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[CoH/CoV] Chat: Big patch! Spring Fling event! ITT we plan Accualt's wedding.
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Pretty much what gear said.
If you read the thread a lot of us who played for a long time, or still play, have a lot of gripes about the game. But you came and went off about everything and made it sound like it was the worst game ever made in the history of ever.
And it's not, by any stretch.
In fact, I have a lot of the same gripes you do, but none are apparently enough to cause me to hate it with such venom. Also, there are a lot of fun things about the game and you pretty much dismiss any possibility of someone enjoying the game and present it as a steaming pile of shit with zero redeeming qualities.
But besides that, yes, I have a pet peeve with people who come into any thread and shit all over something and then just bail, who were never part of the thread in the first place. It just just assholeish, tends to cause drama among the thread regulars and provides no benefit or purpose other than to just be a dick.
Anyway, having said all that; I'm way into someone coming and making a new superhero MMO and making it good, and better than CoX. It would be nice if it were in an established universe that people cared about (seriously, who thinks WoW would have even been a blip on the MMO-meter if it wasn't by Blizzard and in already established and loved lore), so that it was more immersive from the get go. That's not to say a new universe can't be immersive, but it has to be built upon and takes time for a player to really get into it, which in the MMO marketplace these days companies can't afford to allow that time for the designers. You have to hit the player quick and suck them in. I won't say if this is good or bad from a design standpoint, but it's true. Who cares if the story of CoX is fleshed out and in-depth now. At launch it has virtually zero lore than anyone cared/knew about, and the arcs in game, at the time, did nothing to assist this. Add on the witch hunt for players who even resembled a Marvel/DC character a large portion of potential playerbase was lost from day one.
Lets hope Cryptic learned from this.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Theres actually a fairly decent amount of lore in CoH, and a lot of it is written fairly well. One of the few positive things I have to say about Statesman is that he has a great background for creative writing of this sort, having degrees in both history and mythology.
However, if you think the lore in CoH is not so hot, you should probably be concered about how it would be handled in Champions Online, since it will be being done under a crew made up of in par by original CoX devs.
Also, something to keep in mind about Champions and possible balance problems. Guess who is still with Cryptic? Geko, the guy who designed such a badly broken power system for CoH that we had to go through multiple total rebalancings of the game.
Somehow, any new game with its powers potentially being designed by that dude doesn't have much hope of being else but a total balance clusterfuck.
Of course the Box isn't behind all of it, the Mu bloodline is in about a billion people and can probably be blamed for 90% of magically talented individuals. And there's Kheldians and other aliens, and Nemesis for certain is a self-made man.
I think the more details you know, the more you appreciate the other little details that might other be meaningless. Like why the water from the Well of Furies is considered valuable, or how the Skulls, Trolls, Family, and Sky Raiders are all tied together.
Or that one 10-14 mission where the Skulls are bombing some random place and you don't find out why til a followup 45+ mission.
The first time I found out what the deal was with the Lost, it was like... whoa.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The truth about the CoT and Baron Zoria was a big one for me though, since pre-launch Baron Zoria had been hyped as one of the major bad guys like Countess Crey and Nemesis.
You're well-versed in its redeeming qualities; so others shouldn't need to reiterate them every time someone brings up the bad. When comparing it to a future game created by the same company, you better be damned sure I'll bring up the worst parts of their first child. Here's hoping they've learned a thing or two along the way.
The game's lore does come across to me as mostly shallow, unimaginative and bland. That's subjective, yeah... so if someone reading my post has played the game, they will either agree or disagree with me, based on their experience with the content as well as their own likes and dislikes. Now, if it's a new guy that hasn't played it yet... if they're choosing not to try it due to a weak storyline, it's their own fault.
Now, the engine? No. That's not up for discussion; it's a terrible engine from a technological standpoint. I could list all the glaring flaws again, but if you play the same game I do, you know what they are. There's no way to sugarcoat this one. As I said before, CoX's development team should be praising the gods they have incredible customization, awesome gameplay and a unique take on the MMO genre... because the monstrosity under the hood is what cripples it the most. It's THAT bad.
So I can't rant on the less than glorious aspects of this game? Please collect all those eggshells you planted there, because I edited my previous post to soften the negativity. I suppose even an assholeish dick like me can be diplomatic. As for "coming and bailing", I've posted in this thread before; admittedly, way less than the "regulars", but seeing as I'm a lurker, I hope you may find it in your heart to forgive me for lacking in the post count criteria.
The engine is a piece of junk though, you're right.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
After reading some of the responses here, the ones quoting certain examples, and remembering a couple of story arcs I enjoyed... I suppose it DOES have its moments. Perhaps what gets to me is their presentation after all; the way how the majority of the plot points are just Clues or maybe a one-time dialog box from one of your Contacts, delivered at a snail's pace in a series of "Defeat X number of Y mobs in Z area." and "Defeat all X in warehouse." missions.
I like the whole Faultline arc, the entire RWZ arc and while I haven't finished the Ouroboros pseudo-TFs yet, I like what I see. As for isolated story arcs, the time-traveling Council soldier was nice, as was pretty much everything related to the Devouring Earth.
With a few notable exceptions, their signature characters are painfully generic and lifeless though. Even in the comics, where they do more than stand in their platforms handing out TFs.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
And most modern superhero comics are bastions of collegiate thought and higher learning?
Even moreso than other RPGs, CoH is a game that allows, even demands, that you create your own background to some degree. (Perhaps the only game to do this even moreso is EVE, which due to the nature of the gameplay, the tracking of your employment, etc., really does create a narrative arc for your character, corporation and whatnot.) You are given the fundamentals of the universe; you are then invited, in character creation, to define what your character is and how they fit into the world. (If anything I would like to see more background given to the player on the website that's in the game; I know a lot of people who altered character concepts and histories after encountering some of the cooler in-game stories.)
And frankly with each successive issue the 'arcs' of individual zones and plotlines therein grow better and better. A lot of the stuff from around the launch of the game? Yeah, it's worthless. Faultline or later? Great stuff, a lot of fun especially the first time through.
This actually isn't very much in argument. Yes, the game is somewhat inferior, techwise. A lot of recent models (NeoRikti, the new hairs, Enforcer armor etc) demonstrate that the engine still has oomph, but there's no denying that, to bring up EVE again, CoH needs a Trinity upgrade. The fundamentals of the engine need upgrading to take advantage of what modern computing can offer, some of the early problems should finally be bottled up, and the oldest content needs to be given a new coat of paint.
The thing is, this is sort of a "no shit" argument; no one WILL argue with it because it's a known problem pertinent to all long-running MMOs. EVE needed a Trinity upgrade after half a decade of operation; Everquest has had a long series of such upgrades, beginning with their Luclin expansion; DAoC and UO both have received upgrades over time as well. (Hell, UO has undergone total engine rebuilds several times over a decade of operation.) Even World of Warcraft receives upgrades; their first major code rebuild in Burning Crusade featured major changes to the way their UI scripting functioned and also included a few graphical upgrades pertinent to the new areas and Outland if you were sharp-eyed (better handling of surface effects, for starters). The upcoming code revision in Frozen Throne will feature even more of these, such as much better support for translucent materials like ice.
The point is, yes, CoH is an aging engine and we're aware of these problems. I would assume (read hope) that NCSoft and their raft of Cryptic employees is smart enough to implement some major code revisions over the coming year. Trinity was a huge success for EVE and I'd imagine the same would be true for CoH.
One thing you are perhaps forgetting, though: most of what we knew as Cryptic followed the game over when NCSoft acquired it. 'Cryptic' is now Jack Emerett and a few other guys, and people who generally did not work on CoH. Did Jack learn from CoH? We'll have to see. But it's been pretty goddamn obvious that the former Cryptic people who are now NCSoft have learned a hell of a lot over the years and the game has only gotten better by leaps and bounds with every single patch. So for now my faith is in NCSoft America, headed by Positron, as they have proven they know what they are doing with the past few patches.
And you are allowed to state your opinion. We are allowed to present counterpoints.
Hell, in all the years I've been playing it I can count the number of times the actual client crashed on one hand (not counting network issues which really isn't a software issue so much as a hardware issue). In comparison, I had far more issues with other MMO's engines. Like SWG, DAoC, AO and of course TR.
Now, perhaps I'm just ignorant about some facts here, but what specifically is so bad, from a technical standpoint, about the engine?
I'm a pretty novice player, but on my system it has a wicked memory leak.
Well, I'm sure a lot of folks will chime in here about what's wrong with it. (Memory leaks, ATI issues, Vista issues, resources taken vs performance/graphics quality, lack of power customization, character faces, sound issues...) I'm not sure that any MMO ever is free from such complaints, but then again, the conventional wisdom is that that CoH was written by fairly inexperienced programmers so maybe it has more problems than most.
Personally, I've never had any big complaints out of my own experience. The worst I can say is that it's kinda slow to load up and I hate having to hear all the nearby buff sound effects start up upon zoning. I find the engine to be perfectly serviceable even though I know it's not particularly well optimized.
And having played A LOT of other MMOs, I'd say CoH holds up decently. I think the EQ2 and Guild Wars engines are technically better, but EQ2 had mucho dinero thrown into it and GW is a much more limited game. Certainly I've played much, much worse game engines than CoH's.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
A lot of other MMOs have been worse, but the CoH engine does still have some fairly severe memory leak issues that seem to primarily be tied with storing character information. If you go to an area with a lot of characters (like, say, the Atlas statue) and then leave, you'll notice some long-term performance degradation.
And just to note, the core technology of CoX is at least five years old. The game has been around in some fashion since 2001, and they launched in 2004. It's pretty likely they went feature complete in 2002, so their core rendering block probably has not seen massive overhauls for nearly half a decade, and a lot of the oldest content (most face textures, a lot of the older costumes and hairs, etc.) are also that old. It says a lot that the CoH engine still doesn't support eyes that are rendered separately from the rest of the body (see Oblivion, any Unreal 3 game, or really any game released in the past several years) and thus cannot be customized.
The newer stuff still manages to impress to some degree, but CoH definitely shows its age in many ways.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
That being said, inspite of being powered by this clusterfuck of an engine the game manages to be alot of fun. Often theese days due to NCNC's willingness to do what Gecko/Statesman/Cryptic never would.
I'm not saying they couldn't upgrade the engine now if they wanted to. They could, and should have already. But there were reasons, some good some bad, for why it is the way it is.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Email is aoatway at gmail dot com.
Credited.
But I can only log in one of my characters at a time.
Oh.
Oh.
But you guys are all big meanies.
Instead, we need a date for the wedding Acc. Come one, you know you want to. That I'll resub for. I kind of miss my scrapper anyway.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
'Cause I'll plan it with some epic stuff.
As Epic as I can get, anyway.
Only if Acro has an awesome place in it.
Now just have to figure out how to make a cake.
...you know I do like pumpkin pie.