Websnark

August 20, 2009

Eric: On Being Super

One of the epic tales of Closed Beta, over at Champions Online, was an ongoing discussion on the game's challenge level. And by ongoing discussion, I mean "impassioned argument."

Put simply -- there were certain closed beta testers who didn't like that lower level enemies were still a threat to their character... and they weren't too happy about same-level enemies being a threat either. If they got two or three levels ahead of a pack of NPC bad guys, they felt that they should essentially be invulnerable to them. If they left the keyboard for a drink, leaving their L15 character in a hazardous area, and nine L11 or L12 bad guys spawned while they were away and proceeded to beat their character into a pulp... well, they found this to be suboptimal.

And, whenever this argument raised its ugly head, the same argument came up. "I just don't feel super" they said. Each and every time.

It's a familiar complaint. I heard this dozens of times over the past five years connected with City of Heroes. "I just don't feel super" inevitably meant "I don't have the opportunity to bust out equal doses of Cool and Kickass often enough." And, there was something to be said for it -- the early opposition in the game, even though you were told they were enhancing themselves one way or another, just didn't seem like they should be that hard for a super hero -- even a young and inexperienced one -- to take down. Further, you got powers slowly, and some powers were arbitrarily spaced out (why someone needed to hit L14 to fly in a Superhero game has always been a mystery). It was showing some of its MMO roots: cool things came at higher levels. Want to ride a horse or war ram or pink elephant? You need to hit 30th level first, Toby Nightelf, and even then don't expect the horse salesman to sell you a horse if you're not in good with his race: economics be damned, horses are human technology and not just any Elf can be trusted with one!

(As a total side note, both World of Warcraft and City of Heroes have been drastically reducing the level requirements for travel options or powers -- it took quite a few years, but they finally figured out no one's that excited by jogging. But I digress.)

The problem is, and always has been, that 'Super,' the way these people mean the term, means 'Unchallenged.' For a lot of people, 'superhero' means 'unstoppable badass,' and anything that makes their character seem like less than an unstoppable badass means by definition their character is not being a superhero. From there, it's simple to see the formula reduced down to its component level:

character + defeat = nonsuper

That's what their argument really boils down to. "I lost the fight, and Wolverine never loses fights, so I'm not a superhero." "I got knocked out, and Batman never gets knocked out, so ergo I'm not being super."

Oh, in debating this point the people in question will make allowances. Sure, the archvillain at the end of the scenario can take you down -- at least every now and again -- and that's okay. Batman is sometimes knocked out by the Joker, after all. But in everyday life, there shouldn't be anything -- but anything -- that leads to you being beaten. It was perhaps made worse in early City of Heroes levels by the type of opposition you were facing, of course -- even if the Hellions use magic to beef themselves up, it's rough to be a mighty hero and have a bunch of street punks who think orange is a good color choice take you down because you bit off more than you can chew -- but the principle still applied. Superheroes didn't lose, they kicked ass.

The problem with this argument, in the end, is that it's wrong. On every level. And that's true in City of Heroes, it's true in Champions Online, and it's true in Marvel Comics. And it underscores something that every writer, developer, artist, or gamer needs to understand: Challenge is Good. There needs to be real stakes involved. Accomplishing things should take effort.

We've talked about such things before. Conflict is good, as I was wont to say in the days when I was wont to say things. When bad things happen to characters in fiction (sequential-art based or not), that set up interesting and engaging situations that became fodder for drama, comedy or both. Well, when reading about super heroes, there has to be a sense of challenge. You have to believe that Spider-Man could get shot in the head and die even if it was desperately unlikely he would. You need a sense that your heroes have to work at their goals, and that there would be consequences if they fail.

The seminal example of this, of course, was the difference between Superman and Spider-Man in the sixties. In the end, the Mort Weisinger era Superman is exactly what those guys who "just don't feel super" are gunning for -- a character who is so powerful, so indestructible that his enemies are less threats than annoyances. Sure, there was Kryptonite, and sometimes there was magic or "the rays of a red sun," but for the most part Superman was amused by the silly gangsters with their silly guns. An MMO that centered on a Lois Lane type character breaking two hundred pairs of scissors on your invulnerable hair as a requirement to level up wouldn't be fun -- it would be excruciating.

(Actually, if someone wants to create a game where you play an all powerful godlike superhero who spends all his time tricking his friends, teaching them humiliating 'lessons,' and being amused when accidents turn them into monkeys or insect people, a la Superman in the sixties... well I'd buy a copy. But the challenge of that game wouldn't be physical danger -- it'd be setting up the perfect humiliation of the pathetic love interest whose major crime is wanting to marry you. But I stray from my thesis.)

Now, Champions Online is good at giving you challenges. In particular, it doesn't reward stupidity. If you stop paying attention because everything around you is two or three levels below you, you will in fact be defeated. If you engage 30 lower level enemies and lack a decent Area of Effect attack, you will in fact lose. And sometimes, this pissed people off. "These guys are mooks! I shouldn't lose to them! Sure, I was stupid, but still -- I'm supposed to be a hero! Batman wouldn't lose to them! I just don't feel super!"

In one of these exchanges, where Batman was in fact brought up, I chimed in. For me, one of the joys of Batman -- when he was written well, at least -- was that he was constantly having to outthink his opponents. Oh sure, he was a great fighter -- but his strength came from using every advantage. He had gear in his belt designed to confuse, surprise and subdue his enemies. He used fear (and the dark) to panic them, forcing them to make mistakes. He was patient, and quiet, and took them down two or three at a time in ways that made the remaining crooks increasingly jumpy and paranoid. And yes, if he were to drop all that and charge into the middle of the room, he'd probably get beaten. Lord knows he'd been knocked out by lucky saps to the head any number of times. It's why he kept waking up in dark rooms tied to a chair with dynamite underneath it (or chained in giant hourglasses that would slowly pour sand on him until he suffocated -- Batman's enemies spend way more money on death traps then they ever take in from bank robberies. But then, Batman's enemies treat crime like performance art.)

"No way," my debate partner responded. "Batman doesn't need to do all that. He's the greatest martial artist who ever lived! He could take them all down!"

What can you do?

Amusingly, I'm reminded of The Dark Knight Returns. In one of the most famous scenes (which I'm about to entirely Spoil, so, you know. Spoiler Alert on a 1986 comic book that 97.6% of the people reading this have read dozens of times) Batman -- now old, of course -- sees the young, vicious warlord ruler of the Mutant street gang, who challenges him to one on one combat. Batman has enough pride to be pulled out of the safety of his Bat-tank and goes at him hand to hand. And the mutant leader -- younger, stronger, in better condition, and much faster -- proceeds to beat him nearly to death. He would have died right there had a fangirl not spontaneously become the new Robin and pulled him out. He had let himself be coaxed into acting stupidly, and that nearly killed him. When he had a rematch with the mutant leader, it was on his own terms, using psychological effects to prod the leader into a rage, then dropping him into a mud pit. That takes away his speed advantage, and while he's still younger, stronger and in better condition, Batman is smarter and more experienced, and utterly in command of the environment. He proceeds to take the leader apart, brutally beating him down in front of his gang, and completely breaking their morale (and leading to a number of them aping his style and eventually becoming his army).

Batman wasn't super the first time. He was stupid, and he got pounded into mush for it. Batman was super the second time, when he used strategy and tactics to accomplish his goals. And that led inexorably to Batman fighting Superman -- the last hurrah of that Pre-Crisis, all powerful, Mort Weisinger super Superman -- and beating him.

That last scene, by the way? That scene where Batman takes down Superman? That completely redefined Batman and Superman in popular culture. That took the World's Finest team of best friends and made them barely tolerate each other. And that cemented in the minds of comic fans everywhere that of course Batman would beat Superman in a fight. Duh. Before that scene, Batman was just that guy with the ropes, the car, the sidekick and the Bat Shark Repellant. We made fun of Batman in the Super Friends.

But Batman was the character who had challenge in his stories and overcame them, and in the end the indestructible man couldn't compete.

I have always liked the challenge of City of Heroes. I like that I have to pick and choose my fights and be intelligent about them. One of the key complaints about City of Heroes these days is that because the underlying A.I. is five years old and so many of us are so experienced in its nature, we've become too good at it. The challenge is less. And NCSoft is responding by allowing us to alter our difficulty with incredible granularity. If you want to solo a mission as though you had a full 8 man team on Unyielding, you can.

And I like -- I really like -- that if I run through Maniacs territory in Champions Online, even if they're a few levels below me, and I don't have my head in the game, they'll wrap chains around me, haul me off my feet, and beat me into paste. If I'm going to be a hero -- if I'm going to win -- I'm going to have to use my brain and my skills in the game to overcome the odds.

And there's nothing that makes me feel more super than that.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:04 PM | Comments (19)

August 18, 2009

Eric: Six thousand words on video games is one way to say "I missed you all," right?

So... yeah. I've been gone a while.

In a way, it's been symbolic of a deeper thing. I haven't just been away from Websnark since... yeesh, May. I've been away from writing. I haven't updated my livejournal. I haven't written fiction. My word processor hasn't actually been launched more than twice in all that time.

This is, as I've mentioned before, very unusual for me. I'm the kind of person who writes to keep my brain on an even keel. Which is really where all this has gone -- I hit the point some time back of full on writerly burnout. My mind simply stopped working in that way. I needed time away from... well, from everything like this.

Am I back now? I think so. We're going to give it a shot, see what kind of momentum we can get going. We'll see. Weds and I also have some plans that I won't go into now, but suffice it to say Weds is a very cool person who knows things I do not.

So what have I been doing with my time these last few months? Not counting stalking the wild Transformer toy with Weds and having a pretty decent married life, anyway?

What else. Video games. Specifically, I've been playing City of Heroes, The Sims 3, and, most significantly, the closed beta of Champions Online. And I have thoughts on all three -- thoughts which will turn into longer essays later, but for now let's get something 'inked,' shall we?

City of Heroes

It's weird. Not counting games like Soulcalibur, where I'll play each new edition that comes out when it comes along, I haven't stuck with a single video game for a long period of time before City of Heroes. Really, City of Heroes has been a reliable standby for me -- something that has kept my interest, that has continued to engage me, that has inspired me, that has been tons of fun for over five years now. I've been playing City of Heroes longer than I've been writing Websnark, for Christ's sake.

And that is a testament, really, to the job that the developers have done over the past years. They have continually updated the game. They have strived to push the envelope. They have expanded the game's content and gameplay. They have added yet more hot babes, some of them in loincloths. And they are continuing in that vein. It's a remarkable achievement.

Which is somewhat bittersweet, because City of Heroes really has crested the hill. While they are doing a yeoman's job, it is in fact all downhill from here.

That seems odd, in one sense. Certainly, Architect was a monumental shot in the arm. As I've discussed before, it was amazingly fun, especially for a person like me who lives to dig into backstory and adventure design. During the beta process, I freaking lived in the Mission Architect. And after release, I filled my slots up almost immediately.

Well, I mentioned in that linked essay that the biggest problem with Architect was how fast you burned through your arc slots. That was very true, and it took a long time for Paragon Studios to resolve that. Too long, really. When they finally announced that you could buy additional arc slots, the momentum associated with the launch of the system had turned to inertia. And, unfortunately, there were some major issues that came up which ended up harshing the buzz on Architect. People had developed any number of 'farming' missions -- designed to powerlevel characters or farm the Architect badges. Paragon Studios responded with changes -- some of them pretty draconian. They dropped dozens of badges from the game. They even deleted some of (what they described as) the most egregious examples of powerleveling from the game entirely....

...and unfortunately, they caught some innocents in the process. See, they have a feature called a 'leveling pact,' and that leveling pact allows two players to link their characters, so that if one earns experience while the other is logged out, the experience is divided between them. It's a great idea and a nice system in the game.

Unfortunately, a number of leveled-pact characters looked like powerleveled characters to the search algorithms they were using. And got wiped. Right at the same time that they were eliminating those dozens of badges from the game.

Now, here's the thing. A lot of people were pissed off that they were eliminating badges. Badge hunting is a popular pastime in City of Heroes, and a lot of players had devoted weeks to hunting these badges down. By eliminating them, the players who were legitimately hunting badges were being punished alongside the players who had found exploits in the system. It is never a good idea to take something away from your players, after all. Sometimes it's a necessary idea, but it's never a good one. There's almost no way to spin it as a positive, after all. So, tempers were already high because of the changes.

Now, add to that characters getting deleted. And add to that innocent players having characters deleted because of an error.

Paragon Studios fixed the issue. To my knowledge, lost 'innocent' characters were restored with all their perks, as quickly as the GMs could do it. But, the damage had already been done -- and between all of that and continuing issues over players gaming (or trying to game) the rating system, the Mission Architect honeymoon was pretty well over. It didn't help that at the time they still hadn't had ways to buy additional arc slots, so the most passionate users of the Architect system were already out of the loop, cutting down on impassioned defenders when it was having growing pains.

It's still an amazing innovation, but it's not enough to sustain the game at this point.

Paragon Studios knows this. They came out with a new content update -- Issue 15: Anniversary -- in hopes of invigorating the game. But Anniversary -- despite the fact that it returned the coolest villain faction ever developed for the game to the game (and reversed one of the worst early decisions City of Heroes made) -- was an extremely lackluster content update. Sure, the Fifth Column was back... but their return was focused on a single hero task force and a single villain strike force. Task forces and strike forces are problematic, because they can't be run solo. You have to have a team, so players who don't have a regular group have to grab a pick up group or else just skip the content.

For the record? My regular group of City of Heroes players jumped out of the game and started in on World of Warcraft many, many months ago. My only recourse for anything that requires a team is pick-up groups, and I don't actually like them. They're just too uneven for my tastes. So despite my absolutely love of the Fifth Column, I haven't actually seen their return as yet. Well, except in player-made Mission Architect missions. I fought Nazis on the Moon at one point, and that's entirely cool. It just doesn't help Issue 15.

Otherwise? They added some new costume sets, added a bunch of new character faces (several of which honestly aren't to my taste), and added some costume change animations. All of which is cute, but don't really affect gameplay at all, and the gameplay in City of Heroes is pretty stale right now.

Oh, and they added some refinements to the Mission Architect -- in particular, to quote their update page, they made it so "[missions] can now be selected for both 'Hall of Fame' and 'Dev Choice,' allowing players to attain both badges," which would probably be more exciting if A) more than 0.04% of the total number of arcs had gotten either Hall of Fame or Dev's Choice, and B) if they hadn't eliminated both of those badges as part of the purge.

Issue 16: Power Spectrum is currently in closed beta. It adds a feature people have been asking for since, oh, Issue 2, namely the ability to customize the look of their powers. Generally, that means being able to change the color of powers, as well as changing some animations here and there. That's awesome... and absolutely necessary, since Champions Online will be out soon and it's shipping with powers you can customize. It also includes more "powerset proliferation," which gives different archetypes access to powersets previously reserved for other characters. (Which also feels like a response to Champions Online, since they let you mix and match powers as you will). And you can tweak your difficulty more easily, which is a good thing. All of these are good things, really. They're just not overwhelming. At least in theory -- like I said, they're in closed beta, so I can't report on their actual implementation at this time, which neither confirms nor denies whether I'm in said closed beta.

At least the powerset proliferation constitutes new gameplay, which the game really needs at this point. Really, the game needs a monumental influx of new content and new gameplay, including major AI revisions, a ton of new maps, new zones -- the whole nine yards. As it is, new issues come out and they're just not as exciting as they used to be. The Mission Architect is partially to blame -- who cares about new content when there's 50,000 story arcs ready to be played in one building? But part of the problem is... well, it's over five years old. Its underlying technologies date back to the first Bush Administration. The biggest, most innovative games of its graduating class were Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Katamari Damacy, and... oh yeah, World of Freaking Warcraft. We've had multiple sequels to the first three of those games, and not only has WoW had monumentally more success and several major content updates (including two huge paid sequels)... but it too is showing its age at this point.

The future still looks bright for City of Heroes. Their second paid expansion (and the first since '05's City of Villains), City of Heroes: Going Rogue promises to resolve many of those issues. New gameplay systems (including the long long long overdue capacity for heroes to fall from grace and villains to redeem), a whole new world (cue song) with new zones, entirely new powersets and a move forward in their mythology is all really exciting stuff. At the same time, they've announced a loyalty program that's a bit telling: if you stay subscribed to City of Heroes from August through November, you're guaranteed a spot in the City of Heroes: Going Rogue closed beta test.

Champions Online releases in September. They practically could have named this promotion the "please don't quit our game when Champions Online launches" campaign. It's certainly the most telling sign so far that Paragon Studios knows it needs to step up to what could be a major blow to their subscriber base.

Still, Going Rogue does give some hope, and I for one am keeping my account for now. Besides, I've stuck with them for five years, and it's still a good game. I'm not ready to cut the cord. There's too much history there.

For now.

Still, one hopes they either have a lot of real gameplay followups behind this... or else City of Heroes 2. (I for one think a true sequel should be named Nation of Heroes, but then I'm weird.) While City of Heroes may last years before it becomes uneconomic to keep the servers running (Hell, The Matrix Online just shut down at the beginning of this month, which is just stunning when you consider no one on the planet thought it was still online. And the original Everquest is still getting new content, much less still running! Seriously! The Underfoot expansion's scheduled to hit servers this November!) there will come a point where the major development of the 'City of Heroes' universe will require a new engine and design, to take advantage of all the lessons they've learned over the past five years.

Of course, there are those who say Champions Online is, in fact, City of Heroes 2. Paragon Studios needs to fight that perception tooth and freaking nail, and Cryptic won't make that easy. But that's for down below in the third section.

The Sims 3

The Sims has been one of those franchises I've plugged along with from "small times" as Ray Smuckles would have said in happier times. At this point, they know how to sell us this thing. Each new generation of the game is a significant improvement in gameplay and design. You get hooked on the (mostly mundane) beginnings of the new generation, and then expansions come out that build on your game in weirder and weirder ways. This was true back in the days of The Sims, it was true in The Sims 2 (and I'm still pissed off that the last two expansions never came out for the Macintosh), and it's true now in The Sims 3. The major innovation this time is that you're not playing a household, you're focused on one household of the whole neighborhood, but as time passes all their stories evolve at the same rate yours does. People don't just get old, they get married and have kids. New people move in as old people die off, and if you want to send every one of your household's residents to entirely different lots in the neighborhood, all in real time, go for it.

It's all smoother and slicker than in previous years, and the expanded sense of scope really is an improvement. It feels far more like a town now. There's lots more to do. There's challenges to achieve. There's a truly startlingly large amount of fishing. And there is a real feeling of evolution. You're meant to have your characters hook up, procreate, grow old and die while their children do the same, and on down into the ages.

As with almost everything in the world, there is an up side and a down side to this.

The up side is an increased sense of the Soap Operatic reality that has always been the Sims. Friendships are reworked, so it's less important that you befriend everyone and his brother. Mistakes can last for a long time indeed. Ghosts (the token magic of this first game) can be a part of families and even if they're not, you have a sense of the past becoming the future and beyond. And, if you don't like all that, you can turn aging off and say the heck with it.

The down side is some loss of effective functionality. In The Sims 2, when children grew up and moved out, that became a different playable household. If you wanted to jump over and see what they're up to and play them for a few weeks, leaving your main house alone, you can happily do so. Not so in the Sims 3. If you change the household of focus in the Sims 3, your old household continues evolving -- they just do it without you. They become NPCs. You can turn off story progression the same as you do aging, but at that point what is the point? You might as well play The Sims 2 and get the ability to send them Sims to college or send them into a hot tub for unhygienic sex.

(As a side note -- the lack of hot tubs in The Sims 3 is the first thing everyone notices. Somehow, the Hot Tub experience has become emblematic of the Sims as a whole, and its lack feels palpable. So, while I maintain that The Sims remains a Soap Opera simulator, let's not rule out scrambled soft-core couples porn as a secondary goal. This is only exacerbated by your ability to seduce the pizza delivery guy or the plumber.)

The tradeoff of tight continuity over ease of shifting plotlines is a relatively minor one. The major strike against The Sims 3 is economic. Now, it's worth noting they've made it trivially easy to recolor and repattern... well, anything in the game. If you want to have a Toyota Prius painted like a cow, you can. If you want your bookshelves to be painted like a cow, you can. If you want your clothing, kitchen appliances, laptop computers, carpet and juice bar to be painted like cows, you can. It's the cow apocolypse! Run!

On the other side of it, if you want new objects to paint however you'd like... well, you go to an online store and you spend "Sims points" on it. Which is to say they've implemented the same kind of microtransactions that every other video game has. Yaaaay. I suppose it's not significantly different than the DVDs of new clothes and stuff you could buy for The Sims 2, only it feels chintzier somehow. They know it's easier to get someone to spend a hundred 'points' (in reality, about a buck) than it is to get them to shell out thirty bucks for a DVD collection -- even if the collection then comes to significantly less money per object than your online purchasing.

When hot tubs become available, it's a pretty safe bet they'll cost a few thousand points in the store. Assuming they're not going to be part of a paid expansion, anyway.

All told, The Sims 3 remains a lovely way to accidentally spend nine hours reminding your character to eat while forgetting to do so yourself. And with the upcoming World Adventures expansion scheduled to hit personal computers in November, EA is going to continue to print money off Wil Wright's legacy for a long time to come.

Champions Online

Not long after my last City of Heroes essay (and in part thanks to an offhanded comment in that essay) I got into the closed beta of Champions Online. As with all closed betas, Champions Online has been a bit of a rough ride, especially since their beta schedule was two nights a week, typically -- Wednesdays and Fridays. The first (pretty unstable) build of the week would be pushed for Wednesday, and a bug-fixed/stabilized version of that build would go in Friday. Sometimes it would be spectacularly broken, and sometimes it would be pretty amazingly flawless, but all in all it was... well, a closed beta. Betas aren't there for the fun of the testers -- they're so that the game breaking bugs get caught before someone actually pays for that thing.

Still, those sessions gave me a pretty good idea of how Champions Online was supposed to go. And now that the NDA has been lifted and we're into Open Beta, I can share impressions with you guys.

Now, before I got into Closed Beta, most of what I heard about Champions Online was... well, pretty awful. Generally, the word came from disgruntled beta testers who'd up and quit, often for legitimate reasons -- though naturally that gives you a pretty one sided sense of things. I'll write a bit about the nature of a closed beta process -- and what it is and it isn't -- later on in the week, luck willing. Suffice it to say I've watched the game evolve a tremendous amount since getting in, and I can make a few subjective assessments.

On the whole? This is a really, really good game.

Seriously. Cryptic Studios developed City of Heroes before the NCSoft buyout and development split (though all of the developers who were still working on City of Heroes at the time of the split stuck with the property), and their experience with the older game informed Champions Online tremendously. In particular, Champions Online addresses a lot of the long standing complaints people have with City of Heroes. Hitting some of the high points:

• Characters can be built out of any combination of powers, eschewing classes (or archetypes) and permitting a broad spread of abilities, which themselves can be customized in color and often in animation or anchor point. (My current open beta character concept is a techno-shaman whose basic abilities are reflected by light blue electricity, along with some sorcerous powers. The technological spirits of the character's shamanism are reflected by various summonable robots and toys. Needless to say, this character couldn't exist in City of Heroes.)
• Travel powers are automatic after the tutorial finishes, and are far more usable in combat. One can legitimately have a flying hero who never touches the ground. Further, there are a lot more travel powers available -- tunneling underground, riding a flying disk, having an ice bridge carry you a la Iceman, flying wreathed in flame a la the Human Torch (or, if you colored it green, Fire from Justice League International), an acrobatic style of flips and bouncing, and swinging. Swinging. Screw fighting crime -- I'll happily swing half-way across the desert for hours on end just because it's fun. There is far less of a sense that your character has to slog on foot everywhere in this game.
• The character creation engine is astounding. Not only does it have broad uses, but almost everything is adjustable by sliders. What's more, a good number of the costumes incorporate not only patterns but textures. (A leather bodysuit is different than a cloth one, and both of those are different than metal -- and all three of these can be put through a knit weave or various patterns and cuts of jumpsuit, and that's just bodysuits.) You can have a stag's head. Or a shark head. There are jet packs and rockets and backpacks and freaking quivers. You can change your character's eye color. You can make his eyes glow, even, or go with the Batmanseque 'pupilless eyes' look. (I may create a Little Orphan Annie parody with no pupils, if I can figure out a good batshit insane powerset.)
• Barring names that infringe on trademark, names are tied to a specific account instead of a server. Which means that anyone can have any name, but only one character in their own account can be named that name. So, if I want to name a character Force, the fact that my friend Mason might have a character named Force wouldn't stop me. Messages or mail to our respective characters would just go to "Force@ericburnswhite" or "Force@masonkramer" (neither of those are our real global names, for the record.) So, the days of trying to find a misspelled variation of the name we wanted in the first place? Are over.
• Immersion is immediate and heroic. As much as I've always loved City of Heroes, the City of Heroes tutorial, while good at teaching you how to play the game, was terrible at making you feel like a hero. You were in a sealed section of town, beating up sick men (with, admittedly, glowing eyes) who were throwing small rocks at you and hitting you with pipes. And it took a few hits to beat them at that. As much as the backstory of the game justified the events, you never quite shook the feeling that the freaking Wondertwins could have solved this 'crisis' in ten minutes and still had time for a heartfelt moral and some cruel mocking of their monkey.
  
  By contrast, in Champions Online the entire of Millennium City is plunged into abject chaos by an alien invasion. Forcefields are everywhere. The police are cut off. You have to fight insect aliens, rescue hostages, free trapped people from rubble, rescue a lost freaking cat and return it to a grandmother, figure out where the alien menace came from, mount a counterattack, and storm the contested headquarters of the signature heroes in the game. Along the way, you meet several of those signature heroes, not a some L1 newbie unworthy of their attention, but as a peer, save at least one from a horrible fate, then fight alongside the game's Superman figure. And in the major supervillain fight near the end of the tutorial, almost always that Superman figure will go down and you'll have to save the day in his stead. And that is followed by a celebration, and for the rest of your time in the game, whenever you're in Millennium City random people will run up to you and gush over the fact that you saved their lives and the whole freaking city.
  
  Now that's superheroic.
• While there aren't many zones, they are positively huge, and you move back and forth between them throughout the game.This also means there aren't loading screens all the time, and you get a real sense of city. (Or of desert or frozen countryside, depending). They're also totally beautiful.
• PvP is in the game from the beginning and works the way you'd expect superheroic PvP to work. You can invite anyone in the game to duel, and then (after a rocket drops from the sky to mark the duel field) you two can duke it out. Or, pretty much anywhere (with no travel time) you can queue to go into team based or free for all PvP (under the title 'The Hero Games' after the original publishers of Champions). PvP grants experience and in-game rewards. If the model sounds familiar, it's because it's been largely taken from World of Warcraft, who did it as well as anyone in the business. I hate PvP in general, but this is a fun occasional diversion, and because I don't need to travel to special arenas to participate it can be done whenever I have a vague yen -- or see someone on the street I want to have a zero-penalty slugfest with. At the same time, I can never touch it at all and I'm out nothing.
• Because they have access to the decades-long Champions intellectual property, they have hundreds of fleshed out supervillains and organizations to fight. You fight an actual supervillain in the tutorial. You fight a couple of Supervillains in whichever Crisis you choose after the tutorial. You actually run into costumed supervillains as a part of the missions you take place in, even outdoors, in the game. At any point you might discover yourself facing a full on spandex-clad nemesis -- and for those of us who've been playing Champions for half of forever, you'll also do some undignified squeeing during the process. (I was pathetically happy to fight Ankylosaur at one point.)
• Viper (which by the way predates "Cobra" from G.I. Joe by several years) is a monumentally cool recurring enemy. They'd take 'the Council' from City of Heroes any day of the week.
• Environments are moderately destructible, and your stats give you environmental options. A character with an area of effect attack will often lay waste to cars, boulders, computers, lampposts and the like. At the same time, the stronger your character the heavier an object he can lift. The first time you have a superstrong character who manages to pick up a tank, fly into the air, and hurl it an an enemy as an opening attack will stay with you for a long time.
• You can make your own costumed nemesis, and that nemesis actually engages you in the game proper. I can't overestimate how cool it is to have a pack of your nemesis's minions show up and reinforce your opponents because they cut a side-deal to specifically take you out. Further, your nemesis is among the hardest opponents you face in the game. And after a while, you get the option to create more, until you have your own Rogue's Gallery.
• The game is beautiful and laden with little touches. For example, going into a simulated wild west saloon in a robotic theme park, you see a saloon like interior. However, there's also a robot piano player. And he's merrily playing a slightly out of tune piano. And a whole line of robotic cowpoke girls are dancing in a choreographed western style line dance to it. That doesn't add a thing to gameplay, but man it's cool.

This makes it sound like Champions Online is in all ways a better game than City of Heroes, but that's unfair. There are still plenty of issues that need to be ironed out, and lots of those issues will only come with time and development of content. Let me hit those high (low?) points too:

• The game is incredibly linear right now. You must start in the Tutorial (and no matter how awesome that Tutorial is, the fifth time you launch Ironclad you're pretty sick of his bizarrely Ted-Cassidyesque voice). Once finished the Tutorial, you must go to a crisis zone either in the Desert or the Canadian Wilderness. You must do the multiple missions to complete the Crisis. Only after all that is finished are you in a position to take control of your own path, and even then it's strongly suggested that you stick to the non-crisis version of the zone you're in until you level your way up in that content. One won't realistically start having adventures in the 'main' location of Millennium City until L11 or L12 at the earliest. (Though that does give an in-game explanation of how they were able to clean up the damage from the alien invasion so quickly). Someone who enjoys building lots of alt characters is going to get really sick of going through that same content over and over again. While one gets to know all the City of Heroes content (not counting Mission Architect), there's a lot more variety in the early levels before you end up following mission chains. World of Warcraft, which really is the gold standard for MMOs right now, has two major factions and those factions each have three different starting locations and quests, not to mention lots of quests that are specific to given classes or the like.
• On the other hand, Alts are hard to come by anyway. You get a whopping eight character slots to begin with. You can earn (or buy) more, and people who get a permanent account during the promotional period get an additional eight. Compare that to World of Warcraft's fifty total alts, and bear in mind that if you spread alts between servers, you can make a whopping one hundred and twenty one alternate characters on City of Heroes without even touching on earned or bought additional slots.
• While the character creator has incredible depth, it's also mired in a specific house style that's less comic-book and more cartoon. Even if one turns off the trademark 'black outline' surrounding characters to make them look inked (as almost everyone seems to), characters look closer to Kim Possible's wide eyes, the Tick's chin, or Justice League Unlimited characters than they do to a Greg LaRocque drawing. In particular, though you have a ton of sliders that let you change a person's features, those faces look very much alike unless you make them full on grotesque.
• Crafting is, charitably, a work in progress. They're trying very hard to make crafting useful and relevant, and having it incorporate the capacity to swap gear and change your stats and abilities in other games while avoiding changing the lovingly created costumes in the game to something canned. However, the result misses the visceral joy of turning leather into pants that's such a bizarrely addictive subgame within World of Warcraft and other fantasy games. The three professions -- mysticism, science and arms -- feel arbitrary, and they've recently added a byzantine series of specializations within the main fields that just muddle everything. (As a side note, I have long maintained that the 'crafting' system in a superhero MMO shouldn't be goods, it should be based on in-game professions. For example, crooks could drop 'clues,' which a character can gather. If that character is a reporter, he can smith those clues into leads, which in turn could be made into a story you can sell, or you could take several stories and smith them into a series or expos�. Those could then be made into mission arcs or other in-game benefits. Meanwhile, a 'Detective' could take those same clues and smith them into leads, which become full cases. And so on. Sadly, that seems unlikely anytime soon.)
• As cool as your Nemesis is, you don't see very much of them, and what you do see feels canned. You don't even create them until L25, which is more than halfway to the current maximum level. Even after you get your nemesis, you spend a lot more time being ambushed by your nemesis's enemies than you do actually confronting your nemesis. I really, really hope they drop your nemesis's entry to L15 or even lower, and make the Nemesis himself a more prevalent part of your day to day adventuring life.
• Rather than have multiple 'named' servers, all the characters in the game officially exist on the same server, which then will spawn additional virtual servers to reduce load as much as possible. This was meant to put everyone into one pool, so that you don't have separation of players by what server they exist on. However, the dynamic splitting of servers means players are never really sure which instance their friends are going to be on and there can be a lot of confusion.
• On the other side of it, as weird as it is to type this... it's not like the game goes out of its way to encourage friends to meet up in the first place. It's got plenty of social options, but in terms of actually adventuring together? The game is much more solo-friendly. In particular, though there's a mechanism to 'share' missions, it seems like most missions can't be shared via that mechanism. Most teaming that takes place are very short ad hoc pickup groups so that everyone waiting for mission objectives to spawn can clear the mission at once, then split up and go their separate ways.
• The above probably highlights the most obvious weakness. Almost all the missions are live on the streets, in shared areas, rather than in discrete instances. As a result, during earlier levels when there's a lot of people trying to work their way up the only possible way to complete missions is to camp the various spawn points for objectives. There's something innately unheroic about camping a spawn point to beat up Canadian separatists before your fellow heroes have a chance to do the same thing.

As you can tell, the exciting parts of Champions Online boil down to the new and exciting gameplay options in the game. (It is certainly worth noting Champions Online has a much smarter AI than its predecessor. The days of taunting a room of bad guys around a corner and having them all pile around it to let you fry them with AoE attacks seems to be done.) The problems Champions Online has largely boil down to the game being brand new and immature. While there have been plenty of broken and bugged bits (culminating in the first day of open beta being kind of a disaster as everyone hit the patching server at once and it melted under the weight), I won't officially hold those against Champions Online until after launch. That is, after all, why one has Beta tests.

Needless to say, however, I'm preordered on Champions Online. I'm really impressed with what they've done, and the game is fun and fast paced and has shiny bits I rather like. What this means for City of Heroes only time will tell, but I think I can officially state that right now? We have ourselves a ball game.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:55 PM | Comments (15)

May 12, 2009

Eric: It's my second post in two days. Ergo, it's about City of Heroes.

So it's been a long while. And hey, no promises about how long it'll be this time. It mostly depends on whether or not I actually have things to say.

That's a more powerful drag on blogging than you might realize. In the several million plus word history of Websnark, I've said a lot of things. Some of them haven't sucked. Others have. On the whole, I've done okay. Mostly.

On the other hand, very few bloggers manage to get married as a result of their blogs. By any standard, I'm way ahead of the game. But I digress.

The thing is... I don't have a lot of impetus to repeat myself. When I have new things to say or something catches my imagination, I write about it, but there's only so many times you can write about putting a fucking cast page on your webcomic and keeping it at least moderately kept up before it all sounds repetitive. That's what ultimately killed my enthusiasm for State of the (Web)Cartoonist, by the by. It's not that I ran out of strips I read. It's that the stuff I was saying about them just felt repetitive. "X does this pretty well." "Y used to do this better." "Z writes a better strip than I gave Z credit for." Blah blah blah blah blah.

But, there's still stuff I like to write about. And every now and again I'll bring them back up. Sometimes it'll be old hat, sometimes it won't.

Which brings us back, yet again, inexorably, to City of Heroes.

A lot of my friends have given up on the old City. "It's too repetitive," they say. "Gameplay doesn't evolve," they say. "I'd rather play World of Warcraft because it has variety," they say. So, you know. They're weak. Weak like flowers. Weak like children. Weak like children of flowers.

But they have a point. For all the (pretty freaking amazing) content updates that City of Heroes has had in its five year history, it's also pretty long in the tooth. There's only so many times you want to fight Skulls and Hellions. Only so many times you want to contend with Nemesis or run the horror that is the Positron Task Force. Only so many times you want to do the Portal missions or claw your way into Grandville. And when something new comes out, it's usually pretty limited. When Issue 12 hit the servers -- that being "The Midnight Hour" -- it included what looked like a ton of new content. New missions for Levels 10-20 of both heroes and villains. New post-35 content in a co-op zone back in Roman times. The epic archetypes for Villains, giving redside players access to Widows and Wolf Spiders and their various paths for growth. A remaking of the Hollows trial zone to give it more gameplay and missions and stuff. UI improvements. And "powerset proliferation" that opened new powers to new archetypes and even added more powersets to the game entirely.

That seems like it should be enough, damn it. That seems like it should be more than enough, for a good long time.

But... more powersets means more alts, not more content. The Epic villains only applied to the relatively small subset of players who took a villain all the way to 50, and then the custom content for those new epic villains was... relatively sparse. The new Midnight Squad missions pretty much included a pizza run to read content (customized for your character origin, not that it seemed to make much of a difference other than as a proof of concept) about the origins of superpowers, a single mission string at lower level, a mission string to 'become a member of the Midnight Squad,' and then access to an entirely new and pretty zone with... not a lot to do in it. There was an introduction mission string, plus the chance to have continual repetitive missions, and a really good task force which needed six players to try out. They came right out and admitted that the new zome of Cimerora was more a proof of concept and a place where content could be added than a fleshed out zone in its own right.

Put simply... it didn't take long for everything new in Issue 12 to feel played out. A nice fresh influx of content... which quickly felt kind of stale.

This might seem odd, but you have to remember something important about most new content at City of Heroes. If they build new virtual sets, that can be really pretty and really interesting and there can be lots of easter eggs and the like. However, new missions really come down to new text to read and maybe a few new enemies to fight, but for the most part things work the same way that they always have. You click the glowing object to 'disarm' it or 'collect' it or 'interact' with it. You use essentially the same tactics to fight enemies regardless of what their outer appearances look like. It really, really comes down to what you read in the text boxes, and once you've read them... you've read them.

(I have some friends who clearly don't care even slightly about what's in those text boxes. For them, new content is meaningless without new gameplay. There's not much to be done for them, though.)

Cryptic NCSoft NorCal Paragon Studios rallied, though. They came out with two more content updates and announced a third within that same year. The first (Issue 13 - "Power and Responsibility") gave a new system of 'day jobs,' letting players get bonuses for where they happened to log out (and badges badges badges to boot). It also filled out Cimerora's sparse missions (somewhat), and put in several new systems (like a leveling pact that lets you pair your experience to someone else, keeping you both in sync, and a system that lets you earn some of the better trinkets without having to do some of the more repetitive content and the like). It was okay, and kind of cool, and once again lost its new content smell pretty quickly.

The next issue -- Issue 14 - "Architect" -- was the big one. It got monumental press, and was almost universally loved, in part because it really did change the City of Heroes experience. Now, players can actually create their own content. They can create their own missions and create their own enemies (which are actually considerably harder to beat than most of the in-game enemies). It's amazing. And the Mission Architect itself is really well put together. There is amazing flexibility, and tons of maps, and the same capacity for costume designing you get for character creation with the added bonus that all the special event costume bits are available too (with the use, admittedly, of skee-ball tickets you collect when playing in the Architect. And no, I'm not kidding.)

If you wondered where I was in, oh, February and March? I got into the closed beta. I lived in the Mission Architect. Weds was very, very kind and understanding despite my spending hours a day creating new enemy groups and building mission strings, playing other peoples' Mission Architect missions, and in generally just devouring this thing. And then it released and it was a monumental and fast success, with incredibly fast growth....

...which then stopped.

See, you have three slots you can develop. Three mission arcs, with up to 5 missions each. That's it. When you've built three mission arcs, you can hope for one of the Developers to decide your mission is one of the best they've seen -- out of the literally tens of thousands being written -- and make your arc "Dev's Choice," making the arc permanent and freeing a development slot for you. Or you can manage to get a plurality of players -- several thousand being required -- to rate your arc as one of the best in the game, putting it (at least temporarily) in the Hall of Fame, which does the same thing.

Otherwise, if you want to publish a new arc, you have to delete an old one.

I'm sure their intention is to keep the database clear. After all, there are so many more thousands of arcs than there are players to play them. (Before the Beta finished, one of the Dev's admitted that the Beta testers alone had managed to create more content than the Developers had made in the official part of the game over the five years City of Heroes had been out). But the problem is, the kind of person who loves this kind of shit doesn't want to delete their arcs. Someone might play them, after all. They want to hold onto them. They want to build sequels to them. They want to keep going.

Only they can't. It doesn't take that long to make three mission arcs. Even three good ones. Inside of a week or two the kind of person who... oh, I don't know, buys the freaking "Architect" edition of the game on a store shelf is going to have more content than he can publish.

And it's not even a matter of letting your content out to play for a while, then rotating it. If you unpublish one of your story arcs to make room for another, even temporarily, all the ratings and evidence that people have played the first arc disappear. You are starting from scratch. So if a few dozen people have played your arc and you're still sitting at a 4 rating or above, you really don't want to shoot those ratings in the head so you can publish something untested.

I said above -- the only ways... the only ways to get more slots right now are to catch the eye of a developer (and get "Dev's Choice") or to earn your way into the Hall of Fame. And as of this writing there are exactly fourteen missions selected for Developer's Choice (out of 168,000+ arcs that have been published to date). So only fourteen different people (no one has more than one Dev's Choice, and the rumor is no one will get more than one) can have a fourth arc published by that method.

And Hall of Fame? Please. Hall of Fame is conditional. You have to keep your averages up. Groups of players formed coalitions to auto-five-star everything they produced in order to try and force their way into the Hall of Fame. Other groups of players began auto-one or zero-starring everything with five stars to combat it. The rating system is currently so polluted it's eligible for Superfund cleanup money. With over a month of play and over 168,000 missions published (though not necessarily active), a grand total of none have hit the Hall of Fame. It is, at least for the moment, not only a non-entity but not worth going for.

Which is not the worst of their problems. Hand in hand with all that have been a startlingly large number of farming missions that have been built, and a lot of people who are exploiting the Mission Architect to create powerlevelers' dreams. I've heard rumors of characters going from L1 to L50 in a day, and I can believe it. They've started to crack down on these things and redesign the badges you can earn from the system, but it's going to be an ongoing problem and it's further coloring the long term success of the Mission Architect. It probably doesn't help that the people who are really into the creative side of the system run out of arc slots and either have to dump their output or stop creating, while the farmers can cheerfully nuke a farming mission that gets compromised and build the next one in their list without batting an eye.

Now. I'll let you in on a little secret. You know those 14 Dev's Choice missions? Yeah, one of them is mine. Arc ID 1006, Ripping Out Reform. It's a low level villain romp where you're trying to keep efforts to reform the Rogue Island Police from succeeding. I'm proud of it. I'm very proud of it being one of the fourteen Dev's Choices. And as a result, I have not three but four published arcs. Of my three non-Dev's Choice arcs, not one of them... not one of them is below 4 stars in rating, for whatever that's worth in this environment. I like them all. I don't want to delete any of them.

As a result... the Mission Architect -- which I'm apparently pretty good at -- is meaningless to my ongoing City of Heroes experience. I can't publish any more story arcs. I'm done. And I only have so much right to complain, since I'm already ahead of put near everybody else.

I sent a message in the system, begging for a chance to send them more money and open up more arcs. (I honestly can't afford to spend the fifteen a month extra it would cost to have another account purely so I could have the three slots open to that account, but I can drop some one-time cash on getting new slots over time.) Sadly, a few weeks later, that message hasn't even been read. It doesn't matter, they've heard it from a lot of other people. C'est ca. There's nothing to be done for it. I can play other peoples' arcs, but barring a new system that lets us buy new arcs, there's nothing I can add.

Amusingly, we now have new content pouring into the game. New missions, new challenges, new text to read, new costumes to look at. And some of it's freaking amazing. And so people who don't care about creating content are sitting pretty. They can play all kinds of new stuff. But the major selling point of the new update -- the content creation system -- either has a very short shelf-life in a player's experience or encourages the player to not get emotionally attached to what he writes.

Also amusingly, the bar for further new content issues has now been raised. We have a new issue announced for early summer -- Issue 15 - "Anniversary." It sounds pretty damn spiffy, with the return of one of the best of the villain groups the game has ever had, the 5th Column. (Long time readers may recall I had rather firm opinions about the removal of the 5th Column from the game.) But while I'm glad to hear there's going to be some new 5th Column content in the game, it's no longer as exciting for me because... well, because there's tons of 5th Column content in the game right now -- it's just in the Mission Architect. I had an incredibly fun time not too long ago fighting Evil Deep Freeze Nazis on the Moon. Do you know how awesome the official return of the 5th Column will have to be to engage deep enthusiasm compared to that? And even if it is awesome, just knowing there'll be a couple of new Taskforces (solo players need not get excited) to play is no big deal. There's vastly more content in the Mission Architect than can be played, and a lot of it's as good or better than anything the developers come up with. They also have new costume stuff and the ability to change costumes by doing a backflip (which is an extension of a recent paid 'booster pack' that lets you infringe on DC's trademark transform by being hit by lightning or infringe on Warner Bros' trademark spin around into a new costume, among others.

In other words, it may be cool stuff, but it's not amazingly cool stuff the way it would have been, say, a year ago. And they're going to fight that impression with any free content update that doesn't have a significant gameplay experience improvement going forward.

On the other hand, an accidental leak (which actually seems accidental, this time) has revealed the first paid expansion since City of Villains is on the horizon. City of Heroes: Going Rogue is going to cost money, but will also include at least one and perhaps many new zones, plus a new "alignment system" that lets you ultimately Fall From Grace (making a hero into a villain) or Redeem Yourself (making a villain into a hero). That's exciting, and it opens up some really cool possibilities.....

...until people get used to having Corrupters and Masterminds (probably under new names) on the 'hero' side, in which case it falls under the heading of 'new text boxes to read and costumes to look at until you've seen them all' again. And with my luck, half the stuff will only be available to a group of six players or more, or be locked to level 40 or above, which quite frankly is boring. (The chance to Redeem a villain is exciting. The chance to have my L50 Mastermind gad about in Paragon City instead of the Rogue Islands isn't.)

Still, we don't have hard details yet, and I'm optimistic. It's certainly possible there will be a wide range of new things, and there may well be solid new gameplay options. As the first paid expansion since City of Villains, with its own logo and everything, it's possible Going Rogue will include new archetypes to play. It may give us new power customization options (a system that's incredibly hard to retrofit into City of Heroes, but a paid update may give them enough resources to do it). It may let us start as a 1st level character in an entirely new City/Universe, with multiple zones of entirely new content on the level of Wrath of the Lich King over on World of Warcraft. It may add new functionality. New options. New ways of playing. New powersets. New more robust tactical situations. It may be a complete upgrade across the board. It may be a retrofitting of old content into new and exciting things. It may be an excuse to rebalance powers (and endure huge arguments from people, including very possibly me) to help roles fit together better. It may be everything City of Heroes needs.

And almost certainly it will keep City of Heroes's competitive edge over Champions Online (which has been delayed and which has had rumors of being... underwhelming in many ways, none of which I can confirm since I've not been selected for that beta) and the eventual DC Universe Online (and the re-announced Marvel MMO). No matter what the new MMORPGs bring to the table, it will be a long time before they can offer the depth that City of Heroes does.

The problem is, if one of them offers truly next-generation gameplay over City of Heroes, there will be defections. Maybe a lot of defections.

City of Heroes needs to keep really innovating and building truly new things -- not just content-wise, but gameplay-wise. And when they do, in fact, develop a truly new and innovative thing like the Mission Architect? It's probably a good idea to ensure their players get to use it for more than a couple of weeks.

You know. I'm just saying.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:08 PM | Comments (21)

August 31, 2008

Eric: Man, I hope that if you log your character out on City Hall's steps or in front of the doors to the tram, your day job is "panhandler."

Sometimes, one eats crow.

When Issue #12 of the various free content upgrades NCSoft NorCal puts out for City of Heroes was announced, I was guardedly excited but somewhat dubious. "Midnight Hour" featured a new organization called the Midnight Club (well, new in terms of being an active part of the universe -- it had been part of the backstory from the beginning), some new cross-faction content related both to that organization and the origins of superhumanity, a new zone of content back in pseudoRome, some new costumes most characters couldn't use, and new Villain Epic Archetypes to finally balance the scales between the bad guys and the good guys, with their alien Kheldans. And some other stuff.

And I had something to say about all of it -- well, here, let me paste in the specific comments I made about the Villain Epic Archetypes back in March:

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.

Yeah. They released Issue 12. I earned my Villain archetypes.

And man, do I love them. I mean, love them. And yes, I played a female Wolf Spider who leveled up to earn her Crabpack, and it is indeed awesome. The storyline for the Arachnos soldiers is solid (and has one of my favorite hooks from this game to date -- in your very first mission, your Mook wolf spider or blood widow actually hacks the computer with the list of "Destined" Supervillains and adds his name to it. They embrace the idea that you're a nobody minion who then decided to take a shot at the big leagues. The characters play well, they're fun, and the bonuses they give to teams they're on make the Kheldan squid bonuses look sad and pathetic. On the whole, they more than make up for the vague sense of disappointment that the Midnight Club itself represents.

(For the record, the Midnight Club is essentially a non-entity as of Issue #12. You have, like, one string of missions dealing with it if you're a hero, a different string if you're a villain, a chance to join the club a little later on, and a chance to have Fake Roman adventures which amount to one task force and a never ending string of "go Kill X." With a little extra time and content, it'll be cool, but apparently the only really amazing thing is the Task Force, which I have yet to actually get to go on. Since, you see, I generally solo these days, and most of my group's gotten bored with City of Heroes and plays World of Warcraft now. Not that I'm bitter.)

Regardless, Issue 12 is, on balance, very solid. Which brings us to Issue 13, which was just announced.

As a side note, it has been noticed that NCSoft NorCal pretty much gave E3 and Comic-Con to their competitors. Champions Online and DC Universe Online had playable demos and a lot of grist for the anticipation mill, while City of Heroes... well, they had costume codes for people who went to Comic-Con, but that mostly just annoyed the people who didn't, so... yeah. And this had me concerned, because they were giving all the press over to the people coming after them, and the theory is that Champions Online will actually launch before the next round of these begins. While City of Heroes is very healthy, that still seemed like a mistake.

Well, now we know know what they were doing. They were letting the newcomers make their announcements in the midst of a crowded field of video game news... and now that we're at the end of the summer and the beginning of the runup to Christmas, they've announced their next free issue. It's called "Architect." Its subtitle might as well be "screw you, Champions Online."

Champions Online promises a huge amount of character customization, plus a Nemesis system. Both of these things are awesome. Well, City of Heroes is now officially launching the Mission Architect -- the long-alluded to system of player created content for City of Heroes. With the release of issue 13, players will be able to create their own missions, their own story arcs, their own plotlines. In short, anything that a player feels is lacking from the storyline of the game... Mission Architect will let them add in. And the developers will be reviewing the content -- and apparently, if the content is good enough, it'll be put front and center -- and potentially even made canon.

Seriously. Joe Morrissey -- who does storyline development and lots of other cool things -- had a presentation at PAX which was followed by a very brief appearance online on the Training Room test server, and one of the things he alluded to was that the Corolax storyline (it's involved) that was started back at the start of City of Villains and then never touched would be opened up to players to write as part of this feature, and that the best of it would go into the game. I suspect that "Developer's Choice" missions -- the stuff that the Dev Team finds among the top content created for the game -- might here or there actually go live. Meaning that players might -- might -- get the chance to actually have lasting impact on the game.

I have to admit, I am way looking forward to this system. I'm already speccing out story arcs and the missions to develop them. This is a chance to actually gamemaster in City of Heroes, and I'm very excited for this. In particular, it's a chance to really fill out City of Villains content -- to give villains a chance to fight heroes and the police instead of other villain groups. I have a whole set of Rogue Islands Police (RIP) plots in my brain. I also have a series of story arcs I want to tell in King's Row -- including one faux Task Force, with an involved storyline for lower level characters. I will spend weeks making content for people to play. I will live in this thing.

And of course, this will all be time that I'm not actually playing my characters -- but that's okay, because there's also an offline character development system going in with Issue 13. In effect, when you log a character out, that character will then go on to a day job, which is designated by the location he's logged out in. Log him out in the hospital, and he works in the medical field. Log him out in a university and he becomes a scholar. I dearly hope there's a place we can log out our characters that will designate them "Baristas" or "convenience store workers."

The time you spent logged out in that location will then give you buffs or bonuses when you log in, dependent on the day job you've been working on. And yes, you can have "fighting crime" (for a hero) or "committing crimes" (for a villain) as your day job.

So, I'll take breaks from writing mission content to log alts in, move them to where the work I want them to do is, and log them back out. And they will happily gather buffs while I create more and more stuff for other players to do. This issue is essentially like Crack Cocaine for me. Wednesday has been duly warned that I may become a horrible shut in during this time.

There's other announcements too, like Shields (at long last) for certain archetypes and a reverse Empathy powerset for villains called Pain Domination (I'll admit, I will have a Mastermind who has this power). And there's also Yet Another Economy being implemented (a Merit system to buy the specialty stuff you had to farm certain content for before). But honestly, with "create content" and "give your offline characters something to do," they had me pretty solidly.

Hand in hand with all this is movement towards hybridizing their economic model. While they're still subscription based and your subscription fees still get the regular (if slightly slower than earlier stated) free "issues" of upgraded content and gameplay, they're also introducing more inexpensive add-ons. There is a "Booster Pack" coming that will have cyborg costume parts and a bunch of new Emotes (not unlike the Wedding Pack from earlier this year), as well as a currently unspecified "new power." And, as part of a promotion, there are game cards that let new players get the game essentially free, with a five dollar thirty day "jet pack" power that essentially means they don't need to take travel powers if they don't want to. Existing players can get the cards, get a month of time, and get the jet pack. And they're promising that for five dollars, you can get a month of the jet pack if you like.

A lot of people think that's silly -- there's lots of temporary jet packs in the game, after all, and most people take travel powers. But I don't know. For five bucks a month -- one cup of coffee for those of us who like lattes -- you can zip through Mercy Island at level two and never, ever have to think about giving your character travel powers unless they're actually part of your character concept. That's tempting, to be honest. Plus the jet pack looks pretty Flash-Gordonesque.

These small payment options give the developers extra liquid cash to hire more developers, and it shows. The issues may not be coming as fast as we'd like, but they're getting increasingly ambitious. We're getting new systems, new functions. And if a recent survey conducted by a third party company on NCSoft's behalf is to be believed, we're moving towards a flexible alignment system that not only will incorporate side-switching but the concept of neutral or shades of grey characters, and there's even some implications that the long requested, often claimed to be technically unfeasible power customization system may be coming.

I'm stoked for Issue 13. And whatever else I might think of the way NCSoft is handling things, it's clear they're not about to make way for Champions Online without a fight. And for the first time in months, that fight looks like the advantage is to City of Heroes.

Game on, man. Game on.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 5:04 PM | Comments (9)

August 22, 2008

Eric: I admit it. This is 2,100 words of sheer geek, distilled and set forth.

My computer, as I have mentioned, is a pretty sweet 17" MacBook Pro. It does many good things and has a big screen. It is really fast, even though it's over a year old at this pojnt. Its graphics rock. And for 99.7% of my job and 89.6% of my everyday life, it has absolutely everything I need or want. More to the point, it just gets out of my way and lets me work. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: the operating system of your computer is the least interesting part of that computer, for the vast majority of users. People want to use software. The OS just connects you to it.)

But, there's that .3% of my job and 10.4% of my leisure time that just can't get around Windows. Fortunately, there's nothing in my life that requires Vista, so that's something I don't have to cope with just yet. Regardless, I've always had to have a strategy in place to cover the situations where Windows was necessary. In the olden days around the turn of the century, that meant Virtual PC, which on the old PowerPC Macintoshes acted as an emulator -- creating a software version of the x86 processor the software needed. It would work, especially for my job related software, but it was slow -- emulation took processor power and a lot of RAM, and any operation on the 'Virtual' Windows box would need to send a command to the software's emulated processor, which then had to send a command to the actual hardware processor, which would send back its response... yeah. Slow.

Then came Intel based Macintoshes. And from the day they were first proposed the rumors flew -- if these were based on Intel based processors, does that mean these Macintoshes could actually run Windows too? The obvious answer was 'of course,' which led to any number of arguments with the Macintosh Religious Fanatics, who couldn't believe there would be a day that Steve would allow such heresy to run native 'pon the machines of which he granted his blessing and the blessings of St. Wozniak. There was a point where I had a relatively impassioned argument on the subject standing on the expo floor of an educational technology conference. I was debating an Apple engineer, mind, who absolutely swore to me that Apple would never have an official, Apple branded and approved solution for running Windows on an Intel based Macintosh -- the entire idea was absurd and there was no way they would ever, ever do it. Not in a million years.

As I recall, it was less than six weeks before Boot Camp was announced. I've seen that Englneer since then, it's worth noting. He's not shy about eating crow.

Boot Camp was a great innovation. You could take your copy of Windows, and reboot your computer running off that Operating System instead of Macintosh. Wham, bam, boom, you were running Windows. And, with the MacBook Pro, it was worth noting that the hardware ran Windows faster and more smoothly than any other I had used. There is an advantage, you see, in having absolute control over what hardware goes into your notebook computer. Suddenly, drivers... well, work.

Now, Boot Camp was an excellent option. I still use it today when I want to bury myself into City of Heroes and make it real pretty like. But it's not terribly convenient. To run Windows in Boot Camp, you have to not be running Mac OS X. In effect, all that stuff you have running on your computer normally just goes away, while you use your new shiny aluminum Windows XP machine. In fact, Boot Camp actually partitions your hard drive, so that you have a hard drive partition for your Mac, and a different one for your Windows install. They both work swimmingly on the machine, but they don't coexist well.

To that end, there was the next step in the evolution of Windows and the Mac -- virtualization. Unlike the confusingly named Virtual-PC, Virtualization software doesn't create an emulation of a windows based machine. Instead, it's a hardware-based virtualization package. In effect, it takes some of the system resources and makes them Windows instead of Macintosh, and then it launches Windows XP. For all intents and purposes the Virtualized desktop has its own processor, RAM and access to all the devices, even as it runs inside the host Operating System. As a result, it (theoretically) can run software at the speed of the system processor, without emulation lag. You can run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously. And both of the two major Virtualization packages (Parallels and VMWare) have modes that will make windows programs behave like Macintosh programs, with their software icons in the Dock, no "Windows" window needed and the like.

That was a better solution for many things -- certainly, most Windows programs run more smoothly. But some stuff -- especially games -- didn't work well or at all, especially when high end graphics were involved. And while you can set these systems to use your boot camp hard drive as its source for Windows, you had to activate Windows a second time anyway, and all too often that meant calling Microsoft to explain that no, you're not trying to run one copy of Windows on two computers -- you have a Macintosh and....

...which is the obvious 800 gorilla in the room. For any of these solutions to work, you had to buy Windows.

Look, I like Macs, but I don't hate Windows XP. I've been using various forms of Windows since the Windows 3 era. But let's be frank -- if you're lucky Windows XP costs $120, all for an operating system that will sit inside a virtualizer to run those few programs that you, the Mac user, can't otherwise use on a Macintosh.

Fortunately, there are Smart People in the world, and those smart people figured out a while ago that they didn't want Windows features on their machines, they just wanted to run some Windows software. Now, most of those smart people were using Linux, and they all got together and launched the WINE project. The WINE project seeks to create alternate but Windows-compatible shared libraries for Unix derivative systems.

Which means, in effect, that systems that can run WINE can run at least some Windows software without Windows. You can see where we're going with this, right?

At this point, I use Crossover and Crossover Games. Crossover is designed for standard Windows software, and uses the most current stable release of WINE. Crossover Games is... er... used for games, and it's got the most advanced -- and less well tested -- bits of WINE in it to enable gameplay. Supported games, like Half-Life 2 and EVE Online, actually play pretty damn well.

Crossover lets me do probably 95% of my work related WindowsFu, which is more than enough for my purposes. Once in a very great while an esoteric configuration program needs the real deal, but it's rare. As for Crossover Games... well, it lets me launch and run City of Heroes, which is pretty much the only game I can't get for Macintosh to begin with. It's not perfect -- it's Unsupported, which means they haven't developed a specific build for it, and there's stuff it gets hung up on, but for most play it works pretty damn well. Which means I can have a CoH window open while doing other stuff. (As the screenshot above shows -- if you click on it, you'll get a full sized version.)

What this means in the longer run is an open question. Microsoft isn't exactly happy with the existence of WINE and it's various forks. There's reports that Windows Genuine Advantage -- the system that prevents updating programs with pirated Windows software -- specifically blocks WINE. Their word is that WINE is by definition not "genuine Windows," which is true enough, though it's also not pirated. (For the record, it's not illegal to reverse engineer software. Which is how Linux exists in the first place. And Dell, for that matter.) At the same time, the existence (and continuing development) of WINE means that the software we use today can still be used tomorrow. There will come a point in the development of Windows where shared resources today's programs depend on are deprecated and ultimately removed. To a degree, this has to happen -- as cruft builds up in operating systems they become less and less stable. You have to wipe out old code to make the new code work well.

Of course, when your old software won't run on your new replacement computer, you have to replace your software. Which Microsoft sells. It's the flip side of new software not working on old operating systems, both for the practical reasons (it would be at the least a technical challenge to make Office 2007 run on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups) and for obvious financial ones. Which is why Microsoft is trying so hard to drive a stake into Windows XP now -- they want people to run Vista, because they want to sell Vista, and if they sell just enough Vista then they can release software that requires Vista. And in a few more revisions down the line, they'll quietly stop supporting software that today requires XP, and then you'll need to upgrade that too.

That sounds sinister, but it's not. It's the necessary business model for a company that made its fortune selling operating systems (the most boring part of the computer) and office productivity software. For a while, they could add features and people would upgrade. These days, more and more people are content to hold off on upgrading their OS and their programs until they actually have to. So, it's in Microsoft's financial interest to ensure that people have to.

Before I sound too much like a fruitbat, let us make no bones about it: this is common. Remember, I'm using a Macintosh, and have been for years. And for a couple of decades, we had the Macintosh Operating System, all the way up to Mac OS 9, and a monumental library of software written for it. And when Mac OS X came out, Apple had to spend a lot of time, money and effort developing a very WINE like software set called Classic that let people run Mac OS 9 compatible software on their Mac OS X machines. They also developed a coding environment and API called Carbon that let people develop software for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X in one go.

I work at a school, for the record. One that has used Macintoshes since the early 90's. One that developed a monumental amount of curriculum that ran on Mac OS 9 and before, using programs by companies that had themselves moved on after time. We used a ton of Classic on our Macintoshes.

And then we had the Intel Macs, and Classic went away. Now, if we wanted to continue to use that software and that curriculum, we would need to do it on older, PowerPC based machines. At least, as long as the hardware survived. So all's good, right? Well, sure... only we're continuing to develop curriculum on more recent systems and with more recent software, which needs more recent operating systems... and Classic has gone away as of Mac 10.5 Leopard, so even PowerPC based Macs running Leopard can't use the old software at all. And, it looks very likely that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) won't operate on PowerPC systems period. Gosh, that's stunning.

Naturally, WINE and the various other projects (including some Macintosh projects) mean that newer machines can still end up running older software. And, y'know. Blah blah blah open source blah blah monopolies blah evil. You've heard it before.

And besides, who are we kidding? I don't have Crossover because it sticks it to the man -- for Christ's sake, I own a legitimate copy of XP for this machine. And I don't have it because I'm scared that one day I won't be able to run City of Heroes. If the client stops working on current operating systems sometime in the future, it seems unlikely the servers will still be up in the first place. I have Crossover because it's way more convenient to click a dock icon and have it launch without a full boot cycle when I need to run configurations, and I have Crossover Games because I was sick of rebooting into Windows to play City of Heroes. It's not high minded and it's not protest-driven -- it's convenient.

And that's pretty damn cool.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:01 AM | Comments (8)

August 15, 2008

Eric: As a matter of fact, I *am* colicky today and I *would* like a pacifier, thank you.

One of the various things Wednesday and I intended to do this summer was go to the San Diego Comic Convention.

We had all the stars lining up to make that a go. We were newlyweds, whose marriage was bound up with comics in ways few can claim or hope. We had industry friends in the CGI and compositing industry offer to make us their guests, which meant we could get in through the front door without having to pay a cent. One of my coolest friends from my salad days in Upstate New York lives in the San Diego area and likely could have been hit up for couch space for us to crash. Essentially, we could have done San Diego, seen lots of folks and things we had always wanted to, and in general enjoy the convention for the cost of plane tickets and food.

And we just couldn't do it.

Which is not a complaint or a cry for help. We're doing just fine. But between a number of expenses ranging from immigration (including another $1,010 going to the federal government for the right to let them consider letting us stay married now that they've let us become married), medical (I have recurrent medical expenses and needed some high end testing done), dental (stupid teeth), automotive (apparently, brakes are important) and mundane (oddly, marriage doesn't change the fact that you have to eat on a regular basis, and we're short-sighted enough to still want Satellite Television), we just couldn't justify spending the money to fly to the West Coast just a few weeks after going to Las Vegas and actually having... you know, a wedding. We would have to see about next year.

As it works out, we missed... well, from all the various accounts I read, the absolute Apex of San Diego Comic Cons -- the Ur-Con, which forever shall be held up as an exemplar of the type. People had monumentally good times, across the spectrum. Just about everyone was there, and there is video evidence in various places that Jonathan Frakes and Avery Brooks serenaded and sang songs with some of the very cool people all over the freakin' place. Regrets? Oh yeah, I've got a few.

And, it meant I missed out on the Con Exclusive Giveaway for City of Heroes.

I've missed out on CoH swag before. I live on the East Coast, which means that I don't have opportunities to swing by the conventions they typically show at. And that's never bothered me -- whether or not I got one of the capes they were giving out one year had zero impact on... well, anything in my life. I don't begrudge swag.

But, well... this year's swag was different. This year, the swag was an add-on for your account. This year, the exclusive was a chance to actually alter your gameplay experience. This year the swag was a code that let you add a Freakshow Tank "temporary costume" to your characters, similar to the temporary costumes that we were given at Halloween. Only this time, it wasn't temporary. It was permanent.

This has led, as so many of these things do, to people losing their shit. The two positions are, essentially, "there should be a way for people who didn't get to go to San Diego to get this ability" and "this was an exclusive perk for SDCC attendees and there's no reason anyone else should get access to it."

The latter crowd has a darn good point. The Freakshow Tank Costume ability doesn't grant any benefits in gameplay terms. Freakshow don't mistake you for an ally when you're wearing it. You don't get a massive superstrength attack or the ability to hurl balls of electricity when you're wearing it. This doesn't even look like your character with Freakshow Components added to him or her. This is just the ability to look like a stock Freak Tank on command. This isn't even custom costume parts -- you can't add the giant sledgehammer hand Freak Tanks sport to your character's hand, for example. This is a purely cosmetic, extremely minor ability. Getting upset because you can't look like a Freak Tank is just silly.

The problem is, there is more to this than a question of gameplay benefit. There is also gameplay experience -- and that is a more complicated issue.

Gameplay Experience refers to exactly what it sounds like -- the experience someone who sits down to play City of Heroes has. It covers everything -- it covers the tactical game and attendant gameplay. It covers dancing in Pocket D. It covers the invention system and the auction houses and the storylines. It covers the interactions players have with each other in the game. It covers Supergroups and chat channels. And yes, it covers Role Playing.

This giveaway power in fact changes the gameplay experience for the person who gets it, in potentially the most significant way for any RPG -- the person with the power has more options than the person without it.

Not sure how? Well, consider the various character concepts:

• A Renegade Freakshow Tank who becomes a hero (or a freelancer)
• A person changed by a hostile Meat Doctor into a reluctant Freakshow Tank, looking for the chance to become human again.
• A knockoff/stolen Tank design being used by a freelancer.
• A member of a splinter faction of Freakshow who, as with lots of the factions, mostly beat up other Freaks when they see them.
• A person temporarily or permanently mind-switched into a Tank's body.

And many others, of course.

For those who play City of Heroes in part to work on character concept or character design, for those who actually role-play instead of just treating the game tactically, for those who like the chance to practice subversion, the ability to put on a Freak's skin opens up a lot of opportunities and options that don't otherwise exist in the game. Sure, you might be able to put together a reasonable knockoff for at least generic Freakshow, but that isn't the same thing.

That's the real crux of the debate, if you get right down to it. For most people who didn't (or couldn't) attend San Diego Comic Con, this was simply something they couldn't choose to have, either out of money or timing. For every other perk available for City of Heroes, you could either get the perk regardless of location through something like preordering (jn the case of the prestige sprints or the Arachnos helmets), being patient (both the sprints and the helmets become available through Veterans' Rewards, as do other custom powers), or money (people who bought the Good v. Evil edition, for example, get some bonus powers. Other players had the option of paying a nominal fee and getting those same powers. Similarly, the Wedding Costume Pack is available for cash). In the case of the Tank costume power, players could either attend San Diego Comic Con, know someone who attended and ask them to get them one of the cards, or do without.

Is there really a demand, you may ask? Well, if one looks at the central resource for checking on Geek demand -- eBay, naturally -- one sees that all of the SDCC code cards that have shown up there have sold or are selling for more than two hundred dollars apiece. Compare that with the swag from other years -- like the exclusive SDCC posters from earlier years going for a whopping nine bucks -- you can see the distinction. Whether for roleplay reasons, the sense of completion, the coolness factor or pure geek I MUST HAVE IT, people out there are willing to pay big bucks for the chance to make their characters look just like a Freakshow Tank.

On my side, I admit it. I would really really really like to have one of these cards. And I'm kicking myself -- not just because we could have gone to San Diego and then I would have one, and not just because Weds could have gotten one too and turned that into a $200 reduction in our trip expenses, but because I conservatively knew twenty non-CoH players going to SDCC and I think any one of them would have gladly hit up the NCSoft booth on my behalf, but I didn't pay close enough attention to the City of Heroes site to learn about all of this until after it was too late. So in every way I blew it. I do not deserve Freakshow.

At the same time, it seems weird to me. If people are willing to drop $200 on one of these codes, it seems very strange that NCSoft isn't letting those people buy one for $10 or $15 in their store, a la the Wedding Pack. If they charged ten bucks a hit, that becomes free money for them. If 500 people are nuts enough to pay that, then they have a sudden $5,000 surge in revenue. Not too shabby. If 5,000 did it, that's, like, a coworker's yearly salary paid for. And giving out swag in San Diego that other players would have to spend $10 to get still seems pretty old cool to me.

But, it's unlikely they'll do that. At this point, putting Freakshow Tank powers up for sale would be interpreted by the folks who *got* the SDCC codes as reducing the exclusivity of their swag. And they'd be right. too. It wouldn't be exclusive any more, by definition.

So. I entered the sweepstakes to get one of 10 codes from Massively.com along with thirteen hundred other folks. And while they haven't announced the names of the winners as yet, the fact that I don't have e-mail sitting in my mailbox declaring me a winner makes me suspect I haven't, in fact, won. Simply put, there ain't no Tank for me and, barring the Tanks appearing as a Vet Reward down the line there's not going to be one. Like listening to a live rendition of "Ain't Misbehavin'" sung by Jonathan Frakes and the chance to buy Avery Brooks a drink, the Freakshow Tank code is just another thing that happened at this year's SDCC that I missed out on.

I am hopeful, though, that this will turn into the ability to pay for some 'costume power' packs for various CoH NPC factions down the line. That could be really cool.

And then... there's this announcement on the homepage. There's another exclusive costume power up for grabs. This time, it's a Paragon Police Department hardsuit power, and it'll be available to attendees of both the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany and the Penny Arcade Expo. Exclusively.

Now, I used to live in Seattle. I have friends there. I could crash on someone's floor there. I'd love to show Weds the city.

But A) there's still that silly thing about plane tickets (and having seen $200 SDCC codes on eBay, the chances are very very low that the PAX codes will bring that kind of cash in. People know that trick), B) that's the weekend right before the start of school, and so we're killer busy down here and I don't have any chance of going away then, and C) going to a con that costs $30 a day on top of travel and food entirely to get a costume code is at best nuts. I'm not nearly enough of a gamer to make that trek.

And unlike San Diego, I don't have a pile of friends going to PAX. I don't know (as far as I know) anyone who's going to PAX. (Well, okay, I've had some brief contact with Gabe and Tycho in the past, and I understand they're probably going to go for a day or two, but I don't exactly know them and besides, I suspect they'd have other folks interested in their PAX codes) so I can't get a friend to score a code for me. My chance to get the Hardsuit costume power is essentially nil.

And that's frustrating, because it would be cool, it would open up options, it would improve my gameplay experience, and I would totally drop ten or twenty bucks to get one if I could.

But, wanting something doesn't mean getting it, now or ever. I just wish NCSoft were thinking a little more broadly than "how can we generate buzz at our booth this year."

(It's also frustrating that I did have friends going to Gencon this year, but unlike their competitors NCSoft didn't decide to hit that con this year. DAMN YOU MAX POWERS!)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:23 PM | Comments (14)

March 17, 2008

Eric: An entirely too long post on Superhero MMOs.

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:

• Join the Midnight Squad (Levels 10 - 20): The text indicates this is Hero-only content, but developer followup indicates there's some Villain content here too.
• New Roman-Style Maps (Levels 35 - 50): Hero and Villain cooperative stuff in the ancient past.
• Unlock Roman-Style Armor Costumes: Just what it sounds like. Off the shoulder capes and skirts for everyone!
• Villain Epic Archetypes: Finally, a symmetrical balance for villains who hit level 50, in answer to the Peacebringer and Warshade archetypes available to heroes after a player dings 50.
• Powerset Proliferation: We're crossing the factional divide with a few powersets.
• Hollows Zone "Gameplay Makeover:" In the tradition of Faultline and the Rikti War Zone, the Hollows is the latest zone to get a new look, new missions and new balance.
• Major Gameplay Improvements: Various quality of life and minor new systems and functions bundled together into a "major" one.

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.)

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-White at 12:53 PM | Comments (17)

March 1, 2008

Eric: The Obligatory Champions Online Post

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-White 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....

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-White 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....

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-White 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-White 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-White 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-White 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-White 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.

(From the Boondocks page at goComics.)

Posted by Eric Burns-White 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-White 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."

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-White 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-White 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 room.

I'm having fun. In a way, with my solid pack of zombies, I'm teaming by myself -- acting in a support role for my own characters. The zombies are freaking cuisinarts, too -- whirling dervishes of total death, though squishy enough that I have to stay close to heal them and weaken their enemies or else they'll be cut down and said enemies will want to eat my head, instead. I just recently got the power to take a dead zombie -- well, a zombie that's been hacked up. I mean, it was reanimated flesh to begin with -- and tear out his very soul and put it against my enemies. Think about it. Not only am I taking a dead man and making him do my twisted bidding... but even after that dead man is hacked to pieces, I'm ripping its spirit back out of its eternal reward and shouting "Hey! Get back to work! Being killed twice is no damn excuse!"

The graphics are lush and only get better. The ambient sound is a quantum leap ahead of City of Heroes. The opposition -- whether other villains, the horrific result of villainous activity gone awry, the police, superheroic paramilitaries or superheroes themselves -- is well designed and thought out. Clearly it would scale well if I were in fact teaming with other villains, but soloing is a joy, straight through past the current half-way point in levelling.

And I look back at City of Heroes, and I sigh a bit. It's showing its age now. It got some graphics tweaks when City of Villains went online, but that's not the same thing. And of course, all the new content has been going to City of Villains, so it hasn't really had anything exciting added to it since the "Forest of Dread" update (issue 5) last August or so. Really, at some point they're going to need to do a heavy overhaul of the mission trees and chains, to bring it up close to the level of City of Villains, and to be honest, it would probably make more sense to do a full on City of Heroes 2 instead.

I don't know.

City of Villains isn't perfect. For one thing, their constant drumming on the PvP bandwagon has gotten a small contingent of PvPers who've appeared, and who level up to the point where they can PvP, and then go do that -- PvPers who make the low level zones less pleasant than we're used to from City of Heroes, and not in a grand villain way. (I remember one particularly odious player stood next to the Quartermaster in Port Oakes and literally said "joing team]" over and over and over again, so anyone who showed up to buy or sell something got flooded out with requests to have someone pick him up and powerlevel him. (And why wouldn't he want to powerlevel. He was clearly just trying to get to the point where he could jump in the PvP zones. Man, I wish they had their own server or something.) For another thing, while the missions are meaty and fun, a lot of the time you really are just fighting other villain groups. I'd like a lot more bank heists and followup contacts -- maybe even a place where you can sell ill gotten loot. (There's a salvage system for bases, but there's no pawnbroker where you can buy and sell pieces of salvage, so you lose that chance to fence your goods.) And, weirdly enough, the NPC citizens of the Rogue Isles can be snarky to your face and you don't get to send your zombie hoard out to eat their sassy little brains before your eyes.

But that's minor. All I know is, I may have fallen out of love with City of Heroes, but there's a new obsession in my life. And that makes me very, very happy.

My girlfriend? Somewhat less happy. For the record.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:25 PM | Comments (16)

November 7, 2005

Eric: A followup from the Saturday post

So, Sunday morning, mildly hung over (a mild hangover that persisted the entire day, but mild nonetheless), I got Soulcalibur III up and running.

A few fast impressions of the game itself.

First off, the opening video was beautifully rendered, but was slightly disappointing. Which is a pattern of Namco's -- Soulfire for the PS1 had a J-Pop opening video that rocked one's proverbial socks off. Soulcalibur for the Dreamcast's opening video was beautifully rendered but kind of lackluster. Soulcalibur II's opening video was tremendous fun (and when it suddenly throws in an electric guitar string in amongst the orchestra soundtrack, it triggers adrenalin in your body even on the fifth viewing). Soulcalibur III's video was beautiful, but wanting in passion.

I didn't care, of course. Because... well, reread my last post. But still.

Gameplay is extremely good in this version. It's jacked up the difficulty (and it's a lot harder to find those two or three moves that will beat anyone).

Create a character is indeed excellent, though the "Dancer" class needs to take some ritalin.

The RTS put into the game was something I was dubious about. But, if one looks at it as an RTS minigame, it's actually surprisingly fun. RTS fans won't be very impressed, but the Chronicle is worthy. (And it throws in more than a little classic computer RPG elements into it as well).

The new female characters are hot. The new scythe wielding badass is creepy in a fun way. All the new characters own disproportionately, which is traditional for the new characters in a Soul Edge game so it doesn't bother me. All of the last game's disproportionately owning characters have been toned down except Raphael, who's become death incarnate. Or, I've gotten better at him. Either way, really.

And, I think we've finally managed to put Nightmare to bed. Which means he'll still be around the way Cervantes keeps showing up in these games, but he'll now be a former Soul Edge host who's trying to get back into the big leagues. I'm good with that.

My thumbs are calloused today. I've beaten the story mode on several characters, and had to set aside others until I could upgrade the weapons. There's a bunch of characters I've unlocked and a bunch I've failed to unlock, and God help me, I'm likely going to buy the Brady guide.

I unlocked Rock. The point in the game where I first encountered him, he handed my ass to the pavement. I concluded that the "connection to Frank" element is alive and well.

C'est bien.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:39 AM | Comments (38)

October 14, 2005

Eric: Now you fools shall feel THE WRATH OF UNORTHODOX!!!!

Still sick, for what it's worth.

So, the NDA has been lifted, and I'm able to report, at last, that my stress relief of choice from August on has been the two hours a night (later expanded, though I still stuck to about two hours a night on average) of the City of Villains beta. You know it's been an intense time for me, so I've been in the perfect mindset to go home and be evil for a couple of hours, clawing for sanity, time and work schedule permitting.

Truth be told, I'm very impressed with City of Villains. Far more so than I expected. Six months ago, I was convinced I wouldn't even buy the game -- I don't play these things to be a villain, after all. And like some friends of mine I was concerned this would turn out to be Grand Theft Auto: Paragon City. But no -- the developers announced their intent was good old fashioned comic-book grand evil. Not so much the Joker of The Killing Joke, nor the goofy take on the Joker from the 60's, but the Joker who used to run around Steve Englehart's comics in the 70's. A Joker who probably was a mass murderer, but he also had a cool pad under his cell in Arkham.

In other words, it's designed for fun evil. My first character was based on the longest running villain of my Superguy days, Doctor Unorthodox, and the game modeled him perfectly. It's a game that inspires you to occasionally shout "the fools at the Institute shall learn the errors of their ways! Now, feel the WRATH of UNORTHODOX!" And then cackle with malevolent glee. It's important to cackle with malevolent glee.

Gameplay wise, the game really is the next generation of the City of Heroes engine, and at least for the moment City of Heroes suffers by comparison. Of particular note is the upgraded ragdoll physics engine. Now, when you use Force Bolt (and you use it a lot more often than in City of Heroes), the hapless victim flails like a madman. It's a symphony of fear and knockback.

Granted, that's a best case scenario. For the past several weeks playing the beta's been an exercise in framerate destruction and frustration, as the server has been so hammered as to be unplayable. (The first post-tutorial zone, Mercy Island, had spawned ten duplicates last night. Frankly, it's somewhat remarkable the thing works at all.) I got to be in the beta from the first week invites went out, so I got to see it far smoother, at least.

The new archetypes play wonderfully. And they somewhat inform the desperate alterations and (lord help us ) "play balance" in City of Heroes. It's not (simply) that right now, Villains could easily take the heroes' lunch money at will (more about that in a bit). It's that the villain archetypes show months and months of maturity and sophistication. The heroic archetypes have been a combination of the old descriptive archetypes Champions 4th Edition used in its notes, with standard MassMOG classes. (Tankers are somewhere between Champions bricks and the Tanks of fantasy games, for example, and "Energy Projector" became "Blaster" pretty seamlessly, as two examples.) The Villain archetypes, on the other hand, owe far more to the comic book source material and to a balance within this game than they do to other games.

Those archetypes are:

Brute: I predict that, after everyone makes and levels their Masterminds for a little while, just for the novelty effect, the Brute will become the most popular archetype by far. It's just plain fun. If you have to shoehorn it into City of Heroes terms, the Brute is a better Tanker than Tankers and a better Scrapper than Scrappers -- but in the end it's neither. It's a Brute, period.

Brutes get the highest hit points of all characters in City of Villains, and some of the best defenses. More to the point, their melee only powers are decent. They're at base probably just about what a tanker can do. But you don't stay at base very long. You see, the game models the Hulk concept of "the angrier they are, the stronger they get." (You could also look at it as Wolverine's berzerker rage, if you prefer) with a "fury bar." As you attack enemies (whether you hit them or not) and as they attack you (whether they hit you or not) your fury bar goes up. And as it goes up, the damage you inflict buffs. So, run into a pack of Hellions, attract their attention, and start punching. That few points of damage per hit you do in the beginning skyrockets by the end, leaving you at the ends of battles with a sliver of hit points left and the ability to two shot the strongest Lieutenants at your level. You are a damage machine.

Of course, keeping your fury bar maxed out requires you to run from pack of mobs to pack of mobs, hitting and hitting and hitting unt hitting so you end up dying a lot if you're not careful, and your teammates might resent having to keep up with you. Rest is death for a Brute, as his fury drops to nothing.

Brutes? Just plain fun.

Stalker: On the other end of the scale, we have stalkers, who are the ninjas and assassins of the villain world. You would think scrapper when you see them, and you would be wrong. Stalkers are squishy -- they're almost as squishy as Blasters in City of Heroes (though they do get some defensive powers, so it's not too bad). They make up for this by being able to Hide -- which is a full speed invisibility power at the very first level. So they can sneak their way through anything. Further, when fully hidden, Stalkers get a massive bonus to critical hit on their first strike (reflective of their backstabbing prowess). However, they have Dungeons and Dragons™ brand invisibility -- one punch and all your enemies see you and can start with the hurting. It's just, the one enemy you punched is too busy bleeding to care.

In PvE, Stalkers are sort of mediocre. Useful for nuking pesky Lieutenants or doing a potent hit on a Boss, but once they've shot their Hide/critical wad, they're ready to roll over and go to sleep. However, Stalkers absolutely own at PvP. I mean, they're beyond death incarnate. A lot of heroes, on their first trip into Bloody Bay or Siren's Call, will discover quickly the "joy" of running along, only to suddenly fall over, dead, with a grinning Stalker standing over their hospital-teleporting corpse. I have to admit, it seems odd to me, given how dubious so many City of Heroes players are about PvP to begin with, that they'd decide to create a specific archetype of gankers, but they have.

The natural enemy of the Stalker, by the way, is the Fire Tanker. Stalkers need to get right next to you to do their Instant Gank of Horrific Bleeding, and just like doing any kind of attack neutralizes their Hide powers, if they take so much as one tick of damage from an AoE attack, suddenly they've visible, their Critical Hit doesn't work, and you can proceed to make them weep like small children.

Generally, Stalkers are best paired up with teams that can keep them alive to nail the really tough enemies and then run until their Hide resets.

Corruptors: Based, extremely loosely, on City of Heroes Defenders, the Corruptors don't have quite the glitz of the other Villain archetypes, but they make up for it by sheer lethality. Corruptors essentially reverse Defender Primaries and Secondaries, buffing and debuffing their allies and enemies while pouring out Blaster levels of damage. Further, once they get their enemies below a certain percentage of hit points, they have a chance to scourge them. Scourging doubles the damage they inflict, without the Blasters' need to be badly injured first.

Corruptors are the best characters of range in either game. Their powers are broad but they don't sacrifice the pure pain they can inflict. And, being able to buff themselves and others (an enemy who can use Kinetics powers like Siphon Speed and Siphon Power while doing Blaster levels of damage should scare you. One who can use Radiation levels of debuffing to your hero before nailing you with Blaster levels of damage should terrify you) means they're solid members of the team they're on, whereas Blasters often need to stand to the side and just pour out AoE damage when the rest of the team moves forward.

If you've ever been part of the joy that is a full team of Defenders in City of Heroes, just buffing and debuffing and tormenting evil on all sides? A full team of Corrupters is just like that. With critical hitting. And more damage.

Yeah.

Also? Fire Corruptors get a Fire based buffing power. Which means you can set your teammates on fire.

This is far more fun than you can imagine. Especially if you role play.

Dominators: Into all game worlds must come some suck, and in City of Villains suck is named "Dominator." It's easy to think of Dominators as Controllers, but that's not fully right. It's like they're Controllers without the Buffing. Instead, they have some assault powers which honestly are better than anything a controller can field, but compared to the maimfest that pretty much every other Villain Archetype can put forth, you get the feeling someone ought to give Dominators a cookie, gold star and hug just for showing up and doing their best.

Tactically, think Controller and you're not far off. Once you've Dominated an enemy, you're far more able to solo that enemy than a Controller, and in fact Dominators aren't bad solo characters. (They're not as good as Brutes, mind, and neither one can hold a candle to Masterminds, but that's neither here nor there.) Certainly psychic Dominators are far more fun than Psychic controllers or defenders, over on CoH's side. But for the most part, you've got to really love holding your enemies with hold powers to even think about playing a Dominator, and for most people, it's not going to be worth it.

On the other hand, Plant Control is a great powerset. Adding in Thorns actually makes your close to a Mezzing Scrapper, and that doesn't suck. Except when you compare yourself to actual scrappers. Also, not great Hit Points.

Masterminds: I save this archetype for last, though it'll be the first thing every new player plays. Of all the villains, this is the one that doesn't remotely resemble any Heroic archetype, and it's the one that most radically changes the PvE landscape in City of Villains.

Simply put, Masterminds aren't CoH/CoV characters at all. They're refugees from a Real Time Strategy or Squad Based Shooter game, and they brought their interface and squad with them. Masterminds, far more than even Controllers in City of Heroes, are summoners. They call down robotic henchmen from the sky, or ninjas from the shadows, or the Undead from the depths of the underworld, or Mercenaries from right out their ass.

Well, okay. Mercenaries just sort of run in, but my way is funnier.

You have incredibly granular control over your henchmen, and you can direct them into battle with your enemies. The interface comes with basic point and click fighting, but you can also go with an advanced option menu that lets you customize your henchmen's AI and responses, as well as giving them orders. Your other powers are pretty much devoted to enhancing your henchmen (the secondaries are essentially Defender secondaries, but you spend a lot more time buffing and healing your own henchmen than you do protecting the rest of your party.) For the most part, you spend your time hanging out back, letting your henchmen run in and get slaughtered in your name, summoning replacements as needed, and doing potshots here and there. "Skippy," you say to your robot, "be a dear and fetch me some XP, would you?" And Skippy waves his metallic arms with glee and runs over to start seriously hurting Hellions, delivering the XP to you while you stand out of the way and sip tea.

Yes. It really is that much fun.

The robots are death machines, and tough. The ninjas are more fragile, but they do in fact flip out and kill everyone, which is all we can ask of them. The mercenaries are a good, core paramilitary set. The zombies... well, didn't impress me, but at least for once in a City of Whatever game the zombie vomit is on your side. I think they should add in a set where you create duplicates of yourself, though. Doctor Unorthodox demands Doom-bots. DOCTOR UNORTHODOX DEMANDS DOOM-BOTS!

Beta testers who love them some Controllers over in City of Heroes are pissed, by the way, that Controllers don't get the nice interface. (Which also lets you rename your henchment persistently. This is an excellent sign.) I'm not, because my Masterminds don't get, oh, I don't know, to hold their enemies down while the henchmen attack. Controllers and Masterminds are very different critters. Don't approach the latter with the former in mind (that's what Dominators are for), and don't think the latter should correspond back to the former.

Visually, the game is gorgeous. (Though it should be far less vertical and far more linear -- don't take Superspeed in this game. Just don't. In fact, Flight and Teleport are by far your best bet.) The shininess of Paragon City is replaced with old building and shanties and a byzantine nature. The Rogue Islands are both old and corrupt, and this is conveyed in the atmosphere.

And that's a good thing, because your missions don't help with that at all.

Oh, you get to occasionally knock over banks, and that's fantastic. (They play action music in the background the whole time you knock over a bank. It definitely adds to the experience.) And they have the astoundingly cool innovation of newspaper missions. Villains, you see, are proactive. So at any give time they can thumb through the paper, look for a likely target, and run out and attack. No contact needed. But... those missions become very repetitive, very fast, and for the most part you don't feel... well, villainous while you're doing it. Sure, you're not retrieving artifacts from the Hellions to give back to Azuria and MAGI any more, but you're still fighting Hellions and you're still retrieving artifacts from them, and you don't get to keep them. In the early game, you rescue a Casino from Snake-men. Because you're... um... evil.

And for the first fifteen levels, and from what I can see beyond... there aren't any super heroes.

Now, City of Heroes has a dearth of Supervillains. You have occasional "Arch Villains," but you have no run of the mill villains. You have minions and Lieutenants and Bosses, but that's not the same thing. Still, fighting street gangs and Organized crime figures and occasional science monsters still feels essentially heroic, so you let it slide.

But for the whole beginning of City of Villains... you're fighting street gangs and organized crime figures and occasional science monsters.

Hrm.

They're wonderfully rendered, mind, but still. There are only two hero groups you even encounter in the early levels -- some SCA rejects called... the something. I forget. And Longbow, which are Freedom Corps, only they're armed like street Hellions -- but you see very little of them. For the most part, this is just City of Heroes only without people thanking you after you "rescue" them. There should be a dedicated "resistance cell" of heroes working out of the Isles that you see over and over again as they try and stop your nefarious deeds, at the very least.

My understanding is that in later levels -- and probably in Strike Forces, which is their version of Task Forces -- you can go to Paragon City, and no doubt heroes will fight you there. But for the most part, it's just you and the Hellions and the snake men and the Family, and if you're really good you can fight Lost or Council. And every six missions or so you can knock over a bank. Yeah.

Of course, the developers clearly intend for players to spend a lot of time playing PvP against player heroes. Their base system -- which is kind of cool -- is optimized for supergroup raids, for example. And there's lots of PvP zones.

And, well, I haven't any interest in them whatsoever. Like the vast majority of City of Heroes players, I like PvE a lot. That's why I stuck with this game instead of going somewhere where the PvP is mature to begin with. As a result, even though the goodies to be found in the PvP zones are designed to be enticing, I've had little interest or pleasure in trying it out. I honestly suspect we'll have three or four weeks of PvP, followed by months where random folks go through and try to get the goodies, figuring no one will be around. Of course, that one tiny population of psychotics who live for PvP and ganking will take up permanent residence in the PvP zones, waiting for a player to wander nearby so they can break Hide and gank them out of nowhere with a massive alpha strike, putting them in the hospital and making the player think "screw this. I'm going back to Paragon City." The PvP ship sailed a year and a half ago, and this isn't likely to bring it back into the harbor.

Base building was, as of this writing, still only semi functional. You do accrue tons of "salvage," however, and they have tables that are clearly designed to bring crafting to the table... so you can add cool things... well, to your bases. Only if you get enough cool things (specifically Items of Power, which I don't think you can build, but who knows right now?) your base becomes open for invasion, which means that your place is going to have most of its cool stuff broken and your items stolen by those three or four Supergroups who actually do get into PvP to a psychotic degree. For small or moderately casual Supergroups, the whole thing seems to be kind of boring. Still, bases mean that you can teleport to them after being killed, and then hop right back out to where you fell, so you can get back into the fight more quickly.

Still, the PvE experience, while sadly heroless, is engaging and loads of fun, to date. The archetypes are mostly pure joy to play, and the graphics and physics engine are glorious to behold. I can't imagine, especially with the pricing structure, a City of Heroes player not grabbing a copy. (Especially since you get an extra month of combined play automatically, so you need to subtract fifteen bucks from the cost.) On the other hand, those players feeling burned by the whole "Enhancement Diversity" fiasco (how do you mismanage public relations so completely less than three weeks before the major sequel that makes or breaks their company comes out, I wonder?) might give it a bye until they get a chance to really take the changes to City of Heroes out for a ride.

So... I can imagine a City of Heroes player not buying a copy, after all. I'm clearly a liar.

Still, it'd be a pity for those folks, because this is a solid PvE experience with the benefit of 16 months of City of Heroes development. It's richer and more sophisticated, and the archetypes are substantially better than the City of Heroes archetypes -- not because they're more powerful (though generally they are -- the villains really should be able to conquer the world) but because they're vastly more mature in design.

And besides, it's a game that lets you command ninjas to flip out and kill stuff, while your neighbor the brute is slaughtering entire towns. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Well, unless you're into the whole "legal" thing.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 6:11 PM | Comments (43)

October 10, 2005

Wednesday: Bloody hell, that's creepy.

(From Alien Loves Predator. Click to understand how I might be just a little messed up.)

It's not so much the execution, although I normally love AlP to death. Not that I was much on Alien, or on Predator, or on the whole bizarre conflation of those two concepts (why are they the same universe? No, wait, don't explain it to me, because I won't care!), but I'm enamoured with these two repulsive action figures sharing an apartment in a city full of other action figures. Also, as sitcom writing goes, it makes me very happy. Notwithstanding the Buddy Christ. I'm no fan of the Buddy Christ; that part's just been overdone.

But I digress. See, the thing is, Bernie Hou just invoked ELIZA.

As Eliza Dushku.

Okay. Understand, I can cope with the idea of an ELIZA implementation who's sexualized outside of the therapeutic environment -- if you're over 21, go find Sexy Losers strip number 200 and consider ARPA-01, or consider this panel out of context
-- but, for no apparent reason, I hadn't connected the face of Hypersexualized Vampire Slayer Faith with my childhood babysitter.

Yeah.

See, I'm second-generation computer geek. One of my very first memories is of my dad taking me down to his academic workplace, and sitting me down in front of a greenscreen Tektronix terminal in the lab. It was 1979, maybe 1980; I was four. He passed me the phone receiver and dialed a campus number; the phone started squealing. Then he took the receiver, and put it down onto this strange little machine with cups in it.

The terminal, he said, was talking to a big computer down the block in the engineering deparment.

Slowly, the greenscreen terminal started responding. Apparently he was right.

There's not a lot for a four-year-old to do with a mainframe in 1979, or even 1980. So he pulled up ELIZA for me to talk to. I wasn't sure why she wanted to know so much about my mother, but we kept up something of a conversation. A four-year-old can't have much of a conversation with a program from 1966, but, then again, neither can that program have much of a conversation.

I dimly rememeber being frustrated by the limited topic scope, though. My dad would later mess with the code enough to have ELIZA bring up topics more relevant to my personal life (Barbie dolls, for example), but it was never quite the same. Not that I didn't spend entire weekend afternoons or after-kindergarten stretches talking to ELIZA, or that I didn't miss her as I moved on to the WICAT in the other room and such.

Anyhow, the image I always had of ELIZA-the-person was of some austere daycare manager. A bad beehive or perm; perhaps aviator glasses and schoolmarmish garb. Not...

Not Eliza Dushku with the biouxbies falling out, willy-nilly, all religiously devout sex and silver lame trousers. No. No, I'm vaguely creeped out in that way one is creeped out when one's primary caretakers are characterized as possibly being inclined towards private activities now. But that's my problem.

Then again, I was never the sort to develop crushes on my real-life babysitters to begin with. They were cute, and had nice chests, but they didn't know the first thing about computers. Who wants that in a relationship?

Posted by Wednesday Burns-White at 11:39 PM | Comments (60)

Eric: Respecification sounds positively Orwellian, doesn't it?

For point of reference, today we're talking about the video game City of Heroes, not the comic. Just for the record.

Over the weekend, the development team announced Yet Another Change to the underlying mechanics of the game. This one's far less dramatic in appearance than the Issue Five Radical Restructuring... but in actuality is far more pervasive.

You see, City of Heroes has an "enhancement" system in the game. These are little pie shaped doohickeys you apply to your superpowers to customize them. You put a "damage" enhancement on it to increase the amount of damage you do. You put an "accuracy" enhancement on it to hit more often. And so on and so forth. You have to choose what powers you want to enhances (all powers get one "free" enhancement slot, and with time you can add up to five more enhancements on popular powers).

Well, the development team is now looking to change the underlying core of enhancements, so that after two enhancements of a given type, all others have diminishing returns. So, whereas before the enhancements would each add another X to the effect of a power, up to a maximum of 6X, you can now get 2X, and then 3(X/.9), or 4(X/.7), or....

(Note -- I'm pulling the math out of my ass. The principle is the same.)

They claim they're doing this to encourage "Diversity." Everyone, it seems, slots five damage and one accuracy to their powers.

The practical effect is, someone will figure out the perfect build for every power, post it to the boards, and everyone will use that instead.

And on my side, I find myself... well, exhausted with the whole affair.

I haven't done a mathematical analysis of the change, but I can tell already it's going to be huge. Characters built on defense (and most defensive powers only have one or two enhancement types they can take to begin with) are going to have their defenses lose effectiveness rather significantly. In all cases, powers are going to stop working as they have. Pretty much all characters of any level at all will need to be respecified, which means you run a utility that lets you remake your character from level one up to your current level. (Respecs, as they're called, used to only be available after you do heavy in game trials that involve your character getting hit with heavy radiation or the like -- which was an in-joke nod to Champions, which used to call the wholescale remaking of an existing character a "Radiation Accident." These days, we get a new respec for free every time they update the game, because they keep screwing with the underlying mechanics.)

And maybe the new system is vastly better. I dunno. Maybe it will truly improve gameplay.

But I really, really, really don't want to respec my characters again. It's an exhausting process that isn't even slightly fun.

Truth be told, I don't like the enhancements process to begin with. It's not that it's bad -- it's that I honestly don't play a Superhero game to sit there and tinker with my powers. I like punching things in the head. I like it when they fall down. I like needing to organize tactics with the team I'm playing with. So, I always just slot as basically as I can. I slot for damage with attack powers, because it's simple and I can live with the tradeoff that I might not be fully efficient with damage over time. I hit harder, but I don't hit as often or as fast as some others. Fine, whatever.

Having everything drop that critically actually takes that choice away from me. Now it's not a matter of me being less efficient. Now my characters will be demonstrably inferior to characters who are tuned for maximum enhancement effect. Which means I'll need to follow the online recipes.

The excuse they're using is "diversification." They want people to make more diverse choices. As it is, I'm now going to have to have all my characters be cookiecutters of the optimum builds I find online, because that's now the simple way to deal with things. Sorry, guys. Diverse this ain't.

This next iteration doesn't just make respecs necessary, it makes long, organized thought into your choice of enhancements necessary. It makes it a numbers game. And I don't have any interest in that at all.

And I just don't want to have to remake all my characters again. We just did that after Issue Five's changes.

The most astounding thing to me is this is taking place on the eve of their release of their spinoff game/expansion pack, City of Villains. I mean, they just built up tremendous goodwill among their base by announcing there would be absolutely no additional monthly cost to play both games -- which makes City of Villains a one time cost for existing players. And the game adds a free month to your time, so you mentally have to deduct fifteen bucks from the price. And it adds a ton of new content and four character slots to every server, and... oh, right, lets you play supervillains, too.

People were honestly psyched last week. There was enthusiasm.

This week? Not so much. The hardcore base is incensed, and the number of casual players who are upset is surprising. I mean, most casual players take these changes in stride. They look at all the cool new stuff being added and say "well, I guess I can accept they need to balance the game."

Those people, like me, are all completely sick of play balance. "Just let me play the stupid game," they say. "Walk away from the tweaks. Just put it down and walk away. You've got me already. I like the game. I play the game. Stop screwing with it."

I know of people who canceled their City of Villains preorders based purely on the announcement that they intended to go through with this. Which would seem like an overreaction, but I don't think they're canceling because of "nerfs" or enhancements, or whatever. (Well, one or two are, maybe.)

No, they're canceling because respeccing their characters isn't fun. It breaks the roleplay aspect. It makes the whole thing a grind. And they're just sick of the mechanics being changed. They just don't want to do it any more. They're not having enough fun to want to remake their characters again.

I honestly wonder if they just don't have any PR people at all over at PlayNC or Cryptic, because this was a terrible move. It's completely harshed the City of Villains buzz right when they want that buzz to be frothing. They want the diehards who stuck with the game after the PvP fans went to World of Warcraft to be babbling with excitement to those fans. "We're getting new zones, and we can do villains! And there are henchmen, according to the website!"

Instead, the base is bitching and moaning and complaining about it. People are calling for Jack Emmert's head on a pike. People are talking about how the dev team are a pack of liars and cheats who hate fun and (and they may have a point with this one) care more about their vision of the game than the people who are actually sticking around and playing it.

And the dev team may figure -- and may be right -- that this will burn itself out and calm itself down. Which is fine. But scant weeks before their major sequel is coming out, the base is pissed off instead of psyched. And that's just stupid.

As for me? I'll say it again. I honestly don't know if this is the end of gameplay as we know it or not. I just know I'm sick to God of respecs. I don't want to think about the mechanics of the game any more. I'm done with that for now. Please, Cryptic, just let me play the game.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:24 AM | Comments (34)

October 8, 2005

Eric: CoH Comic Rant: The Sequel.

The world endures. The cycle turns. A new issue of the City of Heroes comic book has appeared in my mailbox.

Before I discuss this issue, I should mention that there's only this and the next issue still coming to my mailbox. Cryptic Studios/PlayNC have announced that as of issue 7, the comic will be available electronically for City of Heroes subscribers, and people who want to continue receiving physical comic books can order it at "a reduced rate" through their PlayNC account.

I'm entirely behind this decision. Granted, I'm a webcomics sort of person anyway. But given the economics of producing, printing and shipping out comics to all those subscribers who haven't opted out, it only makes sense to me.

Anyhow, the second Troy Hickman penned issue has arrived. And as you'll recall from my (harsh) comments on the last Hickman issue, I promised to give this one a full chance -- to try not to let my admitted disgust at the post-modernist/unheroic "heroes" we've been given in the person of Statesman and Sister Psyche color everything I read. To have faith that the man who wrote Common Grounds -- a comic book that unremittingly gets it -- could bring a sense of the heroic ideal out of Paragon City... and lift it back up to the city that I like to imagine my own heroes and heroines fight for justice in, over at the video game (which I remain a staunch fan of).

Okay. I've got the next issue. I've given it a chance. I honestly have. Mr. Hickman, you can't claim I didn't keep my word.

I really liked it.

Made you look.

Maybe it was the near exclusion of Statesman and Sister Psyche. Those two wet blankets clearly shouldn't be put out front, because the rest of the Freedom Phalanx, without them, becomes pretty cool. The story picks up where the last issue left off. Our heroes failed to stop the Circle of Thorns from kidnapping the first of three scions of mystical macguffiness to prevent the whole thingy from doing the whatsis. Mystic plot three-fourteen in your Big Book of Comic Book Plots. Don't worry about it. The point of the plot is to give us character development punctuated by head-punching guys in green robes. The difference this time is we're given some solid Troy Hickman development in the story. Two other teams of two -- in this case Manticore and Citadel on one team and Synapse and Positron on the other -- go to save the other two scions etc. And on their way in, we get insight into the characters, which really is something Hickman is good at when the characters he's developing aren't jerks.

Manticore is, as we've seen before, the real star here. He and Citadel (a character who's had less screen time away from the game, which isn't a bad thing) are in a ghetto -- their target is a young boy of a heroin addict, who lets her little girl be the primary caregiver for her little brother and a baby. Manticore's "super power" is extreme wealth coupled with athletic skills (all right, he's also gotten some teleportation tricks, but he still counts as a Natural hero in game terms. We all make compromises). On his way in, he talks about the guilt he feels any time he shoots one of his arrows and misses -- the arrows cost a lot of money to develop and then produce. When he wastes one, he can't help but think of how much good the money that went into it could have done in poor neighborhoods like the one they're in. At the same time, he acknowledges (when Citadel asks) that simply handing out wads of cash won't make societal changes in places like this. It's a hard issue and problem.

All right, it's a touch unfortunate that we have a high-attitude, loud-mouthed, ultra-rich, ultra-liberal philanthropist who also happens to be an archer. I mean, you can't help but think "Green Arrow" every time he opens his mouth, especially in the post-Justice League Unlimited understanding of the character, where Ollie Queen's full billions have been restored to the character. Hickman didn't get to choose that. (Or the costume colors that strongly -- strongly -- evoke Hawkeye from the Avengers.) C'est bien. You take what you've been given, and this time the character of Manticore and Citadel feel heroic. Further, although we don't have a tenement tile set in the game (and I really wish we did), you could otherwise see this mission as actually happening in the game. There's nothing in it to prevent it. So, that too was helpful. This one felt like City of Heroes to me. And as our heroes fail this time, there is less a sense that they find failure to be a nuisance (and the victim an imposition) the way Statesman and Sister Psyche did, and more a sense that they failed to help people, which cuts them up inside.

The third mission -- with Synapse and Positron -- was also some solid characterization and another sense that these guys are heroes because it's a good thing to be a hero. It wasn't quite as solid, but again Hickman was somewhat saddled by constraints on the material. Synapse, for example, is set up to be so much the JLU version of the Flash it hurts -- right down to his juvenile reactions to half naked women. At least this time we have some echo of the brilliance Hickman invested in Speeding Bullet, over in Common Grounds, but it's just that. An echo. Still, I had no problem with these two heroes this time, and the idea that Positron doesn't like mirrors is appealing.

There is a return of the "people who resent super heroes for no good reason" trope in this mission, however, and that's unfortunate. Given that in-game Serge is specifically a Super Hero's costume designer, and he's putting on a Super Hero Fashion Show (with designs taken from actual in-game characters, though these girls aren't super heroes, they're just models) it feels a bit ridiculous that two members of the Freedom Phalanx showing up and saying that one of the models is in tremendous danger gets the degree of attitude it does. Serge of all people should know the score. And of course, they fail too, because otherwise... well, we wouldn't have a third arc issue, too, now would we? The dynamics and the fight scenes show a good, solid understanding of City of Heroes, and that's all I can ask.

Well, almost.

See, Synapse is a speedster, and so he does a number of superspeed tricks to avoid being hit, before blasting (he's a blaster) with electrical bolts. Only with the recent nerfs, you can't use Superspeed to dodge and avoid enemies, even in PvE. So, Synapse is specifically doing stuff players can't use speedsters to do, these days. (These days, Superspeed is pretty much only a power for travel, which Synapse as a comic book character doesn't help the in-game case for. Speedsters should have a solid set of tropes they just don't have in the game. I'd rather see Synapse acting like a full on Blaster -- using his speed to get to the fight, then standing at the periphery shooting electricity at his enemies, rather than wading through trusting his speed can get him out. However, I recognize that even as the game has some trouble modeling comic books, sometimes the comic will have trouble modeling the game. It's likely a good idea not to point out all the tricks that in-game characters have had taken away from them in your official tie in comic, though.)

Anyway, we have set up the climactic confrontation for the last issue. And Statesman and Sister Psyche will be back for it, so it's entirely possible I'll be back to hating the Freedom Phalanx by the end of it. (If only Statesman weren't in the clear Superman/Captain America role for this world, it wouldn't be so bad. As it is, when he shows up and acts so standoffishly, I'm never sure why the younger heroes don't say "screw this" and go join Arachnos.)

There remains one core problem with the comic, which is underscored and alleviated, all at once, with the backup feature. It's actually a problem Champions suffered from for a while. My friend and fellow RPG designer, David 'Doc Blue' Wendt, put it this way in a recent LJ post:

It's a shame really - CoH is almost everything I want in a Supers Computer Game - but in the end, I don't feel like I am a major hero and so it just can't compete with my new-ish shineys for now.

Doc Blue's right, of course. One of the core problems with City of Heroes the game is there's no real way to impact the game world. What's more, your heroes, no matter how powerful they become, are never the stars. Everyone instead talks about the Freedom Phalanx.

When the comic was about random teaming heroes, then the sense that the signature heroes were part of the landscape but the point of City of Heroes were the players' heroes wasn't lost. Now that City of Heroes the comic is about the signature heroes, the underlying message is "the player character heroes don't matter. You're just also-rans in the signature heroes' comic book. And Statesman kind of resents you, too."

The backup feature, which has nothing to do with the signature heroes or the Freedom Phalanx, is an incredibly positive step. It features a heroine named Morgan Le Fey (a descendent of the original) who has two costumes in the piece, both of which look like they could have come from the costume creator, remembering her backstory and doing some fighting. It's a nice piece, and more to the point it's about a heroine that a player could (and probably does) play. I can identify with Morgan le Fey, because it could as easily be about Transit, or Vibrex, or Lady Vermilion.

I hope that becomes a regular feature, even after they jump to all digital for subscribers.

As of today, I have some hope for the comic, in the meantime. Keep up the good work.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:19 PM | Comments (15)

September 1, 2005

Eric: Oh, thank Christ. It's September. Here's a video game post.

It was a long month, but now it's over. Granted, I have several 12+ hour days ahead of me, but those days will work out pretty well, I think. Servers are beginning to migrate, systems are beginning to come up, and life seems to -- potentially -- be okay.

And last night, Issue 5 of the City of Heroes game came out.

(This is not Issue 5 of the comic. That's coming out this month, to my knowledge, but it's not out yet. I've promised to have an open mind with that issue and by gum, I'll keep that promise. However, we're discussing the actual... you know, game, here.)

Issue 5 adds a whole new section of content (a nearby village that's being overrun by fairies, women who are clearly supposed to be witches of some sort but they're trying to avoid pissing off the neopagan community so they're called something else that I can't remember, ghosts and other beasties. I did some of the beta test of this and it's a fantastic new zone, chock full of content.

They also have new powersets -- specifically, sonic powers, archery and trick arrows. So, the obvious gap in City of Heroes has been filled: it is finally possible to role play out your own Green Arrow/Black Canary relationship in their game.

Seriously. Did they specifically sit down, say "man, I wish we could play Ollie and Dinah," and prioritize based on that?

Whatever. The new powersets are fantastic, so I'm just good naturedly joshing. Using sonics, I actually got to indulge in some nostalgia for a different game. A came some of you have heard of. A game called Villains and Vigilantes.

Villains and Vigilantes was among the first wave of Role Playing Games (what we today call "tabletop RPGs" to differentiate them from video games. "Tabletop" RPG veterans, of course, tend to just call them "role playing games," but that's another essay. V&V's first edition came out in... mm. I want to say 1979 or 1980. I know its revised edition came out in 1982, but by the time that came out I was already a V&V veteran. Anyway, it had all the hallmarks of early RPG design -- tables, special cases, every power working with every power differently (it included a grid with to-hit numbers based on all the powers and the ways they'd interact), and a random power generation system that could sometimes lead to bizarre -- or wildly unbalanced -- results.

It was incredible. I loved that freaking game so much. And my first ever super hero in any RPG came out of that system: Vibrex the Invincible.

Hey, look. I was twelve. Maybe you came up with really cool super hero names at twelve. I didn't. Get over it!

(And try to ignore the fact that the name sounds like a chrome plated marital aid.)

Vibrex had vibrational powers, the power of flight, and the ability to teleport, if I remember correctly. A bit of a mixed bag (though better than some). He was vaguely based on me (the game encouraged making characters based on your friends), and he fought alongside Thunderbolt (who had weather control powers and other some such, the Telekinetic Kid, Flambeau (we thought we were so clever), Cyborg-9, Ace, Rainbow and others....

Twelve year olds in power fantasies punching stock supervillains. But evocative ones.

So, I made up Vibrex, silly name and all. In honor of his illustrious beginnings (and to hopefully excuse the name somewhat) I made him a teenager -- not quite twelve, but not too far off. Sonic powers are close enough, and I could get his costume almost exactly. (Not that it's the coolest costume in the world. But then, that's part of the point.)

And, having seen the City of Heroes fanbase turn itself inside out freaking out about all the horrible nerfs and power reductions the developers were inflicting on us (by far the most contentious ever), I took out the character who was most affected by such (a scrapper with a broadsword and "super reflexes," which was a defensive powerset that was most directly affected by the nerfing, if the boards were to be believed) for a little while. Said character appeared in the midst of higher level enemies (yellow and orange, which in the old days meant "possible for a combat specialist to defeat, but it'd be a fight), hauled out the sword, and started whaling. And discovered that to compensate for the defensive losses, said sword now does a lot more damage. The character seems no more or less likely to die while slaughtering supervillains than before.

So, between that and City of Villains on the horizon, everything is aces in the superheroic world.

And it's September, and that means things will get better.

God damn it. Things will get better.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 8:14 AM | Comments (34)

August 22, 2005

Eric: On the plus side, this month's cover art was pretty cool.

So. Not that I think anyone hasn't figured this out yet, but I love City of Heroes.

I. Love. City of Heroes.

I love the game. I love the heroism. I love the ideals. I love the fantasy. I love running through the streets of Paragon City and fighting the good fight. I love the immersive environment that the game has put together. I love the powers. I love the silver age aesthetic. I love the modern age edge. I even love the "grand evil" that they seem to be putting together for City of Villains.

This is convenient, because the City of Heroes comic book is actively trying to cure me of this fact.

You know I have a general policy of not reading webcomics I don't like. The question is, why do I read this comic book I don't like. The answer is very simple: it comes free to my mailbox as part of my game subscription. You can "opt-out" of having them send the comic to you, but you don't get a bump of subscription time that corresponds to your opted out. In other words, you save them a little money, but get nothing in return.

Well, I don't like the comic, but I'm also from Maine. I'm paying for it, so by God they're going to send it to me, and I'm going to read it.

Being from Maine is not the same thing as being rational, just for the record.

The old comic, by Blue King Studios, had its share of problems. It had art issues and was rife with situations that our own characters couldn't get involved in (I for one would have liked to see them push to keep to the same style of missions and costuming that the game... you know, actually provided), but it was goofy fun nonetheless. Most of all, you got to like the lead characters -- Apex, War Witch and Horus -- and the dynamic that formed between them. And you believed in them. They actually felt like yeah, they were in fact super heroes, for all the right reasons.

And they had the same relationship we the players have to the Surviving Eight -- the Justice League/Avengers analogue of City of Heroes -- who are (mostly) members of the Freedom Phalanx. These were legends to them. The heroes that everyone looked up to. The heroes that we heroes believed in.

Well, Blue King lost the license. Top Cow got it. And they hired Mark "excellent in the 90's" Waid to write a three issue arc. And unlike the last series, this one focuses on the Freedom Phalanx.

And in Waid's run, we learned A) that the citizens of Paragon City hate super heroes and are just as glad when they all lose their powers, despite packs of Skulls still running around terrorizing them, B) the Freedom Phalanx are a pack of miserable whiny bastards, not a single one of whom (except maybe Manticore) is in this game for anything that resembles heroic reasons, and C) Statesman is the largest jerk who has ever lived. It was like reading Kingdom Come without the emotional attachment or sense that the Justice League actually was doing what they thought was best.

There were... complaints... on this theme. And assurances that yes, our heroes would rise up, better than ever. And they did rise up more powerful than ever in the third issue.

We're in the fourth issue now. The writing is being handled by Troy Hickman, the scribe of the justly critically acclaimed Common Grounds. And there was reason to hope.

At the end of this issue, I've decided that Paragon City is probably right for being just as glad these miserable bastards lost their powers. Frankly, I wouldn't have them in my house. It's just, now we know they hate low level heroes, too.

They hate low level heroes.

Sister Psyche snarks about how glad she is low level heroes get torn apart running through the Hollows -- "serves 'em right," she says. Statesman brushes off a star struck young hero who has worked up the nerve to talk to his hero. Synapse resents the implications that they should watch out for civilians (while clearly not watching out for civilians) because they're superheroes, so duh.

Sister Psyche in particular has the line of the issue. A fourteen year old boy walks up and asks her for an autograph. She sees in his mind the kid's imagining her in her underwear. So she screams bloody murder and kicks him away from her.

For reference's sake, I enclose a sidebar featuring Sister Psyche on this post, as well as a second picture right here to the side.That's right. She wears translucent clothing WITH LEATHER STRAPS OVER HER NIPPLES AND OUTLINING HER BREASTS, along with strategic cutaways for navel and cleavage. Look, I'm no believer in "she was asking for it," but this is a woman who gets offended because a kid going into puberty sees her dressed like that, and despite walking up and speaking respectfully to her, dares to have sexual thoughts about her?

Later, Sister Psyche and Statesman compare notes on how utterly miserable it is to have to have super powers and be looked up to. Statesman is sick of being a patriotic hero, because it gets him into political debates. Sister Psyche can't tune out peoples' thoughts and she pretty much hates all people. Is it worth noting both of these heroes have been active for over sixty years in this chronology? They've had over six decades to get used to this, and neither of them has ever thought "well, maybe if I just change my name and costume I can get away from people" or "gosh, maybe something that covers my tremendous rack would do something about all those salacious thoughts?"

I don't like these people. Manticore has been consistently characterized as the only one who gives a damn about anyone outside of the Freedom Phalanx, but they also saddled him with an "early Avengers Hawkeye" attitude that makes it sound like he just bitches for bitching's sake. Synapse has all the charm of JLU Flash without any of the humor. Positron is obsessed with technical minutia, with occasional repetitions of the exposition that he can't take off the Iron Man armor lest his heart stop his powered suit or else his antimatter powers will destroy Paragon City.

If this comic book is supposed to be a reward to players, then they're failing. The Freedom Phalanx gets to have clothing and missions and lives we don't get to have in the game, and the Paragon City described in this comic book is a hostile place where the superheroes don't care for the people they protect and those people resent their presence in the city. If this comic book is supposed to be an advertisement for the game, then it's also failing -- I can't imagine anyone picking up this comic book, reading it, and thinking "I wanna play this game, where I can be a young hero the top heroes of the world are disdainful of and amused at even after he gets crushed by a boulder."

Is it so utterly hard... is it so utterly wrong in the twenty-first century... to put forth the idea that maybe being a super hero is a good thing, maybe it's rewarding on its own merits, maybe the people you save might like you, and maybe wanting to be a super hero makes sense?

Apparently so. Apparently so. This won't "cure" me of the game City of Heroes. I love that freaking game.

It just has me convinced all my characters are better than these jerks. And when I earn the mission sequence where I have to save Statesman's life, I figure I'll just skip it. Paragon City's in better hands without him.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:36 PM | Comments (53)

June 23, 2005

Eric: City of Heroes and the Fallacy of Balance

I made a few mentions about the disadvantages that automated MassMOGs like City of Heroes have compared with traditional role playing, last night. While it's really freaking cool to have a game where everyone gets to run out and do things and in effect do improv acting whilst having some structure to it, there is also a serious advantage to having a gamemaster sitting at the head of the table shifting the world to match up to the needs of the players and the drama of the moment. It is wholly impossible to have a game like City of Heroes work like that except by making every mission an instanced mission, and I don't see that happening. It loses all the benefits (and they are many) of having a world where people are out doing things together and in parallel.

However, there are also things that City of Heroes and its developers could be doing that would bring the experience closer both to the tabletop roleplaying game experience, and -- much more importantly -- to bring it closer to the experience of comic books in general. However, they have fallen into a fallacy in their core design principles which unfortunately makes that harder.

Understand, I'm less frustrated with the game now than I was the last time I wrote about something that bugged me. I'm actively hopeful that bows will reignite my full CoH spark -- I have lots of ideas about them. (If they restrict access to bows to high level players a la the Kheldians, on the other hand, I'll just cancel. But that's another discussion.) Still, this is something that I think they really need to look at: namely, the fallacy of Balance.

This particular snark got triggered after reading an interview that Positron, one of the game developers, gave to an independent website. One of the questions and answers given was:

I've been playing City of Heroes since release. The game is still as fun for me today as it was a year ago when I started playing...however, I do see some clamping down on play styles. Power leveling being the most obvious one, the suppression change to travel powers (quick in and out strikes) and recent comments about pulling folks in off the streets and getting them back into the missions. Are there any other methods of play that you personally feel are detrimental to the game mechanics and design you and your team have put in place?

You pretty much hit the nail on the head with the playstyles we see as detrimental. We want to make the game fun in the long-term, so the changes we are making are so that the game never becomes tediously easy. If a Tanker is able to solo an Archvillain, well, that is something that none of the other Archetypes can do... his risk isn't matching his reward. We want the risk to match the reward, and for players to actually partake in some of the stories and story arcs we have in the game. That means making missions more viable and brining a greater balance to the Archetypes.

It's an understandable sentiment, and it clearly has informed everything that the Cryptic Studios team has done in developing the game. You need to balance the different Archetypes so that no one Archetype can get rewards for lower risk than others can get. That seems very basic. Also, this is a social game, and they very much want to encourage people to team up, to make connections, to do things together. (The latter is as much for economic reasons as anything else -- in MassMOGs, more people who group well and join guilds keep their subscriptions than casual players who come in, hit things and leave.)

It's also pretty old wrong. It breaks the comic book genre. And it breaks one of the core best practices RPG design -- balancing the game to the players you have, rather than forcing the players to adapt to meet your game's needs.

Take the example given. It's a clear concern when a Tanker can solo an Archvillain. Translated from MassMOG into English, this means it's a problem when a Tanker can fight and defeat an Archvillain without actually having to build a team for that purpose. If one looks back to Dungeons and Dragons, it's like having the single Paladin who can kill the ancient Red Dragon without any help -- it breaks the mechanics of the game.

Here's the thing, though. Superman, if he were a City of Heroes character, is a Tanker. Specifically, in fact. You can build 9/10ths of Superman in the game now -- the super strength, the invulnerability, the flying, even (at high levels) the heat vision. This design mandate suggests that Superman needs the Justice League to defeat Lex Luthor.

Batman would be a Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper, more or less. This suggests that Batman couldn't defeat the Joker on his own. He would need the Justice League.

But that isn't how the genre works. At all. Superman can defeat Lex Luthor. He does. Often. Batman can defeat the Joker without even Robin's help. Hell, Spider-Man can defeat Doctor Doom by himself, when the pair appear in Spider-Man's comic book.

And yet, when Doctor Doom appears in The Fantastic Four, he's harder to fight. It takes all four members to beat him. When he appears in the Avengers, he can potentially beat six or eight heroes all as or more powerful than Spider-Man. Lex Luthor can threaten the entire Justice League credibly, even though last week Superman beat him by himself.

Villains scale.

When you have eight heroes fighting one Archvillain, that Archvillain scales. No single hero can beat him. But when that Archvillain appears in the solo comic book title of one of those heroes, that Archvillain can be defeated by the single hero. Is it inconsistent? Yes. But it's an accepted part of the genre because it has to be.

City of Heroes, on the other hand, is so emphasizing team play over solo play, that they consider it a break in design when a player manages to model Superman well enough that he can defeat an Archvillain by himself. Superman shouldn't be able to do that, because in this game the Human Torch can't. In order to win, you have to team.

And that's genre-breaking. That's failing to adapt to the players you have. That's failure to scale. It's something every gamemaster and comic book writer does as an absolute matter of course, and it's something City of Heroes doesn't do well at all.

It's started to improve matters -- the game now has an in-game 'switch' that lets you increase the difficulty level of your missions, so expert players can get more challenge. However, it fails in this core issue: it requires teaming, to the point where if players who choose to Solo can achieve the ends of the major arcs on their own, it's considered a bug.

Here's how it should work: every mission a hero is given by a contact should be soloable, except in those very rare circumstances where (for example) you need bombs disarmed simultaneously. And those rare circumstances should be clearly spelled out -- possibly with specific coding -- before the player accepts the mission. Archvillains, in particular, should be designed to adapt their abilities and their AI based on the archetype of the solo hero fighting them... or should switch to "team" mode if more than one hero goes after them.

Does this mean that to 'balance' the game, every Archvillain has to be soloable by every hero? No. There is a real and clear place for both skill in character development and in design goals. It makes perfect sense for Archvillains to be challenging enough that you really need to design a well tuned solo character to fight them. And, should they be too much, it makes perfect sense for that hero to need to call friends to win. That fits the genre and rewards both skill and priority.

Is there a place for team-only missions? Absolutely. There is a social aspect to this game, and it should be encouraged. However, they have a mechanism for team-only missions already: they have Task Forces that require a certain number of characters. They have Trial Zones that require a certain number of players. They have Hazard Zones that explicitly need teams to be survivable. They should increase the numbers of those, and increase their appeal. But, for the individual heroes who are taking on missions from their individual contacts, the style of the game they play should adapt to what the player wants. Some people really, really like soloing. They want to be able to play the game on their own terms, in their own hours, without trying to coordinate with a supergroup or put up with the vagaries of ad hoc team construction.

But. Let's say for the sake of argument that this is too complex. There are too many Archvillains for multiple AI configurations and the like. I can see this happening, very easily. Let's say it's just too hard to tailor the abilities of the opposition to whether or not just one hero is fighting them versus six.

Why not go the other route? Why not improve the solo heroes. That's genre specific too -- Superman is clearly more powerful and competent in his own comic than he is in Justice League, lest he make the other heroes irrelevant. When a given hero enters a mission solo, let his ability get an automatic buff. Let his damage dealt, his accuracy, his resistance, his dodging and so forth increase -- with fewer buffs granted depending on what level of difficulty is. This wouldn't work on the street, of course -- on the street, you're never really solo. But inside of a mission, no other heroes can come in unless invited. So why shouldn't your hero be more effective. If you reduce the experience that solo heroes get, because they're more powerful, you give people a strong mechanical reason to do the team thing, still. If, despite the buffs, a given mission is too hard, you can always call on friends, have them come in, and automatically turn the buffs off as part of it. This would be simple to do. Hell, this would be trivial to do. Most of the energy needed would be in tailoring the different buffs for the different archetypes.

City of Heroes should have room for this style of play. City of Heroes should have room for Superman, or Batman, or Spider-Man. Not just the Justice League or the Avengers. As long as the emphasis is on reducing abilities to ensure people can't solo effectively with certain archetypes, instead of tweaking the other archetypes so they can solo effectively, the dynamics of balance are going to be fallacious... and the players are going to have to adapt to a game that doesn't want to adapt to them.

And that's not a good thing.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:06 PM | Comments (27)

June 22, 2005

Eric: On the cusp of online role play

So, Wednesday's back south for a few days, as you know. Which means I'm not having anyone hanging out with me except my cat. So, I did what anyone would do when they get their apartment to themselves again. I watched a RolePlay event being played out on City of Heroes.

This particular RP event was distinctive for two reasons: the presence of Mercedes Lackey as one of the players, and the active assistance by one of the game developers to help pull it off. So, people headed over that way to watch. I dusted off poor Transit -- left fallow these many months -- and had her (yeah, Transit's a female character. I subscribe to the Francis ethos of MMORPG play. Also, I'm a pig. But at least her costume is tasteful. She kind of looks like a 60's era Legionnaire) truck on over to the site. As Transit's a teleportation specialist, I pitched in to help the Paragon Taxibot Service move folks up to watch the show.

And then I watched the show.

I won't go into depth on what they did. Heck, I barely followed along with it myself. I was struck by a couple of things, though. First off, the hardcore RP community is a lot more likely to fill out a full character description and history. Secondly, the technology for posing one's actions is still lagging behind the power of imagination. Once you looked at the characters, it was actually easier to watch the chat window and occasionally glance up at the actual figures than it was to watch the goings on. Because of said limitations, if you watched the characters while they said the dialogue (including descriptions of actions that they couldn't actually model), it looked like actors were doing a dramatic reading for a dinner theater.

And yet, it was fun. And nicely done. And certainly, the players were into the scene. And that's good stuff.

What I really noticed, however, was the difference between doing all of this in a world where at least some control can be extended over the scene by a plotrunner, and a world where everything around the scene in question is uncontrolled. The first 'act' of the scene was as well controlled as a MassMOG Roleplaying scene could be. It was on the top of the Arena in Galaxy City, and everyone there was there to watch the scene, and knew to keep quiet. Also, the random bits and pieces of City of Heroes life didn't interfere.

The second act, however, took place down on the ground, behind the city hall in Atlas Park. So, there was a certain number of random players walking in and loudly demanding to know what was going. But even more than that (I mean, that's just random confused people or assholes), there's the non player characters. See, there's people walking around Paragon City. Despite the fact that hundreds of muggers are mugging people at any given time, they blithely walk through, shoving heroes out of their way.

So, a poignant scene of loss and return, of sacrifice and rebirth... has random police officers and businessmen walking through, waving. And, because we're all super heroes doing marvelous things... the mundane populace loves to sing our praises.

So, as our heroes are reborn, as the Seraphic Flame's heart breaks and an epic tale of sacrifice is played out... there is a chorus all around us of NPCs shouting "Mighty Bob saved the Codex of Da Vinci from the Carnival of Shadows!" "Tina Terrific has the Outcasts on the run!" "Nice Cape, Wonderdude!" You begin missing the autocratic scene setting of the good old fashioned Dungeon Master after a few minutes.

Also, it's a bit odd to watch such a scene and see that just a block away, heroes are continuing to fight crime and have their own adventures, completely without caring about what was happening. In a traditional RPG, the only thing actually happening in the world deals with the PCs. Here, we're all PCs, and the world isn't much paying attention.

But... to the people in the scene itself, none of that mattered. You could tell it was electric for them. At the very end, they opened RP up to the crowds, and the folks who were watching knew the core principle of Yes-And. Despite the fact that we didn't actually know the heroes involved, we all slid into the roles of peers and even starstruck youngsters. Transit herself is an innocent (her origin starts with her being found in the wreckage of a Fifth Column Cobra Knockoff Council laboratory less than a year ago, with her first memories being of the Galaxy Circle rescuing her. Now, most of the time in missions that gives way to "ACK! WARWOLVES AND FREAKSHOW! Neutron Blast! X-Ray Eyebeams! Siphon Power! SPEED BOOST ALLIES!" But out here, I could indulge my own Role Playing instincts.

And despite the fact that Transit wasn't acting depressed, it put things into immediate perspective. Even off to the side, it felt like Transit was a part of the scene -- her lack of understanding of some of the subtleties allowing for exposition on the part of the participants.

And... well, it was fun. Which is the point.

Still, I'm not sure City of Heroes has all the tools it should for scenes like this. We need lots more emotes and lots more capacity for dramatic scenes being borne out before it'll be more about being in character and less about tactical deployment of hero resources.

Still, if someone talks to Transit in character, she'll answer in character. Who am I to harsh the buzz?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:12 PM | Comments (14)

June 2, 2005

Eric: On the other side of the City of Heroes equation...

...there are possibilities. For example, there's a system I actually proposed for the integration of City of Heroes and City of Villains -- an integration that doesn't actually involve Player verses Player. An integration that would happily have me owning and playing both games for years to come.

So let me repeat it here, to make my negative a positive suggestion, because... it would be so freaking cool!

From my City of Heroes board post on the subject...

...which is gone. It apparently expired. Though there's older stuff on that board.

Well, dang! I guess I recreate it here.

Here's the proposal, in a nutshell:

Players who own and subscribe to both City of Heroes and City of Villains can link one of their heroes to one of their villains. They design them both, of course, but designate the other as a Nemesis. Now, so long as the hero and villain are within three levels of each other... they actually appear in missions for the other. The hero has his villain run through stock missions based on the villain's origin type, the villain has the hero showing up in attacks. The battle cry the player designated gets used, if the character has minions they're used in the attacks. The Nemesis -- obviously run by the computer -- is appropriately leveled to be a Boss automatically.

In other words, it's still Player versus Environment, it's still automated... but the content is specific and unique to the individual character. When he teams, eventually, then other Supergroup members (leveled accordingly) might appear as Lieutenants. The same engine that allows Phantom Armies and other pets to wield the powers of others could be repurposed for your enemies -- and the need to keep within three levels to keep getting the missions would prevent players from dogging it with their characters.

Think of an ambush -- you leave a bank as a villain, and your own character and the characters from his Supergroup round the corner and attack! You're a hero, having gathered the Jewel of Hera (again), only to have your own villain character crest the hill and attack to steal it. Obviously, defeating the computer run nemesis wouldn't cause debt -- it wouldn't affect the other character at all...

...except in motivation! Damn you, Captain Napalm! This time... I WILL KILL YOU!

It would be intensely cool -- it'd be an enemy you could face through your entire career. It wouldn't need PvP and it wouldn't replace PvP (if they wanted to make a PvP "Archfoe" system for the folks into it, that'd be cool too.) And it could be done with largely repurposed code, level design and the like.

The folks at Cryptic really are good at this stuff. They could make a Nemesis system like this work. They really could.

(And, if they decided one day to put in a Secret Identity system, I'd be good with that too. I'm just saying.)

Anyway -- I've been doing some reading, and it looks like City of Villains will have one archetype that specifically commands legions of minions. So... it's clear I'll at least try it.

But I seriously hope Issue 5 has some goodness for we the altaholic casual players, still.

Seriously. You design your hero, you design their arch nemesis. Tell me that wouldn't be cool.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:43 PM | Comments (19)

Eric: Can I even do a "you had me and you lost me" essay for video games? And if so, should I be preparing it?

So, it had to happen, eventually. The luster doesn't stay on things forever, and once tarnish begins to kick in, it spreads quickly.

I'm fast falling out of love with City of Heroes.

This, frankly, stuns me. I mean... it's City of Heroes. I joined up before it went live! I have tons of characters! And I loves me the Superhero action! What the Hell's wrong with me?

The answer is multifaceted. First off, the game seems increasingly less interested in players like me -- somewhat casual players who enjoy multiple alts more than a single main pushed to higher and higher levels. I've been playing for over a year and while I have two characters at Level 26, I don't have any characters higher than that. And further, I have little drive to make them. For one, I'm more casual a player than the rest of my team, so they all have significantly passed me by at this point. It's hard to catch up from L26 to the 30's... and to be honest, the mid and high level game just isn't as fun as the low level game. One ends up teaming, and then the fighting starts, and then pyrotechnics are going off in all directions and if you're playing a damager you keep targeting and attacking, and if (like me) you prefer support characters you click through the same buffs and debuffs, barely bothering to target. At this point, when I play Transit, I can usually talk on the phone to someone while I play, because it's not like I really need any focus on the game. So long as I follow someone and wait until someone else attacks, I'm pretty well good. Oh, and speed boost all the people who should be speed boosted.

It's a good thing I don't need to have much focus, of course, because with bubbles and buffs and attack powers in all directions and enemies everywhere, I have absolutely no idea what's going on most of the time. I yearn for the ability to turn allied special effects off. I never want to see that freaking bubble animation again.

Now, the thing I like most about City of Heroes is the Low to Mid game, where every fight is something of a struggle, everything's comprehensible, everyone's on the same team, and you're smiting evil. I love rolling up new characters and trying out new combinations. That's just plain fun.

Of course, the new archetypes rolled out an issue or two back -- the Kheldans -- aren't available for people who don't have a Level 50 character. So, as a player who loves to play with different combinations and who doesn't love grinding out levels... er... I don't get to play with all the combinations. Ah well. C'est la vie. At least each new Issue includes lots of meaty content for me, right?

Right?

Well, no. See, the last issue -- Issue #4 -- introduced Player versus Player. And new costume options. But mostly Player versus Player. They made a big deal about Player versus Player. They extol the virtues of Player versus Player. They swear that they're not trying to take away from the Player versus Environment game and PvP will always be optional... and then the latest round of advertisements are all about the action packed excitement of 1-on-1 grudge matches or Supergroup Battles and tournament style rankings and PvP PvP PvP PvP!

I don't have any interest in Player versus Player. None.

I've tried it out a couple of times. I even enjoyed it once (in the 1-5 Level weight class, when everyone's more or less equal and no one's supertuned their character into a PvP monster). Anything above that, though, becomes an exercise in being reminded that I am terrible at Player versus Player. I really, really am. I'm bad at first person shooters. I'm bad at team based competitive games. I'm bad at God Damned Bolo. If someone else is my enemy in an online game, I'm at the bottom of the tote board every single time.

The City of Villains game is about to go into beta. That's going to introduce multiple PvP-only Zones, and reams of content only available if you open yourself up to Player versus Player and Supergroup Base Raids and the like. Well, I'll tell you something right now -- I don't play a superhero game to watch my superhero constantly being defeated and destroyed by the forces of evil, and that's what'll happen any time I step foot in those zones.

They insist, over and over again, that players who don't like PvP won't have to participate. Which would be fine, if they then don't give interviews (such as "Zeb" Cook's recent) where they talk about how the whole CoV/CoH connection is clearly designed to encourage players to fight each other. This is going to take away a lot of focus from the PvE stuff. It pretty much has to. It already has. This is what Issue 4 was about. I suspect that post CoV, there will be heavy PvP content in every issue. They're staking too much of their grubstake on it.

Which would be fine, if the PvPers hadn't all left when it didn't show up at the start of City of Heroes in the first place. They're almost doing a First and Ten Syndrome -- they really want all the people who don't care at all about superheroes or supervillains, but want to fight other human beings and powers are cool, so they're throwing in hard to appeal to them. Meanwhile their existing base -- who were hanging out because they like City of Heroes -- has less attention and, if they're not into PvP, find themselves relegated to a kind of second class citizenship. "Oh. Well... yeah, you're going to miss out on all this cool stuff... but it's okay. You don't have to do PvP."

"No no. If you're not the sort of person who powerlevels to 50 just to make it to fifty, you won't get access to the new archetypes... but that's okay. You don't have to get the new archetypes if you're a casual player or like to play alts instead of a main. That's okay."

And then there's the comic book.

Subscribers get a free comic book every month (unless they opt out -- and it probably tells you how bad the comic was if there's an opt out program for a free comic book.) Now, the comic, produced by Blue King Studios was pretty bad -- chock full of costume choices and powers we weren't allowed to get, along with apartments and secret identities we weren't allowed to have. It was like it was City of Heroes, but with all the cool comic book stuff that City of Heroes doesn't include. So it rankled a touch. And it was badly written, largely.

And yet, it was also goofy fun. There was a real sense of the City of Heroes dynamic in it -- the random pick up teams. The funky changes to voice balloons. The plethora of costume options. The Fifth Column. (Man, do I miss the Fifth Column.) In a way, it caught the true spirit of City of Heroes -- a very Silver Age-to-Eighties DC Comic spirit. Heroes are good things in City of Heroes. People make a difference. The populace is grateful and raises up monumental statues to heroes in thanks for all they do. Heroic sacrifice is appreciated. And things are generally goofy and fun.

Well. They fired this group, because... as goofy as this comic was, it wasn't good. And they hired Top Cow to produce a new comic, and they in turn hired Mark Waid to write it. That's huge. And I've read the first issue. And it's extremely well written and produced. It is.

I hated it.

I hated it because they went completely Marvel Angst on it. Within the first three pages -- oh, I'm spoiling the comic. If you care, stop reading now. If you don't read on -- they depowered all of Paragon City, they had a bunch of heroes killed off, they broke up the Freedom Phalanx -- the preeminent heroes of Paragon City, and they essentially ended everything. They're rebuilding all of the damaged sections of town. They're painting over all the billboards. All the street gangs and the like have apparently been eliminated -- and of course, the populace is really really glad and relieved that the heroes are gone. Because Heroes are bad. Everyone hates heroes.

And the Freedom Phalanx? One is homeless and insane, with a horrific knockoff of classic Rogue Split Personality Syndrome. One has post traumatic stress disorder that somehow his having superpowers kept in check because... um... I guess he could outrun the trauma. One is completely bitter and hateful towards Superman analogue Statesman for "abandoning" them for no real reason. One is sitting in their old headquarters because his powered armor stopped working and so his ANTIMATTER IS LEAKING.

HIS ANTIMATTER IS LEAKING. Okay, somehow the leaking antimatter hasn't blown apart Rhode Island. Accept that. Why is his power and his power alone the only power not to be turned off?

(And for that matter, what about all those martial artists and other Natural heroes? They make the point that Manticore's bow and arrow skills still work just fine -- though an unpowered Synapse is able to catch a freaking shot arrow. Why aren't the naturals still patrolling the city?)

Oh, and all the statues and the like are gone. Because... um... well, heroes bad. I honestly get the feeling the artists don't even play this game, because after page three, nothing in Paragon City looks even slightly like Paragon City.

In other words, it's dark and angstful and all Identity Crisis crap, and it's completely antithetical to the spirit of City of Heroes. It can't possibly have any connection to City of Heroes, since the game isn't going to repair all the crisis zone damage, much less depower all the heroes for six weeks. Heroes bad.

So, it either has nothing at all to do with City of Heroes, in which case why am I reading this... or this is the tone that Cryptic wants for the game, in which case why am I playing this?

I have held to the faith. I know there are two new archetypes and more content scheduled for Issue 5. Maybe it will be targeted to players like me. Or, maybe it won't be available at anything less than level thirty or something, in which case forget it. I'm done.

I'm still in the game for now, but the clock's ticking. They won't care if they lose me, mind. I'm just one guy. But if they lose a lot like me, they might start caring.

Unless, of course, they get all the World of Warcraft players back to play PvP.

Yeah, that's going to happen.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 3:40 PM | Comments (30)

March 3, 2005

Eric: The Passion of the Sessler

So, there's this show called X-Play. It stars Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb. It started in San Francisco, put together by TechTV, which was aptly named because the entire television station seemed to have been produced in someone's garage. It was a sequel to Sessler's "Extended Play," which was just Sessler introing reviews of video games, which he would then be somewhat sarcastic about.

They upped the sarcasm and got Webb, a geek grrl from "The Screen Savers," to be a cohost. This became X-Play. And it was funny. And also lame. But the lameness was in a funny way.

You see... Sessler is clearly actually very intelligent about video games. And Webb actually was a producer instead of on air talent. They were both smart, and they had a kind of geek charisma going. Also? Neither one of them can act. At all. And that was funny -- the whole thing came across as public access cable meets a particularly funny blogger.

Webb brought a certain sex appeal to the whole thing, in an ultra-geek-grrl way. Lots of cute tee shirts and jeans and a bob cut. She looked like a gamer girl. Sessler played off his dorkiness. They did some sketches, mostly based around the fact that Webb was moderately cute and somewhat exaggeratedly violent, and Sessler was a weenie. Those got tired fast, but they were okay. The reviews were fun, and sometimes had little tiny sketch bits put into them, which were funny. Crude sometimes, but funny. Sessler reviewing a terrible video game and then cutting to a montage of things he'd rather do than play this game any more, including stapling himself in the crotch? Crude but funny, especially because it ended almost immediately. The point of the review was the review. The touches were just that -- little touches.

Then, four things happened:

1. Because they got a good reaction from the little snippets, those snippets expanded. They became part of almost every review. They began doing whole segments on the show that were nothing but sketch comedy. They upped the slapstick and the goofy voices.
2. Morgan Webb started getting heavy press as being gorgeous. Which, it's worth noting, she's not. She's extremely pretty, in a very real world way. She's not a Model in the artificial Model sense, and she's never going to be. But in a very natural, geek girl way she's pretty and cute. The press, however, made her out to be gorgeous.
3. Adam Sessler stopped bad acting and started "acting bad acting." Which went from charmingly inept to entirely too self conscious.
4. G4, which had both lower ratings and a worse reputation than TechTV, but a richer corporate parent, bought TechTV out, and moved the bits they retained to Los Angeles.

X-Play, at the end of the TechTV era, was in danger of becoming a parody of itself. With the move to California, that danger was realized in every conceivable way. Sessler went from acting wussy and inept to acting... well, retarded. (And that's not a word I use, normally.) Webb began doing photo shoots for training wheels mens' magazines like Maxim. The sketches became everything. Stupid characters, fart noises, Clutch Cargo style animation and running gags overwhelmed the actual video game reviews, which became far less about actually detailing the pros and cons of video games and more about doing goofy Quebecois characters whenever they do a Hockey game review.

And they upped production values. They did significant set design -- when before, the empty room with the couch worked just perfectly. They started dressing Sessler even stupider. And they started dressing Webb like an upscale sex symbol instead of a geek grrl.

Webb is the most frightening part of this whole thing. She has long, highly crinkled hair, heavy makeup, and shirt/slacks combos that scream "look at me, I'm the hot one you all like." Which would be fine if she kept as witty and funny as she always has been. But these days, she looks drugged most of the time, lacks almost all fire... she's sleepwalking to the end of her contract, when she will no doubt drop X-Play in the interests of her "career," which will end almost immediately because she can't act and she's not nearly pretty enough to get work despite not being able to act.

Sessler, on the other hand, also seems to be waiting out his contract and seems increasingly less engaged in what he's doing, but you get a sense he knows this is the end of it. From here, he'll get a column in a magazine or two, and maybe he'll get a gig doing 30 second video game reviews on Spike TV or the like. So the difference is he knows he's crested.

I get the feeling both realize their show has gone to Hell, and neither care enough to continue fighting for it.

In and around this, "G4TechTV" has gone back to plain old "G4," with most of the shows from TechTV having been purged, and an increasing number of hot chicks being added to their lineup. Which should be the writing on the wall for Morgan Webb -- her fellow geek girls aren't true geek-cred girls like Cat Schwartz any more. It's the hot miniskirted redhead they got on this season of "Cheat" -- girls hired for appearance and because they can convincing read copy, not actually game. The true hot geek girls left are the ones on G4TV.com, and both of them have stuck to appealing to the geek girl aesthetic all the way. Webb, going halfway between the G4TV.com girls and the Cheat girl, can't compete with either of them. Sessler, being male, can't compete with any of them.

There will still be an X-Play. It will still have stupid sketches and "X out of 5" ratings. It will still have a dorky guy and a hot chick girl. But it won't be the X-Play of TechTV and sometime soon it won't have Sessler and Webb, almost certainly. If they're smart, they'll get Victor Lucas from Judgement Day (he deserves better) and Tina Wood or Laura Foy from G4TV.com to do it. My odds are they'll get the absolutely execrable Tommy Tallarico (the reason Judgement Day is unwatchable) and some random hot chick in the Kristin Holt (the new host of Cheat, formerly an American Idol finalist and Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, lest you think she's... you know, actually a gamer) mold instead.

Either way, it's official. X-Play just plain sucks now. And that's sad. Maybe, after Sessler punches out of his contract, he and Leo Laporte and Cat Schwatz and a few other refugees can get some backing to do a production company up in San Francisco. Maybe that company can start producing shows to sell to places like SciFi (you think a "Call for Help" wouldn't go over well in the three pm block at SciFi? Or at least better than "Old Manimal Episodes" does?) and Spike-TV and maybe even VH-1? TechTV's gone for good, but we can get glimpses of quirky substance over plastic style once more. Maybe, after a few years, Morgan Webb -- having been ground out of the LA Machine -- will hook back up and remind everyone she really is a producer, too.

Until then, I'm going to watch some horrible VH-1 talking heads shows. At least those are sometimes actually funny.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 12:06 PM | Comments (16)

January 7, 2005

Eric: The Pussification of the 5th Column

So, as you may have guessed, it's been a busy week down here at Casa Websnark. We got back from vacation and had... well, you know. Stuff. To do. Stuff to do. You know how it is. To give you some idea of just how busy... not only has my snarking been light all week, but I only got around to hooking up my Windows computer and booting up City of Heroes today.

"So what," you ask?

So... there's a new Issue of content out, Mister Man. Whole new areas! Whole new archetypes I'm never actually going to get to play! (Bastards.) Whole new sound effects and shifts of functionality!

And the 5th Column -- one of the premier bad guy teams -- has been wholly remade into "The Council."

We knew this was coming. There's been debate about it for months. You see... the 5th Column were Nazis. That's right, Nazis. Evil Germans who believed the Reich would rise again. They employed batteries of Helmeted Ninjas (because nothing says "Nazi" like the martial arts), guys with grenade launchers and Unteroffizers (I couldn't care less that I misspelled that) with names like Col. Wagner spreading their message of hate through the city, kidnapping and recruiting and blowing shit up. At higher levels, they also turned into werewolves and vampires and had Nazi Death Robots.

And it was cool as Hell... because it's seriously fun to beat up Nazis. You don't need any justification for it. You don't even have to think about it. A contact would give you a mission where the 5th Column were invading an office park to steal a valuable painting with some kind of encoded clue on it. You immediately got on your supergroup channel. "Bonedancer! Ms. Mercury! Azure Ampere! Nazi Art Thieves!" And a cheer would go up, and the Galaxy Circle would strike forth, assembling and entering and beating the living hell out of those Nazi bastards. Even just running along the streets in Steel Canyon, hearing them giving recruitment speeches, was enough reason to pause and start hammering them with electricity and radiation blasts. Because damn it, they were Nazis, and Superheroes fight Nazis! It's what they do! Nazis are evil and spread hate, and so we punch them in the head and call them "Ratzis" and make bad puns like "Don't cause a Fuhrer, Hans!" while you did it.

This is a core element of comic books. It has been since the actual Second World War. Captain America and the Invaders explicitly fought Nazis. The Justice Society spent a good amount of time fighting Nazis. The retconned "All Star Squadron" was a flying brigade of Nazi hunters. Nazis held on into the last part of the century, always ready to unleash a new steam powered Nazi robot on our heroes, who would defeat it and beat the fascists down for Justice -- and it felt good, because they were evil, rotten Nazis!

In the Issue 2 update, we also got a new low level 5th Column Base Map, which was a warehouse painted up in 5th Column Regalia, with a speaker system that intoned in German as you stormed the base. It was a wonderful piece of atmosphere as you and your low level hero chums beat the snot out of the 5th Column. Even the name was cool in an evil way. The Fifth Column. It sounded like a potboiler from the 40's, evoking thoughts of insurgents and spies and bunds going out and doing evil.

Well.

Cryptic Studios is preparing to launch City of Heroes in Europe. Including Germany. And now... the Fifth Column has been retconned. Literally retconned. There's apparently something about time travel involved or the like, so that for the most part, the 5th Column never existed (or was tiny and inconsequential), and now they've been replaced by The Council.

The Council.

First off, the name is lame as Hell. It makes it sound like you're fighting a corrupt pack of City Aldermen. And, running through a low level Council mission earlier today, that's pretty much exactly what they are, or so it seems. It's all the same missions, apparently, only now the Nazi elements have been taken out and replaced with... well... you remember all those soldiers in Cobra? The ones who didn't get action figures of their own -- they're the anonymous soldiers who sprayed energy fire at their enemies, had no personalities, and pretty much existed to eject at the last millisecond when G.I. Joe blew their planes up with missiles?

Yeah. That seems to be the entirety of the Council. Only Cobra's Generic Soldiers got to shout "COBRA," which honestly seems like more personality than these doinks have.

The reason they claimed the change happened was because of their overall plotline bible. They claimed that the bible just naturally called for this to happen, and the fact that they're launching a German version of the game had nothing to do with it.

This, of course, is transparent bullshit. They spent significant time, money and effort creating skins and textures and ambience for low level 5th Column bases in Issue 2, which then had to be largely redone for Issue 3. Plus they had to rewrite every 5th Column mission to make sure all the Nazi was pulled out of them. And when they first did this, they also changed the dedication plaques extolling the hero Atlas's fight against Nazis at the start of WWII to nonNazi stuff as well, until people freaked. They then claimed it was an error.

The real reason all this is happening is a German law that makes the display of Nazi regalia and the positive portrayal of Nazis illegal. Only... the 5th Column didn't display Nazi Regalia (their symbol was a kind of Skull done in Soviet Realism) and they weren't positively portrayed. Quite the opposite. You were supposed to beat the Hell out of them! They were evil! There was nothing good about them! They existed to have their helmeted heads crushed before being carted off to jail, sterilized by nuclear radiation.

The overall experience of City of Heroes has been cheapened by this. It feels... craven, somehow. It feels like the people at Cryptic didn't have the guts to keep the cool villains they had, and instead had to replace them with lame villains just to make sure they didn't get angry phone calls. This, I would add, despite that fact that there are tons of video games that do feature Nazis and do get sold and played in Germany. Including things like Castle Wolfenstein and Battlefield 1942. Games where you can play as the Germans if you wish.

Will this cause me to drop City of Heroes? Nah. There's not a huge amount in this latest issue for me (though I have a character in the range of the new zone, so there's that at least), but I still loves me the Superhero action. But I kind of wish they'd just cut the 5th Column out entirely, instead of forcing a lameass sea change onto them to make them as inoffensive as humanly possible. The visceral pleasure of destroying virtual fascism and racism and anti-semitism has been replaced with the dubious pleasure of beating up well armed janitors.

When Captain America fights the Red Skull, there's something epic going on. It's America and Freedom against Nazism and Tyranny on a grand scale. When Captain America fights Hydra, you hope there's a few pictures here and there of his current love interest in scanty clothing, to keep your interest. City of Heroes gave up the Red Skull to get themselves the dorks Hydra don't return phone calls to. And that's just sad.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:20 PM | Comments (18)

December 10, 2004

Eric: A brief electronic discussion on City of Heroes

Chris Meadows 02:16: I'm amused that the Kheldian level bump on the City of Heroes test server has been made "permanent". Leading to a request from someone to wipe all the Kheldians after update 3 goes live, for the benefit of the people who use test as their main server.
Eric Burns 02:16: Wait. Things are unstable. Events and inventories get wiped out regularly. Powers vary from moment to moment. There are terrible crashes. Who in their right mind would *want* to use the test server as their main server?
Jesse Taylor 02:17: DC Comics fans.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:52 PM | Comments (3)

November 22, 2004

Eric: That moment that all becomes worth it.

So as you know, I spent a plurality of yesterday playing City of Heroes. Call it sanity. Call it recovery. Call it giving the tendons in my arm a day to heal from frantic typing. Whatever you call it, it was pretty much a full day of fighting for justice and experience points.

And truth be told, I spent a chunk of that day feeling pretty cynical about it. Early in the day we cleared out a couple of missions for my main hero, Transit -- but at least one of them was vastly easier than we expected, and the followup mission actually requires a full team of eight heroes to even start it. (Which is a pain in the neck, to be honest. There are about seven of us in our little coalition of heroism, but the likelihood of all seven of us being available to play at any given time is negligible. So, we'll need a coterie of pick-up heroes for this adventure. And while City of Heroes's pick-up adventuring system is pretty damn sweet, when you're at the culmination mission for an entire adventure, to suddenly have to have guest stars "Spydorr Man," "IMSOSEXYHOT" and "N0tBatM0n" join the Galaxy Circle is just plain disappointing.

So that was a bit anticlimactic. I then hit the streets with my "ode-to-Silver-Age" hero Matterman until the gang was ready for something for the evening. That something was the second Task Force you can take your heroes on. Task Forces are a long series of interconnected missions assigned to you by NPC heroes. This particular Task Force is assigned by Synapse, so those of you sitting at home who play this game and know from task forces are now nodding your head thoughtfully.

As it works out, this is the first time I ever played through Synapse. I've played through higher level task forces, as well as the soul crushing, mind numbing, finger cramping marathon that is the first task force, assigned by Positron. (Positron -- the only time in City of Heroes I've ever decided point blank that the citizens of Paragon City don't deserve rescue this much.)

Well, the Synapse Task Force is essentially one of the "end plots" for the early game. You see, at different levels in City of Heroes, you find yourself facing down different groups and organizations of nefarious intent. For example, as a first level hero... well, you're generally in the tutorial facing down contaminated thugs who've been sprayed by evil pathogens and gone nuts and throw rocks at you. But second through sixth level, you're generally facing street gangs like the Skulls or the Hellions, "scientific zombies" under the command of the insane Doctor Vahzilok, the odd pack of Nazis (which you can call "Nazis," but not "Nazi dogs," because the word "Nazi" is one of those the language filter triggers to block in the game. That's right. You're fighting a foe you can't name without it being bleeped. And yes, you can turn the language filter off, but Jesus Christ, half the fun of comments are watching language turn to [$@&%^]).

And one of the groups you fight are the automatons of the Clockwork King.

These things, as annoying and deadly as they can be, are cute. They look like scrap metal art as done by Phil Foglio, generally with little windup keys in their backs. And they make the most satisfying "crunch/clank" sounds when they collapse into junk. Now, there's a lot of Clockwork missions, so you become mind-numbingly used to them as you go along. "Oh, yeah. Fetch the weird spring. Oh, right, find the odd power source. Oh -- the mind of the King. Oh boy."

Well, the Synapse Task Force is the endgame of this. And it's... well... grueling.

At first, it's fun. The XP flies fast and free (especially for me, as two of the team members were L20 and I was L17 to begin with, meaning I got a healthy bonus for being a babe in the woods). And it's all doable. There's a few million helicopter clockworks and minion clockworks and giant killer clockworks to fight... they break the missions up into "recover the part" and "save the hostage" and "break all the robots in the power substation" type things. It's a good time. Also, you get to fight Bertha and Long Tom.

I swear. Bertha and Long Tom.

Anyway, it was sometime after one in the morning. We're exhausted. And it's just work at this point. We've lost all narrative thread. Our banter -- our group gives excellent banter, balancing the concept of role playing with the reality that this "role playing game" really is just a tactical hack and slash with multiplayer. (Admittedly, I feel that way about a number of the D&D Campaigns I was in and ran alike, growing up.) We've lost Darklens to fatigue and the recognition that tomorrow is a work day. And more crucially, our scrapper -- a speedster named Ms Mercury -- lets us know that sleep is no longer optional. And finishing off the Task Force with two defenders (my own Transit -- who as a teleportation specialist isn't exactly... useful on this task force in her own right, except as a minor buffer of allies and a minor doer of damage, and the more effective Schattenelf -- which I may be misspelling because I don't know German, but to my knowledge it's not a dirty word so stop snickering), and our leader, the Controller Living Prodigy, really couldn't do it all on our own. Nor would we want to cut Darklens and Ms Mercury out of the endgame. So we exit the mission after finishing and start saying goodnight....

Now, some of my team mates have played this Task Force through before. And they expect that at the end of the next mission, there is a Big Thing. However, the designers like to mix things up a little. So, we've exited a warehouse in Skyway City, right next to one of the gigantic walls and sequences of highway overpasses that is architecture in Skyway City... we're saying our goodnights, and beginning the 30 second countdown sequence to logging out and HOLY [$@&%^] IT'S BABBAGE!

Babbage is a Clockwork Monster. Huge, and epic... like something Jack Kirby and Lea Hernandez would collaborate on. There's nothing cute about Babbage. When we ran to engage, Ms. Mercury didn't come up to Babbage's knee. This thing drops down the wall out of nowhere, ready to decimate us for ruining the Clockwork King's plans, and any thought of leaving now went away.

It was frightening in the best cooooool way. Adrenalin was flowing (not in such a way that I'd need to medicate, thankfully) and the team was back into full swing. Ice bolts and darkness blasts and radiation bursts and swift kicking combined. Our controller locked Babbage in ice -- it lasted less than a second before he burst free! Ms Mercury flurried punches and kicks but couldn't nail anything vital. The Elf tried her own hold (those were some damn big tentacles of darkness) but they didn't manage to snag it. I burned the thing with my eyes and tried not to die... it began to weaken--

And it jumped to the top of a building and started to flee. It was out of angle for our attacks! And none of us had swift versions of flight (in fact, I'm the only character with Hover) or Superleap!

Which had been bugging me, earlier. Transit can teleport and hover, but when pretty much all the other heroes on my team have Superspeed, it still means she arrives last to the party most of the time. Last and exhausted, as chain teleporting takes a lot out of you. I finally used enhancements to alleviate that somewhat, but still -- it seemed like the power I'd based my whole character concept on was a wash....

...until that moment. Babbage was getting away! But Babbage would terrorize the streets and wreak havoc on lower level heroes if we didn't stop it! And no one else could get up there quickly. I looked up, targeted my teleport (teleport isn't a very granular power -- 98 yards forward onto your target, period) to the underside of an overpass, beamed up, whirled in air, targeted the rooftop, beamed down next to where Babbage was walking, jacked up all my remaining Inspirations for extra power and fired everything I had.

It worked. I got Babbage's attention. And therefore got very hurt, very fast, though not quite dead. And it gave my fellow heroes a chance to work up how to get within range of the beast. And we were able to nail the monstrosity.

In that moment, at the end of hours of gameplay and fighting vague dissatisfactions (at 17-19th level, I shouldn't feel superfluous)... suddenly, I was in a comic book. We were desperately outmatched, and the stakes were high and real (trust me, I've been on the receiving end of someone's high level ambush going "uncleared" while walking through a lower level neighborhood. You despise these people). Suddenly, we were the Fantastic Four fighting against a giant mole creature. Suddenly, we were the Justice League being pushed to the limits of our mighty powers taking on a threat no one of us, not even Superman, could fight alone.

Suddenly, it was role playing. For one brief second, I was the hero I'd been pretending I was since I was five years old with a gold towel to represent Captain Marvel's cape (not the comic book Cap, the SHAZAM! television show).

When you beat Babbage, you get a Badge in the game. The badges are fun, but generally fluffy (some combinations of them 'earn' you bonus powers, but when you're 19th level, you're very, very far away from any of those. They're just kind of cute at this point in the game). Well, this Badge represents something to me. This badge represents combat teleporting and desperation... represents those who wield entanglements trying desperately to hold the beast while our speedster tries desperately to get hold of the thing and shake something loose. It represents a multihour task force where you grind for XP and get a couple of levels and become almost jaded being transformed, alchemically, into the very heart of the genre you want so desperately to be a part of.

Oh yeah. It was worth it.

So, did anyone actually read this thing to the end?

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 9:27 AM | Comments (15)

November 12, 2004

Eric: Let's talk about monumental stupidity -- in other words, let's talk about the Comic Book Industry.

Marvel Comics is suing City of Heroes, because it's too easy to make characters who look like Marvel characters in the game.

Okay, let's stop for a moment and have a look at the Terms of Service for the game:

(e) Character Name. In order to use the service, you must create a character and choose a name for your character to identify your character to other Members (your "Character Name"). You may not select as your Character Name the name of another person, or a name which violates any third party's trademark right, copyright, or other proprietary right, or which may mislead other players to believe you to be an employee of NC Interactive, or which NC Interactive deems at its sole discretion to be vulgar or otherwise offensive. NC Interactive reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to (1) delete or alter any Character Name or (2) terminate any license granted herein, for any reason whatsoever, including, without limitation, any suspected or actual infringement of any trademark or trade name right, copyright, or other proprietary right.

(f) Super Group Names, Super Group Member Titles, Battle Cry, and Character Description. While accessing the service, it is possible to name your Super Group, give titles to members of your Super Group, create a Battle Cry, and write a Character Description. You may not create a Battle Cry, Character Description, give a name to a Super Group, or give a title to a Super Group member that is the name/description/title of another person, or a name/description/title which violates any third party's trademark right, copyright, or other proprietary right, or which may mislead other players to believe you to be an employee of NC Interactive, or which NC Interactive deems at its sole discretion to be vulgar or otherwise offensive. NC Interactive reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to (1) delete or alter any name/description/title given to a Super Group, Super Group Member, Battle Cry, or Character Description or (2) terminate any license granted herein, for any reason whatsoever, including, without limitation, any suspected or actual infringement of any trademark or trade name right, copyright, or other proprietary right.

In other words, you're explicitly prohibited from naming your character "Iron Man," your superhero group "The Avengers," use the battle cry "IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME," or use character or super group descriptions that make it clear you're just playing the X-Men. There is a mechanism in-game for slapping down people you see wearing Superman's togs (more or less) or the eight thousand variants of "Wolvernine" or "LogaNNN" out there.

This is apparently not enough for Marvel. They want to sue to force Cryptic to somehow prevent characters from modeling Marvel heroes at all, period, by hobbling the character creation tools so they can't possibly create the Hulk or Spider Man in any context.

It's not possible.

It's not possible. People are damn good at making graphics tools model what they want to model. Cryptic can only block explicit name-choosing and respond aggressively to reports that come in. They have no capacity whatsoever to ensure no one will dress a character up like the Black Widow. I mean, Jesus Christ, it's a grey leather jumpsuit. It's not like they can prevent people from choosing grey leather.

All this can possibly do is piss off video game fans and bias them against Marvel. And to be blunt, that doesn't do Marvel any good. Comic books are increasingly niche products. Teenagers aren't buying the Avengers -- thirty year olds are. And that's mostly okay with Marvel, because it's sale of the trademarks that drives their business now, not sale of the comics. Which is why they're suing, because they feel needlessly threatened.

Well, this won't kill off City of Heroes. It'll mean that there's going to be a lot stricter policing of character knockoffs, but I'm okay with that. Frankly, I get pretty bored with the Solid Snakes I've seen running around. However, it will pretty quickly be determined that Cryptic took steps to ensure Due Diligence, and the case will be dismissed. Or, Cryptic and Marvel will come to an accommodation before it ever reaches that stage. This won't end up being any big deal.

Except, of course, to Marvel's potential market. They will be pissed off at Marvel.

Someone explain to me how that's a good thing for Marvel. Seriously. I'd like to hear it.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:13 AM | Comments (4)

October 29, 2004

Eric: My Weakness is Shiny Things!

So, I'm not that jazzed about City of Villains. I mean, I love City of Heroes the way any good addict loves his own personal crack, but part of what I love is the idea that we're all, every one of us, out there doing the hero thing. There's no PvP. There's few ways to grief new players. Every move you make in the game is heroic, with the possible exception of using stealth and teleport to make your way to reading obscure plaques in the middle of hellacious city parks so you can earn the "Intellectual" badge. I don't want to compete with others on their level, because I won't be able to. I'm a total PvP wuss. I die a lot -- alot -- when human beings are the ones fighting me instead of A.I.s. And it just kills the fun for me -- oh, here's my brave super hero. Oops! Sniper killed me from far off! I guess the world is doomed, because I'm just a piece of crap! Hah hah!

So. Cryptic just announced Prelimenary terms for the City of Villains Beta.

And my immediate... immediate thought was "oh cool. I'll qualify."

...damn their skillful coding and alluring opportunities....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 11:37 AM | Comments (4)

October 26, 2004

Eric: It's like a brush with celebrity, only the celebrity doesn't know it. So it's more like stalking, really

So, today seems to be the day I'm trawling through Schlock Mercenary (early prognosis: "good"), which means I'm not typing in here enough. But I surface and check my feeds every now and again, and came across this post from Wil Wheaton's log.

It's weird, but I get all excited when I see famous examples of the name "Burns." I don't know why. It's not like we don't have some fame associated with the name. I mean, outside of America where our public schools are considered progressive if they have poetry that doesn't rhyme for one tenth of one quarter, Robert Burns is revered as one of the great poets the world over. And of course, Montgomery Burns extols all the virtues we of Sept Burns (Burns is a minor family, or Sept, in Scotland -- officially under Clan Campbell, which means we're all a pack of scalawags and thieves. We're also more common there than "Smiths" are in America) claim as our own.

So, I'm weirdly tickled pink that Wheaton is playing "Richard Burns" in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. For no good reason at all. But heck, I'll buy a copy of the game now, so mission accomplished, I guess.

(And if anyone wonders if I feel the same kinship towards the Fox News Apologist who happens to share my natal as well as surname? I decided long ago that he was actually born Erich Berstanpeniswang, and had to change his name for television. And until I see a birth certificate, I'm sticking with that story.

Berstanpeniswang. It's Monacoian, I think.)

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:51 PM | Comments (3)

October 17, 2004

Eric: What makes a good video game.

So you haven't seen me yet tonight, which is really okay. I've done something almost every day since mid-August. It's good to not sweat it for a day. Today was devoted to City of Heroes, and was astoundingly fun.

A series of adventures for our team (I'm playing Transit, a teleportation specialist -- which will seem odd to CoH players, but works pretty damn well) led us to a fight against one of the Archvillains. These are always extremely cool adventures, and this more than most. You see, he had ice powers, which meant there were rooms with iced over floors that were frictionless, to make things harder on us....

Only... in one of the rooms... there was a giant ice slide down one stairwell, going up into a jump.

Seriously.

So we cleared that room of the evil Outcasts... and then blew twenty minutes sliding. If you did it just right, you could jump to a second floor catwalk. And if you jumped off the catwalk just right, you could make it all the way back up the iced over stairwell. And if you balanced sliding just right, you could half-pipe for a while.

It made sense from a role playing standpoint -- our Supergroup is officially a school for superheroes. So we were mostly supposed to be kids or teenagers. With a graduate who was embarrassed, and a teacher who was trying to balance decorum and wooting sounds. Which means this was a damn good RP scene for an online MassMOG where the goal is punching things.

This is an incidental bit in the middle of one room of one mission.

This... is why this game is so astoundingly cool.

Oh, and we took him down, hard. Ah, sweet simulated over the top superheroic violence, how I adore thee...

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:28 PM | Comments (4)

August 26, 2004

Eric: Coincidence? HAH! I scoff at coincidence!

From Gaming Guardians.

So... EDG is vacationing in City of Heroes. But one of the recurring menaces the Gaming Guardians face is the threat of Shane Hensley, the founder of Pinnacle, creator and designer of Deadlands, and fair shot with a pistol.

And now... Cryptic Studios has announced that Shane Hensley has become Senior Writer for City of Villains.

I wonder if Graveyard Greg's going to latch onto this....

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:57 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2004

Eric: Maybe the Empire should just stop hiring Bothans.

(From Penny Arcade. Click on the thumbnail for full sized dead Bothans!)

Not to harp on Sony and Galaxies more than is strictly necessary, but once again Gabe and Tycho encapsulate what makes an issue desperately desperately wrong within a few short panels. And there is the order of the death of many Bothans. And I also have no doubt but that Worlds of Warcraft will be better than Star Wars: Galaxies, since the popular consensus of review sites are Galaxies sucks bantha.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 2:16 PM | Comments (0)

Eric: Dude, it's a game.

I love early morning video game news. It's never good news. It's always, somehow, some way a company we like is being crushed by the soulless forces of commerce, a company we don't like extending its vicious grip and crushing the good, decent people playing the game, or something about John Romaro getting a new job.

Today's early morning video game news is especially cheery. It seems that makers of crap MMORPG Star Wars: Galaxies had a problem with people using a bug to duplicate in-game money, which they then spread around. Sony Online Entertainment, the soulless company in question, responded by banning all characters who had used or received the fake money.

All characters.

Including all the people who received the money in good faith, had no idea it was duplicated, and would gladly have cooperated with game officials had they known.

If this were the real world, this would be like the guy at the convenience store who had the fake five dollar bills passed to him going to prison along with the counterfeiter.

If this were the real world, there would also be organizations like the ACLU to come in and demand said convenience store worker would receive his rights, make a stink, etc. so on and so forth. See... well, see America since the passage of the Patriot Act for many, many examples of the process. But that's not important here, because this isn't the real world. It's a game. And players don't actually have any rights. At all. Period. It's someone else's machine and they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Friends of the banned players gathered in protest on one of the servers. Sony responded by first threatening to shut the server down, and then 'dispersing' the mob by randomly teleporting the characters all over space, willy nilly. Were this the real world, this would be like the police gathering up protesters, herding them into cars, and driving them all over the country, blindfolded, then dumping them in ditches all over this great land of ours. See the above regarding the ACLU in such cases.

Only, once again, this isn't the real world. Characters in Star Wars: Galaxies have no right of free assembly. They have no right of appeal. They have no rights of any sort. It's a game, and someone else is running it.

Does that make Sony's responses right? Absolutely not. It is an infuriating, ham handed way of treating the people who are paying you by the month. This is wholly bad business, handled extremely badly. Period. If people want to get together and protest, let them. Let them play the game any way they feel like it. And when your customer base is complaining, listen to them. It's not that hard, honestly.

However, Sony didn't handle it that way. And so we have many, many players directly affected, and thousands of players on the edges who see just how little they rate in this game. And they want to know what they can do. How can they seize their virtual world back? How can they force change.

Simple. They can't. Sony doesn't care.

But they can stop playing.

Dude, it's a game. If someone dicks you over while playing a game, you stop playing the game. If you've paid for the game, you cancel your account and demand your money back. If you're watching other people play the game and you see them get dicked over, you stop playing the game because you don't like the way people are treated, and it's just a game.

Now, the response is predictable. "I've been developing my character for weeks/months/years. I've invested tremendous time and energy into my character. I've invested tremendous emotion into my character. I'm not about to throw it all away because Sony are dicking players over. There has to be another way!"

There is.

You can accept that all of that time and investment was done on someone else's machine, and that if you choose to continue playing, you do so at the risk of being dicked over randomly. You accept that if Sony decides to remove all characters' pants to make random pleasuring themselves on characters easier, they're going to do it and you're not going to be able to stop them.

I understand how these folks feel. My City of Heroes characters have gotten to at least mid level and I truly love them. I love the game. I love how I'm playing it.

But so far, Cryptic and NCSoft haven't dicked folks over. If they did -- especially if I were one of them -- I'd find some other way to spend the monthly subscription fee. Because it's just a game, and I won't pay for the privilege of being dicked over.

The appropriate response to Sony's actions in this case is simple. There should be massive account cancellations, from people affected and from people who have nothing to do with the situation. Sony -- and more to the point, Lucasarts -- should be forced to have meetings where someone in a tie slaps a hardcopy onto the table and says "Damn it, Steve! Account cancellations are up twenty percent and new accounts are down fifteen percent. Who's the idiot who decided the way to break up protests was to teleport people all over gamespace? I have a garbage bag for him to put all his stuff in and a security guard to 'teleport' him off the premises!" Players should make it clear that their monthly fees means they have an expectation of how they're treated, and this isn't it.

Absent those account cancellations, there's not much point to discussing it. Their game? Their rules.

Check your pants on login, Rebel Scum.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2004

Eric: Is it in fact objectification if the woman is a virtual object, code-speaking?

I got this off of Boing Boing, which is a place where wonderful mind blowing things are often found.

There is a videogame out in the world. It is called Bloodrayne. It features a female protagonist, Rayne, who is noted for being ultraviolent in a gory fashion (thus, the "blood" part of the title). She is also noted for being... female. Very female. In black leather. She is one of those characters who the term "breast physics" was developed for. In other words, yet another bondage gear fetishist daughter of Lara Croft.

Well, Rayne's beaten Lara once and for all with her sequel. And beaten Jigglefest Maestros Tecmo (known for Dead or Alive and the softcore porn "fan-friendly" Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball as well. We knew they'd upped the ante, because in some of the released screenshots of the game, we saw that Rayne's low rider leather pants were laceups, and open enough that you could tell... just barely... that... (cough) a good interior decorator was consulted in the design. (If you don't get that joke, ask a sixteen year old boy. No, it's not a Queer Eye reference.)

But that wasn't enough to take Tecmo down. After all, the DOA girls have their own line of swimwear. Swimwear. Based on video game characters who originally were supposed to punch people.

Well, Rayne is now going to appear in Playboy magazine, topless at the least.

By appear, we mean Rayne's developers are going to do several modeled renders of the wholly not-real-person character, then shade it in to make it even more... um... detailed.

They're doing a Playboy spread. Printed, not online. Of a video game character.

I think it's good Rayne declined to go full frontal, by the way. I mean, if Majesco, the publishing company, ever decides to do Lytle Wymen the video game, Rayne will need that "I didn't take off my panties" cred to keep from being typecast and shut out.

Posted by Eric Burns-White at 4:13 PM | Comments (0)