Last night I decided to play some City of Heroes, in part because Thalen created a SuperGroup yesterday and I was hoping to potentially get an invite. That did not happen, but what did… is I experienced something that I am guessing I had pushed out of my memory. I was hanging out in the highest level end of King’s Row because it was much easier to solo than Steel Canyon. I had just rounded a corner when I noticed that a bunch of bombs had spawned with what looked like countdown timers. A few minutes later… there was a massive wave of players rushing towards me and before I knew it I had been invited into a raid group for whatever nonsense this held. I had completely forgotten that City of Heroes had zone-wide events.
What proceeded was about thirty minutes of nonsense where I targetted whatever I could get my hands on… and made my way through waves of mobs that were way too high level for me. The splash healing of my party though kept me alive and well throughout the entire event. Per the patch notes on the Homecoming forum, apparently, the Rikti Invasions will keep going through January 23rd when the next maintenance happens. I guess maybe I need to actually start reading chat, because I have been playing this game with the entire chat window minimized and slowly working my way through quests and doing some random combat. Last night though was a heck of a lot of fun and I would happily join in this nonsense again in the near future.
I realize I am playing on Everlasting the Roleplaying server, but I was pleasantly surprised by just how chill everyone seemed to be and how much actual roleplay was happening. Granted I myself am not a huge roleplayer but I always try and respond in kind. I tend to roll on Roleplay servers when possible because the players end up feeling like they are much more community-minded, and last night absolutely made me feel like Everlasting was the correct choice for me. You have to figure that the folks playing Homecoming are folks who missed the special magic that City of Heroes had over other MMORPGs so just from that alone they are probably going to be on their best behavior. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much fun I am having and how close to my memories of the game the actual experience ends up being.
At this point I am level 16 nearing level 17 and am hanging out in Steel Canyon. I’ve continued to follow this build guide that I found linked via the wayback machine to the old forums. It isn’t exactly the Katana/Regen scrapper that I played at release but it also isn’t super far off. One of the things that I want to do for my own benefit is to start collecting City of Heroes resources that still exist around the web and create a tools page as I have for other games. At a minimum I want to create a copy of that wayback machine page so that if I lose it, it will still exist in some form on my infrastructure. There are so many resources that I remember having… that just do not exist anymore. For example, I remember zone level guide maps that showed which factions and what level ranges were in each area. I would love to have those back so I am going to do some digging to attempt to unearth some of these things.
One of the things that I dig about this server is that pretty much everything that cost money at one point is free. You can move your characters freely between servers and it seems like you can also respec your character as often as you like. On the character select screen it shows that we have access to 1000 character slots which also seems similarly silly. I need to dig up what sort of support infrastructure this game has because I would not mind chipping some money towards the product. I feel like I am getting more than enough enjoyment out of it that I should at least make a one-time donation if not a reoccurring one. This is not how I expected to be spending January… but I am having a blast all the same.
The post Rikti Invasions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know about my yearly tradition that I refer to as the “Years in Review” where I attempt to track the games I play in a given year. I don’t go into a ton of detail in this process, mostly it is just a hashmark of “Was this game played during this month” and it doesn’t go into much detail to quantify how much something was played. Other bloggers do similar things, and one of the more interesting versions of this is from The Ancient Gaming Noob where he has used a software tracking tool called ManicTime to log actual hours in specific games. There was a time when I briefly kicked around the notion of writing something to do this for me… all in the name of attempting to replace functionality that Raptr used to do.
Last year I learned that my friend Kevin Brill had been working on precisely this side project and had made quite a good deal of movement towards a production client. Essentially, TempusGameIt, as he calls it, is an application that you install and hangs out in your system tray and then utilizes an application detection library to log when you are playing specific games. This information gets uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers and quietly tracks the games that you are playing, matching them against its database of existing games. I had known this was a functionality that existed, but with the New Year, I decided to support this project and become an active guinea pig. So since the beginning of the year, I have been keeping the client updated and logging my gameplay.
I’ve wanted to talk about this application for a bit, but decided I should probably get permission from Kevin before diving into it and introducing my audience. Right now this is mostly an application that has been bouncing around on the Gamepad.club Mastodon server with a handful of us testing it, but I believe I am the only person who is actively running it all of the time. Essentially there is currently a Mac and a PC Client with some side discussion about potentially creating a Linux client at some point. This installs a service on your local machine and when you double-click the icon in your system tray it opens a webpage at http://localhost:45000/ that allows you to configure various options. You can publicly log your time or privately do so… which makes certain aspects of the data only available to you. You also need to configure which drives you want it to scan and identify games on. Essentially each time you install new software as it stands currently you will need to run another sweep of your drives. For me, I technically have games on three of my four drives so I have it inventorying those.
Under Catalog it will show what games have been detected. Occasionally the same game shows up multiple times, specifically if there is for example a 32-bit and a 64-bit executable. If a game does not exist currently in the known catalog of available games, there is also the option for you to add it which involves you searching for the game title and then selecting which process currently running in memory represents that game. I’ve done this for a few things that had not been seen yet like Fallout 76 and more recently City of Heroes. Once the game has been detected and is in your local Catalog, the detection from that point forward just works “automagically”. I believe there is some sort of minimum session length, as there have been a few times I have seen my sessions get ignored if I accidentally launched the wrong game for example as I occasionally do with Steam when I click the wrong listing.
From there everything pretty much takes care of itself. Your session data will begin showing up in your local interface as well as when you are logged in through the TempusGameIt server. The application has several different ways to slice the data and in truth, this is probably going to be perfect for most users. For example, this is a snapshot of a weekly view showing how much time I spent in games. Right now my data is heavily skewing the usage patterns of the application as a whole, but I am hoping as more folks start using it the global data becomes a bit more interesting. I’ve requested to have a raw export option because in truth I would rather dump my information and fiddle with it in google sheets than have reports compiled for me. At a minimum, I plan on using this information to feed into my “Years in Review” process, but I think I will be able to generate far more specific data than I have ever before.
There is a bunch of functionality that I have never touched as well. Supposedly the application can detect new screenshots from specific applications and have those uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers as well. Additionally, there is a methodology for linking to various game accounts and tracking achievements. The fact that I have my profile fairly locked down in Steam and tend to run in “show offline” mode seems to be throwing an error when it attempts to track achievements there per a discussion with Kevin last night. There are also a lot of ideas that are planned for the application and you can see where various features are on the roadmap via the Trello board. There is also a discord server for discussions and feature requests, but I think for the moment Kevin and I are the only ones who have joined it.
For the moment this is a passion project, but one that I personally think is really freaking cool. At some point, if there is ever a Patreon or something of the sort to fund development I will probably pitch into it. For the moment it is doing a functionality that has been missing since Raptr, and it will be interesting to see how this service evolves. I’ve not talked about it a ton to this point, but I figured if nothing else I would share it with my readers. For the most part it “just works” and has required little fiddling. There have been a few things I have talked back and forth with Kevin about and have helped debug a few problems but the majority of the time it quietly does what it is supposed to be doing.
The post Tempus GameIt appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I am technically in holiday mode this morning and as a result, getting up and around far later than normal. However, I decided to go ahead and make a post given that I had something I wanted to talk about. Over the weekend we recorded our podcast as normal, and one of the subjects we discussed was the recent news about the City of Heroes Homecoming server officially getting a license from NC Soft… and thereby gaining the legitimacy that no emulator server project has gained to date. This made me and several other members of the podcast nostalgic about this game, and as a result Sunday morning I got everything up and running and took my first steps into Paragon City since 2020. We are rolling on the Everlasting server and I believe my handle is @Belghast so if you find your way over there say hello.
One of the most interesting things about being back in City of Heroes, is this game is a snapshot of what the evolution of an MMORPG looked like before the world changed. This was the game that me and my circle of friends were playing when we all started getting into the World of Warcraft beta process. This was the last game we played before that title stole our attention for the next several years. After the launch of World of Warcraft, the formula for what an MMORPG was changed forever to shift to adapt to what that game was doing. However, in City of Heroes you can see the slow steady progress of what came before culminating in this exceptionally polished product. This was the best the genre had to offer and had so many ideas that were well ahead of their time like Mentoring and Bolstering to raise or lower the character level to make sure that you could always group with your friends. It also had these amazing open area “raid” zones that were way too tough to tackle alone, but if you gathered up a group of friends you could run around and fight baddies for hours.
The mission structure was also revolutionary for the time. Instead of a single quest… you had chains of quests that were related and felt like you were investigating a case. You might start with tracking down clues by killing baddies in the open world, which would then lead you to a hideout… and eventually maybe even to take you to the lair of a boss for that faction before eventually wrapping up that chain and leading you to a new contact. It isn’t that quests did not exist before, or even quest chains… but the entire experience had more narrative cohesion. You were a hero and you were fighting back against the evils that sought to decimate this fair city. On top of that these instanced areas required strategy to get through them… you might have to learn how to work your way through a “pulling puzzle” and figure out which enemies you could single pull to ultimately lower the amount of damage you were going to take when you eventually had to charge forth out of the shadows.
Another aspect of the game that was somewhat revolutionary is that it had some proper build craft. Every level you either got to choose a new ability or add sockets to your existing abilities… this allowed the player to pick and choose how to evolve their character over time. For example I am playing a version of what I played at launch… the Katana/Regeneration Scrapper each of those aspects dictating what type of build I can craft with it. You chose a primary power pool, a secondary power pool, and a base class that dictated what your ultimate role in combat would be. I remember this being an extremely solo-friendly character back in the day, and I managed to dig up a build that I am loosely following from the now long-defunct official forums.
I am not sure if I am just drifting by on a wave of nostalgia, or if this game is far better than I remember it being. So many aspects of combat from the superb sound design to the gravity of your attacks… make combat feel more “meaty” for lack of a better term as opposed to a lot of other hotbar combat games. World of Warcraft really gets a lot of credit for making combat feel immediate and visceral… but City of Heroes was doing this as well. The class design also stems from an era before the holy trinity of DPS, Healer, and Tank… and includes a lot of crowd control and pulling mechanics to add more strategy to approaching every combat puzzle. I remember I used to have an ability called “Teleport Other” I believe, that would allow me to yoink a single mob out of a pack and silently pull them over to me. That way I could whittle down the strongest member of a pack making it a bit easier for when I pulled everything else.
I only made it to level eleven yesterday, but I had way more fun than I was expecting to. Legitimately City of Heroes is a better game than even my rose colored vision seemed to remember. There have been a number of times on the podcast where we have wondered what MMORPGs would look like if World of Warcraft had not been the runaway generational success that it was. I think playing City of Heroes gives you a pretty decent idea of what a best-in-breed game looked like from that time. I remember at the time it legitimately was one of the best-selling games and was breaking records… that only got eclipsed in scale by the launch of World of Warcraft. Somewhere around here I still have the comic books that we used to get in the mail from our paid subscription.
If this post made the nostalgia well up inside of you like the podcast did for me this weekend, I am thankful to say that the process of getting everything up and running is straightforward. As someone who has jumped through some nonsense hoops before to play on emulated servers… this is as simple as setting up an account on the Homecoming forums, setting an in-game password, and then downloading the installer. Because this is an older game, the total footprint is about 5 gb which should not be an awful download from a modern internet connection. That is smaller that a lot of mobile games these days, to be honest. There are even folks who have been successfully playing it on the Steam Deck which is pretty sweet.
If you make your way over to the Everlasting server feel free to say hello. I’ve set up a private area on the Super Dungeon Friends discord for City of Heroes. At some point, I need to rework the auto-role menu, but for the short term ping me if you want access to it.
The post The Path Abandoned appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Hopefully, everyone is staying warm this week with the big cold snap hitting the center of the country and more specifically impacting Bel and Thalen. This week we start off talking about the Rogue Trader CRPG and how it is doing a pretty solid job of moving the bar forward. From there we talk a bit about the upcoming Granblue Fantasy Action RPG and how we have been waiting for it since 2017. In shocking news, we talk about the City of Heroes Homecoming server and how it is officially licensed and we believe it is the first fan-run emulator server project to achieve that status.Â
Last Epoch is nearing its official 1.0 launch and with it, a bunch more information about the Trade system came out this week so we dive into it for a bit and contrast it with our experiences from Path of Exile. Peglin has released a bunch of updates and we talk a bit more about that phenomenal puzzle combat game. Thalen shares some information about how Dungeons and Dragons Online is apparently just giving away a ton of content and selling a bunch of mission packs for cheap on top of it. Tam finishes out the show talking about how it has taken him the better part of a year but he finally understands Star Trek Online.
