Friday 6 June 2003

Pic of the day: Screenshot courtesy of Cryptic Studios, as the game is not released yet. (You can see that this is from the later stages of development, because the girl now has boy hips. Another similarity to DAoC, I am sorry to say.)

Waiting for CoH

That's City of Heroes, the massive multiplayer online superhero game. Reports from E3 show that there has indeed been some progress on this project, which has proceeded at barely a snail's pace for the last year, or even since it was announced in fall 2001. To be honest, it seems to me that they made a graphics engine originally and had only vague ideas about how to make it into a real game. But evidently some progress is being made. And even if not, technology is catching up to the point where performance issues will be trivial; this should make implementation much easier. After all, if you have a super fast machine, even a slow and inefficient graphics engine would be good enough. And with broadband and huge servers, you would not need to bother about communications bottlenecks.

The concept is certainly intriguing. We have plenty of medieval magic role playing games online already: Ultima Online, EverQuest, Asheron's Call, and of course Dark Age of Camelot. Recently there seems to have arrived a Star Wars game too. A similar game, futuristic instead of medieval, is Anarchy Online; it is made in Norway so it is bound to be good! As our long-time Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland once said, "It is typical Norwegian to be good". She ought to know.

Superhero games are notoriously difficult to make. One reason for this is that superheroes fly. Programming for 3 dimensions is a lot harder than for 2, obviously! The wide range of superpowers is also a tough cookie to crack. The essentially single player superhero game Freedom Force has a pretty wide sample of them, but for a massive online game you will need something more. You will need to BALANCE all these powers, so that not one particular "killer combo" becomes known as The One, drawing all people to create the same type of character. In the intense competition of an online game with 1000 or perhaps 10 000 players, even a small advantage is sure to attract a huge number of copycats.

I notice that the new "archetypes" are basically starter classes, corresponding roughly to those in DAoC. The tank is a warrior, of course: Someone who can take a lot of beating and remain standing. The scrapper is our light tank, who can dish out a lot of damage but might benefit from standing behind the tank until the fight has started. The blaster is doing ranged damage like our spellcaster, possibly includes archer only with guns rather than arrows. The controller is what we call crowd control or mezzer (mesmerizer). The fifth archetype is unfamiliar: The defender seems to be specialized to defend against ranged damage. So if you go up against snipers, you want to bring your defender; but if you go up against normal thugs, you bring your tank character. There seem to be no sneak types. At least that is the impression I get so far. The game is still far from finished, or indeed from beta test.

As in existing multiplayer game, great care is taken to make sure each player is unique unless he actively copies another. The combination of uniform parts alone gives billions of billions of possible uniforms; even if you choose all parts in one color, not all parts will look the same, as there are variant shapes. You can also have one uniform when in team and another when you are working for yourself.

The combination of archetype and origin (magic, technology, mutation etc) opens up for a choice of powers, from which you can initially only choose a few. Some will forever be beyond your reach, while others will become available over time. Furthermore, the powers are modified by bonuses you get from your contacts. These are kinda like quest givers in an ordinary MMORPG, and you will have several. Based on the combination of these, your powers will be modified to make you even more unique.

This is similar to how we in DAoC do quests to get magic items; but there are no items in DAoC. Furious fans stoned to death the very idea of anything vaguely like EverQuest's item hunting. So, while technology heroes may be portrayed with items, these will not be detachable, much less sold or given away. Instead of items, you get upgrades to your powers. So you carry your "items" as part of yourself. No twinking, ever. (Twinking, for those not familiar with this idea, is giving powerful items to newbie characters, making them super powerful. It is not possible in DAoC either, as high level items simply won't work for low level characters. But here you cannot even twink someone your own level.) I guess this makes sense ... you don't hear Wonder Woman say "Sure, you can borrow my magic lasso while I am on vacation".

Well, I hope this gave some of my fellow gamers an inspiration to watch for this game. I am still pretty sure I am going to move over there ... if it ever gets finished. Keep an eye on the City of Heroes homepage.