A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Death to the warehouse map!
by Eliot Lefebvre 
Feb 3rd 2010 at 6:00PM
Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Culture, Game mechanics, Endgame, Opinion, A Mild-Mannered Reporter
As I was thinking about this week's column, I was trying to figure out why it is that City of Heroes gets criticized as often as it does for being "repetitive." I'd gladly concede the point, but the follow-up question becomes, well, what's so inherently different between the gameplay here as opposed to World of Warcraft, or EverQuest II, or Lord of the Rings Online, or even Dungeons and Dragons Online? How is killing X of critter Y for questgiver Z in any way less repetitive than punching the Fifth Column around for the hundredth time?
But with the recent addition of Melissa "War Witch" Bianco as lead designer, with her promises of "more content," I formed at least part of an idea of why that pointless accusation will not go away. And I believe the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of that stupid warehouse map.
It's not that the warehouse map is bad. Well, not that it's particularly bad, at any rate. At low levels, frankly, it makes sense that you're hunting down thugs in a warehouse. That's what you do at the rookie stage. You expect that you have to go through the arbitrarily-laid-out set of corridors and pathways that have no logical place in a warehouse as part of your apprenticeship, and then you get to move on to things that are... slightly more superheroic.
Twenty levels later, you are still going through the warehouse. Or the office building. Or the sewers.
Can no one think of a better place to hatch their evil plans? I understand that the warehouse map is nice and generic, a definite draw for filling in a level -- any villainous group can technically go there, after all. But I have a really hard time believing that the Sky Raiders and Nemesis have to put things together in a random abandoned warehouse. Nemesis in particular seems like they should have secret bases just popping up all over the place.
Instead, most of your battles still take place in the same limited set of maps, with the same set pieces and small clusters of villains hanging out and waiting to be beaten on. It works, to be certain, but the result is that it feels like we're still in the same place as we started no matter how far we go through the game. And that has a big impact on how much of the game feels repetitive.With Going Rogue, we're going to get one heck of a new setting. The entire world is different. But what are the odds we're going to see another reskinned office building, only this time we're fighting Praetorian Clockwork or Resistance Members or whatever other enemy factions are concocted? No matter how much we might want said faction to be fed their own face, that doesn't really qualify as new content in the eyes of most players.
Compare this to Final Fantasy XI, a game I know a thing or two about as well. There's little chance you would confuse the leveling game from 10-20 on the sandy shoreline of Valkurm Dunes with the snowy rock-strewn isle of Qufim, or with the lush and earthy jungles outside Kazham. Even though it's yet another endless series of camp-pull-kill until your eyes fall out, it feels a bit less repetitive as a result of the change in setting and format.
Bianco has promised new content. And there are a lot of things that the game can do even to just make more content feel new, even if we're still doing the same essential thing that we have been in the past. The various outdoor missions, Safeguards/Heists, some of the more imaginative settings for task forces... it's not as if we don't have interesting content out there so much as we have a somewhat unpleasantly limited access and scope much of the time.
I don't mean to make it sound like Matt "Positron" Miller didn't do some wonderful things with the game. His work on the game was nothing short of excellent. But a new task force, more often than not, really isn't new content. Faultline, on the other hand, is a clear picture of what the game can do when given the freedom to experiment and try new things. We need more of that in the game. more polish, more odd new areas, more strange lines of pursuit. And more big storylines, things that feel like they have a purpose and a goal beyond just "well, the Circle of Thorns are doing something."
CoH, to an extent, has always struggled against its setting. Comic books take place everywhere from the moon to deserts to strange spiritual realms to wilderness romps. Paragon City (and, by extension, the Rogue Isles) are about as diverse as you can possibly make a unified area, but there are times when the ubiquity of warehouses and office buildings and "hotels" that look exactly like office buildings starts to grate.And that's Bianco's strength as a designer. I remember actually refusing to do much experience farming when I was making my way through the redesigned Faultline because, well, it was interesting and novel and it felt meaningful. It felt like there was an overarching plot, not just random thugs standing in a warehouse map.
So I say, death to the warehouse map. Let's see this content come out and start smashing down all of these endlessly repeated missions inside it. Let's start turning on the police scanner and finding out that there's a Nemesis base downtown, and getting to invade a steam-powered nightmare of a hideout. Let's see more overarching storylines and running elements, seeing resolutions to barely-addressed stories in the game. (The option to actually resolve the hinted-at gang war between the Hellions and the Skulls could be entertaining, for one.)
We've got an excellent design team with almost endless amounts of talent on it. Let's kill the warehouse map and dance upon its corpse.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Eric said on 6:17PM 2-03-2010
Cake cave map is much, much worse. Especially on 'kill all' missions.
Reply
Utakata said on 7:00PM 2-03-2010
I agree with you Eric 100%. Those blue and purple caves are hideous in every respect...even made worse when someone throws a speed buff on you, and you get stuck in every frackin corner because you overshoot your turn. :(
Though Villian side, those maps are laid out a little more interstingly and expansive. Though those designs don't carry over on Hero side until you start hitting Tasks Forces.
Anyways...yes agreed, the game needs more new inovated maps (without making them Black Rock Depths in WoW.)
Valdamar said on 7:58AM 2-05-2010
Yeah villainside has much more map/mission variety - it's one of the major reasons why 14 of my 17 Level 50 characters are villains - heroside bores me too.
Sure, CoH itself can be boring and repetitive (heck, all MMOs are repetitive), but most of its content was created before the game's launch and most of it has never been revamped - by contrast CoV's content is much more interesting, as the Devs had learnt from their mistakes with early CoH. That's why if you look at the best content on heroside it's all stuff that was added after CoV (the revamps of Faultline & RWZ, especially) using the lessons they learnt from making that. Going Rogue's Praetoria should be a similar leap forward in terms of map design and storytelling - this Dev team learns from their mistakes and listens to player feedback, so the game is always improving.
Though I just can't help but wish that CoH would do a WoW:Cataclysm style revamp of all their old content (maybe post-GR). Even if Praetoria is stunningly good, the old Paragon City content will still be there, for CoH veterans to moan about and for the haters to point out as evidence that CoH is a tired old game, when really it isn't - NCSoft know that, which is why they've poured so much investment into CoH/V.
CoH/V is very slick systems/gameplay-wise - now they just need more content - and War Witch has confirmed that mission/map content is their main priority now.
Brandon said on 6:48PM 2-03-2010
Are you freaking kidding me? ALL of the other City of maps are worse.
Yes, the warehouses lack in RP / story value, yes they are repetitive, and yes their graphics aren't great.
BUT they have the best flow, best sizes, best speeds... all the things required for actual gameplay. Frankly, they're the most fun to actually play.
If I had to banish maps in that game it would be caves and sewers.
Reply
Scarecrowe said on 7:22PM 2-03-2010
Cave maps.... mmmmm, yes. :)
But the ubiquitous science lab maps are almost as bad. And then there are the outdoors maps... the portal/train ones that has that little island off to one side? That map gets way overused.
Reply
Tolgar said on 7:37PM 2-03-2010
This is why CoX gets so stale even after creating 40 different types of characters, its the same dang thing over and over and over and it LOOKS the same every time, if you killed zombies in the sewers day one on release waaayy back, you're still doing it years later.
It's why CO felt so fresh with super heroes doing quests outside in the open, sure the types of quests weren't much different, but the area you were doing it in was different as you beat up the bad guys.
A shame that was about the only thing they got right with that game.
Reply
aurickle said on 8:02PM 2-03-2010
For me it's not so much the areas as the fact that EVERY SINGLE THING in those areas is predefined. Not only do you quickly learn the layouts of each map module, but you also know exactly where every single mob is going to be located because the designers saw fit to program spawn points into the maps themselves. Even the Architect system can't get around that limitation. No matter how cool your story and other ideas might be, you have very limited control over the maps and zero control over the placement of the mobs or other elements.
CoX needs to give both its in-house designers and its Architect volunteers a lot more control -- more like what designers have with Neverwinter Nights 2. Imagine the power of using CoX's wizards to create dialogue and trigger events, but then being able to tie those events to whatever location or object you wish. And being able to actually place the objects you want in the locations you want. Or being able to build maps in a progressive manner by clicking on a connection point and then being given a list of all tiles that can connect to that location. So for example you could have a warehouse that you design, but with a more upscale front office. Or a high-tech research lab hidden inside an otherwise shabby-looking warehouse.
This is ultimately Cryptic's eternal achille's heel -- everything that they do (starting with CoH and continuing through STO) is consistently built around the idea of recipes. Even their own designers are stuck with a recipe that they then drop specific ingredients into at specific locations, with no flexibility for being able to innovate or truly create. Sure, it lets them churn out games at a faster and faster pace. But one could easily argue that the product has long since grown stale!
Reply
Cinnamoon said on 8:06PM 2-03-2010
I see I am not alone in actually liking the warehouse map. The raver warehouse is the best. I'd much rather see that map pop up than the red-and-cream office building! I actually like the cave maps too.
I think people hate on the early maps more because, well, most people make lots of lowbie toons and not many highbie ones. Naturally, they see the early maps the most and get sick of them. (MA helps with that; people use a wider variety even for low-end crawls, so lowbies can get a taste of what the higher-end maps look like.)
Faultline rocks. I do it on every character now. But even Faultline's plot takes place within indoor maps, and some of them are annoying (like the set where the entrances are all underground and nasty to find.) The maps are just fundamental to the game's design.
Reply
Davy said on 10:37AM 2-04-2010
You're right about these maps getting more stale because they show up so much with low-level toons, which many people have umpteen million of. It's also a problem because they're also the same maps that show up in every radio mish. While I love the radio mishes for the ability to just grab a mish and fight, they have hurt the game in making repetitive content seem even more so.
Kilawhar said on 6:23AM 2-04-2010
This is what got me to quit playing CoH after I finally got my hero to 50. I'm not the type of player who enjoys running up alts. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to come up with new concepts but I really enjoy the experience of making one character the best he can be. When I realized that endgame was the same as the leveling game and I was going to be doing the same outdoor missions and fighting different bad guys on the same maps over and over again? I walked away.
Sad, really. I love the concept, but there just is no replay value for me.
Reply
Zsazsa said on 7:47AM 2-04-2010
I have 5 level 50s (4 blueside and 1 redside) in CoX and can't wait for Going Rogue. Most of my toons are quite old now and I haven't played CoX much in years, so it will be good to finally get some new content.
I've heard there are even going to be new maps located in space for all us level 50s to explore (with the Rikti aliens featured in so many impromptu raids that makes sense). Will the level cap be raised?
Hang on, Massively, and keep pounding the CoX pavements....Going Rogue news should start cropping up soon! Thanks for not forgetting about this MMORPG.
Reply
Lemmo said on 11:25AM 2-04-2010
This is a big problem in CoH, but the bigger problem is that they've solved it for the most part and players still don't know about it.
Go to the Hollows and Faultline and try some new story arcs where you get to blow up submarines and fight in ice-covered buildings. Do your midnighter arch as soon as you hit level 10 and enjoy the new missions. Do stuff in Croatoa and Striga. Get into Ouroboros and Cimerora as soon as you can. Play the featured stories in AE.
Or, better yet. Pop into Atlas Park at level 1, turn around and go 30 feet, and enter the Rikti War Zone. Go fight some aliens with some level 50's and just do end game content right away.
And if you don't know what the Shadow Shard is, go and check it out. The Rulaaru are a hoot to fight.
I'm pretty sure if you play your cards right, you can spend less time in warehouses and more time fighting against things like the Giant Tree of Thorns or something.
(This isn't saying CoH isn't repetitive, I'm certainly not arguing the post, it's spot on. I'm just adding in some alternatives to people who want to get more life out of the game)
Reply
Lemmo said on 11:31AM 2-04-2010
Oh, and I suspect CoH will always have warehouses unless someone starts deleting old content from the game, which I don't think they're interested in doing.