If there's one thing that CoH's devteam always did right, they was that they took their own setting fairly seriously in the worldbuilding department. You could entirely believe in the setting. They took the time to add the city plaques and even bugs got changed to amusing world info, like that one "Rikti phenomenon" with the NPC civvies running in circles over that building basement entrance...
It all had a really SOLID feeling to it. Real pity that the tabletop RPG didn't get to pan out.
...I apparently had this draft saved from the last flurry of activity in this thread, but I can't recall for the life of me what I wanted to say that related to all these quotes.
Anyway, I never really had a main in the sense people usually mean (I was constantly making alts, I had over 50 characters by the end, and that's not counting all the ones that got deleted or re-rolled), but ended up spending the most time on an Emp/Rad Defender on Virtue server just because I had joined a guild for members of a forum I used to be active on. Hell, I still fire up Icon once or twice a month just to concept out a character. The latest was kind of a mash-up of Samus Aran and the Knight Sabers hardsuits from Bubble Gum Crisis; you can get surprisingly close to BGC's aesthetic with the right armor & sci-fi bits.
Ony of my favorite comments from a dev comes to mind to do with Whatsisnehm, some fellow standing out in the open giving out quests. Why, asked a player, does he not help newbies who get swarmed and die right next to him?
He explained that those baddies won't give him xp.
Man, yeah. Here we are years on and there is fuck-all for new hotness superhero games. I'm still using Warframe as a surrogate. I miss my Kheldians. I don't miss my crab so much, he was powerful to the point where I considered him done with. The space lobsters died young.
Basil on
+2
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Considering how in vogue superheroes are at the moment I am honestly a bit surprised no one is capitalizing on it with an MMO.
Although I would argue we are curretnly in a lull period as far as MMOs go.
We started off fine.
Then WoW made more money than some European countries.
Everyone desperately attempts to copy WoW.
Hundreds of millions of dollars later Devs realized they couldn't just copy WoW.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Currently a lull.
Many Indie studios are creating smaller budget niche MMOs.
World waits for Blizzard's next MMO to start the cycle anew.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
+4
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
I remember my villain was named Professor Insano. I was so God damn proud of that name. :razz:
Suplex Sam is still my favorite gimmick character ever and I loved that you guys rolled with it. I can't remember who wrote the backstory for me but holy shit it was tremendous.
I remember my villain was named Professor Insano. I was so God damn proud of that name. :razz:
Suplex Sam is still my favorite gimmick character ever and I loved that you guys rolled with it. I can't remember who wrote the backstory for me but holy shit it was tremendous.
I think Kheebler was my favorite gimmick character. A Robots/Devices mastermind convinced that he was an elf that had been exiled from Santa's workshop after an industrial accident left him maimed. I rolled him intending to just pick him up for the winter events when they opened the ski slope so I could yell about wanting to kill Santa.
Turned out to be a lot of fun to play.
Named his robots French Hen 1,2 and 3 for the drones, Turtledove 1 and 2 for the protectors and Partridge IAPT for the assault bot.
It is genuinely sad to take a look at the various CoH attempted fan projects out there and what states they are in
Because, look, game development is hard. I've done it on the indie scale, and that's basically the scale these people are doing it at with their Patreons and Kickstarters and PonziGoGo and stuff.
And none of them seem to actually be game developers. Or programmers. Or artists. Or writers. Or really have any kind of applicable skills or talents to what they're trying to accomplish, and really are doing this stuff out of a desire to bilk rubes revitalize a game they love.
I understand all of that.
I also get that of all the possible genres they could be trying to create for their first game, they're all trying to create a full-blooded remake or revision of City of Heroes as a fucking MMO, a dying genre in the first place and literally the hardest possible for an indie team to put together for their first game.
None of them are say, trying to make a single player or even co-op multiplayer RPG with a smaller scope story, tighter zone design, etc. which wouldn't require dedicated servers or really intense netcode and instancing and shit.
No, they gotta dream as impossible as they can.
At best, they're quixotic buffoons. At worst, they're scam artists preying on a small and sad fanbase. I scowl at the lot of them.
Considering how in vogue superheroes are at the moment I am honestly a bit surprised no one is capitalizing on it with an MMO.
Although I would argue we are curretnly in a lull period as far as MMOs go.
We started off fine.
Then WoW made more money than some European countries.
Everyone desperately attempts to copy WoW.
Hundreds of millions of dollars later Devs realized they couldn't just copy WoW.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Currently a lull.
Many Indie studios are creating smaller budget niche MMOs.
World waits for Blizzard's next MMO to start the cycle anew.
There are 3 in development that I'm aware of:
Valiance Online
City of Titans
Ship of Heroes - I thought this was a pirate MMO forever, but it actually looks to be the game most like CoH. Makes sense because some of the devs are from the ol' CoH.
0
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited October 2017
I was more referring to all MMO genres, but yeah those are the only three superhero MMOs I know of too. All of which seem interchangeable to me. Although I suppose part of that is because they're all trying to copy CoH.
I also don't expect to see anything come of them. Though I'd love to be proven wrong.
While on the subject of a CoH successor I actually don't want a new superhero MMO to just be CoH: Again. As much as I loved CoH, MMOs have come a long way since those halcyon days. Probably about the only thing I'd want copied from CoH is the fantastically robust character creator.
I'm not even sure I'd want this hypothetical CoH successor to even be a full on MMO. I probably wouldn't be against that idea, but I feel like a quasi-mmo system, ala Warframe et al, would be a fine fit for the genre.
edit- Oh and the hypothetical CoH successor needs to nail the fun loving spirit of CoH too. Something Champions expertly failed at (which the Devs aren't fully at fault for).
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
MMO is a dying genre. Small scale RPG with 1-6 friends is where the sweet spot is now.
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
+5
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I wouldn't say it is a dying genre. It is in a bit of a lull, at least in the West. WoW is still doing great, FFXIV is kill'n it (and it is a subscription MMO no less), TESO released an expansion not long ago and is by all accounts doing well for itself and Guild Wars 2 just released their second expansion.
Korean Devs have been taking some amazing strides in the MMO world. Granted many of them trip and face plant after that stride, but some very fine things are being salvaged from their wreckage and they keep getting better every time.
Back in the West Devs have realized that making WoW-clones is dumb and have instead started to cater to more niche markets with smaller budgets. Many of which are moving away from the traditionally static worlds and are pushing for more player agency. You can see a pretty neat tonal shift in upcoming Western made MMOs compared to the Gold Rush era.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
The City of Titans folks definitely seem sincere, if completely unprepared for the reality of their project. They've clearly been hemorrhaging team members, judging by the dwindling list of people providing kickstarter updates, but the enterprise doesn't seem overtly compromised by corruption.
The Valiance Online team seems to be a couple egomaniacs at the top who think that their brilliant leadership is enough to ensure success, and then they're baffled when everyone else they recruit stops responding to emails as soon as the first check clears.
So in either case, they're falling apart, and a skeleton crew is doing its best to keep up appearances.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
+1
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited October 2017
It's not just that there was a "gold rush" phase of trying to make WoW-clones, it's that the expectations for the genre were warped to unrealistic levels by WoW's success. Very few MMO's that weren't Asian-made, principally for Asian markets, had experienced anything remotely like the success WoW had in its first year alone, let alone the 12 million or so that it reached at its peak. Companies were throwing money at development projects with the expectations of another mega-blockbuster, but meanwhile there were mmos that kept more realistic goals who were able to keep the doors open and do well for themselves with numbers in the hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands in some cases.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2017
People still have a warped perception of what "success" means for the MMO business. Bringing in a profit technically means success. If you have to subsidize or shrink the operation, it's not a success.
Instead what people do though is go "well WoW has x-million so that's the bar of success now." And it would fuck with how games were developed, or how currently operating games were treated. Hence City of Heroes. A game that was operating on a profit, but it wasn't WoW insane with its subscriber numbers, and also NCSoft wanted to subsidize its shithouse Aion, so here we all are. In perpetual mourning.
Edit - I still remember the reports about Korean stock holders going "WHAT THE FUCK" at NCSoft over this.
Oh really? I was under the impression that the stock holders were the sole reason they even killed CoX (to show that they were Doing Something).
0
KayWhat we need...Is a little bit of PANIC.Registered Userregular
I read that they killed CoX to keep Lineage going, and one of those MMOs wasn't making money. It was a show for stockholders that they were cutting costs?
MMO is a dying genre. Small scale RPG with 1-6 friends is where the sweet spot is now.
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
Its only dying in the sense that it is not blowing up and towering over all other game types. That happened for a while and now it has fallen into its own thing. A thing that as a whole still maintains millions of players per game over multiple successful games. maintains being such a key term that is way too easily overlooked. When a single game can keep people for many many years, it is pretty remarkable.
Blizzard will never make a new WoW because WoW will never lose its core player base. Which is the one that is still there when the game hits its low point. Which from what I remember, is still near 5 million. When someone else can completely smother that they might even consider making a new game. That likely will never happen until they just stop caring about the game at which point they likely stopped caring about the genre.
I read that they killed CoX to keep Lineage going, and one of those MMOs wasn't making money. It was a show for stockholders that they were cutting costs?
Definitely not Lineage, both 1 and 2 were still doing fine in South Korea at the time, although it's hard to get accurate subscription numbers for either since their business model relied heavily on selling bulk licenses to internet cafes without actually revealing how many unique users accessed those licenses and which games they played. Anyway, Aion has been cited more places as the probable under-performer they were trying to prop up. And Guild Wars 2 being heavily over budget around by launch time doesn't seem to have helped.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
MMO is a dying genre. Small scale RPG with 1-6 friends is where the sweet spot is now.
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
Its only dying in the sense that it is not blowing up and towering over all other game types. That happened for a while and now it has fallen into its own thing. A thing that as a whole still maintains millions of players per game over multiple successful games. maintains being such a key term that is way too easily overlooked. When a single game can keep people for many many years, it is pretty remarkable.
Blizzard will never make a new WoW because WoW will never lose its core player base. Which is the one that is still there when the game hits its low point. Which from what I remember, is still near 5 million. When someone else can completely smother that they might even consider making a new game. That likely will never happen until they just stop caring about the game at which point they likely stopped caring about the genre.
Ehhhhhh.
It's dying because the demographics of video game consumers has shifted drastically.
It impacted WoW to such a degree they had to change their entire game design to compensate for it.
Traditional MMO markets cater to the young gamer that can dump something like 20+ hours a week into a game. You see this with Asian MMOs. Asian MMOs do terribly in the US because no one wants to play them like that. I mean sure, people still play the games, and maybe they're "successful" if you stretch the meaning because the Asian markets will prop up the western ones.
WoW is an aberration, you will never get another MMO to beat it because people don't want to play MMOs, they want to play games with their friends. You look at WoW right now and people barely even do the MMO aspect of the game itself. If I get on to level my character I don't want to fight with 20 thousand people to play when I can only devote 30 minutes before I have shit to do.
When I say "dying" I don't mean as soon as it dies it's dead forever, it's just a fun word to replace "in a very serious lull and it's probably not a lucrative market to target as a game dev"
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
+4
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
I opened Mids for the first time in years today.
This game meant a lot to me over the years. I played since release and had a blast the entire time (ok, I was a bit miffed when ED rendered my defender useless BUT STILL). Superheroes has been one of my favorite genres since I was little, and this game had that in spades. You felt powerful, and definitely super, when taking on hordes of enemies. The character creator allowed me to play dress up, which is apparently something I still appreciate as I spend hours in Destiny 2 playing with shaders and costume bits. The game was lootless, allowing me to be as engaged or casual as I needed to be. It had SIDEKICKING and GLOBAL CHATS. And the community made use of those things to become such an amazing place.
I just loved this game to pieces. It also existed during probably the worst ten years of my life, and every time I found a way to bring it back into my world it provided a much needed pressure valve on the ongoing insanity of my daily existence. The last time City of Heroes and I crossed paths was in December of 2011, and that return lasted until the shutdown. Earlier that year my depression had gotten the better of me in a major way, and it eventually led to spending the month of December in a live-on-site therapy program as a last ditch effort to find my way back from the edge.
And I don't remember how it happened, but during my extremely limited amount of time with access to a computer, I learned that CoX had not only gone free-to-play that fall, but it was also thriving from the changes being made! And suddenly I had a light at the end of the tunnel. There was a point to all this painful and frustrating emotional work I was doing. I was gonna get my mind back together, get out of there, and play my fucking game.
My journaling started having pages of notes about character builds. I spent time on forums looking at the changes to my old setups. I eventually jacked their network security so I could download Mids. And I got better. It definitely wasn't all CoX. I did a lot of hard work during that month. But I knew I was going to have fun again when I got through with the work, and knowing that there was still fun in the world was like an oasis in the desert of my depression. Just to want something was a refreshing feeling.
In January I logged back in. By March I had secured a way to pay for a sub. Most days were still hard. But I dragged my ass to day programs and other supports, knowing that when I'd put the work in I could go suit up and punch some supervillains. This community on PA, and the rest of CoX helped make everything more bearable, and for that I will forever be grateful.
And yes, I find myself thinking about this game and its impact on me a lot. But I have to give credit where credit is due - the shutdown forced me to find new hobbies and new friends, which initiated another stage of growth in my life that is still wonderfully baffling to me. So I can be grateful for that too, I guess.
But I still miss it.
So I went and opened up Mids today. And decided to reminisce about the good times I had, and how they made surviving the bad times possible. And to say that while it may always twist the knife to see this thread open as the years go by, I appreciate that we can all remember those good times together.
It's weird, I still remember who some of you dudes were in game just from your forum handles. Glad to see you're doing well. Life is weird, I wasn't playing much anymore when the game was killed off, but I still miss it sometimes.
Can't imagine having much time to play if it was still around though.
That is, in some ways, the worst part.
If it came back today, I honestly don't know where I would find the time for it.
(A close runner up is how much of what I loved was the people, and those are gone now, dispersed and migrated, like me, to other shores.)
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
+1
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
MMO is a dying genre. Small scale RPG with 1-6 friends is where the sweet spot is now.
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
Its only dying in the sense that it is not blowing up and towering over all other game types. That happened for a while and now it has fallen into its own thing. A thing that as a whole still maintains millions of players per game over multiple successful games. maintains being such a key term that is way too easily overlooked. When a single game can keep people for many many years, it is pretty remarkable.
Blizzard will never make a new WoW because WoW will never lose its core player base. Which is the one that is still there when the game hits its low point. Which from what I remember, is still near 5 million. When someone else can completely smother that they might even consider making a new game. That likely will never happen until they just stop caring about the game at which point they likely stopped caring about the genre.
Ehhhhhh.
It's dying because the demographics of video game consumers has shifted drastically.
It impacted WoW to such a degree they had to change their entire game design to compensate for it.
Traditional MMO markets cater to the young gamer that can dump something like 20+ hours a week into a game. You see this with Asian MMOs. Asian MMOs do terribly in the US because no one wants to play them like that. I mean sure, people still play the games, and maybe they're "successful" if you stretch the meaning because the Asian markets will prop up the western ones.
WoW is an aberration, you will never get another MMO to beat it because people don't want to play MMOs, they want to play games with their friends. You look at WoW right now and people barely even do the MMO aspect of the game itself. If I get on to level my character I don't want to fight with 20 thousand people to play when I can only devote 30 minutes before I have shit to do.
When I say "dying" I don't mean as soon as it dies it's dead forever, it's just a fun word to replace "in a very serious lull and it's probably not a lucrative market to target as a game dev"
The MMO aspect was dungeons and Raids. Both are extremely active still.
People acted like WoW was about to go away because it ALMOST dipped below 5 million subs. Which is insane to say. The only time it was worse than that was when it was building up from its beginnings when that number was an absolute pipe dream for ANY game.
All the stuff you say about the genre is true, but unless your metric for a successful game is like Overwatch levels, many MMOs are doing super fine and not only have as many players as any of the best releases in other genres, they KEEP them. Which WoW is basically always going to do because those 5 million it always seems to keep are never going to leave even if they spend more time on forums bitching then playing.
I never heard of Ship of Heroes before this morning -- took a quick look at their site, and wow oh wow, is that a CoH clone! It doesn't look like they have made any updates at all. In anything. At all. Anywhere.
I never heard of Ship of Heroes before this morning -- took a quick look at their site, and wow oh wow, is that a CoH clone! It doesn't look like they have made any updates at all. In anything. At all. Anywhere.
Sheesh.
Looking over their website, they sure could stand to hire a professional writer or two. Their lore reads like the packaging copy from a knock-off Spider-Man figure for sale at a Chinese grocery store.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
MMO is a dying genre. Small scale RPG with 1-6 friends is where the sweet spot is now.
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
Its only dying in the sense that it is not blowing up and towering over all other game types. That happened for a while and now it has fallen into its own thing. A thing that as a whole still maintains millions of players per game over multiple successful games. maintains being such a key term that is way too easily overlooked. When a single game can keep people for many many years, it is pretty remarkable.
Blizzard will never make a new WoW because WoW will never lose its core player base. Which is the one that is still there when the game hits its low point. Which from what I remember, is still near 5 million. When someone else can completely smother that they might even consider making a new game. That likely will never happen until they just stop caring about the game at which point they likely stopped caring about the genre.
Ehhhhhh.
It's dying because the demographics of video game consumers has shifted drastically.
It impacted WoW to such a degree they had to change their entire game design to compensate for it.
Traditional MMO markets cater to the young gamer that can dump something like 20+ hours a week into a game. You see this with Asian MMOs. Asian MMOs do terribly in the US because no one wants to play them like that. I mean sure, people still play the games, and maybe they're "successful" if you stretch the meaning because the Asian markets will prop up the western ones.
WoW is an aberration, you will never get another MMO to beat it because people don't want to play MMOs, they want to play games with their friends. You look at WoW right now and people barely even do the MMO aspect of the game itself. If I get on to level my character I don't want to fight with 20 thousand people to play when I can only devote 30 minutes before I have shit to do.
When I say "dying" I don't mean as soon as it dies it's dead forever, it's just a fun word to replace "in a very serious lull and it's probably not a lucrative market to target as a game dev"
The MMO aspect was dungeons and Raids. Both are extremely active still.
People acted like WoW was about to go away because it ALMOST dipped below 5 million subs. Which is insane to say. The only time it was worse than that was when it was building up from its beginnings when that number was an absolute pipe dream for ANY game.
All the stuff you say about the genre is true, but unless your metric for a successful game is like Overwatch levels, many MMOs are doing super fine and not only have as many players as any of the best releases in other genres, they KEEP them. Which WoW is basically always going to do because those 5 million it always seems to keep are never going to leave even if they spend more time on forums bitching then playing.
I agree, chasing WoW's coattails was dumb and I have no idea why they were doing that. You look at games like Everquest and DAoC and CoH.. their operating budgets are large, sure, but the subscription of a few thousand people is all you really need to keep that afloat. I still think there's a huge market for small scale online RPGs. Think skyrim but you can invite a few friends to come play with you.
Obviously you'd want it to be all seamless, I'd love to see a large city in something like skyrim have an active swarm of people trading and doing shit too.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I agree that WoW-style mmos are probably done. The only one I can think of that's doing well and hasn't gone free to play is FF14. It'd be smart to aim a superhero game closer to Destiny.
The real trick would be figuring out a way let players build up their characters the way we can build up costumes. Maybe take a page from games like Pillars of Eternity- lots and lots of dialogue choices that lead to personality traits rather than a flat morality system? Like, is your character a Cape or Cowl? That would also make Foundry-like content more viable, as players would have way more freedom to craft strong stories, and the people who played them would be getting more out of it.
Another thing I'd want to see is a way to bring your alts into a character's gameplay. Marvel Heroes has "team ups" where you call in a B-list hero to help you out. It'd be cool if a superhero game let you do that with your alts.
I'd also completely separate the mechanics of power sets from their appearance. Instead of having a whole powerset for Fire, and another one for Lightning, you'd just have "Energy Projection." Whether that means you're firing lasers or tiny, angry leprechauns would be a costume choice. Players get more freedom, and devs only have to balance 5 or 6 classes and their hybrids.
+1
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I know its not an MMO thing to do but since we are pretty much leaning toward MMOs being online single player games you can play together, there is something I would like that likely would lend itself to super hero games.
I loved how the original Guild Wars would let you basically customize a team of AI assistants both in their build and gear. It was SUPER fun to set up a team of people to function as a strong unit. It doesn't have to have as many, but even one like mention in Marvel Heroes would be grand. If they could incorporate it into multiplayer modes even better. I think there is a market for something like that and it would be a new direction to try going in.
I know its not an MMO thing to do but since we are pretty much leaning toward MMOs being online single player games you can play together, there is something I would like that likely would lend itself to super hero games.
I loved how the original Guild Wars would let you basically customize a team of AI assistants both in their build and gear. It was SUPER fun to set up a team of people to function as a strong unit. It doesn't have to have as many, but even one like mention in Marvel Heroes would be grand. If they could incorporate it into multiplayer modes even better. I think there is a market for something like that and it would be a new direction to try going in.
This was my favorite feature, too.
Star Trek Online has a bit of this with their bridge officers; you can create officers out of whole cloth visually and skill-wise, and they follow you around on ground missions. They also "talk" to you, in that the game will use their portrait/model for dialog when appropriate (for example, your highest rank Science officer will be the one telling you about Science stuff that happens).
Sort of makes me want a modernized, 3rd-person Freedom Force. The player character controls their own narrative via dialog/decisions, and plot-integrated NPCs can be swapped out for custom creations (the cutscenes, etc would use the custom-character graphics). Gameplay is standard 3rd person hero-action with a robust team management element between action missions. Now if I could just get millions of dollars in funding, somehow...
God I just want a good super hero something that I can play with friends. I've always been big into the comic book super hero stuff, and CoH was not only my first MMO (not counting text MUDs) but also was how I really got into the forums, before CoH I was just a lurker.
Like man, you know how sometimes you and your friends will be hanging out and just say "Lets open a bar!" or "Lets create our own business!" sometimes when I read this thread I want to shout "Lets make a super hero MMO!"
You could probably reasonably make something like freedom force without millions of dollars of budget, maybe scale it up a bit and switch it to 3rd person instead of that weird 3d isometric.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I've said it before in this thread I think, but I still miss my fire/storm controller. Nothing quite like locking down a big group of mooks with an aoe hold, summoning a thunderstorm directly on top which keeps striking people with lightning while animated imps rampage through all of them. It's probably the most satisfying MMO build I've ever played.
Oh, and if all that didn't quite get them: giant tornado.
second of all, unless you are a big AAA studio, MMOs are the hardest, most impossible game genre for a company to make
if you are a group of friends or whatever who want to make a game because you love something, do not make a MMO, ever
make literally any other kind of game.
ANY OTHER KIND
like, why the blue fuck is there not a superhero RPG that is basically equivalent to Divinity 2? A co-op multiplayer RPG where you create your own superhero and play through a campaign with your mates
I've said it before in this thread I think, but I still miss my fire/storm controller. Nothing quite like locking down a big group of mooks with an aoe hold, summoning a thunderstorm directly on top which keeps striking people with lightning while animated imps rampage through all of them. It's probably the most satisfying MMO build I've ever played.
Oh, and if all that didn't quite get them: giant tornado.
Everyone who stayed 'til the end had that archetype they loved. I think my favorite was my Stone/stone brute. The damage. The pure chaos. Knock down, knock up, knock back, causing earthquakes with each mighty stomp. Powerful holds too.
My Ice/Elec blapper was fun too. Freeze 'em and Smash 'em. A lot of people hated blappers. 'cause with most powersets Blapping is incredibly high risk. Ice though has holds. Nothing like freezing down a boss and delivering the one-two-three combo of havoc and thunder and have his health drop like a rock.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I've noticed no game really takes the position of "you are a motherfucking god, so you should play like you are" which is what I really missed from CoH. I always like when WoW raids had toooooonnnns of mobs to be dealt with as a paladin tank and that's the closest I've felt to the pure raw "I'm awesome" thing that CoH did so well.
I should be able to dispatch of goons easily, even at low levels. Focus more on the story arcs and give me a bad guy to take down instead of making every single fight dangerous or something.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I've said it before in this thread I think, but I still miss my fire/storm controller. Nothing quite like locking down a big group of mooks with an aoe hold, summoning a thunderstorm directly on top which keeps striking people with lightning while animated imps rampage through all of them. It's probably the most satisfying MMO build I've ever played.
Oh, and if all that didn't quite get them: giant tornado.
Everyone who stayed 'til the end had that archetype they loved. I think my favorite was my Stone/stone brute. The damage. The pure chaos. Knock down, knock up, knock back, causing earthquakes with each mighty stomp. Powerful holds too.
My Ice/Elec blapper was fun too. Freeze 'em and Smash 'em. A lot of people hated blappers. 'cause with most powersets Blapping is incredibly high risk. Ice though has holds. Nothing like freezing down a boss and delivering the one-two-three combo of havoc and thunder and have his health drop like a rock.
I think Fire/Kin controller was probably my favorite.
I didn't roll one early, back in the days when you could six slot hasten to keep that up permanently, then stack it with the siphon speed and get a horde of fire imps following you and leaving a path of burning bad guy bodies in your wake. I remember seeing one bounce through Boomtown with his army of imps though, and it was a beautiful sight.
But even later when you could only have one casting of imps out at a time, and enhancement diversification made more than 3 slots in hasten a waste, getting off that perfect fulcrum shift to buff your imps and watch them tear through mobs (which, of course, you'd blinded/held/disoriented and slowed, because you're a controller and that's what you do) like paper was a lot of fun.
Posts
...I apparently had this draft saved from the last flurry of activity in this thread, but I can't recall for the life of me what I wanted to say that related to all these quotes.
Anyway, I never really had a main in the sense people usually mean (I was constantly making alts, I had over 50 characters by the end, and that's not counting all the ones that got deleted or re-rolled), but ended up spending the most time on an Emp/Rad Defender on Virtue server just because I had joined a guild for members of a forum I used to be active on. Hell, I still fire up Icon once or twice a month just to concept out a character. The latest was kind of a mash-up of Samus Aran and the Knight Sabers hardsuits from Bubble Gum Crisis; you can get surprisingly close to BGC's aesthetic with the right armor & sci-fi bits.
He explained that those baddies won't give him xp.
Man, yeah. Here we are years on and there is fuck-all for new hotness superhero games. I'm still using Warframe as a surrogate. I miss my Kheldians. I don't miss my crab so much, he was powerful to the point where I considered him done with. The space lobsters died young.
Although I would argue we are curretnly in a lull period as far as MMOs go.
We started off fine.
Then WoW made more money than some European countries.
Everyone desperately attempts to copy WoW.
Hundreds of millions of dollars later Devs realized they couldn't just copy WoW.
Once bitten, twice shy.
Currently a lull.
Many Indie studios are creating smaller budget niche MMOs.
World waits for Blizzard's next MMO to start the cycle anew.
I think Kheebler was my favorite gimmick character. A Robots/Devices mastermind convinced that he was an elf that had been exiled from Santa's workshop after an industrial accident left him maimed. I rolled him intending to just pick him up for the winter events when they opened the ski slope so I could yell about wanting to kill Santa.
Turned out to be a lot of fun to play.
Named his robots French Hen 1,2 and 3 for the drones, Turtledove 1 and 2 for the protectors and Partridge IAPT for the assault bot.
Because, look, game development is hard. I've done it on the indie scale, and that's basically the scale these people are doing it at with their Patreons and Kickstarters and PonziGoGo and stuff.
And none of them seem to actually be game developers. Or programmers. Or artists. Or writers. Or really have any kind of applicable skills or talents to what they're trying to accomplish, and really are doing this stuff out of a desire to bilk rubes revitalize a game they love.
I understand all of that.
I also get that of all the possible genres they could be trying to create for their first game, they're all trying to create a full-blooded remake or revision of City of Heroes as a fucking MMO, a dying genre in the first place and literally the hardest possible for an indie team to put together for their first game.
None of them are say, trying to make a single player or even co-op multiplayer RPG with a smaller scope story, tighter zone design, etc. which wouldn't require dedicated servers or really intense netcode and instancing and shit.
No, they gotta dream as impossible as they can.
At best, they're quixotic buffoons. At worst, they're scam artists preying on a small and sad fanbase. I scowl at the lot of them.
*lands on roof of skyscraper that for some reason has enemies on it*
*activates Force Bubble*
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
There are 3 in development that I'm aware of:
Valiance Online
City of Titans
Ship of Heroes - I thought this was a pirate MMO forever, but it actually looks to be the game most like CoH. Makes sense because some of the devs are from the ol' CoH.
I also don't expect to see anything come of them. Though I'd love to be proven wrong.
While on the subject of a CoH successor I actually don't want a new superhero MMO to just be CoH: Again. As much as I loved CoH, MMOs have come a long way since those halcyon days. Probably about the only thing I'd want copied from CoH is the fantastically robust character creator.
I'm not even sure I'd want this hypothetical CoH successor to even be a full on MMO. I probably wouldn't be against that idea, but I feel like a quasi-mmo system, ala Warframe et al, would be a fine fit for the genre.
edit- Oh and the hypothetical CoH successor needs to nail the fun loving spirit of CoH too. Something Champions expertly failed at (which the Devs aren't fully at fault for).
If you really want the MMO aspect, build a "town" where people can go into, or just a group finder tool and use steam's API to handle it all, which is all anyone really needs anyways.
Korean Devs have been taking some amazing strides in the MMO world. Granted many of them trip and face plant after that stride, but some very fine things are being salvaged from their wreckage and they keep getting better every time.
Back in the West Devs have realized that making WoW-clones is dumb and have instead started to cater to more niche markets with smaller budgets. Many of which are moving away from the traditionally static worlds and are pushing for more player agency. You can see a pretty neat tonal shift in upcoming Western made MMOs compared to the Gold Rush era.
The Valiance Online team seems to be a couple egomaniacs at the top who think that their brilliant leadership is enough to ensure success, and then they're baffled when everyone else they recruit stops responding to emails as soon as the first check clears.
So in either case, they're falling apart, and a skeleton crew is doing its best to keep up appearances.
Instead what people do though is go "well WoW has x-million so that's the bar of success now." And it would fuck with how games were developed, or how currently operating games were treated. Hence City of Heroes. A game that was operating on a profit, but it wasn't WoW insane with its subscriber numbers, and also NCSoft wanted to subsidize its shithouse Aion, so here we all are. In perpetual mourning.
Edit - I still remember the reports about Korean stock holders going "WHAT THE FUCK" at NCSoft over this.
3DS FCode: 1993-7512-8991
Change is good, right?
Quite right!
Its only dying in the sense that it is not blowing up and towering over all other game types. That happened for a while and now it has fallen into its own thing. A thing that as a whole still maintains millions of players per game over multiple successful games. maintains being such a key term that is way too easily overlooked. When a single game can keep people for many many years, it is pretty remarkable.
Blizzard will never make a new WoW because WoW will never lose its core player base. Which is the one that is still there when the game hits its low point. Which from what I remember, is still near 5 million. When someone else can completely smother that they might even consider making a new game. That likely will never happen until they just stop caring about the game at which point they likely stopped caring about the genre.
Definitely not Lineage, both 1 and 2 were still doing fine in South Korea at the time, although it's hard to get accurate subscription numbers for either since their business model relied heavily on selling bulk licenses to internet cafes without actually revealing how many unique users accessed those licenses and which games they played. Anyway, Aion has been cited more places as the probable under-performer they were trying to prop up. And Guild Wars 2 being heavily over budget around by launch time doesn't seem to have helped.
Ehhhhhh.
It's dying because the demographics of video game consumers has shifted drastically.
It impacted WoW to such a degree they had to change their entire game design to compensate for it.
Traditional MMO markets cater to the young gamer that can dump something like 20+ hours a week into a game. You see this with Asian MMOs. Asian MMOs do terribly in the US because no one wants to play them like that. I mean sure, people still play the games, and maybe they're "successful" if you stretch the meaning because the Asian markets will prop up the western ones.
WoW is an aberration, you will never get another MMO to beat it because people don't want to play MMOs, they want to play games with their friends. You look at WoW right now and people barely even do the MMO aspect of the game itself. If I get on to level my character I don't want to fight with 20 thousand people to play when I can only devote 30 minutes before I have shit to do.
When I say "dying" I don't mean as soon as it dies it's dead forever, it's just a fun word to replace "in a very serious lull and it's probably not a lucrative market to target as a game dev"
This game meant a lot to me over the years. I played since release and had a blast the entire time (ok, I was a bit miffed when ED rendered my defender useless BUT STILL). Superheroes has been one of my favorite genres since I was little, and this game had that in spades. You felt powerful, and definitely super, when taking on hordes of enemies. The character creator allowed me to play dress up, which is apparently something I still appreciate as I spend hours in Destiny 2 playing with shaders and costume bits. The game was lootless, allowing me to be as engaged or casual as I needed to be. It had SIDEKICKING and GLOBAL CHATS. And the community made use of those things to become such an amazing place.
I just loved this game to pieces. It also existed during probably the worst ten years of my life, and every time I found a way to bring it back into my world it provided a much needed pressure valve on the ongoing insanity of my daily existence. The last time City of Heroes and I crossed paths was in December of 2011, and that return lasted until the shutdown. Earlier that year my depression had gotten the better of me in a major way, and it eventually led to spending the month of December in a live-on-site therapy program as a last ditch effort to find my way back from the edge.
And I don't remember how it happened, but during my extremely limited amount of time with access to a computer, I learned that CoX had not only gone free-to-play that fall, but it was also thriving from the changes being made! And suddenly I had a light at the end of the tunnel. There was a point to all this painful and frustrating emotional work I was doing. I was gonna get my mind back together, get out of there, and play my fucking game.
My journaling started having pages of notes about character builds. I spent time on forums looking at the changes to my old setups. I eventually jacked their network security so I could download Mids. And I got better. It definitely wasn't all CoX. I did a lot of hard work during that month. But I knew I was going to have fun again when I got through with the work, and knowing that there was still fun in the world was like an oasis in the desert of my depression. Just to want something was a refreshing feeling.
In January I logged back in. By March I had secured a way to pay for a sub. Most days were still hard. But I dragged my ass to day programs and other supports, knowing that when I'd put the work in I could go suit up and punch some supervillains. This community on PA, and the rest of CoX helped make everything more bearable, and for that I will forever be grateful.
And yes, I find myself thinking about this game and its impact on me a lot. But I have to give credit where credit is due - the shutdown forced me to find new hobbies and new friends, which initiated another stage of growth in my life that is still wonderfully baffling to me. So I can be grateful for that too, I guess.
But I still miss it.
So I went and opened up Mids today. And decided to reminisce about the good times I had, and how they made surviving the bad times possible. And to say that while it may always twist the knife to see this thread open as the years go by, I appreciate that we can all remember those good times together.
Also, FUCK Ncsoft
Can't imagine having much time to play if it was still around though.
If it came back today, I honestly don't know where I would find the time for it.
(A close runner up is how much of what I loved was the people, and those are gone now, dispersed and migrated, like me, to other shores.)
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
The MMO aspect was dungeons and Raids. Both are extremely active still.
People acted like WoW was about to go away because it ALMOST dipped below 5 million subs. Which is insane to say. The only time it was worse than that was when it was building up from its beginnings when that number was an absolute pipe dream for ANY game.
All the stuff you say about the genre is true, but unless your metric for a successful game is like Overwatch levels, many MMOs are doing super fine and not only have as many players as any of the best releases in other genres, they KEEP them. Which WoW is basically always going to do because those 5 million it always seems to keep are never going to leave even if they spend more time on forums bitching then playing.
Sheesh.
Looking over their website, they sure could stand to hire a professional writer or two. Their lore reads like the packaging copy from a knock-off Spider-Man figure for sale at a Chinese grocery store.
I agree, chasing WoW's coattails was dumb and I have no idea why they were doing that. You look at games like Everquest and DAoC and CoH.. their operating budgets are large, sure, but the subscription of a few thousand people is all you really need to keep that afloat. I still think there's a huge market for small scale online RPGs. Think skyrim but you can invite a few friends to come play with you.
Obviously you'd want it to be all seamless, I'd love to see a large city in something like skyrim have an active swarm of people trading and doing shit too.
The real trick would be figuring out a way let players build up their characters the way we can build up costumes. Maybe take a page from games like Pillars of Eternity- lots and lots of dialogue choices that lead to personality traits rather than a flat morality system? Like, is your character a Cape or Cowl? That would also make Foundry-like content more viable, as players would have way more freedom to craft strong stories, and the people who played them would be getting more out of it.
Another thing I'd want to see is a way to bring your alts into a character's gameplay. Marvel Heroes has "team ups" where you call in a B-list hero to help you out. It'd be cool if a superhero game let you do that with your alts.
I'd also completely separate the mechanics of power sets from their appearance. Instead of having a whole powerset for Fire, and another one for Lightning, you'd just have "Energy Projection." Whether that means you're firing lasers or tiny, angry leprechauns would be a costume choice. Players get more freedom, and devs only have to balance 5 or 6 classes and their hybrids.
I loved how the original Guild Wars would let you basically customize a team of AI assistants both in their build and gear. It was SUPER fun to set up a team of people to function as a strong unit. It doesn't have to have as many, but even one like mention in Marvel Heroes would be grand. If they could incorporate it into multiplayer modes even better. I think there is a market for something like that and it would be a new direction to try going in.
This was my favorite feature, too.
Star Trek Online has a bit of this with their bridge officers; you can create officers out of whole cloth visually and skill-wise, and they follow you around on ground missions. They also "talk" to you, in that the game will use their portrait/model for dialog when appropriate (for example, your highest rank Science officer will be the one telling you about Science stuff that happens).
Sort of makes me want a modernized, 3rd-person Freedom Force. The player character controls their own narrative via dialog/decisions, and plot-integrated NPCs can be swapped out for custom creations (the cutscenes, etc would use the custom-character graphics). Gameplay is standard 3rd person hero-action with a robust team management element between action missions. Now if I could just get millions of dollars in funding, somehow...
Like man, you know how sometimes you and your friends will be hanging out and just say "Lets open a bar!" or "Lets create our own business!" sometimes when I read this thread I want to shout "Lets make a super hero MMO!"
Oh, and if all that didn't quite get them: giant tornado.
stop trying to make superhero MMOs
stop it
STOP IT
first of all, MMOs are a dying genre
second of all, unless you are a big AAA studio, MMOs are the hardest, most impossible game genre for a company to make
if you are a group of friends or whatever who want to make a game because you love something, do not make a MMO, ever
make literally any other kind of game.
ANY OTHER KIND
like, why the blue fuck is there not a superhero RPG that is basically equivalent to Divinity 2? A co-op multiplayer RPG where you create your own superhero and play through a campaign with your mates
why does that not exist
like, just look at everything Divinity 2 does
now
make it a superhero game
WHY IS THAT SO HARD
I was fond of standing next to Lady Liberty and hitting all the new players with super jump powers.
Then you waited and watched them attempt to jump up the steps to City Hall and suddenly they are on the roof.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
4-5 person netcode is much easier to implement than MMO.
Everyone who stayed 'til the end had that archetype they loved. I think my favorite was my Stone/stone brute. The damage. The pure chaos. Knock down, knock up, knock back, causing earthquakes with each mighty stomp. Powerful holds too.
My Ice/Elec blapper was fun too. Freeze 'em and Smash 'em. A lot of people hated blappers. 'cause with most powersets Blapping is incredibly high risk. Ice though has holds. Nothing like freezing down a boss and delivering the one-two-three combo of havoc and thunder and have his health drop like a rock.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I should be able to dispatch of goons easily, even at low levels. Focus more on the story arcs and give me a bad guy to take down instead of making every single fight dangerous or something.
I think Fire/Kin controller was probably my favorite.
I didn't roll one early, back in the days when you could six slot hasten to keep that up permanently, then stack it with the siphon speed and get a horde of fire imps following you and leaving a path of burning bad guy bodies in your wake. I remember seeing one bounce through Boomtown with his army of imps though, and it was a beautiful sight.
But even later when you could only have one casting of imps out at a time, and enhancement diversification made more than 3 slots in hasten a waste, getting off that perfect fulcrum shift to buff your imps and watch them tear through mobs (which, of course, you'd blinded/held/disoriented and slowed, because you're a controller and that's what you do) like paper was a lot of fun.