A couple of friends from EQ1 play casually on City of Heroes. They still play on EQ1; I moved to EQ2, but I miss playing with them. Turns out they occasionally play on City of Heroes, although, unfortunately, not on my server (Virtue). So I remade my “main” on Virtue, Madame Scurry, to play with them on Liberty.
I hadn’t been happy with Madame Scurry’s old look. Basically, well… she looked too *nice*, and not much like the cockroach from which she gets her powers of stealth and regeneration. And plus, c’mon… the original Madame Scurry looks more like a hero than a villain.
I’m all about the villains… so I took the opportunity of restarting to completely redesign the character.
First, her costume is far more chitinous. Antennae, of course… that should have been in the first one. A more interesting face, and a nicer looking hair color. All sorts of sharp things. I was trying to make v1’s shoulders look like beetle shell but that just didn’t work.
Now… she looks villainous.
Carlisle and Binxs had been powerleveling me, but that left me very low on enhancements, since many times they’d complete my missions before I even got to them. I’ve been doing a little soloing for more.
I’ve been reconsidering the whole Stalker class, anyway. I always seem to play stealth classes, or healers, in every game. It might be time to knock over the apple cart and try something new, like a tank or a blaster… Even a mastermind.
5 thoughts on “CoV: The Rebirth of Madame Scurry”
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I played CoH a little bit with a friend, and while I didn’t care for the game, at all, I did LOVE their character creation. So many choices! That’s what I want.
That’s the whole “Hero’s Journey” thing MMOs, especially fantasy MMOs, really seem to enjoy. You have to start off as a simple peasant, and then become a hero as time goes on. That has become incredibly hackneyed in literature but still persists in games. In CoH, you start off as a hero, complete with costume, history and powers, and just get even more awesome 🙂
My largest hope is that Chronicles of Spellborn will do for fantasy MMOs what CoH did for its genre in allowing great customization.
Just because I am low level doesn’t mean I want to look like everyone else. Come on. Supposedly we start out as young adventurers — did we really spend the first fifteen years of our lives in rags? The original D&D let you start with gear appropriate to your upbringing, and of course it could look exactly as you liked.
Great character design there, Tipa. Character customization greatly enhances the RPG elements of MMORPGs, IMHO. Though one of my greatest MMO wishes for the next five years is that gear-based progression will become ancient history, those games that allow you to customize your gear significantly at least let us feel like we’re not all automatons grinding reaching for the same pie in the sky.
The whole grinding thing burns me up. Because we start out with ugly, crappy gear, we get used to the conceit that only through leveling and grinding can we actually be, and look, heroic. I should start out looking freakin’ AWESOME and then get MORE AWESOME.
I would like to see content blocked not by level, but by challenges. If you can meet a challenge, you can progress. If you’re clever, you can meet the challenge with crappy gear. If you’re less clever, you may need to find better gear, or just try something new. Gear should be an aid and not a necessity. Your BRAIN should be your most important weapon.
This requires dynamic content to some extent in these ‘challenges’ so that spoiler sites aren’t much help.
Re: dressing — I feel character creation is too vital to be left to the vagaries of a MMO house. Someone, somewhere is working on a MMO-independent character creator. The MMO devs will be responsible for the meshes and textures if they want to be. We need an independent character creator so we can take our characters out of their game. They are our characters, we put our time into them, we should have some freedom to do what we like with them.
Reminder to self: Plead with the developers of Chronicles of Spellborn to be let into the beta.
I kinda like the whole thing of starting off not-awesome and then moving up to awesome although I understand what you mean. I did like CoH as a distraction between games but it never really hooked me. What I wasn’t overly fond of was the side-kick thing – I had guildmates who got side-kicked up to the top end of the game and then that was all they wanted to do. It seemed to encourage the wrong attitude (and I know that sounds snobby)
Just saw this: http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14/rumor-new-sto-developers-being-cryptic/
I think Cryptic could do a really good job of Star Trek. I hope it’s true.