I was contacted by a Korean Journalist to comment on CoH

[chasearcanum]

Excellent writeup, VV.

[healix]

I was surprised and honored when I saw that VV used my meme in her post!! ( "I don't always despise a company....) Thank you for making me feel a little famous. Your post was perfection, and stated everything that matters.

[Rotten Luck]

I got the website saved so I can see when it get's posted!

[Twisted Toon]

I think the response was very well written.

I did notice one tiny little mistake that is easy to over look. Especially as the author of the written piece, since you know what it is supposed to say.
I know I've done it often enough in my posted responses on the CoH forums.

In the hands of the skilled developers, the old game engine was made to do things no one every believed it could. 

Like I said, as easy mistake to over look.

In this case, I think the content far outweighs the tiny typos that few people would notice.

You're still among my favorite authors.

[Daimyoshi]

Great posting, I love to see it in print!

[Victoria Victrix]

I would have liked to have gotten the take from the rest of you before I answered the interview.  However, as we know, journalists want their answers RIGHT NOW, so I did the best that I could as quickly as I could. 

Best person to keep an eye on if/when this is posted would be Rae, I think.  She found Joe in the first place.

[Mistress Urd]

Now I'd love to read a translation of what is actually printed.

Good to know we are not going to go away quietly.

Edit: ew it was late.

[Knightslayer]

My "PC" hasn't been replaced in 8 years. Seriously upgraded, yes, but not replaced.

I think mine's going on five now, with a new videocard about three years ago? And the addition of a laptop two years ago (mostly for going over to LAN it up with friends =P or MMO it up).
I did buy a smartphone this year though, and will most likely get another one soon (not happy with my current one as it seems to be incompatible with just about every app out there >.<).
As someone else already pointed out somewhere, everyone already -has- a PC, and often a laptop too - obviously smartphones and tablets are going to be selling more, until everyone has one of those too.

[Rae]

Joe says it's scheduled for publication 'early next week'. He said he'd drop me a line when it goes live, so I can link y'all.

[Knightslayer]

Joe says it's scheduled for publication 'early next week'. He said he'd drop me a line when it goes live, so I can link y'all.

Awesome!

[CapaDevans]

That was a superb response.

A friend is playing things like Skyrim and while it is visually stunning, he still oohs and ahhs at CoX. I recently got SLI and have gone from mostly high settings to Ultra across the board and frankly ... damn. Eight years, you could have fooled me. WoW always seemed ok from a distance but get close up and everything is very flat. Not so in CoX.

Again .. thank you for the time you are putting into this.

The sheer variety of players is always outstanding, CoX is truly unique.

[Rotten Luck]

Joe says it's scheduled for publication 'early next week'. He said he'd drop me a line when it goes live, so I can link y'all.

I be looking forward to it.  Got the site saved on my favorites and been checking it every so often.

[RogerWilco]

That was a superb response.

A friend is playing things like Skyrim and while it is visually stunning, he still oohs and ahhs at CoX. I recently got SLI and have gone from mostly high settings to Ultra across the board and frankly ... damn. Eight years, you could have fooled me. WoW always seemed ok from a distance but get close up and everything is very flat. Not so in CoX.

Again .. thank you for the time you are putting into this.

The sheer variety of players is always outstanding, CoX is truly unique.

Don't fool yourself, the graphics engine was showing it's age. Ultra mode helped a little, and the newer areas did look better, but overall the polygon counts were low and the textures crude by today's standards. WoW had a complete overhaul of the areas from 2004 about 2 years ago, CoH was in need of that as well, but would never be able to afford it.

What made CoH great was the ability to create: characters, backgrounds, missions, bases/buildings. As a player you could have a lot of creative input into the game.
Next to that was the great community, I think because a superhero game will attract helpful friendly players.
Finally it was friendly to casual play, you could team with anyone though the sidekick system, scale difficulty as you pleased, no need for tank/healer/dps trinity as in most other games, no daily grinds mandatory items or gruelling PvP.

[corvus1970]

Don't fool yourself, the graphics engine was showing it's age. Ultra mode helped a little, and the newer areas did look better, but overall the polygon counts were low and the textures crude by today's standards.

I, along with many others know this, and know it well.

I didn't care one jot.

[Rotten Luck]

Don't fool yourself, the graphics engine was showing it's age. Ultra mode helped a little, and the newer areas did look better, but overall the polygon counts were low and the textures crude by today's standards. WoW had a complete overhaul of the areas from 2004 about 2 years ago, CoH was in need of that as well, but would never be able to afford it.

What made CoH great was the ability to create: characters, backgrounds, missions, bases/buildings. As a player you could have a lot of creative input into the game.
Next to that was the great community, I think because a superhero game will attract helpful friendly players.
Finally it was friendly to casual play, you could team with anyone though the sidekick system, scale difficulty as you pleased, no need for tank/healer/dps trinity as in most other games, no daily grinds mandatory items or gruelling PvP.

All the more reason to make CoH2 not drop the whole IP.

[Heckfire]

I doubt you remember me from the old Pinnacle RPC boards about 6 years ago (I bowed out at the time because I was going through a very painful divorce and had lost my account to my ex, and the board hack at the time wiping out all of my stories was salt on an already festering wound), and this is probably a bad place to say ANYTHING defending DC Universe Online, but I do feel I need to correct one of your statements.

You actually design and play your own characters in DCUO; in fact, some combinations of words that make up existing DC character names (like any variation of "Wonder Girl" I discovered for one of my toons there) are AUTOMATICALLY blocked as "Syntax Errors" in the character creator. Seriously, one of the most common complaints about DCUO is that you CAN'T play as the established characters (the common wording being some variant of "playing as Batman's errand boy"), which I guess shows how out-of-touch I apparently am with PS3 game reviewers...

Mind you, it's not a GOOD Character Creator; if CoX was a Ferrari and Champions Online is a Porsche, then DCUO would be a soap-box derby car with a missing wheel. As someone who bought a Lifetime Membership to it at launch (I'm a big DC fanboy, at least before the "New 52" reboot), I ended up dropping it and returning to CoX after the first month, only returning to it recently at the urging of a friend ("Hey, at least you don't have to pay for anything in it") and because it's the last place to find the DC Universe I had loved. Seeing a beloved place full of characters I'd grown to care for be completely destroyed; I am HONESTLY uncertain if it's better that CoX is (hopefully just for the moment) gone completely as opposed to seeing a bunch of bastardizations pretending to be those beloved characters going through pathetic imitations of the motions. 

...sorry, got off-topic. Anyway, I think you might have confused DCUO with the Marvel MMO in-development, since that one you can only play as the existing characters, or with the Legends mini-game thingy in it where you run missions as existing characters as "training simulations."

[corvus1970]

As someone elsewhere said, the the DCU character-generator makes the one for CO look like the one from CoX.

[Samuraiko]

A friend is playing things like Skyrim and while it is visually stunning, he still oohs and ahhs at CoX. I recently got SLI and have gone from mostly high settings to Ultra across the board and frankly ... damn. Eight years, you could have fooled me. WoW always seemed ok from a distance but get close up and everything is very flat. Not so in CoX.

I had a similar conversation after I found out that my computer could actually handle Ultra Mode with the graphics turned ALL the way up. (No joke - EVERYTHING was maxed out with the single exception of Bloom because it was too much light for me.) Someone saw one of my videos and said, "Nah, that can't be COH, it looks too good - someone did a graphics mod or something."

"No," I said, "That's COH in Ultra Mode. Cranked all the way up."

"CoH looks like that?!"

"Yep."

"Okay, I need to get back into the game, and I want your computer."



Was it showing its age? Oh sure. But with the proper resources, oh, the game we could have had...

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[corvus1970]

Sure it was showing its age: much like a fine wine or good cheese.

Or good pickles

[Empyrean]

All the more reason to make CoH2 not drop the whole IP.

I agree, and at this point I think a CoX 2 is the best future for the game.  Just my personal opinion, I know, but just keeping the extant game running is a much  more limited future than keeping the IP moving forward.