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VulnaviaPhibes

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Everything posted by VulnaviaPhibes

  1. I just wanted to say how much I love the Grandville update. Checking on all of the heroes in arachnos' dungeon was so cool, especially the special cells. I love the little worldbuilding touches that you've been adding!
  2. I've got to say the new redside striga story arcs seem strangely unfinished. Obviously their production value is a lot lower, and maybe the previous arcs, both the vazhilok stuff and especially the rogue and vigilante content, just set the bar too high with dialogue trees, moral choices, interesting boss fights, and so on. And presumably most of the focus was on the issue finale. However, even for a more low-key project, a lot of the writing feels like a first draft. The NPCs don't have much character, the wording is often awkward, and there's none of that classic redside camp since the dialogue is so sparse, and mostly utilitarian exposition. The bare-bones sparseness of the writing combined with the bare-bones simplicity of the missions makes the story really hard to get into. The vibe and quality seems much more in the vein of the blue-side striga arcs. The contacts even tell you to check their shops for enhancements, even though contacts don't sell enhancements anymore... Was it intentionally written to be a throwback to old-style CoH? To match the quality and style of the blue side arcs? If so, why? This is obviously an enormous project, especially for an all volunteer team, but the Homecoming team has made so many incredible, beautifully polished quests in the past, so it just seems weird that these quests were released in this state.
  3. Just wanted to pop in and add my opinion: the story/lore of city of heroes has always been my favorite part. The extremely high quality of writing has always been what set this game apart and made it truly special, and I'm overjoyed to see the homecoming team carrying on that tradition. You guys are doing incredibly! Much love. ^_^ ❤️
  4. I'm just popping in to say how much I love Becky the Tarantula Mistress, and that I love that she's getting some well-deserved screen time, and I really appreciate the makeover the art team gave her! The pink is so swanky, and I love the custom decals! Hot Mess Express indeed... ❤️ (It has always been my headcanon that tarantulas customize their exosuits with stickers and decals and stuff and it's amazing to see that confirmed with my favorite tarantula of them all :3) All the little details, like the beds in the smelting factory, the multiple clickable pizzas, the secret Crey experiments, not to mention the new music... SO much love went into this release, and I want you to know that I appreciate and ❤️ you. ^_^
  5. I played on live but only for two or three months before it shut down. It was so fun that I had to come back. I was still in middle school back then, so this game is definitely very nostalgic for me.
  6. Oh that was so cool!! You did such an amazing job! I was NOT expecting it to be the way it was. SUPER spooky!
  7. Great news for anyone having this problem- Island Rum still works just fine! It will give you an error message when it tries to install Wine, but then it will go on to install and run the game without trouble. That's obviously not a sustainable fix lmao, but it does allow you to play the game. ^_^
  8. Thank you! Tragically, even with the latest build I still can't install the game, though the launcher otherwise works. 😞
  9. It doesn't seem to be working for me, unfortunately. I've checked the launcher.log and I'm running build 4520, but I'm still having the same game files installation issue. EDIT: As a secondary concern (The log says I'm running on 4520, not 4518, so this is probably not the issue)- my computer won't acknowledge the launcher.exe you linked above as "safe," even if I open it manually, for some reason it forgets that I did that when it comes time for the launcher to use it, and either cancels out or trashes the file. @golias how did you manage to get around that?
  10. The problems I mentioned with the installer and launcher seem to be fixed- it installs properly, and the launcher doesn't freeze or crash upon opening. Thank you! ^_^ However, there seems to be a new problem. When I try to download Homecoming, the progress bar stays stuck at 0% permanently, and trying to close the launcher during this process causes it to freeze up and become non-responsive exactly like it did before.
  11. Update: it seems like it might be a problem with Wine. It was the Wine64 preloader that was freezing before, and now that I've uninstalled, the Wine64 loader is freezing again and failing to complete the setup and install the launcher/game.
  12. The launcher has been working fine for me for months, even worked this morning, but starting now, it doesn't open correctly. The window can't be clicked on or interacted with in any way, and the Wine taskbar is also unresponsive. The only solution is to force-quit. Is anyone else having this problem on their Mac? I'll probably uninstall and reinstall, but that seems a shame.
  13. I love this proposal so much. The gradual transformation of the order vs liberty themes of Praetoria from political to mythic is just so fun to see play out in-game, and I really feel like a storyline for these archetypes could integrate those mythic themes back into the main storyline of Praetoria in a way that makes you go "Oh crap! That's what was going on here, that's what this means symbolically..." plus it could add yet another conspiratorial twist, and it's always fun to layer those. Also I love Lamashtu and an elaboration on the relationship between the mythic world and Praetoria would be welcome. PLUS SNAKE BODY. I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED SNAKE BODY. ❤️ This is just wonderful, thank you for suggesting it! ^_^
  14. Yeah Port Oakes is squeezed into a small level range but Bocor, the Radio, and Veluta Lunata remain quite good. I almost always hop over to Bocor before I hit level 10, and then go for the other two before going over to Cap.
  15. Honestly sometimes I just log in and walk around. Usually somewhere pretty like night ward or mercy island. Just take in the atmosphere and go about my little day for a few minutes.
  16. The Graham Easton arc definitely has really tight and well-designed missions. Efficient and particular and with variable amounts of combat depending on your build and choices. Beeline to the end on your Stalker and get out, or brawl for a while on your Brute. I feel the story could be fleshed out slightly though at the end though. My absolute favorite thing about it is the option to more or less side with the Tsoo and tell off Easton to his face. I love when Hero storylines have Vigilante~ish "I care more about my personal code of ethics and justice than the letter of the law" options. I definitely see the comparisons with Shauna Braun, both in terms of mechanics and in terms of narrative. Both very clean, fast, streamlined stories.
  17. Very interesting! I like the idea that planned spawns and spawning behavior, not just unique enemy/faction design, can lead to more interesting mechanical challenges that require more forethought and planning than normal. And objective design too, maybe with more objectives being added with larger groups, instead of just more enemies, if that's possible. It might help avoid the rolling death ball and make the mission more dynamic. I will say in terms of narrative design and storytelling, I think looking to the Vincent Ross / Mr G method of incorporating old contacts into new content is a smart idea. It makes the choice of what contacts you spend your time with in a given level range important in the long term and adds weight to that choice, like you're actually building up a powerful network of allies that can help you in your long-term plans. I think it might be interesting to offer multiple choices of these as well. For a magical problem, you could call Vincent Ross OR Mr Bocor OR Mortimer Kal, depending on whose missions you'd completed. Maybe they all give you the same info with different dialogue, or maybe they each give a different clue that adds a different side-objective to the next mission, or maybe they use branching mission tech to give you different missions. I really like the middle option though- clues that add new side objectives, Vincent Ross style, because it doesn't seem overly taxing and complex, but allows missions to play out very differently depending on what choices you make and who you choose to side with. This is very villain focused but you could probably do some hero stuff with this as well. Sort of like the investigation mission from the new Vazhilok arc, but instead of a branching mission based on a specific dialogue, a situation where calling up different people would give clues that let you pursue different elements of your investigation within the mission and pursue the mystery from different angles. You could even do it where you could work with a traditional detective or a magical investigator or a crook on the inside, and explore the same mystery from different angles. It seems like it would a cool way to add more personal choices and more replay value to a lot of story arcs.
  18. "Just join everlasting" was a pretty silly/dumb "solution" for me to propose lol. But I do think that Everlasting's villain population makes forming paper, mayhem, and strike force teams very easy. They just need to advertise more aggressively and be more fun and quirky to get people's attention, since you're competing with good single player content as well as other team content. (I was on that Renault SF as well, as Cervina Dolorosa, and I must say the LFG messages were a bit tepid). I know I was a bit dismissive of the whole argument, and that's not fair, but I do think that it means something that the unofficial RP server also has the highest % of Villain and Praetorian characters. The draw of the Rogue Isles is not rolling through bland missions with huge teams, and Praetoria even less so. Homecoming has a fraction of live's player-base, Redside has a fraction of that, and most of those players are not jumping from big team to big team like blueside players often are. So yes, big teams will form slower, but that's in part due to the nature of the game and the way it's designed, I think. I like this idea because it opens up a lot of conceptual space. Your morally grey types, amoral mad scientists and revolutionary freedom fighters and stuff like that, can play the content that makes the most sense for them without having to change their alignments back and forth to get access to it. However I'm not sure it would actually fix the problem of it being hard to find a redside group on most servers. If 99% of players are already rogues or vigilantes, and alignment can be changed instantly in the pocket D, and TUNNEL/bases allow you to teleport anywhere from anywhere, then the main mechanical obstacle to redside grouping is already gone. I'm not sure how much more this would do. I think people who've posted about players in most RPGs finding evil content unfun or unpleasant in itself might be hitting the nail on the head, actually. Redside content is fun and well-written and enjoyable, but it's only to the taste of a limited number of players who really love the vibe or really get into character, and that would explain why it's most popular on the rp server, I think.
  19. I feel like this argument has been going on for so many years that it's lost track of itself. Why do we even want more people to play redside? So it's easier to find groups? Just play on everlasting, I've literally never failed to quickly fill a group for whatever evil deeds I wanted to do there.
  20. I'm glad this means the Paladin event will trigger more than once per server reset, but I did rather like the new event, it was dynamic and fun and it came with a cool temporary summon power! This reversion is just until the trigger behavior on the new event can be fixed, right? I still get to summon my good good clockwork boy again someday, right? 🥺
  21. I always go evil if a game will let me (DCUO has some very nice villain missions), but yeah, it definitely seems like the less popular choice. The only MMO I can think of that's an exception is AQWorlds, where the evil faction is so overwhelmingly popular that the developers completely abandoned any kind of good vs evil competition and events just have various evil sub-factions competing among themselves. Even the story has sidelined the good guys in favor of a dark, sprawling evil-vs-evil plot, since most players are just so profoundly disinterested in being heroes. (The game is famous for hosting live emo/goth concerts so that might be an influence on the kinds of players they get, to be fair.)
  22. I will say that a lot of debate on this topic seems extremely stuck in the past, which is to be expected given how long it's been going on. The problem isn't a lack of dedicated "redside" players. Everyone's in the same world, and we can change alignment with the push of a button! The problem people have actually identified is that it's difficult to find groups to do villain content with, compared to hero content. Villain content is on average better written and generally more story-focused than hero content, and that's part of the problem. You're more likely to want to take it slow with a small group and roleplay a little than rush through the missions with a big group and not read anything, or level too fast and miss your favorite story arc or zone. Praetoria has this same situation but more so. Rapidly leveling and rushing through in big teams kind of ruins the point. There is villain content designed for big teams, but it's the exception, not the rule. As supporting evidence for this: Everlasting. it's the unofficial RP server and as far as I know has the largest villain population of all of Homecoming's servers. I'm almost exclusively on Everlasting and I rarely have trouble finding a villain team, and they're often in-character teams as well.
  23. I do agree that if the Rogue Isles did feel a little more lawless, and Arachnos' role in governing them was somewhat toned down, that might open up the experience a little bit more. If the rogue isles politics stories focused more on factionalism and competition rather than Arachnos' superiority, or even if Arachnos were more visibly fractious and its power over the isles required more direct enforcement instead of being ambient, this would make those stories more interesting and give them more hooks. I wouldn't get rid of Arachnos though, they're my favorite part of the CoX games, easily. As it is, there are plenty of ways to reject working with or outright screw over Arachnos, and until you seek their Patronage (as they are the Big Dogs on the Isles, after all) you can be hostile/avoidant very easily. and when you do get Patronage, you're a couple story arcs away from cutting off alt!Recluse's head and slapping it down on his desk. It just reinforces a theme: You're in the water with the sharks, and whether you swim in their shadow or break off on your own, you need to eat, get bigger, and not get eaten.
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