Failsight

The Champions Acrobatic run looks...just as unrealistic. I honestly don't have a big problem with it, as I'm not looking for realism.

As for the Ninja Run we have now, I'm okay with how it looks for any melee weapon set (outside of the odd-looking Claws). It works for me. Barehanded, I just wish they did something with the trailing (right) hand, like open and close (clench) it every once-in-a-while, just to give a bit more of a, "I'm rushing over there to punch someone" feel to it.

I don't think it works as well for AR, I'm not sure about pistols or bows (I haven't seen them except in a few screenshots).

I think that it looks great for swords, even Broadswords (especially since there are some more Asian-influenced customisations, but even regular BS doesn't look bad), as I honestly think it looks more natural running at that speed than an upright run (which makes more sense at a lower speed).

As for the patter-patter, I think it depends more on just what top speed you're hitting. At more regular speeds (NR or NR + Sprint), I don't think it looks ridiculous. Closer to SS speeds, I don't know.

Honestly, I've run in that position before (generally when I was gassed, though) other than having my arm trailing behind me. Down low, leaning forward, and arms close. It's actually more comfortable than it looks, at least for thinner folks like me. It's probably not the most optimal barehanded run (unless you mean to be ducking incoming fire), but while wielding a blade, I say there's precedent for similar enough positions that taking it and making it "super" doesn't break anything for me.

To me, running with a blade while standing upright actually makes less sense. You either have to move your arm to get into swinging position or hold it and jostle around with it.

I do kind of wish that if the weapon wielded was of a larger type, it could sometimes touch the ground and spark or something, but that's really unnecessary and difficult to do. But it'd look cool, I think.

0.46 end/sec

Almost twice of Sprint.

I dunno, I'm loving this run on my acrobatic SS/SR Brute. Keeps low to the ground and ready to rise up for a big smack. I love using it to charge into a fight. Looks sexy, either running or jumping in!

Only way I can think of to test: O down to the Frostfire arc and go play on the slides, with and without NR on.

Most likely there will be little to no benefit, but you never know!

I'm a bit surprised by reactions like this. Most people who have CJ also have travel powers, often SJ, which de-toggles CJ.

Other travels which may not, or players who go without actual travel powers are losing out on a grand total of 2-2.5% def. If you're soft-capped with it, there's still very little chance you'll get hit, so long as you don't stop to fight while keeping NR up instead of switching back to CJ. If you're not near or at soft-cap, then that 2.5% really isn't making such a large impact to really matter.

As for the movement aspect, NR actually provides faster jumping movement and height than CJ, albeit with less air control.

Ultimately, the only real aspect left out when toggling NR on is CJ's immob protection. Personally, I can't see that as a game breaker for a power that either makes no change to your build otherwise or actually saves a power.

Mind you, not buying it is not buying it. I just think that it detoggling CJ is an odd reason to base this decision off of when looking at the facts.

You went from the poster's "good ninja anime" (of which, I agree, most if not all are suspect to being called something-not-good--though some are potentially fun if not at all deep or enthralling) to all anime being anything but good. That's...kind of a broad and unfair view, don't you think?

He's got quite a big...mushroom.

For cryin' out loud, we're still arguing about this?!

Art is everywhere. Whatever someone wants to call art can justifiably be called art. There is an entire category called found art which requires practically no design intent by the artist and relies almost exclusively upon context set up by said artist. Regardless of one's opinions of whether that piece is worthy of display in a gallery, it is a category still widely accepted as art.

Whether it's any good is another matter completely. This is arguable, as the formation of opinions can either rely solely on the individual or solely on the collective criticism of those most educated on the subject. More often than not, it is some nebulous combination of the two.

Video games are, and always have been, art. Art is not always good art. The stuff a 6 year old does with crayons and cardboard is, technically, art. It's just not likely to sell for $1,000,000 in an art gallery. Then again, some of that stuff looks like the scribbles of a six year-old.

Not technically true, but practically true. Which is generally what matters. And I apparently love italics.

Banished Pantheon minions. Nemesis don't use flintlock. They use "steam powered."

It'd honestly be faster to just make a whole different set called "Crossbows" and have minor differences like there are between Katana and Broadsword. The powers themselves are mostly copyable data, so duplicating the set would be trivial–if one could convince the Devs that making a Crossbow set would be worth it.

Would be a nice little QoL change. Have to be careful what colour to choose for that effect though, to avoid colour blindness issues and plain ol' annoyance.

Seriously. I've said my piece, but to sum up, it's simply this: graphics engines are meant to serve gameplay. Whether or not realistic graphics is required or not depends greatly on the gameplay and otherwise on the tone of the narrative being told.

CoX's base engine serves gameplay very well, and that needs to be maintained. Thus, any additional features cannot give any significant advantage to higher graphics settings compared to lower.

However, when it comes to setting narrative tone, more and more advanced graphics--when used appropriately and with some restraint--definitely enhance one of the most vital parts of gaming: immersion.

I seriously just don't see how anybody's losing out. These graphics engine programmers aren't the same people writing new mission arcs or making new graphics assets (well, probably not) or adding new sets. They'll probably have other engine work to do after GR hits, but adding too many deep-down engine changes at once is dangerous. We already have a big game mechanics change in side switching, which has been long requested and is pretty popular with the majority of players. Asking for more changes in GR gameplay-wise is a risk that doesn't need to be taken. More free content with some major gameplay changes can happen any time. A major graphical update like this? You don't see those in regular Issues.

Uhm...you should be able to use your 4GB of RAM with a 32-bit OS. It's going beyond that where the system won't utilise anymore. So if you wanted to, say, move up to 8GB of RAM, then it certainly makes sense.

Then again, I still have issues today with Vista, and am hoping 7 fixes them, even though the only thing I use Windows for is playing games.

As much as I love Atomic Robo, saying that moral ambiguity has no place in superhero fiction is more a blanket statement on your preference of superhero fiction.

I think there's a lot of room in superhero fiction for all kinds of things, moral ambiguity and philosophical exploration included. Some fictional worlds don't lend themselves to such things due to established styles. That's why many people feel uncomfortable when it happens in the established Marvel or DC Universes–it wasn't there before, so it feels odd to have it now. But that's it. There's no reason why a superhero story has to be simple. You just like it that way. So don't state it like it's fact.

I will say that a lot of the philosophical meandering done at a pop culture level is inane and altogether cheesy (which is sometimes the goal, often times...not), but sometimes the odd gem is actually interesting. This is generally because it's been done before, and better.

I don't expect this game to be the basis of philosophy papers for university students for years to come, so if they don't go philosophical, that's fine by me–I'm here to pound some folks and have a good time (well, not here here as in the forum...)–if they want to get all "deep" on me, I'd rather they do it in unexpected and emotional ways: I always bring this up, but perhaps the most touching moment for me in this entire game was after the Meet with Longbow mission in the Dark Watcher arc. What Captain Dietrich says after the mission really hit me and motivated me to really take it out on the Nemesis in the next mission.

While I won't expect that kind of thing in GR, I certainly do want a moment or two like that.

Not necessarily so: there are probably some number of current subscribers who, with time, will leave this game because the graphics haven't been updated. Thus, updating graphics isn't only about new subscribers, but also to keep current subscribers interested.

However, in order to keep as many current subscribers happy as possible, the Ultra Mode is only built on top of the current engine, such that minimum requirements don't change (at least significantly–hard drive space usage may go up some, though I expect minimally as the same textures are being used, so only some amount of code is being added).

I'm really wondering how "five year veteran" has become equated with "five year old computer." I mean, has nobody upgraded their computer since buying CoH?!

I'll be happy to turn on Ultra Mode! Saying it's not for "us" is simply incorrect. It will provide a refreshed gaming experience for those of us who can use it. Ultra Mode is for everyone...who can use it.

Heheh I'm neither here nor there on this game's faces (and hands), I meant games in general.

I certainly wouldn't complain about a facial upgrade–we got a number of new faces recently, but I only use one or two of the new ones–but to be honest, I really can't see much gained from adding individual fingers beyond a bit more realism.

Oh, and to a previous post about CO's "emotive" faces...it was a decent idea, with horrible, horrible execution. Most of the faces just look...painful.

All I said was I can't see how standing there and shooting someone with two pistols can fill a full attack powerset without looking flashy. Eventually, you just run out of ways to shoot two pistols at a target and need to get creative. Or, in this case, copy a silly action movie.

I think that this may come down to the fact that we (as a general, stereotyped populace) don't really look at the faces of game characters except when we're forced to in close-ups. Things like clothing, emblems, weapons, etc. catch the eye far more in a video game, probably more for the simple reason that faces haven't been done acceptably well until recently, and partly because until recently, very few games have had close ups on them.

Anime (and the cartoon and comic forms in general) is generally in the same boat: faces aren't distinctive enough alone to differentiate characters, so other tropes need to be utilised, like funky coloured hair or outfits that become representative of that particular character.

Sidetrack: I wonder if there's been a study done where newborns are deprived of actual human faces, and are instead brought up only seeing drawn faces. Does that affect their development in communication? Sounds a bit unethical for an experiment, but the results would be interesting.

All-in-all, while great graphics are not necessary to tell a good story, graphics are necessary to do so in a video game. "Great" graphics, in the sense that they assist the telling of the story, tends to rely more on style than fidelity. They need to be evocative of a world in order to help draw the audience into that world.

An example is the difference between CoX and CO: CoX's style in more of an abstracted realism, such that we are invited to be reminded that this is a world that is both "unreal"–a place where superheroes roam–and yet "close enough" to real that we can feel comfortable in sympathising with characters; CO on the other hand, has gone with a very much more cartoon-y aesthetic, which I personally do not enjoy, as it distances me from my characters–they become characters in a cartoon instead of characters I want to pretend are real (at least in the sense that we pretend with all fiction). Regardless, the graphics technology is meant to serve its style: CO's cell shading, for example, enhances that cartoon-y-ness, whereas CoX's coming Ultra Mode will enhance that semi-realism that it utilises.

CoX's comic universe, I think, is very much influenced by a number of recent comic illustrators, who have made their images really "pop" off the page with their almost realistic art. If anyone can name a few, that'd be great. CO seems to be influenced more by golden age comics, or perhaps a kind of nouveau golden age style that is actually less detailed than actual golden age comics–which I think was a very strange decision, considering the design aesthetics of its signature characters. It really borders on cereal box comic quality, IMO.

In any case, a game like Half Life 2 utilises its graphics engine to suit its world. The Unreal 3 engine is generally the same: look at the games where that dirty, wet, over-exaggerated look works (Gears of War, for instance), and where it doesn't (soooo many other games)–it is a graphics engine designed with a particular aesthetic in mind.

So tl;dr version: graphics engines should suit the art style. Art style is extremely vital to video games. The art style of CoX is much more grounded in a sensationalised realism than CO. Thus Ultra mode is actually a good fit.

Oh, and faces have been crappy until recently, so gamers tend to not notice them as much as real faces.

Problem being that a large boost in poly count would completely negate one pro of Ultra mode: it's completely optional, and the engine is fully backwards compatible to the requirements we have now.

It's not that they can't do it if they want, but if they did, they'd alienate all the players running lower-end systems.

Meanwhile, the tech that they're putting in, IMO, does a lot more than just what pumping more polys could accomplish alone.

I've always been a fan of using texture and shader technologies instead of just making more detailed models.

That, and if it's possible to add tesselation support into the engine (supported in Windows by DX11), it'd already be adding more polys without having to do much to the models. Unfortunately, that wouldn't help lower end video cards or Mac users. But really, only the Mac users would be left out, because lower end video cards would need to be running "low" (i.e. what we have now) poly models just to play anyway.

I'm still trying to figure out what 7-8 non-flashy DP attacks would look like. If it was more realistic, it'd be seriously lacking in AoE beyond a cone of non-Full Auto proportions (shorter range and probably assuming a non-fully auto pistol).

As to someone mentioning throwing a bunch of coins in the air and using them to ricochet for a ranged AoE, I did see something that looked like Rain of Bullets, which I honestly consider "close enough" as it'd probably end up being a shorter animation than holstering, throwing stuff in the air, redrawing, and firing.

I honestly don't see that the Devs had a choice but to go the flashy route if they wanted a full attack set. The only alternative I can think of is adding a lot of single target or cone debuffs/controls, in which case it'd be much less of an attack set and more a control set.

I was honestly somewhat against a Dual Pistol set made for the main ATs because of this. I would've preferred to see an EAT layout for a set this specific, allowing more flexibility in design–allowing debuffs, controls, and AoEs to exist in the same set, allowing more character flexibility within a somewhat restrictive design spectrum. But as a main AT set, I think what the Devs did was to be expected. And for those who love the flash (heck, it's a superhero game), it does look flash.