New efforts!

[MWRuger]

You can call it a Mary-Happy-Sparkle-Farts game for all I care. I just want to play CoH again.

[worldweary]

This ^^^^^^^^^

[Brigadine]

Oh dear god look at the two pages of zombie talk I started...

[Azrael]

You could say, that it's initial design was poor but ultimately, it's the direction that mattered.

If the design is broke the direction doesn't matter.  CO had flawed design from the start.  Cryptic were confident they could outdo CoH.  They failed.  Interface.  Combat.  Mobs.  'Feel.'  Empty square rooms.  Teaming.  Animation very 'skittish.'  I was in from the Beta and have a Life Sub.  I don't play it.  Bad design.  Bad direction merely compounded bad design.  Yeah.  The launch day wrecking ball nerf bat didn't help.  But it doesn't matter.  CO is a failed CoH2 or attempt at maybe what CoH could have originally been in the mind of Jack's eye.

But that's life.  Sometimes you capture lightning in a bottle.  And that's CoH.  Very different in Beta to launch to just a couple of issues later ie. Issue 2.  Half intention, half redirection because maybe 'some' of the original combat design and power sets would work so they structured it different.  Not being in the beta, I can only say I was very happy with early CoH.  Combat.  Teaming.  Mobs.  Maps.  Missions.  They got all that right.  Champions didn't.

Was CoH any better/worst initially, when  you look at it objectively?  It wasn't until after Issue 9 or so when the game grew the beard. 

Yes.  Better!  Better design.  Better basics.  Better combat.  Better powers.  Smoother animations.  No frogman character animation.  The whole feel was far, far better.  It wasn't until issue 9 that CoH grew a beard?

Er.  'No.' 

CoH worst initially than Champions?

Not in this universe.

Azrael.

PS. 

Oh dear god

CoH issue 23 comes back?

CoH 'Legacy.'  Proud of what it was and still means to the players.

[Ultimate15]

I'm having one of those mornings.

Y'know how it goes. Waking up with that feeling of "GOD I CAN'T WAIT TO GET INTO PARAGON. MY SUPER GROUP NEEDS MY TANK TO RUN A TASKFORCE AND I HAVE CONTACTS IN PEREGRINE THAT I NEED TO CATCH UP WITH AND I HAVE A NEW COSTUME IDEA AND A BUILD TO TRY OUT AND I WANT TO /LEDGESIT FROM A BUILDING IN STEEL CANYON JUST BECAUSE AND..."

*explodes*

And then you're hit with that all-too familiar realization that you can't. And you're all  :'( :'( :'(

[Azrael]

MY TANK

Yeah.  I miss my tank too.  Once I realised there was more to life than blasters I began the quest for Tank mastery.  *(Blasters.  Those nightmares where I would get mezzed by Vamps on 'blue striga' map rooms were over.  And two/three shotted punching bag that I was...  Leaving blasters behind, I could tank Vamps and show them what Energy Transfer could do. :P)

My En/Invuln' Heavy resistance and off the scaleable defence build was diamond hard.

Should have taken the alpha to up the recharge on Dull Pain.

Azrael.

[Balince]

I'm having one of those mornings.

Y'know how it goes. Waking up with that feeling of "GOD I CAN'T WAIT TO GET INTO PARAGON. MY SUPER GROUP NEEDS MY TANK TO RUN A TASKFORCE AND I HAVE CONTACTS IN PEREGRINE THAT I NEED TO CATCH UP WITH AND I HAVE A NEW COSTUME IDEA AND A BUILD TO TRY OUT AND I WANT TO /LEDGESIT FROM A BUILDING IN STEEL CANYON JUST BECAUSE AND..."

*explodes*

And then you're hit with that all-too familiar realization that you can't. And you're all  :'( :'( :'(

I've had a few CoH dreams, then I check the forum with this crazy hope that it wasn't a dream but of course it was. It's very sad, I want CoH back! I really hope something good is happening behind the scenes.

[Azrael]

I've had a few CoH dreams, then I check the forum with this crazy hope that it wasn't a dream but of course it was. It's very sad, I want CoH back! I really hope something good is happening behind the scenes.

I can echo that sentiment.

Azrael.

[LaughingAlex]

If the design is broke the direction doesn't matter.  CO had flawed design from the start.  Cryptic were confident they could outdo CoH.  They failed.  Interface.  Combat.  Mobs.  'Feel.'  Empty square rooms.  Teaming.  Animation very 'skittish.'  I was in from the Beta and have a Life Sub.  I don't play it.  Bad design.  Bad direction merely compounded bad design.  Yeah.  The launch day wrecking ball nerf bat didn't help.  But it doesn't matter.  CO is a failed CoH2 or attempt at maybe what CoH could have originally been in the mind of Jack's eye.

But that's life.  Sometimes you capture lightning in a bottle.  And that's CoH.  Very different in Beta to launch to just a couple of issues later ie. Issue 2.  Half intention, half redirection because maybe 'some' of the original combat design and power sets would work so they structured it different.  Not being in the beta, I can only say I was very happy with early CoH.  Combat.  Teaming.  Mobs.  Maps.  Missions.  They got all that right.  Champions didn't.

Yes.  Better!  Better design.  Better basics.  Better combat.  Better powers.  Smoother animations.  No frogman character animation.  The whole feel was far, far better.  It wasn't until issue 9 that CoH grew a beard?

Er.  'No.' 

CoH worst initially than Champions?

Not in this universe.

Azrael.

PS. 
CoH issue 23 comes back?

CoH 'Legacy.'  Proud of what it was and still means to the players.

CO was a game trying to be an action game.  It ultimately failed, but that's largely what it was, an action rpg.

As for  the beard comment of mine, lets think about how much(or really how little) build diversity CoH had, and how it even lost some with Jack in charge.  Paragon studios actually improved the game many times over and got the game out of a dark age caused by cryptic.  I've said it numerous times :/.

[LaughingAlex]

I've had a few CoH dreams, then I check the forum with this crazy hope that it wasn't a dream but of course it was. It's very sad, I want CoH back! I really hope something good is happening behind the scenes.

Me to.  I had a weird(and dumb) dream about super heroes just before I got up.  Maybe thats a good sign, considering that the super heroes in the story had some of the model flaws of characters in a video game, like I was playing CoH from first person.

[Brigadine]

I can echo that sentiment.

Azrael.

Are you Azrael on Steam?!?

[Arcana]

Yes.  Better!  Better design.  Better basics.  Better combat.  Better powers.  Smoother animations.  No frogman character animation.  The whole feel was far, far better.  It wasn't until issue 9 that CoH grew a beard?

Er.  'No.' 

CoH worst initially than Champions?

Not in this universe.

I played CoH from release to shutdown.  I played CO from beta through release and periodically past that point, and was also a very early beta participant (like, before beta test, before the passive slot, before the powers structure itself).  In my opinion, CO prior to release had more potential than CoH did prior to release.  And I would say if you looked at them in isolation, CO was actually the better game at release.

The problem is that CoH was released in April 2004, when its competition was Saturday morning cartoons and Ultima Online.  World of Warcraft was still months away.  CoH had broken powers, broken missions, broken task forces, broken teaming, broken chat - even the trains didn't work consistently all the time.  It only released the first 40 levels, and the content was so thin there were leveling gaps near the tops of decades (i.e. 27-29, 36-39).  But it was the only game in town, and it had time to fix things.  CO launched with less broken powers, less broken missions, and less broken game mechanics.  But it launched with equally thin content for leveling purposes and it launched in an environment where players expected a lot more.  And it made a few critical mistakes like freeform that reduced replay attractiveness.

CO's job was to meet the expectations of the players it had, not the players it dreamed it had in 2004.  City could launch broken in 2004.  CO could not.  And it made just a few critical mistakes that amplified that problem, and that set them on a downward spiral that in my opinion would have been very difficult to fix.  CO's game balance was badly broken, but CoH launched much more horribly.  But CO wasn't being compared to 2004 City, it was being compared to 2009 City.  2009 City was a vastly superior product.  And with other MMOs also competing for people's attentions, having thin content was probably one of the most serious sins for CO.  You just had to wait for them to fix that in CoH.  You could jump to any number of other games when you ran into that in CO.

Objectively speaking, I believe 2009 CO was better than 2004 City.  But 2009 CO needed to be at least as good as 2009 City because even if that wasn't the competition for all players, it was the standard.  CO failed to achieve that standard spectacularly.

I'm not a CoH bigot.  I actually bought a lifetime sub to CO.  I think it had a lot of promise, and unlike some CoH players I actually wanted CO to succeed.  But CO did not seem to think it had to fix the mistakes CoH did make and tried to fix CoH things that were not mistakes (in my opinion), and that's not a recipe for success.

[Abraxus]

What constantly astounds me is that, to date (at least that I am aware of), the specific things that made CoH a game that people still miss enough to launch an effort to resurrect it; have yet to be emulated to any real extent, in any other game.  Nobody has attempted to employ a character/costume creator, the sidekick system, the teaming dynamics, and so many more aspects of the game like the one we knew.  Most of this, in various states of functionality, have been around since its release, so it is not like there has not been ample opportunity for some developer of some unnamed game that was being planned to say "You know, the **fill in the awesome feature** in City of Heroes was out of this world.  Why don't we try to employ some of that here?".  But, it has never happened. 

Was it that doing so would have been some admission that they got it right, and as a matter of pride that just can't be allowed to happen?  I realize that the coding of those things would be protected, but the concepts or ideas about them surely cannot be.  I just don't get how such great ideas could not only go so unrecognized for their success in the game, but are so completely ignored as demonstrated by their lack of duplication/emulation.

[Dev7on]

I'm having one of those mornings.

Y'know how it goes. Waking up with that feeling of "GOD I CAN'T WAIT TO GET INTO PARAGON. MY SUPER GROUP NEEDS MY TANK TO RUN A TASKFORCE AND I HAVE CONTACTS IN PEREGRINE THAT I NEED TO CATCH UP WITH AND I HAVE A NEW COSTUME IDEA AND A BUILD TO TRY OUT AND I WANT TO /LEDGESIT FROM A BUILDING IN STEEL CANYON JUST BECAUSE AND..."

*explodes*

And then you're hit with that all-too familiar realization that you can't. And you're all  :'( :'( :'(

I recently had a City of Heroes dream similar to you. I was playing my Scrapper running around Talos Island beating up Tsoo. [sigh] Those were the good old days....  :gonk:

[LaughingAlex]

I'm not a CoH bigot.  I actually bought a lifetime sub to CO.  I think it had a lot of promise, and unlike some CoH players I actually wanted CO to succeed.  But CO did not seem to think it had to fix the mistakes CoH did make and tried to fix CoH things that were not mistakes (in my opinion), and that's not a recipe for success.

Other than the lifetime, the same paragraph describes me in a nutshell.  CO was a game I wanted to succeed.  It's what happened to CO that irritates me whenever I'm reminded of it.  (And why I view it the way I view it now.  Simply put, views of things change.).  Even if I never played CoH, I am pretty sure I'd have come to the same view of CO I have now :/.

[Sinistar]

I recently had a City of Heroes dream similar to you. I was playing my Scrapper running around Talos Island beating up Tsoo. [sigh] Those were the good old days....  :gonk:

I had the dream of using my electric armor or energy armor brute to hunt the energy beings in the storm palace Shadow Shard Zone and using special AE missions I had created with energy using enemies to farm with those alts.   S/L/NRG def cap :)

[blacksly]

What constantly astounds me is that, to date (at least that I am aware of), the specific things that made CoH a game that people still miss enough to launch an effort to resurrect it; have yet to be emulated to any real extent, in any other game.  Nobody has attempted to employ a character/costume creator, the sidekick system, the teaming dynamics, and so many more aspects of the game like the one we knew.  Most of this, in various states of functionality, have been around since its release, so it is not like there has not been ample opportunity for some developer of some unnamed game that was being planned to say "You know, the **fill in the awesome feature** in City of Heroes was out of this world.  Why don't we try to employ some of that here?".  But, it has never happened. 

Was it that doing so would have been some admission that they got it right, and as a matter of pride that just can't be allowed to happen?  I realize that the coding of those things would be protected, but the concepts or ideas about them surely cannot be.  I just don't get how such great ideas could not only go so unrecognized for their success in the game, but are so completely ignored as demonstrated by their lack of duplication/emulation.

I personally agree, however we are probably biased because clearly we loved CoH. So clearly, the type of game that CoH was, was the kind of game that we wanted to see. But other games (notably WoW) have done quiet well with very different design CHOICES (not an inability to copy).

WoW is largely oriented towards an end-game grind. Not completely, but greatly so... so, a sidekick/exemplar system is not nearly as useful. When your character is meant to play much or most of its life at the level cap along with others at the level cap, playing around with level equalization in teams is not nearly as important. I would like WoW to have it, but it's not as important for it as it is for an alt-oriented game.

Costume... again, looking at WoW: WoW prides itself on its visible gear. Getting the awesome-looking item is deliberately meant to be something that you manage by completing the right quest, not just by saying "I want that look". It's a deliberate choice, not a lack of ability. While to us it feels like it's just deliberately annoying, to the WoW designers, forcing a player to run through a side quest three flights away from your current region is a way to make them spend more time in the world. It's a literal player hook, not in the idea of drawing a player in, but of keeping a player in for longer once they do come in.

That's actually kind of the point for a lot of the choices... most other MMORPGs are oriented towards forcing a grind, whether leveling or end-game, in order to force players to spend more time before their main character is finished. And it's why WoW keeps bumping up the cap. Because they want to hook you on playing your main character forever and ever, and if you can get what you want too quickly (to team with your friend, to have most of the appearance that you want, etc), then they lose your playing time. And a game that isn't drawing you in to play for more minutes in a month is a game that they figure is not going to have a high retention. Whereas if you had to put in an ungodly number of hours to (temporarily) finish your Level 70 max-cap (at one time), then you're less likely to just drop that character when a new and shiny game comes out.

[Arcana]

What constantly astounds me is that, to date (at least that I am aware of), the specific things that made CoH a game that people still miss enough to launch an effort to resurrect it; have yet to be emulated to any real extent, in any other game.  Nobody has attempted to employ a character/costume creator, the sidekick system, the teaming dynamics, and so many more aspects of the game like the one we knew.  Most of this, in various states of functionality, have been around since its release, so it is not like there has not been ample opportunity for some developer of some unnamed game that was being planned to say "You know, the **fill in the awesome feature** in City of Heroes was out of this world.  Why don't we try to employ some of that here?".  But, it has never happened. 

Was it that doing so would have been some admission that they got it right, and as a matter of pride that just can't be allowed to happen?  I realize that the coding of those things would be protected, but the concepts or ideas about them surely cannot be.  I just don't get how such great ideas could not only go so unrecognized for their success in the game, but are so completely ignored as demonstrated by their lack of duplication/emulation.

Well, picture yourself as a developer of another MMO, trying to pitch *any* idea from CoH to your dev group.  Look at how great this feature is, you exclaim.  We should replicate that feature in our game.  And then someone else says "yeah, and then we can end up just like that game; oh wait."

There'a a couple of things to consider when thinking about this question.  First, if we are thinking about Cryptic people specifically, then you have to consider that all of the people who thought CoH game features were great features were very likely to want to split off to Paragon and continue to support the game.  Positron, Castle, and the rest believed in City of Heroes, and thus wanted to continue to develop it.  The people who thought there were better ways of doing it and wanted to try those, were more likely to go off with Cryptic and work on CO.  In fact the split goes deeper, to when Cryptic was working on supporting CoH and developing MUO (Marvel Universe Online).  Self-selection would tend to put CoH-believers into the team supporting CoH, and the can-do-betters into the team developing MUO.  That tended to be the team that eventually left with Cryptic.

It is not that everyone at Cryptic didn't believe in CoH, it is that a lot of them did, but most of them became our developers in Paragon Studios.

When you look at other MMOs, they tend to fall into one of two groups.  High end triple-A MMOs have tended, for the most part, to try to replicate World of Warcraft's success, with varying degrees of not.  But if you're going to aim for that target, your tendency is to look to its design features when it comes to looking for what will succeed.  By that standard CoH was always a failure: at no time did it have enough players, even at its peak, to support that sort of model.

Other MMOs, ones aimed at a niche and not at the universe, tend to be smaller affairs.  And when they are smaller, they tend to have smaller dev teams.  Smaller dev teams tend to have more personalized dev goals.  Each of those devs has much more say in what happens than they would in a larger dev group.  Each of them has a better chance of getting their own personal ideas into the game with less compromises.  So those dev teams encourage developers to implement their own visions for how things should work.  Any game designer worth anything at all will want to implement their own ideas more than copy someone elses.  That's why you get into the business in the first place.  So while they might copy ideas they see, they will tend to copy the ideas they believe in, and try to put their own spin on them.  So it is far less likely that any of those developers are former CoH players, and far less likely they would want to put their own spin on CoH's ideas.  They are far more likely to be WoW veterans, or Warhammer veterans, or AoC veterans, or Rift veterans.  They are more likely to have played the games that had more players in them, because of course.

And one final thing to consider.  Many CoH ideas would not be all that great in isolation.  If you want to steal from CoH, you have to steal the right *sets* of features, or less it may not be all that helpful: it might even be bad for you.  Global chat, side kicking, rapid travel, and minimal zone encounters combine to form the basis of CoH's rapid informal teaming system.  But put rapid travel in a game like SWTOR, for example, and you allow players to bypass all the zone work you made, and you can even break how the story model works.  The game is designed to *require* you to slog through that stuff in many places or the story, which is one of that game's few strengths, falls apart.  CoH's relatively light leveling curve makes sense because we have archetypes: our replay is tied significantly to being able to play different archetypes with substantially different gameplay feel.  When CO was all freeform, making the leveling curve short would have solved the content gap problem, but created a new problem of players running out of things to do because they did not have the same archetype-replay environment.

Games are not disconnected bags of features.  They are systems of interconnected features, with wheels inside of wheels.    The APU in the space shuttle performs a critical feature in the shuttle.  In my car it would perform the task of vaporizing me into a hot expanding gas cloud.

[Minotaur]

You'd have thought Cryptic would have learned from some of what was good in CoH though. I play NW, the level scaling is atrocious. There are situations where you are levelled up or down to a set level. There is no adjustment to your gear. This means that when I have cause to take my high level well geared nasty to a lowbie zone to kill a dragon, even though this is designed for 15 people of even level to kill in 20 minutes, I solo it in less than 2. The reverse problem exists, when they upped the level cap from 60-70 people were going into what were level 60 zones that they'd been killing groups in for a while, finding they were levelled up 10 levels as were the badguys, and they were getting taken down by one minion.

[Mistress Urd]

I personally agree, however we are probably biased because clearly we loved CoH. So clearly, the type of game that CoH was, was the kind of game that we wanted to see. But other games (notably WoW) have done quiet well with very different design CHOICES (not an inability to copy).

WoW is largely oriented towards an end-game grind. Not completely, but greatly so... so, a sidekick/exemplar system is not nearly as useful. When your character is meant to play much or most of its life at the level cap along with others at the level cap, playing around with level equalization in teams is not nearly as important. I would like WoW to have it, but it's not as important for it as it is for an alt-oriented game.

Costume... again, looking at WoW: WoW prides itself on its visible gear. Getting the awesome-looking item is deliberately meant to be something that you manage by completing the right quest, not just by saying "I want that look". It's a deliberate choice, not a lack of ability. While to us it feels like it's just deliberately annoying, to the WoW designers, forcing a player to run through a side quest three flights away from your current region is a way to make them spend more time in the world. It's a literal player hook, not in the idea of drawing a player in, but of keeping a player in for longer once they do come in.

That's actually kind of the point for a lot of the choices... most other MMORPGs are oriented towards forcing a grind, whether leveling or end-game, in order to force players to spend more time before their main character is finished. And it's why WoW keeps bumping up the cap. Because they want to hook you on playing your main character forever and ever, and if you can get what you want too quickly (to team with your friend, to have most of the appearance that you want, etc), then they lose your playing time. And a game that isn't drawing you in to play for more minutes in a month is a game that they figure is not going to have a high retention. Whereas if you had to put in an ungodly number of hours to (temporarily) finish your Level 70 max-cap (at one time), then you're less likely to just drop that character when a new and shiny game comes out.

I've been liking the system in Destiny, while hitting level cap isn't hard, took me about 2 weeks with casual (1-2 hours a night) play. To fully open up all of your character abilities takes much longer as each character AT has 2 additional subclasses to "skill" up. I see the "matchmaking" TF on destiny which is a lot like the summer blockbuster/Dr Kane. CoH had a lot of good features and they tried to keep improving them. Super Side Kicking, which was a real great improvement is CoH is also in destiny, so if you are new, your friend with a level 40 can just join you with no problems.