What was so special about City of Heroes?

Conceptual freedom.

In any other game, a dwarf fighter is a dwarf fighter - there's only so many possibilities.

Here, we take the a few Inv/Fire tanks, and we end up with, because of the amazing costume creator: a Soviet in power armor, a djinn, a dragon, a robot, and a catgirl.

And, aside from a few things like capes being locked at level 20, we could look and feel powerful, fulfill our vision of our characters right out of the gate. No wandering around in rags killing rats with a rusty dagger for us: we had shiny and colorful costumes out the gate that fit our visions of the characters.

That's huge, and the vast majority of other MMOs will simply never have it.

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Comrade Smersh, KGB Special Section 8 50 Inv/Fire, Fire/Rad, BS/WP, SD/SS, AR/EM
Other 50s: Plant/Thorn, Bots/Traps, DB/SR, MA/Regen, Rad/Dark - All on Virtue.

-Don't just rebel, build a better world, comrade!

This is why City of Heroes was special to me.

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It was fun, thats what made this game special compared to other MMOs.

We got to have fun.

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The community, devs and players. I feel like I'm losing my family.

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For me:

1) The number of possible character concepts you could represent in the game.

2) Related to that, the large number of different build possibilities and alt-friendliness.

3) Almost all of the content scales to be worthwhile as a team, which is massive - most MMOs have strictly separate solo and team content, with very little incentive to team for the solo content, and even less if you've already done that piece of solo content - making it a nightmare to coordinate playing with friends as you level up.

4) Almost as much of the content is also perfectly playable solo.

5) The frequency with which you get to blow up large quantities of bad guys. AoEs are usually either anaemic or a death sentence (or both) in standard MMOs, yet there's not much I find more fun and satisfying than mowing down large groups of enemies at once.

6) It's a pretty easy game - this'll be a negative point for many MMO players, but I really like that we don't have the same emphasis on ensuring everyone's geared up properly, or that everyone's got the most optimal dps rotation possible, or any of that. Not to mention that it means you can just grab whoever's wanting to team and go; faffing around waiting for just the right combination of classes is 100% optional.

I've not found any other MMO that even comes close to measuring up on any of those points, much less all of those points.

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