A new VIP's review of city of Heroes: Freedom

Before I start, I'd like to specify a few things about me as a player:

- I have never played City of Heroes before the launch of Freedom, though I had been constantly hounded by a friend to join (and so glad I did)
- My game knowledge is, thus far, quite incomplete so I apologise for any mistakes, I'll just be saying things as I see them.

I was be honest, when my friend first talked to me about City of Heroes, I was amazingly sceptical of the concept. I mean, if you're a super hero who is totally indestructible.. what's the point? Where would the challenge be?

However, I am so very happy to announce that my initial impression was so far wrong I'm almost ashamed. The day since I started my subscription, I have done almost nothing else but sleep, eat and play CoH. The mission story lines are so well put together and linked up brilliantly, it really absorbs you in to the gameplay (my first day, after I'd figured things out, I was so zoned in to the game that I was at my computer for 19 hours before I realised that the time had... gone).
The combat was amazingly sluggish for the first few levels (because I only had my short range origin attack, a power move, a toggle support move and brawl) but that very quickly changed so that, by level 8, I could seamlessly chain together a deadly barrage of attacks.
The sewer trial is a lot of fun. Fast paced, the right level of challenge for a new player and an excellent way to make friends, however I'd love to see this trial fit in somewhere with one of the main story arcs.
The graphics are amazing (ultra mode everything maxed, baby) and I do wonder exactly how much time and effort went in to the coding of those capes, as they seem near perfect.
The character customisation is excellent. There are only a few games (which I won't name) that I have played with a more in depth character editor. I spent about 3 hours in my first character perfecting his looks before unleashing him on Paragon.
Another thing I totally adore is the shared power pools. Once I hit level 4 and learn that "zOMG I CAN FLY" I seriously made a noise like a schoolgirl finding out her crush likes her >.> . I have never played an MMO before where the exploration was so open
The badges are awesome. I've spent a good few hours flying around just looking in totally obscure places for explorer badges. I also hear that getting a certain set of badges awards you "accolades" or some such thing, which in turn unlock extra powers
The task forces are... a grey area for me. They're brilliantly put together but some are just way too long seeing that, unlike missions, you can't just log off and log in later and carry on.
I have already covered my opinion of the tutorial in another post, however I'll give a short version: I think it should teach you a little more while still keeping the same fast paced atmosphere. If a player doesn't know what they're doing by level 10, especially F2P (not really the same when you subscribe and pay to be able to play) then chance are they'll just quit and go off to find another game.
Another thing that genuinely surprises me is lack of a global chat channel, or server wide chat. (most people seem to use the help channel for this, but that's not it's main purpose)
The true make or break for ANY MMO, however, is it's community and, I have to say, you guy are totally damn amazing. Usually new players are met with hostility/indifference/"I'm better than you" attitudes but in CoH I feel welcome, there's always someone patient enough to answer my never ending questions about what to do

Story Arcs: 10/10
Gameplay: 9/10
Combat System: 9/10
Archetypes/Powers/Power Pools: 10/10
Graphics: 9.8/10
Character Customisation: 9.9/10
Tutorial: 5/10
Community: 11/10 ( )

All in all, I give City of Heroes a 9.5/10.

I love this game, Paragon Studios. You have yourself a totally loyal and submissive new follower.

CoH team should just spread this review around everywhere, best form of advertising. Interesting to hear the perspective from the type of new player freedom is designed to attract. Welcome to the family, we know you won't regret it.

I will say that the taskforces you've seen, namely anything except Positron 1 and 2, was designed under the old vision of how a taskforce was meant to be run...as in you were suppose to run it over the period of several days with the same group and not all in one hit.

It was a stupid design choice, very stupid, the player base has always run them all in one hit and its only once the man who made that stupid design choice left have they started to provide shorter, more fun, taskforces. So don't judge taskforces purely on the hero ones (Synapse, Citadel and Dr Q are the freaking WORST taskforces in the entire game and you'll find few players who disagree). At around level 35 they do tend to pick up with the Katie Hannon Taskforce (short but challenging) and the Imperious Taskforce (the most popular of all the taskforces).

I still think my crowning achievement is completing a Dr Q taskforce in under 5 hours (before Incarnates came along) and thats a taskforce that can regularly take an 8 hour session of player to complete.

There are global chat channels. What server are you on? If you're on Union I recommend joining Union Chat and Sals badgehunters. On Virtue I used Virtue LFG Beta and Virtue Taskforce 2010 channels but that's exclusively for taskforcing.

I'm sure people from other servers can recommend a good chatty channel for you to join and walk you through it step by step.

Glad you're enjoying the game, always nice to hear how new people view the game.

Welcome to City of Heroes!

Yeah, one of the Hero Task Forces are from the first year of the game, and they were designed to fit a different idea of how players would interact with the game - and that same idea is also found in a lot of the really old Hero missions and arcs too - but the devs seem to be working to a plan of revamping the content 1-50, and either adding newer and more dynamic alternatives to the older content, or by totally removing it and replacing it with the more sophisticated modern content.
Older content has a lot of repetition, but newer content uses linked objectives to redcue the amount of less exciting missions into fewer misisons that are way more action packed.
A good example of this is in the Incarnate content - the Tin Mage Task Force only has 3 missions, and the Apex Task Force only has 2 - but there are so many changing objectives within the missions that you're not really aware of there being so few - instead of sending players to a new missions for each new objective like the older content does, the objectives are now all inside a handful of missions, which makes for a way more dynamic experience.

As an anecdote to add to this:

I just resubbed two days ago and had forgotten how to check my own chat handle, so I posted in broadcast.

I had 5 tells and 3 people that replied on the broadcast channel.

Welcome to the game and the forums. Glad you enjoy it as much as I do. What character are you playing?

Welcome to City of Heroes!

Re: the global chat channels -- what server do you play on? If you check your server-specific forum (down past the 'For Fun!' section in the Forum dropdown) there should be a sticky thread near the top listing global channels organized for various things: forming task forces, badge hunting, general chat/teaming, etc.

And people wonder why I never, ever, left.

This review by you, Rapthorne, is pretty much summing up why I still think Co* is the best game evar. And the cool thing is, it just keeps improving, IMO.

/Call me Rick Astley, Paragon.
//Never gonna give you up.

One of us! One of us! One of us!

Wow. Now this just made my day. Thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rapthorne Before I start, I'd like to specify a few things about me as a player: - I have never played City of Heroes before the launch of Freedom, though I had been constantly hounded by a friend to join (and so glad I did) - My game knowledge is, thus far, quite incomplete so I apologise for any mistakes, I'll just be saying things as I see them. I was be honest, when my friend first talked to me about City of Heroes, I was amazingly sceptical of the concept. I mean, if you're a super hero who is totally indestructible.. what's the point? Where would the challenge be? However, I am so very happy to announce that my initial impression was so far wrong I'm almost ashamed. The day since I started my subscription, I have done almost nothing else but sleep, eat and play CoH. The mission story lines are so well put together and linked up brilliantly, it really absorbs you in to the gameplay (my first day, after I'd figured things out, I was so zoned in to the game that I was at my computer for 19 hours before I realised that the time had... gone). The combat was amazingly sluggish for the first few levels (because I only had my short range origin attack, a power move, a toggle support move and brawl) but that very quickly changed so that, by level 8, I could seamlessly chain together a deadly barrage of attacks. The sewer trial is a lot of fun. Fast paced, the right level of challenge for a new player and an excellent way to make friends, however I'd love to see this trial fit in somewhere with one of the main story arcs. The graphics are amazing (ultra mode everything maxed, baby) and I do wonder exactly how much time and effort went in to the coding of those capes, as they seem near perfect. The character customisation is excellent. There are only a few games (which I won't name) that I have played with a more in depth character editor. I spent about 3 hours in my first character perfecting his looks before unleashing him on Paragon. Another thing I totally adore is the shared power pools. Once I hit level 4 and learn that "zOMG I CAN FLY" I seriously made a noise like a schoolgirl finding out her crush likes her >.> . I have never played an MMO before where the exploration was so open The badges are awesome. I've spent a good few hours flying around just looking in totally obscure places for explorer badges. I also hear that getting a certain set of badges awards you "accolades" or some such thing, which in turn unlock extra powers The task forces are... a grey area for me. They're brilliantly put together but some are just way too long seeing that, unlike missions, you can't just log off and log in later and carry on. I have already covered my opinion of the tutorial in another post, however I'll give a short version: I think it should teach you a little more while still keeping the same fast paced atmosphere. If a player doesn't know what they're doing by level 10, especially F2P (not really the same when you subscribe and pay to be able to play) then chance are they'll just quit and go off to find another game. Another thing that genuinely surprises me is lack of a global chat channel, or server wide chat. (most people seem to use the help channel for this, but that's not it's main purpose) The true make or break for ANY MMO, however, is it's community and, I have to say, you guy are totally damn amazing. Usually new players are met with hostility/indifference/"I'm better than you" attitudes but in CoH I feel welcome, there's always someone patient enough to answer my never ending questions about what to do Story Arcs: 10/10 Gameplay: 9/10 Combat System: 9/10 Archetypes/Powers/Power Pools: 10/10 Graphics: 9.8/10 Character Customisation: 9.9/10 Tutorial: 5/10 Community: 11/10 ( ) All in all, I give City of Heroes a 9.5/10. I love this game, Paragon Studios. You have yourself a totally loyal and submissive new follower.

Holy carp, she is alive!

What forum is that?

5/10 on the tutorial is harsh, but I see where you're coming from.

Twinshot and Graves were added in to serve as continuing tutorials, explaining enhancements, sidekicking, supergroups and other gubbins. But they're flawed. For one, nobody explains conning. What the hell?

On the bright side, the extremely quick tutorial sure makes repeat visits more pleasant.


You're right about task forces being long winded. Something that the game can never actually tell you is that there are two kinds of content: the old, and the new.

The Old: Story arcs that consist of dull Defeat Alls strung together, interrupted by a few Defeat X of Y, all to get a better idea of what is going on. After ten missions like this, you may face a named boss. If you're lucky.

See, these missions were created with the overall goal of setting up 400 hours worth of content. Not good content, just lots of it. Paragon City is littered with content like this. It was never fun seven years ago, but we stuck with it because the combat itself was fun enough that we didn't mind blasting through hordes of faceless enemies. That said, the playerbase has much higher standards now.

The most egregious example of this sort of 'content' is, as mentioned, Dr. Q's task force. Though I'm loathe to call it content, like I'm loathe to call a moldy communion wafer food.

But Issue 21 has shown what the devs are doing to remedy the situation. Rather than re-work or improve the aging arcs, they're bombing them with napalm. Then, they replace them with...

The New: Punchy, short and to the point. Missions are chock full of unique mechanics, your contacts are fleshed out, the odd decision and dialog tree is included, and there is a good deal of in-mission exposition. There are twists and turns, betrayals and sacrifices, and you actually care about the outcome.

They've been adding content like this for a long while, but now they're renovating the core of the game, redside and blueside.

Praetoria has four entirely separate tracks of content that stretch from level 1 to 20, all of which is most definitely New. The First Ward is 20-30 and has content so awesome I can scarcely believe this is the same game. Issue 17 and Issue 18 added in four new arcs in the 20-30 range, all of which are superb. The endgame taskforces are of a much more reasonable length, taking just over an hour to do on reasonable teams.

The Positron Task Force was once so Old it hurt, as it used to be two task forces, but was merged into one when it was realized that a single task force contact could only give out task force. This has been remedied, and not only is the Posi TF now split into two but both halves have been trimmed, dieted, re-written and infused with unique stuff.

Edit: IF I MADE THIS SHORTER I'D BE FPARN WAAARGGH RAEG MURDER