 Fighting evil by moonlight |
 Filing papers by daylight |
| Always ready for a real fight, she is the one named… oops, sorry. | |
City of Heroes’ Issue 13 code name: Architect, is going to be introducing DAY JOBS!!! Because, staying up all night fighting good and evil alike just isn’t tiring enough, you have to put in your eight hours at a job. EVE Online has had offline progression from Day 1. Having your character progress in some way even while not logged in is genius, though this is more along the lines of The Sims’ day-job-you-never-actually-see than EVE’s skill training, which occurs whether you are logged in or not.
Where you log out determines your job for the day. Log out in a university, and you’re a Scholar, and you earn Salvage. Log out in a hospital, and you’re a Caregiver, and get Health Regeneration buffs. Any place of note you can log out, gives you SOME sort of job. As well as the stuff you get just for doing the job, there are badges and titles available if you do the job consistently enough, and they increase your earnings for the job. Do multiple jobs and get Accolades for even more rewards.
My ex-main that I haven’t logged in for a year or so would be Paragon City Mayor by now, I bet. Though I imagine they will cap the amount of rewards you can accrue while logged out.
But that isn’t the best thing. Issue 13 also brings along player-generated missions and story arcs. This is the sort of thing which will be the salvation of MMOs, in exactly the same way it’s been the salvation of FPS and RTS games for the past decade. Give the players the tools to make their own content, and a lot of it will be crap. But some of it will be an order of magnitude beyond what anyone else has done.
Write GOOD missions as determined by the community, and even more exclusive rewards open up.
This is VERY exciting stuff. CoX has the big advantage here in that their mission environments are procedurally generated, whereas games like World of Warcraft make theirs by hand. It’s good to see they are taking what I consider a weakness — bland, generic missions — and turning them into a strength.
This is really cool stuff.
I mean, these people filled up their game of the most innovative and cool ideas of the market and I think that the result is visible.
In which other MMORPG can you form an efficient group in 5 minutes and start fighting 10 seconds later? And your missions difficulty is perfectly balanced with the group skills?
OMG
I wish I liked Super Hero games. Bah..
This is cool stuff.
This game really is balanced well, and the different ways you can play it…I, I…
I hate you NCSoft!
Ok…well, time to put on my cape and get back to writing surveys (ugh)
Later
@Mantees — well, for sure, CoX is the one game where I never have any trouble finding groups. Everyone wants full teams for missions 🙂 Now, everyone is going to want to get people to try their mission… that might be a little harder.
@Openedge — I like CoX because they keep trying to push the envelope. I actually hit a mission I’d never done before a couple of days ago, one where you are fighting from the moment you zone in. That was a wipe :/ Nobody in the team was expecting that. Bad for Masterminds (like my current main), because it takes us a couple of minutes to summon and buff our pets after we zone… but it was definitely different.
Tipa, NCSoft should put you on their payroll. I have never played CoX, and never really felt like I was missing out until I started reading about your times in the game. I know this this post was basically reporting news that I could have found elsewhere, but it was your wonderful blog that is likely to be the reason I pick up the game this weekend and give it a go.
I came for the EQ stories. I will stay for getting good info on games I havent tried from a source whose taste and opinions I greatly respect.
Player generated missions … wow. This could be huge if done right. I wonder if the Diablo 3 folks are looking into something similar?
Oooh that’s some sweet news!
Very first toon I made in CoH looked like a librarian and had a nice, boring cover story. (He was an accountant)
THEN I found out how difficult it was to change costumes (OK,so not *that* difficult but not as easy as in, say, SWG or EQII) and he never got his tights and cape outfit..
He just stands around outside City Hall, reading his paper and sulking as all the superheroey looking cool kids go flying past, laughing at his folksy, John Denver dressed at GAP look… But soon, he can get a JOB?? Just by sleeping inthe right place? giggity!
(OK, just realised how that sounded… and now am replaying it in my head with some Barry White music and my accountant dude definitely walks with a swagger… how odd)
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the mission designer was included already in Issue 13; I had suspected that it would be in a later issue next year.
One can certainly argue that the game has some shortcomings in its design, but they certainly do a good job at making the best of what they got.
I do not think that the mission areas are procedurally generated however, as Anarchy Online missions are. Rather I think they have a limited set of building blocks to construct the areas with, kind of like building with Lego.
Well, procedurally generated, as I understand it as a programmer, is something generated through a set of rules automatically, rather than by a designer. I haven’t played Anarchy Online :/
I’ve been reading more interviews with the CoX devs and am even MORE excited about the mission designer. I can’t wait to see what sort of stories can be told.
Same background, same understanding.
CoX mission areas are too regular to be generated on the fly I think; possibly pre-generated once automatically at design-time and then reused.
I have played numerous alts in CoX and done some missions many many times. I would have expected more variation if they were generated on the fly; instead I think I have seen at most 2 variations for a single particular mission (real missions that is, have not bothered to try to check the newspaper/safeguard ones).
Although Anarchy Online missions were pretty much as close as one could get to the CoX newspaper missions – just some generic mission objective. But there you could also adjust a number of settings when you asked for missions; get more cash/loot or get more xp; higher level or lower level mobs; many or few locked containers etc.