New efforts!

[ivanhedgehog]

ive just returned after a long time away and I see things happeneing. can some one give an update to us folks so we dont go blind reading 300 pages? what is happening?

[Blue Cloak]

ive just returned after a long time away and I see things happeneing. can some one give an update to us folks so we dont go blind reading 300 pages? what is happening?

The first post has the most up to date info. Everything else is kinda just a general chat while we wait for more.

[TonyV]

Nothin' much.  People are talking, deals are still being worked on, yadda yadda yadda.

[Angel Phoenix77]

The first post has the most up to date info. Everything else is kinda just a general chat while we wait for more.

exactly, this sit is almost like the original message boards :), I  like the idol chitchat :)

[Nealix]

Unless they completely change the mechanics it can't feel like DCUO. DCUO is arcadey combo and close to twitch gaming. CoH is not.

But let me ask this, did Ultra mode destroy the feel of the game? Not for me and I suspect many others.

But it's confusing to me to advocate that dumping the lore and moving everything to a new city DOESN'T destroy the feel of the game, but porting to a new graphics system DOES.

Wasn't there a discussion about how porting to an unreal engine would change the feel of the game?  New engine, new gameplay, is how I understood it.  Ultramode was great!  It was the same game engine though right?  That was my understanding, which is flawed by lack of an IT background.  Would we be playing an unreal game which felt more like Borderlands or something?  I would give it a shot but I love he gameplay in CoH as is.

[Blue Cloak]

Wasn't there a discussion about how porting to an unreal engine would change the feel of the game?  New engine, new gameplay, is how I understood it.  Ultramode was great!  It was the same game engine though right?  That was my understanding, which is flawed by lack of an IT background.  Would we be playing an unreal game which felt more like Borderlands or something?  I would give it a shot but I love he gameplay in CoH as is.

The unreal Engine is much more flexible than you think, i'm assuming the plan is to try to recreate the game as much as possible using the new tools available. Hopefuly if they do it right the game will play exactly the same but the code will no longer be an eldritch horror to gaze apon.

[Scendera]

No, it's extremely customizable and there's nothing saying it would be anything like Borderlands...which while a fantastic game that I've burned many hours of my life on, would still be all wrong for CoH.

I'd go as far as to say that the main reason to choose UR4 *is* how beautifully it can be customized to get exactly the look and feel you want.

[Golden Girl]

Graphics-wise, it's also important not to try and look too realistic - a comic book game should really look closer to a comic book than a comic book movie.

[MWRuger]

Wasn't there a discussion about how porting to an unreal engine would change the feel of the game?  New engine, new gameplay, is how I understood it.  Ultramode was great!  It was the same game engine though right?  That was my understanding, which is flawed by lack of an IT background.  Would we be playing an unreal game which felt more like Borderlands or something?  I would give it a shot but I love he gameplay in CoH as is.

The gameplay engine (which controls the gameplay mechanics) and the graphics engine (which renders what you see) are separate on most modern games. CoH does not do that and that is part of the problem. You can't just plug in a new engine.

Lots of very dissimilar games use the same engines. That said some engines do better at some things than others and some have limits on how big an environment you make. Scaling is important as is draw distance. Some handle weapons fire better. Just depends on what you want to model. In addition, there are rendering and texture packs that you can add to engines to extend and add capability.

[Codewalker]

Ultramode was great!  It was the same game engine though right?

Ultra mode was a mostly new rendering engine, though designed in a particular way as to be a drop-in replacement for the old one (which is still present and can be accessed with command line parameters).

The game engine is not directly connected to that and ultra mode didn't change it, however the game engine underwent constant improvement and gained many new features from 2004 to 2012.

[MWRuger]

I just want to add that no matter what direction the new team takes the game in, I hope that we will always have the original is some way. It is a great game and even with flaws is still what I would choose to play over much shinier and more sparkly games.

That way if they do somehow break the feel of the game we'll still have Paragon City!

[Luna Eclypse]

APB is an online game designed on the Unreal Engine but there are issues with hacks and aim bots because those calculations are handled client-side and not well protected. Not even the presence of Punkbuster can prevent it. Yes, it's not the same kind of game and the mechanics are different but that's still an issue I am concerned with if they are going to move CoH to the Unreal Engine. What will be calculated client-side in combat or in vendor transactions? I'm assuming all of that was handled server-side with the original game and that they'd continue to leave it so.

[Wyrm]

Heh, you make it sound like opinions on this forum will be a directly implemented into the new game

Of course opinions about what we'd like/wouldn't like won't go straight into the game.  That's a "creative" take on what I said. 

(which is not true because their just my personal ideas and we don't even know if CoH 2 let alone CoX will be online)
It's also sounds like your trying to quash any ideas or any play style that is not your own.

Sorry, but you are not allowed to make me into a villain in this conversation just because I happened to disagree with you.  The fact that aspects of your suggestion don't fit with my playstyle is much less important in the long run than the fact that they don't fit with the spirit of CoH, which never required a large static group for anything.  If you had one, it made coordination of raids and trials easier, but not having one didn't result in automatic exclusion.

You are right that one of the lures of CoX is that you can team up with anyone, any level, any time with ease. Heck you can get a incanate trail going in a pug. My idea is not making you join a big SG. You can choose on the level of SG mission based on your SG (casual or hardcore). The SG mission are there as an option. If you don't want to do them, then you don't have to. Just having the option there is nice.

Your "option" would lock people who are not in large SGs out of aspects of content, based on what you originally described.  That wasn't part of the original game, so just as you have a right to offer your opinion on why you would like this potentially added, I have the right to offer my opinion on why I think it would go against the spirit of the game and be needlessly exclusionary.

You're also adding details in your response that weren't present in the original posting.  I hope you can forgive me if I couldn't read your mind. ;)

It's like I said.  I'd have to "wait and see" on something with multiple locales.  I would be vehemently opposed to systems that turned the CoH endgame into something like what I see in other MMOs, though.  If that's not what you're proposing, fine - but that's how it sounded, as originally presented.

All I really want is my game back. :)

[MWRuger]

APB is an online game designed on the Unreal Engine but there are issues with hacks and aim bots because those calculations are handled client-side and not well protected. Not even the presence of Punkbuster can prevent it. Yes, it's not the same kind of game and the mechanics are different but that's still an issue I am concerned with if they are going to move CoH to the Unreal Engine. What will be calculated client-side in combat or in vendor transactions? I'm assuming all of that was handled server-side with the original game and that they'd continue to leave it so.

That's just bad design. No good reason to do it that way unless you are very tight on bandwidth and/or worried about client's have a good connectivity. I doubt that CoH2 would do that. Actually, I'm surprised that anybody does that.

[Blue Cloak]

This is really really good. And it totally fits - Back Alley Brawler and the Regulators dedicated themselves to ending Superadine, and it makes sense that player heroes would have similar causes. I think lots of people wanted to see more player villain scheming, rather than wokring for Arachnos / your contact, and gameplay like this would solve that issue. I htink a new engine would allow for this not only in a sort of "getting mission from home base" sort of way, that moves you along a certain arc, but also as you go around the city, you could encounter random events that may move you along certain paths. Even as you go through the "normal" story arcs, you could work towards your master goal, either by taking out certain villains associated with your life's work, or by acquiring certain pieces that go towards building your ultimate death ray.

I think there NEEDS to be multiple 1-50 paths. One of the things that turned me away from CoV at the beginning was the lack of starting contacts - 1, then 2, eventually. The move from 10 to 1 in CoH was a BIG mistake, in my opinion.

Because playing alts is a HUGE component of CoH, it is important that the gameplay doesn't become stale. Yes, even when CoH was launched you had several initial contacts with a few common story arcs, and that got funneled in to just a few, maybe up to 2, in the 40-50 level range, but it was still enough that you didn't get bored making alts. Plus, by the time the game had matured a bit, there was enough content that if you wanted to level 1-50 multiple times, you could do it in mostly different ways.

Combining both this and the import Idea, a benefit, of bringing over your old characters is unlocking special LW/MP based on what you have accomplished before, so lets say you have the Vanguard badge, your character would get a special LW working with vanguard against the Rikti  different from the normal Rikti LW path because you would already be trusted and in the know from the start. and so on and so forth.

[Waffles]

While I was playing SWTOR, I told some random guy about this thread, got him pumped, felt good.

[Wyrm]

I think there NEEDS to be multiple 1-50 paths. One of the things that turned me away from CoV at the beginning was the lack of starting contacts - 1, then 2, eventually. The move from 10 to 1 in CoH was a BIG mistake, in my opinion.

I agree with you, but I think you're talking about two separate issues, since the number of starting contacts and the variety of early-game experience is important, but that's a very small chunk of the journey to 50.

We had 2 distinct "paths" in the original game (Paragon City/Rogue Isles) and could do a chunk of the game starting in Praetoria, which might have eventually had a full 1-50 path.

There were many more people in one of those paths than the other two.  It was more difficult to find groups for CoV than CoH side, and I remember the Praet zones being kind of ghost-towns after the initial rush wore off.

That's what I'm concerned about.  There will be more popular "paths" for one reason or another, and people who wind up on the less popular paths will end up with poor impressions of the game.

Edited to add:  The rest of your quote - which I accidentally snipped - was spot-on.  There were a lot of ways to get from 1-50 in Paragon; with all the alts I leveled, I don't think I ever had the same experience twice.  I apologize for sounding like I didn't support that kind of diversity of options, since I definitely do. 

[LaughingAlex]

Graphics-wise, it's also important not to try and look too realistic - a comic book game should really look closer to a comic book than a comic book movie.

I hate to say it though, but CO's outline effect, even as someone who normally likes CO, the outlines reaallly detract from the game.  But playing DCUO I can tell you that its not to realistic looking, in fact it's very comic book like, but it's unreal engine 3 to.

[sindyr]

Maybe it's foolish , but I consider issue 25/coh2 just one helluvan update with a new engine and character model. Maybe some content retired, some added and other parts remodeled.

I am not ready to part with COH again when we still do not have it back.

A city can be a zone.  A zone could be a city.  I still want our moon base.

I love checking this thread over lunch and after work.

This would be my preference as well. CoH2 as a port of existing mechanics and content to a better interface, with a few new bits and pieces, but no loss of anything.

[sindyr]

I would probably stick with static issue 24 CoH over a true sequel. If CoH2 is a revamp/continuation with new technology (minus some understandable losses, ie. bases) then I would be all in for that effort.

Same here.