The last time I blogged about time I personally spent in City of Heroes or Villains was in March of 2009, when I was playing in the Architect system, where players could author their own missions. I imagine I kept playing for at least a little while after, but there were always so many other games to play… so best guess, this is a game that I haven’t played for a decade and a half but I still think about it every now and then.
Looking back on those blog posts, it seems that in every one, I was playing a new character. That defined my time in City of Heroes and City of Villains. I was always trying something new. I wasn’t in a guild, I didn’t have anyone I knew who played, and that always leads to me quitting an MMO. I hate playing MMOs alone.
I’ve known of the City of Heroes rogue server for awhile, “Homecoming”. I didn’t really feel I needed to try it; all my characters were gone, I have plenty of other superhero MMOs to play (I spent a decade in DCUO), nobody I knew played, etc. But when I heard that the current owners of the IP had given their blessing to the Homecoming project… Well, I had to try it.
I went through my old blog posts and remembered a character I’d made to go through some new content or other, I don’t remember what. Amoy Tiger, inspired to seek revenge on the poachers that were killing her beloved Amoy tigers. She took on their name and followed their trail to Paragon City. Some day, she’ll find them and have her revenge. Until then, she’ll do her best to strike down evil wherever it exists.
Creating an account was fairly straightforward; there are instructions to create a forum account and then a game account, and after that, you’re in. There are several servers, some of which offer double experience to encourage people to create or transfer their characters there.
Character creation was as fully-featured as usual. DCUO takes a different approach, where you have few costume choices at character creation time, but receive many many more costume pieces during normal gameplay. City of Heroes does give you the opportunity to unlock some costume pieces through gameplay, but the vast amount you get from the start is… overwhelming. I had a screenshot of my previous CoH hero to work from, and it still took me well over twenty minutes to find all the various costume bits I had back then, and I still had to go back later to tweak it some. In CoH, character creation is its own game. I sure spent a lot of time on it back in the day.
Gameplay is just as it was. You meet a contact, you take missions from said contact, and when your reputation is high enough, you are introduced to a new contact. The missions themselves are cut from a template; beat up bad guys in the overworld, or go into a generic warehouse/office building/sewer randomly put together from parts and beat up bad guys there.
I’m not going to get into the weeds about City of Heroes here; it’s the same game it was a dozen years ago. It does run well at the highest graphics settings on my out-of-date computer, which I appreciated. But that is only because those graphics are very much out of date; muddy and low polygon. The superhero story a player is writing in their head is better than the one on the screen.
I joke that every fight in DCUO was me hitting the same four buttons over and over. In CoH, it’s similar — I hit all the powers as they come off of cooldown. I know that there will be a little more strategy to which powers to hit when as I level up, but right now — as a physical melee type — every fight is the same. Close in and start slashing.
I’ll stick with CoH Homecoming for awhile, but unless I find a superteam or some friends who play around the same time I do, I can’t imagine sticking with it for long. Still, I like the trip down memory lane. I’d love to at least see the endgame at some point 🙂
