Rise of the Phoenix (City of Titans, the successor of City of Heroes)
For those of you not in the know, (and judging by the amount of messages I get about this on Twitter, it’s a few) The project that went by many names, that had started with the Save City of Heroes petition, morphed into “Plan Z” when attempts to secure a City of Heroes private server fell through, (at least that’s what I believe happened judging by the amount of “city of heroes private server” searches that led to this site.) and finally was reborn as the Phoenix Project, a means of creating a new IP based heavily on the mechanics, playstyle, and environment of City of Heroes, dubbed “City of Titans.” Said project is now running full steam on Kickstarter.
(I’ve also found out that Plan Z and The Phoenix Project were two names for the same ideal that ended up splitting off into two different teams, Phoenix Project (Missing Worlds Media) becoming “City of Titans” and Plan Z becoming “Heroes and Villians”. No idea why there was a split between the community, but this article is about City of Titans. Those interested in the other game can check out the Heroes and Villains site by clicking here : heroes-and-villains.com)
I’m not here to tell you that you need to donate to “make City of Titans a reality” because that was covered within the first week. The game has met its initial goal, and is now fully ready to reach the market… but since reaching initial goal, donations had slowed incredibly, which is a pity now that we’ve got some stretch goals that make this far more interesting.
The team developing this title, affectionately dubbing themselves, “Missing Worlds Media”, have a lot of interesting ideas under their hat, and I’d love to see how they’re going to be fully developed, such as the idea to allow multiple approaches to “instance dungeons”, making instances more logical and realistic to navigate, offering individual storylines and much more. You can tell this is a game made by fans that are not only trying to rebirth the game they lost, but bring about fantastic and interesting ideas to light, and I have major respect to that.
I know a lot of people like to trumpet the supposed merits of games recently released, or soon to be released, despite those games being obvious IP-based WoW clone cash-ins. While I await their inevitable “3 month cycle” of eventual abandonment of, and disappointment in, those titles, City of Titans is a title seriously worth getting excited over… provided they can pull half these ideas off.
My concern?
Being an upstart comes with a lot of ideas, and sudden realization those ideas aren’t as easily realized.
I read somewhere that MMOs are one of the hardest games to program, similar to playing Jenga. Take out one problem, and you potentially create a whole slew of new ones. Add some more content, and the balance shifts wildly potentially causing the whole thing to come crashing down. This is clearly a development team with a LOT of fascinating ideas, but sharing those ideas without being certain they can implement them will bring about Molyneuxian levels of hype, and a ton of players feeling betrayed because of “broken promises”. It’s probably best to illustrate your points as “Here’s what we WANT to do. Here’s what we CAN do, and here’s what we’ve already done.” Otherwise you’ll have a ton of media sources leaving out the important bits and talking about all the things your game will have to offer when you’re not entirely sure even a quarter of them will make it in. I’m not sure how far in development things are, but this would really be better served to remember the importance of “Show, don’t tell.” and especially “Entice, don’t promise.”
The game is looking to go the “buy-to-play” route, with a subscription option, and cash shop, which I honestly think is the smartest move in this market. I honestly think the sub-only market is dead, and despite people wanting to cling to games like FFXIV and WoW as “proof” the model is viable, it’s pretty much a death knell for an upstart title and developer. Look at everything that happened to “The Secret World” when it hit the market with an initial purchase, a subscription, AND a cash shop. People saw it as a company being “greedy” and not just someone trying to get an initial turn in their investment. (MMOs are NOT cheap. Look at EA’s constant whining about how much SWTOR cost them if you need proof.) With as many people that were happily subbed to City of Heroes, I don’t think City of Titans will have any trouble making back their investment. Time will tell.
While initial stretch goals were kinda…. pointless (basically 2 app ports of the avatar builder), a ton more have been recently added, and while much more enticing, like the addition of more skins, costumes, and powers available at the start, the money isn’t pouring in nearly as fast as it was to make initial goal. I really REALLY don’t see this reaching it’s ultimate stretch goal of 2 million, which would expand the game’s starting content by 10 levels, and add more starting zones, but one could hope.
If you want to get in on the ground floor, and see what perks are available to donors, or at the least go check out what’s in store for this new game based on an old classic, visit the Kickstarter by clicking here, or if you’re unable to click links for some reason, search Kickstarter for City of Titans, or “The Phoenix Project”, or visit the link here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/missingworldsmedia/the-phoenix-project-city-of-titans
It’s up for nearly another 2 weeks at the time of this post, and while I’m hardly a massive draw to anything, I’m hoping I can at least give this game a slight “signal boost.”
Just… if I end up reviewing this game when it’s released… could ya’ll maybe.. ya know… chill the hell out?
Off-Week Update (10-12-2013)
This is going to be another one of those updates where I forget to talk about something I would have wanted to go on about, so let’s get to forgetting.
The continued descent of FireFail:
I hate liking games so seemingly content on destroying themselves. Red 5 continues to toss out baffling decision after baffling decision, the current “bwuh” of the month being their decision to completely remove… REMOVE PvP from the game until they decide it’s time to focus on it.
One of my favorite quotes in the post is this:
“Our last big attempt was a pure PvP eSports mode, Jetball. While very fun, its a high skill game and doesn’t attract many of our players (less than 3% PvP in Firefall).”
So yes, rather than let their players warm up to the mode, or listen to player feedback about what they’d do to improve it, they decided to take their Jetball and go home. Considering, as I said in the video, the game was originally designed to be PvP ONLY, and this idea of an open-world co-op shooter was tacked on later, this is one of the most confusing decisions I’ve seen out of a developer yet.
Yet, of course, my initial mention of the instanced PvP got a small flood of comments telling me I was “wrong” because the game is “going to be” a purely open-world PvP system, which, mind you, would be the worst idea ever for this game. These comments also made sure to repeatedly insist on this fact, providing no links, references, or sources, but claiming they, of course, KNEW the truth. (Said comments were on Youtube mostly, because… you know.. where else?”)
Speaking of, there are a lot of people claiming I was off about the community, and they’ve never seen that side of people in the game. Maybe your server bracket is really lax, or perhaps you just don’t pay as much attention to it, but that doesn’t mean it’s NOT happening. I’m not the only one who felt this way about the people playing this. Would you rather I relay my most recent story about a player trolling the chat in Copacabana, claiming his frame/class to be better than another, then refusing to use the stock arsenal of that frame when dueling people, because he didn’t want to play on an even field? My theory is thus, if you don’t think there’s a problem with the general community, it’s because you don’t notice, don’t care, are extremely lucky, or… you are that side of the community. Do you honestly think that bullies realize they’re bullies? They’ve already made up dozens of excuses in their heads to justify their behavior, and they don’t see what they’re doing as “wrong.” You’d be surprised how often that same principle applies.
If Red 5 wanted to actively KILL their game, they’d make it an open world PvP shooter. There’s no factions, mind you, so this means that ANY person on the map could turn their gun on you can kill you, and when you consider that Snipers will almost always one-shot a player, and the sheer amount of immediately unreachable places you could hide, it’d be a griefer’s paradise, and no one would be able to play normally. Said people who insist they know the truth have recently switched to saying that it will have specific map areas where players would compete over rarer resources… ok… That’s still not “open-world” PvP, ya know.
Whatever the hell is going on over there, I hope they figure it out before I really feel like that Founder’s Pack was a complete waste of money. I guess what I’m really trying to say here is- Did you see that?… on SIN. Some kind of weather effect?
War Thunder (Episode 48):
Out of the frying pan and into the… “that was an episode?” I can’t wait until the inevitable “Why don’t you review War Thunder” comments I usually get with low fan-fare eps. Not too much was really said about this one across the board, which to be honest does NOT surprise me when I get one of those “bubbles” of MMO fervor. People burn themselves out of these games way too easily… it’s all “OMG OMG PLAY THIS IT’S THE BEST GAME YOU HAVE TO TRY IT!” and two weeks later its, “Oh, that game. I don’t play that anymore… BUT HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS OTHER GAME OMG BEST GAME I EVER PLAYED YOU HAVE TO TRY IT”. This is pretty much why I’ve stopped looking at the Suggested MMO List, and I’m still debating the validity of the thing. Let’s just say I seriously had NO idea how vast this market was when I asked people for these suggestions…. Still had a general idea of how psychotic, though…
As for War Thunder itself? Solid title. Use my referral link so I can get me some more Golden Eagles if you want to sign up. Whether you’ll see me in it is another story… mostly because…
Dragon’s Prophet (Episode 49):
God I love broken games. There’s a charm about any title that does something wholly idiotic to amusing effect that makes you want to pat it on the head and say, “There, there, Wushu. At least you tried.” Even when it does something less cute, I can’t get overly enraged at it. “No, Dragon’s Prophet. No! Don’t crash on me… stop locking up my inventory slots! Look what you did! …aww, I can’t stay mad at you.” The key being in the last sentence, for the first puppy/child analogy, “At least you tried.” I stand by the fact that I can wholly respect a game that’s at least trying to be different. People look at DP at face value and immediately go, “Oh, such a WoW clone. Oh, they took that from TERA.” and while I honestly CAN’T figure out where these people are coming from, I at least GET it. DP has a pretty generic setting overall. It’s fantasy. It has dragons, wizards, goblins… zombies? Well, undead is a common staple. It what it’s doing with all of these that brings it to a more interesting light.
Yeah, it’s a fantasy setting, but you can ride, train, battle with, and collect dragons of various “dragon-ness” throughout the land. Half the fun of exploring is discovering what dragons are available and what skills they possess. Any game that grants you a flying mount nearly out of the gate is something worth notice at the least.
Yeah, it’s an action combat system, but it combines the systems of TERA, DCUO, Vindictus and others to create an experience all it’s own. It’s a game that makes you go, “Holy crap, I didn’t know I could do THAT” at nearly every step of the journey, and just when you feel you have a “rotation” down, the game tosses new enemies and new skills that make you rethink how you’re going to approach the fight.
Yeah, it’s full of impractical/shameless outfits and Escher-women you can create with the aid of 5-7 breast focused sliders, but again, just because you can make a woman with gravity defying, torpedo-shaped 44H cups wearing a leather battle bikini doesn’t mean you HAVE to. With the right tweaking you can make your female Guardian a lithe, muscular warrior, or your Sorcerer a waifish, petite spellcaster…. or vice versa, It’s entirely your call. Outfits aren’t all horribly impractical, and even if you’ll find more than a fair share of “Long Pants” that are anything but, you can convert your favorite pieces to costume outfits, and have up to ten switchable sets of them. It’s not nearly as deep as Aion, but whether you want to make your character, male or female, a model or a monstrosity, it’s entirely your prerogative.
Yeah, it’s a buggy mess, and it’s got issues that are still in need of repair, but it’s a fun title, I’ve actively playing and thoroughly enjoy.
We have a guild… it’s a … FEW people from the Wushu guild, and at least far more active than Wushu is currently at the moment. The game is far more casual. If you want to join, keep an eye out, for Grindstone on the Lysaia server. We are already Guild level three, and getting more points every day. Main rule of Grindstone, “Don’t be a dick.”
Upcoming Events:
I’ll be getting episode 50 done fairly soon, but I’m expecting a serious backlash, considering it’s one of those “barely scratched the surface” titles, that’s going to have me missing a lot of detail. I’ll have to invoke the “newbie show/guide” clause again that everyone seems to miss/ignore. After that is the Halloween ep, which will be an official episode this year (like Hellgate was the first year). That’s all I’m saying about that. Hopefully I’ll have the time to finish before/on Halloween.
Following that, I have nothing slated, but I’ll probably taking a bit of a break with what I’m calling the “Backtrack Block” where I’ll try to toss out a BUNCH of Backtrack videos with a week or two. While I have a few slated to look at, suggestions on what you’d like to see wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome. Just don’t… you know… do that thing.
Finally, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I HIGHLY encourage you to take a look at the “Phoenix Project” on Kickstarter for their fan-made spiritual sequel/remake of City of Heroes titled, “City of Titans”. They’ve already hit goal, and have a bunch of plans for the future, so take a look if you’re interested, and I’ll probably write up a full blown post about it sometime before the project finishes its KS run. Stay tuned.
MMO Grinder 