Off to the Fortress of Solitude

Between Vacation, then Stuff, now more Vacation, I fear I’ve not been posting much here.

Which, since I’m headed off to Vacation some more, isn’t going to change soon.

But I’ve been doing a bit of CoX play, actually got onto a high-level PUG that wasn’t doing AE farming (or even AE), and enjoyed myself immensely, despite that godawful lag.

Need to play more …

CO catch-up

  • On the differences between CO and other MMOs. The focus of the article is on fantasy MMOs, WoW in particular — which, yeah, is going to be very different. I’d like to see more discussion (without snark) on differentiators from CoX.
  • Another interview and discussion about powers and themes. The travel power outline (first, second, third gears; how teleport will work, acrobatics) is interesting, as is the reiteration about being able to keep an item / weapon / attack and still fold improvements and upgrades into it. I’m not sure about “themed crafting areas,” though …

CoX catch-up

Played with our Masterminds over the weekend — lvl 33 (my highest CoV character), and still having fun. Took down Mynx and Back Alley Brawler easy-peasy (albeit as EBs).

I was disappointed to discover that there’s no Hair Lightning as an aura. I don’t want my eyes to be all lightiningy — I want my brain to be. I am The Gifted Kid, dagnabbit!

I was looking the other day for some of the new juggling emotes. Alas, as BAB explains, the Quickmenu isn’t designed to deal with conditional emotes (juggling is from the Mystic booster pack). Though he indicates (without telling how) that you can actually edit the Quickmenu file …

If you want to be in future closed betas, make constructive comments on the existing I15 open beta.

Reichsman has 226K HP? Yikes! Though it’s good to hear that he has a “considerably lower than standard regen rate.”

T-shirts! Meesa want! Well, actually … nice enough, but nothing compelling enough to make me break my oft-broken vow of No More T-Shirts Until I Get Rid of Many of the Ones I Already Have. 

Return to AE

Finally got some game time last night, waiting for Margie to arrive home. Signed on with Miss Crackle, and immediately got an invite … in Atlas?

Ah.

I was a bit hesitant when I saw the team was gathering for some Mission Architect play, but as it turned out, it was actually fun. It was refreshing play some AE that was interesting, with a good group, and (most importantly) not farming. Which we did, including a few missions that were a real hoot.

While I did see some farming requests at AE between mishes (“PLZ INVIT LVL 42 LF AE FARM!”), they were few and far between.

I might have to go hang out there more often.

I was actually inspired enough, when all was over, to hop onto Lady Zebra and look for some scrapper action. Alas, nobody was inviting in the low 30s on Virtue by that time of night, so I did some solo mishes, enjoyed them immensely, then welcomed Margie home.

Gadgets and stuff

Cool article on the Munitions, Archery, and Gadgeteering power sets in Champs Online. These represent gun-based powers, archery (duh), and any number of roboticist / “toyman” / “mad thinker” sort of inventor goodness. 

One of the nice things noted here (in context of the munitions) is that, once you’ve acquired a given weapon form, then as you get additional powers and enhancements, you can apply them to the forms you have / want. Love those pistols? You can keep using them with your added attacks. Want to be carrying around an arsenal? Sounds like you can.

Customization = good. I hate being stuck with either a single weapon (see CoX AR Blasters) or have to trade in the weapon I like for the latest most-powerful thing I’ve found (see LotRO).

Also: new screen shots.

Back!

But, between unpacking and tagging photos and taking care of a sick spouse, I’ve not done any gaming since returning yesterday evening. That will, in fact, change soon.

In the meantime, news that’s been accumulating in the in-box …

Champs Online:

  • A nice article on thematic power set building through “frameworks.” Rather than focusing on archetypes, the CO folks are trying to let people do a lot more picking and choosing of different types of powers amongst varied sets. Will this add welcome flexibility, create confusion, or let min-maxxers unbalance the game? Should be interesting to see, but it sounds promising.
  • I am so pleased that “power armor” is its own power set. That’s been a serious frustration for me in CoX.
  • Another good survey interview here. One interesting note: Cryptic basically bought the Champions property, and is licensing it back to Hero Games.
  • And yet another review of the game, with some good information. Not sure that the “console” orientation is a plus, but there’s plenty of positive stuff conveyed.
  • How to make sure players don’t make nekkid characters.

City of Heroes:

Going AFK

We’re off tomorrow to a different city where people cluster around costumed characters all day (Walt Disney World), so barring Positron showing up on my doorstep tonight or something of that nature, this blog will likely be going quiet for a week. 

Be heroic! (Or, if you swing that way, villainous!) We’ll see you when we get back.

CO preview at ZAM

At ZAM News:

Plusses: gorgeous, lots of character creation options, a power-switching mechanism that makes gameplay a bit more easy and varied.

I have to say here that of all of the MMORPGs I’ve played over the years, Champions Online has, hands down, some of the most stunning graphics I’ve seen in an MMORPG. The team decided to go for a cel-shaded comic book style with this game, and let me tell you, it works.

[…] In combat, players can ‘charge’ their attacks to make them do more damage, or gain extra utility in their execution. Not only this, but the game utilizes a form of ‘endurance,’ that goes up as players use light damage ‘charging’ moves, and is then expended when the player uses a heavy damage ‘draining’ move. Think of it like the Warrior’s ‘Rage’ system in World of Warcraft, or the Warpriest / Disciple of Khaine in Warhammer Online.

Interestingly, the game only allows players the ability to use seven abilities in any given scenario. Players can switch between three ‘roles,’ each with a customizable ability toolbar of 7 abilities. This effectively gives players a total of 21 powers to use when switching between one of their three stances, although switching stances comes with a yet to be determined cooldown. What this effectively does is allows players to break out of the one-character one-role cliché, and it doesn’t clutter up combat with 50+ skills.

Minuses: Clunky and not-yet-terribly informative UI, some repetitious content early on

All in all, Champions Online is shaping up to be a solid MMORPG, even if it is in beta, and for anyone interested in non-stop action and incredible character development depth, I’d highly suggest this beautiful MMORPG.

“Racing to the Bottom”

Slate’s published an article on the whole Mission Architect / farming foofoorah. Not much new news here, but a decent analysis.

The face-off underscores an iron law of MMO play: Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they’ll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible.

Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early.

The article gets a bit apocalyptic over what the undefined (and unpredictable) crack-down on AE farming might mean to CoX — if people will leave an “unfair” situation once other super-hero MMORPGs come online. I don’t think that’s the worry. Instead, I think AE was a tremendous opportunity to instill some new life into CoX (steady new content and QoL improvements notwithstanding). Unfortunately, the flood of farming has turned a lot of potentially creative folks off of the Mission Architect (too little signal to noise), and the PLers, who are bearing the brunt of the crackdown, were the folks most likely to jump ship anyway,

Because of the folks “racing to the bottom,” and the Devs inability to predict or prevent them before the fact, one of CoX’s best chances for some serious reinvigoration may have been lost.

A muddle of Champions Online questions answered

In a flurry of “RTFWS” inspiration, I actually started reading the material at the CO site. The background on heroes and villains demonstrate that they plan on drawin heavily from the already-established Champs universe, which should be all to the good. 

The Dev Blog has a wide array of info, all sort of muddled together. Nothing worrisome read yet — the more generic (non-class) bundling of powers sounds promising.

I’m actually looking forward to this, even if it’s been pushed back from July to September.

“Ready to diminish and sail into the West now”

Watching Margie play LotRO last night during the stress test reminded me of everything I loved and didn’t love about the game. (The comment above was hers, by the way, playing her “hot elf ranger chick with a bow” Frellian as I headed upstairs for bed.)

Big plus: the setting is still stunning, a beautiful and thoughtful rendering of Middle Earth. If you were going to make a LotRO MMO, it would be hard to craft it better than this.

Biggest minus: a lot of running around; still a lot of mining (harvesting, pruning, digging, skinning) resources; a lot of wild animals killed to get “a scrap of dirty hide,” “a tongue,” “a claw,” etc. Grand and epic, not so much.

Margie did show me some of the new mapping functions that make it a lot easier to find where your quest is located.  I’m sure there are other QoL improvements, from what Doyce has written. But as I watched Margie, after hours of playing, still stopping by each bush, struggled to make sure she had her axe active vs. her hoe, and harvest off some wood for this and that, it still felt more like Starcraft than LotRO.

Not feeling any great compulsion to re-up. I dinged Molly Morningstar up to 24 on CoH and had a blast with it (literally, as I grabbed a pretty nasty Mental cone power to go with all of her Fire AoE attacks). We had a very good team, led by an excellent tank, which is just what Molly needs (keep the aggro off of me and gather all the baddies in one spot).

The LotRO stress test, btw, appears to have been pretty stressful, as both Margie and Avocet complained of major lag, especially earlier in the evening. That’s what they were trying to test for, of course, so I guess it was successful. No fabulous prize awarded to Margie, alas.

City of Rogues – more info

But not much. Instead, we get a short FAQ, in which we learn:

  1. This will all happen post-I15, “later this year.”
  2. You don’t have to change sides to play CoR, and if you do change sides you can change back.
  3. That seems to be all they are saying right now.

#2 makes sense — but I have the aesthetic feeling that there should be some sort of cost in changing — and even moreso in changing back. It shouldn’t be purely mechanical. There ought to be “a price to pay.”

We’ll see.

City of Rogues — the rogue release

Oops.

For some CoX subscribers who were watching their emails last night, a little something came through …

Paragon Studios™ is proud to officially announce the next City of Heroes® expansion, City of Heroes Going Rogue™! This will be the first major expansion for the City of Heroes franchise since the launch of City of Villains® in 2005.

Praetoria, a utopian mirror to our own world, hides a dark secret. Exploring this mysterious alternate earth, the heroes and villains of this world feel an uneasiness of doubt creep over them. Loyalties are questioned. Choices are made. Lines are drawn. As they search for the truth behind Emperor Cole and his Praetorian guard, brutal foes and fierce allies emerge, turning this once blissful paradise into a battle ground.

City of Heroes Going Rogue officially opens the “mirror universe” of Praetoria and an all-new alignment system that explores the shades of gray that lie between Heroes and Villains. For the first time, Hero characters can become Villains and vice versa, enabling Heroes to cross over to the Rogue Isles™ and Villains to experience Paragon City™.

For more information, read the official press release and check out our new Going Rogue website to view the announcement trailer and register for the latest news and updates for City of Heroes Going Rogue.

The web page link is still up, but the announcement was dubbed premature and the press release is MIA. Speculation and thought run rampant on the subject however. My initial reactions?

Well, first, people have been clamoring for being able to run both Blue and Red power sets together for a long time. Earlier speculation had some sort of a conversion process — where a hero would turn villainous (and move to CoV setting), or a villain heroic (move to CoH), perhaps around some sort of particular mission arc.

Instead, it sounds like they are creating a whole new setting — Praetoria — to house both moral ambiguity and, presumably, both Blue and Red side powers. That’s a little odd — do we really need to be pulling people away from the Paragon and Rogue Isles maps? Does having a new setting invalidate the legitimate (and time-honored) storyline of heroes fallen or villains redeemed?

We don’t know much about the metastory or how folks get there. Will this be someplace you can go some time during your career, or do you start characters there? If the former, what’s the mechanism for transfer, and is it reversible? In other words, is Praetoria a third new game locale to split up the CoX population, or a new meta-zone that people can enter and leave? The email leaves open the possibility of the former, but doesn’t make it certain.

Further, the trailer at the website makes this sound more like an event than a simple new location — is Praetoria going to invade? And how will that be part of the “moral ambiguity” story arc over time?

New maps and new story are good. I look forward to hearing more.

 

Early-to-mid 20s

Regardless of what happens going forward with the AE system, I’m pleased I got a couple of characters (Al McGordo and Tyger-Tyger) over the hump into their 20s, making for a bit more fun play.

I’ve been trying to think of a good way that the Devs could create some sort of shortcut to let folks start at higher levels. Actually, it’s the 10-13, or even 10-19 range that’s the most problematic, I think. A way to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing, and therefore should be allowed to start play at a higher level would be a good way to start — but then that runs into meta-game issues of reducing the veteran pool among low-level players, which hurts the game long-run.