[MUD-Dev] Re: CoH and others (was Cancellations: ...)

[Alex Chacha]

Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:

> It's just that CoH has become the poster child for quality shallow
> gameplay and that irritates me. "Shallow" is NOT the same as "pick
> up and play". Go takes a "moment to learn, a lifetime to
> master". CoH is like Tic Tac Toe. The more I see people praise the
> gameplay, the more I want to argue and defend depth. I don't hate
> CoH in any way, but the wasted potential frustrates me.

There is definitely a lot of recycled content in CoH, the gameplay
doesn't get any more diverse, it stays the same with different skins
and slightly different powers on the enemies.  The tough part is,
game play past level 15 gets very very slow and thus boring, this
was a knee-jerk reaction to few people leveling very fast, they made
experience gain very slow thus actually hurting the bulk of their
users for the actions of the few hard-core players. This is very
common in MOGs, where developers feel insulted that someone actually
got to the highest level and thus they "nerf" everyone, not
realizing they are hurting their game in the long run.  Many MOGs I
played did that and it was never well received.

The idea of a minimal MOG is nothing new and the users may actually
welcome the simplicity.  I remember in EQ, you would have to search
5-8 sites trying to figure out a quest (thanks to the god-awful
quest engine: "what gem?" "what about gem" "give me gem" "a gem of
what?" ... ad nauseum until either you get lucky or you look it up
on the web to be "which gem?") or figure out how something works,
but they did have over 5 years to add content. I wager since CoH
just shipped, they still have time to improve the game and add
content, maybe even make leveling over 15 interesting since now the
only thing to do in the game is get new powers and if that slows
down the repetitively content isn't going to keep people.

The real test of CoH and many other MOGs out there will be when
Worlds Of Warcraft is finally released, it will definitely put a
dent the community initially while people try it out and if it lives
up to its name people may jump ship, if it doesn't people will find
a new "Next-Best- Thing" on the market preaching salvation.
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