Hi, I’m new here. You may have noticed Ethic’s post about new bloggers. I seem to be the first one. This means I get the cubicle closest to the water cooler, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. I’ll tell you how that works out. It also means that I get to learn to use WordPress, and it is always exciting to find new software to break. Many exciting things lie ahead, surely.
Oh, I’m the new City of Heroes guy. I get a cape and everything. Issue 4 went live last week, so I will find something really edifying to say soon. For the moment, though, Ethic wants a cup of coffee. Coming!
: Zubon
Welcome Zubon! Tell me why I need to be playing City of Heroes…
Umm… you quit. Kind of a hard sell when you’ve tried the product a couple of times and set it aside as “not what you’re looking for.” No matter how broad the appeal, a game cannot be for everyone, and certainly not forever. That said, let’s toss out two points: simplicity of the basic play and variety once you get into it.
I think Penny Arcade described CoH as what an MMO looks like when you take away all the BS. CoH has no “must have” quests, although some are helpful later on. CoH has no loot unless you want to farm the Hamidon at level 50. CoH doesn’t require you to go buy a new version of your spells every few levels; Fire Blast scales up with you, rather than getting Fire Blast I through XVI over your levels. CoH does not have trade skills, which I normally like but without which I feel surprisingly free. No class is necessary to play. Every character can solo. (At least, those are the simple versions. I included the “but”s on some of them, though of course there are more details and nuances.)
In a game with six archetypes (like classes), there are a surprising variety of ways to approach the game. Each archetype has several different primary and secondary power sets, so each plays differently. Other than the damage sets (Blaster and Scrapper primaries, Defender and Tanker secondaries), playstyle can be very different for people with the same archetype. Fire Tankers live a different life from Ice Tankers. Mind Controllers and Fire Controllers get interesting and different toys. Defender primaries are pretty much different classes; Empathy (healing) is almost entirely unlike Dark (debuffing), even if the outcome is similar. Class synergy is rather interesting, seeing how the same job gets done with, say, a Fire Tank and a Kinetics Defender as opposed to an Illusion Controller and a Warshade.
Ultimately, a major reason you stay with a game is the people you meet there. Despite losing half of our Supergroup to WoW and EQ2, we still have good people around, and I can consistently get good groups with people with whom I enjoy playing. Our Teamspeak server usually has a few people on it. When that’s not viable, I have friends in a couple of other Supergroups, so I can frequently find competent people.
This comment is getting pretty long, so I’ll leave it there for now.
The reality is that I always run towards the shiny. CoH is one of those games that I know I’ll go back to at some point. I don’t like to play too many games at once so I cancel one to try another and return to the ones I miss later. CoH is in that “miss” category for me, but right now it is going to have to wait for me.
I’m with Ethic, the lack of the shiny is what made me drop CoH, which honestly, probably had the most fun combat of any game out there. If there was a fantasy style game with combat that good and useful and fun loot, I’d drop everything else and be there in no time flat.
I really enjoyed playing COH, especially as a blaster. The combat is definitely fun and the character creation is so great that I had an army of alts running around.
In the end it did lack a little depth for me. Also, I have a tendency to drift towards solo play and pretty much soloed to the high levels. Thus, I didn’t make the social connections I have in EQII and that’s what really keeps you in the game long-term. It’s kind of a tough decision for developers: People complain if you can’t solo in a game but you when you make it too easy to solo right through the game you don’t create social bonds.
I also reccomend COH to people who have never played an MMORPG before. I have a friend who is really not that into computer games at all and he was able to pick it up quite easily and still plays his scrapper.
Yeah, CoH is great as an introductory game, for the simplicity reasons above. It’s my wife’s first game of this sort, and I meet many people who are also on their first MMO with CoH.