Ok. So far I'm enjoying CO a lot. I do have a few quibbles, but nothing major.

What I'm ranting about here is about the game design choices of CO... but I can't blame them precisely, as I think it's also indicative of most MMORPGs, and certainly was with CoH/CoV

In comic books, while heroes certainly ended up fighting lots of minions, they also fought lots of supervillains... and usually one-on-one, team-on-team, or several-on-Hapless-Hero.

In CO (and CoH) you fight mainly the henchmen, who are often villains, and face the supervillains rarely. And when you do, they are in some regards much more powerful, if for no other reason than because they are, for example, immune to effects we are not.

Now, this makes sense in some regards. For instance, fighting the Hulk - er, Grond, sorry - would truly be a team effort, as would Dr Destroyer, or anything along those levels.

But the comics are riddled with supervillain after supervillain. It seems to me there should be many more supervillains, and thus many more mano-a-mano, toe-to-toe battles, and a bit less running around squashing Minion # 1001.

Again, I can't entirely blame CO, as its an indemic symptom of all MMORPGs. But I surely wish someone would think a bit more out of the box and make more supervillain-team, supervillain bashing combat instead of making supervillains into end-mission bosses and god-raids.


That in mind, the Nemesis system is a great start! It's not perfect, but tis better than what's been offered so far methinks.

In fact, I think they should get rid of the Rate my Hero and instead have Rate My Nemesis, complete with reading the backstory and everything. And then have the highest rating Nemesises appear in the world at large to challenge other heroes too.

And thus, many more nemesis missions to make them more varied. I can see if, for instance, a half dozen to a dozen heroes all got the same message that, say, my Nemesis, the Black Knight, was raiding a scientific lab, and as much help as could be found would be needed immediately, and have it a real _ _ _ _ storm in there. :)


Ah well. I can dream.

Actually, you often fight multiple Super Villains in the Nemesis missions. There is even a particularly tough battle where you fight two Super Villains at the same time.

For me personally, I wish the Super Villains at the upper levels were a bit tougher. My Power Armor / Gadgeteering Hero just pops out Munitions Bots, fires up the Orbital Cannon, and lets the Gauntlet Chainsaw do the rest. Battle usually over before the Super Villain has gotten off more than 2 attacks.

At the lower levels, Super Villain level seems about right.

Holgar

I'm not sure what your complaint is?

In CO, there are 6 levels of opponents: henchmen, villans, master villains, super villains, legendary, and cosmic.

In theory, henchmen are trash. Villains are trash with better gimmick attacks. Master villains should require some expenditure of effort to defeat. Super villains should be tough memorable solo fights, and legendary and cosmics should be team fights. Obviously the theory breaks down in various ways for various characters and strategies, but I'm not sure what you are exactly referring to?

While I agree with you, he does have a point in that there could be many more "Super Villains" running around -- for instance one in many of the ordinary "door" missions and more roaming the world. As he said, that would give us more toe-to-toe tough fights with interesting named characters, solo and not on a team.

I like your breakdown above, which makes sense and which is clearly what the devs intended, but I do think having more named supervillains around (not cosmic or legendary) would be great fun and more "comic-bookish".

There's always room for more, but there are quite alot now. Probably more than a hundred named master villains or higher.

I agree, and adding a couple a week or whatever just grows the stable, just the sort of accretion the comic companies have via their published titles. :)

I'm quite happy with the distribution of bad guy types so far...Super Villains aren't too rare, you'll often get to face one at the end of the many short instance missions.

ive always wanted to experience random attacks from player created Nemesis'.

or even random patrol/citizen missions, after which we would get a mail or item telling us about that nemesis, what character it 'belongs' to, etc.

its a free source of player created content....and imho, a random supervillian attack is better than crushing another group of 2 hench/1 villian.

I realize I trimmed out a lot of your idea, but this specific part does sound pretty good.

The problem with using nemesis characters as game content is mostly one of filtering -- people, being people, are going to create nemesis characters who really shouldn't be seen in the open. Also, nemesis powers are really a lot more restricted than what the game engine permits.