Out of curiosity, how do you think Champions' combat is like WoW's? It's a ton more mobile, you can fight while flying, you can actively block, and you can charge attacks. I mean yeah, you have instant casts, cast time abilities, and you press hotkeys on your keyboard to use them, but that's like saying that TF2 and Wolfenstein are the same combat system because you press LMB to shoot.Dasher said:snip
As soon as it has a back and armrests, no matter what the size.CantFaketheFunk said:Think about it, and get back to me when you can tell me when a stool becomes a chair.
A stool becomes a chair the moment you stop calling it a stool and start calling it a chair.CantFaketheFunk said:A View From the Road: The Stool and the Chair
If Champions Online is an MMOG, then maybe so is Team Fortress 2.
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Never played it, huh?Dasher said:Champions Online, like its predecessor City of Heroes/Villains, is supposed to be a superhero game (MMO or not). Despite its really quite beautiful costume elements and occasionally whiz-bang "pew-pew" graphics, it is really no more than World of Warcraft in spandex. In fact, it is demonstrably World of Warcraft in spandex, as the developer seems to have taken his cue from Lord of the Rings Online and done no more developing than was necessary to put spandex over chainmail and overlay a comic book environment onto the WoW combat engine, at least from the point of view of this player.
I think this is pretty close to what the new definition of MMO should be - Multiplayer is playing with other people to win, Massively Multiplayer is just playing with other people with player-set objectives. Even people who only play Team Fortress to have a laugh for a bit are still on a team whose objective is to win the round, while the most serious World of Warcraft or Champions Online player plays to do whatever they want.lewiswhitling said:Well, an MOG in my opinion, is "a game" in which multiple people play. There is a game in TF2, which is a set of parameters - "complete certain objectives in order to make your team win". Into this game you can put however many players you want, and not change anything fundamental about the way that the game inherently operates.
I don't think I can necessarily agree with this. I mean, I see *why* they did it, and I think it definitely has its benefits, but the world ends up feeling very sterile to me, personally. I remember leveling up in WoW and meeting new people just by virtue of constantly running into them in groups, or learning to hate specific Horde, and I think Champions loses something when it has a persistent world but not a persistent playerbase. It has, at least as far as I've experienced, no real "community" visible in-game, since the players are always different.KaiusCormere said:WoW's approach to server architecture greatly divides the playerbase, and while that may not be an issue for a game with purportedly 11 million subscribers, it poses substantial problems for smaller games. I take the view that arbitrarily - and permanently - dividing the playerbase is bad. I have to reroll, or spend $25 to move servers in WoW. From this standpoint, I can appreciate that in Champions, I move servers with the click of a button.
The sense of community of a server with consistently the same players is lost. However, the freedom to shift from server to server really adds a lot more than it takes away. Someone farming the mobs you need? Shift away. I don't feel limited by the 100 player "limit" either. I can't remember a time in WoW where I meaningfully interacted with 100 people at once. In fact, most often when you get too many people too close together, a mob mentality takes over and the chat channels turn bad.
I think that single server as far as playerbase interactivity is great, and sharding it a la guild wars is fine by me.
I wouldn't call Guild Wars an MMORPG, either. Guild Wars, like Diablo, is... well, I guess I could call them MORPGs. Multiplayer Online RPGs, but without the Massive aspect.Cap said:I fail to be impressed by this argument;
Guild Wars runs almost entirely instanced worlds that are only punctuated by towns where anyone can run around, those towns then are divided by "shards" (which are really just servers) in which you can then socialize and build a party. From that party you create you can then enter the instanced world together, ultimately limiting the amount of players who can interact together in a game, removing monster spawn camping, ganking and other bullshit like that early MMOs like Everquest were plagued with.
The author also argues that C:O is an MMOG, NOT an MMORPG, which is what Champions Online, WOW, Guild Wars and all other games are. The comparison of TF2 to C:O as MMOG's works perfectly because an MMOG can simply be defined as a game which has the capacity to network large amounts of players together. For TF2 the steam network manages to pull that off, in fact, Halo 3 might as well be called an MMOG, or COD4 could be an MMOG.
Champions Online boasts an RPG system that makes it obviously an MMORPG. The breaking down of the actual landscape into different servers serves the same purpose that Diablo 2 did back in the old days, except that Diablo did it to support Battlenet Servers. What will Diablo 3 be called? It certainly fullfills the idea of an MMOG, since you have a persistent character who can then log into a server and play in that large world with friends, much like TF2, if Tf2 is to be an MMOG as well, totally not just a game with multiplayer.
I think merely the definition of Multiplayer has evolved from its old, 16 man Quake server days to a much larger capacity, and eventually that capacity, as it has been argued right now, will rival that of a classical style MMORPG.