In the second part, we come to a conclusion. NC Soft is the FOX of MMO's.
Showing posts with label controller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label controller. Show all posts
9.12.2012
Fight for City of Heroes!
If you had asked me which game, City
of Heroes or Anarchy online, was most likely to shut down first, I
would not have guessed City of Heroes. And yet here I am, writing
about something I never figured I'd be writing about. I was on Skype
when my friend “Namiru” messaged me: “GW2?” which was the
status on my profile. I told him that I had picked up the game at the
behest of one of my coworkers, despite also playing both The Secret
World and World of Warcraft. I was interested in the fact that GW2
had an open world system in place, rather than the persistence based
world from GW1. To which Nam responded: “I'm not TOUCHING anything
NCSoft made after what they pulled today.” That's when I found out
they were shutting down City of Heroes/Villains/Rogues in November.
You can read the official notice here:
I was totally shocked, as were many
other devoted players. I did notice a decrease in population between
when I joined on May 19, 2008, and when the Dual Pistols power
debuted (for those who pre-purchased the Going Rogue expansion)
around March 2, 2010. After that, the population seemed to spike and
fall again until Going Rogue finally hit. I noticed yet another spike
ending in a plateau in November 2011, when the game went
Free-to-Play/Freemium. At first, nearly all the servers were in the
red, but by the time I came back to game they had returned to either
green (low) or yellow (medium). Occasionally on the weekends, Freedom
and Virtue would reach red or be grayed out as full. Still, after the
conversion to the f2p model, the population on Virtue seemed to
remain substantial and never dip as low as it was in mid-2009.
Once the rage around the fact that I
had just spent $143 for a 1 year sub, only to get about 7 months of
game play out of it had subsided, the questions started surfacing.
What was going to happen to all the proposed content? Hadn't the team
at Paragon Studios just added the new Staff Fighting, Water Blast,
and Plant Affinity power sets? Weren't they working on new content
for Praetoria? Might there actually be a City of Heroes 2 planned
that would make them do this? And most of all: “Why?”
Most people I've talked to suggest
that it's financial. I find that hard to believe, though. As stated
before, several new and intriguing power sets had been introduced,
along with new enhancements, inspirations, travel powers, emotes, and
some very detailed costume sets. There was also the Blockbuster
Summer event where the players participated either in gladiatorial
combat in an arena, or in a casino heist. LOTRO has done a similar
thing during their Yule Festival at the theater in Frostbluff. I saw
many players partaking in these activities with cash shop products.
Why keep developing an unsuccessful game for nearly a year instead of
simply axing it and cutting losses?
I think the most likely reason (cited
by ChaosD1 on MMO Grinder:
http://mmogrinder.net/2012/09/02/r-i-p-city-of-heroes/#comments
) is to try to push players off of an old acquired IP on to Aion, a
title more inline with the company's Korean “grindfest” themed
MMO's.. Some people are suggesting in the comments of the above post,
that Nexon may somehow be responsible. This theory is based on their
buying up a significant amount of NCSoft's stock, effectively making
them the biggest holder:
For NCSoft's financial earnings, check
here. I've not been patient enough to really sift through this
information:
I was on the Massively website looking
up articles on this closing, and came upon one that asked what the
reader's favorite memories of the game were. One of mine was when I
first started playing and was running around a park to the North of
Kings Row. Spotting a purple named enemy below me, I made a quick
escape. Then out of curiosity, and the fact that it wasn't following
me, I returned to carefully observe what I'd stumbled upon: the
Clockwork “Paladin.” Over the years, I would catch a glimpse of
someone fighting this Giant Monster, or see alerts of it's impending
assembly. Once I even saw a solo level 50 controller take it down
with pets.
Kings Row was one of my favorite
areas, although even Galaxy City had some fun nooks and crannies
before the rock slammed into it. Gemini Park was where I first
encountered my dreaded enemy, the Vahzilok Eidolan. At least
in the lower levels. Valor Bridge in Independence Port was another
favorite hangout, especially when you Super Jumped off the top down
into the bay. Another fun place was Croatoa, the monsters there
having also been used in the Halloween Event. They would jump out of
the door every time you got a “trick,” whereas a “treat”
earned you temporary costumes, inspirations, special salvage, etc.
I'll also miss the Ski Chalet and trying to earn the special badge
from the ski jump ramp. It was fun slipping and sliding all over the
place! And the lodge at the top was great for sitting around and
chatting with friends.
Then there are all the things I never
got to do, such as get a character to level 50, explore the Incarnate
abilities, do a Task Force or Trial, not to mention fully explore the
new Dark Astoria or Praetoria. Hell, my Praetorian is only level 15.
There were ideas for future characters and rerolls of current heroes
and villains, too. I was also working on a few CoH themed projects
for the blog here such as a “Grand Tour” themed series where I
explore various parts of Paragon City that might fly under people's
radar, probably linking to Paragon Wiki for people looking to collect
the exploration badges. Hopefully I can get a few screen caps of the
House of the Wayward Soul super group base. I was also working on
several character profiles such as the Vellum one posted.
It seems most of the Legendary super
group and my friends are giving Champions Online another try. Namiru
says it's a bit better than when he last tried it. I have only just
fired it up on the new gaming desktop, and am out of the tutorial
zone with a CO version of archer extraordinaire, Elsie Dracona. I'm
also going forward with the “Grand Tour” series, only it'll
probably focus on LOTRO now, with maybe whatever I can get of CoH
before it shuts down. I'll be taking screen shots of all the CoH
characters I can unlock and putting up profiles of them.
A lot of people also seem to be
holding out for a last minute save for CoH from someone willing to
buy the rights to the IP, the characters, and the engine. There is
also talk of a fan run server. Author Mercedes Lackey, apparently a
long time player, has thrown her support behind the campaign to keep
the game going and there has recently been a large protest staged by
players across 30+ instances of the Virtue server. TonyV has
organized a special message board found here:
A writing campaign has been organized
on the Titan Network forums. The etiquette guidelines and addresses
for CEO Mr. Taek Jin Kim can be found here:
The heroes of Paragon City have always
been there me. It's high time I be there for them.
8.22.2012
Gamepadding Through The Secret World
I've been playing The Secret World off and on for the past month, or so. Everything was going well until I reached the first combat sequence after watching my character fall unconscious outside London's Ealdwic Park. This was when things got rather difficult, and painful, fast. The shooter style combined with the hotbar commands and tab targeting put a bit of a strain on my wrist. The result is that I stopped playing, did a little research, and found the following link on the TSW forums:
From there, I downloaded the Xpadder
program for about $10:
Now I'm sure more than a few of you
reading this know of other, better (free) programs and techniques for
getting a gamepad to work with The Secret World. I'm also fairly
positive the layout pictured isn't the most efficient. However this
is my first time trying to set up a gamepad to work with a PC game,
so this layout is very much a work in progress.
What we see here is Set 1 of 3, where
I try to put the most useful buttons such as main attacks, movement,
tab targeting, and camera. When you first create a new layout, you
can select from a list on the Xpadder website to load the image of
the controller you are mapping, in this case a Logitech Gamepad F310.
I made sure to register the movements of all the analog sticks and
buttons with the program. I then went through and assigned key(s)
from the keyboard to each button and each direction of the analog
stick. The sticks can be assigned as few a 4 direction functions and
up to 8, as well as defaults for W,A,S,D and the arrow keys. Clicking
the little wrench will show you more options. In order to keep
everything organized, I named the buttons after their function by
clicking on the green “Abc” area in the Xpadder UI.
I was able to also bind multiple
keyboard functions to one button/analog direction as well. You can do
this by clicking on the initial key you want to bind in the Xpadder
keyboard interface, then going into the “Advanced” menu to add a
second key bind. This helped in setting up the camera movement, since
I could map the right click mouse button along with a direction:
Now here comes the tricky part. Since
there are a lot more keys for TSW than just the primary ones featured
in Set 1, I needed to make a second Set. Once I created Set 2, I had
to link it to Set 1 to be able to switch between the two. The forum
post recommended using the “When Held” assignment to one of the
triggers/bumpers. Instead, I played around with the “One Way Click”
and “Two Way Click” options before realizing that all of these
functions needed an anchor point between the sets involved. I decided
to stick with the “When Held” function as it was the easiest to
work with. I then went through and, still using the TSW forum post as
a guide, assigned the next round of commands to Set 2:
Finally, Set 3 focused on the basic
functions of the mouse in interacting with the GUI:
I plan on using this program to assign
keys for Age of Conan, as well. Considering that game relies on tab
targeting and directional assault on the enemy's flanks, it should
come in handy. I hope this this post has been of interest.
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