March 17, 2008

Eric: An entirely too long post on Superhero MMOs.

Cohlogo

This is one of those mornings where I don't have enough brain to work on webcomics criticism. I know, that may seem like a strange statement, but sometimes these posts actually take a moderate amount of thought. Who knew?

So, that to me says it's time to touch on a few announcements from the wide world of Superhero Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games! Yee-haw! I know folks were just praying that I'd get back to this subject in short order.

Right now, we have our two entries into the field, and they're at significantly different places in the universe. City of Heroes is a strong, vibrant game. It has a solid subscriber base, it has the force of momentum behind it, and it makes announcements in terms of weeks or months. Champions Online is, for all the excitement, vapor right now -- it's due in the Spring of 2009, and there's very few video games that actually hit their target release date without a few delays. So, no matter, how cool Champions Online sounds, it's still more than a year away at best.

Still, the news coming out of the two Heroic Houses -- our DC and Marvel, and I have no idea which is which -- makes for fun dissection and speculation, and that's how we're going to approach this here post. We're going to dissect and speculate, which is a fancy way of saying 'bitch and make shit up.' But hey, with luck it'll be fun to read.

City of Heroes, having come off of an unusually weak Valentines'/Spring Event, has come back strong. First off, they brought back one of the best "in-zone" events they've done -- the Rikti Invasion. This is a sequence where every so often (on a relatively regular basis) the alarms are sounded in almost any given zone, the forcefields drop (if it's a City of Heroes zone), the skies turn green, the bad guy NPCs flee and the Rikti come sweeping in, with carpet bombing and ground troop assaults. This was a big event last year, and was an occasional event since (whenever some team completes the Lady Grey Task Force in the Rikti War Zone it triggers a Rikti invasion in some random game zone). Well, they've now made invasions a recurring event. It looks like, roughly, they do one week on for the invasion for every six weeks off, with the "weeks" breaking down to encompass a weekend.

I know some of my friends hate the Rikti invasion -- it's an imposition, from their lights. It makes actually playing the game in the affected zones harder, not to mention the massive spamming that goes on during them. But God help me, I love the invasion. For a solo roleplayer (I know, it's a contradiction in terms) they're just about perfect. They're relatively fast, and there's a real sense of everyone dropping everything, defusing bombs and grabbing any pickup group they can to smash the invading armies. Because they've implemented scaling code on Rikti invaders, everyone can grab whatever team they want -- it doesn't matter if I'm Level 37 and my partners are level 9 -- we all get XP for our fighting, and we're all equals in the battle.

This is the first sequence that's really felt like a world shaking event in the game, and as laggy and confusing as it can get, it's amazingly cool to be standing in the heart of forty heroes slamming down Rikti soldiers, drones and Heavy Assault Suits at all sides, noise everywhere and flares and particle effects flying at all sides. On the other hand, I have a really solid computer to play on and this last invasion I was generally playing a Mastermind, which meant I pretty much threw Healing Poison on my allies and henchmen and spun around looking for Heavies to target while my henchmen did all the actual fighting. For a scrapper, these chaosfests might suck.

Anyway, I really like this. I'm glad it's happening in one-week chunks, so I don't have time to get sick of it, and I'm glad it recurs. And I noticed that the incidence of Lady Grey Task Force-triggered Rikti Invasions went up significantly in the days following this Invasion's completion -- clearly, a good number of players were inspired by it. Or wanted the Apocalyptic badge. Either way.

Anyhow -- this turned out to be the minor bit of City of Heroes news, because after the first week of renewed invasion was over, they made their major announcement: Issue 12: Midnight Hour, the 11th major free expansion of City of Heroes. (They call Issue 6: Along Came A Spider a free issue because of a few adds to City of Heroes, but that issue was really the release of City of Villains, which was a paid expansion which actually funded things like Siren's Call and Warburg, even if they credit them as 'free' because City of Heroes players could play them.) We had been told to expect little this issue, with the major stuff coming in Issue 13, but as it works out the paid Wedding Pack costume and emotes pack sold very well indeed, giving them the chance to get ahead of the cost/result curve in research and development, and as a result Midnight Hour looks like a solid expansion.

The announced new features are:

Let's cover each of these in turn, shall we?

Join the Midnight Squad: The Midnight Squad is a Pulpesque organization dating back to the 20s, mentioned in various places throughout the game. It's known this semi-public group of occultists was of particular value during the Rikti Invasion, which also took a monumental toll on their ranks, and most of their in-game inclusion to date has involved some researcher or the other getting killed.

This is a cool thing all around. In storyline terms, enough time's passed since the war that this organization is finally getting its feet back under itself, and it promises to add some significant content both in terms of the Rikti War ongoing storyline (including a teased resolution to it, which makes me wonder what will happen to the Rikti War Zone in coming Issues, unless this is a red herring), and in terms of the very creation of superpowers in the World of Paragon City and the Rogue Islands.

On the other hand, the level 10-20 stuff is described as a significant story arc for heroes and "two smaller adventures" for villains, and the story description we have to date is couched in Heroic terms. (Stopping the war, helping end the assault, fighting the Lost, stuff like that.) This is one of those areas where heroes and villains have different content, but the villain content is either less significant (to the point where they're not advertising specifics) or is in fact still "heroic" content. The player base strongly cants Hero, so that's where the development goes, which makes bad guy players (like me, much of the time) sad pandas. But more on that in a few minutes.

In terms of what this is, rather than what this is not, this is exciting stuff. Levels 10 - 20 can be a slog on either side of the factional divide -- play enough alts and you see pretty much all the content over and over and over again. Having something to transition you into the 20s that isn't the Golden Roller or Virginia Hoffman will be a nice change.

New Roman Style Zone Maps: Let me say first and foremost -- anything that expands the City of Heroes map base is an innately good thing. I remember when I was introducing a friend to City of Villains, and talking about the lush levels of detail, the expansion of gameplay, the joys of Brutes and Masterminds and the like, his response was, more or less, "wait -- this is just that same warehouse map I've been on a thousand times. They just redressed it." He went back to World of Warcraft in disappointment, and I spent some time sighing. These things do matter.

And new content from 35-50 is also always good, especially if it's engaging enough to pull my level 50 heroine back out to play. And this sounds like it could be interesting and exciting, adding depth to the City of Heroes backstory and mythology and giving us a preview of the long-promised Shields powerset (the Romans you encounter have Shields, you see). Let me quote from the announcement:

There is a familiar threat in an ancient land and the Midnighters need the help of both Heroes and Villains to stop it. Players step foot upon the ancient land of the Roman Cimeroran Peninsula, where they battle deadly creatures, defend an ancient city and ultimately come face to face with the enemy of time itself. Throughout this journey players uncover the mysteries of power and the origins that guide them today.

On the one hand, I like the sound of this. I'm looking forward to playing in it. And if it's a chance to play my favorite character (a villain) alongside the friends I most like to play this game with (all of whom vastly prefer playing heroes to villains), so much the better.

On the other hand... I'm waiting for the day we get an announcement like this: "from the ancient depths of antiquity comes an order heroic and true, who have access to a source of power so monumental, so epic, and so valuable that villains and heroes alike will band together to smash these paladins and seize this power for themselves -- to change the world, destroy it, or sell to the highest bidder!"

I'm waiting, but it won't ever come. In fact, it shouldn't come. Everything in the genre demands that heroes remain, in the end, heroic, There won't ever be a situation where they join with villains for villainous reasons.

But we've now had several instances where villains join with heroes for heroic reasons. The threats are too large -- and as distasteful as the heroes might find it, it's the villains' world too, and sometimes they need to set their differences aside for the Greater Good. This drives the entire Rikti War Zone. This drives the co-op elements in the Valentine's Day and New Year's events. Heck, while Ouroboros isn't a cooperative zone, in order to become a real member of Ouroboros you need to save a future Atlas Park, fight the scourge of the Rikti, invade old Fifth Column bases (and help bring it down) -- pretty solid good-guy stuff. And while there are some villain missions in Ouroboros (the 1960's battle to establish Lord Recluse in the Rogue Islands is a heap of fun, if you can get past the ridiculous "proving yourself" mission in the middle of it, and damn it, I want one of those cheesy 60's Arachnos suits -- they have non-functional 'spider arms' coming out of their sides! It would be like being the Monarch's Henchmen!) there's a lot of places where you can be a good guy, and not many places where a good guy can be (forced into being) a bad guy.

This is a tangential complaint, however. The content should be good and I'm looking forward to running through it. See more of this later.

Unlock Roman Style Armor Costumes: This, on the other hand, I'm a little dubious about.

Don't get me wrong -- the Roman Armor looks cool. I could easily build a good character concept for it.

However, that may be a fool's errand. The armor is unlockable, which is to say we have to do something in-game to get it.

There's a lot of ways that could happen. There may be a badge or mission in the 10 - 20 range Midnight Squad missions that unlocks it. There may be a "Merit" system similar to the Vanguard Merits unlocking the Vanguard costume pieces. There may be a reward of the whole thing for completing the Level 35-50 mission sequence. There may be a Task Force or the like in the game. We just don't know.

The problem with most of those is they make the new armor essentially useless for the best possible use of it: character concepts.

Seriously. If I can "unlock" my armor at Level 10, it's probably fine (from L1-10 I can come up with some kind of placeholder) but if the earliest level I can unlock Roman Centurion armor is 35 then forget tailoring a design around it. That's a mug's game. And L35 is a terrible earliest level to get a new suit of clothes unlocked anyhow -- sure, some folks will jump into it, but a good number of people get their costume slots set and at most do variations after that. If you get the armor unlocked from L35-39, then maybe you'll use it in your last slot at L40, but if you're already over 40 when you do this set, is Roman really a look that'll displace one of your current costumes?

And if they use the horrific "Vanguard Merit" style system to unlock the armor, I'll just give up on it and be done with it.

Vanguard Merits are the game's means of creating an 'alternate currency' for players to earn costume pieces, temporary powers and even temporary pets while fighting the Rikti. When I first sent my L50 character into the Rikti War Zone, I was into the concept -- the character had gone to war, and as the character earned Merits, one of the character's costumes would slowly morph into a Vanguard uniform. That made happy sense to me.

But it took so freaking long to get enough Merits to get any of the costume pieces, I abandoned it. The only way the Merit system really works is if you do a lot of the Raids on the downed Rikti ship in the middle of the zone. I don't do Raids. I hate Raids. I hate Raids. I may be the only person who preordered City of Heroes and started playing on the first day who's never once done a Hamidon Raid. So I just gave up on costume pieces for that character.

If we have to earn Midnight Merits to unlock the Roman armor, then each piece better be five freaking Merits, or else I have no interest and by the by, stop clogging my salvage display with them.

On the other hand, the announcement actually says that a player's achievements will unlock the Roman Armor costumes. If this is the case, then it's possible they'll be hard to unlock and a part of the higher level range, but unlocking the costumes once unlocks them for all that player's characters, past and future. If so, that's okay -- a hard task that gives a solid reward is cool instead of frustrating.

Villain Epic Archetypes: As I said above, Villains have been waiting since the introduction of Grandville and L40-50 content for an Epic Archetype to counterbalance the heroes' Kheldans (the aforementioned Peacebringers and Warshades). Now, "Epic" in the City of Heroes sense means "tied to a specific epic story," not "all powerful and grand." On the other hand, the Kheldans are pretty damn spiff. You can become an all powerful energy squid that can blast as well as any given blaster, or you can become a gigantic lobster person -- in effect a somewhat gimped pocket tanker -- and you can also develop a wide variety of personal powers. And you get your travel powers for free, and the content -- the epic story -- was all new to the game, and added whole new dimensions.

The Villain Epic Archetypes are... Blood Widows and Wolf Spiders.

Which, for those who don't play the game (and if you don't play the game, why are you still reading this far down?) are two of the minions that serve Arachnos.

Yeah. On the hero side, we have energy squid lobsterpeople with a rich, new dimension of storytelling to the game. On the villain side.... I have the mooks I've been mowing down by the truckload since the day I first started playing City of Villains. In fact, one of the sidequests in the Outbreak tutorial involves your Level 1 villain saving a hapless and clueless Wolf Spider from capture and completing the mission he bungled. And hey, now you too can be that wolf spider! Yay!

Yay.

On the one hand, the execution of these new Villain Epic Archetypes looks really cool. It's a branching system, so you can climb the ladder of Arachnos types -- you start as a Blood Widow, say, but work your way up to Fortunata Mistress or Night Widow. And Wolf Spiders can become the nasty and powerful Bane Spiders, or they can become Crab Spiders, which means will have giant eight armed crab spider backpacks. And God damn it, I want a giant eight armed crab spider backpack. And they describe it as "infiltrating" the ranks of Arachnos, which could be cool and the story could be good.

But... dude, the Villain epics are mooks. And honestly, I'm sick of Arachnos anyway. Instead of Epics that added a new dimension and story to City of Villains, we're getting additional depth and explication on the overused part of City of Villains.

But dude. Eight Armed Crab Spider Backpack. Not to mention Night Widow. And they've finally put gender equality into the ranks of Arachnos, including male Blood Widow(er)s, and female Wolf Spiders, which they highlight in the archetype specific costume choices. I'm weird -- It's not the metrosexual guys or the Goth Chick Bane Spider that looks cool to me -- it's the badass reddish female wolf spider on the end. Yeah, she's a mook in the most mooklike armor, but that armor is slick.

So, on the one hand I'm disappointed. On the other hand I'm desperately levelling my top villain to be able to play one of these upon release. So, I'm going to call this a win for CrypticNCSoft, but I hope we get some different kinds of Epic which add new story elements soon.

Powerset Proliferation: What this means, in effect, is a bunch of the powersets currently reserved for specific archetypes (especially on one faction's side or the other) are going to be added to other archetypes. We already know that Plant Control has been imported from the Dominators to the Controllers, which is cool. And we know a Psi set is going to the blasters, and Brutes are getting both Mace and Axe. Everyone is getting a new primary and secondary except for Brutes, who get two primaries and a secondary, and Masterminds, who only get a secondary since there are no Mastermind primaries that Masterminds don't innately get.

This is all good stuff. More variety is more variety, and it makes me more likely to indulge my Altaholism, testing out new combinations and having fun. I'm looking forward to learning more -- especially what the Defenders are getting, because there's lots of cool stuff on the Villain side and any of it would be fun. That said, I hope it's Thermal -- because Thermal means setting your allies on fire, and who doesn't like to do that?

Major Gameplay Improvements: In brief (yeah, fat chance) summary: significant improvements to the UI, including new configurable power trays, being able to organize your contacts, continued real numbers in place of the vagueness instituted at the beginning, and improvements to chatting. You can also take three Inspirations of a similar type you don't need and convert them to another type you do need, which is exciting. And the explosion of light and sound you get when you Level Up now also gives you one of every inspiration autocast on your character. So when you're in a pitched battle and you level up, not only do you get better combat statistics, you also suddenly get a pile of 30 second buffs on your character. I am entirely in favor of all of the above, though it's not the sort of thing that inspires dancing in the streets.

On the whole, Issue 12 looks like a really solid issue, and I'm glad people bought the Wedding Pack so we could get the cool stuff. My lingering regret is generally villain-related, though it's not like Villains were ignored this time out.

(That said, I really, really want Redemption in Issue 13 -- or at least Probation. Either let my villains, having fought alongside the heroes so often, finally join up and become heroes or give a system that lets a villain cross the divide and work with the heroes a la Catwoman with Batman or the Rogues with the Flash in all those issues of the comic book. Or, you know, go the other way if they'd rather. But honestly. My friends play heroes. I love Masterminds. Please let me play with my friends in something other than Pocket D or the Rikti War Zone. I'll give you a doughnut.)

Champions Logo

Well, the stuff coming out of Champions Online central isn't as deep or rich as what's coming out of City of Heroes, but that makes sense. Champions Online is still a year away, and so we're at the point of getting dribbles of information, not details. Still, we did learn a few things that continue to have me excited for the game, and so I'm going to goob about them. Because Christ knows a 4000 word post on City of Heroes needs padding.

We got some new screenshots that demonstrate our heroes have actual facial expressions -- something the City of Heroes characters lack. Your character can smirk, or look defiant, or stuff. Wink, I presume. Which, by the way, is likely how these announcements are going to go for a while. We're going to see new and exciting stuff that you can't do in City of Heroes highlighted. Cryptic knows who their competition are, and they're not going to highlight the stuff that's essentially the same between the two games.

That said, facial expressions, while neat, aren't at the top of my wishlist.

One thing that was on the top of my wishlist was autotargeting, as you'll recall. And an "Ask Cryptic" dev post where players got to ask questions helped to allay some of my fears for the game. It's that post I'm going to focus on.

First off, we learned about some of the HEROalike elements of the Champions Online system, including a good breakdown of a Champions (pen and paper) energy blast. Now, it's worth noting -- I was not hoping for nor even wanting this game to use the HERO system. I adore HERO. I used to sit for hours and generate characters with it, refining and developing them and fitting them into the point constraints. But if there's one good way to turn a lot of casual gamers off, it's monumentally complicated math based character generation. Sitting there and optimizing your CON to punch up your END and REC stats is a lot of fun... for some people.

So, instead of the incredibly broad HERO system, which separates mechanics from special effects, we have a system that has predefined special effects (they mention Dark Blast and Ice Blast as examples, instead of a HEROesque 'energy blast' you could then define as ice or dark if you wanted) that you can then add advantages and limitations to as needed. Amusingly, this sounds more like GURPS Supers than Champions, but that's okay with me!

And, while the customizing system is exciting and cool, I know a lot of City of Heroes fans who are mostly just excited at the chance to change the colors of their powers. That's one of the most requested features in City of Heroes, but the graphics engine wasn't designed with that in mind, and it's nigh-impossible to retrofit it. You can bet the Champions Online people will be trumpeting this for some time to come.

They also say that there will be a rich and robust non-combat skill system, where you can take things like Stealth or Science and use them in missions to affect things, or compete with your enemies or the like. This could be amazingly cool, but it could also be pretty lame. Further, this was the sort of thing that Cryptic tried several times and methods to add to City of Heroes without success. It's possible that those skills just couldn't be added to the engine, but they might work really well if the engine is designed with it in mind in the first place. I'm hopeful, but I'll actually believe in the robust skills system when I see it.

They mentioned also that Archvillain fights will involve more than just beating your archvillain into pus, again highlighting the upcoming Nemesis system as a part of that. As part of my ongoing hope that heroes will be able to do good as opposed to just fight evil, I'm hopeful this is a sign of flexibility in mission design.

They've revealed that the penalty for defeats will echo the World of Warcraft system -- your equipment is damaged if you lose, and will lose effectiveness until repaired -- eventually becoming useless. This includes all "upgrades," which may be how they do the Level system in this game (they may eschew the Level distinction altogether, which I'm in favor of since it's more Championsesque, but they'll still need some means of easy comparion). Nothing dramatically new, but I'm just as happy to see "debt" not a part of this.

Finally, the one I cared most about. They reinforced again the very active combat system, but also reinforced it would have things like autotarget. However, they've reduced recharge times (in hopes of preventing the 'energy blast that goes around corners) issue, and added stuff like persistent powers that will hurt you until you break line of sight with your opponent. These are good ideas, especially because they sound intuitive. I should be able to run around a corner to break Firewing's line of sight and stop the horrible pain.

So, the short term prognosis for City of Heroes is excellent, and the long term prognosis for Champions Online is exciting. With City of Heroes learning that sales of an optional costume pack can equal significant increases in resources (and the continuing growth of their development team, thanks to their new corporate overlords), there's every chance we'll see more optional paid content which in turn will fuel more free expansion content going forward. And as Champions Online gets closer to release, we can start to see how the promises being made in 2008 turn into gameplay in 2009.

All in all, it's a good time to be a Hero.

And an okay time to be a Villain. Stupid heroes with their new zones and their universal threats and "oh, if the Earth is destroyed where will you spend your ill gotten gains and rabble dragah mutter....

Posted by Eric Burns at 12:53 PM | Comments (17)

March 1, 2008

Eric: The Obligatory Champions Online Post

Champions Online
In my last post about video games, I talked about the way that Champions Online's announcement contributed to a bad month for City of Heroes. I didn't really go a lot into the potential (and potential pitfalls) of Champions Online itself -- that wasn't the essay for it.

Well, in and around spending time with Weds (she's in the shower as I speak), I guess I'd like to start actually discussing Champions Online itself. I'm really looking forward to what they do with the game, and at the same time I have a certain amount of dread for it. And how they pan out depends a lot on what happens between now and release.

So, here's a fast little wishlist for Champions Online, and hand in hand with it I'll touch on potential pitfalls and out and out dealkillers. As always, your milage may vary.

Here we go!

Make both 'factions' potentially sympathetic

The setup and execution of PvP in City of Heroes blew, badly. It wasn't in the game at all at first, and then when it was added in "arenas" it soured the experience for a lot of folks. And then City of Villains came out, and was a really great addon to the game (I'm running a villain right now and loving it). But, the Villain side is way less represented than the hero side. I have friends who never play City of Villains sheerly because they don't want to be a bad guy (and, given that a number of missions make it clear you're killing everyone in a mission, for example, I can understand that.) It doesn't have the rich potential of, say, Alliance vs. Horde in World of Warcraft, and part of the reason for that is that neither the Alliance nor the Horde have to be the bad guys.

Stop and consider what that means, for a moment. Yes, one side has Paladins and the other side has Undead, but if you play as Horde there's absolutely nothing requiring you to be a slavering monster. There's plenty of built in examples of nobility on the Horde side, and plenty of examples of questionable or downright evil behavior on the Alliance side. And as a result, each individual player can decide for himself what his character's ethos is. (And yes, I'm presupposing some roleplaying here. It's an RPG.)

The problem with Superhero Role Play, on the other hand, is that it seems to have a built in dichotomy. The heroes and the villains. The good guys and the bad guys. While there are significant nuances in the comics, they're hard to encode into a role playing game. And that means that the Villain side pretty much has to be... well, villainous. They can't all be antiheroes who reject society's rules -- some of them are going to want stuff, or be nasty, or murderous. The Joker kills people, folks.

Well, Champions Online isn't going to have factions to begin with. They're going to have PvP, but not full 'dual sided' PvP a la World of Warcraft. I honestly think that's a mistake, but we let it go for these purposes. (Why a mistake? One of the primary review points I heard when City of Heroes was initially reviewed was how unspeakably lame it was to have a superhero game without the option to be a villain or PvP against the heroes. One learns from the past or one has a bad future, but I digress.) They said that one of the first expansions will be Dark Champions.

And that gives me some modicum of hope -- because the original Dark Champions RPG supplement wasn't a villain supplement. It was Grim and Gritty, Modern Dark hero supplement, and that could be perfect for a MMORPG.


Consider, if you will, the traditional four color hero/modern "compromised" hero dichotomy. The idealist versus the realist. How many modern comics (including such phenomenal ones as Kingdom Come and such poor executions as Civil War) have rested upon this. I'm reminded of a seminal moment in Kingdom Come, where a hologram of Superman is trying to instruct the Gulag prisoners in right and wrong, and one shouts up at him. "Where does depriving us of our civil rights fall? Who bagged Eclipso? People like us! We saved lives, man!" Now, Kingdom Come was a polemic, and the 'modern' side was largely strawmanish, but the potential there is amazing. The paragons of virtue, whose hands are clean. The urban warriors who can't afford to stay clean. On the one side, Superman and Captain America. On the other, the Punisher and Wolverine.

Now that could be awesome, because it lets everyone involved be a hero, while fueling the debate of just what a hero is.

Not that having a villain PC option is a bad idea. It's a very very good idea, but it will be hard to make it a full balanced "side" a la the Horde and the Alliance, and having those strong factions is a worthy goal.

Don't Make "Active" combat == Twitch Combat

One of the selling points of Champions Online is that the combat system will be fast and frenetic. No more 'boring' auto-attacks. No more long recharge times. As they say on their feature list:

Hi-Octane Excitement: Champions Online delivers furious, fast-paced encounters previously reserved for action and fighting games. No more boring auto attacks and lengthy recharge times. Champions Online combat is instantaneous ? and electrifying!

...um... yeah.

Look, I'm all for excitement. But if this means that things like auto-targeting are out, and the result is a twitch style (or even FPS style) game that's as much Counterstrike or even Ratchet and Clank as City of Heroes, it's most likely I won't make it a month in that game, and there won't be any chance whatsoever I will ever venture into PvP. There is a good reason for this. I am terrible at those games.

I'll say that again. I am terrible at those games.

I love Soulcalibur, and I love playing it with friends, but that is because I have deep connections to that game, love the single player mode, and don't mind losing over and over again to my friends. Playing Soulcalibur online would swiftly grow unsatisfying to me, as someone half my age (or younger) proceeded to absolutely hand my head to me every time I so much as stuck it out to look around. I despise 'ganking,' and I don't have the skills or reflexes for twitch.

I liked Kingdom of Hearts all right, for point of reference, but I never finished it. In large part, that was because the combat system wasn't fun for me. It turned into just another platformer, and I never really saw how anything I spent points on in improving my abilities turned into actual gameplay, because I wasn't any damn good at the button combinations for the controller so I just swung at everything, desperately. I hope all that mana I collected went into something nice.

In playing City of Heroes, I can use all of my abilities and use them well, because I can think about them, set up appropriate attack chains, not worry about aiming or twitch style mechanics, and just in general feel like a superhero. That's why I play a role playing game instead of an action game. If the gameplay engine in Champions Online streamlines that, so I can set up my abilities and macros for fast paced action, all the better. But if they mean that I'm going to be desperately hitting buttons -- any buttons -- in hopes of launching attacks before I die, then I'll hang out in City of Heroes until they turn the servers off, which (as many people pointed out in my last post) won't be for a long, long time.

Alas, this might be a battle already lost. They're targeting the XBox 360 as well as the PC, almost certainly with an eye to having both groups play on the same server. It may be that the best way to play will involve a controller, and that keyboard jockeys like me will just have to make do.

Don't Make 'Voice Chat' into All Chat

As stated, I play RPGs because I like to immerse myself into an experience. I am a roleplayer, even if I'm playing a role of one while soloing in PvE.

Put simply, voice chat is antithetical to this style of play.

If I'm playing a tabletop RPG with a group of friends, I can, after a fashion, let my brain ignore the fact that the ethereal elfin maid is being played by six foot two bearded guy. Assuming he's actively working at it, of course. However, if I'm across the room from a beautiful red haired heroine, energies playing around her as an aura as she channels the incarnate forces of the universe, and in my ear I hear her say 'alright, we're gonna have to herd the Viper to the left side of the room -- Bob, buff Tony and Jesus, people. No jumping the gun" in a baritone voice, I'm afraid the delicate environmental illusion will suffer for it. Also, the fewer people who call me a crude euphemism for homosexual in my ear while I play, the happier I will be.

Note that I have no problems with people who do play these games with tactical intentions in mind. How they want to play is entirely up to them, and crack teams of players who see this game as a tactical exercise are still paying their money each month and having a good time, and good on them. But that doesn't mean that I want to have to be using voice chat to play the game on my own.

(Again, this may be a lost cause. If they're targeting the 360, they're targeting XBox Live, and that means presuming everyone in the room has a headset hooked up. And if that's the case -- hey, have fun with it, guys.)

Make Secret Identities Meaningful

I'm really, really psyched that this game has announced that Secret Identities are a part of the game, and the choice between a secret and public identity will have different impacts on the game experience. That's the sort of thing I've wanted for a long time in City of Heroes.

However, there's lots of ways of making that a meaningful part of gameplay. Let me throw out a few thoughts -- not as requirements, but as suggestions or things I would find really cool.

First off, have ways of using one's superpowers in 'hidden' mode, a la Clark adjusting his glasses to surreptitiously use his heat vision when no one's looking. Having missions where you have to use your powers in 'low' mode to avoid revealing your secret would go a long way to making it feel comic bookish. (And if you define your powers through objects -- or foci, in Champions speak -- then your secret identity couldn't use those powers at all.)

First off, have meaningful skills systems. They can follow the skills systems of, say, WoW and I'd be perfectly happy, but make sure those skills have applications to the superheroic genre instead. Instead of, say, Leathercrafting or Tailoring skills, a superhero could have 'Detective,' 'Reporter,' 'Occultist,' or 'Scientist' skills (as a bare beginning of a list). As low level criminals are beaten, they might drop clues as part of their drops (or be searchable for them). Those clues could be crafted by a Detective or Reporter into a Lead, and Leads could be developed into (for a Detective) a Case or (for a reporter) a Story. Those could then be 'sold' to their workplace for a mission that might have some special content or drops, or for significant in-game currency and reputation. Occultists, engineers or scientists could gather up clues or elements or find places of significance they can 'observe' (think Mining in WoW) for elements that could be combined into buffs, abilities, even new powers. Finding new recipes, new ways of using abilities, and engineering new things could become as addictive as crafting in World of Warcraft currently is. And giving people stuff to do that doesn't require combat is not a bad thing at all, in a game you're trying to keep them addicted to.

Which is not to say that Secret Identities should only define professional abilities, in that same way. Superman is not simply a mild-mannered reporter so he can collect a paycheck and find out where the Toyman is going to strike. There is also Perry White, Jimmy Olson, and Lois Lane. Which raising the very Champions concept of the Dependent Non Player Character.

In the tabletop Champions RPG, the Dependent Non Player Character (or DNPC) is a weakness your character can take. This is a person in the hero's life that the hero cares about for some reason, who has a knack for getting into scrapes. They also add depth to a character's backstory. They are Lois Lane, Aunt May, Linda Park, Alfred the Butler, Pepper Hogan and lots of other folks who populate the comics but (as an example) never appear in City of Heroes.

Well, I think they should appear in Champions Online. Make the workplace a given hero goes to an instance instead of a common area, and you can create his very own editor, best friend and/or love interest that he can get to know. Add a few elements of The Sims or other such games, where you can click on a DNPC and interact with them, minigame style. Let those interactions, when they reach certain thresholds, spawn new 'mission' content. Maybe you can take Mary-Lois out on a date, which you run Sims style -- at least until CLOWN bursts into the restaurant and it becomes a 'low power/stealth' mission. Give XP or other perks for strong interactions and you have a real potential for cool 'side' elements.

And go all the way with this. If there's going to be a Secret Identity and DNPCs, then give relationship ratings that the player can check on a regular basis. If in three weeks of playing four hours a night you haven't given Aunt June a call, it makes sense she'd have a very low opinion of you. Let it get bad enough and she might come looking for you to find out why you never call, and there's your Archnemesis ready to kidnap her and strap her to the giant table of rotating sawblades.

These things don't have to be obtrusive, mind. It can be a system that adds value (and gives solo players a lot to do) in the background while letting you concentrate on punching out Shamrock and the Lady Blue in the foreground.

Let My Powers Be More Than Combat Effects

This is a superhero game. One of the most important aspects of being a superhero is fighting evil. There's no doubt about that. But it's nowhere near the only aspect.

Give me a chance to stop an onrushing train from derailing! Give me a chance to put out a fire with my powers (City of Heroes had a fire event... that involved picking up fire extinguishers and spraying the flames. Ice powers didn't affect the fire. It was one of those moments that made me wonder why we didn't call licensed professionals in, since we were using their equipment and all.) Give a flying hero a chance to catch a falling citizen. Let me use my stretching powers to get a cat out of a tree.

In short, let me do good, not just fight evil.

Above All, Be Flexible

They're invoking heavy customization as a major feature of Champions Online. I heartily approve of this, because that's what Champions was all about. But more than anything else, Champions Online should be flexible to different styles of play experience.

This is one of those areas, by the by, where it makes long-time City of Heroes players nervous to have Jack Emmert at the helm. A lot of the time, Emmert would justify changes that weren't necessarily popular as conforming more to the game vision -- the idea and ideal that the developers had in how people were going to play the game and have a good time. For example -- the game was strongly oriented at first towards group play, because the game was more fun played in groups.

Only... not everyone liked to play in groups. Some people preferred to play solo. And some people liked to play in casual, role play defined groups whereas others liked to play very fine tuned groups with roles defined tactically. There were a lot of ways to play City of Heroes, and attempts to 'nudge' (or 'shove') us into the vision's way -- because it would be more fun -- didn't turn out to be more fun. It turned out to be annoying.

And City of Heroes has gotten much better at such things, as a result.

Well, I'm here to say that if they really, really want to make the most people happy? They should make it easy for people to pick and choose the kind of play experience they want. If someone really enjoys PvE soloing, he should have a rich experience (the Secret Identity and Professions stuff I mentioned above would go hand in hand with that.) If someone prefers PvP group play, the game should give him some solid avenues for it.

Almost everything I mentioned in the beginning parts of this essay highlights things around what I would enjoy. However, to force someone who's not into the things I'm into to do NPC interactions or crafting wouldn't be fun for that person. Heck, I won't even mind a twitch combat system if it's something I can opt out of. (Have a buff to going in manually, with aiming and the like, versus a slightly less effective but more traditional RPG experience, and you'll have a lot of happy players. And if you need proof of that, look at Knights of the Old Republic, which was amazingly good at giving the player options on how he wanted to run his characters through combat).

If you go into the game maximizing the potential for different kinds of players to have different kinds of experiences in the game, you'll end up having a really kickass game. If you focus on one style of play (and player) as "the right way to play," then you'll appeal to that player only.

I want this game to be downright awesome. I want this game to be better in every way than City of Heroes. Not because I don't like City of Heroes. I love City of Heroes. But I want the gaming experience of this next generation MMORPG to be amazing. I want to be able to do all the things I've yearned to do in City of Heroes and more.

In short, I want the moon. Now, I won't get it, but that doesn't mean I can't hope. Hope is what we have, a year plus away from release.

Now. On the other side of things? I'm hoping a lot of the stuff I want from Champions Online... will actually be stuff I get in City of Heroes. They have a year. If they keep up the way they have been going, that's 3-4 "issues" of new content and gameplay. Any number of the things I mentioned above could be things they could do ahead of time, and that would be way more than fine with me. Or they might do stuff I don't mention above that will still be amazing, and that will make me mondo happy too.

(They can start with villain redemption/hero falling. Damn it, I want to send armies of thugs or zombies running across Atlas Park for justice! Is that so wrong? Don't answer that.)

There's one thing for sure right now. This is going to be a fun year, of speculating and arguing and anticipating and all the rest.

Posted by Eric Burns at 5:25 PM | Comments (16)

February 20, 2008

Eric: So Help me, if Jack Emmert starts calling himself Defender I'm going to punch a puppy....

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City of Heroes has had a bad month.

I've been building towards a City of Heroes post, really. It's been a while and some really amazing things have been happening in the game for a while now. In the time since my last post on the subject City of Heroes has released two more "Issues" (issues being a massive influx of new mechanics, playability, and content) for free. They've had several special events that have gone brilliantly, including a (dual) city wide invasion by the Rikti, a Halloween event with some cool adds to last year's, the same for Christmas and other stuff. They've created a cooperative zone where heroes and villains can come together to fight a greater central threat, redesigning an entire city zone as part of the process. They've created a system that lets you go back in time and play content you missed the first time, as well as adding all kinds of new time travel based content. (Hey, I had no idea I was responsible for the destruction of the Fifth Column or Lord Recluse's rise to power. Good to know!) They've given deserved props to Troy Hickman. They've added new powersets including the flashy and cool dual blades set and the extremely functional Willpower set (finally, 'Natural' heroes and villains have a chance to make some sense in the Scrapper, Tanker, Brute and Stalker ranks). They finally started letting you customize powers, by letting you customize weapons -- so your Mace tanker could come out with a baseball bat or a pipe wrench instead! And they've added a metric ton of new costume options, new veterans' rewards (dude, I can finally have a Clockwork Gear of my very own!), new badges, new invention sets....

...in short, there is no damn reason for anyone who likes City of Heroes to complain. Things are going great.

And, in a move that excited a lot of people and frightened some others, NCSoft, the company that distributed the game, bought the game lock, stock and barrel from Cryptic Studios, the original designers. Jack Emmert, who we once called Statesman, had moved out of the day to day with City of Heroes and was concentrating on other projects anyhow, and Matt "Positron" Miller had been going great guns and sticking with the game regardless. A new studio was founded, mostly made up of the City of Heroes development team, who essentially all crossed over with the game. Cryptic was out of the picture now, and NCSoft was all in-house, and they clearly had a lot of hope for Paragon City and the Rogue Isles -- indications were this didn't come cheaply to them.

And if there's one thing that seemed certain, it was that Cryptic Studios was in trouble.

They were selling off their one real success, and one had to believe that was so they could make payroll. Their major known project was the Marvel Online Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Game, developed in conjunction with Microsoft for Vista and the XBox 360, but it had been months since we had an update and all indications were it was about to be cancelled. Things looked black for the house that Jack built, and within a few weeks the rumors were confirmed. Marvel Online, at least the way Cryptic was designing it, was dead, and Microsoft wasn't going to be working with Cryptic any more.

So, February looked like was going to be a banner month for City of Heroes.

Well, sometimes the world is more interesting than we expected.

Now, February started well. They announced and executed one of their massively popular Double-XP weekends (a weekend I missed, as at the time I was in Las Vegas doing server training. Also, there was some drinking, here and there. And gambling. And I was three feet from the underside of a lion. But I digress.) And they had announced their annual Spring Fling -- what's usually just called "The Valentine's Day event" probably because Spring is still months away, but what the heck. And, as with other years, they were adding new content.

Which, unfortunately, is where the trouble started.

See, this year they decided to go with a signature character event: the wedding of Manticore and Sister Psyche. This came out of the last issue of the published comic book, and it also corresponded with Sean Fish, the Developer who had been tagged/conflated with "Manticore," returning to the game. Now, Sean and his wife have a yearly Valentine's tradition where they find a new way to renew their vows each year. That's a very cute idea, and adorable, and all kinds of warm and fuzzy stuff. And when the developers heard it, they decided to actually go through with the Manticore/Sister Psyche wedding, letting Sean play Manticore and his wife play Sister Psyche.

And, you know, that is a nicely romantic idea, and it's a nice romantic thing for the game. The idea was, on the surface, not a bad one.

Now, hand in hand with this romantic event, NCSoft decided to release an actual paid content expansion pack for the work -- this is the City of Heroes Wedding Pack, which for ten bucks gives you some new costume options for your characters (wedding dress bustiers, tuxedos, ugly womens' shoes, stuff like that) and some appropriate emotes for weddings (rice throwing, getting down on one knee -- stuff like that.) So, for ten bucks you get some new costume options that let you dress up for the wedding! Good enough, right?

Well, let me pause here to make something clear. I don't have a problem with paid content packs like this one. Not at all. And I dropped my ten bucks on this even though the wedding didn't much interest me. I did it because I like the game. I did it because the new costume options are actually really cool -- heck, being an old fan of Zatanna, just being able to do a female hero in a tuxedo tail coat with vest was worth it. I like options, and these are nice. And at the same time, nothing is in this pack that's so seminal to the superhero experience that I'd get mad over needing to pay for it. There's nothing wrong with optional content you need to pay for. Frankly, I'd like to see more of these packs come out.

The problem is, this was tied very closely to an in-game event.

A live in game event.

Now, there are thousands upon thousands of subscribers to City of Heroes. And when they decided to do the wedding, they elected to have it on Valentine's Day, and reenact it three times, once an hour, so that lots of people could get to attend it. The wedding would allow an equal number of heroes and villains to attend each reenactment, and at the end of the wedding proper there was (as is appropriate at a superhero wedding) a supervillain attack, and all the villains in attendance got to beat on all the heroes in attendance in the first honest to God PvP free for all I've heard of in this game that sounds like it would be a lot of fun.

From all accounts, a lot of people showed up. Thousands, even. And there was a mob surrounding the click-door (an usher), alongside some jerks who did jerk stuff.... but mostly, when they opened the door, it was an orgy of players in slow frame rates desperately trying to click the usher to get in.

As far as I know, fifty heroes and fifty villains were let in the gates for each of the reenactments. With three total reenactments, that's three hundred characters.

Which means a couple of thousand people who didn't get to go, and countless thousands who didn't even try. For them, there was exactly one mission's worth of content added -- heroes have a chance to save the happy couple's wedding presents, and villains have a chance to steal them. Presents which include Sister Psyche's wedding night lingerie (why on Earth did she elect to store that in a crate in a warehouse) and a "gag arrow" from her bachelorette night which is pretty clearly supposed to be a dildo.

Rated T for Teens, kids!

The mission? Is literally a warehouse map -- a very standard warehouse map -- where you fight either Arachnos (if you're a hero saving the presents) or Paragon Police (if you're a villain) to click on seven glowing crates. No hero or villain shows up as part of the fight. No custom content other than textual descriptions of the picture frame Lady Grey gave them. It was the sort of mission a level designer can come up with in fifteen minutes. There isn't even a special badge to earn for stealing or saving the presents.

So... you could spend ten dollars... to get clothing options for a wedding the vast majority of players had no chance to attend.... and then do a dull-as-dirt mission in 'celebration' and not even get a marker for doing it. Needless to say, this particular iteration of Valentine's has not impressed people as much as earlier years. Really, for the first time in at least a year the developers blew their PR roll, and excitement has been relatively minimal as a result.

To add insult to injury for the CoH Devs, they had a screwup in their patch notes system. See, when they update content, they also put out comprehensive patch notes so people know why they did things and what they've done. Well, this last patch the Patch Notes only included a patch to fix the new Wedding Veil.

They missed some fundamental changes to how the mission spawns in Task Forces work.

The sort of fans who go ballistic over such things went ballistic. Positron himself jumped on the forums, explained the changes (and I'm not complaining about the changes) and that missing them in the patch notes was a mistake that upset him a great deal. Now, why they didn't, at the same time, go in and add the changes to the Patch Notes is beyond me (I just checked and as of right now, it's still just the Wedding Veil), but it's still a pretty crappy mishandle.

As for the wedding itself -- all the people who didn't get to go get to read a 'special comic' instead. And it's a well made screenshot comic, done by one of the top fan screenshot comic makers. And they put it right up on the same page as all the PDFs of their actual comic book series.

The thing is? It's a meta-comic. A fan comic, with lots of game in-jokes (including one person shouting HAX when Positron beat her during the fight). What it isn't is a comic done in the same style as the other comic books in the page, including the comic where Manticore proposed to Sister Psyche in the first place. The result, for people who go through and read these comics, is Batman in the Operating Room. The styles are discordant. The payoff feels cheap and disrespectful to the (at least six) people who were really into the comic book.

Which is really weird to me, since the one thing we absolutely know is true, in Real Life, is the depth of feeling of the two people playing Manticore and Sister Psyche. They're really reaffirming their love for each other there.

So, this wouldn't be enough to ruin the month for City of Heroes. Okay, the new content is lame, but the old content for the Spring Fling is fun and it was fun to take new characters through it once more (including my current project -- a villain hight Lady Velvet from my Banter Latte Justice Wing stories). And while I can understand why people who bought the costume options for the wedding were pissed that the wedding was essentially inaccessible, as someone who bought them because I liked the concept of them, I was happy enough.

However. Over the last couple of days? Cryptic done come back from the grave.

Cryptic has announced their next game.

Cryptic has announced a game that could well be the death knell for City of Heroes.

Cryptic has announced Champions Online.

Champions Online is a new MMORPG that isn't only based on the Champions Intellectual Property that Hero Games developed for their seminal Champions Role Playing Game back in the early 1980's, but is that Intellectual Property. Cryptic bought the Champions IP from Hero and licensed it back to them for Tabletop RPG sales. Millenium City, Doctor Destroyer, Foxbat, Mechanon, Defender and the Champions -- Cryptic owns it all. UNTIL and VIPER and CLOWN. The Dark Champions stuff. Grond. GROND for Christ's sake.

From what they've said so far, Champions Online takes one of the great strengths of City of Heroes -- the costume system, which lets you greatly individualize your look -- and goes across the board with it, as a game based on Champions should have. You have archetypes, but no archetype is denied any power. You can customize your power effects. They're promising a unique experience for every player.

And, they're promising an Archfoe system -- you, as a player, get to design your very own Arch Villain, design his look and backstory, design his basic powerset, and let him bedevil you until you're ready to defeat him once and for all... at which time you can design a different one.

For the record -- and don't think I was the only one to suggest this -- I proposed just such as system for City of Heroes back in 2005. Am I excited to see someone is doing it? You're damn right.

What is more? They're going to have Secret Identities. In an interview, it was said that one of the big in-game choices was the moment where your hero either has to decide to go public or to maintain his secret identity with all its troubles.

Now, I love Champions. I've loved Champions since their first edition, back in the Stone Age. And from everything they're saying, Champions Online isn't just going to be the Champions experience online, it's going to truly be a next generation Superhero Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game. In effect, it's going to build off of the learning experiences that City of Heroes listed.

And that? Sucks for City of Heroes, because they're already coming out and saying they're going to have City of Heroes's big strengths, along with some really cool features people have wanted for years... and be a much more modern game engine and system to boot.

And let us not pretend they can't exceed City of Heroes. When City of Villains came out, I was amazed at how richer the experience was than City of Heroes. The couple of years they'd had had taught them a bunch of things. Now there's been a couple more years, and while the City Of development team pretty much all went to NCSoft, we can't pretend that Cryptic didn't learn those lessons too.

They're projecting Spring of 2009. Which means City of Heroes has a year to position themselves as the solid, time tested frontrunner, adding as many cool new features as they can. Because if this game comes out, having learned not just from City of Heroes but from World of Warcraft and other such games, and actually delivers on its promises? Then City of Heroes is going to become the Everquest 2 of Superhero Online Games.

I mean, I love City of Heroes. Absolutely love it. And I'm not the biggest fan of Jack Emmert in the world. And the second this game comes out I'll be right in there playing it, unless it just absolutely fails between now and then. And if it can give me that sweet heroic crack in a new and exciting way....

Yeah. It's been a bad month for City of Heroes.

Posted by Eric Burns at 4:45 PM | Comments (24)

May 25, 2007

Eric: Jesus. He's away for a solid month, and his second post is on frigging City of Heroes. God damn rip off....

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Eleanor regained consciousness slowly, a feeling like a thousand ants crawling over her skin filling her senses as she regained some sense of herself. She had blacked out on her way to her Founders Falls apartment, and awakened just outside of Louis Forest. To her horror, she realized she was suspended six feet off the ground, held by an unseen force, while a baleful green fire surrounded her. Dimly, through the flames that seemed to burn her soul but not her flesh, she could see red robed cultists chanting, a blue robed wizard with burning green eyes leading them, and some kind of spectral horror floating above them.

"Stop!" she shouted. "Don't do this!"

"You have a destiny!" the mage cried out. "Your sacrifice will open the gateway to a new kind of darkness through the world as we know it!"

"Noooo!" Eleanor cried.

There was the sound of a whip-crack, as inky darkness seemed to swell all around the Circle of Thorns. A vapor-wreathed fist slammed out of the blackness, driving into the stomach of the mage. It was followed by a flurry of blows from phantom arms and a twisting assault. The green fires faded, and Eleanor dropped to the ground. To her shock and joy, a woman in a black and white camouflage jumpsuit was beating the cultists senseless. First one, and then another, and then with a titanic series of darkness-fueled blows, the spirit itself was driven from the plane.

"Why -- Umbral Lass! You saved me!" Eleanor said, leaping to her feet even as Umbral Lass crouched and searched the fallen cultists.

"Yeah, yeah," the heroine said, rifling the mage's pockets.

"I never thought I'd actually meet a hero," Eleanor said. "Especially one who just--"

"Oh shut up, you cow!" Umbral Lass snapped. "Six cultists taken out and not one of them was carrying Spell Ink? I have regenerative powers! I need to boost them with unholy superscience and that means SPELL INK! Get out of my sight! I have to go find more Thorns!"

"But--" But the darkness dynamo was gone, leaving Eleanor to make her way home, just one more speed bump on the heroine's quest to build healing inventions.

Crafting had come to Paragon City.

In the last month, after Weds had returned to Canada... I found myself... well, unmotivated. It was the kind of thing where you're recovering. It's like grief, I suppose. The apartment seemed empty, the days seemed routine. The chemicals didn't make things more than 'okay.'

In such a situation, I turn to City of Heroes. That's most of where I was during the month of not being here. Heck, I've got a character in the middle 40's now, and I'm in striking distance of the elusive 50th level.

For those of you who remember I've been playing since launch, having preordered the game more than three years ago, the fact that I'm just now getting close to 50th level should amuse you. To you I say "screw you. I have a life! Really! Stop laughing!" But regardless, this meant I was doing some heavy punching of Malta operatives and Carnival Psychics right about the time that Issue 9 hit City of Heroes, and with it brought a full fledged crafting system to the game.

Crafting, for those who don't know, is a staple of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Games like Everquest and World of Warcraft used it to flesh out their worlds, giving the heroes something to do besides punch evil. It was addictive in its own right -- the first time you find yourself playing your Dwarf Hunter for sixteen hours at a time, all on one island, killing off six legged alligators you can skin and turn into pants... you realize you're in this for more than Orc punching.

City of Heroes didn't have crafting. It had been looking into ways of doing it for years, but in one sense the genre doesn't really fit it. Super heroes don't take fallen supervillains and skin them for jackets. (Though admittedly if they did crime rates would fall.) With the Ninth Issue of free content updating (well, eight of free content -- one of those issues was City of Villains), they finally rolled out the brand spanking new Invention system.

In the invention system, you get salvage from defeated enemies. You can also find (or buy) recipes to combine that salvage into inventions. Most of those inventions work the same as other Enhancements -- little add-ons that improve your powers, which fit into one to six slots on each power. For instance, a couple of damage enhancements and a couple of accuracy enhancements make your power more likely to hit and increases the damage the power does. Makes sense? Sure it does!

On the normal enhancements system, you can only use enhancements within three levels of your own. So, if you're thirtieth level, you can use anything from L27 to L33.With invention enhancements, you can still slot one in that's up to three levels higher than your own, but lower level ones never lose effectiveness. Among other things, this means that three L25 Invention enhancements slotted into a power will give you roughly as much of that benefit as any other levels, which means you never have to upgrade them again. (The reasons why get into Enhancement Diversification and diminishing returns and the nature of Single Origin Enhancements versus Invention origin enhancements and whatnot, but for all practical purposes three L25 Damage Invention Enhancements will top that power's damage out straight through to L50, for example). Of course, different enhancements require different salvage -- some of it rarer than others, so the hunt for Stuff is on!

There are also other, more specialized Inventions. You can Invent temporary powers -- say, the ability to become intangible five times. And you can Invent costume pieces which you can redeem at the taylor. Say, winged boots, or wings made out of bone, or fairy gossamer wings..

Finally, there are also Invention sets -- rarer invention enhancements designed to all work together inside a specific power. On their own, they give bonuses to one or more of your powers. But when you get more than once Invention Enhancement from a given set into a single power, you get "set bonuses" that can be significant -- like a 10% bonus to your regeneration, or greater maximum health, or having all your powers recover more quickly, or getting various defenses. A hero who doesn't normally get defenses against things like knockback, being put to sleep or immobilized or the like can use these set bonuses to great effect. My own Dark/Regen scrapper now has obscene regeneration rates, a lot of speed, recovery times for both endurance and recharging powers like no one's buisness, and psi defense. Anyone who's played a non-Dark Armor scrapper in this game knows the joy of Psi Defense.

To facilitate getting your grubby hands on rare invention recipes and the salvage needed to build them, the game has added Consignment Houses. These are places where you can put up your unneeded salvage, recipes, enhancements and the like for other people to bid on. Someone beats your bid? Someone gets your stuff. In a truly cool move, the Consigment Houses are cross server -- both American and European -- so if someone out in Estonia has bid four million influence on Hamidon Goo, and you put Hamidon Goo up in the consignment house with a 3.5 million influence minimum bid, you get some sweet Estonian influence and he gets the chance to build Ghost Widow's Embrace Invention Set Enhancements. Or roll around in mitochondrial jello. Whatever makes Estonian superheroes happy, I suppose.

The system, mechanically, works and works well. It's easy to do, easy to work with, and everyone starts spending time in consignment houses selling off crap and jockeying for bits and pieces of salvage to make their own Inventions. (Though I'm not sure "invention" is the right word -- you're not inventing the stuff, you're following 'recipes' you buy. I'm impressed by anyone who buys a DIY book on building a deck and builds it, but I don't generally credit him with inventing the deck.) Badges spice things up as well, and it's possible to ignore the system entirely if you don't want to do this stuff. (Though if you're a PvPer -- and you still play City of Heroes in the first place -- not going for Set bonuses while your opposition tunes around them is asking to lose a lot of fight. But honestly, how many people are playing City of Heroes for PvP and not using the Invention system?)

Conceptually, it's a little harder to justify. I mean, the system rests on the idea that after beating up criminals, you get to take their stuff. Including things like bars of gold, silver and platinum. Or high tech gear. Last time I knew, that's called 'mugging.' Even police officers don't get to rifle the pockets of downed drug dealers for paraphernalia they can use to build better nightsticks or sell on eBay. It just seems weird that the superheroic invention system rests entirely on petty theft, coercion and armed assault.

Of course, that makes it perfect for City of Villains. (In City of Villains, the consignment houses are called the Black Market, and they look like trucks that the stuff "fell off of.")

Would I make it any differently? Well, maybe. I've always felt City of Heroes needed a secret identity system, and it seems to me this would work for that -- have criminals 'drop' clues or secrets that someone with a detective Secret Identity can convert into influence or Arrest Warrants or manufacture into special missions... while someone with 'reporter' could turn them into stories which go for influence, or for Exposes, or manufacture into special missions... an 'occultist' could turn arcane secrets and clues into arcane powers or missions, techs could do the same to technical secrets and clues... and so on and so forth.

But, it's not for us to say what we would do differently. It is for us to assess what they have done. And in my estimation, the invention system works. It adds a new layer to the game -- one I find fun and engaging and useful. One that's helped distract me from the loneliness of the apartment.

I'll keep it up. Heck, it's six months at the least before my Canadian Fiancee magically is allowed by Immigration and Naturalization Services to become my Living-with-me-wife, and that's a lot of loneliness to defer into experience points. L50's around the corner, and various forms of almighty squid follow that....

In the meantime, excuse me. I have to go mug criminals for their spell ink. And would it kill people to sell off a few more Numina's Convalescence recipes?

Posted by Eric Burns at 8:31 AM | Comments (29)

February 1, 2007

Eric: Many notes, in various forms.

Work started just before 7 and ended... hm. A couple of minutes ago. No breaks today. There was... a problem last night. Tomorrow will be the same. No Wiiplay tonight, and restricted before that (I was deathly ill at the start of the week, and this much exhaustion can't possibly help with that.)

I haven't written my Order of the Stick snark yet, though it keeps getting better and better. This is amazing stuff. If you're not reading it, you ought to be, really.

PvP launched its animated series today, which served as a backdrop while I worked. As Scott Kurtz himself admitted in comments, the pacing wasn't as solid as one would like, and he promises improvements with that. The voice acting was pretty darn cool (I know there was the Skull controversy, but at this point I can't hear him any other way). The others were at least serviceable -- and Brent is spot on perfect. If I had my wishes granted by scantily clad djinni... well, first off I'd be mind numbingly rich, the workstuff would be dealt with, and Wednesday would be declared Canada's Ambassador Without Portfolio to New Hampshire, but at some point we'd reach my PvP animated wishes, and they'd include a little more of the really good incidental music and more of a patter. However, it's worth noting I'll be back next month to see the next, and that's the core thing you can ask of a first episode.

Note to T and Phil. I will, I swear to God, write back. I'm just exhausted.

Note to Frank. See above, times six. Man, do I have things I owe you.

Note to WiiFolks. I'll be adding everyone tomorrow night when I recover from round to from Oh My God Work Is Eating My Soul. I'm excited to see the enthusiasm.

Note to Wednesday -- I love you, and I'm sorry I'm not exactly focused at the moment.

Note to Activision. Marvel Ultimate Alliance for the Wii is f-f-frickin awesome.

Posted by Eric Burns at 9:41 PM | Comments (32)

January 30, 2007

Eric: A brief Wii update, for *yooooou.*

WarioWare Smooth Moves is startlingly awesome.

I can't get the freaking glass-drinking thing, dagnabbit!

I grabbed that and Marvel Ultimate Alliance, on the theory that A) dude, Captain America, and B) I won't get Zelda until I can give my life to Zelda for a week, which isn't yet.

I did start playing Zelda: A Link To The Past, downloaded from the Virtual Console. It is just as cool as I remember. And highlights that one does not need state of the art graphics to have an amazingly cool game.

In other news -- dude. Burns needs Mii Parade fodder, yo. E-mail or comment to open dialogues to gets us some friends codes trading going.

Posted by Eric Burns at 12:32 AM | Comments (62)

January 29, 2007

Eric: All this said, even after all this time I'd wait in the cold for a ROM Spaceknight. But we knew that.

On friday, temperatures were below zero, especially in the early parts of the morning. Saturday was also bitterly cold. Sunday, on the other hand, saw a spike of temperature, up to a practically balmy 18 degrees Fahrenheit as of 4:45 in the morning.

I was standing in that cold. It was approximately four and three quarters hours since my 39th birthday had ended, and I was spending that first morning waiting outside a WalMart in Windham, Maine. A WalMart that would be selling 19 Nintendo Wiis at 6 am. And I was not alone.

I am not a passionate gamer. Not really. I loves me some City of Heroes as you all know, and I'm forever beholden to Soulcalibur and its ilk, but for the most part I'm a casual gamer. I do not own an XBox 360, and currently I do not plan to buy one. I do not own a Playstation 3, and as near as I can tell no one who doesn't already own one plans to buy one of those. They sit on the shelves next to excited handwritten signs declaring that they are in stock, and people just sort of shrug. There is something to be said for the additional muscle these 'next generation' consoles have, but almost every review I've seen for almost every game released for them is the same -- the graphics are generally slightly prettier (though to be honest, it doesn't look that different to me. I've never cared about being able to see the sweat on a game avatar), but the games play exactly the same way as their lastgen versions did. The same button combinations, the same moves, the same modes. And all too often, the games lack some of their predecessors' functionality. For no good reason I watch XPlay, and review after review they go over this is essentially the same game as Madden was on the original XBox, only with slightly better graphics and fewer game modes. And so forth.

That will change, by the by. Games like Gears of War couldn't have effectively existed on the original XBox, and as developers get comfortable with the greater power and capacity of the XBox 360, the games they release will become bigger and grander. Which is all fine and good for the serious gamer, but of less interest to the casual gamer. As for the Playstation 3? At this point, it almost doesn't matter what they do. It's had the kiss of death in the popular culture -- it's considered lame. Half the people (it seemed) who waited on line to get one turned around and sold it on eBay for a profit, and now no one's into them at all. When prices get slashed way down, they may regain share, but I wouldn't count on it.

The Nintendo Wii, on the other hand, is a casual gamer's dream machine. It's innovative. It doesn't have the graphical power of the other nextgens, but in part that's because they decided to make the console more fun instead. It was the Christmas must-have. It continues to sell out whenever it becomes available.

Which is why, two months after the system release, I was standing in the cold for one.

I wasn't alone. There were a good number of others waiting too. High school and college guys who didn't luck out before. Parents (and grandparents) trying to make good on Christmas promises. A couple of little kids who were so excited you could power a turbine with them. Every new person who showed up kind of chuckled, too. "I'm glad I'm not the only one," was the common refrain. "I was gonna feel ridiculous if I was the only one."

At the same time, there was a way I was the only one. I was neither a late teens/early twenties guy, nor a parent or grandparent, nor a ten year old kid. I was a full adult, waiting in the cold for a toy. For myself. For my birthday.

Which might be 39 in a nutshell.

This is your last chance. Your last shot. Right now, I'm still thirtysomething without kids. I'm not beholden. I can cling to the extended adolescence that has been the hallmark of my generation -- the first generation of Generation X. I don't have to be all the way grown up just yet. I can still get excited for a new toy. I can still wait in the cold to buy it. I can still drag my amused parents on a pre-dawn quest. (Which was nice, as they could run to Tim Hortons and grab me coffee.)

The time came. There was acrimony as it looked like they opened other doors first and there was the possibility of line jumping. The doors opened. There was a mad dash to electronics. And everyone who waited got a Wii. (Though the first guy in line -- who sent his 12 year old son at a full on sprint to be the first to the electronics counter -- wanted to buy all 19. The WalMart employee just snickered, said "one to a customer sir," and moved on to the next.)

I bought my Wii. I didn't get any additional games or the like, just then. I wanted to try it out on its own merits. And I was in no way disappointed. The Wii is fun. We brought it back to my folks' house and set it up. We downloaded patches. We created Miis. And we bowled. And I was stunned at how... well, good the bowling was. My mother, who became disenchanted with video games after Zelda went 3D and the maze games of the Ladybug era were phased out, happily did the same kind of bowling dances you do at actual alleys when she did well. And the bowling went exactly as bowling always does for me. I do really well for four or five throws, and then I overthink it and it becomes harder. My Dad hooked to the right generally, too. And all that just amazed me.

Boxing? Really cool. Tennis? A lot of fun. Baseball kind of bored me, but golf was okay. All in all, it was a fun thing. A good thing. A good game that everyone enjoyed.

Tonight, I'm going to buy my first real game for it. (Not counting The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that I downloaded off of virtual console last night, of course.) Everyone tells me I should grab the new Zelda, and of course I will. I love Zelda. But the thing that really, really stood out for me was how much fun the party game aspect was -- so I'm thinking I'll grab WiiPlay or Warioware -- quick, easy and fun games that don't take long and really use the Wiimote and the like.

Next year, I'll be forty. Chances are likely I'll have a wife and household. I trust I'll still enjoy fun, but I don't anticipate I'll wait in line at four forty-five for a toy, no matter how cool it is.

But this year? I got the best toy on Earth for my birthday, and that just plain rocks.

Posted by Eric Burns at 12:54 PM | Comments (26)

January 7, 2007

Eric: Erratatica!

I've had some interesting (and sometimes spirited) reaction to my recent City of Heroes post. I stand by it, but in writing, I let enthusiasm and memory guide my writing, and said memory failed me in a couple of areas. Areas which should be acknowledged and corrected.

For those who are new around these parts, when I need to issue a correction -- and it does come up -- I leave the original essay up. It seems to me that the nature of discourse requires we have our errors stay in the record.

The errors, it's worth noting, were not in the thesis. The core theses -- that Issue 8 was a superior edition to City of Heroes which both introduced great innovation and highlighted other innovations that have come along to distinction, leading to a revitalized game that deserves to be played -- I stand by without comment. The errors were in supporting materials.

Probably the most egregious was in terms of the various holiday events that have happened. I had forgotten that last year's winter event had temporary powers (including a really cool Jingle Rocket Flight Thingy, and yes indeed, a costume part) aplenty, for example. And I ascribed the first co-op Hero and Villain mission to the Halloween event, instead of to the Valentine's Day event from significantly earlier. The halloween event didn't have a co-op mission -- but it did have the ability to add a permanent costume slot to a character, which was a really cool perk.\

The reason this is important is twofold, really. One, because it again highlights that the innovations listed predated Matt Miller's heading of the development team. We need to remember that Jack Emmert initiated many if not most of the innovations that have revitalized the game that he was one of the core visionaries behind.

The second reason this is important, however, is it really does highlight the stronger public relations position the game is in now. I remember very clearly, when City of Villains was scant weeks before release. I was in the beta, and like most folks in the beta I loved City of Villains. There was a groundswell of excitement both for the expansion/new game, and for what it implied for the future of City of Heroes itself. (Things like Elite Bosses/Archvillain scaling, the more mature mission design, contacts who gave cell phone numbers early instead of late in a contact tree, and... well, Masterminds, which remain the coolest archetype ever. I still wait for the last to be ported in some fashion into City of Heroes -- perhaps by creating a 'duplication' powerset). There was some real, hardcore excitement.

Which is when "Enhancement Diversification" was first announced. And it was announced on the beta forum for City of Villains, where anyone who broke the NDA to tell the regular community about it would be subject to losing their beta status and very likely from City of Heroes entirely.

Naturally, someone immediately broke NDA. And a huge maelstrom burst. Now, I don't actually think the Cryptic team was trying to deceive anyone. I think they had decided the Enhancement Diversification scheme was the best thing for the game, and they were actually going to their beta testing community with it because they actually meant to... well, beta test it. However, the way it all went down made a lot of people angry and upset.

And it made them angry and upset just a few weeks before the first sequel game and/or paid expansion of the game came out. Scant weeks before they wanted people dropping money in stores -- and recouping a lot of investment and development costs -- their most devoted fanbase was, to be blunt, losing their shit.

That was, to put it mildly, a public relations problem. It got people angry when they wanted them frothing with excitement. And it was hardly an isolated incident.

Matt Miller, on the other hand, has built significant momentum and enthusiasm, both by having several successful big changes and events in a row, by teasing future upgrades and new elements ("oh, gosh, we accidentally turned the Wentworth's contacts on on the test server! How could we have so foolishly let people see these potential future plans that we're doing -- woe! WOE!")

Now, there's been problems too. Maybe most significantly, there have been some persistent bugs in the game. One of the most serious I'll quote from the Known Issues page:

Gauntlet and other Inherent Taunt powers currently do not effect Lieutenant, Bosses or Underling rank critters.

What this means is one of the lynchpins of team-based City of Heroes, the Tanker, has trouble with his most important power. Tankers are designed to absorb massive amounts of damage, so they have the power to attract the attention of the enemy, so that the squishier heroes can avoid being smacked around. Take those abilities away, when it comes to the most dangerous enemies, and that's a major problem. Heck -- one of the things I love in Veteran Rewards is the team base teleport, and I've been dumped out of it back to the zone I just left more than once.

But despite persistent issues, the majority of players seem to be pretty darn happy and excited about the future. Not blasé, not pissed off, not accusing the devs of immorality... happy and excited for the future.

That's public relations. And they're doing it well. And that's a good thing for this game.

Had I gotten the details right the first time around, that would have been made clearer.

(I also had a couple people point out I described the Event co-op missions as 'task forces,' which mean something quite different in the game, and I called the old Faultline a Hazard Zone instead of a Trial Zone. I regret those errors too,)

Posted by Eric Burns at 11:44 PM | Comments (17)

January 4, 2007

Eric: My single favorite search query string *ever....*

...came over the statistics page yesterday:

fucking let me read some boondocks comics damn it

I can but provide.

Boondocks

(From the Boondocks page at goComics.)

Posted by Eric Burns at 5:45 PM | Comments (10)

Eric: Eight is the Charm: the periodic City of Heroes post

It's a new year, and so it's time to talk about City of Heroes. You knew it would be coming one of these days.

I'll admit, I got very, very close to cancellation there. The game had simply stopped being fun. I felt like the people in charge were focusing on their internal vision of the game to the exclusion of the actual fanbase who were playing it. After a full development cycle for the City of Villains expansion (at this stage, one really can't call it a different game), followed by nearly a full "expansion issue (number 7, for those playing along at home) focusing on City of Villains and a staggering amount of development for a Player versus Player system that only the tiniest percentage of the player base used, this meant that many, many months had gone by with no love for the game that had brought the players to the table.

But, if people were feeling ignored, that was okay. There was also several months of "play balance adjustment" to make us feel loved. Powersets being changed to 'balance' them. "Enhancement Diversification" to force players to use the enhancements system the way the book said they should instead of the way they actually did. And, of course, arguments arguments arguments.

Things seemed pretty dark. I'll admit that. But then, a change happened -- one that would reverberate throughout Paragon City like an earthquake. Jack Emmert, Lead Designer for City of Heroes (and known as "Statesman," the top superhero of the city) got a contract to make a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for Marvel Comics, and passed the lead designer duties over to Matt "Positron" Miller. And Matt Miller seemed to understand that his game was in trouble.

Immediately, there were shifts in how things were done. The (very) occasional events that took place in the game before (like the Halloween event of a couple years previous) were ramped back up in a clear effort to make the city seem dynamic. Information about Issue 8, a new free expansion that would heavily favor City of Heroes was seeded. And "accidents" began happening on the test server. Accidents like the upcoming crafting and auctioning systems being previewed "by accident," generating buzz through the community.

Now, maybe it's unfair to lionize Miller and demonize Emmert for these decisions. After all, events like the recent Winter event (more of which I'll discuss later) clearly took months to develop. It had to have started when Emmert was at the helm. But what Miller clearly and solidly brought to the table was an understanding of his fan base. He knew how to get very jaded fans interested, and he knew how to whet their appetites for more. In short, he understood that the war to save his game was a public relations war, which Emmert never seemed to get.

So. Now we have had Issue 8 come out and be solidly tested. We have also had both the Halloween Event and this year's Winter Event take place. The focus has been heavily on City of Heroes while still allowing the bad guys the chance to enjoy Christmas fun. And what, precisely, has taken place as a result?

Many, many good things.

Let me start with the major events. Unlike before, there were tangible benefits for participating in the events. The original Halloween Event from a couple of years back was fun, mind, but had little true, practical, enduring benefit. The major perk you could get from punching out ghosts, ghouls and oddly hot witches were badges. The badge system is designed to reward doing things or seeing things, and that's a nice enough perk, but people stopped really caring about it almost immediately, with the exception of those few badges that led to bonus powers (like the accolades). Well, this year you had the chance to earn bits of costume salvage which could then be 'turned in' for a whole new costume slot. That was a perk that was seriously worth earning, and players burned through the game getting costume pieces and setting up supergroup bases and salvage racks for putting spare costume pieces into, so that they could continue to redeem pieces for costume slots through the year.

We just had the winter event, and like other winter events it had badges and temporary powers you could earn (such as "snowball," which is just good clean fun). Unlike other winter events, it also granted new costume items to characters that they could add to their costumes permanently. One showed up just for logging in. Others could be earned. This was extremely popular, and encouraged people not only to run through trials and earn winter boots and gloves and earmuffs on all their characters, but in fact encouraged them to change their costumes into good 'winter outfits' to get into spirit of the season. Further, a whole transdimensional ski chalet was set up for heroes and villains alike to congregate in and ski down the slopes together in.

Which leads to another common theme to both the Halloween and Winter Events: task forces were set up that heroes and villains could participate in together -- true common Player versus Environment events, to unite against common foes, save time itself, and rescue the ugliest baby known to polygons. This was a blast. I did a couple of runs with a mixed group, and it was truly fun to have corruptors and masterminds fighting alongside defenders and scrappers. It felt comic-bookish, and that is nothing but a good thing.

Next, let's discuss rewards. Two different rewards became available recently. One came when one bought the City of Heroes/City of Villains Good Versus Evil pack. As a side note, if you've never played this game and you want to try it out, this is the version to buy. Period. The pack-in powers are that good. But, you can also get the in-game powers for a pittance on the PlayNC website, and they're totally worth it. Beyond some nice costume stuff (which was an important thing), there is the VIP Pass to Pocket D -- a transdimensional aperture and nightclub with exits into several city zones -- and a jump pack that gives 'flight' to low level characters. (I put it in quotes because the jump pack is more a thing that flings you though the air and speeds your travel powers up, rather than a true flight device.) The VIP pass gives you an ability to teleport from anywhere in the game into Pocket D, then emerge from one of the other points. This is a monumental perk -- one of the worst aspects of the game was the deeply boring trudge from one zone to the next to get to your missions. One of the least satisfying of all the missions was the dreaded "pizza run," where you had to cross two zones and use two different mass transit systems so you could click on a contact back in the Atlas Park zone to get your next mission. As it turns out, this is not even slightly fun, and anything that mitigates it is an unqualified good thing.

Which brings us to Veteran Rewards. Now, City of Heroes grants certain powers, costume parts and perks based on the length of time someone is a player in the game. This is a great thing -- of course, I was one of the first players of the game, so I get the rewards essentially as they're released, but that's neither here nor there. This includes strongly desired costume parts like wings or trenchcoats, permanent powers that give you more attacks, and a supergroup base teleporter which works similarly to the Pocket D teleporter.

As a side note -- Superbases have been a disappointment all along. They were designed essentially for PvP, originally -- the idea would be superteams would create bases, and then rival teams would raid them for a series of Perks and Good Things that would be passed around by whoever was... well, best at PvP, I suppose. However, the base raid system and the Item of Power system has never worked right, and as it turns out most players don't really give a damn anyway -- they want a base that gives them tangible Player vs. Environment benefit.

Well, one of the base items you can get are teleporters. And those teleporters can be aligned to the different zones when beacons are earned. Get enough teleporters and enough beacons, and you can go to any zone in the game with a click. Add that to the Veteran Reward that lets you automatically teleport to the base, and between that power and the Pocket D teleporter you can almost eliminate the aggravation of the pizza run.

Almost.

Which brings us to the big prize. Issue 8. The new content.

Wow.

Issue 8 does many new and shiny things for superheroes. First off, one of the in-game zones that had been a devastated landscape of horror and misery (called a Hazard Zone in the game's parlance) has been remade into a partially repaired landscape of horror and misery. With a donut shop. And opened as a standard zone in the game instead of a wasteland. This gives us a sense that maybe -- just maybe -- the efforts of the players to reclaim Paragon City after the Rikti War of several years ago has borne some fruit, and the city is beginning to rebuild. There are also new contacts and mission trees to be found in this rechristened Faultline -- and these missions are actively superior to the older missions in the game. The developers have learned a lot about designing fun missions that seem distinctive, and it's a blast to go ahead and run through it. There's also a greatly improved sense of storyline that runs through them.

And you get to sink submarines! How cool is that?

Sorry.

In addition to the new zone, however, there's also a sudden and pronounced renewal of police presence in the city. Patrolmen and Longbow now walk the streets and help engage the enemies. There are now precincts in every zone. Once again, we've got the idea that Paragon City is recovering from the war, and redoubling its own efforts. And hand in hand with this new police presence are Police Band Missions. Essentially, the Newspaper system of City of Villains, which let players look up missions in the paper and take a proactive approach in spreading mayhem instead of waiting for a contact to tell them to spread mayhem. Now, players can listen to the police bands and hear about crimes in progress, running to them and engaging them immediately, once again without a need to go running off to contacts.

And -- and I can't say this clearly or strongly enough -- these missions, either Police Band or new missions in Faultline -- can be done by a solo player. You don't have to be on a team to succeed.

This is major. You see, it was the stated philosophy of the developers during the Emmert era that the game was meant to be played by teams. You could solo, but it was much harder and there's stuff you just couldn't ever do. As stated above, it was a triumph of the vision for the game actually trumping what the players who played the game wanted, and it sowed discontent. Casual gamers, gamers who preferred soloing, and shy gamers were discouraged from playing the way they wanted to, and ultimately that turned into them leaving the game.

Well, now the game can be soloed. In fact, the game subtly reconfigures itself around soloing versus small team versus large team play. The ultimate enemies of mission trees are where this is most obvious -- in the old days, a lot of missions culminated in Archvillains. And Archvillains were meant to be beaten by teams. Period. When a Tanker was able to solo an archvillain, that was publicly held up by Emmert as a clear design flaw that needed to be corrected -- generally by wrapping the tanker's hands in soft foam while handing his enemies kryptonite.

Now, if you're soloing or have a small team, that Archvillain isn't an Archvillain. He's an "Elite Boss." A really tough fight, mind, but one that a solo player can win if they're smart. Elite bosses don't give as much experience as Archvillains, and Archvillains give everyone a really nice enhancement when they're beaten (which Elite Bosses do not), but it's fine to have tradeoffs like that. If I choose to solo, I should have a different experience with different rewards than the folks who exclusively play in teams of 8.

In other words, supervillains now scale.

I wish I could take credit for this -- that my essay back in 2005 lit some fires and made people change their minds -- but let's be honest. It was an obvious idea with too many obvious advantages not to simply do it, and the developers figured that out.

Finally, there's also a perk to doing Police Band missions. Do enough of them, and you get a Safeguard Mission. A major villain and a pile of mooks are robbing a bank and wreaking havoc in a section of the city. It's up to you to stop then. Beat the main villain and you get a certain amount of time to run around the zone finding sub missions and smaller side quests and pummeling evil. It's an experience point bonanza and heaps of fun, and the missions often have really cool temporary powers you can earn in them. Most particularly, the early missions have temporary travel powers, like a superjump-faking zero G pack, or a true flight harness. This means that the traditional near requirement that you tailor your character around getting a travel power as fast as possible has been lifted. It's now optional -- do it when you feel like it.

The result of Issue 8 is a much faster paced game that's eminently soloable and deeply satisfying. Heck, if you stick to Police Band Missions, you have absolutely no pizza runs, no running back to contacts to get your next mission, and all your missions are in the same zone as you are, no exceptions. That increases speed of play and the overall fun factor exponentially right there.

It's worth noting the developers have figured a lot of this out. Every contact has a cell phone. Work with them long enough and they give you their cell phone number so you don't have to run back over to them to clear the mission and collect your next one. It's really nice and a massive time saver. And all of the faultline missions (for example) allow you to get your contact's cell phone number within one or two missions, so that for most of the mission tree you have it.

Well, I have a character in the thirties now (more about this in a moment), and I'm in the Brickstown zone, where I've never spent a lot of time, so I decided to do the traditional contact run instead of the police band missions, at least to start. And these are are old missions, developed early on in the game.

And they have me running to half the other zones, going on pizza runs, and six missions in these bastards won't give me their cell phone so I have to run all the way back to Brickstown, then go see them to click them in person. I'm beginning to think they don't want me helping them out. And that's fine with me -- I got a police radio right here that'll give me missions in the same stupid zone I'm already in, pally!

It really, really highlights how much the developers have learned over the years.

Going back to the character in the thirties, and the speed of the revised game. Bear in mind, I've played this since 2004. I'm old school. And yet, during this time I never had a hero go higher than level 29. I liked playing alternates too much, and the lack of soloing options meant that I had to wait for when my friends or teammates were on and in a mood to play characters of that level to advance.

Now? I can play whenever I damn well feel like it and be successful. And so a character (admittedly, a dark/regen scrapper -- one of the best soloing options) I created since Issue 8 came out has rocketed past all my other superheroes into the 30s, and is on track to be my first L50 character. This scrapper's now within one level of my highest level character ever, a Villain Mastermind -- Masterminds practically being powerlevellers by design.

And I'm having a monumental blast. And I know that decent crafting that's worth the effort and an auction system are on the horizon, and I'm excited by them. Hell, in just a few months, City of Heroes will reach that exalted peak -- a game that's essentially as good as World of Warcraft was at launch.

But I kid, I kid....

To sum it all up, under Miller City of Heroes has made a dramatic comeback. It's not perfect -- I had a friend who went on a run with me and my regular friends in City of Villains one day who had fun, but noticed that the maps were essentially the same, and that there wasn't enough real change to catch his interest. That friend would feel the same about much of issue 8. But there's hope, now. And Miller knows Public Relations -- something the developers have needed for a long time -- and knows how to get us excited for what comes next. I can't wait for Issue 9. I can't wait for the next seasonal or holiday event. I can't wait....

And for a three year old video game, that's a very good thing indeed.

Posted by Eric Burns at 12:29 PM | Comments (28)

April 6, 2006

Eric: We were unable to solicit a comment from Bill Gates, as he was too busy covering his naked body in treacle and rolling in giant piles of money. So, you know, "Thursday."

Widescreen City of Villains

Well. I knew Hell was in danger of freezing over. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon.

For those who don't know, Apple Computers yesterday announced and released a free public beta of Boot Camp. Boot Camp is a system designed to allow users to quickly, easily and without significant issue turn their Intel based Macintoshes into machines that will boot either Mac OS X or Windows XP. They clearly weren't going to do this for some time -- the clear plan was to release this functionality in Leopard, which is Mac OS X 10.5, or -- as Apple's fond of crowing saying, the fifth major upgrade released to the Macintosh Operating System since the dawn of the new millennium, and how long have we been waiting for Longhorn Windows Vista again?

Not, however, to start that argument up.

As I said, Apple's hand was forced. An independent group of users had held a contest to allow dual booting of Mac OS X and Windows XP on a Macintosh, and that contest had seen fruition in mid-March. Now, that particular victory was very much "it's not that the bear dances well, but that he dances at all," with XP booting without drivers for most of the modern Macintosh's advanced features and built in hardware. However, with a working solution on the boards, hackers and grognards had turned their massive brains to the tasks of writing drivers, which meant that come August, when Leopard was announced, people would yawn at the thought of putting XP on their machines. "What? That? Anyone can do that."

So, Apple needed to grab the news cycle, as quickly as possible. Boot Camp did this. It did it by providing all those drivers and providing a vastly easier installation and configuration process for Windows XP.

Yesterday, this was announced.

Needless to say, I have a dual booting computer now. And naturally enough, I immediately turned said computer to the task of running City of Villains.

Oh. My. God.

First off, understand -- I have a MacBook Pro. That means I have a screamingly fast dual core intel processor now. And City of Heroes/City of Villains is optimized to run on Dual Core.

However, I also have that truly beautiful 1440x990 display, and good graphics acceleration.

Now, I didn't expect much from it. To be perfectly honest, the MacBook is a beautiful notebook computer, but it's a notebook computer. It can't compete, graphics card wise, with the sorts of things you can slap into an honest to God gaming computer built on a Wintel frame.

Or so I thought.

I ran at full native resolution with all the bells and whistles. It was beautiful. Effects I'd never been able to see before showed up perfectly. In the middle of a gigantic fight with a giant monster (the Ghost of Scrapyard, for those playing along at home) I and two other Masterminds, along with a pile of corruptors and brutes, were all in a pack alongside about sixty minions, the giant monster, special effects of everyones' attacks, at least twenty Henchmen and a giant blue glowing thing... oh, and explosions everywhere... at absolutely no choppiness nor loss of framerate.

The other side of it is, 1440x990 is a widescreen ratio. Which means my controls are nicely spread across the screen and kept out of my way. Which to be honest is a welcome change.

The bear isn't just dancing. The bear is doing a freaking paso doble. I've included a screen shot which you can click to get the (obnoxiously large) appearance of the screen, up above. That's some seriously nice screen real estate for this game. My friend Chris Meadows put it succinctly: "All this time we've been waiting for them to make City of Heroes for the Mac, and now they've made a Mac for City of Heroes, instead."

But, despite appearances, this isn't a video game post. This is a post about the change in the technology landscape. Because what's happened is the MacBook Pro, in addition to being... well, a Macintosh... is now phenomenally good Windows laptop.

I would be happier if I could have my Windows stuff living on an external hard drive instead of requiring me to partition my internal hard drive (not that the partitioning process was hard), but one takes what one can get in these matters.

Oh, I almost forgot. It drives my Sling box perfectly, too.

It gets better. Similarly spurred on by all the hubbub, a company called Parallels has announced Virtualization software today that will run XP in a window on your Intel Mac OS X machine. It doesn't have the sheer graphics might of the dual boot (yet), so if you want to game or do heavy graphics stuff, that's your best bet. But, if you just need those one or two Windows applications for work, they're your huckleberry. Initial reports are it's damn fast as well, but as Parallels has been crushed by a mind numbing onslaught of downloaders, their server is not currently talking to the world, so I don't know first hand.

What I do know is this -- far far far more than in the Virtual PC era, the Macintosh now makes it relatively trivial to do an extremely successful Windows build on your laptop.

You want to bet Michael Dell went into counseling, today?

Posted by Eric Burns at 10:38 AM | Comments (44)

March 6, 2006

Eric: From an e-mail sent about my last post

The following got sent to me by a fellow named Dale. Or, I suppose, a woman named Dale. Either way, Dale says:

Tell me something. How much of your unhappiness with City of Heroes came from little new content? And how much of it came from multiple waves of forced re-specification for "balance" purposes, and "enhancement diversity" (which wasn't), and "here's how we're changing everything again?" without any real reward to go with it?

Dale's a smart person.

There was a ton of rules changes, power changes, and "balance" issues in and around there. To the point where we were begging and pleading for them to just stop. They already had us. We were playing. Please please please stop messing with it.

Well, they've stopped messing with it... but they also haven't really ever given the Heroes something really, really cool to bring them back. Special events have been Hero and Villain events, not just Hero events.

So, yeah. I think that is a big part of why I just feel "meh" towards Paragon City these days.

The Rogue Islands, on the other hand, haven't been nerfed yet. Right now, I can solo to 21 with a Necromancy Mastermind -- and have a blast doing it. Right now, Brutes can lay waste all around themselves. It's fun. We feel eeeeeeevil. In a good way.

Maybe next year we'll be screaming about nerfs again and begging them not to "balance" us once more. And maybe not. Maybe they'll just leave well enough alone for a while.

Because in the end, they really did lose the war for the sake of a few battles, when it comes to their flagship.

Posted by Eric Burns at 4:13 PM | Comments (14)

Eric: It's been a long time, so here's a City of Something post. Just accept it and move on.

It seemed like the love affair was over.

Oh, I still liked super heroes. I liked the conventions. The spandex. The pummeling evil. The defeating of evil with glowing green rays coming out of my character's eyes.

However, sometime back in November, I got busy. Very busy. And then Christmas was busy. And January was staggeringly busy. And so I stopped logging in. Days between sessions of punching became weeks. And then months. It seemed like I just no longer cared.

I had fallen out of love with City of Heroes.

I went back to it, finally. Got back together with my cadre of hero pals. But it just wasn't the same. They were still full on synchronized in their banter. They still cared. They still wanted it. But I was running along behind, and kind of yawning.

Maybe it was because all the development love for many months now is going to City of Villains. And the next Issue of free content updates ("Destiny Manifest") is almost all Villain content as well. So going back and trying things out was very much the same old same old.

I thought about canceling. I mean, I wasn't that interested in City of Villains. Oh, I had playtested it. And I knew it was worthy. I knew it was good. But it wasn't for me. I liked playing heroes.

And besides, they were really, really pushing the City of Villains PvP content, and I detest PvP. At least in part because I suck on toast at it.

Hey, I'm honest. Give me that much.

Well. I got together with my friends during the "Valentine's Event," but it seemed like a last hurrah.

And then last week, I made a new City of Villains character. Somewhat randomly, mind. In fact, the whole reason I did it was because I wanted to make a character wearing a lab coat. That's all. So I made a doctor, and decided to make that doctor a Mastermind. Masterminds, you see, control henchmen. They control ninjas. Or robotic minions. Or soldiers. I've played them before, during the playtesting, and they're fun.

Well, I decided to give this character a backstory. I always give my characters backstories. I'm into the whole "role play" thing. I know, I know, you can steal my lunch money later. Anyhow, I decided my character had been a medical student who was badly injured. Said medical student was then reshaped by the vivisectionist known as Doctor Vahzilok -- an archvillain from City of Heroes known for his Frankensteinian monsters and the reanimated flesh he sends out as waves of cadaverous zombies of death. Because my character had a decent amount of money for his "treatments," the character wasn't used as spare parts for an abomination of nature, but instead had organs largely replaced and flesh remade into a super powered wielder of darkness -- what in the game is called a Murk Eidolon.

Well, when Doctor Eidolon broke away from Vahzilok, the knowledge for reanimating and vivisecting flesh went along with. And so Doctor Eidolon commands not only the powers of darkness... but zombies! Better than zombies, even. Science zombies! Mu hu hah hah hah!

You get the idea. It's a role playing game.

Anyway, I started playing the character as a lark. Soloing, instead of teaming. In fact, I'm not even playing this Doctor Eidolon on my normal server.

And I discovered something.

City of Villains is a good game.

City of Villains is a really good game.

First off, I discovered I was able to solo, in a practical way. See, "soloing" is exactly what it sounds like. You're not gathering together with other players, teaming against the forces of... well, whatever. No, you're going it solo.

City of Heroes didn't do soloing well. At all. It could be done, with just the right build... but it was far too onerous. Level advancement, for someone who took missions instead of just hunting the streets and grinding out levels, took too long and didn't give enough rewards. The missions didn't chain together well -- there were "plot arcs," but they were relatively few and far between.

City of Villains, on the other hand, has a vastly more mature system of mission chaining. First off, thanks to the "newspaper" system, you're never without a mission if you want one. After all, we're supervillains. We don't wait to be given a mission. Sometimes, we flip open a newspaper, learn that Doctor Aeon's built a cool new thingammie, and realize "hey, I could steal that and get a ton of money for it on the black market." Or a psychologist releases a new book claiming your antisocial behavior stems from an unhappy childhood, and you get astoundingly pissed off and go kidnap her. Or you just decide to break some heads because you just like breaking peoples' heads.

Do enough newspaper missions, and you get to knock over a bank or a casino or the like. Knock over said bank, and you get a contact, who'll almost always put you into a full plot arc -- sometimes chaining you to other contacts who do further plot arcs.

And the contacts are brilliant this time. In City of Heroes, the contacts are almost cyphers. Sure, they're written in character... but there's only so many upstanding young environmental reporters or public defenders or taciturn men in black you can deal with before they all seem the same. The fight for justice is never ending, but it's also dull.

The contacts in City of Villains, on the other hand, are all over the freaking map. One of them doesn't like to be seen, so your contact is actually his car. His gigantic solid gold Cadillac, to be exact -- you can practically hear Isaac Hayes music in the background when you see him. (His "contact picture" in your list is his hood ornament.") And then there's the radio. See... one of your contacts is a radio. And when you listen to it... it almost sounds like... like they're talking about you. Giving you suggestions. Giving you hints. Passing you messages.

In other words? City of Villains has an entire mission chain being given to you via delusion of reference.

The missions themselves are delightfully villainous -- in a "high villain" style. You're not killing schoolchildren or selling peoples' daughters on the street for drugs. This isn't real evil. This is supervillain evil. You're taking nasty peoples' money and shutting down the generators to the television station before they can broadcast their exposé. You're picking sides and factions and playing them off each other. You're sneaking off to Paragon City and destroying their efforts to rebuild the war-torn sections of town so the "city of heroes" has to stay on the defensive. You're going back to Paragon City and blowing up some of their freaking superhero statues just to wipe the smug look off their smarmy little hero faces.

In City of Heroes, after a solid week of solo play, you'd be lucky if you had four or five plot arc "souvenirs" of your heroic exploits. And there's only so high a level you can become without teaming up with other folks or being really good at soloing.

In City of Villains, I and my undead horde of science zombies have been soloing for a week. And I've broken level 21. And I have twelve souvenirs of my exploits. Including a hat from when I went back to Paragon City's prison (which you break out of to start the game) and busted out a bunch more villains. And a report faking my own death and falsifying my involvement in an affair where one of the leaders of the corrupt military used me as a freelancer to take down some of his rivals. And a drawing of me from the future, that implies that the true horror of that future was born in my bloody, bloody hands. And a golden hub cap. Because everyone should have a golden hubcap on the wall of his trophy ro