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Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies!
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies!
#21
With regards to City of Villains, and why some folks like it and some don't...
Well, there's a few reasons, I think. Let's start with game design.
CoV is the newer game, and it was designed based on things the devs learnt from CoH. Or more correctly, on things they thought they'd learnt from CoH. Things they figured "hey, this time round, we'll do right".
So you have smaller zones - and no hazard zones. Contacts that each have distinct story-arcs tied to them, rather than CoH's grab-bag where each contact is usually just a different "skin" for missions shared between a few contacts. And then there's linear contact progression. Some hidden contacts as well.
Cryptic would argue that CoV has a sleeker and more streamlined design for missions, contacts, and story arcs. That the zones are more compact, there's no needless fluff. Conversely, a lot of players believe CoV's contact progression is like a train chugging down a straight line.
Also, the fact you have fewer and smaller zones isn't a good thing for many folks - they want variety and big open spaces. Add that to the fact CoV zones are also more built-up in general, compared to CoH city landscapes - making the heroside game easier to navigate. Furthermore, all those heavily textured and complex-shaped villain zones are holy hell on lower-end computer systems. Grandville is lagtastic for many people, that's well-known, but a lot of computers just conk out over CoV as a whole.
Then there's stuff with regards to how the /combat/ side of the game is built. The enemy groups you get on the villain side are built differently - some would say they're more powerful. The individual villain characters are also built to a different scale - this is very apparent in PvP between hero and villains. The heroes are vastly more powerful and have better power choices, no question.
They'd argue that the combat side of the game is more balanced than CoH. There's a lot of stuff in CoH, after all, that isn't working as the devs intended. Given a chance to do things over, they've made new ATs that better fit their notion of balance.
And as for the combat part of the equation? It makes people think that villain characters just suck and are totally weak.
Finally, there's issues about the setting of the game.
I'm thinking from an RP point of view, City of Heroes gives you fewer constraints. City of Villains, however, restricts your concept more - the way the game is set up, the missions, story arcs, hell, the whole Arachnos-centric environment... that presumes a lot about your character. It constrains your freedom.
In CoH, you're a hero, right?
But what kind of hero you are is very ill-defined; the game does not generally place any onus on you one way or another. It assumes you are registered with the authorities and are publically known as a crimefighter...and are working your way up through the ranks of the hero world. That's about it.
The CoH story arcs are, as a whole, fairly generic, seeing as how most of them are shared between multiple contacts - you can get the same arc from different people. So even the text is rather flavourless.
It's also easier to define what a comic-book hero is. You fight bad guys. Plain and simple.
That gives you lots more freedom to define things on your own.
What about a comic book villain, however? That's a whole lot trickier. The motivations can be very very different. While CoH missions can assume that you're doing good stuff simply because you're a hero, the CoV missions generally presume you're being paid to do whatever it is you're doing. But that's just one kind of villain - the mercenary villain. However, if you don't assume that the player is being paid... it's very hard to write meaningful mission text. If you're not profiting from this, why then are you bashing people's heads in? Because you like bashing heads in? Well, the game assumes that as well.
It has to assume something.
A lot of people don't like how CoV makes you a flunky of Lord Recluse and Arachnos. That's a fair statement. But it's hard to imagine how else it could have gone. Consider that for heroes, it can usually be safely presumed that a hero will work with the authorities and the police - and other heroes. So trainers to level-up can be other heroes, you can get missions from the police, and talk to detectives as contacts. You can visit stores run by Freedom Corps... so on, so forth. There's all this support infrastructure that most people don't question.
Villains, however? What kind of infrastructure does evil have? Who's gonna provide essential services to the bad guys? Who will the level-up trainers be? Who will sell you stuff? Hence, to a large part...Arachnos.
Also consider that it's fairly traditional for all the heroes in the world to band together against big threats. The heroes of the world can, quite readily, form a concerted front. They can be considered a "faction", as it were.
For traditional comic book villains, however, there isn't really such a unified sense of identity and association. Villains do team up, yes, but those generally are small team-ups. You don't generally see really really really large groups of villains banding together.
Or at least, that's not been the case in traditional superhero comics over the past few decades. In recent times, DC and Marvel have been moving towards that model - some sort of regimented overarching structure that governs both good and evil. Heroes report to the government, and villains are linked together in some sort of, I dunno, organized syndicate. This is a relatively new development, however, in superhero lore.
But a sense of factional identity is absolutely essential for an MMO. The developers needed to solve it somehow.
But the solution they picked might not sit well with many people.
Players, CoX players in particular, like to have freedom of concept in their characters. The costume creator encourages this. Even if people don't RP as such, most CoX players do have some idea of what their character is... an evil demon, a power-armored hero... they have a concept.
The way the Heroside world is set up, it doesn't restrict concepts so much, it doesn't presume as much about your motivations. You're a hero. You fight crime. That's about it.
Even then, there's people who react badly to what little established hierarchy there is. I know a lot of folks, RPers and non-RPers alike, who somehow resent the fact that Statesman and the Freedom Phalanx are unquestionably the top dogs, while the player heroes are...what? Second-string? Second-fiddle?
Which leads to an interesting phenomenon I like to call Statesbashing - whereby a lot of folks basically go "Yeah, I can take Statesman", and write into their RP and stories situations where States and the Freedom Phalanx are shown to be inferior. Smaller.
So. The heroside game has few restrictions, but even then, people rebel against the few limits that exist.
What of the villain game?
Villainside has even more constraints. The game assumes you're a villain that was in jail, you do stuff for money. And you wanna avoid angering Arachnos because they're the king of the hill.
The last one is a fairly big sticking point. In the Hero game, it's evident that your character is a B-list second-stringer for the most part... at least, there's no way, in canon terms, you can compare to the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators. But the game doesn't rub that inequality in your face. And some of the high-level story arcs are really epic in scale, so you can still feel good about yourself. Hey, I saved the world!
Whereas in Villain story arcs, you're reminded at every turn that Arachnos rules the Isles, and there's little you can do to shake that established order. When you get to the higher levels, what do you have to look forward to? Well, gee, you get to lick the boots of a Patron villain. How nice.
And those high-level contacts you do arcs for? You're still working for them. You're still jumping to someone else's tune.
A lot of people don't like that.
-- Acyl
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Messages In This Thread
Raining... - by Rev Dark - 06-13-2007, 07:23 PM
Re: Raining... - by The Hunterminator - 06-13-2007, 07:49 PM
Re: Raining... - by Acyl - 06-13-2007, 08:42 PM
Re: Raining... - by Logan Darklighter - 06-13-2007, 11:40 PM
Of course you know, this means WAR.... - by MechaDeuce - 06-13-2007, 11:46 PM
Re: Of course you know, this means WAR.... - by crimsonsun - 06-14-2007, 01:16 AM
Re: Of course you know, this means WAR.... - by Render - 06-14-2007, 06:27 AM
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies! - by His Lovely Wife - 06-14-2007, 11:16 AM
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies! - by Acyl - 06-14-2007, 01:13 PM
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies! - by Chibi Konatsu - 06-14-2007, 03:10 PM
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies! - by crimsonsun - 06-14-2007, 03:15 PM
Re: Well, CRAP. Keep watching the skies! - by Kokuten - 10-31-2007, 07:26 PM

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