What made City of Heroes unique for you?

The original poster is correct in all detail and additions.

The concept I like most about City of Heroes/Villains: you can make whatever genre you wanted. There are the flying witches of croata with electric blast/storm summoning. You have the alien kheldians. You can create your own aliens. You can be a robot, mad scientist, or a fighting rooster ( I was pwned by one in Bloody Bay), a cowboy, a troll, a revolutionary war soldier, a pirate, a futuristic soldier in the RWZ, You can even be your very own original superhero or archvillain! As stated, there are billions of costume permutations.

I looked but not extra-careful, I might have missed. You can have 3 (three) alternate builds for each character if you are feeling like teaming or PuGging, or super-future or arcane. This to me was a HUGE consideration of characters I intentionally had special designs for such as the potential permutation of powers AND slotting of say a Rad/rad defender/corruptor.

Storm/fire doesn't resemble an empathy/ice, but some of my Rad/rads look nothing like my other Rad/rads

I have to add, CoH doesn't require 30 minutes of rolling to see who gets what loot dropped after each and every mission/taskforce.

There were four things CoH had that I've never really seen duplicated in any MMO I've played (or rather I've never seen all four at once, some MMOs have one or two):

1. The Powerset system meaning that each class has 70+ "specs" each of which will play at least somewhat differently. Contrast with other MMOs where most classes have fewer than 10 viable specs.

2. The really fast travel time making it simple to just jump in and go.

3. The easy PvE and lack of team building requirements allowing a team to be composed of whomever wants to come instead of needing a specific combination of roles.

4. Content being almost entirely instanced which combined with the difficulty settings allowed for easy ability to play how you wanted to without impacting others.

Swinging signs hanging over shops.

Gates that you could break off thier hinges

Monsters in the waters of Faultline

Sally.

Baby New Year.

Snowball fights

"I got a rock"

The ghost ship

Veluta Lunata (what a wonderful phrase)

O wretched man

Random NPC chatter that becomes a Nemesis threat

Luddite chatter

All of these and more. Simply because they showed me that the Developers cared about this game. And if they cared that much, how could I do any less?

The community. Oh, I am a grinder at heart, and I ground solo for years, in ignorance, happily. But looking for answers (and friends) I found a couple great channels, and they made my gaming life complete. Also certain posters. I don't want to start a list, cause I will leave out some peeps. I loved getting my butt handed to me when I was wrong (too often) because then I learned stuff. I loved listening to some people talking way over my head, not because they wanted to sound cool. They just naturally think and talk WAY over my head. One name in particular jumps out there (Arcana) of course. Disagreeing with her and getting a response was like disagreeing with my mathematics professor. But I love so many posters for different reasons, their style, their humor, the graphic on their signature. Where the heck did Aett Thorn ever find that odd photo? Thank you for being here, for being those posters. I am trying to find a place for myself elsewhere. Again, I am a solo grinder by nature, so that is satisfied. But the channel I said goodnight to before logging out every night? The channel I would drop my gaming plans to get into a 8 person "I know all you geeks" Synapse for? The wonderful mix of nuts on this board that gave me great advice, bad jokes, and listened to my whining for years? There is a big hole. I hope to find a good community I fit into for online gaming. But City of Heroes will always be the bar they are measured to. Thank you all.

For me the thing that stood out for COH was flying. I never played another game where you could fly.

Game concepts and mechanics that could be mastered and enjoyed by players from 7 to 70 years old. I was always amazed and delighted by the broad range of players that called CoH home.

Updated:

• Didn’t involve politics or endless rolls for loot distribution – all drops were 100% random for every member in your group and dropped instantly directly to your character

• Allowed each character to have three different builds, enabling even more customization of ability sets
• Was the first MMO to allow your character to be capable of fully unrestricted flight
• Allowed your character to fall from any height without dieing or swim in any water without drowning

If I had to sum up the points that made CoH unique in four bullets it would be as follows:

• Fast - both travel and combat, Enemies fall fast individually but overwhelm in numbers or in damage, as well, there are almost no pure time sinks in the game at all.
• Cooperative - While PvP exists technically, the majority of developer focus was on cooperative PvE, which went a long way toward building the friendly community.
• Sandbox - from character creation to story arc building, there are as few limits as possible on player creativity.
• Story Driven - While street farming from start to finish is possible technically, the majority of developer focus was on story-driven content.

1) fast paced combat

2) the community

1) Not a fantasy MMO but set on "present day" earth. I want to throw cars and leap tall buildings.

2) Superpowers (Laser Beam Eyes yay!)

3) Very high customization, through Archetypes, Powers, costume designer, etc. No cookie cutter builds. Everyone was unique and looked unique

4) Roleplaying though Origin, background story and wikis.

5) OSX support!!!!

6) Ragdoll physics.

7) Lot's and lot's of content, and a lot of very good stories.

8) Nice mature community.

The very first thing that made City of Heroes unique for me was the fact that they had an extensive skin tone palette, which allowed me to make heroes that looked like me. That palette actually represented the skin tones of the world. There are 3 rows of 10 shades each having undertones of red, yellow and I believe green...30 different shades for skin colors. I do not know of any other MMO that has that many or would even take the time to make that many. I know this seems like a very tiny thing, but it really is not.

Skin tone palettes are extremely important because it says to me that the makers of the game actually have a good world view and understand that people come in a variety of colors and not all from a eurocentric palette. I'm an African American woman and a large portion of my characters are African American women. I probably have more black female superheroes than there are in the entire comic universe. Sure that could be exaggeration but the sad part is, it probably is not.

City of Heroes allowed me to create the characters I wanted to play and to have characters look the way I wanted them to look.

Just thought of another point that was a big addition for many people:

* Enabled players to find level-appropriate content with a single click, thus eliminating XP "dead zones"

And another one that should've been listed earlier:

*Provided multiple opportunities to respecify your character's abilities and enhancements, without spending any real money

It revived those AOL chatroom days.
Let me discover levels of creativity that I've never thought/known how to test.
Brought out the leader in me that tends to hide behind a shield of humility. *pre-emptive KOIS thwap* (stop snickering!)
Gave me yet another reason to learn more about computers (repair, diagnostics, troubleshooting, etc).
Most importantly, it gave me an outlet for the wide range of emotions and general personality quirks that I simply cannot do IRL because it scares the pants off people. (IE: even during gaming IRL I would lose the privilage to speak. :-p)

1. Unprecedented customization. Eight years later, no game has managed to come close.
2. Flight. No mounts. No gliding. True, unfettered flight.
3. Taking on dozens of mobs at once, and blowing them all away with a nuke.
4. The friendliest, most supportive community in all of gaming.

The costume customization

The story arcs/missions

The powers

Ease of PuG

Ease of leaving that PuG to solo and still level up.

Somewhat nice maps.

Cool concept.


That is about it for me that I can think of. Short list but it is the most important things that matter to me in a game.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!