Character Design Archives


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August 25, 2008

CoX - Poking at bad guys

More Kitsune/Ex-Terra action over the weekend, up around 34, which means Bricks into Founders, zone-wise. We're picking and choosing our story arcs and generally having a good time. 

As a pair, we're sort of like a Regen Scrapper ... everything golden until it goes into the toilet fast. Ninety-nine percent of the mobs we engage we simply carve through like butter (we're running on Unyielding at the moment). But there was some death involved over the weekend. Aside from the one case of "gosh, I guess ambushes will come after me if I stand in the train station while on bio break just after I've taken a hunt mish," the rest were all about drawing too much aggro, too quickly. For all my smacky-smack controlling with Illusion, it's also easy to draw a lot of unwanted attention with the Rad secondary. And a lot of my powers have a long cast time, so it's easy to watch the health bar drop-drop-drop-gone while waiting to get power X fired so that I can throw a heal.

Biggest regular problem was in the Bricks (Talos) Safeguard mish on the side mission to stop the jail break. Eleventy zillion Tsoo bosses. We both took some temporary dirt naps with those.

Still, fun times.

Margie's been doing soloing with Old Star, who's a Fire/Rad Controller, and evidently quite soloable. I rolled a clone of Al McGordo as the same (instead of a Rad/Rad Defender), but didn't get any play time.


Posted by Dave at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay

April 21, 2008

CoX - Wings at last

So I've been off CoX for a few weeks for this and that in private life. I hopped back on, ran around through various alts cashing in on all the long-shot bids and sells at the auction house that, in the long-run eventually come in (yes, I've become an auction house player, sigh; more on that some time).

And I thought to myself, "Y'know, now that I know how this all works better, I should sign on as Torchielle and see how tough it would be to finally get dragon wings for Torchielle."

Brief digression: Torchielle was the daughter of a female super-hero and a male dragon, both "heroes" of Chicago. As she matured, she had both flame powers from her dad and energy melee stuff from her mom -- and, eventually, the power of flight -- first from Uncle Frim's cloak ("No, it's not cloak that Uncle Frim gave me -- it's a cloak made from Uncle Frim. Those are dragon scales, see?"), and eventually from wings ...

Yes, when wings came in back in Issue Whatever, she grabbed the Demon Wings as something vaguely draconic. Fun ensued.

And then the other wingsets came in with Issue Whozits, and I was seriously torqued off because, well, there were draconic wings -- like the demon ones, but larger and scalier -- but they were only available if you found an ultra-rare recipe or else if you spent eleventy-zillion influence at Wentworths. Grumbling ensued.

So ... flash-forward to tonight. "Hmmm. I have like 5 mil in Influence. Let's see what I can do about the dragon wings." I headed over to Steel and went into Wentworths and looked up the recipe and ...

... huh? 

... wha--? 

Wing recipes are the Tulipmania bubble of today. Whereas once they were all selling in the millions, now draconic wing recipes were selling for 20K or so. Part of that was increasing the supply. Part was the marketplace just eventually getting saturated. Only so many heroes want wings.

So for about 100K in recipes, supplies, and effort, I ended up with the recipe.

And now Torchielle has her wings. Huzzah!


Posted by Dave at 7:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

April 1, 2008

CoX: Cast of Characters

I've had this sitting in my sidebar for some time -- but it's gotten woefully out of date, and, honestly, I'm not playing so much that I feel the need to keep it updated or fully revamped. So ... I'm going to turn it into an entry that I'll link to from the sidebar so that I can edit it and/or reference it as I choose, but it's not in the way on the main page. Not ever toon is listed here, but the significant (mostly lvl 10+) ones are:

Dave & Margie - Team: (31-Jul-07)

Dave - Solo: (31-Jul-07)

Margie - Solo: (11-Apr-07)


Posted by Dave at 9:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Consortium of Justice

March 31, 2008

CoX: I12 Character Creator

Official news on the Issue 12 Character Creator and UI changes, mostly driven by the "Real Numbers" changes. So there will be a "See Detailed Info" in the character creator that will show all the underlying numbers, with a "show me at level X" slider (moderately interesting for me).

More spiffy than that will be "costume sets" -- a start for, say, "Biker" or "Jester" (!), etc. While in theory that might make slightly more homogeneous costumes, in practice it will make a much easier starting point to get a bunch of similar sets. Nice.

Closed Beta is promised in the "near future."


Posted by Dave at 6:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

March 28, 2008

CoX: The Powers are Yours(yours)((yours))!

Dr. Brainstorm unveils new addition powersets for City of Heroes, City of Villains - PC News 

Lots of fine introductory text ... but here's the list.

Blaster 

  • New Primary - Psychic Blast 

  • New Secondary - Mental Manipulation 

Corruptor 

  • New Primary - Electrical Blast 

  • New Secondary - Storm Summoning 

Controller 

  • New Primary - Plant Control 

  • New Secondary - Thermal Radiation 

Dominator 

  • New Primary - Earth Control 

  • New Secondary - Electricity Manipulation 

Defender: 

  • New Primary - Cold Domination 

  • New Secondary - Ice Blast 

Mastermind: 

  • New Secondary - Storm Summoning 

Brute: 

  • New Primary - Battle Axe 

  • New Primary - War Mace 

  • New Secondary - Super Reflexes 

Stalker: 

  • New Primary - Electric Melee 

  • New Secondary - Electric Armor 

Tank: 

  • New Primary - Dark Armor 

  • New Secondary - Dark Melee 

Scrapper: 

  • New Primary - Fiery Melee 

  • New Secondary - Fiery Aura 

Spiffy!

(via Margie)

 

Posted by Dave at 1:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

January 28, 2008

Meanwhile, back in Eriador ...

Though we keep talking about doing up some other duos (including reimagining Rita and Runt -- Mistral/Guardian? Burglar/Champion? Elf/Dwarf? ("An elf?  Where?  Where?  Where's the elf?")), we continued moving along with Frelliel and Frellien, our elvish hunters -- now around ... 13? ... and finally moving into Shire after waaaaaay too many unsuccessful attempts to duo a fellowship mish, even at teal.

Still having fun.  And now that I've finally gotten to an auction house and see how it works -- I seriously just need to sell a bunch of stuff I've been lugging around rather than wait to auction it.  I am strawberries-rich and silver-poor, such that I am behind on picking up some very valuable skills from the trainer (well, all those repair costs didn't help, either).


Posted by Dave at 12:22 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay , LotRO

January 21, 2008

Costuming Options in LotRO

One of CoX's rightfully renowned strengths is its costume creator, with zillions of combos of outfts, accessories, body types, features, etc.  While there's always "just one more thing" every player wants, it's without a doubt one of the gems in CoX's crown.

LotRO is very pretty in many ways, but character customization is limited.   You have control over hair style and color, complexion, eye color, a couple of other things, but after that, the only variations are ... what adventures you have.  Every class/race/gender starts off looking exactly alike, and based on the gear you pick up (or buy), you can change that.

But it's more complicated.  My elvish hunter, Frelliel, picked up a lovely plumed hat somewhere.  Loved it.  But eventually I had to give it up because, well, I picked up a stupid kind of hat that had much better armor rating.  Good-bye, plumed hat.

Things get found of different colors, too.  Margie notes the "clown" effect -- "why the heck am I wearing these purple shoes with this outfit.  Oh, yeah, they have a nice armor class and Agility bonus."

You do get one other level of customization -- you can turn off helmets/hats (so that your bare hair is shown), cloaks (to admire your outfit), or boots (if you're a hobbit) in the UI, which lets you keep the bonus, but tune the look just a bit.  It's an imperfect solution, but that's what you got.

Enter Book 12, and Outfits.

The goal of The Outfit System is fairly simple: Give players complete control over how they look in the game, without impacting the gameplay benefits they gain from their currently equipped items.  [...] Now, as of Book 11 you already have your first Outfit. The Outfit System refers to that set of items you currently have equipped. That won't be changing at all.

What we're unveiling in Book 12 is the ability for you to define two additional cosmetic appearances, called Outfits, for your character. These Outfits will override the visual appearance of your base Equipment.

Now, it's important to emphasize that these additional inventories are only cosmetic, and that your Equipment will continue to be the only items affecting your stats. With that said, once Book 12 goes live it's really up to you as to how you want yourself to look in Middle-earth.

Spiffy!

Two extra outfit slots open at level 20.  If you pick it up (or buy it), you can make it part of an alternate outfit.  There will be some (reasonable) restrictions, but also the adding of a lot of various non-combat-related clothing items.  Excellent.

Also being introduced is the Barber Shop, which lets you change some physical appearances -- hair styles, facial details, etc., with various new ones of these also being added in.

It doesn't look nearly up to CoX level yet, but it's a welcome addition to a good game.

Other Book 12 patch notes info is here.

(via Doyce)

Posted by Dave at 6:05 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , LotRO , Resources & Rules

January 14, 2008

LotRO Playtest Continues

Continued grinding things out wiith our human Cap/Champ combo.  Finished a big brigand finale (despite it being a Fellowship quest) through an effective combination of (a) reading a guide that noted a shortcut past some bad groups of bad guys, (b) following someone else in (inadvertently) who cleared a lot of the riff-raff, and (c) using the Map to exit after finishing off the head bad guy.

Then ended up in another climactic brigand mission, this one an annoying combination of story-driven railroading ("Can't act now -- have to wait for NPCs to emote) and the opposite of our berserker Ranger from the other night -- a very slow-moving lady who, once rescued, insisted on snail-pacing her way through various caverns of bad guys, just in time for them to wake up ("Lady, listen, I'll bloody carry you, okay?").

When we picked up again last night, we were starting a new duo to see how it went -- a pair of Elvish Hunters.  Got through the 1-5 content with no problem, and were making decent progress with the 6-10.  Hunters are fun -- if nothing else, they let you be lazy and draw the bad guys to you, often with entertaining results.  And they're not quite as squishy as blasters are, either, which was my initial impression.

I'm enjoying the elvish content, even if is relentlessly depressing (these guys could teach Marvin the Robot a lesson or two about wistful moroseness).  And, of course, it occurs to me that I found the Shire bits of LotR to be the least interesting in the books, too, so maybe that's a clue I should pick up.

We have a couple more days on the trial accounts, and I'm not sure we're hooked enough to go for it.  I find the story-driven missions to be pretty keen, though that isn't grabbing Margie the same way at all.  We're probably spending more time kvetching over things than waxing enthusiastic over them.  I'm enjoying it more than Margie, but it's not yet grabbing us by the noses and making us want to play it full-time.

We'll see.


Posted by Dave at 6:23 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay , LotRO

October 30, 2007

Dainty little hands

One of the new things in I11 is weapon scaling -- having weapons (broadswords, katanas, ARs (?), axes, claws, etc. scale appropriately to at least the body type (female, male, huge).  This isn't universal -- there is a "legacy broadsword" (etc.) that remains unscaled.

Folks have objected to the female weapons now being too small.  While rejecting the idea of a weapons scale slider before, BAB noted:

We scaled all of the weapons based on the scale and proportions of the player models, particularly the hands. The female models just happen to have small and dainty hands. Up until this point, the exact same weapon models was shared between all 3 body types, so they had to be scaled large enough to at least fit in the huge model's hands...which are roughly the size of the female model's head. It's something that's bothered us for a long time, but we weren't able to change it. Now that we can, we did.

I'm certainly not opposed to gigantic, anime style weapons but we don't to create those in a haphazard way by just taking something that's designed to be hand sized and scaling it up to a ridiculous scale. I'd much rather create a completely new piece of geometry that is a gigantic, anime style weapon but still looks like it could be held and wielded by the player model it's attached to...rather than having the small, dainty female hand buried completely in the grip the size of her forearm.

The answer, of course, seems obvious -- get rid of / redesign those ridiculously dainty Female hands.  No, seriously, they're laughably small.  I have any number of brawling female toons who I've put "Large" gloves onto just so that they have ratiionally sized hands (especially when you consider that Male hands are actually oversized to scale).

Maybe we need hand size sliders ...


Posted by Dave at 10:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

October 17, 2007

"Alts, Mister Rico! Zillions of 'em!"

My gaming activities over the past week have led to all sorts of fine ideas for even more alts.  Because that is, of course, exactly what I need.  (If I said I was running out of space across all servers with alts I've generated, one should not be surprised.)

Some of the fun ones ...

  1. The return of Honeygun, in various flavors.  I found the AR Blaster set to be really annoying back in the day, but that's because the "super soaker" AR was a butt-ugly weapon to be carrying around.  I11 will provide some much more attractive alternatives.
  2. A Sten analog, complete with 80s-paperback-cover hair, cool camoflage tech outfit, and both a Gurkha kukri and a crystal dagger.  That would be the plan under the Dual Weapons primary, of course, planned for I11 but available to those lucky souls who are in the closed beta.
  3. "Punchin' Judy" -- okay, I admit that I saw someone with that name, and determined I must have an alt with the same name.
  4. "Warm Fuzzy."  Surely one can create a teddy-bear Fire Controller.
  5. "Carmine Zuigiber" -- a red-haired, red-garbed war correspondent and (as envisioned) some-sort-of-weaponed fire aura brute.

That's not keeping me from exercising my current burgeoning stable of alts.  I just dinged Lady Zebra to 23, for example.


Posted by Dave at 12:06 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

October 10, 2007

New weapons

Someone's doing screen caps (legitimately, despite the closed beta) of all the weapon options.  Nice stuff, as well as making notes of which are or aren't colorable.

Insert litany of complaints on the boards about (a) "They didn't include my favorite!" (b) "This AT power got more options than that AT power" and (c) "That's not a Glaive-Guisarme, that's a Lucerne Hammer"  Etc.  BAB comments.

Additional textures have to be created to fully support color tinting of weapons. They also have to be set up and exported a different way, hooked into the costume menu slightly different, additional scripts have to be written for them. It's not a ton of work, but overall it's just a couple of extra steps that we simply haven't had time to do on every single weapon we've pulled out of the library of existing things. Bows, on top of all of that, have another couple of extra steps because they have to be animated to match the player animations.

Why so many maces and swords and not bows or claws? Because our existing library of weapon models is full of that type of stuff. Not a lot of bows on the other hand...what was there is basically in.

The original plan was to have only 3 unique options for each weapon set. The default weapon, the villain version if it existed, an arcane version and a tech version. I really pushed to get as many things in as we could with the intent of filling in the rest later as time permitted. If it's really that big of a deal to you guys that there are just more options available to mace than bows, we can very easily go in and comment everything out so that everyone has an exactly equal number of options available. But I really don't think that's what anyone wants, is it?

All I can say is that we will continue to create new weapon models, obviously starting with the sets that are a bit sparse right now.


Posted by Dave at 9:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

September 29, 2007

RUAGIRL?

Given that I have quite a number of female alts in CoX (it runs about 50%, interestingly enough), it's a good thing I don't play in China:

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game accounts of male players who chose to play female in-game characters in its in-house developed MMORPG King of the World, reports 17173. Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam, according to the report.

Yikes.

(via BoingBoing)

Posted by Dave at 11:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

September 19, 2007

Character Transfer and Renaming is Up ... kinda

Evidently it's hitting the servers (or the billing servers that handle it, or something) harder than expected, but the (pay) service to (a) transfer a toon to another server, or (b) rename your toon is now officially up.  Woot.

Once upon a time, I would have seriously done a lot of capering about regarding this, but it's been several months at least since I've been highly server-centric, or had a group of friends that I Really Truly had to hook up with regularly on a given server.  Instead, I have various duos scattered about that Margie and I play, as well as a ton of alts across all the servers as the mood seizes me.

That said, I could see possibly gathering some folks together in one place to do a particular activity -- the $9.95 isn't meaningless, but it would cost more than that to meet some friends for dinner.  Or I could see wanting to pull some alts together to create yet more Margie/Dave duos.  We'll see.

As for renaming -- I can think of only one toon I might consider (changing Psi-clone back to the original Psiclone I had in mind) -- but only if the name was free.  Other than that, no sawbuck-worthy regrets over character names, at least for now.

What amazes me is the folks who sound utterly frantic to transfer their toon Right Now.  Come on, guys -- wait until tomorrow, or Friday, when the lines die down.  Really.

Now, what is kind of interesting is the speculation about whether certain servers will see a major drop or rise in population, based on reputations as PvP or RP or whatever servers -- or, alternately, if those reputations will become self-fulfilling prophecies. It will be interesting to see if any stats come out of this.


Posted by Dave at 3:06 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

September 17, 2007

Gameplay update

Actually did a fair amount over the weekend.

Miss Crackle:  Got her up into 13 doing various PUGs of various success.  A lot of stupid people out there, and nobody I felt like keeping track of for the long run. 

Cammie Kandachi:  This was an electrical brute I'd built about the same time as Miss Crackle (they even look a fair amount alike).  I played a bit with her on Friday afternoon, then Margie joined me later with the brute she'd built to pair with her back in the day.  We got up to 16 or so, I think, over the weekend (starting around 12), and I learned why I'd not played her, as much as I like the look.  (1) electrical is a hellaciously endurance-intensive set., (2) brutes are not as damage-intensive as scrappers, and don't seem as sturdy as them either (probably because of the lack of a self-heal).  We spent a lot of time resting and/or working off debt.  Still, fun.

Rita the Cat:  So we swapped over Sunday afternoon to our scrapper duo, who dinged 37 during play.  Obviously higher level helps game abilities, but they've always felt kick-ass as a duo, where as Cammie and Annie always feel struggling.

Saturday was a Rikti invasion night.  Ended up fighting several battles with different folks (Miss Crackle, Cammie, Kheldiel), and learned a bit more about how the process works.

Good stuff.


Posted by Dave at 11:53 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay

September 11, 2007

More Armored / Tech Heroes Coming to Paragon City!

Once, that is, folks get a gander at the new Iron Man movie -- tastes whetted by this trailer.

Now if only Fly worked like that ... and you could make a Tank that was also a Blaster.


Posted by Dave at 7:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Media

July 17, 2007

Server Transfer and Character Renaming - woot!

Discussion on the boards about ... Holy Mother of Pearl ... could it be?  Yes!

Server Transfer and Renaming features being tested.

It's ... about ... time.

Quoth Lighthouse:

Starting on Tuesday, July 17th, the Training Room Test Server will have two new game features enabled for testing: Character Transfer and Character Rename.
Character Transfer will allow customers to move characters from one server to another.
Character Rename will allow customers to rename a selected character.

Both of these features are not part of Issue 10: Invasion. Although we are beginning to test them now, we anticipate that they will not be enabled on the live service until after the launch of Issue 10.

We estimate that both features, Character Transfer and Character Rename, will carry a transaction fee of $9.99 each per use (there will be no fee for transfers to or renames on the Training Room). Should a Character Transfer have a name conflict on the destination server, a free Character Rename will be made available to resolve the conflict and rename the moving character.

So, at $10, not something people will do casually.  But it would be very nice to be able to do it -- and, honestly, to the extent that I do any teaming, I would be willing to shift most characters someplace else for some sort of group TF/SF activity.

We feel the price of these features is enough to prevent potential abuse, but also reasonable enough to not be prohibitive for those who want to improve their gaming experience by moving servers or changing a character name.

I'm sure people have detailed it somewhere on the boards, but lacking the motivation to ferret it out ... what sort of "potential abuse" is there in server transfer?  (Or, really, in renaming?)

Will "GenericHero003497" be able to rename him/herself, I wonder?

Interesting bit here:

IMPORTANT! Customers who are interested in taking advantage of the Character Transfer service should know that it is possible in the future that we may make changes to the game that would remove the need to Transfer servers. One example of such a change would be a "server-less" game configuration where all players can group with anyone, without the restriction of which server they play on. We are not committing to this "server-less" configuration, and in fact there are no plans to implement a "server-less" environment this calendar year, but because we are charging a fee for these services, it is important that our players understand that the possibility exists. We want to be very clear in this regard so that those who do decide to make use of a Server Transfer, when it becomes available, understand that they may not need it in the future.

I have no idea how something like this would work (various DC "Crisis" comics would indicate the answer is "badly"), but ... well, good on them for giving a warning.

Some official ramificaitions:

All purchases are final and non-refundable.

Any disputed credit card charge can lead to a permanent account closure. Please ensure that the card on file that you are using is the correct one you wish to make the charge to!

Keep in mind that after the character is moved, your Friend's list of players on that server will no longer be valid and you will be removed from any Supergroup that character was included in.

Taskforces or Strikeforces in progress will be abandonded.

Kiosk stats will be preserved, but rating positions will likely change.

We cannot guarantee that your character's name will be available on the destination server you move to.  Should there be a name conflict, your character will be issued a free character rename to change the name.

Some other Red Name (mostly Lighthouse) observations on this:

I have no idea how much advantage I'm liable to take of this feature at the moment.  $10 is enough to make it not something I'd do casually, but if I really wanted to move some folks onto Champs, I have some other character (which I don't want to delete) that I could move elsewhere (which would cost me $20, which is steep, but not utterly, completely out of the question).

Anyhow ... it's definitely something that's been asked for, and I'm glad it's here.


Posted by Dave at 10:08 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

June 18, 2007

Double XP Weekend - after action report

Well, alas, never did hook up with anyone else for the event, but Margie and I had fun on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon/evening plowing our Mastermind duo, Gifted Kid and Special Educator, from 23 to most of the way through 27.  Which netted Gifted Kid both an additional Protector Bot (dubbed Dr McCoy to go with the extant Dr Franklin) and the (woo-hoo) Assault Bot (dubbed Ah-nold) (for the record, the Battle Bots are dubbed Huey, Dewey, and Louie -- after, of course, the drones in Silent Running -- Gifted Kid is, if nothing else, a geek).

Only died once during the weekend (and debt went away pretty quickly).

Did briefly exchange tells with Ktbuffy, but between a final bank-robbery-a-palooza and a very yummy steak dinner with Margie, never did get with her.


Posted by Dave at 7:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay

June 15, 2007

Costuming

Cool Q&A with Jay Doherty, lead costume designer for CoX.  Here's an interesting one:

Community Qestion (Belga): Can we be given access to the NPC costume pieces? Many players would love to use the Carnival of Shadows pieces, for example, and I'd really like to have access to the Mu Mystics costumes.

Jay Doherty: When NPCs where first made there was no intention to give players those costume pieces, mostly because they would not work with other costume pieces (ex: clipping, overlapping) When the PPD exobot guys were first put into the game, players really wanted those pieces for themselves. Unfortunately all those pieces where made to work with each other not as separate pieces, and they look really silly if you don't have all the pieces on. So to address this we have come up with a few solutions. First, while not completely copying the carnival of shadows I have built a completely new costume set with the flavour of the carnival. Second, there will be a new NPC group that was built with the player in mind, all costume pieces from this NPC group will be something players will be able to wear. Now depending on how the players respond to this is how we'll handle more things in the future. Please don't think that every NPC costume group from this point on will be given to the players, but I will put forth the effort to do as many as possible.

Rumor has it that some of this shows up in I10.

Other topics include scabbards and quivers (not soon), new body types (nope, would have to port over all the costumes), long skirts (nope, too much clipping), I10 stuff (4 new costume sets done so far, 3 of them player-requested), and what he'd most like to put in (A chef costume set, an evil clown costume set, 1930's robot costume set).

 


Posted by Dave at 6:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

May 17, 2007

Alt-itis flare-up

Been doing a lot with sub-10 characters of late, playing with power sets I've never used (or not used for a long time).

Managed to create what looked like a completely naked girl (except for her cowboy hat) by going with white outfits and white skin.  Yeah, that shouldn't work (and, of course, it was missing little anatomical details, like toes, that would have made her look "real").  I decided not to do anything with her, since I really didn't feel like (a) attracting the attention that I would have, and (b) getting a petition slammed on my head.

I did end up pulling out a Lvl 2 character I created probably my first week in CoH and never went back to -- a stone golem (Stone/Stone Tank) with an Egyptian head-dress named Mr. Thebes ("They call me MISTER Thebes!").  Margie and I had fun PUGging around, but I don't see doing much with him in the future -- Stone Armor, like Dark Armor, seems to be a huge management bother ("Hmmm, Left-Handed Mutants with Red Electrical Attacks -- I'd better pull out my Slate/Amethyst Armor, Jeeves").  Visually, though, a lot of fun.


Posted by Dave at 9:26 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

May 10, 2007

A SciFi Original Character ...

Well, not really.  I mean, sure, he's a wizard, and he throws fireballs, and has a big, magical, knock-you-back-through-the-air punch attack,  And he dresses in a long black leather coat and hat, and black jeans and a t-shirt.  But his name's Hal, not Harry.  The Wizard Hal, who I ran up to 7 in the Sewers last night (and had a jolly time of it, too).

Hmmm ... should've snapped a picture of him.


Posted by Dave at 1:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

May 9, 2007

All your desired costume parts are belong to us

Costume items, to date, have been to date of six sorts:

  1. Stuff that's there in the costume builder from the get-go.
  2. Stuff that requires a specific, mission (e.g., the cape mission) to unlock.  (Arguably, this applies to recostumiing missions for Icon et al.) 
  3. As #2, but event-related (Winter and Valentires costume pieces).
  4. Feature items with box sets (e.g., helmets via buying the CoV box set).
  5. Vet Rewards.

One of CoX's greatest strengths has been its character creator and costuming.  It's constantly under expansion, and many folks are drawn to the game just for it.  Requests for a stand-alone costumer are regularly received by the devs, and a lot of people roll up alts just to try out a new visual concept.

Note that most of the above items are available to anyone in the game, at least after a certain period of play. Options 3-4 aren't, but the number of pieces involved, and their "hotness," is pretty liimited.  Having the toga is nice if you want a togaed character, but I haven't heard too much wailing over that.

I9 introduces a new class of costume item:

6.  Costume inventions.

Now, we'll leave alone the idea of "inventions" for developing costume pieces.  ("You mean I can get all this spiffy power armor stuff just for free, but if I want fairy wings vs bat wings I need to 'invent' something?")  The changed dynamic here is that in order to get the stuff, you need ...

a.  To find an invention recipe.
b.  To buy an invention recipe.
c.  To find or buy the underlying ingredients for the recipe.

Simply playing the game isn't enough.  Especially when these costume pieces -- and I'm talking wing types here -- are considered premium bits, by design.  Quoth Positron:

I looked at the dataminer today at the costume drop rate and it IS lower than we anticipated.

We are looking into making some changes, but do not expect anything radical or quick.

We DO want costume recipes to be "commodities" that players actively seek and pay top inf. for, but we do not want them to be so rare that players can't get them, ever, in the course of their play.

If you don't have "top influence" or aren't a high enough level to get it, you are SOL.  If you don't want to be a day-trader at Wentworths ("Where CoX meets eBay with 1985-style computer interfaces!"), you are SOL.  If you want to play a fairy character or a draconic character or a winged robot or whatever, and you're not a "playah," you're SOL.

That just strikes me as a horrible strategic decision on the devs' part.  If costuming is such a big part of the game, then leveraging that to taunt folks into the invention system is manipulative at best, and for those who don't want to dive into its clutches, a shut-out at worst.  It's like going to Disneyland, getting your entrance pass, but being told that some rides can only be ridden if you pay a lot extra, or find a random FastPass ticket for them.  It stops being about fun and starts being about commerce.

Bad idea.


Posted by Dave at 7:40 AM | Comments (22) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

May 7, 2007

Weekend play

Despite my steady whining about Invention stuff, we did play a fair amount over the weekend, both solo and teamed. 

On the solo side, Fr. Frank (Emp/Sonic Def) got up to 14-15 (travel power! huzzah!) and got invited onto an SG.  Some stray low-level toons -- Miss Crackle (Elec/Energy Blaster) and Old Saucy Jack (BS/Regen Scrapper) -- sewered their way up to 6.  Woe Nellie is getting there, and now that I've gotten him through Outbreak, The Wizard Hal (Fire/Energy Blaster) needs some play time.

As a team, Margie and I got Hildy and Torchy both up to 49 -- most of the time being Teh Uber against everything we encountered, until the PI Police Mission sent us headlong into a passel of Dark Ring Mistresses who fed us our lunch.  Yikes.  We also ran Idzune and Unchained Path -- I'm not happy with the latter, as I'm sure I'm plenty effective but in a very subtle (slow, debuff, slow some more, hold, slow even further) fashion that doesn't leave me with a feeling of having rock-em-sock-emed the baddies.

We tried another experimental duo, Winter's Darts and Winterbound, two fay from the Winter Court here for [backstory pending].  WD's an Archery/Ice Blaster; Winterbound's an Ice/something Controller.

Y'know, Archery looks good on paper, and the characters look simply faboo, but the play-feel is just way too wimply. "Twonk" "Twonk" "Twonk" ... the damage may be fine, but the sound and visuals are feeble.

Problem is, even though archers are a staple character in comics, they are noteworthy either for clever trick arrows (sorry, that's the secondary) or for trick shooting -- knocking the gun out the guy's hand (or pinning the guy's hand to the wall), etc.  A simple "twonk" and an arrow sticking through a guy is kind of lame.  It would be like creating "box cutter" as a Scrapper set -- sure, you could make all the big numbers roll up you want, but a tiny little "snickt-snickt" is not going to be an award-winning play experience.  That's the problems with Archery (and, actually, with Sonic).

Live and learn.

The Winters were the first lowbies Margie had run through the Sewer -- she's a "blast through all the low-level missions" type of gal.  She's curious as to which approach actually levels faster.  Sewers provide somewhat uninterrupted melee experience -- but there's the delay for the team to form, the comparative of fragility of some teams, and the lack of mission credit.  Missoins give mission credit, but require running all over Atlas/Galaxy and back.

For soloists, I think the Sewers may still be a bit better, but it's also a matter of play style and interest.  If you have a duo, doing Missions whilst taking out groups along the way combines the best of both worlds.

 


Posted by Dave at 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Gameplay

April 18, 2007

Re(ho-hum)spec

New respec a-coming with the 3rd Anniversary of CoH.

We wanted to let players know that, as part of our celebration of the 3rd year anniversary of City of Heroes, we will be applying a free respec to all characters. So, if you have been wanting to change your powers around a little bit, switch up your power slotting or make other changes, this will be a good time to do it!

[...] The actual timing of when the respec is applied is likely to be shortly after the actual Anniversary on April 28th. We will post here with specific dates when they are available.

To be honest, I've been at it long enough that I have so many Vet Award respecs that ... well ... not terribly meaningful.

But it beats the heck out of not having a respec when desired.


Posted by Dave at 9:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

February 13, 2007

Mastermindful

We continue to plug away with The Gifted Kid and Special Educator. Dinged to 20 last night -- which was not nearly the grand hoohah that it is with every other character because, damn, really not having stamina problems.

SE is hitting the endurance the most, with her various Darkish activities. But she's been doing fine on blues. Before she started taking Leadership, though, she decided to finish up getting to Stamina, which she'll grab at 22.

TGK, on the other hand, is wildly non-Endurance-sucking -- aside from when I summon my Crewe, of course. Aside from the occasional Force Bolt, and (as of 18) Assault, not much going on with the Endurance for him. Bubbling is intermittent, and I spend most of my time directing the 'bots as to their next attack.

That might change Real Soon Now -- just picked up at 20 Dispersion Bubble, so that's a second sucking toggle. I'm on track to take Health at 22 and Stamina at 24, which will be perfect timing for the Assault Bot at 26. And if I find myself seriously sucking wind between now and then, I can use one of my Vet respecs and swap out the thus-far-unused Recall Friend for Health and get Stamina next power level.

Playwise, things continue to roll right along with them. We've yet to encounter anything we can't handle -- we're bumped up one to Malicious, so the mobs are numerous but never over orange. We might try another tick, just to see how badly it hurts. We can be overwhelmed by numbers -- it's happened with some ill-timed patrols -- but concentrated fire tends to make short work of pretty much anyone, and Margie is quite talented with all the debuffy bits.


Posted by Dave at 9:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design

February 5, 2007

Masterminds!

Masterminds!My own experience with Masterminds has been fairly limited but not all that great -- Mr. Thorne was more of a concept character, and I ended up really disliking both Mercs and (again) Dark -- but Margie has done quite a bit of soloing with them, so we decided to give it a whirl with a duo.

Great fun.

I played The Gifted Kid (Robots/FF), the young evil genius who got bullied a lot until, well, he killed them all, bwah-ha-ha. Margie did Special Educator (Thugs/Dark), whose goal is to teach her boys some very special lessons ...

Together, they commit crime!

Managed to get both of them up to over 14 over the course of the weekend. Neither of us died once, I don't believe (though I have never gone into so many missions that had mobs posted on the door), and, in fact, we didn't really have too many troubles with anyone (which makes me think we need to bump up the difficulty).

For me, I enjoyed Force Fields because, well, at this level most of what I do is stand around, manage the targeting and position of the 'bots, and spam off Force Bolts to keep the boss on his butt. Only rarely do I get targeted, which is hard to object to, and the boys throw out plenty of firepower (when focused) to keep things moving along nicely.

Good times.

Though let me say -- Lab Coat has got to be the clippiest piece of clothing out there. Hands, butt, even chest symbol clip through it. Yeesh.

Posted by Dave at 7:23 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design


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