Samuel_Tow

I tried it, but it didn't grab me. I like the Art Style ten times more than brown Diablo 3, but the gameplay bugs me in much the same ways, sadly. I guess I just don't "click" with this sort of game any more. I left not knowing exactly what I wasn't getting, but clearly knowing I wasn't getting something.

The visual designs are decent, though. I especially like the more techy parts, especially the magazine-operated pistols The "cannons" are severely disappointing, though. I'd have wanted something with a long barrel like a howitzer (or the Harkonnen), but they went for a more "bombard" look. Same for the "shotgonne." Where's my precision rifle from Torchlight? I like shotguns, sure, but I like rifles, too.

I didn't use to need to, because City of Heroes was pretty good about not pigeon-holing me into a "role." You can always tell stories without assuming anything but the broadest aspects of a character, and even those you don't so much need to "assume" as just create stories to account for. In the Architect, I created a villainous story centred around opportunistic behaviour, but I didn't tell the villain what he wanted or why he was doing it, instead choosing the present mission briefings as simply actions that make sense. And if the player found them to not make sense, sell - quit out of the story and stick the McGuffin up a sheep. That's a perfectly logical outcome, too.

Here's the thing - I don't want a half-way job. If I'm going to be playing someone else's character, then don't kick sand in my eyes. Give me a selection of pre-made characters, tell me what they are and I'll experience their stories. Probably even find inspiration for my own. But if they're going to be my own, then let me pick basic aspects like... Motivation, personality, dreams and so forth. It's this half-and-half that really turns me off in Guild Wars 2. My character isn't truly my own, so I can't use the stories I want to tell to engage me... But it's not really the game's, either, because it doesn't have that much story for said character. There is some, but it's tangential to what I'll be doing for the most part, which is "heart quests." Hopefully not the one about washing cows and pulling weeds.

The result is a generic character that I can't make my own, but that the game doesn't run away with, either. I'm not given a character I want emulate, and I'm not given a character I can craft, which is pretty much the two larger hooks I have for practically any game gone with the wind. Even Star Trek - that takes part in a very stringent fictional universe - let me play an "Alien." Sure, I'm still beholden to Starfleet command and their ideals and hierarchies and suchforth, but the CHARACTER inside the uniform is still mine and I can pick what she things and why she does things.

Nothing like picking up said semi truck and having it turn invisible in your hands, too.

Yeah, that's kind of the point. I don't want my characters to have an important role in the world, because for that to happen, many aspects of my character have to be written for me. Kingdom of Amalur ALMOST pulled off a miracle with the whole "You don't know who you are, so you could be anyone" deal... Right up until the end where it turns around and basically tells me what my story is, and it's nowhere near as exciting as I imagined it might be. It's downright dull, as a point of fact.

City of Heroes taught me a valuable lesson - the less the fictional world tries to tie ME into it, the more leeway I have to imagine. Inversely, the more the world tried to assume about my character for the sake of "immersion," the more uncomfortable I became. It's why I despise the basic setting of DC Online, where my origin is always "Exobites," with an implied pre-origin of "human." Well, that's 3/4 of my characters down the drain right there. Same for the Secret World, same for Guild Wars.

I games giving me a discrete choice between several predetermined concepts, is what I'm saying, and that's precisely what races are. Sure, Human, Kheldian and Rikti are statically defined in CoH lore... Which is why I never made any Kheldian and Rikti characters, and why most of my humans tend to be from alternate dimensions or timelines, and the ones that are from "here and now" tend to more or less disregard the game's story but for the broadest of strokes. Basically, I account for "the great disaster" in general terms and that's about it.

No game with races will ever work for me, and that's just a simple fact. Not after City of Heroes. I prefer a game to focus on building up an engaging world that I have reason to care for, but also make no effort to tie me into it. Give me the playground and I'll figure out whether I want to swing on the swing set or climb the jungle gym, or maybe even just sit on a bench and look into the distance. The more games try to "engage" me, the less engaged I am because I'm constantly butting heads with the narrative. The only way this works is if you can get me to switch mental gears and just accept I'm playing someone else's character in someone else's story, like I would be in Oni, say, but that's a very different type of game that I wouldn't want to play in RPG form.

More or less. One race will give me pretty much one character (I don't like to repeat races if I can avoid it), and one character is not worth getting invested into a game for, especially a game whose gameplay I don't actually like. I don't really like the gameplay in City of Heroes all that much, but it's given me eight years of character concepts, and that's more than just one.

True, true. I tend to not like birds as characters in general, but Kung Fu Panda 2 REALLY sold me on the character of Shen. I don't really know what it is about him - it's partly his writing and partly that they did manage to make a frail stork look like a legitimate threat and probably THE strongest fighter in the movie, aside from Po himself. But that's incredibly rare, and to a large extent it's achieved by compromising what makes him a bird by hiding his wings and torso in large robes, as well as giving him a VERY expressive face.

So it's not an impossibility, just a general rule of thumb thing. Something extrodinary would have to happen for me to give a character bird feet or fish fins, is what I'm saying.

That's part of my problem - I don't like any of them. It has less to do with their design and more with my general extreme dislike of the concept of "races," for the simple fact that - as demonstrated - I tend to have my own preferences for what kind of race I want my characters to belong to. As broad as developers might be, they'll never get it right, which is why I prefer to define my own.

I don't like the Char because I don't like how they look and walk. Personal preference, but just don't find that "attractive" in any sense of the word. I dislike the Asura because I don't like the personality of the characters as written. I don't like the Norn because they're pretty much as typical Fantasy as it gets, and I don't like the humans because... They're humans. I've seen that. I might consider the Silvari an option, but I just don't know enough about them.

At most, I might be able to make a single character worth sticking with in Guild Wars, and that's just not enough to pay money for, in my opinion. Not for an RPG. Any more than that one character just ends up with me wanting to break the whole setting and introduce aliens or demons or time-travellers.

Mine do. It's why I like them. The face, I mean.

I don't know about "best." It's a matter of taste. That's what I want out of a game, simply put. Specifically, that's what I want out of character design. You can always have the player control just a straight-up animal, like Nanaki/XIII in Final Fantasy VII, but that just doesn't work for me. It's the same reason I don't like bird and fish people - I just don't like the animals themselves and don't enjoy characters styled after them.

I've always enjoyed a half-way point between human and monstrous. Lean too much in one direction and it's boring and trite. Lean too much in the other direction and it's just weird and uncomfortable. Strike that middle ground of dissonance, though, and that's where I'm happy.

And Guild Wars 2 doesn't strike that balance in the slightest. It's either mostly human or mostly not human, with only the Silvari somewhat in the middle. There's really no way to change my preferences, so I just have to pick a game that either matches mine, or that lets me customize, and Guild Wars 2 really doesn't let me customize by much.

That's why I say Guild Wars 2's approach of "no need to team, just be in the same area as other people." On the one hand, it's convenient for those who want to team for the mechanical benefits but don't want any of the social aspects of it, but by trusting social interaction pretty much entirely on a machine means you train people to delegate this, and so fall out of the habit of communicating with words.

Correct. Test used to be where new stuff came out, but nowadays it seems to be a lot like Live, but for player testing. It's usually not very populated with people, as I've found, AND it's available to non-VIP players. About the only downside is you need to install a secondary client.

I suggest Test because it's free to transfer there without mucking up your friends lists and SGs, while you can leave a "real" copy of your character on your home server. I moved Sam to Virtue for the event, but I moved him back to Victory where he belongs, and I'd rather not move him again. He belongs on Victory.

I actually had an argument regarding anthropomorphic characters somewhat recently, and it got bogged down in semantics, which is why I didn't bring up the term. But where you appreciate deviating from the human norm considerably, I find that to be demotivating, at least for my enjoyment. I just don't believe "true monsters" are good enough at emoting, and the reason for this is my brain is programmed to read human emotions through the human apparatus for delivering them. When you break the mould too much, you end up with something that's just not comprehensible enough for me.

Sure, in a Pixar movie, that might work, because you have a whole team of talented animators that perfect body language and a plot to depict this, but in a game, the characters have to speak for themselves, and if they don't represent humans enough, I just find them uncanny. I'm a great lover of cats, myself, and I have a knack for telling the expressions of actual house cats (yes, they have a few), but - and maybe this is racist/specist of me to say, but I really can't "see" them as people. I don't really consider them lesser beings. Hell, I loved my cats when they were still alive. But I like to see my characters as someone I can sit down and have a conversation with. Limiting, yes, but that's just what I like.

A snarling, toothy snout and a constant slouch just doesn't lend itself to that. Yes, their designs are great as "other people," but just not as "my characters," if that makes sense. I can see them as part of a broader world, but not as something I'd like to work with. They don't have the right balance of monstrosity and humanity, because honestly... Even in the weirdest of my characters, it's the aspect of humanity I'm ultimately after. I just enjoy finding that in the weirdest of places.

Well, to be fair, that's the aim of her design Praxis is a villain, a higher-reality god that sees life as meaningless and enough power to blink-out all of existence, were she not trapped by the very creators of all things. The Avatar of Praxis, which is what you see in the pic, is less of a person and more of an... Idol, so to speak. It's an incomprehensible alien consciousness' facsimile of a person. I made her with the express intention to be uncanny, sort of like sticking a porcelain mask on a slime monster.

She's probably not the perfect example, so let's try again. Let's try Stardiver. She's an automaton from the beginning of time, made by a rogue creator who wanted to prove that life was not "special" and could be emulated by an intricate using of the natural laws they'd created. She is not a "robot" per se, but more a living statue, composed of dense, solid matter involved in complex reaction. She's as far from human as you can get... Yet I still took the time to make Stardiver a "she" and make her just that bit more relatable. She has no face, her figure is mostly masked by complexity and her whole frame is bathed in auras (pity Champions can't do that), yet she still looks like a person.

Or how about 13, the experimental robot who developed sentience and a sense of self? The Praetorian Clockwork gear is AWESOME, in the sense that it's clearly robotic, with the exposed spine and all, but at the same time very shapely and "person-looking." I'm a big fan of the Battle Angel Alita design of a person who has just the right features of "a person," but just enough "wrong" with them to where they're clearly not, and it's through this lens that I view the Guild Wars races. The Silvari are on-the-nose exact, but the others... Not so much. And the humans are actually too plain.

I don't actually have a problem with spider creatures, but with a few caveats in much the same vein. For instance, I really like Smite's Arachne, and not because she's basically a cheesecake. I like that they've managed to combine a spider and a person in such a way as to almost make you forget about the weirdness... Right up until you remember, and THAT'S what makes her work. Plus, I love her walking animation

Agreed. I was disappointed to find that they had access to basically three models - skinny, normal and fat. And I don't mean "big" - the last model basically has giant hips and junk in the trunk, so to speak, but still has tiny narrow shoulders and relatively small arms. I don't get why there are so few games that give us choices in this regard. Even Champions Online really drops the ball because while you may be able to make a broad-shouldered woman with arms like pipes, you can't control her waist so she ends up looking like this. No, I don't like it, but I've had to learn to live with it.

Lineage II, amusingly enough, is the only game that "got" this that's an MMO. Saints Row: The Third kind of did, as well. But most games simply don't dare go there. Take Darksiders, for instance. This is a game of weird anatomy. The "Old Ones" are a race of mutant musclemen wider than they are tall, with shoulders so big they come up over their heads and hands several times the size of their heads. Darksiders 2 gives us Old One women and they look like... Well, check out a comparison.

So yes, the Norn are, ultimately, a disappointment to me. They do make an effort to portray a more realistic build for women, but they only go as far as "not skinny underwear models," which while admirable, doesn't really go where I think a race of giants should. Point is, they don't look like giants. You can only tell they're supposed to be big when you run across other people, but they themselves don't look big. In fact, they look kind of skinny.

Same difference *edit* This sounds mean. I just mean I don't know any better.

If I have to be honest, the Char are probably the biggest source of disappointment for me in Guild Wars 2, largely because character design is usually my biggest source of enjoyment in most games. By FAR the most fun I've had with my characters here in City of Heroes has been with the weird and wonderful, ambitious characters like my hive queen from another planet, my literal cow girl or that creature made up of toxins, radiation and reanimated body parts. I should LOVE the Char to bits! They're giant cat people with horns, tusks and mohawks, for cryin' out loud! I should be all over those things...

But they look like crap! The Asura re weird, sure, but at least they're expressive, and they emote like people would, but the Char? They have a zillion body and face sliders, and yet they all look the same to me. It may sound... Racist? Maybe, I don't know, but there's a reason for this. As a human being, my brain has an entire subsection devoted to perceiving and reading human faces. I can spot even the minutest differences and facial expressions. I didn't need to train this, I was born with it. I don't have nearly as advanced an apparatus in reading the expressions of cats, nor the body postures hulking hunchbacks.

A little secret of artistry that I picked up after eight years of experimenting with character designs is something Guild Wars 2 simply doesn't have: A good "weird" character is one who looks as little like a human as possible while being as much like a human as you can get away with. You want to break up the character's silhouette, face and body structure as much as you can, but still retain key body lines and vital facial features. To this day, I find Praxis to be one of my best designs, simple though it may be, because it works on just that principle - she looks like a person at first glance, until you notice there isn't a face behind the mask. It's just a mask over blackness.

To me, the trick to making weird characters isn't to make them completely unrecognisable and unsympathetic, so much as it is to weave into them a sense of cognitive dissonance. They need to look and feel both familiar and alien at the same time, because it's this conflict that makes them at once compelling, strange and interesting. Guild Wars NAILS this with the Silvari. Words cannot describe how happy I am with their mix of normalcy and weirdness. You can't see that from static screenshots. You need to see them move around, emote and look at you with those glowing eyes. But the rest? Fail. They look too weird for me to accept them, yet not weird enough to be interesting.

I get that this is just my personal opinion and not an objective fact. If you like the Char or the Asura, then I don't want to take away from that. It's just that to me, their design is not very good, and that keeps me from playing them. City of Heroes taught me a basic point about gaming in general - if I don't like the look of my player character, I can't play the game for any real stretch of time.

That's where I am. I have nothing against MMOs as a concept, but damned if they aren't all boring, monotonous slogs that try to ram socialisation down my throat and waste my time. And why are they almost all Fantasy? Seriously, this is like the dark age of FPS games where everything was either Doom or Quake which had no plot, characters or interesting locations outside of brown castle and grey castle.

To me, City of Heroes was the Half-Life of the MMO world - a game which used the basic RPG mechanics and MMO infrastructure to deliver a new, unique, eccentric experience more focused on impressing its players than just yanking money out of their pockets. And it really WAS ahead of its time. The MMO market then wasn't as saturated as it is now, so a "different" game wasn't valued as highly.

This is where my complaint about "races" comes in. After seeing my friend play with his Asura character up to quite high level, I got the sense that that's what I should have done... But I didn't want to play a little fish guy. The character concept I had in mind required a very large, very heavy-set type of build, hence the Norn.

This is also where, I feel, one of City of Heroes' greatest strengths lay - in both dissociating the various pieces of concept from each other and in presenting an environment where shockingly different themes could coexist. Yes, your average D&D Party may have "disparate" characters in it, like barbarians fighting alongside high-class erudite wizards or assassins buddying up with paladins, but...

Consider an average chance team-up between City of Heroes characters. It might go something like this: A reptile from the stone age teams up with a computer nerd who got super powers from a game, a time-travelling high wizard from another land, a green space babe from Mars and a cop who moonlights as a vigilante, led by the avatar of an eldritch god here on holiday. How can this NOT be awesome?

That's what kills me. I get character appearance choices in the secret world - it's supposed to be SECRET. You can't walk around with a character 10 feet tall sporting green skin and a broadsword wider in the blade than most people are at the shoulders and expect to not stand out. You have to blend into society, and that imposes a restriction on style (and my ability to play it - I don't like looking like a person).

But DC? They have weird characters with implausible costumes all over the place. What if I want to be an eldritch demon, or a bug monster from outer space, or an animal-human creature from another dimension? Why do I have to have been a person in a city living a normal life before I got zapped plot device? That slashes a good 3/4 of my characters. I may have exaggerated before - I do have a couple of scientist, a mutant and a born leader from this world's current timeline, but that's still, like, four characters out of 50, and all of them six or seven years old.

But what if I want to make THIS? Yeah, it's a terrible idea with questionable execution that only works in any real setting through narrative slight of hand, but at least in City of Heroes, it CAN work. Where else is this even possible, outside of Second Life?

I recall having arguments similar to this about City of Heroes. Why not make the game level-less? Why not make all enemies just use the GM code so no-one would ever be too high level or too low level? Wouldn't that be better?

Well... No. Not to the extent of what I want out of the game. To me, what matters in an RPG more than anything else in terms of gameplay is a sense of progression. I want to meet enemies I have no hope of defeating so that I can one day level up and defeat them. Then, some time later when I've grown even more powerful, I want to be able to go back to those enemies and find that they are no longer even worth my attention. I fought the Skulls. I fell to the Bone Daddies. Now that I'm level 50, yes, I do want to see them show up as trash mobs and patsies for the Malta Group. I do want to go back to Kings Row and wipe the floor with their faces and feel like there's nothing these guys could ever do to hurt me. For my level 50 hero who just got done cutting her way out of Mot's guts by hand to go to Kings Row and get seriously damaged by a Skull just kills any sense of progression I might have had.

Static enemy levels and static player levels help establish a "base" by which we compare ourselves to the world. Numbers are empty. They tell me nothing. It doesn't matter if I do 100, 1000 or 10 000 damage, what matters is how much health my enemies have and how hard I have to fight to bring them down. It's the ease or difficulty of fighting that tells me how far I've gone, and by forcibly level-scaling me, the game is effectively moving the goal posts. There's a very visceral, instinctive kind of feedback in this sort of static system that I just don't get when I can be level-scaled on a whim.

Sure, City of Heroes also does this on teams, but that only happens if I choose for it to happen.

I am speaking from experience. A friend of mine is a huge Guild Wars 2 fan, but doesn't own his own PC, so he installed it on my laptop. He plays the game when he comes over to visit, but that's a fairly rare occurrence due to his work schedule, say two or three times a week, if that. He has shared his full account info with me and we have it installed on my gaming rig, as well, so if I want to play the game, I can do so without actually buying it.

And I have. I played a Norn up to a decent level, I forget which. I also spend a lot of time hovering over my friend's head, because he doesn't speak English very well and sometimes gets confused by spacial orientation puzzles. I'll often have to parse the text of quests for him since the "objectives" don't always convey a complete idea of exactly what to do, and I've had to basically co-pilot for him looking for a path to several vista points, since the game makes some of those very roundabout to get. I'm an old PC gamer and Guild Wars uses a world traversing mechanic that's very similar to old Half-Life titles and the like, which my friend wasn't that into back in the day for lack of a computer. He's more an RPG/MMO gamer, basically.

I don't have Guild Wars 2 installed on the PC I'm at now, because right now I'm at work (the whole department is out of the office on a conference save for me and, like, two other people). At home, however, if I want to play Guild Wars 2, I can. And I have. What I played didn't interest me. Not only that, but even if I DON'T play Guild Wars, my friend is playing it on a screen that's within my field of view as I'm using my gaming rig, and involves me with it pretty much constantly, so I'm basically watching an uncut let's play where I can ask questions. I know as much about Guild Wars 2 as I do about Champions Online at this point, and I'm actually subscribed to Champions for a month (game's not worth touching for free, far as I'm concerned).

And yes, I would buy Guild Wars 2 just to be contrary, even if I wouldn't actually play it. You ought to know me well enough by now.

Hah! Coincidence or not?

But seriously, I had the same problem a few times. Some level 28 ******* was spamming my level 8 self with repeated duel invites, then emoting, then duel-spamming me again. When I refused several times, he proceeded to repeat "duel me." I really wish people who make a fuss about me not wanting "consensual PvP in PvE zones in City of Heroes" could get duel-spammed every now and then, just so they know why I don't want it.

I ended up putting the errant person on ignore, which stopped the invitations. I've gotten blind-invited a lot, blind-invited to Super Groups and even trade-spammed once. And I really don't get it.

The Champions community on the forums and in the CoX channel is amazing and actually very positive, but the actual people I run across in-game? Dear Lord! I guess I should thank my lucky star City of Heroes was so heavily instanced that I didn't see other people as often. Also - thank you, Mission Architect, for killing crowds in Atlas Park. That helped avoid the stupid so much it's inspiring.