I've been playing City of Heroes for a month now and I'm pretty upset. There are parts of the game I absolutely adore, and other parts that I abhor. I've never played an MMO with so many unique and fun features coupled with some of the worst grinding ever. This is only the latest of my trials with the game - I tend to return every year or so for a couple of weeks to a month, to see what's changed, and what's remained stagnant.
Let me start off with what I enjoyed, so I may buy some time before the angry mob rips me to pieces.
I love the character creation - when I grew tired of the actual game, I retreated into the creator and made a couple dozen characters. This is actually my favorite part of the game, which is kind of worrying when you think about it, but it's still very fun. Moving around the city, exploring, badge-hunting, and "street-sweeping" are all activities I enjoyed. Travel powers are really fun and make me feel more superheroic than pretty much any other type of ability. Collecting badges is an addictive activity. As for street-sweeping, I had a lot of fun with it but it was a very inefficient way of earning XP compared to what I call "door missions".
I hate door missions so much. They are excruciatingly repetitive. I was tired of the warehouse map by the sixth time I was offered it. I'm currently approaching level 30 and I've probably been to over 50 warehouses. Same goes for the omnipresent office buildings. Even sewers and caves, which used to be a little rarer, have become commonplace. When I'm soaring through the sky over Steel Canyon, being a superhero feels like an amazing thing. When I'm clearing the 40th cut-and-paste warehouse mission, being a superhero feels like a humdrum job. No matter how urgent or dangerous my contact says the mission is, when I'm inside that warehouse for the umpteenth time, I'm just going through the motions.
Back to street-sweeping - my favorite contact missions are the ones that encourage a little bit of street-sweeping. I find the city environments, at least Hero-side and Praetoria-side, somewhat repetitive as well - some parts of Steel Canyon look exactly like Galaxy City, for instance. But at least outdoors you can go from fighting gangbangers on a rooftop, to battling thugs in a park, to defeating villains outside a factory. As I leveled I found myself having to choose between battling random enemies outdoors with no clear mission in mind, or taking repetitive door missions for the comfort of having at least a little bit of 'lore' pushing a simple story forward.
The game started taking on a really stilted feel to me - it reminded me of early 90s beat-em-up video games, where you'd walk from screen left to screen right beating up hordes of identical enemies. Another thing that frustrated me was the slow acquisition of offense abilities - this may not apply to every powerset in the game, but if it doesn't, I have not yet found a way to ascertain which powersets feature more offensive skills earlier in the game. For the first 10 levels I was basically alternating between two main attacks and brawl. It felt terribly slow and samey. All MMOs start you off with only a couple of skills, but none I've played have granted new abilities at a slower pace than City of Heroes.
I suppose the sum of my gripes with CoH can be put this way: The premise of the game, the appearance customization, and the plethora of powers lured me in. It really felt like an epic, one-of-a-kind adventure was about to begin. After the initial 'wow factor' wore off, I found myself in an utterly generic MMO that seemed to squander the promise it had shown in its opening moments. All MMORPGs feature repetition and some kind of grinding, of course, but they try their best to alleviate some of the wash-rinse-repeat feeling by incorporating varied environments and a wider selection of skills - some of which are only situationally useful, but serve to give the player more freedom and choice in gameplay situations.
At this point, six years on from the game's launch, it seems my issues with the game would more likely be addressed (if at all) with the sequel that's been rumored. Still, if Paragon Studios is planning on keeping the game alive and fixing what doesn't work so well, they would attract a lot more potential players by just adding the spice of variety to the parts of its game that lie outside shiny new Praetoria. More door-mission environments to alleviate the warehouse-office-sewer cycle, and more powers learned less slowly, so that players who have put six hours into their character have more than three offensive abilities to choose from.
I have the utmost respect for the developers of the game and the players who like CoH just fine the way it is - I merely wanted to provide the viewpoint of a new-ish player who has tried multiple times to get into the game, but finds that everything that lies beyond the exciting premise incredibly mundane.
Thanks for your time!
