I tend to play City of Heroes/Villains in spurts. Months will go buy without anything, and then I’ll play for eight hours straight.
I have lots of reasons not to play that much. Most of the game is in the character creator, which is justifiably awesome. Once I’ve made my character, she’s made and barring inventions and trips to the tailor shop, will look exactly the same at 50 as at 1.
Another thing that doesn’t change, is missions. When you’re soloing, missions can be challenging, but in a group of eight or so people, you just find a crowd of mobs, use every ability, rez, and move on. I’m so busy trying to keep up and not get lost that I don’t know the plot, if it even has one, or what we’re doing. It’s a frantic hairball of confusion until “MISSION COMPLETE!” displays, and we exit the mission and head to the next red star on the compass.
By making the game random, it becomes meaningless. I know there are task forces, at least on the good side, but at least on the evil side, nobody was doing them. And I’ve been on task forces; they are the same thing as random missions, except with a plot (which everyone ignores).
I guess that’s why I play in spurts. I play until my character gets her travel power. I know there is nothing to look forward to except variations on what I have already seen, so there’s no point to move on. I have three genin and one jounin ninja in my team, I do sabotage missions in Paragon City with ease, and in a team my ninjas do dps and keep crap off me while I ice storm the ground, snow storm them so they move slowly and gale them against walls with superstrength winds. I might grab some healing powers after I get my final ninja training power, but aside from that, what is there to look forward to but another sewer mission?
My love for the superhero genre beats itself against the iron barrier of CoX’s random mission design. Let’s hope Champions Online’s handcrafted missions bring on the perfect storm that brings the superhero MMO into the mainstream. DC Universe Online? I dunno, all I saw in the trailer was Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and that crowd, and since I know you can’t play as the DC superheroes, I’m not sure why they showed them. Who really cares what they do? You won’t be playing DCU to watch some NPC be the hero. You play because YOU are the hero.
Okay, DCU trailer bit: Wonder Woman. She can fly without her invisible jet? When did THAT happen? And can you imagine a worse flying suit than a bustier and panties? Everytime she lands, she must spend ten minutes picking bugs out of her cleavage, while the guys just brush the crud right off. I wonder how she keeps her skin looking good when she has been running around outside, mostly naked, for forty years.
15 thoughts on “CoH: Same stuff, different day, and the DCU trailer.”
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Actually I think she flies constantly in the Justice League cartoons, although how I have no idea. The jet kinda went away at some point. Which is good I guess.
With you on CoH, I just cant get into it anymore, someone needs to set that genre right, whether it be on or offline. I get more customization in Marvel Ultimate Alliance on the XBOX 360 than I do in City of Heroes
I’m thinking waterproof SPF 100. And lots of lotion. As for the bugs, you tell me which is worse, cleavage or eyes?
I’m in the same place with CoX. I play for a while, then get bored and wander away. It is ALMOST worth it to pay the monthly fee just to use the costume generator. That’s where I’ve always had the most fun with the games.
I always thought she could fly and never understood the purpose of the jet.
Not to double post but I’m gonna… you know what would be great in DCU? If we could at certain points take control of the legendary characters. Like you save up some sort of tokens, and when you run a special instanced raid one of the players can purchase the option to transform his character into Batman/Superman/etc. That character having some relation to the raid itself.
If I want to play the DCU characters, I can buy the video games. I want to play my own. Actually, and this might brand me as not the person they want for their games, I have zero interest in the DC IP. Nor the Marvel IP. Nor the Champions IP. I even played the tabletop version of Champions and didn’t care the IP. All I want to do is have my character do heroic things. I played SWG and never once looked up Chewbacca or Darth Vader or any of them, either.
If I’m part of a DCU supergroup, I want it to be a rival to the Justice League, and we get a chance to kick their butts, and Superman has to sweep our floors for a month.
It would be cool if supergroups got their own cities to protect, one shared by no other supergroup, though lone heroes could come by, patrol the streets, and maybe join the group.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Wonder Woman, it depends which of her versions you talk about. The invisible jet was from the TV series, where I got almost all my Wonder Woman info. I never could afford to buy all those comic books when I was a kid. I think the only ones I did buy were Josie and the Pussycats and Lil’ Devil. Ya know, Harvey comics. I loved those.
CoX do have some good story plots and you do not need to do strike/task forces to get that. The problems here are a bit with the frantic part – a number of people just focus on the xp gain.
To get the plots properly you generally need to read the clues when they appear, which may be difficult with fast paced teams. Also, plots are only obtained from real contacts, if you do newspaper/police radio missions then it is truly just generic missions without plot. But a number of people do them because they are easier and faster xp than the “real” missions.
Chances are also that you will have a few people in the team who has probably done the missions story arcs a few times before also and thus just rush through it.
There are certainly some good plots, but the sameness of the mission areas does not help to bring that across.
Heh… my highest character is a level 21 ill/emp controller, and my second highest character is one I leveled from one to eighteen yesterday. My third highest character. Madame Scurry, I leveled with a few team missions but I did a lot of solo missions as well. So I did get to see some of the missions that had actual plots, followed some of the storylines with the snake people and the Circle of Thorn, but when you got into a mission — was the same clumps of mobs standing around, your job: kill them and hope for invention stuff to drop so you can make non-lame enhancements.
CoX is the best superhero MMO out there. It’s the ONLY superhero MMO out there. Champions Online gives you your very own arch-nemesis! How cool is THAT? And you get to GO places. The Rogue Isles are so DAMNED ugly everywhere. P
Changes I’d make to CoX.
First, nobody likes generic sewers, generic caves, generic office building, generic high tech lab, generic warehouse.
Secondly, heroes and villains in the same world!
Thirdly, have your actions affect the world in some way. If you and friends tirelessly protect a part of the city, it gets nicer. Flag, and avil marches back in. Or for villains, corrupt a nice place through relentless villainy. Slack off and the law moves in. The world could be good to the east and evil to the west, with contested zones between them. If you in a contested zone, PvP is possible. If you are in an enemy zone, PvP is certain, but your influence increases with your risk. The very bravest villains could turn Atlas Park into a dangerous place. The very bravest heroes could make Arachnos move offshore.
The character creator is awesome and it’s easy to spen 2 hrs just on this part of the game, and it’s tempting to make alts just for the creator. Beyond that I haven’t been able to get too into CoH for much the same reasons you pointed out. In fact, I think my highest characters are maybe a 16 healer and a 12 blaster. Though I’m always tempted to reactivate my account.
The character creation engine is the best part of the CoH/CoX series while most of the gameplay is a purposeless grind-a-thon. I have a feeling that Cryptic Studios had an unformed idea for a superhero MMO and NCSoft helped them filled in the gaps with poor game design. Champions Online looks to be a more well thought out design with the procedural generated missions replaced with developer and player created content. Also rumor on the forums is that you’ll be able to use the character creator for a secret identity also.
I play CoH for about one random month a year and then get bored with it. Highest is a 20 Bubbles/ Dark defender. I tend to play until my core abilities are slotted out with DOs, and then get bored. With ED, you’ll never get the core stats of of abilities over +100%, and it’s easy to do that even with DOs. Keeping about the same +damage and getting a bit of +Accuracy when I go from DOs to SOs is not really all that exciting a prospect, for example. The pace that you learn new abilities also tends to slow dramatically around the teens, which makes the game feel grindy.
All that said, still one of my favorite MMOs. If someone can take everything I like about CoH and put it into a game that is less grindy and repetitive, I will play it in a heartbeat. I don’t really care of SOE or Cryptic is the one to do it, and I don’t care if it’s set in a world I’m familiar with or not.
The generic environments are certainly a big issue with CoX – easy for the developers to build new maps, but quickly becomes less exciting for the players. And in many of these maps you will learn where the mobs may be located – e.g mention “corner of death” for an office map and any experienced player will know what you mean.
Heroes and villains are in the same zones in some places in CoX, in addition to the PvP zones. These are the newer zones that has been added to the game and the path NCSoft seems to be taking with CoX I think there will be more of that. You need to get to higher levels (35+) to get into some of these zones though currently.
One can certainly see that Cryptic learned their trade as CoX evolved, later missions and zone updates are clearly better than the older ones. E.g. on hero side the revamped Faultline zone (lvl 15-25) is a good example in comparision to the old hero-side content in that level range.
Which makes me hopeful for Champions Online. I think Cryptic had many good ideas for CoH originally, could not deliver on all of that and ended up (technical reasons, other reasons) with a more limited game than what they wanted – combined with some assumptions from earlier games on how things “should” be which may not have been the best. Still, I think there are a number of elements that they have done better in CoX than in most MMORPGs. Assuming they have a good understanding of the good and bad parts I think Champions Online can be excellent.
BTW, I would not bother with IOs at low levels unless you have extra infamy/influence funding or get a rare drop that can be sold for significant amounts – too expensive for enhancements that you can get better regular ones in a couple of levels. Better to sell it and buy the best the best regular ones for the cash (from consignment house or vendor).
Well, there’s a reason to level up right there 🙂
One of the stupidest things CoX did with groups is to not allow players other than the team leader to see mission text. Even if you wanted the plot, you have no obvious way to see it. At the very least when the team leader speaks to a task force contact everyone on the team could get a popup window with the NPC text on it. If they want to click it off and not read it that’s fine, but whenever I’ve been in TFs (which isn’t often) it mostly consists of standing around wondering what’s going on, until a new waypoint lights up and off everyone goes. You clear that, then stand around waiting for the next one. Only the team leader gets to really experience the TF, and that’s just stupid.
While you can not see all of the dialog if there are multiple steps in it, you do see the last part of it if you look at the mission text in the mission log. It is certainly not ideal, but you are not completely lost to what happens.
This falls into the same category as the clues – they are too good at hiding it and you have to make an effort to follow the plot. Which is a shame, because they have some good stories from time to time and some intersting characteristics of some of the contacts.