Day 3

Again with Costumes

I started day three of the open beta with an attempt at recreating another one of my City of Heroes characters. It was… interesting. I find in many ways the Champions Costume editor to offer a broader variety of piece types, while at the same time feeling as though it is missing many of the pieces that were in CoH at launch which I have come to expect.

The good news is CO looks to have the system in place to add new pieces, patterns, difuses, emblems, etc. easily.

The bad news I suspect there will be few free additions of such pieces, instead I suspect most will be offered by DLC.

City of Heroes offered subscribers a lot for their monthly fee, thus far most of their content additions have been in free patches. World of Warcraft has had two paid expansions and many free content patches. With micro-transactions in place at launch how will cryptic handle new content?  I fear getting “nickel & dimed” for every thing, leaving me to ask why am I paying a monthly fee, but I am hopeful that we will see some free content patches.

Edit: A Hero creation Boggle

After publishing this post I discovered something that boggles my mind. The standard frameworks offer “characteristics” that are not options if you create a custom framework. Why not?

I implore cryptic to add those options to all the select “characteristic” windows, both the one at creation of a custom framework and the ones gained when leveling up.

Bugs

As the honeymoon wears off a bit bugs start to annoy more, right now my biggest pet peeves are:

Teleportation

Cryptic Listen to the Community, there IS a bug. It is not just a misunderstanding with how it works. When Teleporting across a zone up at the ceiling , with no enemies around me at all I suddenly have 15 sec cooldown and fall to the ground.  This would not be so bad, if you had not seemed to ignore the issue in a recent new post.

Also I would strongly suggest replacing the after TP slow fall with a hover, or add 3 second hover to the start of the slow fall. This will give players a few seconds to look and scan and area before have to TP again.

Oh and the in combat cooldown, feels like an eternity I vote for it to be reduced to 10 second. Though I suspect if the bug was fixed the 15 seconds would not be so annoying.

Chat window and game fonts

Yes it seems like a minor thing, but its NOT. In order to chat players need to be able to read chat text. Allowing the resizing of the window needs to be a high priority item.

While you are at it, I strongly believe there needs to be an “in game” (separate from chat) font size option. Quest, tooltip, character windows, etc all have fonts that get tiny if I scale the UI down. I want the window smaller but the font bigger.

Crafting

1. The inability to tell if crafting an item has a chance to give me a skill point.
2. I can not tell what a blueprint will do until I buy it and look in the crafting window
3. Do we really need giant exploding spheres of light when we open a crafting node? If we do, make it explode upon actual looting of the node and not opening.
4. I feel as though I should have a bit more feedback when I am “experimenting”. Is it better to put all the items I can on the table at once, or should I do them one at a time?

Other things

I really want to be able to see the target of my target. I have become so used to that feature I feel lost without it.

The Loot !s are odd to me. I think they might need to be bigger and there should be some way to distinguish a quest item !s and item loot !s.

The chat window bug strikes again when I encounter an NPC with dialog, and it scrolls by so fast I can not read it.

PvP balance is going to be a mess to balance. I saw a guy last night at level 10 beating up on people several levels above him. He was able to mostly because of one power, but I believe it was his particular combination of options that made him near indestructible in the the tier 1 pvp. Well unless someone else had a similar setup, at which point stalemates ensued.  Of course I also hope they don’t mess up the fun of some powers in PvE when they balance for PvP.

World object that you have to interact with for quests can be annoying for several reasons. First some quests require each group member to interact with the object. Second most object have a reactivation timer on them so you have stand around and wait for it and then race other players to click. And third when the object are not ready to be interacted with, you are not given good notification that the object you are looking at is the one you need.

Targeting world object to destroy seems a bit wonky. At least for me, it seems hard to target and keep them targeted.

Also I am pretty happy with the variety of enemies I have encountered thus far, and hope that variety continues throughout.

Day 3 summary

I again, despite the bugs and polish issues, had a really good time playing. As our characters level up into their teens I am started to see much more diversification of power mechanics and usage in fights compared to what we saw at level 6. This make me hopeful that not all characters will play exactly the same way their entire ‘lives’.

Unless something big pops up, it may be a few days before I post another update.