Have to admit I thought these were heroes at first. The caption says they are Praetorians, including a “Neuron, Battle Maiden, and Marauder.” Doesn’t make sense since the girl in yellow with the mohawk is also in another screenshot as the player. The others look very similar (are they clones?) of Synapse, Valkyrie, and the Backstreet Brawler.
I think the shots of the unnamed guys in black with super-hero type powers (i see a turret, and electricity melee power?) are the Knives of Artemis faction that wasn’t mentioned on the official update page:
Seems like most of the new content is for high level players, since the new areas and factions that inhabit them are all high level. I am curious though as to how the outdoor instanced missions work, and whether lower level players will get to see them at all.
I haven’t heard anything about entirely new tilesets for missions, but they’ve mentioned adding more interactivity in them. The only example I’ve heard of is getting captured and thrown into jail if you knocked out in some 5th Column missions.
The new areas, and the new villains are most likely to fill in the high end as the level cap is being raised from 40 to 50.
If I ever get the permits to start my own private army, those are the uniforms they’re going to wear. :D
I really don’t understand why they’re raising the level cap. It already is something of a grind to get to level 40. It’s not a fast leveling game at all.
To my thinking, they need more content at the earlier levels because 5-6 tilesets for instanced missions isn’t enough at those levels. The mob variety is ok, though I wish they had figured out a way to work in more non-humanoid mobs.
One of the big reasons the game got tedious for me is that the instanced missions all looked alike after I’d done each tileset several times.
Oh, one thing I didn’t see in that list that was promised – an alien spaceship to investigate. Is that still coming?
Several villain groups each seem to have mission levels made just for them (5th Column and CoT lairs I know for certain), but you don’t get to see them from quite a while when you’re well into their story arcs. The early story arcs, Skulls, Clockwork and Vahzilok, are just too generic. I’d much rather trudge through a shopping mall than a sewer.
As for alien spaceships, the Rikti Crash Site is a new zone set around an alien ship. I don’t know if you get to go inside though, I wonder if they use the same interior decorator as the Covenant.
You know I don’t think it would kill them to raise the level cap a bunch but maybe lower the experience curve a bit so that getting up there isn’t such a pain in the ass. I mean, we don’t need an exponential growth here. It’s a game, we’re supposed to be having fun no matter how long you play it; without the rewards portion of the cycle it becomes tedious.
Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here, Synic. I need to get those new abilities to keep from getting bored. There are five character archtypes. If I could level more quickly and hit the level cap, I’d probably level a couple of different heroes. For players like me, at least, speeding up leveling would increase how long I stick with the game.
One of the main problems I have been hearing about is the fact that all of the character classes are dependent on a single line of physical buffs, otherwise you’re screwed. I’ve also been hearing about the Task Force bugging, but really, as I would be a solo player, that’s not that big of a deal.
I’m upgrading my PC this summer with one of the main justifications being City of Heroes. Their every-other-month content update schedule is really fantastic. It could be better, but honestly, isn’t that enough new content to satisfy the casual player? It is me.
Count me in on this, even with the naysaying. I’m not even playing and this update looks nice.
Make sure to check out the Who’s Who & Pics pages to see who ppl are. Mostly everyone is on the Virtue server. If you’re looking for someone to play with also, you can drop by IRC (irc.enterthegame.com#qt3) and see if anyone else is playing.
Developers seem to be particularly retarded in this area of things and likely always will be.
They seem to think that to keep people chasing the carrot longer you need to grind them out fully and make it as long as possible which is false for most casual players.
CoH has totally lost its luster for me now for this reason. The brilliant gem it could have been has faded rapidly now that I am level 20. Getting 1 bar of experience is an absolute grind now unless I’m being powerleveled by people much higher than myself. At 20th level with a group my range I’m getting about a bar of XP every hour or so, that is insane. So even at 20 to get a new level it will cost me 10 hours of my life now at a minimum. Who has this free time??
Why on earth developers dont understand that if you shallow the curve it will actually keep more players is a mystery to me. I have all the intention of wanting to play a tanker and a controller but none of the motivation because I’m simply not climbing this hill again. If they made experience gain happen at 3-5 times the current rate I would max a character then immediately start another because its an attainable goal for a somewhat casual player. (And I fall on the pretty hardcore end of casual)
By making the grind long you take the will out of most people because as Mark pointed out the carrots of new powers, etc get so far apart that you simply don’t care enough to get through it. I have now hit that wall because 10 hours per level is not an acceptable amount of time to me when I can go play a singleplayer game and see major progress in that same amount of time.
If I were to keep at it for even just 2 more levels thats 20 hours of my life… no thanks. The cat assers can do that all the want but I think all these companies should get a clue about the fact that a casual gamer would like to be able to max a character or two. Yes, you will lose the hardcore crowd to boredom, but the majority of your dollars over the longer term will come from the casuals anyways.
And then once you’ve advanced and finished that single player game what exactly do you do? Get a new one and start over?
I think the thing is MMO gameplay is just different. If you don’t enjoy the process innately, or can’t enjoy it without the rapid rewards of progress, the whole genre just isn’t really for you.
I could level the same complaints at something like Diablo: I like diablo, but I hate having to invest 30+ hours into a character build just to try out something or make use of the equipment I found with another character. It’s even worse when you consider that many characters there aren’t complete without gear that’s almost impossible to find.
Similar problems with traditional RPGs… they take forever to get characters up to where they’re well-built and the choices really start branching. And really, with the exception of Morrowind, I can’t imagine playing other games through multiple 100+ hour playtimes just to try something different or see where some other subquest completeion path will take me.
It’s not an MMO problem, it’s an RPG problem. Why nobody calls out single player RPGs due to it is beyond me. Maybe it just doesn’t feel as baren with all the carefully crafted narrative in there?
(FWIW, I like the combat model in CoH. I’m sure character development gets long in the tooth, but I don’t care so much when combat itself seems to vary greatly based on who else I’m playing with. Working with a good illusion controller is different than with a scrapper or a healer, and group variations can be even more complex. Couple that with CoH’s near-action level combat and I’m happy.)
This same charge could be leveled at MMORPGs as well, but in a far far worse way. At the end of a singleplayer RPG I may have 50 hours put into it, but I have defeated the Great Overlord™ and regained all the Foozles and saved the kingdom, etc etc. I.E. There is a palpatable sense of accomplishment and closure. 500 hours into Everquest (as the worst example) I have solved no great mystery, I have not defeated any great Overlord (at least one that won’t respawn for the next hero), but I have collected some foozles, and killed about 10000000 monsters. I.E. Closure is minimal and I stand around with a 60th level character and 500 hours lost and go. “That was fun!”
And yes, I can then start another singleplayer RPG say going from Baldur’s Gate II to KOTOR as an example and get a totally unique play experience. So for my 100 hours, that is more worth my time.
We have had this conversation before and you are very quick to roll over and die for this “grinding” style of gameplay. I attest to you that it does NOT have to be this way, and the paradigm should and must shift if these developers ever want to attract more than that little sliver of audience that is the “hardcore”.
This is absolutely the reason why. The narrative is normally strong in a singleplayer game and of course the biggest reason of all is that you are the center of the universe in a singleplayer RPG so when the story is custom tailored to your perspective that certainly keeps interest higher. To its defense CoH took some infant steps in this direction but it is a long way from really feeling like your character is at the center of any story in an MMORPG. Also the gains in singleplayer are perceptible with very little time investment in almost all RPGs I have played.
And FWIW, that wasn’t ever my charge. Being the center of the universe in a game with 1000 players is an unrealistic expectation. I just want to be able to get a few characters up to max level in a reasonable amount of time by the stanards of someone with a large life outside of games, I don’t feel that is much to ask.
I am in agreeance with you here. That is why in my original post I called CoH a brilliant gem because in some ways it is. The combat is exceptionally fun and action oriented and its primarily what held my interest until the bone crushing grind started at 20th.
This same charge could be leveled at MMORPGs as well, but in a far far worse way. [/quote]
Yeah, easily. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise. Except not many people “finish” MMOs.
Rather than get into some long-winded discussion, let me just ask you the one thing I don’t get from your argument:
You mention you want to max characters. Why? What’s important about having max characters?
I think the general reason these games aren’t more “accessible” is because the feeling is that it’s a tradeoff:
Lose folks such as yourself who hit a wall early and lose motivation
-or-
Lose folks who get all the way through the game quickly and lose interest
Seems like the latter is inherently more dangerous in a revenue model driven by ongoing monthly subscription prices. Do you really think if you could level a character to max level in a week or two that you’d be compelled to play more than a few months at most once you’d tried out all the builds up there? In such cases it seems like the majority of unexplored content would be well below you in level because you blew through it so quickly; yet there’s no real way to team up with other folks and “push ahead” into stuff that’s already trivial for you alone.
