Used to be West Karana and now it's not
City of Heroes cast a long shadow over the superhero MMO landscape. There’s easily a half dozen efforts to resurrect the game in some form, either by recreating the original game, or building a clear sequel. As of now, though, there’s only two MMOs that can carry COH’s torch — superhero MMOs where you can build your own hero your own way. And those are Cryptic’s Champions Online, and Daybreak’s DC Universe Online.
Which one is the better game for those who miss City of Heroes?
I like my main character, Teal Green, just fine. Well, most of the time. She started out as a hard light controller — a deputy of the Green Lantern corp. But I soured on all the constant comboing and didn’t feel I contributed much DPS. With wild abandon, I tried a few different DPS options, finally settling on Munitions when it came out. I later changed over to become an electricity-based healer, and that is where I am today. My DPS is … reasonable. Team Spode (the league I belong to) is usually at the tops of the DPS charts, and I’m usually third or fourth behind Lord Spode’s ice tank and Stingheal’s sorcery healer.
DC Universe Online has had a problem. It’s the most popular of Daybreak’s MMOs, but its spandex tights flies under the radar of most MMO players. Recent content dumps (called “episodes”) are still very crowded. Recent changes to show exactly how many players are in each zone (and across how many instances) shows that the most recent hub areas support hundreds of players at any time of the day — and this isn’t counting the Nintendo Switch players, who have their own sets of servers.
A long, long time ago, in a different blog, I was frustrated with myself for trying and abandoning so many MMOs. Every new MMO that came along — I’d try.
So I started the MMO Challenge. The challenge was simply this: to play a MMO as my main game for at least a year. I’d join a guild, I’d level up, grind gear, go on raids, see all that I could see and make some memories along the way. Really dive deep. If I made that challenge, I’d know what to do when I sat down to game. I’d log into that MMO.
I don’t really play survival games. I liked Minecraft until an update broke my roller coaster. I spent a lot of time on that. I tried that Age of Conan one, but grew bored. I never thought I would play another tree puncher. But Team Spode got to talking about Valheim on one of our … Read more