Super strength: interacting with environment, i.e, lifting

[Rhale]

Super strength: interacting with the environment, i.e, being able to "lift" heavy objects for different effects (throwing, freeing victims, hitting baddies with heavy objects, etc.). Also, comics, movies, and TV heroes constantly cause collateral damage, and those with any greater than normal strength are always lifting/moving heavy objects for various reasons, busting through doors, even walls.  Is it possible to build that mechanic into the CoH game somehow?

Furthermore, the old trailers of the live game often depicted heavy objects being lifted and thrown. Perhaps this mechanic was planned all along.

 

 

[Rudra]

You can do a lot more in presenting a story in a cinematic than you can in a game. Cinematics don't require players to interact with anything, so there is no need to develop structures/elements for the player to interact with, and possibly break the game in creative ways doing so when it comes to damaging the surrounding terrain. Maps are not designed as destructible. Set mobs like cars and civilians need to be able to follow preset paths on the zones to avoid causing problems in the game, so they are neither destructible nor liftable. (Edit: You can see how poorly mobs not following logical paths are received by watching the NPCs at Portal Corp. for instance. It very much breaks immersion.) Even the vehicles you see being destroyed by various groups are not part of the zone map, but are destructible objects that are part of that group's spawn. Buildings have no interiors, so making them destructible would provide major holes in the map for players to get under the map with, so they are not destructible. Even the buildings you enter teleport you to another part of the map much lower than the base map which has its enclosing features rather than letting you directly into the building. The only maps with destructible elements for players are the Mayhems, and those are only partial zone maps that had to be created specifically for their designated purpose. And even on those you can't damage infrastructure like buildings, bridges, and roads.

 

As far as the mechanic itself goes? Characters can already lift massive weights using powers like Hurl. They just do so without damaging the map.

 

Edited Tuesday at 11:20 PM by Rudra
Edited again to correct "possible" to "possibly".

[Ghost]

While it would be cool, it would also open the door to a lot more requests and expectations for what could be done to/with the environment.

 

[Steampunkette]

The cars you see parked in parking lots in CoH are not interactable objects, they're part of the map. Sure, they're "Objects" in the map design sense, but so are sections of the War Walls and buildings and the hills.

 

Even if there were an easy way to flag them "Throwable" you'd then need to move onto the second hard part... Telling the game engine what that means. City of Heroes is built on a game engine over 30 years old that wasn't designed for destructible environments. In point of fact, I don't think there were any games at that time that sought to have malleable environments. So you'd need to build up a massive code base within the spaghetti that is CoH to tell it "This is what a throwable object is". We're talking "Expansion Territory" levels of new code.

 

Then, someone will have to go through every map in the game, including mission maps with cars and any other object that the devs want to be throwable and delete every object on those maps only to replace them with the new Throwable version of the object.

 

Then we'd need an animator to go in and design an animation for lifting objects. An animation for carrying an object while walking. An animation for carrying an object while running. Eight more animations for carrying an object while running forward-right, right, backward right, backward, backward left, left, and forward left. Then more for jumping while carrying an object. Then at least ten more for flying while carrying an object. Then another two for Teleporting while carrying an object. Then another nine for swimming while carrying an object. And then triple it since there's 3 body types that all need the animations.

 

And then animations for throwing an object while standing, jumping, or flying.

 

Then they have to go into the super strength powerset and figure out where to put the "Can now interact with throwable objects" tag on the powers.

 

Then they have to go through the various possible thrown objects and determine how much damage they do, how much of an area they hit, how many targets, etc. And create an individual power for every thrown object in the game to trigger when it gets 'Thrown'.

 

And then create throwing animations for every object.

 

ALL of this, just so Superstrength Characters can ignore their powerset to instead run around the area grabbing every item they can find to chuck them at enemies instead of bothering with things like "Recharge Times" or "Endurance Costs" or other balancing metrics.

 

It would certainly be cool. But the amount of effort involved is flatly insane for the benefit of only a handful of characters within a handful of archetypes. Heck, I'd posit the effort would be insane for any game not designed from the ground up to allow for it even if -everyone- got the power to throw any object on the map.

Edited yesterday at 03:28 PM by Steampunkette

[Chance Jackson]

On 5/16/2025 at 8:26 AM, Steampunkette said:

Telling the game engine what that means. City of Heroes is built on a game engine over 30 years old that wasn't designed for destructible environments. In point of fact, I don't think there were any games at that time that sought to have malleable environments. 

 

 

In that time period? Only the Red Faction games come to mind, i think they called their system Geo mod.

 

 

That aside

 

I could see a specific context temp power being granted when you are in front/behind (or flying just above the roof of) certain cars that when activated uses the throw boulder animation but with that car replacing the boulder, i won't pretend to know how feasible that is.

[Rudra]

2 hours ago, Chance Jackson said:

I could see a specific context temp power being granted when you are in front/behind (or flying just above the roof of) certain cars that when activated uses the throw boulder animation but with that car replacing the boulder, i won't pretend to know how feasible that is.

So would there now be two f those cars? The one actually part of the map and the one you are throwing that will disappear as it shatters into little rock shards after?