Keep on whispering in my ear. Tell me all the things that I wanna hear.
Don't count your weasels before they pop dink!
Your forum icon gives me vertigo
"SARS, Bird Flue, 9/11, Anthrax in the Mail, Mad Cow Disease. Pope John Paul didn't die, he preboarded." - Christopher Titus "5th Annual End of the World Tour"
I believe that City of Heroes is the prototype for the perfect superhero MMO.
It's going to take a massive effort, and a better (American?) publisher, as a distant hand like NCSoft wouldn't be able to nuture it.
I loved, LOVED that in City, you could make something you could call your own, that you weren't forced to change your appearance with the loot, and you could team with anyone.
I invited newbies on level 50 paper missions, super-sidekicking made it no problem (aside from the inherent weakness of the newbies).
I joined DFB's and regular sewer runs with my 50 when they needed that last person to fill the team. Super-sidekicking made it no problem.
The costume creator was a groundbreaker in the genre, and remains one of the best.
Even after everything else, I'd purchase the costume creator for offline use for a decent amount of money.
@Kyuu
In the realm of 'no one else is doing it' I totally forgot to mention the Mission Architect; and I have three missions in it.
Is anyone else anywhere considering the ability to allow players in their MMO the freedom to make their own entire content?
How many of y'all ran mission created by Scott Kurtz? Or Mercedes Lackey?
Is there anything like it anywhere in gaming?
(And Kenny; don't mention Neverwinter Nights. Yes you can use that program to make your own servers and meddle but it really is not on the same level as what CoH did here, allowing any other player in the game to play a mission *I* made and not have to sign on to a special server or have a cracked copy of the game)
There will probably be other super hero MMOs. The Secret World has some interesting things. Shadowrun got a bunch of money from Kickstarter and is looking like it might happen.
But they are still much closer to the WoW clone we see everywhere than they are to the freedom of choices available in City of Heroes.
"SARS, Bird Flue, 9/11, Anthrax in the Mail, Mad Cow Disease. Pope John Paul didn't die, he preboarded." - Christopher Titus "5th Annual End of the World Tour"
There's a billion 'goodbye' threads. This is another. Sue me.
I am going to miss the CoH community almost more than anything else. Over on Liberty I was once tagged 'the biggest rhymes with witch' on the server. I had a reputation for harsh reactions to randomly spammed invites. And still, y'all put up with me. This is the best gaming community I've played with in something like a decade and a half of MMO and MUSH playing. So with it being a given that the best thing about CoH was the players and the dedicated developers who let us have so much fun in their world....
City of Heroes is (and always will be) the best damn game ever. In a world that seems to only be able to issue WoW clones as games, City of Heroes was different.
City of Heroes decided early on that chasing 'just five more levels' was not the way to keep things interesting. They expanded the mid game and early game content as much or more than the end game content that every other MMO seems to hold as their only focus.
City of Heroes turned game expansion into events. Remember the first time Portal Corps went online? Eyeballs popping out of gates in Atlas Park and in Steel Canyon. Or the time that The Fifth Column had a civil war and fascists with guns were running around shooting at anything that moved all over the city. Or fires in Steel Canyon and other 'heroic but not beating someone up' type content. Other games may have similar things for expansions, but I think CoH did it better, and they did it first in my experience.
Side Kicks and Exemplars. City of Heroes is the ONLY one with this sort of game mechanic. The ONLY game that allows you to play alongside your friend, no matter if you bought the game five years ago and they bought it five minutes ago. This seems like a no-brainer. It boggles me that every game that came out after CoH did not automatically include a similar game mechanic. I am stunned that no other game I have seen has anything remotely like it.
There were some little things too. How many of you ever found the One Skull in King's Row who managed to get the purse? The 'comments' from the mobs as you passed were just awesome. I do not remember the list, but certain civilians with names starting with a particular letter gave you information. They could tell you what time it was, how long you had been playing that particular alt, or just say 'stop poking me'. Skull Girlfriends complaining about how long it takes their boyfriend to break into a car. The various bored 'guard mobs' inside door missions that tended to complain about their jobs. Nemisis Robot Flunkies asking for the TPS report. City of Heroes had a sense of humor about itself that few other games manage to maintain.
City of Heroes made 'game loot' pretty much a non-entity in their game. Drops happened, sure. But there was never the grind of finding just the one type of mob that dropped just the one part you needed to make the only gear that was of use in the game. Your character acquired 'loot' automatically without having to click on a dead body.
More importantly, your gear never defined your look. City of Heroes understood from the start that being a comic book hero meant having an iconic look. Something that stayed with you. Superman and Batman have gone through costume changes, but their iconic look has remained (with some exceptions that were universally reviled and dumped swiftly) steady throughout. CoH understood that and let us have our Iconic Costumes without worrying that I might need better gloves or a chest piece that is going to make my shoulders look like I'm wearing bowling balls with spikes. You could look like that if you wanted; but you did not have to.
And that may be the ultimate thing that the City of Heroes developers got right. They understood their genre. Batman doesn't go rooting through the pockets of the Joker to see if he has any cool stuff. You know what, the Joker wouldn't do it to Batman if he won. It just isn't the way the genre works.
And it bears repeating, because the developers of Comic Book Hero games that are still operational have missed that critical point. City of Heroes understood what the comic book genre was about.
In seven years of playing, I have gone out and fiddled around with other games. Played WoW for about two years straight. But I never dropped my CoH subscription and I always came back once or twice a month to do a Hami Raid or run a new character around through Atlas Park and into King's Row.
Seven plus years in a game and only a handful of 50s. Because playing all parts of the game was just too much damn fun. From having a unique costume, to having an in-game 'ID Card' that let you put a little bio for everyone to read about your character, to allowing your developers to make a dance club in their spare time (anyone remember the Paragon Dance Party before there was Pocket D?) and implement it in the game and then turn it into a major portion of the game.... The examples of what City of Heroes got right far out number and out class the things you can say they got wrong.
But the thing I will miss most about the game mechanics are travel powers.
City of Heroes is the only game that I have had fun just traveling around. From the day back at the beginning where a crowd of us gathered around Miss Liberty to watch the first person to reach Level Six take 'hover' and begin to fly.... Maybe not the first in the game, but obviously the first that morning... I think there were something like fifty of us gathered on the steps in the shade of Atlas holding the Globe... If our characters could have pointed at the guy, we all would have. And an hour later when I had finished the level chase and got to buy hover for myself; there was a similar crowd to enjoy the moment. Hell, I spent over an hour chasing the zeppelin in Atlas Park, just because I could.
Super Jumping across King's Row and playing "Don't touch the ground it's made of lava" with my friends. Flying 'nap of the earth' in BoomTown or Faultline. Super Running almost anywhere. And for real fun, combine Super Running with Super Jumping and streak across the map like a comet. Other hero games give you only one 'travel' power. In CoH, I can have a hovering teleporter with combat jumping and a jet pack. My kyrptonian homage character has flight, super running and super jumping in their third build, just to show off and do the tornado.
City of Heroes is unique in the MMO community. Nobody is doing anything even close to some of the things they did here.
I am going to be here until they shut the lights out. And then I am going to be sad, because it does not look like anyone is ever going to come close. I'll get over it. It's just a game after all. But it was nice to be part of catching Lightning in a Bottle. Because it looks like it may never happen again.
"SARS, Bird Flue, 9/11, Anthrax in the Mail, Mad Cow Disease. Pope John Paul didn't die, he preboarded." - Christopher Titus "5th Annual End of the World Tour"