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I mean there's a very real possibility that The Radio (And the later contact, Television) exist purely to set up the 'Video killed the Radio' mission; but aside from that they're not really a reference to anything. They're just weird little media-entities that can mind control you.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:06
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I always figured Radio, Television, and Slot Machine were all somehow related. Just weird technological spirits interacting with our dimension for grins. No big deal.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:46
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Mirage posted:I always figured Radio, Television, and Slot Machine were all somehow related. Just weird technological spirits interacting with our dimension for grins. No big deal. The slot machine is actually gets explained, it's a smart hackotron machine in disguise; you learn more about it in its second story arc "High Roller's Last Gamble". I actually looked it up on the AMA and Radio, Television (and HD, from Praetoria) are 'demonic spirits' possessing random appliances.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:56
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Mirage posted:I always figured Radio, Television, and Slot Machine were all somehow related. Just weird technological spirits interacting with our dimension for grins. No big deal. The idea behind Television is that you are interacting with Television itself, like the entire concept of watching television has become sentient. Like imagine what Vernor Vinge would dream up while binge-watching TV and smoking a doobie.
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Jan 14, 2020 21:35
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Fun but completely pointless fact: The gibberish audio the Radio spouts out is Jack Emmert saying "I'm Jack Emmert and you're playing City of Villains" chopped up and scrambled.
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Jan 14, 2020 22:26
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Jack Emmert looks like a bespectacled James May now that he's grown his hair out. 
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Jan 14, 2020 22:46
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Gynovore posted:The idea behind Television is that you are interacting with Television itself, like the entire concept of watching television has become sentient. Like imagine what Vernor Vinge would dream up while binge-watching TV and smoking a doobie. This is why I was always so amused at the Freakshow blundering into Television, like some inverted Yellow Rose of Cairo.
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Jan 17, 2020 02:03
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I still can't believe this game is back. Whenever I get the urge I can just fire this game up again and mess around with toons. It owns. 
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Jan 17, 2020 21:27
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Gynovore posted:The idea behind Television is that you are interacting with Television itself, like the entire concept of watching television has become sentient. Like imagine what Vernor Vinge would dream up while binge-watching TV and smoking a doobie. Long live the New Flesh
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Jan 18, 2020 14:38
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So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking at story bible/design doc stuff related to the 5th Column, Council, and Striga Isle and now I share my findings with ya'll: 1) The original origin of the War Wolves was that Requiem took a bunch of loyal Column troops to the Path of the Dark so they could gain Nictus buddies for themselves. The Nictus, also being loyal to Requiem were like "oh you like this whole cool butch wolf motif? k *transforms hosts into wolf monsters*". This is in stark contrast to the later, dumber explanation that basically if you get some Nictus in you and it goes bad, you just turn into a wolf man because ??? Also the War Wolves are described as being...well, think how War Wolves look now then layer the Dark Control possession FX on top. (There's even a reference to them having dark powers on account of explicitly being Nictus creatures, though even in the very same document their powers list is the same "uhh....brawl?" default they shipped with.) These troops were also explicitly supposed to be Requiem's elite squad and not all over the goddamn place. Interestingly, once the Council comes along there are references to them actively ramping up both Vampyri and War Wolf production, with the latter even translating into a mechanical higher chance for troops to wolf out. 2) East Gate Bay! East Gate Bay!!! One of the seemingly throwaway missions you get early on in Striga is about how some researchers found a fish man out in East Gate Bay. Not only was this an unsubtle hinting towards the Coralax (though the actual fish men are a different species - the "Virtea" - I vaguely recall some rumblings about them being a subservient race to the Coralax or maybe they were doing yet another Peacebringer/Warshade type split) but East Gate Bay itself was supposed to be a new zone, presumably to house all the new oceanic Lovecraft poo poo. This tickles me greatly because I actually concocted my own version of this very same idea, in part by picking up these very same dropped plot points. 3) It looks like maybe we originally were supposed to fight Arakhn in the Moonfire TF like how we ended up fighting Mary Macomber in Katie Hanon. One of the scripting requirements for Striga is a 1:1 description of that fight, and specifically references a female AV. While everything else is detailed (and is 85-90% identical to what we got) Moonfire's TF only gets a single sentence summary (and a slip revealing her original name was just Lune). 4) This is one of those things that only I remember because it got stuck in my craw, but Long Jack has a grudge against the Council because of nebulous "experiments" they did on him. However, in the original design doc there's no weird ambivalence: A Council doctor working under Maestro chopped off his goddamn leg and replaced it with a robot one. Presumably this was cut because they didn't have the art resources to visibly give him a robot leg (this may have also tied in with Burkholder's non-origins below). 5) Burkholder was one of the last things designed for Striga, seemingly, as he's only identified in the design doc as "Council AV (TBD)" and such. Which would explain why he basically has no character beyond "robot arm" and "pilots giant robot". 6) The big finale with the Mega Mech was originally going to have multiple branching paths. In one, you'd just punch Burkholder until he died. In another, he'd manage to escape into the giant robot (using that awful escape code they'd later use all over CoV, yes on an AV) and that would activate the Mega Mech's head and you'd fight that against a countdown clock, destroy it, and then Burkholder would pop out and you'd punch him. And lastly, you'd completely gently caress up, the countdown clock would go off, and the Mech would launch. Cue going to some kind of destroyed city map to punch the Mega Mech. 7) Matt Miller has long since admitted the 5th Column were removed to cover their asses for the European launch. Ultimately it was completely unnecessary - the Column were never at risk of running afoul of The German Law About Nazis. The story bible and design docs make it abundantly clear though that the old chestnut of "the Council takeover was planned all along!" was pretty much a total lie. No references (beyond the Nictus stuff being a thing) to any kind of inner group pulling the strings of the Column, the Council design doc outright says they need to replace the Column in a hurry and for cheap (the other goals being to tie into Kheldians, check, and hint at SPIDER for City of Villains, also check), and literally the very first thing the Striga design doc says the goal of the zone is to "create an environment which will drive the story arc of the assimilation of the 5th Column into the Council, in order for the game to be launched in Europe". John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Jan 21, 2020 |
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Jan 21, 2020 07:16
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From what I heard, when CoH was in it's early planning stages, they hired a writer who poo poo out a mammoth pile of lore the size of a New York phone book (1). Then that guy either left or was reassigned, so the job of writing the specific pieces went to some other dudes. If one of them wanted to go off-script, their bosses said "eh, whatever", so the final result was a bunch of stuff that adhered to the bible except when it didn't. (1) For those under 25, a 'phone book' was a big book with phone numbers in it. The one for New York was, I'm told, rather big.
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Jan 21, 2020 07:43
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That original writer would be Rick Dakan, who also worked on All Flesh Must Be Eaten alongside Jack Emmert (and George Vasilakos). He's the primary author of the game's original pre-launch story bible and then left under questionable circumstances (given he went on to write a book about an evil game development studio or something similarly  I'm guessing it wasn't a totally amicable parting). From then up until about CoV or so I believe, the head story guy was Sean Fish (aka Manticore) The overwhelming majority of the game's launch-era content is drawn directly from the story bible, presumably Dakan's work. All of those seemingly throwaway standalone missions that sometimes reveal obscure and/or inane facts about a particular villain group? Straight outta the bible. That said, it's hard to pin down who's responsible for any given piece of content beyond that; the copy of the story bible we have access to goes up to Issue 2 and it explicitly says it's a rolling document open to ongoing edits. (I'd love to know who wrote the full story of Rularuu because it is cool af and we only got to see like 10% of it tops.) Though going back to the initial topic, thanks to the Council being their own separate document, we know Fish was the one who filled out their entire backstory. Certain things seemed to have been surprisingly planned well in advance, but they could've been later additions. The Dream Doctor and Dagger of Jocas, Dark Astoria's connection to Cimerora, stuff like that.  The "eh, whatever" era was distinctly a Matt Miller thing, I'm pretty sure. Basically once they had exhausted plot threads from the story bible (and again for CoV) and Sean Fish was no longer around to keep things under control is when you started to see a lot more slip-ups and allowances for basically anyone who felt like writing a story arc to go ahead and do so. It probably didn't help that once they got away from zone-based storytelling there was less of a skeleton to hang story on so stuff just got cobbled together - Faultline and the RWZ are pretty drat good, but Cimerora is a mess, for example. There was also a lovely sort of inertia where anything that did happen to get left hanging from previous writers stayed that way, because eh, they weren't around to push their ideas forward. Might as well just dump more random new crap on top instead. Edit: Looking into it, Rick Dakan was seemingly one of the original architects of CoH, then got fired for undisclosed reasons. He kept with CoH by writing the original Blue King comics run, then did in fact proceed to write a novel unsubtly based on his experiences where a burnt out game designer is fired and then gets one over on his former company by joining up with an underground hacker group or somesuch. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Jan 21, 2020 |
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Jan 21, 2020 08:23
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I found this but it doesn't seem to help with my survivability.
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Jan 21, 2020 19:10
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John Murdoch posted:
You mean fighting ten ambushes of increasingly strong Arakhns? It would help explain how much of a speedbump she is right now.
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Jan 21, 2020 23:27
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Yup. Similarly, there's a brief reference to escort code that just like the 10 round slug fest wouldn't be seen until I5. Another piece of cut content: Striga was supposed to have transport trucks that would move from the Council base, through the Wolf's Throat, and then out to the docks. You could attack said trucks and once destroyed there was a chance for the surviving Council goons to pop out and attack. I think the otherwise arbitrary-seeming "go hunt bad guys in the Wolf's Throat" mission was meant to be "go hunt trucks" instead. They obviously didn't get enough time to implement them and given how janky moving vehicles are in the engine to begin with it probably wasn't a huge loss, though it's interesting that the Wolf's Throat itself almost exists just to justify those trucks. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Jan 22, 2020 |
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Jan 22, 2020 02:22
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Speaking of ye olde stuff, apparently everyone's good friend Jack Emmert is still getting work, which is a bold choice. Daybreak (formerly SOE) has split into 3 studios:https://www.daybreakgames.com/news/daybreak-games-introduces-three-new-franchise-studios-january-2020?fbclid=IwAR030xPi73SzUqMQKZr0TN4b8DJJ_Gn7Prm8qvpW3p4vE4x_Sw1mW6VMFk0 posted:Dimensional Ink Games in Austin develops and operates DC Universe Online, the one-of-a kind DC Super Hero-based MMORPG enjoyed by millions across PC and consoles. Dimensional Ink will be led by Jack Emmert, the mastermind behind City of Heroes, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter. The studio will continue to support DCUO while developing its next high-profile action MMO project starting in 2020.
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Jan 22, 2020 02:31
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lmao doesn't even mention Champions
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Jan 22, 2020 02:55
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That's just people's reaction to that game.
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Jan 22, 2020 02:57
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John Murdoch posted:lmao doesn't even mention Champions When I think of Jack, I think of CoX and CO. I didn't even know he did anything for STO or Neverwinter.
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Jan 22, 2020 14:24
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We live. We patch.   Been some hard time getting this together - the patch itself has been ready since the 13th of December - but we found bugs in the patcher itself, and weren't equipped to redeploy it. Finally found a way around the problems - and it required three solid weeks to bend the game to fit. City of Titans: Titan Create 1.0.5 is live. More patterns. Glitches fixed. Female actually working.
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Jan 23, 2020 01:50
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Warcabbit posted:Female actually working. But that's...impossible! Everyone knows that women are too difficult and too costly to animate!!!
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Jan 23, 2020 02:40
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I need more titans
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Jan 23, 2020 05:30
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I need more titans You've waited a decade, you can wait another, jeez.
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Jan 23, 2020 05:35
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New homecoming update dropped, lot of tank and MM changes, check out the discord for everything. Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character.
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Jan 23, 2020 18:29
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Nonexistence posted:Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character. 
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Jan 23, 2020 18:31
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quote:Fixed a bug that allowed players to inadvertently delete the geometry of entire zones. lol seems bad
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Jan 23, 2020 19:57
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That's super cool. Too bad I've never found my groove with controllers. Maybe I'll have to try again.
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Jan 23, 2020 20:57
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site posted:lol seems bad A few weeks ago on Torchbearer there was a random server wide admin message out of the blue, almost verbatim, "DO NOT ABUSE THE EXPLOIT. WE ARE FIXING IT. ANYONE ABUSING THE EXPLOIT WILL RECEIVE AN UNAPPEALABLE PERMANENT BAN." This caused, uh, some speculation as to what was up, then 15 min later there was a message that the floors were back in Cimerora. Wonder if this was the culprit.
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Jan 23, 2020 21:52
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Nonexistence posted:A few weeks ago on Torchbearer there was a random server wide admin message out of the blue, almost verbatim, "DO NOT ABUSE THE EXPLOIT. WE ARE FIXING IT. ANYONE ABUSING THE EXPLOIT WILL RECEIVE AN UNAPPEALABLE PERMANENT BAN." This caused, uh, some speculation as to what was up, then 15 min later there was a message that the floors were back in Cimerora. Wonder if this was the culprit. lmao
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Jan 23, 2020 23:21
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Nonexistence posted:New homecoming update dropped, lot of tank and MM changes, check out the discord for everything. Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character. what happened to the days of patch notes being on websites instead of chat rooms
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Jan 24, 2020 01:03
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the discord just links to the website https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/14458-patch-notes-for-january-23rd-2020-issue-26-page-4/
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Jan 24, 2020 01:06
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Nonexistence posted:Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character. Dear god. I've been wanting this ever since launch. Tragic oversight that they haven't also done the same for Phantasm and the Phantom Lore pets, though. Maybe next patch.
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Jan 24, 2020 04:35
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Nonexistence posted:New homecoming update dropped, lot of tank and MM changes, check out the discord for everything. Special mention to Phantom Army now being able to summon copies of your character. Hell yeah that whips rear end
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Jan 24, 2020 17:46
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Sounds like the tanker changes didn't work out. More damage, but less aggro management.
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Jan 25, 2020 02:43
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Freakazoid_ posted:Sounds like the tanker changes didn't work out. More damage, but less aggro management. But seriously, how does "Now tank punch harder" result in less aggro 
Section Z fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 03:30
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Unless there's stuff being posted elsewhere, the core problem with the patch seems to be some kind of nasty interaction involving Brutes, Burn, and/or their taunt auras that's leading to mobs freaking the hell out and running for the hills. Outside of there being more undiscovered bugs, actual Tankers should be holding aggro like champs for all the changes they got. John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Jan 25, 2020 |
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Jan 25, 2020 06:57
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I'm seeing the tanker AoE changes already. Spinning Strike actually hit stuff on the other side of me! I was floored!
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Jan 25, 2020 08:03
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Yeah, near as I can tell Tankers are just way better across the board and make a bucketload of powers crazy strong with the 50% Range/Radius boost they get now. Frost is gigantic and Repulsing Torrent from Kin. Melee hits entire hallways.
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Jan 25, 2020 08:17
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Patch 2 for City of Titans is out. More outfits, fewer bugs.
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Jan 26, 2020 15:41
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I need to trick someone into giving me $75, so I can Fly Free…
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Jan 26, 2020 15:57
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