Category: City of Heroes/Villains

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Architect Mechanics

City of Heroes has moved the mission editor to Issue 14 in 2009. Issue 13 will be adding all the content that was missing from Issue 12: they are finishing up Cimerora and the Midnight Squad. Because releasing incomplete content and getting to it 5 months later is acceptable on a four year old game with a direct competitor in development. *ahem* The delay on “create your own mission” is so that they can include “create your own villain” for it.

That aside, evolution in the genre:

The Leveling Pact: A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

Multi-Builds: Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It’s up to you.

Multi-builds are straightforward and a great idea for all of us who do not want to be forced between PvE/PvP, healing/damage, solo/group, etc. Leveling pacts, however, are … interesting. They explain that you split xp, no matter which character earns it, and you are in that pact for life. I like it as a way to make sure you do not out-level your friend. Their initial plan is for two characters, and if it does not destroy things, more. Because it can be hard to arrange having everyone on at once.

: Zubon

Update: you can leave the leveling pact, but you cannot get another after level 5.

True to Comic Books

Many comic book writers, artists, and publishers are truly lousy at keeping deadlines. I recall the early days of Image, with about two comics that managed to publish monthly. This proud tradition continues today, with monthly comics that publish five times a year and quarterly comics that will someday get their second issues. Others take the “fast, good, or quick: pick two” approach, consistently arriving on time, under budget, and guess about the quality.

The City of Heroes developers are aware that yesterday marked four months since their last Issue. That was the major update where two evenings was enough time to finish all the new content available without making new alts.

So if you noticed that I have not been posting much about City of Heroes, that would be why.

The funny thing is, the game is supposed to have been getting increased attention since the NCSoft acquisition. Maybe it is taking longer than expected to train the new hires, or maybe they are re-writing half the game. They did, however, find resources for two new microtransactions options: rent a rocket pack for all characters for a month ($5) and the Cyborg pack with costume pieces, emotes, and a Self-Destruct power ($10). Is it still “micro” at $10? The Cyborg bits are, at any rate, a permanent account upgrade.

: Zubon

Grouping as the Better Option

Some games require grouping. We hate that, especially when certain classes are required, because you can easily spend half your in-game time looking for group members. Some games encourage soloing. We often like that, but single-player games deliver a much better solo experience. Some games discourage grouping, often as an accident of game mechanics, which is just poor. Some games encourage and reward grouping without requiring it, which is the best of all possible worlds.

I have a very long version with many examples after the break, but that is the core of my message today: encourage grouping, do not require it, and make sure the game mechanics really do encourage it.

You encourage grouping by increasing rewards for groups and adding abilities that require groups to take full advantage of them. You require grouping by giving enemies ridiculous numbers of hit points, failing to scale encounters for different numbers, or making encounters that demand (or all but demand) several specific abilities that are spread across the classes. You discourage grouping by making quests difficult to do together and failing to scale encounters for different numbers. Yes, a lack of scaling can both require and discourage grouping.

Continue reading Grouping as the Better Option

Crowded Comic Books

City of Heroes has had the superhero MMO market to itself for the past four years. (I don’t think Twilight Heroes counts, although Kingdom of Loathing compares favorably with Everquest in many ways.) Now the next couple of years are promising a sudden flurry, with DC, Marvel, and Champions MMOs forthcoming. Is there really that much pent-up demand for superhero-based MMOs? Maybe this summer’s batch of excellent superhero movies will help build an audience, but I do not see it. One game might have hoped to cannibalize City’s playerbase, but four?

Marvel and DC have their obvious stables of characters to use in advertising their games, although how you use those characters in-game could succeed or fail dramatically. Cryptic can market its game as “City of Heroes II,” with all the things that, in retrospect, they should have had the first time. City of Heroes can market itself as having four years’ worth of content additions and as Cryptic Without Jack Emmert, which appeals to a certain vocal part of the playerbase.

I know we have more than a dozen significant fantasy MMOs, but do we have even a half-dozen successful sci fi MMOs? Four superhero MMOs seems like a crowded marketplace. Unless the audience for them expands, that is bad for developers, and, due to network effects, bad for their players.

: Zubon

Five Degrees of Awesome in Testing

Testing of the City of Heroes Halloween event started last week.

  1. This year’s addition is Zombie Apocalypse, modeled after the Rikti invasions. I think we can all agree that Zombie Apocalypse is an awesome theme to run with.
  2. It will reappear for the occasional hour throughout the year, in case you miss it or want to experience it again. If the reaction is anything like it is with the Rikti invasions, these will be a lot of fun with massed players, assuming your system can handle it.
  3. City of Heroes Halloween is cumulative, so previous years’ events will be returning. Trick-or-treating is being tweaked to get people moving; doors are still giving out candy, monsters, and costumes; and there are giant monsters to enjoy. Badges, badges, badges.
  4. Halloween was being tested in July. This is the most awesome part: leaving plenty of time to get it tested and get it right.
  5. Because Halloween will be ready months in advance, the test server will be free for Issue 13 testing.

: Zubon

Improving Auction Houses

There are few improvements to be made on EVE Online’s economic tools. The more your system resembles that, the better.

Buy orders are a key feature. Most systems lack this, but it is the “Buy It Now” equivalent for the seller. It would improve economic efficiency enormously. Creating a market is hard, and letting either buyers or sellers make the first offer will encourage more use.

Continue reading Improving Auction Houses

Appearance: Achievement or Individualism?

Can you identify the hardest-to-get weapons in your game? How about the tiers of armor for your class? Can you tell how far someone is into the endgame based on what s/he is wearing? This is the standard item-based model of character (appearance) customization. There may be options to make your orc 5% bulkier or give your elf fourteen shades of blue or green eyes, but it will be covered by equipment anyway. Making yourself look interesting is almost always a result of making yourself powerful, and your appearance suggests your capabilities. The guys in those robes heal, and the guys in those robes blow things up, and the guy in that hat is obviously very experienced. Looking good is a reward worth working for, and it immediately commands the appropriate respect from the knowledgeable (and often wonder from the ignorant).

Or is form radically separate from function? City of Heroes gives you almost all the costume items up front. Norrath and Middle Earth have cosmetic tabs for equipment to cover your mismatched raid gear (a half-measure to let you lock in your favorite achievement-based appearance). In a world where the same gesture might be a sword-slash or a fireball-toss, there is no need to connect how something looks to what it does. This allows the maximum of customization and individualization, and it can come as early as you like. I have seen swordfights somewhere between a feline hominid and a lightsaber-wielding lesbian mermaid slave; spectators included several librarians, someone in an oversized cowboy hat, and a robot-thing with a cow levitating over it. None of these had special abilities.

You can cross the two a bit. Item-based systems have dyes for customization, although the colors can still signify wealth levels. Function-free systems can have unlockable pieces or categories, like City of Heroes auras that are available after level 30, costume sets reserved for long-time subscribers, or weapons that require certain badges (and you can bet I show off my Rikti Axe).

Is one better, or is it a matter of taste? I often enjoy a connection between form and function, such as making the meaner monsters bigger. You can even reverse the two standards: have item-based play that does not affect appearance (like Diablo II sockets or City of Heroes enhancements) or non-item play that ties appearance options to accomplishments.

: Zubon

Yeah, I keep citing City of Heroes here. I have played a few years of it, and its costume designer is still the industry benchmark.

Also Annoyingly Linear

The problem with annoyingly linear is not that it is linear, but that it is annoyingly so. Done well: Portal, a puzzle game where the whole point is to get from Point A to Point B. Done not too badly: the last level of Portal, where the tile set changes but there is still just the one path and someone has conveniently painted signs as if this too were a planned part of the enrichment center activity.

Done fairly badly: City of Heroes office buildings, where each set of elevators only goes between two floors. To get to his office on the top floor, the boss must walk about a mile and take five or ten staircases (on the strange multi-story floors). The shapes of the floors have no connection to each other, despite the normal outside appearance. Darn non-Euclidean architects. This one is bad in terms of logic and suspension of disbelief, not gameplay; as a gameplay element, the buildings are fairly straightforward tubes of monster to smash. The gameplay problem is when things are less linear, and you must find the last three enemies standing behind a rock around a corner on a small incline on a spur off the third path on the second level, who did not notice when you fired some grenades and a sonic wail at their boss twenty feet away.

Done badly: Garth Agarwen in Middle Earth’s Lone Lands. Garth Agarwen is an outdoor instance, your group’s own chunk of the red swamp. There are a few loops and dead-ends, and a fork separating the two big bosses, but mostly it is a path that winds around itself. It faces the same strange architecture whereby you go through every room to get to the back. It is as if you took all the hallways out of your home and put a door on either side of each room. And sometimes the door is a trapdoor leading to your basement, then up to the catwalk you built near the ceiling to get to the trapdoor up into the bathroom, through the door in the back of the shower into the laundry room, slide the oven aside to get into kitchen, take the door to the kids’ room, out the window into a fenced portion of the backyard, climb the ladder to the top of the shed, then walk across the board into your bedroom window to get your cell phone, which already went to voice mail, dangit. Was that oven-slide a one-way passage? I need to use the bathroom. It might be faster to jump out the other bedroom window and walk around to the front door, assuming the dogs haven’t respawned.

Again, this is not necessarily bad gameplay, although it is annoying to see a teammate just above your jumping height when you know it will take a hundred yards of running to reach him. Could you just throw me a rope? Or when you shoot an enemy and must wait a minute while he navigates all those corners on the way to you. Or when you try to think about the enemy actually living there. Okay, it’s annoying.

: Zubon

Different Grouping Experiences

In City of Heroes, groups are where it is at. Pick-up groups are not hard to find, and they are rarely apocalyptically bad (although some are pretty weak). If you are in a supergroup or on a global channel, you know some people to group with. With sidekicks and exemplars, and auto-exemplaring in TFs, finding people “your level” is trivial. The game is not built around fighting one thing at a time, and there are many powers that do not hit their stride until you have a team of 4+. We love fighting huge spawns, and with the xp curve changes, fighting bosses (group size 7-8) is where the great xp is. All missions are shared instances, so everyone can join in anything. It is typical to keep a group going for several hours, shuttling in people as a few drop out. This starts as early as level 2, when people form sewers groups, and continues through level 50. Team composition does not matter: this is no holy trinity, and I have done a task force with 3 Scrappers and a Defender.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ PvE, grouping is not encouraged. There are several reasons why you might want to, from fellowship maneuvers to shared experience, but the quest-based leveling system pushes you away from sticking with the same people. If you are with the same people for more than a half-hour, and not in an instance, you are probably grinding enemies for a trait. When you reach a new town, you get a stack of solo quests scattered around the zone, some of which will lead to group content. You group for one quest, then Legohlaz has a full pack, Legolass wants to do her spider quest, Lejolas is working on a quest in the other direction, and the group splits. Repeat at next group content, except in the quest chains, where you split after completing the chain. Groups cap at six, so a couple of people leaving means you are paralyzed until you find new members.

I have yet to fiddle with The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ endgame PvE content. There seems to be a lot of it, and it is all group content. I hope the expansion does not consign it all to the dustbin, since I am not going to be able to get a raid together for something 10 levels below the cap.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ PvMP, open raids are great. There is almost always one open, maybe two, and we get so used to it that we forget to start a second when the first fills up. Voice chat is lively. People are work pretty well as a team, even with random composition. You regularly see raid-and-a-half versus raid-and-a-half, with a player troll and a bunch of NPCs in the mix (no problems with my graphics card), so the Ettenmoors really does re-create that “war” feeling that so many games miss, complete with monsters that keep dying and coming in waves while the free people play conservatively and have far better kill-death ratios. It is the most fun I have ever had in PvP.

City of Heroes PvP feels lonely. There is so much mobility that the fight sprawls over city blocks, in 3-D up to the flight ceiling. The goal is to pounce on one squishy, crush him, then spring away before his teammates can react. The only alternative to skirmishing is the long, drawn-out brawl from They Live, featuring Tankers and Scrappers who take forever to kill with ridiculous defenses. The skirmishers may actually continue their bouncing bloodsport over the tanks who have nothing else to do but engage their similarly invulnerable counterparts.

: Zubon