Nothing Great out there.

I've been looking at what is out thee, as far as another game to play, and I just don't see anything that great. Rift is ok but not great. WoW doesn't look to be doing anything much different. Tera isn't getting great reviews. What has happened to the gaming market. I used to have so many choices now it seems that here are very few great titles out there worth buying.

From what I've seen, the closest to CoH play would be The Secret World.

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Played Issue #1 through Issue #12. Occasional play for a couple more issues, then gone.
Back now till the end. One 50: Ella Tundra, Earth/Ice Tank.

I find Star Trek Online to be fairly enjoyable... Well, space missions are enjoyable. Ground missions are often a chore and something I suffer through to get back to the space missions...

The secret is not finding something "like City of Heroes", because honestly, there isn't.

I did recently get The Secret World, and it is vastly different to CoH. It took me a few days to decide whether or not I wanted to get it, and once I broke the mentality of trying comparing it to CoH, I found myself beginning to enjoy it a bit more.

At this point, I can't say I will stick with it for the long haul. I don't really foresee myself wanting to attempt to "master" the game, but it's a great diversion for the time being.

Thank you, Champion.

I tried playing the Secret World and really didn't understand the ability points, skill points, etc. It will be uninstalled soon.

However, the graphics and storyline are quite impressive...so I think it's just a matter of "can't teach an old dog new tricks" (at least for this old dog, anyway!)

Agreed......In the days that have past since the news I have started looking at new games to try and take the place of CoH and so far nothing comes close. I tried Secret Worlds free trial. Did not like it. It took almost half an hour before I could start doing anything. Graphics were nice and the story seems interesting and in the end it is not for me. I like the ability to create your character and just go like with our tutorial or skipping it and going right to defeating bad guys in atlas park. Champions. Simply awful. I can't get past that shaded cell look they use for the game. Decent character creator but not enough to keep me interested. I am currently eyeing the Transformers Universe MMO that is in development.

Personally, I play Star Trek Online (got a LT Sub a while back and have not regretted it), and am part of a fleet of current/former COH players. The cool thing is that, whether you play STO or Champions Online, the same COX global channel we use is linked to either game.

Rift for me, did it last year on it's release and loved it, with Storm Legion coming out soon, especially with the CoH announcement, i decided to go whole hog into that. The dynamic content, rifts, raid rifts, level increase with new souls for each calling, coming player and guild housing system, huge new world with great open world events and a fairly nice community, along with some nice graphics and many other things, well, that sold it to me.

To me NC Soft has alreadt salted its own ground. I care not for apologists and GW2 fanbois, thats it. GW2 might have taken my fancy, but not now, the other NC Soft products in the pipeline might have to, but not now. WoW did in the past for TBC and WotLC for a bit, did some in Cata to...but fluffy pandas...no thanks.

So if any of you make it to Rift pop along to Blighweald or Argent on the EU servers, i am still an altaholic there, but only Guild and Raid on my Guardians on Blighweald, as I am doing my Defiants on Argent just to see the other side of the story...several times...as I usually do

For those of you thinking of The Secret World, I highly recommend it, because it's one of those games that takes some time to start to understand. Unlike a WOW-like game, where everything is dumbed down to make it as simplistic as possible, there's a learning curve that the more you play, the more you start to understand.

It's one of those rare games where they went a different direction, and you don't run the risk of feeling like it's all like you've played before.

Yesterday, I was playing along, doing my thing when suddenly I hit a threshold I didn't know existed, and I was jolted out of my "usual" experience and told to do a completely different task that was completely unknown to me. What I discovered is that even though there are no "levels", there is progress, which means after a certain amount of achievement stuff you do, you're pulled into a much larger part of the game to continue that progress further.

And when people say there are no levels, that's not really true. Well, on the surface it is, but you still gain experience and then once you hit a "level" you gain either ability points or skill points and then use those to further the growth of your character. It's a lot more like the Ultima Onlne growth structure (rather than levels), but you still become more and more powerful the more stuff you do in the game.

What's really nice about the game is that you can repeat a lot of the same quests again, but they're on a daily timer, so you have to return the next day to do some of the same quests, which are highly worth it. The real positive of that is that even in the first real area, there are so many quests that your chances of finishing them all up before turning in for the night are pretty slim. Yesterday, I was doing a run through of similar missions from the day before and came across a couple of quests I somehow missed the first time around. Sometimes, those quests are right there in front of you, but you're so busy with something else that you miss it.

It's definitely not COH, a game that I, too, loved. But it's worth trying. The only real problem it has is that it had a horrible PR campaign in the beginning so that it was completely missed by the majority of the potential fan base. Before the COH decision, I had heard about the game, but never gave it a second thought. Now, I'm kind of glad I looked into it.

I've only been playing Secret World for a few days; much too little to really get a firm grasp of it. Still, it's interesting and there seems to be a TON of depth to it. Mechanically it's not a lot like COH, graphically it's much, much superior. It's DirectX instead of OpenGL so it's performance is better too.

Right now I'm still wandering around trying to figure things out and probably horribly gimping my character... how many of us on our first character did things like skipping key powers, multiple travel powers and the like out of ignorance? It looks like character progression is at least as complex as CoH with set IO's in the mix so it's a lot to grasp at once.

In my limited time on their forums I was pleasantly surprised at the atmosphere there, the community seems friendly, helpful and mature just like I expect here. It's nothing like the WoW or STTOR communities; the Secret World forums felt very much like CoH.

Yeah, there's some aspects of the game mechanics I don't much care for; it has the resurrect at a point and go back to your body, or fully resurrect at the point that WoW uses but there doesn't seem to be any death penalties and if there's gear degradation I haven't seen it yet. Combat is far more mobile; there's no rooting for attacks so run and gun works very well.

All in all after the 3 day trial I bought a key and I'll make a decision once the 30 days are up.

My husband and I also headed over to The Secret World, right now we're on day 2 of our free trial. I found myself comparing it to CoH a lot at first and I admit that the ability wheel is a little confusing at first, but if someone like me, who isn't really a gamer by definition can figure the majority of the game out in a day... I think really anyone can. I thoroughly surprised myself with how well I took to the game play. It's no CoH, nothing ever will be, but it's pretty enjoyable.

We also have STO accounts, but I find that game tedious and boring. I was excited for it when it initially came out, but found myself severely underwhelmed by it. Not to mention they screwed with the canon of my favorite race, a race that I can't even play, those two things soured me even more. There is talk of Romulans becoming playable as a mini-faction, up through lvl 5 only. I ask you...what the heck is the point of that? make them fully playable or don't bother.

Wow...I went off on a tangent...lol

As for other games...nothing else appeals to me. I may buy a key for TSW and see where I am after 30 days.

But...still...I really don't want to fully give up on CoH, not just yet.

I've tried many MMO's and the closest to CoH that I have found is Star Wars TOR. The combat, power trays and movement are very simular. The one drawback is that here is no side kicking so teaming isn't as robust as CoH. Anyways, I took a Jedi Knight to lvl 40 and if you are looking for a replacement to CoH , give SWTOR a try.

Now that some of the rage is gone, I'm almost certainly going back to Dofus, which is... absolutely nothing like CoH. Really, my biggest problem with it is me. I much prefer to solo, and Dofus (especially at higher levels) is not a solo-friendly game. The devs also like to put the focus on tactical thinking and team cooperation rather than simply steamrolling battles, so you can't just jump in and start tearing through monsters, which is sometimes exactly what I want to do. But I know lots of people there, and the summer event is going on right now (just extended for two weeks, in fact), and I have some decently high-level characters there, so I'll probably resubscribe. (It's only $7 a month, or $60 for a whole year, so that's no strain on my budget)

Kingdom of Loathing is not really a MMO. It's online, and there are other people there, but the gameplay is almost strictly single-player (with some minimal interaction in the high-level Clan Dungeons). It's mostly text with simple graphics, which hides weirdly deep game systems. It has a pretty friendly community and helpful to new players, though the long-time vets are all irreverent, sarcastic, and just a touch cynical - kinda like the game itself, really. Also, don't use txt-speak. They hate that. No subscription required - all the content is free. (You can donate for special items that change each month, but the devs work hard to make them helpful but not game-breaking. They're not "required" unless you want to be on the bleeding edge of speed gameplay, and even then only a few specific ones are required)

Despite my initial problems with it (which I've ranted about at length), I'd actually probably subscribe to Champions Online just for the Freeform Characters that would let me realize some concepts that I couldn't do in CoH (including a beloved tabletop RP character, who would best be described as a Martial Arts/Electric Melee/Super Reflexes/Electric Blast Dodge Tank), but they don't have a Mac Version, so unless I can get it running stably on my four-year-old laptop (which is an iffy proposition at best - even CoH isn't always stable and is a CPU hog), I won't subscribe.

... I've also been playing Toontown Online a bit this past week, primarily because it's nothing like CoH and doesn't rub salt in the wound. It's not great by any means, but it's mindless and has some nice music. (I just don't talk to anyone there, knowing they're probably all kids one-quarter my age or younger. Which is made easier by the fact that the chat system sucks)

I've tried to play through the fair number of 'options' out there, but each one fell on its face for me. This will never be replaced short of a properly thought out successor.