The Shivan Tutorial Was Fantastic

[GuyPerfect]

Or better yet, Villains go there to *break in* to the Zig, planting explosives and blowing your way in.

Reminds me of that one mission where you break into the Zig to bust out the villains in there to wreak havoc on Brickstown. Can't remember if there were any explosives involved.

[JaguarX]

I must admit, that would have been awesome. Much more villainous sounding than some of the red side content felt.

I think red side's biggest short coming was that you always felt like a lackey doing stuff for other people, and never really did plots or schemes of your own. Even Positron seemed to admit this fault a little bit during one of his panels at C2E2 a few weeks ago. He said that Mayhem missions helped alleviate this a little, but my main issue with those missions was that you were still robbing the bank because someone else wanted you to, not just because you wanted to SMASH stuff and steal money for giggles and profit...

That's kind of why villain stories seemed to fall short to me, because that's always the feeling I got when I was doing anything but newspaper missions where I could crack some guy's skull in simply because I didn't like the guy... Almost everything red side felt like I was someone else's lackey, and almost nothing made me feel like I was just being bad because bad felt good...

Granted, I could have pretended that the mission text didn't exist, and just go into each mission with the simple goal of smashing as many people/things as I could, and ignore whatever the actual goal was, but then I'd be missing out on the same level of story driven involvement that the Heroes were receiving by ignoring the canon stories to make up my own...

Essentially, I'd be making it more difficult to play red side because I have to explain to myself why I'm there, instead of just going with the story as it's presented. Blue side made more sense, and was easier to go along with the stories on almost any given character. This is just a baseless guess, but it's probably why most people preferred blue side...

Yeah I loved the resdie layout. Maps were nice sized but not too big. The contacts gave missions usually within the same map or near by, and the contacts got to the point relatively fast and done instead of doing a bunch of fluff missions to get the contact to get to the meat of the arc, especially in early days of COH where it seemed most contacts wouldnt release the arcuntil after about half dozen fluff missions then end up with the "outleveled" contact message where they wouldnt give anymore missions. Ouroboros helped later on with that though. But yeah, red side biggest ding I have against it was that my villain felt merely like a lackey to various other people. Kind of made it hard to RP a villain that lived for chaos and destruction and want to watch the world burn when only time it could act was given the green light and order by some civilian that I would probably normally smashed right then and there. Hero side was the same way but it was easier to stomach as sometimes heroes react to what is asked of them by nature to help out.

But red side- "I'm an evil warrior from another planet here to take over, cause destruction and fear and the best mission you got for me is to burn a few school books?"

[Lightslinger]

Welp, I was incredibly right. I just randomly threw out the idea of tweaking the Shivan tutorial to add more...tutoring and you all come up with awesome ideas in an instant.

Is it ok to still /sign suggestions? That sounds sad

[Golden Girl]

I think that there should have been a bit more done with the Freedom Phalanx and Arachnos in the tutorial, to let players get to know them early on.

[goodtime]

I really didn't care for it much.    It wasn't a very realistic introduction to the game.  The voice-overs in particular were jarring, and the lack once you were in-game would have annoyed me if I were a new player to CoH.   It was all just click click click.  No contacts, no hospital, no color coding, very little information.   And while the Shivan at the end was imposing, I didn't care for the see-thru-ness of it.   The whole thing felt very Cryptic, a la Champions Online, and I hate that tutorial with a fiery passion.  Plus the end boss was just tedious when you were the only one in the tutorial, which was more often than not for me.

[Codewalker]

Easiest way to do the end part was to run around and aggro all the Shivans onto you. You can't die, so just lead them in a line into the flashing arrows of where the jets are going to shoot and they all go poof at once.

Then go AFK for a while and make a sandwich. The giant one ineffectually tries to kill you while getting whittled down by the airstrikes.

That alone tells me something was very wrong with the design.