Category: City of Heroes/Villains

.

Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

.

What Am I Doing Here?

Zubon talks about the double-edged blade that occurs when players can scale everything so that everything is end game content.  The opposite edge occurs because either developers or players feel that because so much happens on the journey to the level cap then basically there is less at the level cap.  My first thought, and the first commenter on Zubon’s post, was about Guild Wars 2.  I had just read an interview from an ArenaNet developer on some website, and the developer’s response to a question of end-game content in Guild Wars 2 was very on point:

We have a lot of cool content when you get to the end of the game. That’s one of the cool aspects of our events. You can play all of our content over and over again, and even when you get to level 80 you can go back to old places and finish out the areas and we’ll level you down to where they are to allow you to go back and play that stuff at the appropriate level. So you can always go back and play through content, it’s not just worthless content to you because you leveled past it. It’s almost like a temporary thing where the game sidekicks you down to the level range for the content.

It does sound great on paper. Yet, the opposite edge that Zubon describes feels real. So many MMO players eventually get to the point where they can return to older content. When I do it, I often wonder what I am doing there.

Continue reading What Am I Doing Here?

Nothing and Everything as Endgame Content

I see more games trying to avoid having their earlier content become completely irrelevant while improving their endgame. You do this by having a version of the old content that scales to the new level cap; games without levels have this mostly baked right in anyway. Feel free to comment with your favorite game; World of Warcraft and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ are the ones I know best for having another version of older dungeons available at the level cap. Borderlands had its own version: after you beat the game the second time, everything levels to the cap, from the final zone to the first skags.

City of Heroes took a different approach, and it seems to have worked against them from many players’ perspectives. Everything scales, and you can always drop back profitably, so every instance remains relevant as you level. Everything is endgame content and leveling content. Perhaps because of that, City of Heroes has never built much that is endgame content in name. A favorable interpretation is that very little is held back and hidden behind a grind; a less favorable interpretation is that there is little new to do at the cap, which quickly becomes “there is nothing to do at the cap.” Those who took the latter interpretation generally unsubscribed. The illusion of scarcity is an important marketing principle.

: Zubon

Buffing

Ravious’s trinity and beyond discussion reminds me: buffing is a lot more fun than healing. City of Heroes will always have a place in my heart because of how awesome Kinetics is, especially at high levels. Buffing is less visible than putting green numbers over folks’ heads, and you cannot slap a DPS meter-equivalent on it, but it is more fun for both the buffer and the buffed (than the healer and the healed).

You know the litany against healers, in design and in playing one and in needing one, so skip that. Apart from enjoying the resource management game of the little bars you watch, the big fun in being a healer is making your friends limitless gods that go toe-to-toe with Cthonic horrors and win. Sure, you could do that by pretending you are a battery and re-filling the little bars every time the big bad all but one-shots your tank, while your other friends plink away its health, but why not actually make your friends limitless gods? Buff their defenses so that they can take the hits without constant healing, buff their regeneration to cover the gap, and buff their attacks so they swing more often and put really big numbers over their enemies’ heads. Cut the umbilical cord. (Debuffing does about the same, although something within me loves helping my friends more than hurting my foes, even if I am helping my friends hurt my foes.)

But why should I go on at length when we have this view from D&D?

: Zubon

Unique Mechanic

Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR.

By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many of a class’s skills/abilities. (They are not truly unique in WAR, because one class on each side has it.) The orc and elf tanks tier up, the chaos and dwarf ranged DPS summon turrets, and the human and dark elf healers have an energy pool they can refill with melee combat. The mechanic mattered to different degrees based on your class and spec line; it never felt all that exciting on my chaos healer, while my dwarf ranged DPS had turret- or gun-improving talent options.

My unsubstantiated feeling is that the earlier in the design process that the mechanic was added, the more vital it feels. City of Heroes gives every class something special, but it does not feel terribly special. City of Villains mechanics do feel special, because the classes are built around them. Brutes, Stalkers, and Dominators are defined by their special mechanics. Blasters and Defenders? Eh, it’s a bit of a bonus.

You get a reset on that timer if you completely re-do the class. Then you can re-build around a new core. I expect a bit of that to happen in Cataclysm, so that there is less feel of “mana or something slightly different,” although you do get rather different effects from bars that build up during combat and those that empty out. Or I could be completely wrong, because what do I know about WoW, but you have certainly seen classes re-done so that they fulfill the same role with radically different mechanics.

Unique class mechanics create additional balance issues, but for the moment I am wondering which I would prefer: designing classes entirely around the mechanics or just using them as a bit of flavor on whatever else they would do. There is a delicate balance in the latter, sometimes done well with race: if you can be a dwarf cleric or an elf cleric, you want there to be some interesting difference in how they play without making it an effectively forced choice because one race synergizes so well. “Sometimes” because there is that narrow range between “doesn’t matter” and “forced choice.”

: Zubon

More Guild Projects

Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more.

An essential difference, as Ravious says, is collective rather than individual advancement. If I get a piece of armor, my character has a piece of armor, but if I make a charcoal furnace, everyone in the guild can use it. If we felt like it, we could set it up so that any passing visitor could use it; some guilds built public camps so that new players would have access without starting from zero. I made something and everyone benefited, even after I logged off.

Continue reading More Guild Projects

Developer’s Gift to Modders

One great way to encourage your community to add to your game is to make it easy for players to get those additions. It is not enough to have tools for modders; you want it to be easy for players to use those mods, which will encourage their use, which will encourage their development, virtuous cycle ho!

Having it in-game helps. If I can access player-made mods, maps, quests, characters, etc. without searching the web and planning ahead, I am more likely to do so. The trivial inconvenience of downloading something and putting it in the right folder will keep many of your players from using much of anything beyond the standard game. The hardcore MMO player who will crawl through barbed wire for his fun is an atypical user.

One great gift to modders in Torchlight is having an achievement for using mods. People will do absurd things for useless badges and shinies that no one else will ever notice their having. A player who might never have looked at mods will notice when there is an un-checked achievement box to try them. It is a tiny thing for the developers to do, but it adds much encouragement. Yes, it also rewards “do it once to get it out of the way,” but some people will find interesting things in that try.

City of Heroes combines the two with Architect Entertainment. There are in-game sites devoted to trying player-made content. There are badges awarded for doing various things. After the initial release, the developers even toned down the badges to “try it” rather than “grind it until you hate the system and play only farms.”

Ease of use plus a low-cost nudge: encourage modders and harvest their ideas for official releases.

: Zubon

Variable Support

My City of Heroes “main” was a Blaster, but Defender was the only archetype for which I had multiple level-capped characters, three in this case. Were I to go back, I would be all about Controllers, of which I left at least three in the mid-levels.

For me, this was all about diversity of play. Blasters and Scrappers are damage dealers, Tankers are tanks. While each archetype has several power sets, all but one of them are usually more or less the same thing: damage with some minor effect attached. The differences between Ice Blasts and Fire Blasts and Dark Blasts were small unless you specialized in those side effects rather than in damage. I did that on my Defenders, making their attacks even more support, but you rarely want your primary damage class to be ersatz-support.

The support sets, however, differ quite a bit. You could have damage prevention through Force Fields or healing through Empathy. Darkness focuses on reducing enemies’ effectiveness, while Radiation mixes buff and debuff effects. Kinetics is a ridiculous stack of buffs and debuffs. The control sets use a common template of holds and other control, but each varies and also comes with a few trick and support abilities; Controllers got a control set and a support set, so you could see some real diversity in what they brought to the table.

The only interesting thing about trying more than one version of the non-support classes is the one odd power set per archetype. Spines is the Scrapper melee with AE and range. Ice is the defense-based tanker armor with two taunt auras and a bunch of debuffs. Some Electricity Blasters went melee, relying on endurance drain to keep the enemies from doing much. And in powerset proliferation, which opens up more combos, and a second tank or DPS might be interesting.

: Zubon

Account-Level Rewards

I am interested in seeing more factors tied to the account rather than the character and in the form of unlocks rather than items.

Most MMO elements are tied to the character. Your level, skills, reputation, achievements: all of these are character-specific. You may be able to trade money and equipment between characters. Some games are progressive enough to let you share a few items like a friends list, chat channel, guild affiliation, or key bindings across characters.

Some of my interest comes from being an altoholic. If I have a dozen characters, a bonus that applies to all of them is more interesting than a single-character upgrade. It is secondarily of use to the hardcore with multiple level-capped characters, less so to players who devote themselves to a single character. It makes it a lower-investment decision to try new character options, and it retains the illusion of progress and permanency rather than making each character feel like something entirely new. Continue reading Account-Level Rewards

Cultural Difference

In World of Warcraft, the shared world is where you complete the leveling game. It is organized by and dominated by quests. The goal of the leveling game is to earn experience points and to complete it as time-efficiently as possible. The end game is the real game, and it takes place in instances. The goal is to improve your gearscore. Completing achievements and collecting pets and mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.

Or at least that is how I see the majority of hardcore players. If you disagree, the question is not whether it is true for you but whether you think I have mis-assessed the majority. You could also make the case that the real majority is casually making its way through the leveling game. Those people are less likely to be engaged in MMO blogs or the meta-game, so I don’t know if they are part of the conversation.

In City of Heroes and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, the leveling game is the game. There is a veneer of end game, but people who think that the game begins at the level cap are severely disappointed. There is some harder content at the cap, along with the chance to farm for best-in-slot gear, but the games are designed for the journey. If you power-level to get past the leveling game, you are just missing the game. The end game is pretty much more of the leveling game, without experience points. (Completing badges/deeds and collecting costumes/mounts are shared mini-games between the two levels of play.)

Going from the latter two to the former, I was constantly annoyed by “the game begins at 80.” Meanwhile, the population in the former is much larger and therefore is a constant source of complaints as visitors in the latter two. “I left WoW because I was bored, but this game sucks because it isn’t more like WoW. I need you to change it for me now, because I’m going back to WoW when the next expansion drops.”

: Zubon

Support

For those of us inclined to do so, the healer is a great role. Yes, it has problems in PUGs when three different people pull then blame the healer, but it is rewarding to see your friends made into boundless engines of destruction and victory.

Healing is great for marginal teams that are barely scraping by, but moving a team from “non-functional” to “winning” or from “winning” to “dominating” is a job for non-healer support. The best times I have had on any support character have been when healing is a secondary role. It is nice to have that in your pocket, in case things go pear-shaped, but support is at its best when healing is unnecessary. Debuffing is great, buffing is usually better, and control is invisibly wonderful if often fragile.

As with many things, City of Heroes does this the best of any game I have played. It is not readily apparent in the early levels, when defenses and abilities are weak and healing is necessary. It starts in the mid-levels and comes into its own in the late game. Everyone who got tired of things in the 30s? You missed the best part of the game (although I concede a love for the frantic newness of the low levels). Kinetics is the big star, with Fulcrum Shift as its last ability, putting your entire team at the damage cap. Life at the damage cap is a beautiful thing. Along the way, Defenders might put you at the speed cap; put all enemies at the speed, damage, or accuracy floor, or all at once; give everyone endless endurance (mana) and regeneration good enough to make healing redundant; and be the best pulling class around. Controllers do all of that with slightly lower numbers and the bonus ability of turning the enemies into statues. If you were not loving the game in the late levels, you were playing with/as a healer and not a Defender.

This is not CoH-specific. Playing a support mage in Asheron’s Call was a beautiful thing, letting my friends specialize all their attacks while multiplying their damage. There was a special joy in debuffing an enemy’s magic skills and watching it fizzle its attack spells repeatedly. My Theurgist in Dark Age of Camelot was a primary damage class that was more valued for its run buff, stuns and slows, and especially the bladeturn chant (self-refreshing group buff: the next enemy attack misses). A Minstrel will improve his legendary items’ healing cost and power buffs in The Lord of the Rings Online, but one “required” legacy is increasing the group melee damage buff, and the damage reduction from traiting for buffs is greater than the healing increase from traiting for heals. World of Warcraft is kind enough to make many buffs last ten to thirty minutes, for your ease as a buffer.

The life of a healer is usually boredom or panic. In a good group, there is not much to do. In a bad group, there are too many people demanding your attention at once, and in a badly designed encounter, you have people going suddenly from full health to nearly dead. Buffers are not half-AFK waiting for a green bar to go down, and there is always something interesting to do as a debuffer.

: Zubon