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City of Heroes -- *Wow.*
May. 3rd, 2004 03:12 pmI have found my downfall, and it is City of Heroes. A combination of picking the game up on Friday and my Powerbook dying (cutting me off from e-mail, the web, and 'stuff') led me to playing it for... well, at least thirty hours of the forty-eight of the weekend. It's that good. In fact, it's better than that. Holy mother of God, this thing is good. It's everything a Superhero RPG and a MassMOG should be, but better.
The costume and character design is incredible. I could get almost exactly what I wanted every time -- the costumes look good and every character in the game has personality. It's amazing how well the system works. Further, powers are easily adaptable and modifiable. It's like someone took the very best parts of the Champions or Mutants and Masterminds game, then tweaked it more and added the finest costume designer you've ever seen.
MassMOGs live and die on giving you things to do and ways to level up. In traditional games of this ilk -- fantasy ones -- you go out and kill rats until you're tough enough to kill things bigger than rats. In this game, you save old ladies from muggers, prevent carjackings, stop vivisectionists and cultists from kidnapping people for nefarious intent, bust drug deals and generally run around the city doing Good Deeds. There's no crafter's or artisan's guilds -- pretty much your whole life is devoted to buttkicking. "Dungeons" are designated by missions you learn from contacts, going through an incredibly well thought out tree based initially on what origin type you choose (Magic, Technology, Mutation, Science -- the difference between technology and science is the difference between Tony Stark building a suit of armor and Barry Allen getting doused by chemicals while being hit by lightning -- and 'natural,' which is another way of saying Batman or the Punisher) and what archetype you pick (Blasters shoot energy/stuff from a distance, Scrappers wade in with martial arts or claws, Defenders protect and heal their teammates and snipe from a distance, Controllers control people or the weather or the like, and Tankers absorb massive damage while punching things out around them).
Powers are incredibly varied as well -- even two fire based Blasters end up with very different specializations and abilities, and of course the costume designs are infinite, so no one seems cookie cutter. The superteam system just plain works, and if (like me) your friends who are playing are already ten levels above you... no problem! You can be designated a Sidekick while with them, and fight at approximately their level, while catching up experience-wise. You might never catch them, but who cares?
Because the character system is so well done, I found myself making new characters (you get I believe eight total, and then can delete ones you don't care for). I got a feel for the system -- at least at low levels -- and it's almost as much fun making your character as learning the Clockwork automatons have taken a Mensa meeting hostage to create friends for the Clockwork King, and you have to go take the machines out before someone gets hurt. I will now goob about my characters, including particulars of conception and how the costume came out looking compared to what I wanted. However, because I like you, I'll put it behind a cut.
( Read more... )
The community is a good one. People don't snipe your random encounters without asking, people are polite and generally nice, and the system is designed that if you go into a dungeo-- er, go on a mission into a warehouse, a unique warehouse is spawned for you and your team (if any), so no one else can wander in. And for the most part, people are showing taste and discretion. Oh, there's a few girls with overly suggestive codenames wearing pasties and g-strings running around, and others who take advantage of the neo-Witchblade style costumes that you can choose, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The total lack of PvP (and player villains) bugs a large portion of the gamers (to the point that "City of Villains" has already been announced for November), but where they see bugs I only see features. I'm a child of comic books of the 60's (in reprint, mind, as I was 2), 70's and 80's, when the closest antihero we had was Batman, The Dark Knight Returns was a little shocking, Watchman was very shocking, and The Punisher was wholly classified as a supervillain. City of Heroes comes across as a truly Superheroic game, where the most 'extreme' of heroes still abides by a certain code, and the people who get burned alive are the ones who deserve it. I'll probably shell out the cash for City of Villains, because these people deserve our money, but I'm not that enthused about it compared to CoH.
As for my own wish list, it's simple. I wish there were capes and wings (the company has said they left them out because they couldn't do them 'right,' and if you can't do them right they won't do it, which I respect). I wish there were destructible environments so you could throw cars at people and hit them with lampposts, a la the not quite as spectacular but still good Freedom Force, though I can understand why it's hard for a MassMOG to have that -- if you bring down the 800 foot tall statue of Galaxy Girl, it's going to go down for everyone. I wish you could buy more slots for character creation. And I wish you could record 'movies' of your adventures, save them to disk, and play them from multiple angles.
Oh, that reminds me. It's fun to watch someone with powers different than your own fight crime. Any time a game is cool enough to be a spectator sport, it's a winner.
This game deserves to be on your machine. It will also eat your time alive. Enjoy it. Live it. Be a hero.
The costume and character design is incredible. I could get almost exactly what I wanted every time -- the costumes look good and every character in the game has personality. It's amazing how well the system works. Further, powers are easily adaptable and modifiable. It's like someone took the very best parts of the Champions or Mutants and Masterminds game, then tweaked it more and added the finest costume designer you've ever seen.
MassMOGs live and die on giving you things to do and ways to level up. In traditional games of this ilk -- fantasy ones -- you go out and kill rats until you're tough enough to kill things bigger than rats. In this game, you save old ladies from muggers, prevent carjackings, stop vivisectionists and cultists from kidnapping people for nefarious intent, bust drug deals and generally run around the city doing Good Deeds. There's no crafter's or artisan's guilds -- pretty much your whole life is devoted to buttkicking. "Dungeons" are designated by missions you learn from contacts, going through an incredibly well thought out tree based initially on what origin type you choose (Magic, Technology, Mutation, Science -- the difference between technology and science is the difference between Tony Stark building a suit of armor and Barry Allen getting doused by chemicals while being hit by lightning -- and 'natural,' which is another way of saying Batman or the Punisher) and what archetype you pick (Blasters shoot energy/stuff from a distance, Scrappers wade in with martial arts or claws, Defenders protect and heal their teammates and snipe from a distance, Controllers control people or the weather or the like, and Tankers absorb massive damage while punching things out around them).
Powers are incredibly varied as well -- even two fire based Blasters end up with very different specializations and abilities, and of course the costume designs are infinite, so no one seems cookie cutter. The superteam system just plain works, and if (like me) your friends who are playing are already ten levels above you... no problem! You can be designated a Sidekick while with them, and fight at approximately their level, while catching up experience-wise. You might never catch them, but who cares?
Because the character system is so well done, I found myself making new characters (you get I believe eight total, and then can delete ones you don't care for). I got a feel for the system -- at least at low levels -- and it's almost as much fun making your character as learning the Clockwork automatons have taken a Mensa meeting hostage to create friends for the Clockwork King, and you have to go take the machines out before someone gets hurt. I will now goob about my characters, including particulars of conception and how the costume came out looking compared to what I wanted. However, because I like you, I'll put it behind a cut.
( Read more... )
The community is a good one. People don't snipe your random encounters without asking, people are polite and generally nice, and the system is designed that if you go into a dungeo-- er, go on a mission into a warehouse, a unique warehouse is spawned for you and your team (if any), so no one else can wander in. And for the most part, people are showing taste and discretion. Oh, there's a few girls with overly suggestive codenames wearing pasties and g-strings running around, and others who take advantage of the neo-Witchblade style costumes that you can choose, but they're the exception rather than the rule. The total lack of PvP (and player villains) bugs a large portion of the gamers (to the point that "City of Villains" has already been announced for November), but where they see bugs I only see features. I'm a child of comic books of the 60's (in reprint, mind, as I was 2), 70's and 80's, when the closest antihero we had was Batman, The Dark Knight Returns was a little shocking, Watchman was very shocking, and The Punisher was wholly classified as a supervillain. City of Heroes comes across as a truly Superheroic game, where the most 'extreme' of heroes still abides by a certain code, and the people who get burned alive are the ones who deserve it. I'll probably shell out the cash for City of Villains, because these people deserve our money, but I'm not that enthused about it compared to CoH.
As for my own wish list, it's simple. I wish there were capes and wings (the company has said they left them out because they couldn't do them 'right,' and if you can't do them right they won't do it, which I respect). I wish there were destructible environments so you could throw cars at people and hit them with lampposts, a la the not quite as spectacular but still good Freedom Force, though I can understand why it's hard for a MassMOG to have that -- if you bring down the 800 foot tall statue of Galaxy Girl, it's going to go down for everyone. I wish you could buy more slots for character creation. And I wish you could record 'movies' of your adventures, save them to disk, and play them from multiple angles.
Oh, that reminds me. It's fun to watch someone with powers different than your own fight crime. Any time a game is cool enough to be a spectator sport, it's a winner.
This game deserves to be on your machine. It will also eat your time alive. Enjoy it. Live it. Be a hero.
