New efforts!

[avelworldcreator]

Dated in this sense means more and more incompatibility with the various operating systems and and other technical issues. Some of it is cosmetic. But there were features that Paragon Studios wanted to add to the game that were difficult if not impossible with things the way the were. This isn't change simply for the sake of change but out of necessity resulting from the efforts to add more content and story line. There are people who play 8-bit games out of nostalgia using emulators - but the emulators themselves are not 8-bit. Old cars are maintained with new parts, even the classics and those are typically manufactured with modern techniques. Classic movies are often digitally remastered because the old copies are deteriorating and they are distributed with modern methods (CDs, DVDs, the internet, etc.). A similar thing is happening with classic novels. But when CoH was still online weren't you craving the next edition? The next new expansion of the world you had come to love and cherish? Would you want to play Issue 0 or 1? People here can tell you they were pretty bad. Just like CoH did a major change with Dark Astoria and a few other zones with a plotted story disaster so have we as far as far as we can. "Spirit" is not an exaggeration.

[avelworldcreator]

*cough*Minecraft*cough*

There are tons of very successful games released in the last 10 years built on way, way worse engines than the CoH one. Shiny isn't everything.

No, it's how they are used that matters. You can still get good performance with a Model-T Ford car but after a point any effort to improve the base system becomes a battle against diminishing returns.
As a consequence you get this:
It's finally coming - Minecraft 2.0!
It's not "shiny" but normal efforts to implement ideas that you hope will make your product enjoyable and more playable.

[Angel Phoenix77]

Thank you.

CoT's map is HUGE. 25kmx25km. I'm one of the people who's working on that.

Interface? I'm one of the lead people on that. If you check our forums and look at the draft designs of the color picker I designed you will see more than a nod to City of Heroes but "on steroids". We've dumped the color restrictions for one thing.

Combat... Wait and see.  ;)

Zones? Well, no "war walls". Zones may be virtually non-existent, but the city does have for game play purposes various districts and divisions.

Chat. I'm the guy designing the chat UI and the code. I also picked the protocol we'll be using (XMPP). In fact we already have fully functioning chat server that we have been using internally for our own communications for a year. You will see some new and old features in the chat system.

Teaming? Of course. And Supergroups too. Expect some improvements here.

Question about teaming will it be 8 people like in City of. or 5 such as in the God awful like in co?

[Soul Resonance]

Dated in this sense means more and more incompatibility with the various operating systems and and other technical issues. Some of it is cosmetic. But there were features that Paragon Studios wanted to add to the game that were difficult if not impossible with things the way the were. This isn't change simply for the sake of change but out of necessity resulting from the efforts to add more content and story line. There are people who play 8-bit games out of nostalgia using emulators - but the emulators themselves are not 8-bit. Old cars are maintained with new parts, even the classics and those are typically manufactured with modern techniques. Classic movies are often digitally remastered because the old copies are deteriorating and they are distributed with modern methods (CDs, DVDs, the internet, etc.). A similar thing is happening with classic novels. But when CoH was still online weren't you craving the next edition? The next new expansion of the world you had come to love and cherish? Would you want to play Issue 0 or 1? People here can tell you they were pretty bad. Just like CoH did a major change with Dark Astoria and a few other zones with a plotted story disaster so have we as far as far as we can. "Spirit" is not an exaggeration.

Your right: I can't wait to play i23 on a newer engine while waiting for APR :D

[worldweary]

I'm not sure why some of you are talking about issue 1 game vs issue 23.Issue 23 image is what was being talked about.As far as emulators and remastered versions the movie,game,music etc nothing was really changed.What made it great was still there.

[avelworldcreator]

I believe we allow teaming up to 8.  I suspect we can go higher but then the logistics get a bit crazy. I'm in the middle of our game website redesign and we have a game play section where we should be organizing all such details for our players. I'm so spread out right now as far as tasks I tend to forget things I haven't touched or discussed in months without consulting with that part of the team or other online docs.

[avelworldcreator]

I'm not sure why some of you are talking about issue 1 game vs issue 23.Issue 23 image is what was being talked about.As far as emulators and remastered versions the movie,game,music etc nothing was really changed.What made it great was still there.

Precisely. I'm making the comparison to show that nostalgia only goes so far. There are things that people happily see go away for an improved version because the old one is quite broken. Paragon studios were dealing with something broken or not quite right for the things they intended to do. It worked well enough at the beginning but as time went on it's failings became more problematic. They weren't after changing basic mechanic or fundamental appearances (though I'm sure cosmetics were on the list) but only the implemenation.

[darkgob]

While not the life itself (eg to play the game) is not an issue, H1Z1 business model is essentially pay to win. You need to pay a micro transaction to get an air drop in which you may or may not even get because if someone else intercepts the package (because the game will alert everyone a airdrop will be coming) before you, your are SOL. The airdrops gives military grade weaponry, while everyone else is using crud bow and arrows. Again you technically can play the game, but once someone gets the airdrop it pretty much turns into the guy with the airdrop pickup rolling their face on the keyboard and win.

I'm not sure this can be called "pay to win" when you're not even guaranteed to get the thing you paid for (it's worse than PWE's lockboxes, where you at least get something), which is an astoundingly poor business practice.  And again, this is not remotely representative of all modern games.  "Pay to win" becomes a meaningless phrase in games lacking PvP, which is actually a lot of games.  Stripping out content that was originally developed for the core game and turning it into paid DLC is also scummy and does sometimes happen, but unless you can demonstrably prove that this happens a majority of the time, this isn't an appropriate barometer for the state of modern games.

All I'm seeing is a lot of generalization based on edge cases in order to justify close-mindedness.  Don't like games with paid DLC?  Don't buy them!  There are a lot of games without it.  Although honestly, I have a hard time taking you seriously if you say that you hate paid DLC and then claim that CoH is the only game for you, because I will remind you that CoH was doing paid DLC long before it became popular.

[Arcana]

I wasn't there at launch.  I'll blame myself for not keeping an eye on it after reading of it in a games magazine and also my Duo-Partner (who was in the Beta...) who kept it to himself until just after launch.  So while I don't have vivid memories of Issue 0 or 1.  I do remember the novelty of it.  It was fun.  Wandering around this virtual hero world.

Trying out the costume creator.  Trying out the different character types.  Negotiating the 'endless' zones without getting myself killed or pressed against a chain link fence.  Wandering around missions getting lost and yes, trying to find your way back out again.  Charging into colour coded mobs as a blaster or a MA scrapper and wondering why I'd face plant versus a mob of eg. anything. 

And for me, this is the 'core' game.  The interface, the costume creator, the 'types' you can roll, the zones, the mission content, yes, 'some' teaming (impeccably implemented), the immortal 'colour coded' combat (which was the bedrock of the game) and powers with the level ladder (Seemed 'tough' going at certain plateaus.  But I took it as it was at the time...)

First of all, that can only take you so far.  What you're describing are superficial elements of the core gameplay, not the core gameplay itself.  What you're describing is novelty, but novelty isn't an inherent part of the game play, it is a measure of your unfamiliarity to it.

Second, even those things were enhanced significantly by game improvements.  Although people liked to explore the costume creator, it wasn't until Icon came along that this became a signature part of the game.  Icon makes it far more possible to explore the costume creator, to adjust costumes over time as characters evolve or as the player gets a better understanding of what's possible.  A significant innovation of City of Heroes is that your appearance doesn't dictate functionality and vice versa: we don't have "functional costumes."  If we want to have better damage mitigation, we're not forced to put on a specific armor that looks like something very specific.  But with Icon, costumes become genuinely detached from character creation.  They become mutable.

And while you can say that "wandering around in missions" was an important part of core gameplay, there isn't a single MMO out there where you can't do that.

The one thing left off that list?  Ultra Mode.  How the game looked was core of the game.  But the race was on.  They were behind.  And they shiny crowd had moved on a while back.  'Too late.'

Actually, I did mention Ultra Mode, just not on the list.  And that's because in context, Ultra Mode has nothing to do with the game engine, at least the server side of it which is what was generally being discussed.  Ultra Mode is a client-side enhancement specifically.

The other thing off your list?  The ITF.  Paragon Studio's finest hour.  A glowing testament to what could be done by the developers.  Cleaner level design.  Superior narrative.  Great battery of gameplay using the 'core' aspects of the game.

Err, yeah.  The ITF is a task force, and I think you are confusing content with mechanics.  What was being discussed, and what I was responding to, was the question of whether the limitations of the game engine limited the developers' ability to significantly modify the way the game worked.  The ITF says nothing about what the developers were limited by.

(Instead of a naval gazing list of things that only seemed to appeal to either a vocal or hard core sub-section of the casual pick up and play 'player base.')

To be honest, this borders on insulting.  First of all, we were actually talking about changes to the game engine, not whether they were particularly important to a single player.  But second, to call things like the Invention system or the Incarnate system "navel gazing additions" simply places your opinion of the game radically outside the norm.  The invention system was so important it completely altered the game even for players that ignored it.  It changed the economics of enhancement.  Prior to I9 it was practically mathematically impossible to maintain high levels of slotting while leveling without being under extreme debt conditions or through donations.  Those problems essentially disappear after I9, even for people who barely participated at all.  That's an objectively fundamental change to the game.

Honestly, given your feedback in general to the list of changes I specified, I'm not sure you understand just exactly what is being discussed.  If your priorities were game content, that's fine.  If you believe the devs didn't prioritize the kind of content you wanted that's fine: in fact I would tend to agree with you there.  But the technology behind the changes that affected and were significant to the vast majority of players is not trivial to dismiss either.  The notion that the invention system did nothing to help retain players is almost certainly false.  The idea that things like sidekicking and exemplar were not important parts of the game is definitely false: it was one of the features publicly lauded about the game.  And even if all you wanted to do was play a single player edition of City of Heroes with no teaming and no chat and no sidekicking many of the engine changes over time made those missions possible.  They just fall into the category of technical minutia, things most players shouldn't care about, until they start claiming they didn't need them.  Even if all you want to do is try new powersets, practically all of the powersets added after launch required game mechanics that didn't exist at launch, and were only possible because the devs were able to evolve the game engine to support them.

[worldweary]

Precisely. I'm making the comparison to show that nostalgia only goes so far. There are things that people happily see go away for an improved version because the old one is quite broken. Paragon studios were dealing with something broken or not quite right for the things they intended to do. It worked well enough at the beginning but as time went on it's failings became more problematic. They weren't after changing basic mechanic or fundamental appearances (though I'm sure cosmetics were on the list) but only the implemenation.

It's not nostalgia.CoH was fun warts and all.

[Arcana]

*cough*Minecraft*cough*

There are tons of very successful games released in the last 10 years built on way, way worse engines than the COH one. Shiny isn't everything.

I'm not sure I would call the Minecraft engine "better" or "worse" than the Cryptic engine powering City of Heroes.  I'd say that Minecraft's underlying world engine is reasonably well designed to do Minecrafty things although it probably suffers from a similar problem as City of Heroes' engine: it was originally written to do one thing, and over time it has been asked to do increasingly more by organically adding more features in not always well-structured ways.  City's engine was good for doing what it *was* doing, but not very good for doing what the developers and the players wanted to do in all cases.

Probably a more fundamental issue with the CoH engine is that because so many people worked with it and on it over a long period of time, no one person really understood every aspect of how it did what it did, which made things like trying to troubleshoot the Oil Slick race condition non-trivial.  A game engine that was designed to do such replacement spawning as an atomic action from the start wouldn't suffer from those kinds of problems.  There was just no way to know when the game engine was first being written that such an event sequence would be necessary.

I don't think its a question of whether or not you can make a good game of some kind in a particular engine.  I think we judge platforms based on whether they can implement the kind of content we want to make.  A good content developer will meet in the middle: they will modify their design expectations based on what the engine can do, and yet also want to make content that stretches that engine beyond what it is normally capable of.  When that tension snaps, it is time to get a new engine or a new content developer.

[worldweary]

Even with the limitations I still had years worth of power combinations to try and with the AE lots missions
to run them.Coh had many many years of life left in it.

[Codewalker]

No, it's how they are used that matters. You can still get good performance with a Model-T Ford car but after a point any effort to improve the base system becomes a battle against diminishing returns.

Fortunately, software is not a car. Software can be evolved organically and even have parts of it redesigned in place if necessary.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I would point to things like Windows NT, Photoshop, and the Unreal engine. All of those are older than COH, but have been continuously improved and upgraded to meet current needs.

The COH engine itself underwent many changes and improvements from launch day, often in growth spurts. It's clear that Paragon had both the knowledge and desire to do so, though how much of both they had at any given time tended to vary based on how management allocated resources.

The vast majority of features that people wanted and blamed on engine limitations weren't so much a limitation due to being difficult to add to the engine, but rather because of all of the accumulated content built on top of it. Fixing or improving something in the engine is fairly easy until you have to deal with all of the content that makes assumptions that are no longer true. However, doing so is usually still less work than throwing it out entirely and starting over.

As a consequence you get this:
It's finally coming - Minecraft 2.0!
It's not "shiny" but normal efforts to implement ideas that you hope will make your product enjoyable and more playable.

I'm not really sure what an april fools day post listing joke features has to do with anything.

[Shibboleth]

I'm not sure why some of you are talking about issue 1 game vs issue 23.Issue 23 image is what was being talked about.As far as emulators and remastered versions the movie,game,music etc nothing was really changed.What made it great was still there.

Because the people claiming all other games are awful would have written off CoH in the same way they write off all other games for not arriving in perfect form as a gift from heaven.  And if enough people had done so, their little piece of perfect would never have existed.

Of course the claim that all other games are bad is absurd on so many fronts that complete critical analysis of it would be an effort like unto counting grains of sand on a beach.

[MM3squints]

I believe we allow teaming up to 8.  I suspect we can go higher but then the logistics get a bit crazy. I'm in the middle of our game website redesign and we have a game play section where we should be organizing all such details for our players. I'm so spread out right now as far as tasks I tend to forget things I haven't touched or discussed in months without consulting with that part of the team or other online docs.

I know I'm probably getting ahead of myself, but any plans on raids (16+ players?) I know the old saying, enjoy what is on your plate before going for desert (in this case the core game before even asking for a end game) I'm just curious.

[Soul Resonance]

It's not nostalgia.CoH was fun warts and all.

COT will be my CoH2 while CoH legacy's up and i'm waiting for APR.

[Soul Resonance]

Dated in this sense means more and more incompatibility with the various operating systems and and other technical issues. Some of it is cosmetic. But there were features that Paragon Studios wanted to add to the game that were difficult if not impossible with things the way the were. This isn't change simply for the sake of change but out of necessity resulting from the efforts to add more content and story line. There are people who play 8-bit games out of nostalgia using emulators - but the emulators themselves are not 8-bit. Old cars are maintained with new parts, even the classics and those are typically manufactured with modern techniques. Classic movies are often digitally remastered because the old copies are deteriorating and they are distributed with modern methods (CDs, DVDs, the internet, etc.). A similar thing is happening with classic novels. But when CoH was still online weren't you craving the next edition? The next new expansion of the world you had come to love and cherish? Would you want to play Issue 0 or 1? People here can tell you they were pretty bad. Just like CoH did a major change with Dark Astoria and a few other zones with a plotted story disaster so have we as far as far as we can. "Spirit" is not an exaggeration.

Also: Don't take this the wrong way at all  :'(, and know that I will support your game alongside CoH Legacy as well :D. But, it seems to me that your doing a bit of passive-aggressive subtle persuasion in your post with regards to us wanting to stick with CoH legacy in i23, or at least that is my take(I know it's quite far-fetched but, just expressing a nagging thought in my head  :P). It seems you wish for us to move on from CoH all together as it is "Out dated" in engine(the current deal states that since the engine CoH was running on is indeed not worth the trouble of reviving, that the current negotiation team would allocate a third party company to put the disk image on another engine to actually run the game, static).

[Codewalker]

I'm not sure I would call the Minecraft engine "better" or "worse" than the Cryptic engine powering City of Heroes.

Having picked it apart while working on some minecraft mods, I'm going with "worse, far worse."

I'd say that Minecraft's underlying world engine is reasonably well designed to do Minecrafty things

Not really, given how much it struggles to do minecrafty things even on hardware an order of magnitude more powerful than should be needed to do minecrafty things.

It's seriously awful and worse than amateur design. That's why I always hold it up as an example of how gameplay, networking/word of mouth, community mod-ability, and marketing can make something a success in spite of technical inferiority. It's handy that it also serves the same purpose when it comes to shiny AAA photorealistic graphics, as well.

[Arcana]

Because the people claiming all other games are awful would have written off CoH in the same way they write off all other games for not arriving in perfect form as a gift from heaven.  And if enough people had done so, their little piece of perfect would never have existed.

Myself personally, I'm making a slightly different claim.  I'm claiming that if someone claims to like City of Heroes, and only City of Heroes, and only in a very specific form, like Issue 23 (the last released issue before shutdown), then that's a strange assertion for two reasons: one: City of Heroes was never like that, until it became that, and two: City of Heroes would never be that again.  If the game wasn't shutdown, it would have continued to evolve and the City of Heroes of Issue 30 would have been as different from what we last saw as what we last saw was from, say, Issue 16.  Maybe even deeper, because some of the changes coming were likely to be transformative in the long run in ways prior changes were not.  Its impossible to say for certain, but I believe LUA scripting integrated into the mission execution engine could have been to mission content what the invention system was to enhancements.  Genuinely dynamic scripted mission content is a quantum leap forward.  Imagine missions spawning different critters depending on team composition, or even player decisions in the mission.  Missions could react to player activity in more sophisticated ways.  NPCs could obey more complex narrative directives (as opposed to randomly shouting dialog as soon as they entered perception range).  With proper NPC scripting we might have even finally been able to fix those stupid escort missions.  Maybe, gasp, we could have made them actually fun.

Once you can use generic scripting rather than triggers to dictate how content runs, the sky is the limit.  Provided you don't overload the hamsters running the servers with your scripts, of course.

[Shibboleth]

As I indicated, there is much to analyze in the claim. Your critique is another that can be levelled and I am certain plenty more could be offered.