Friday, October 28, 2005

The Walls have Ears... and Eyes!

This enhanced level of difficulty should be worked into some missions: The Clockworks (or Crey, or some other technology-savy villain group) has taken over office building X. They've also tapped into the building's security system and are watching the heroes' every move on the many security cameras set about the building. They know where you are... They know where to send reinforcements. Basically, the building's security cameras become targetable and act as ambush-spawning devices until they're disabled (working much like the "protect the artifact" missions). Once heroes come within visual range of a camera, unless they destroy it quickly, villain ambushes will spawn at regular intervals. When they're disabled, no more ambushes.
Yes, this makes many of the current building layouts trickier to navigate. The spawn-timer should be set at a delay that's adaquate for the heroes to avoid ambushes if they destroy the cameras soon after getting within visual range. It also makes invisible team members more valuable and forces attack planning in some areas. Make the players think just a little? Not necessarily a bad thing.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Send in the Clowns!

"Get them, my phantom clowns!"
....at least that's what I'd like to be saying. I have an illusion controller named Prankenstein. He just got Phantom Army. I quickly realized... phantoms are visually boring. Especially for someone as flamboyant as Prank. Illusion controllers should be able to customize how their phantoms look. Seems like it should be pretty easy to set up. Me? I want an army of clowns.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

[Applause!]

A small detail. I've always been bugged by the apparently random flight (you know... "fleeing") of the civilians on the streets of Paragon City. I wish the A.I. of the civilians was a little tighter when it comes to realism. But the main reason I'm posting this is to make a suggestion of how civilians can be used to add a little more realism (and gratification) to CoH. I'd like to see civilians be used to reflect how "popular" (i.e., successful) a hero is. By success here, I'm talking about success rate in missions... Finishing timed mission on time, completing missions without dying, etc. This rate of success is used to establish how popular a hero is. As for the civilians... When heroes with higher popularity are fighting villains on the streets of Paragon City ("hunting"), rather than run away from the action, civilians gather around the fight ...at a safe distance... and cheer the hero on. The higher a hero's popularity is, the more civilians gather to watch and cheer. The animations already exist for various cheers and applause. It might be nice to add a nice cheering sound effect.

Yay heroes!!