding even more zones rather than revamping the unused old zones as they eventually did.

A common complaint at the time is that the city zones that the game funneled you through naturally were old and busted, and the arcs the game heavily pointed you towards were janky bullshit. Revamping those zones would have been helpful, because then players would stop being shoved into boring zones and pointed towards garbage arcs full of patrols and kill-alls and street hunts, but the response was usually "revamping an old zone and making a new zone take the same amount of effort, and wouldn't you rather have a new zone?" The players would then point to the "new zones" that stand empty and forgotten, but I don't think there was ever much response to that.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

spectralent posted:

Individually, CoV has a bunch of great arcs, but overall CoV doesn't make a fantastically cohesive experience IMO, and there's a few weird gaps.

There's a fair amount of evidence lurking around that CoV went through some pretty substantial rewrites over its development which likely explains the unevenness. You can see bits and pieces of it in-game as-is, like Longbow Nullifiers. Here's the unit description: "Nullifiers are notorious for temporarily taking away a villain's greatest asset—his powers." There's a contact who wants revenge on Longbow because they permanently drained her powers using...a Nullifier Rifle. You get a temp power version of it and it is basically a Sapper weapon mark 2. None of this represents what Nullifiers actually do in-game, and they just use a regular frankengun. Given how much people hate Sappers, I think it's obvious what happened there.

Another example I stumbled across was Peter Themari's arc has a stray reference to "Pyro Clockwork" which don't actually exist. Bat'Zul-posessed Clockwork DO appear in some missions and as zone spawns but they just use normal Clockwork attacks.

A pretty substantial one is only in the files. Originally Siren's Call was going to have the ghosts of those slain in the megaton blast hanging around and ready to murder you (with Sonic attacks, I believe). And on that note, there's a lot of story material that got invalidated or revised over time. The official Prima CoV Strategy Guide has zone descriptions, including a backstory for Siren's Call, which then got overridden by newer drafts.

I mean, Arachnos wasn't even Arachnos at first but instead SPIDER.

usenet celeb 1992 posted:

Because, around launch and for maybe 6 months after, it was. Server populations were at their absolute peak, zones were busy, and street sweeping in hazard zones remained the favored method of fast leveling for quite a while until missions got beefed up and more interesting zone-based arcs like Striga were implemented.

It was a valid approach given the state of the game at the time but that population didn't last, and it's likely a consequence, at least in part, of so much dev time and effort needing to be spread across so many zones, leading to the perception that things were static and stagnating. The devs knew they needed to scale back to focus on really fleshing out zones and making them more dynamic, but perhaps it was an error to do it (at first) by adding even more zones rather than revamping the unused old zones as they eventually did.

But wouldn't multiple zone instances handle most of that? A lot of those massive hazard zones have overlapping level ranges, too. I can understand some of those places existing, but all of them taken together is a bit much.

MechaCrash posted:

A common complaint at the time is that the city zones that the game funneled you through naturally were old and busted, and the arcs the game heavily pointed you towards were janky bullshit. Revamping those zones would have been helpful, because then players would stop being shoved into boring zones and pointed towards garbage arcs full of patrols and kill-alls and street hunts, but the response was usually "revamping an old zone and making a new zone take the same amount of effort, and wouldn't you rather have a new zone?" The players would then point to the "new zones" that stand empty and forgotten, but I don't think there was ever much response to that.

I remember this coming up time and again, and one of the last times it did Matt Miller specifically said that revamping zones "didn't make the game bigger" :rolleyes:

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Jul 2, 2019

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

MechaCrash posted:

A common complaint at the time is that the city zones that the game funneled you through naturally were old and busted, and the arcs the game heavily pointed you towards were janky bullshit. Revamping those zones would have been helpful, because then players would stop being shoved into boring zones and pointed towards garbage arcs full of patrols and kill-alls and street hunts, but the response was usually "revamping an old zone and making a new zone take the same amount of effort, and wouldn't you rather have a new zone?" The players would then point to the "new zones" that stand empty and forgotten, but I don't think there was ever much response to that.

The Hollows is kind of a fantastic example, even, because it got a kind of tidy-up rather than a total overhaul and it's way better for it. Boomtown was like 50% of the way to a revamp, looking at it.

I guess, what were the "new zones" nobody went to? The Shadow Shard was a real waste, but people went to Striga and Croatoa, not least because they had some great temp powers.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

spectralent posted:

Boomtown was like 50% of the way to a revamp, looking at it.

Not even. I'm pretty sure the construction you see there today was ported into the zone proper by I25 efforts. Originally that stuff only existed in a single obscure redside mission before the map was finally reused for a tip. I24 had a renewed focus on the Council but I think even the Council Base and associated zone event is more I25 content. The base is certainly just transplanted from the Council dimension map.

It was downright infuriating after a point because they wanted to extend Steel Canyon itself to add a loving rocket launch site rather than use the big empty zone just north of it that could've used the love. (This is what the construction in NE corner of Steel was supposed to be for, btw. You can actually place the rockets/shuttles we would've used to go into space in your SG bases. Also all of this was planned way back in I8.)

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jul 2, 2019

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

John Murdoch posted:

Not even. I'm pretty sure the construction you see there today was ported into the zone proper by I25 efforts. Originally that stuff only existed in a single obscure redside mission before the map was finally reused for a tip. I24 had a renewed focus on the Council but I think even the Council Base and associated zone event is more I25 content. The base is certainly just transplanted from the Council dimension map.

Hot drat! I didn't realise they had actual new content. That's a lot of work for an amateur team.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
It's pretty basic in the grand scheme of things but the Market Crash trial is, AFAIK, entirely original content rather than just porting geometry or polishing up unfinished I24 content.

Abroham Lincoln
Sep 19, 2011

Note to self: This one's the good one



John Murdoch posted:

It was downright infuriating after a point because they wanted to extend Steel Canyon itself to add a loving rocket launch site rather than use the big empty zone just north of it that could've used the love. (This is what the construction in NE corner of Steel was supposed to be for, btw. You can actually place the rockets/shuttles we would've used to go into space in your SG bases. Also all of this was planned way back in I8.)

Isn't there also one of these in Port Oakes that was added later along?

iirc the moon base stuff was finally coming around for... i26? i27? The near-ish future before the shutdown, more or less. I'd have to dig around in the old dev Q&As, but they mentioned it a few times there.

I ride bikes all day
Sep 10, 2007

I shitposted in the same thread for 2 years and all I got was this red text av. Ask me about my autism!



College Slice
I'm surprised this doesn't get brought up: if you want to play a tough ranged guy, try the Bane Spider. They're pretty sturdy and the powerset is good. Except Omega Maneuver. We don't talk about Omega Maneuver. But they crap out good AOE damage, have better versions of the Leadership toggles, and can handle some return fire.

Just make sure you have a good group to carry you to 24, because those first few levels are balls out awful.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD
A bane spider with omega maneuver, huh. Interesting build choice.

Gynovore
Jun 17, 2009

Forget your RoboCoX or your StickyCoX or your EvilCoX, MY CoX has Blinking Bewbs!

WHY IS THIS GAME DEAD?!

John Murdoch posted:

*As an aside, please take the time to go check out Echo: Faultline sometime. I can understand why they made it more sane to navigate, but holy poo poo the scale of the original zone is insane and genuinely scary at times. Same thing for Terra Volta. I still have no loving clue why they thought the game was going to be so busy and huge that they needed these crazy out-of-scale zones to support the population, but now they're actually kind of cool to go back to because they're so out of place.

When the game was in development, the assumption was that that majority of the players would spend the majority of their time street sweeping. This explains a whole bunch of things:

* Why those huge, empty hazard zones exist, and why Independence Port is so big.
* Why the 'looking for patrol' lfg setting exists.
* Why early missions are so lazily written. "Hey, uh, hero, I think I saw some badguys in that warehouse, go check it out?"
* And so poorly playtested. "Hey, uh, level 6 hero, here's a mission in the center of Perez. Pack a lunch."

I AM THE MOON
Dec 21, 2012

John Murdoch posted:

It's pretty basic in the grand scheme of things but the Market Crash trial is, AFAIK, entirely original content rather than just porting geometry or polishing up unfinished I24 content.

it also awards a purple recipe on first completion

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Gynovore posted:

* And so poorly playtested. "Hey, uh, level 6 hero, here's a mission in the center of Perez. Pack a lunch."

Oh, that's why I got a mission to beat up purple-conning Lost in Perez. I had wondered.

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

Abroham Lincoln posted:

Isn't there also one of these in Port Oakes that was added later along?

The big flat platform it was going to be built on was added and then eventually removed. But yes, the construction work in Port Oakes between the two ferries originally extended out towards the water and was going to be the redside launch site.


Also I think a point that's getting lost is that I'm less baffled by the raw size of the hazard zones and more agape at how out of scale to anything else they are. Independence Port is needlessly large, yes, but it otherwise looks like a pretty standard industrial port. By comparison Terra Volta is just nuts in how huge and sprawling and tall and deep it goes.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jul 3, 2019

Howard Beale
Feb 22, 2001

It's like this, Peanut

Gynovore posted:

* Why early missions are so lazily written. "Hey, uh, hero, I think I saw some badguys in that warehouse, go check it out?"

Is this also why you get way too many "Just go and beat up 10 Skulls" missions? I always figured they were put in place for introducing you to a new area and for when you had finished a contact's story arc but hadn't leveled past their mission range.

MechaCrash
Jan 1, 2013

It's also why mission completion bonuses were low to non-existent in the early days. The thought was that you'd take a mission, and stop and fight along the way. The idea that "if I choose to do a task, I want to go directly to that task instead of taking a fucktrillion detours" did manage to get through, at least.

Hefty Leftist
Jun 26, 2011

"You know how vodka or whiskey are distilled multiple times to taste good? It's the same with shit. After being digested for the third time shit starts to taste reeeeeeaaaally yummy."


all this talk really makes me want a City of Heroes 2. I suppose Champions Online was that in a sense, but I've heard that MMO took a nosedive or something

usenet celeb 1992
Jun 1, 2000

he thought quoting borges would make him popular

John Murdoch posted:

But wouldn't multiple zone instances handle most of that? A lot of those massive hazard zones have overlapping level ranges, too. I can understand some of those places existing, but all of them taken together is a bit much.

Even before you hit the saturation point where another zone instance would trigger, you'd still hit a point where mobs were being cleared faster than they could respawn and there would be killstealing, hurt feelings, etc. Given their self-imposed restraints (their views on how popular street sweeping would be vs. instanced missions, as has been pointed out), it made a certain amount of sense to expand the game zones laterally.

quote:

I remember this coming up time and again, and one of the last times it did Matt Miller specifically said that revamping zones "didn't make the game bigger" :rolleyes:

Well, they eventually did revamp a number of zones (Hollows, Faultline, RWZ, Boomtown next) as well as adding zone events to existing ones. It's good to remind ourselves that in so many ways, despite their own inherent predispositions, the devs were willing to listen to the playerbase in a lot of ways and improve the game in ways that haven't been replicated since.

On the other hand, First Ward, Night Ward, and arguably the entire existence of Praetoria (firmly separated from both the existing hero and villain worlds) indicates that they backslid a bit on that revelation. Whatever the merits of the Praetorian content (and don't get me wrong, they were significant), it was a fundamental mistake to take a player population that had already dwindled, and not only divide it up into a third faction, but also have forced single-player content.

usenet celeb 1992
Jun 1, 2000

he thought quoting borges would make him popular
feh, quote is not edit

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OgNar
Oct 26, 2002

They tapdance not, neither do they fart

BuhamutZeo posted:

So from day 1 of live I played a Gun/Gadget blaster. My go-to tactic was to go stealth, find the boss halfway through the dungeon while my team cleared adds. I'd then proceed to stack proximity mines on top of the boss. When my party arrived I'd then put down a time bomb and step back. I'm sure it wasn't optimal but it always made me giddy to chunk a boss's health right as the fight began. I can still do this, right? :ohdear:

Well sure, but in the meantime the rest of the team is fighting (and possibly dying multiple times) to get to your position, which would have been easier if you just would have stuck with the team and had fun on the way.

I'm actually seeing this a bit, where someone will just stealth to the end of the map and just attack the boss.
Why not just join one of the servers where you can just give yourself max XP and not have to do all the missions.

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