Tuesday 8 June 2004

Pic of the day: Another beautiful day, another beautiful human sacrifice broken up. Screenshot from City of Hero. Err, Heroes. Text added later by the voices in my head.

A task force of 1

City of Heroes may be simple, even simplistic by the standards of massive multiplayer online games. True, each character is unique; but items and economy are so abstract that you barely recognize them, and there are hardly any social activities except fighting together. Fighting villains is what this game is about. And what it does, it does well. You can go out on the streets and look for muggers and drug dealers. Or you can talk to your contacts to get missions, some of which will gradually reveal more and more about the city and the various factions that inhabit it. Or you can do Task Force missions.

A task force (often called just TF by the locals) is a team, but not just any team. It is a team committed to a larger task, typically consisting of 10 missions and lasting 5-10 hours. I have seen stories about 12 hours or more, but this is usually a sign of poor team design.

There are only a few task force arcs, each of them revealing more than your average set of missions about the city and its villains. A task is given by one of the Surviving Eight, the few major heroes who overcame the Rikti invasion with their lives intact. Unlike other missions, it is not scaled to the level of the team leader, but has a fixed level. (This was not so on release, but has been implemented later, and not all people adore it.) The first task is given by Positron in Steel Canyon, and is security level 15. Heroes up to 16 can participate, although I am not sure if anyone over 15 can lead. Possibly. It makes sense, because the villains will also be level 16 if the task force has more than 5 members. And it usually has.

It makes sense to start out with a full team of 8, because you cannot take up new team members once you have started the task. This holds true even if one member quits. So your team can only grow smaller over time. On the bright side, if you log out without explicitly quitting your task force, you can assemble again the next day (or next weekend, whatever) and continue where you stopped. The task force is by design more permanent than a team, but less permanent than a Supergroup (guild).

***

So at 15 I joined my first task force. I was rather curious. We were first sent to neighboring Boomtown, a hazard zone, to go into a sewer there and clear out some scientifically created zombies there. (These are usually called Vahzilok, after their inventor, Dr Vahzilok.) The zombies were level 16, most of us were not, and it was rough. After the first mission was over, so many people had quit that we disbanded and formed again with new members, and took on the task force again. This time we were sent to Skyway, another habitable zone, but still in a sewer to defeat the same sort of zombies. (The layout and cast is similar but not quite identical for each time, enough to keep you on your toes.) We fought and triumphed, and went on to the next mission. Mission two was a horrifying fight with the evil mages called "Circle of Thorns". They had also summoned some decidedly nasty spectral lords to help them. We won, eventually. But after this, the team was so reduced that most quit, and the task force dissolved.

The next day I reached level 16, and answered once again to a plea for a tanker. At this level, tankers are truly hard to get for a team, even harder to find than healers (but perhaps not quite as necessary). I understand that tankers grow slowly more common at higher levels, for the simple reason that they grow more powerful over time compared to most archetypes. Or it could just be that tankers in their teens solo a lot. Anyway, it wasn't hard to get accepted, as they asked specifically for a tanker. (Both days.)

We had not come too far into the first sewer when our only scrapper suddenly said "Have to go. Bye." Luckily scrappers are generalists, and a team can usually do well without a scrapper if it has tankers and blasters. Blasters are rarely ever in short supply (at least until later in the game) and the tanker was my humble self, so onward we trudged in the green goop. We triumphed without further losses, and moved on to the evil mages. At this point we were only 5, but this is a good thing, since it means the villains won't get the bonus level. There are also fewer of them. So eventually we won again. By then, however, three of the five had to quit for various reasons. Soon after, I was on my own.

I had still not quit the task force, and we had finished our mission. So I returned to Positron, who praised our team roundly and gave us a new task, involving clockwork robots. Great. Even though my character is of magic origin, I seem to do surprisingly well against these critters. In part I attribute this to the wisdom of taking Energy Resistance early in my career. When combined with Unyielding Stance, which has a bonus against all damage except psionic, I can wait out the ranged attacks and beat up the bronze robots as they try their propellers at a direct attack. It went well until the very end, where I met the boss. I had to burn all except one of my healing inspirations (kinda like potions, but more abstract again). If I had been level 15, I would have been defeated. It was hard enough as it was.

Like ordinary missions, this one scaled to the team's size, in this case 1. But unlike other missions, it did not scale to my level. I was 16, the mission was still 15, which is how I managed to get through it. I returned victorious once again.

However, the next was another confrontation with the Circle of Thorns. I managed to make my way a bit into their caverns, but by now it was past midnight and not a good time to immerse myself in life-threatening extremely detailed rendered demons from the Abyss. Perhaps I will return to this character later and see how far I can get in the task force story arc. Or perhaps I will cave in to some team's pitiful mewling for a tanker. Who knows?

What I know is that it is possible to continue a task force with only one player. Nice to know, for the less social among us. (You need to be 3 or 4 players to start one, I don't remember exactly which. But theoretically you could just borrow some nearby heroes for a couple minutes, then wave them goodbye and do the missions yourself. You're not likely to defeat the final boss, but could still have a good time. At least unless Cryptic Studios read my journal and decide to plug this hole. ^_^*