Category: Character Design

CO Pre-Orders

*sigh*

I don’t mind Micro-Transaction Madness, but fergoshsakes, don’t make me feel like who I buy the game from will influence whether I have a good time or not.

Cryptic has announced the preorder bonuses for their upcoming massively-multiplayer online superhero game Champions Online, with what you get depending on where you buy.

No matter where you preorder Champions Online you’ll gain access to the open beta test on August 17th, 30 days game time, and five in-game microtransaction dollars, but after that it all comes down to where you pick up the game. Want access to the early-start preview weekend? Then you’ll want to buy from GameStop or Best Buy, depending on whether you want an in-game pet or special costume pieces.

Wal-Mart preorders are for those who prefer real-life swag, with a lenticular cover, and iron on patch, and a zone map packed into its exclusive limited edition package, while Amazon is the place for those who value avatar looks above all, with three exclusive costume pieces on offer.

None of this sounds game-play-breaking, but it’s still annoying. I’ll probably rely on my Game Strategist Wife to figure out what makes most sense.

(via BD)

GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

Heh heh heh.

No, really.

  1. CoX female toons tend to move a lot more nicely than the clunky male toons (the “huge” toons get a pass for being, well, huge).
  2. I’d rather watch women than men. That’s my cuppa. Since I’m not going to stare at any character more than one I’m running, I’m going to tend to roll up females.
  3. My first 50 was male. And it looked like me. I’ve done my gender-appropriate time, dammit.

Coming Concepts

Soccer Dad: MA Scrapper (“Here, son, let me show you the right way to kick.”)
Soccer Mom: Grav Controller (“You! Stop right there!” and “You wouldn’t believe what I have in my purse!”)

Margie sees them as “suburbs” heroes — non-city/core zones (Perez, Striga, DA, maybe Boom and Faultline, Eden …). Just to keep it different.

(I suppose, in parallel, Mom could be a Sonic Blaster. Dad could be a mace (baseball bat) tank.) 

Together, they fight crime — and raise a famly! 

 

CoX – Poking at bad guys

More Kitsune/Ex-Terra action over the weekend, up around 34, which means Bricks into Founders, zone-wise. We’re picking and choosing our story arcs and generally having a good time. 

As a pair, we’re sort of like a Regen Scrapper … everything golden until it goes into the toilet fast. Ninety-nine percent of the mobs we engage we simply carve through like butter (we’re running on Unyielding at the moment). But there was some death involved over the weekend. Aside from the one case of “gosh, I guess ambushes will come after me if I stand in the train station while on bio break just after I’ve taken a hunt mish,” the rest were all about drawing too much aggro, too quickly. For all my smacky-smack controlling with Illusion, it’s also easy to draw a lot of unwanted attention with the Rad secondary. And a lot of my powers have a long cast time, so it’s easy to watch the health bar drop-drop-drop-gone while waiting to get power X fired so that I can throw a heal.

Biggest regular problem was in the Bricks (Talos) Safeguard mish on the side mission to stop the jail break. Eleventy zillion Tsoo bosses. We both took some temporary dirt naps with those.

Still, fun times.

Margie’s been doing soloing with Old Star, who’s a Fire/Rad Controller, and evidently quite soloable. I rolled a clone of Al McGordo as the same (instead of a Rad/Rad Defender), but didn’t get any play time.

CoX – Wings at last

So I’ve been off CoX for a few weeks for this and that in private life. I hopped back on, ran around through various alts cashing in on all the long-shot bids and sells at the auction house that, in the long-run eventually come in (yes, I’ve become an auction house player, sigh; more on that some time).

And I thought to myself, “Y’know, now that I know how this all works better, I should sign on as Torchielle and see how tough it would be to finally get dragon wings for Torchielle.”

Brief digression: Torchielle was the daughter of a female super-hero and a male dragon, both “heroes” of Chicago. As she matured, she had both flame powers from her dad and energy melee stuff from her mom — and, eventually, the power of flight — first from Uncle Frim’s cloak (“No, it’s not cloak that Uncle Frim gave me — it’s a cloak made from Uncle Frim. Those are dragon scales, see?”), and eventually from wings …

Yes, when wings came in back in Issue Whatever, she grabbed the Demon Wings as something vaguely draconic. Fun ensued.

And then the other wingsets came in with Issue Whozits, and I was seriously torqued off because, well, there were draconic wings — like the demon ones, but larger and scalier — but they were only available if you found an ultra-rare recipe or else if you spent eleventy-zillion influence at Wentworths. Grumbling ensued.

So … flash-forward to tonight. “Hmmm. I have like 5 mil in Influence. Let’s see what I can do about the dragon wings.” I headed over to Steel and went into Wentworths and looked up the recipe and …

… huh? 

… wha–? 

Wing recipes are the Tulipmania bubble of today. Whereas once they were all selling in the millions, now draconic wing recipes were selling for 20K or so. Part of that was increasing the supply. Part was the marketplace just eventually getting saturated. Only so many heroes want wings.

So for about 100K in recipes, supplies, and effort, I ended up with the recipe.

And now Torchielle has her wings. Huzzah!

CoX: Cast of Characters

I’ve had this sitting in my sidebar for some time — but it’s gotten woefully out of date, and, honestly, I’m not playing so much that I feel the need to keep it updated or fully revamped. So … I’m going to turn it into an entry that I’ll link to from the sidebar so that I can edit it and/or reference it as I choose, but it’s not in the way on the main page. Not ever toon is listed here, but the significant (mostly lvl 10+) ones are:

Dave & Margie – Team: (31-Jul-07)

  • 50 – Psi-clone & Amorpha
  • 50 – Torchielle & Hildegard
  • 36 – Rita the Cat & Runt the Dog
  • 32 – Velvet Jones & P-Siren
  • 29 – Ho-Ho & Princess Peep
  • 27 – The Gifted Kid & Special Educator
  • 23 – Fazenda & Araware
  • 22 – Kitsune-chan & Ex-Terra
  • 22 – Mister Ravenous & Charity at Home
  • 19 – Unchained Path & Idzuna
  • 17 – Mister Thorne & Undone
  • 17 – Mr. & Mrs. Azure

Dave – Solo: (31-Jul-07)

Margie – Solo: (11-Apr-07)

CoX: I12 Character Creator

Official news on the Issue 12 Character Creator and UI changes, mostly driven by the “Real Numbers” changes. So there will be a “See Detailed Info” in the character creator that will show all the underlying numbers, with a “show me at level X” slider (moderately interesting for me).

More spiffy than that will be “costume sets” — a start for, say, “Biker” or “Jester” (!), etc. While in theory that might make slightly more homogeneous costumes, in practice it will make a much easier starting point to get a bunch of similar sets. Nice.

Closed Beta is promised in the “near future.”

CoX: The Powers are Yours(yours)((yours))!

Dr. Brainstorm unveils new addition powersets for City of Heroes, City of Villains – PC News 

Lots of fine introductory text … but here’s the list.

Blaster 

  • New Primary – Psychic Blast 

  • New Secondary – Mental Manipulation 

Corruptor 

  • New Primary – Electrical Blast 

  • New Secondary – Storm Summoning 

Controller 

  • New Primary – Plant Control 

  • New Secondary – Thermal Radiation 

Dominator 

  • New Primary – Earth Control 

  • New Secondary – Electricity Manipulation 

Defender: 

  • New Primary – Cold Domination 

  • New Secondary – Ice Blast 

Mastermind: 

  • New Secondary – Storm Summoning 

Brute: 

  • New Primary – Battle Axe 

  • New Primary – War Mace 

  • New Secondary – Super Reflexes 

Stalker: 

  • New Primary – Electric Melee 

  • New Secondary – Electric Armor 

Tank: 

  • New Primary – Dark Armor 

  • New Secondary – Dark Melee 

Scrapper: 

  • New Primary – Fiery Melee 

  • New Secondary – Fiery Aura 

Spiffy!

(via Margie)

 

Meanwhile, back in Eriador …

Though we keep talking about doing up some other duos (including reimagining Rita and Runt — Mistral/Guardian? Burglar/Champion? Elf/Dwarf? (“An elf?  Where?  Where?  Where’s the elf?”)), we continued moving along with Frelliel and Frellien, our elvish hunters — now around … 13? … and finally moving into Shire after waaaaaay too many unsuccessful attempts to duo a fellowship mish, even at teal.

Still having fun.  And now that I’ve finally gotten to an auction house and see how it works — I seriously just need to sell a bunch of stuff I’ve been lugging around rather than wait to auction it.  I am strawberries-rich and silver-poor, such that I am behind on picking up some very valuable skills from the trainer (well, all those repair costs didn’t help, either).

Costuming Options in LotRO

One of CoX’s rightfully renowned strengths is its costume creator, with zillions of combos of outfts, accessories, body types, features, etc.  While there’s always “just one more thing” every player wants, it’s without a doubt one of the gems in CoX’s crown.

LotRO is very pretty in many ways, but character customization is limited.   You have control over hair style and color, complexion, eye color, a couple of other things, but after that, the only variations are … what adventures you have.  Every class/race/gender starts off looking exactly alike, and based on the gear you pick up (or buy), you can change that.

But it’s more complicated.  My elvish hunter, Frelliel, picked up a lovely plumed hat somewhere.  Loved it.  But eventually I had to give it up because, well, I picked up a stupid kind of hat that had much better armor rating.  Good-bye, plumed hat.

Things get found of different colors, too.  Margie notes the “clown” effect — “why the heck am I wearing these purple shoes with this outfit.  Oh, yeah, they have a nice armor class and Agility bonus.”

You do get one other level of customization — you can turn off helmets/hats (so that your bare hair is shown), cloaks (to admire your outfit), or boots (if you’re a hobbit) in the UI, which lets you keep the bonus, but tune the look just a bit.  It’s an imperfect solution, but that’s what you got.

Enter Book 12, and Outfits.

The goal of The Outfit System is fairly simple: Give players complete control over how they look in the game, without impacting the gameplay benefits they gain from their currently equipped items.  […] Now, as of Book 11 you already have your first Outfit. The Outfit System refers to that set of items you currently have equipped. That won’t be changing at all.

What we’re unveiling in Book 12 is the ability for you to define two additional cosmetic appearances, called Outfits, for your character. These Outfits will override the visual appearance of your base Equipment.

Now, it’s important to emphasize that these additional inventories are only cosmetic, and that your Equipment will continue to be the only items affecting your stats. With that said, once Book 12 goes live it’s really up to you as to how you want yourself to look in Middle-earth.

Spiffy!

Two extra outfit slots open at level 20.  If you pick it up (or buy it), you can make it part of an alternate outfit.  There will be some (reasonable) restrictions, but also the adding of a lot of various non-combat-related clothing items.  Excellent.

Also being introduced is the Barber Shop, which lets you change some physical appearances — hair styles, facial details, etc., with various new ones of these also being added in.

It doesn’t look nearly up to CoX level yet, but it’s a welcome addition to a good game.

Other Book 12 patch notes info is here.

(via Doyce)

LotRO Playtest Continues

Continued grinding things out wiith our human Cap/Champ combo.  Finished a big brigand finale (despite it being a Fellowship quest) through an effective combination of (a) reading a guide that noted a shortcut past some bad groups of bad guys, (b) following someone else in (inadvertently) who cleared a lot of the riff-raff, and (c) using the Map to exit after finishing off the head bad guy.

Then ended up in another climactic brigand mission, this one an annoying combination of story-driven railroading (“Can’t act now — have to wait for NPCs to emote) and the opposite of our berserker Ranger from the other night — a very slow-moving lady who, once rescued, insisted on snail-pacing her way through various caverns of bad guys, just in time for them to wake up (“Lady, listen, I’ll bloody carry you, okay?”).

When we picked up again last night, we were starting a new duo to see how it went — a pair of Elvish Hunters.  Got through the 1-5 content with no problem, and were making decent progress with the 6-10.  Hunters are fun — if nothing else, they let you be lazy and draw the bad guys to you, often with entertaining results.  And they’re not quite as squishy as blasters are, either, which was my initial impression.

I’m enjoying the elvish content, even if is relentlessly depressing (these guys could teach Marvin the Robot a lesson or two about wistful moroseness).  And, of course, it occurs to me that I found the Shire bits of LotR to be the least interesting in the books, too, so maybe that’s a clue I should pick up.

We have a couple more days on the trial accounts, and I’m not sure we’re hooked enough to go for it.  I find the story-driven missions to be pretty keen, though that isn’t grabbing Margie the same way at all.  We’re probably spending more time kvetching over things than waxing enthusiastic over them.  I’m enjoying it more than Margie, but it’s not yet grabbing us by the noses and making us want to play it full-time.

We’ll see.

Dainty little hands

One of the new things in I11 is weapon scaling — having weapons (broadswords, katanas, ARs (?), axes, claws, etc. scale appropriately to at least the body type (female, male, huge).  This isn’t universal — there is a “legacy broadsword” (etc.) that remains unscaled.

Folks have objected to the female weapons now being too small.  While rejecting the idea of a weapons scale slider before, BAB noted:

We scaled all of the weapons based on the scale and proportions of the player models, particularly the hands. The female models just happen to have small and dainty hands. Up until this point, the exact same weapon models was shared between all 3 body types, so they had to be scaled large enough to at least fit in the huge model’s hands…which are roughly the size of the female model’s head. It’s something that’s bothered us for a long time, but we weren’t able to change it. Now that we can, we did.

I’m certainly not opposed to gigantic, anime style weapons but we don’t to create those in a haphazard way by just taking something that’s designed to be hand sized and scaling it up to a ridiculous scale. I’d much rather create a completely new piece of geometry that is a gigantic, anime style weapon but still looks like it could be held and wielded by the player model it’s attached to…rather than having the small, dainty female hand buried completely in the grip the size of her forearm.

The answer, of course, seems obvious — get rid of / redesign those ridiculously dainty Female hands.  No, seriously, they’re laughably small.  I have any number of brawling female toons who I’ve put “Large” gloves onto just so that they have ratiionally sized hands (especially when you consider that Male hands are actually oversized to scale).

Maybe we need hand size sliders …

“Alts, Mister Rico! Zillions of ’em!”

My gaming activities over the past week have led to all sorts of fine ideas for even more alts.  Because that is, of course, exactly what I need.  (If I said I was running out of space across all servers with alts I’ve generated, one should not be surprised.)

Some of the fun ones …

  1. The return of Honeygun, in various flavors.  I found the AR Blaster set to be really annoying back in the day, but that’s because the “super soaker” AR was a butt-ugly weapon to be carrying around.  I11 will provide some much more attractive alternatives.
  2. A Sten analog, complete with 80s-paperback-cover hair, cool camoflage tech outfit, and both a Gurkha kukri and a crystal dagger.  That would be the plan under the Dual Weapons primary, of course, planned for I11 but available to those lucky souls who are in the closed beta.
  3. “Punchin’ Judy” — okay, I admit that I saw someone with that name, and determined I must have an alt with the same name.
  4. “Warm Fuzzy.”  Surely one can create a teddy-bear Fire Controller.
  5. “Carmine Zuigiber” — a red-haired, red-garbed war correspondent and (as envisioned) some-sort-of-weaponed fire aura brute.

That’s not keeping me from exercising my current burgeoning stable of alts.  I just dinged Lady Zebra to 23, for example.

New weapons

Someone’s doing screen caps (legitimately, despite the closed beta) of all the weapon options.  Nice stuff, as well as making notes of which are or aren’t colorable.

Insert litany of complaints on the boards about (a) “They didn’t include my favorite!” (b) “This AT power got more options than that AT power” and (c) “That’s not a Glaive-Guisarme, that’s a Lucerne Hammer”  Etc.  BAB comments.

Additional textures have to be created to fully support color tinting of weapons. They also have to be set up and exported a different way, hooked into the costume menu slightly different, additional scripts have to be written for them. It’s not a ton of work, but overall it’s just a couple of extra steps that we simply haven’t had time to do on every single weapon we’ve pulled out of the library of existing things. Bows, on top of all of that, have another couple of extra steps because they have to be animated to match the player animations.

Why so many maces and swords and not bows or claws? Because our existing library of weapon models is full of that type of stuff. Not a lot of bows on the other hand…what was there is basically in.

The original plan was to have only 3 unique options for each weapon set. The default weapon, the villain version if it existed, an arcane version and a tech version. I really pushed to get as many things in as we could with the intent of filling in the rest later as time permitted. If it’s really that big of a deal to you guys that there are just more options available to mace than bows, we can very easily go in and comment everything out so that everyone has an exactly equal number of options available. But I really don’t think that’s what anyone wants, is it?

All I can say is that we will continue to create new weapon models, obviously starting with the sets that are a bit sparse right now.

RUAGIRL?

Given that I have quite a number of female alts in CoX (it runs about 50%, interestingly enough), it’s a good thing I don’t play in China:

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game accounts of male players who chose to play female in-game characters in its in-house developed MMORPG King of the World, reports 17173. Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam, according to the report.

Yikes.

(via BoingBoing)

Character Transfer and Renaming is Up … kinda

Evidently it’s hitting the servers (or the billing servers that handle it, or something) harder than expected, but the (pay) service to (a) transfer a toon to another server, or (b) rename your toon is now officially up.  Woot.

Once upon a time, I would have seriously done a lot of capering about regarding this, but it’s been several months at least since I’ve been highly server-centric, or had a group of friends that I Really Truly had to hook up with regularly on a given server.  Instead, I have various duos scattered about that Margie and I play, as well as a ton of alts across all the servers as the mood seizes me.

That said, I could see possibly gathering some folks together in one place to do a particular activity — the $9.95 isn’t meaningless, but it would cost more than that to meet some friends for dinner.  Or I could see wanting to pull some alts together to create yet more Margie/Dave duos.  We’ll see.

As for renaming — I can think of only one toon I might consider (changing Psi-clone back to the original Psiclone I had in mind) — but only if the name was free.  Other than that, no sawbuck-worthy regrets over character names, at least for now.

What amazes me is the folks who sound utterly frantic to transfer their toon Right Now.  Come on, guys — wait until tomorrow, or Friday, when the lines die down.  Really.

Now, what is kind of interesting is the speculation about whether certain servers will see a major drop or rise in population, based on reputations as PvP or RP or whatever servers — or, alternately, if those reputations will become self-fulfilling prophecies. It will be interesting to see if any stats come out of this.

Gameplay update

Actually did a fair amount over the weekend.

Miss Crackle:  Got her up into 13 doing various PUGs of various success.  A lot of stupid people out there, and nobody I felt like keeping track of for the long run. 

Cammie Kandachi:  This was an electrical brute I’d built about the same time as Miss Crackle (they even look a fair amount alike).  I played a bit with her on Friday afternoon, then Margie joined me later with the brute she’d built to pair with her back in the day.  We got up to 16 or so, I think, over the weekend (starting around 12), and I learned why I’d not played her, as much as I like the look.  (1) electrical is a hellaciously endurance-intensive set., (2) brutes are not as damage-intensive as scrappers, and don’t seem as sturdy as them either (probably because of the lack of a self-heal).  We spent a lot of time resting and/or working off debt.  Still, fun.

Rita the Cat:  So we swapped over Sunday afternoon to our scrapper duo, who dinged 37 during play.  Obviously higher level helps game abilities, but they’ve always felt kick-ass as a duo, where as Cammie and Annie always feel struggling.

Saturday was a Rikti invasion night.  Ended up fighting several battles with different folks (Miss Crackle, Cammie, Kheldiel), and learned a bit more about how the process works.

Good stuff.