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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3737077" data-attributes="member: 11760">And WoW breaks the EQ1 mold very specifically. Instead of having more than a dozen narrowly focused classes, WoW broke that model by having fewer classes with a great deal of overlap between them.The EQ1 paradigm survives only in CoX. It was a bad choice at the time Cryptic did it and it's a worse choice now.Nonsense. Good design does not involve taking an existing game, knocking off the decorations, slapping new ones on it and pretending it's a new game. That's lazy design.Good design instead looks at what the end goal is -- superhero roleplaying, in this case -- and models that. Cryptic's success is due only to having a then-novel genre for MMORPGs, along with a spiffy costume creator.I absolutely disagree. CoX could be much, much deeper and still be true to comic books. The designers just didn't care about anything other than "grinding," EQ1 style. (It's almost as though they didn't play any other MMORPGs, much like Brad McQuaid banned anyone on his Vanguard team from discussing WoW, with even worse results.)Comic book elements that could be added to an MMORPG to make it more than just combat:* Secret identities. Quests that could only be done in secret identities, the ability to shake off pursuit by enemies by switching, contacts that can only be accessed this way (think Barry Allen, police scientist, or Jack Ryder, annoying newsman) and resource management (draining the kids' college fund to buy new body armor).* Detective work. Right now, CoX detective work consists of running from contact to contact, until one tells you to go beat someone up. After doing so, you get the next breadcrumb, leading to a contact or someone else to beat up. Instead, clues could be searched for, CSI-style, much like gathering works in other MMORPGs. There could also be clues in newspapers and radio broadcasts (CoX has a nod to this, but it's a pretty overt "pick a news story for a quest" mechanism) that, taken in toto, would lead to hidden quest areas or NPCs.* Exploration of outside areas. In CoX, the only way to experience content -- all of which is experienced on the ground or in the air, last I played -- is for the designers to graft on a new zone (and wow, how retro to have zoning at all) featuring an alien invasion or whatever. While Star Wars Galaxies took it too far, the game could dynamically generate space and underwater environments for characters to explore. Space aliens, incidentally, should not all look like squids, which is probably the least interesting possibility for aliens imaginable.* PvP. The PvP in CoX is a sad joke. In a genre where the Hulk and the Thing beating the crap out of each other is a staple, the game doesn't allow two player characters to consensually duel one another without going to a special arena to do so. Player characters should be allowed to fight anywhere, at any time. Likewise, the CoH/CoX line should be more permeable than it currently is. Instead of entering PvP-only zones (well, unless you're collecting badges, I guess), Paragon City and whatever those villain islands were called should share multiple zones where regular missions occur, but where villains and heroes will run across one another. In those zones, everyone should be PvP-enabled as far as those on the other side are concerned. (To keep griefing down, the Sidekick code should lower characters down to the maximum mission level for the zone, just to prevent level 40 characters from beating up level 14 enemies all day long.)CoX doesn't suck because of the genre, it sucks because of the incredibly unimaginative designers who, frankly, come off as people who aren't particularly interested in comics, but just saw it as an available genre they could exploit for an MMORPG.Many CoX players came from comic book communities -- go look at the avatars over on the ComicBookResources.com message boards -- with no background (or interest) in MMOs.There are healers in CoX because the designers couldn't be bothered to think up a mechanic that didn't need them.It goes without saying that CoX isn't worth $15/month. The market's said it -- never having to add a single server after the first week of CoH's launch is incredibly telling -- and neither of us pays for it any more. Now, if they dropped their monthly fee to $5 or so, I'd certainly give them my money.Even better would have been to not run off of central servers at all, and use a GuildWars or Diablo set-up -- maybe with a server just checking character validity -- so that a monthly fee wouldn't be necessary.The one-time thrill of seeing a dozen supercharacters in one place isn't worth paying $15 from then on, especially since so much of the content is now played in small groups in instanced environments anyway, which Diablo I showed years ago can run just fine as a peer-to-peer game.My reasoning's not arbitrary, I just am not interested in their justifications for not modeling the superhero genre, since that's the game's sole selling point. I don't want to play "weird semi-science fiction, semi-superhero game thingy," I want to slip on some Spandex, drop-kick my neighbor over a water tower and go save the city.An MMO that regurgitates what other games did before it, whether or not it's appropriate, and without adding anything significant to the model (although /sidekick is great and inexplicably hasn't caught on with other games) is a game that stays on life support forever.Sort of like CoX.</blockquote>

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