a group of adventurers on an epic quest
“The people who remain, you can’t get rid of them… it’s absolutely impossible to do it because they’re so used to the pain and agony of the gameplay that they love it.”
Someone who was there, was this (1) played straight; (2) a humorously exaggerated line being unfairly taken out of context; (3) a fake humorously exaggerated line intended as a shot at what is now the competition. The Onion explains that last one.
: Zubon
Quote from Gamasutra, with a hat tip to Broken Toys.
As you may have heard, Cryptic is making Champions into an MMO. Cryptic, in case you don’t know, made City of Heroes, now owned and run by NCSoft. They also were making the Marvel MMO before it was cancelled. I presume that most of the code was recycled into Champions, which will get content and appear in 2009ish. For me, this is exciting, because Champions is basically what I wanted City of Heroes to be. I still love my big blue book, although I could see how a player might want a computer to do all the math for the game. Viola, MMOs solve that problem.
To explain the appeal of Champions, it is a generic system (Hero Games). It recognizes that damage is damage, and whether it is a club or a fireball is just a special effect. It becomes a fireball because you declare it to be fire damage, you bought an AE effect, and maybe you also bought a small DoT or having the enemies blinded by the flash. It simplifies so much of the game when the crunch and fluff are explicitly severable. Haktar has a flamethrower, Dul’kash is a fire-breathing demon, and Torchy McTorcherson is a mutant, but you don’t need three sets of rules for energy blast (8d6, cone, special effect: fire). Champions is also (character) skill-based rather than class based, so I pictured its in-game character sheets being something like Asheron’s Call or EVE, where you assign points to whatever categories you want.
I usually describe City of Villains as what City of Heroes would have been if they had another year to develop it. Really, publishing CoH one year later would not have yielded CoV, because it also shows confidence in getting away from the standard MMO holy trinity. I expect Champions Online to be what City of Heroes would look like starting from scratch with the experience of having made City of Heroes. Which is pretty much what happened. Big things like moving away from classes (though I am told they will still exist; I have yet to research much myself), smaller things like letting you have purple fireballs. Of course, if you prefer the direction that CoX has taken under the new lead developer, you might not want to see the Vision made flesh. But my sparse Champions reading does show things from the original CoH plan that were missing from the published game; perhaps Champions’ class system will be like the original origin plan.
In a way, this is a sequel. To a game they sold to what will be a competitor. I expect many similarities between the two games, and it feels odd to me. If it were an explicit sequel, no worries, lift as much as you like. Since NCSoft now has City of Heroes, it feels kind of like plagiarism to re-use chunks. Wait, no, that’s stupid, every MMO looks a lot like other MMOs, so it does not matter that WoW and The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ have rather similar character creation screens. But that costume designer in CoH is a big selling point… but how can you rip off the game that you made? I have many buts here. Toss in your thoughts. We have a long time to discuss.
: Zubon
Lest we forget, “The Orcs [in Middle Earth] were obviously stolen from PC game maker Blizzard and its Warcraft series. Too bad Blizzard is apparently too scared to sue New Line over it.” Let’s not even get into how AE Mythic is ripping off Blizzard.
One of the huge, huge advantages of being married to a gamer grrl is, when Valentine’s comes around, the ability to skip the flowers, the chocolate, the Hallmark moment and all those other embarassing, passé 20th century moments and get her something she would really love. If said girl … grrl… also happens to have her birthday within a month of that auspicious pagan celebration, well, you can really go for the big guns.
I wall-hacked her heart and captured the flag of her love by getting her one of these. It looks really good compared to the old Cantankerous Radiation Tube, it has tons more screen real space on the sides (which is nice, because she can finally tell when she’s being flanked and killed, something that happens an average of ~7 times a day) and it looks really neat on her desk, which I’m told is very important.
Guild Wars looks really nice in it, which is quite fortunate because that’s basically all we’ve been playing since around last July. It would have been heartbreaking had it looked bad. Like giving her a card that says “Happy Valentine’s Anastasia” when her name is really Denise, Beatrice or Her Unholy Grace Xinissa, Reaper of Agony (yes, she roleplays too). Would have been an awkward moment.
And yes I got one of them for me too, put it on the same card, and had them delivered at the exact same time, but dagnabbit that is not the point here. The point is that gamer grrls deserve only the best. She’s happy because she has a great new toy. I’m happy because she’s distracted and I can keep courting all those other tons of women I have. Well, I don’t really have, it’s more of a thing in progress. I mean, I was thinking about it. In a dream I had. Only once, yeah.
P.S.: Newegg, you rock, but tell the UPS guys to take it easy with the LCD panels, hmm? Mine arrived with a nice bump and crack on the plastic side, and if you tilt it you can hear something small and loose on the inside. It still works by the grace of Cthulhu.
My friend Charlie has one of the best farming/powerleveling characters in City of Heroes. I say that with no hyperbole; it may be mathematically impossible to beat his build. He has the standard Fire/Kinetics/Fire Controller farmer, and he has every purple ultra-rare enhancement that he needs. To translate for players of other games, he has the best possible equipment, and there is an endlessly repeatable group quest that his class can solo with ease.
His girlfriend Nicole complements this with a character that could otherwise be suboptimal. Archery Blasters are not that popular, but they do come with the perfect nuke for farming: Rain of Arrows. I do not know her slotting (she must have her own set of purples by now), but between her powers and his buffs, her recharge on Rain of Arrows is twenty seconds at the most. Because of his Fulcrum Shift, she can live at the damage cap. While he is crushing one group, she takes out the next one in two attacks. Re-Fulcrum Shift off his next group and continue.
My latest character (Sonic/Sonic Defender) makes this even faster. When you are at the damage cap, enemy resistance debuffs are the only way to increase your damage further. Negative resistance becomes a damage multiplier. Disruption Field on the Controller, Howl at the enemies, and they are at -50% resistance. Add another nuke, plus some shields to deal with return fire.
Farming can be exceedingly dull and repetitive, but it hardly has time to when it goes that fast.
: Zubon
This is actually sort of old news, but I wanted to wait until there was more useful information to post. Microsoft officially canceled the Marvel MMO that Cryptic had been developing for them. Cryptic has turned around and partnered with Hero Games, creators of the Champions tabletop RPG and retooled what was going to be the Marvel game to be a Champions Universe game. There’s now a website for the game, and it looks pretty spiffy. Their feature list and dev blogs read like the Requested Features section of the CoH forums, with things like power customization, AT-separate power picks (but not an entire lack of ATs, which is odd), loot (which apparently doesn’t obscure your costume), more action-based gameplay, etc. Amusingly, the game won’t be based directly off of the tabletop system, but after the MMO is released, there’s a plan to release either a conversion kit or something similar to port characters from the MMO back to the tabletop RPG. It’ll be interesting to see what they actually manage to pull off and what’s pie-in-the-sky. Regardless, good luck to them.
IM- and chat-speak are not the wave of the future. They are the wave of the past. Language Log quotes Noah Webster’s proposed spelling changes:
Thus greef should be substituted for grief; kee for key; beleev for believe; laf for laugh; dawter for daughter; plow for plough; tuf for tough; proov for prove; blud for blood; and draft for draught.
They aren’t idiots, they are classicists. I still hate them.
: Zubon
We have not had a dating article in a while, but Ctrl+Alt+Del demonstrates some great advice in a single comic. Flip back another day if you need context.
Do you see what is happening there? They are dealing with an emotional reaction as a mature, reasonable couple. She understands that her initial presentation of the problem may not have been the best, and accepts his reaction. He does not hold it against her, instead pressing for clarity. She provides it. Now that he has a better grip on the situation, he prefaces his emotional response with the appropriate disclaimer, providing context. She understands and sympathizes with his reaction. They will be able to address the matter in more intellectual terms once they work through their initial emotional responses.
Full marks for both parties. This is a good sign for their relationship.
: Zubon
