NCSoft kindly sent along a notice that they’re releasing next week a box containing both the City of Heroes and City of Villains games, for one subscription fee.
I’ve had World of Warcraft as my “couple of minutes free” game since I stopped playing it full time last spring. But I can’t play that game any more. I log in, do the same thing I did with every other character, and log out. Nobody I knew when I was playing still plays (or they have moved to another server). The WoW churn rate is incredible. And yet this is considered the best MMO ever.
But I digress.
With the new expansion coming out, I have to decide to go back to WoW and level my priestess there to 70, join a non-dead guild and spend another three or four months getting current and seeing the new content, or just saying goodbye to WoW and moving on.
I’m thinking seriously of punting WoW and getting this new CoH/CoV box. Now I was getting pretty bored with CoH after it released, but a lot of time has passed and unlike WoW, the newbie experience has changed substantially. I doubt I’ll ever see my heroes Narusegawa, Doujinshi Girl or Jade Tiger again (okay, I was in an anime phase at the time). (Naru was as close to an exact copy of Love Hina’s Naru Narusegawa as I could make (ill/emp controller); Doujinshi Girl was a black-and-white girl-with-guns manga come to life (blaster); and Jade Tiger was a ninja, naturally (scrapper)).
3 thoughts on “City of Heroes: Good vs Evil”
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yes I bought both separately in a deal few months ago. Definite improvements since both Betas, but my God — the grind, the grind… Other than costume customization there’s just not much to do. And you need a willing partner or more for regularl play to make it fun.
Interestingly, Damion Schubert at the AGC two weeks ago brought up the CoX franchise as having a fundamental problem with having only humanoid enemies till lvl 30 or more. Point he tried to make was that players like to move from small creatures to larger and more imposing/frightening enemies as another way of getting feedback on their progression. As they can take on bigger and more different enemies, players get a reinforcement of their advancement. BUt I know running through thugs in CoH it sure seemed to grind and there wasn’t a lot of variety. So the grind seems to go on longer.
The tedium of cookie-cutter missions was definitely one of the reasons I stopped playing. The last time I played, I finished a mission with my controller and flew around, but had zero interest in getting another mission.
You’re right about having someone else to play with. A friend can make many otherwise boring games fun. Almost all my online friends play EQ1, and so I keep playing EQ1.
Still, I’m just after a casual gaming experience. WoW fit the bill for awhile, but now it’s dull.
I agree with the mission problem of CoH, that was also one of the main reasons I never got into Anarchy Online, which like CoH I felt was a pretty good game after their initial problems.
I like a lot of what CoH has done with the game in the last couple of years since launch (capes were great, I love the badges idea, and the zones they’ve added are pretty good too, not to mention all the powers and archetypes they’ve added), but I too have had a hard time going back due to lack of people playing there. I was also quite disappointed with the CoV expansion. i liked the villains, and I liked the pvp, and I really liked the bases (though their usefulness is still low almost every guild has them anyway which is the whole point of it), but I was disappointed with the lack of level increase (which the game really needs, depth (which the game really needs), and uniqueness of the villain side (just looked like a trashed version of CoH and I just wasn’t interested in living in a trashy world as much I guess).
For me It hink though I’d rather play CoH or AO for their casual experiences though because if I only have a half hour it is so much easier to go into those mission booths than it is in WoW. You can get stuff done in half hour but the booths are just so dang convenient.