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City of Heroes: A Look at the 14 Day Trial
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood recently jumped into the 14 day free trial of Cryptic Studios' City of Heroes. In this At A glance Article, Jon gives his impressions of the game and a rundown of what makes it a unique MMO.
These last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with City of Heroes from Cryptic Studios. I have to say that for a game that launched over three years ago (April 2004), it’s really got quite a bit to recommend it.
I should really start this by saying that this is by no means a full review of the game. These At A Glance articles are designed so that the writer plays the game’s trial (in this case, 14 days), and reports back with their impressions, so here goes:
Character Creation
Right out of the gate players are met with the feature that, in my opinion, is the biggest highlight; character creation. Every MMORPG has it, but outside of the “virtual world” games (Second Life comes to mind), I have never seen such a diverse and interesting creation system. Cryptic Studios has done a fine job of allowing the players to feel like their characters are totally unique. Whether you want to make a costumed superhero, a “regular guy” or some kind of monstrosity, you can do it, and quite easily. A person can easily spend an hour or more choosing every detail of their character’s appearance… if they choose to. It’s also relatively easy to make a unique character in a minute or two.
;)
Read the whole thing here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
The link to the rest of the article is broken
It's quite a good article and it decribes CoH well... except for one thing: questing is mostly inside buildings and HIGHLY repetitive. Yes, HIGHLY.
Many people who have tried out CoH went "oh, THIS IS FUN" for about 10-20 days, changing their opinion to "jesus, this is BORING" when confronted with this feature for a while.
It's still a good game though.
ps: Servers are pretty empty, too.
I still can't get to the article because of the incorrect link, but...
CoH has always been a game I *want* to love. The character creation is great fun, those first 10 or 15 levels are lots of fun, but then you realize it's just more and more of the same. I've always said CoH was one of the most polished games from day 1 that I've ever played and they really focused solely on the things they wanted to accomplish, but it's just too repetitive to keep me around.
Now, why does MMORPG decide to make an article about the free trial of game as old as CoH? It´s called purchased editorial content. PlayNC obviously paid to get this story out. Not that I care but that´s how it´s gotta be
Now don´t get me wrong, I love CoH and played it for several years. I agree with it being rather light in certain areas and they really need to open a OpenPvP-server to regain the momentum. The major problem is world immersion. It´s very hard getting attached to a modern world (as we see it every day in real life, you don´t really get drawn in) especially since most of the missions are instanced or inside. At higher levels there are some really cool maps but still you really don´t get attached as it feels like you´re somewhere else than the actual area maps.
It is also very repetetive around the 25th to 40th level but it really opens up in the higher levels with epic missions. I wish the game held a "bigger" story somehow, something to really dig into.
The game IS unbeatable though when it comes to character creation, skillsets and good ole plain fun when it comes to actually teaming and PvE-ing. The ragdoll effect is a blast and kickin someone off a ledge to see em splatter around like dying fish gets me every time. It´s a game that´s very easy to get into, you don´t need to loot anything so the action is fast and smooth.
Still, I hold CoH as the Nr.1 MMO so far, looking at the total package. SwG was close but Sony wrecked it and the combat was never 100%. All in all, I´ll be playing CoH whenever I look for some fun.
www.excisiongaming.com
Casual PvP & gaming fun for mature gamers
A very nice review. Two thumbs up!
LINK
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I wrote this article because I was playing the game, and thought that it would make a good "At A Glance". Also, it's my job.
The only "paid for" parts of this site are the advertisements.
I hope that clears things up for you.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Good article....but as Gnomig said - 14 day trial would not show the gaping fault COH has
And that is repetitive content
What at first looks like amazingly good idea - randomised missions , slowly turns into bore fest when you realise that all missions happen in handfull of same areas.
For all expansions COH had until now, i never could figure why they didnt add more areas ?
Just 20 or some new maps would make this MMO 500% better experience
I'ma read the article in more detail but ya the newness wears off due to repititive missions. But really thats expected. but whats unforgivable is the Class based system is too darn rigid and "respecs" is just totally darn hard to come by. its a typical shallow character advancement system
character creation is totally awesome and it can be fun to play. for sure worth checking out.
I dunno how to describe it, I would call this game a "Flawed Masterpiece".
I'm surprised no one mentioned that there are facial sliders available for you character. If you look under the portrait in character creation, you will see the sliders for the body as well as ones for the face--you just have to click on them to expand and see them.
The first time I subscribed to CoX, I was in full grind mode and determined to hit 50 as fast as possible--I quit the game after about 2 months with my highest character at level 27. On this, my second go, I play when I feel like it and figure I'll get to 50--or not--whenever I get there. My highest is now a level 36 after less than a month (a new character) and I'm still enjoying it without being bothered so much by the repeated missions? Why? Partly because I've made a full stable of alts this time around in order to experience different aspects of the game, but also because I'm just not in a hurry. Ironically, I've levelled faster, but that's partly because they've made it easier with reduced debt in missions and the wonderfully powerful invention origins.
Apply lemon juice and candle flame here to reveal secret message.
I believe a game gets repetitive when there's only a few things to do: kill monsters, loot, sell, get new mission, kill monsters... But CoX has so much more! There's the character creation and the possibility of creating new costumes, improving them, acquiring special effects for your character; adventuring in the forms of battling foes on the streets or in instanced missions, solo or teaming-up, with or without your nemesis (Heroes/Villains), robbing banks and causing mayhem as a Villain or trying to stop them as a Heroe, going into the special missions; gathering money and items to create items, selling them and getting richer at the auction establishments; searching for badges; respecing; building your supergroup base, raiding the Heroe's bases as a Villain; getting to level 50 with a Heroe just to be able to play with the special character classes; going to the Pocket-D night club; PvPing one-on-one, team-on-team, Supergroup-on-Supergroup and even collecting Gladiators to let them fight your PvP battles; saving people, killing people... And don't forget: it's two games for the price of one!
CoX could improve in many ways but it's already a great looking game, with easy tutorials, easy gameplay, easy chatting and grouping (and I'm comparing this with WoW, which I also love).
Now, about the empty servers, I never understood why CoX has so many servers. Even at its peaks, you can only see Freedom and Virtue full, the other barely make it moderate. If they merged some, it would end this bad impression the game leaves on newcomers.
CoH is repetitive in the sense that mission maps look the same, and you often battle the same enemies. Some of the low level stories are also repetitive (dropping some bad stuff in the city water). However, where CoH (and CoV, though I played it less) win over other games is the stories. There are a lot of story arcs consisting of several missions, which reveal a lot about the world and are often interesting in themselves. For me this makes everything a lot more interesting (and is why I'm looking forward to Issue 11, which should allow my level 50 to do missions I missed).
Playing the lowest levels in this sense is not representative of the game. It comes a lot more into its own in the 20s, when you get a lot of areas geared towards these levels. Independence Port, Talos Island, Striga Island and Croatoa provide quite a lot of stuff to do, and it's pretty varied. At the higher level more epic story arcs are available.
Another thing that I think is different than other games, and only comes into play at level 14 (again, not covered in the article) is the travel powers, which take a lot of the drudgery of getting from place to place out of the game, a problem which is common with other MMOs.
I have yet to play an mmo that isn't highly repetitive,and i've played MANY. They are all repetitive grinds. I have never had a hard time finding a team on any server.
First off to say that all the missions are indoors tells me that some posters here haven't play CoH for very long. It was quite some time ago they added outdoor instances in addition to adding more variety to indoor missions. Not all caves are quite the same. Most of the Croatoa missions are actually outdoor instances. Plus early on you'll figure out what villain groups frequent what areas, so if you hate cave missions just avoid Circle of Thorns missions.
Second servers are hardly empty, NCSoft actually reported an increase in subscriptions from a year ago. You can't judge how many people are in a zone but seeing who's running around. Remember, a lot of them will be inside their instances.
Game never got repetative for me due to the sheer number of options on how to do missions. I can adjust difficulty if I want to change the number and types of mobs I face. Heroes has a LOT of contacts, so if I get bored doing Contact Jane's story arc I can go do Contact Bob's story arc instead. Plus the police band missions added in Issue 8 let you pick and choose what kind of mission you are in the mood for.
With Issue 11 announced they are going to keep me busy and un-bored for quite some time.
Good for you Jon. I notice that no one commented on the pimp slap you laid down on the obvious 'intarwebz knowleage' that the poster used to determine that your article was obviously bought and paid for. I'm glad you posted to defend it and straighten out the readers.
The character creation feature in this game is A M A Z I N G. My wife and I *STILL* tell other gamers about it, and we've not played CoH since before CoV was in Alpha. My wife spent literally spent hours playing with creating toons. I don't think she entered the game until I was like level 6
It's a great game, but unfortunately like too many others have pointed out, it becomes too repetitive too quickly =( If only it could be combined with the 'casual' gameplay that WoW offers, it would be a killer. Who doesn't want to fly and be a super hero!? I know we had a blast flying around and finding all the achievements, err, badges in the game.
We still keep an eye on it, but unfortunately, there's not been enough done to yank our slim time-slices away from WoW...
I'm going to stop you right there. I take major exception to this accusation. Never before has ANY feature content been paid for by ANY game company here at MMORPG.com. The fact that you would imply it is, frankly, insulting. I take pride in my work and the fact that MMORPG.com doesn't take money for editorial content.I wrote this article because I was playing the game, and thought that it would make a good "At A Glance". Also, it's my job.
The only "paid for" parts of this site are the advertisements.
I hope that clears things up for you.
The review from Stradden is fair and accurate. For 14 days CoH is definitely a blast, esp for those who are abused by excessive elf roleplaying. There is no point in bashing Stradden. He has the right to write anything he wants for any game out there, and you Imzz do not need to read it if you know CoH well enough. If your line of bashing makes sense 90% of the forums here should be closed. SWG is even far less played, why do we still have discussion forums here? Because someone else online wants to know about some other games, or someone is trying to search for a new game genre (to him).
I do not know if Stradden is paid for. I have no proof either way, so I reserved my judgment, sorry Stradden not that I do not trust you. That said, I would hold a similar view of CoH. It is worth wasting 14 days trying it out. As for the game being repetitive eventually. Yes all games do, I have yet to find one that is not. This does not nullify the suggestion that for a free 14 days trial, CoH is worth a shot, and a very good game at that if played casually. There is always the option of cancellation when the feeling of repetition sets it, but till then there is a lot of fun trying out the game, and even after years, I still recall the huge enjoyment I have during my first year trying out CoH.
CoH was a game i really wanted to like but couldnt. Aside from a varied costume design the game offers nothing close to what i would call fun.
As others have pointed out the game takes repetitive grinding to new levels. My "favorite" thing about the game was getting missions that required me to pass through areas where the mobs were so much higher level they could kill me as i tried to run by. What fun.
Everything about the game since just before Issue 4 came out (I'm talking nerfs here) was designed to ramp up risk and screw reward, as though to punish players for leveling too fast or having too much fun. In issues 1-3, players could have as much fun grouping to street sweep or power level each other as they could doing missions or task forces, if they so chose. Now the game is nothing more than run to a contact (or call them if you've done enough of their missions), run to instance, do mission, collect reward: it's the ultimate "rinse and repeat" grind-fest, offering little or nothing in the way of a "sand-box" style of play.
I originally joined CoH on January 21, 2005, during the hay-day of Issue 3 and right at the height of the Winter Lord event. Everything - and I mean everything - Emmert and Company did to the game after Winter Lord did nothing more than punish the players for having a blast. The only reason Cryptic didn't get more bad press for all the nerfs to CoH was because SoE was busy screwing its customers worse. And SoE had way more customers to screw.
Fourteen days isn't enough time to get heinously bored over this catastrophically nerfed and boring P.O.S. But after a month, you'll wish someone would put your eyes out and dip your fingers in sulfuric acid.
YMMV.
Serling!
I've missed your bitter ex-boyfriend comments.
Please..keep em coming, keep em extreem.
Because, not learning to adapt keeps things in perspective. We need to know when the inner child died and that evil is still afoot!
Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Serling. Your sad devotion to that ancient issue has not helped you conjure up the stolen childhood, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the 5th column...
your arguement is so persuasive, so filled with knowledge and insight. You back up your argument very articulately, with suggestions of improvements and raising examples to glorify your position....oh wait, you didn't
CoH was new to me when it goes commercial, I was not in the beta. The customisation, the travelling modes (flying was fun for a while till I got shot down in bricktown, and even that was fun), the combinations of skills ... are fun to me. What I like most is the fact that your lvl 1 skill is as good when you are lvl 50. Properly slotted, a skill never grows old. Unlike the other games where you get single heal class 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, .... in CoH you get single heal and then you can slot it and augment it as you like as you level up. The power of the heal scales with your level. Come to think of it, that makes sense on its own.
Its gets old fast, I agree, the newspaper missions from CoV adds a dice of fun but not enuf for a long haul. There is little end content, I already stated that indirectly, I do not want to put my words with force, b/c everyone deserve a chance to make his own judgment.
All this does not negate the suggestion that, for a 14day free trial its worth a shot. Whether you feel bored a month down the road or 2, it does not deny the fact that it entertains the newcomer for a while. And when that duration ends, subscriptions will be cancelled, but the player might have a good memory of something that does make him/her smile for a month or few.
There are betas and free games that you will feel sorry for wasting the time downloading the client and patching. I for one do not think CoX falls into this category.
But it sure was fun perma holding huge groups of bad guys while my imps tore them apart. But then holds got nerfed. Cryptic decided it was to much to let controllers "control" so they cut way back on hold duration to the point of making many holds totally worthless.
Another fun thing was watching my Fulcrum Shift power line up about 50 debuff icons across the screen and watch the pack of crazed imps tear everything apart with the huge damage buff from Fulcrum's Shift. But it was too much apparently because Fulcrum's Shift was nerfed and had caps on the amount of mobs it could affect. To much damage for one character to wield apparently.
Thats ok because my saving grace was being able to 6 slot the imps for damage...think again. No more six slotting anything in the game. That too was nerfed. You could have 3 slots with maximum effect then severe diminishing returns kicked in. No more perma hasten meant your powers refreshed much more slowly thus making you less effective.
What made all these nerfs even worse was that as a controller for the first 32 levels of my existance I could not solo a grey con mob. I was completely and totally group dependent and ran PUG after PUG to climb my way to 32. Once I'm there and really getting into it the nerfs start raining down. They "fixed" this hard path to 32 for controllers. They allowed controllers to do double "containment" damage when a mob was held. This makes the first levels easier to get through for new controllers. The damage from containtment was about 1/10 of what I did before the parade of nerfs.
These changes were SUPPOSED to make the game more challenging thus more fun. It just made me feel like a super wimp. I ending up cancelling. I realize your game experience may change while playing any online game but that doesn't mean I have to stick around and like it.
I came back for CoV and got a taste of the completely watered down, so unfun to play, villain archetypes that Emmert and Co. came up with. Obviously, these mangled versions of the hero archetypes was Cryptics attempt to "get it right". All of the CoV archetypes suck. They are all shadows of the hero side even after all the class "adjustments".
Dominators = gimped controller combined with a gimped blaster. You are only really effective when the dominator bar fills up. So, this leaves your character feeling helpless when the dominator bar is not full. This is a horrid mechanic. Even if you gave dominators perma domination they would still merely be ok.
Brute = can't tank and has to build rage to do 1/2 the damage of a scrapper out of the box. Rage goes away fast and takes a long time to build. I remember one of the devs (maybe even Emmert) talking a few years ago on the tanker forum about ways to help improve the tanker. One idea was to make the tanker more effective as the fight progressed. I'm convinced this is where the brute was born. They can't take nearly as much damage as a tanker and again you have to stare at a rage bar and wait for it to fill totally in order to feel like your character is playing at maximum effectiveness. Think of a class with the defense of a scrapper but only does scrapper damage every once in a while. Why would you even bother with this class? Just go build a scrapper. They are better all the way around.
Mastermind = pet class that can't debuff or hold like a controller could back in the day. Somewhat fun but once you've tasted what a real controller could do when this game was in its prime it just feels watered down.
Corrupter = gimped blaster damage with second rate defender abilites. You do double damage when the mob is practically dead otherwise your damage is on par with a defender but you don't have nearly the power to debuff as a defender. Admittedly there are a couple of strong lines in this class but overall it feels watered down as do all the CoV archetypes.
Stalker = stealther character that make blaster look like tanks. I personally hate stealth characters in all MMO's so I never even bothered with this class.
I know this won't stop many of you from having fun. And some people managed to play through the nerfs and still enjoy the game. I, however, was not one of them.
I sound like a paid ad, but no I am not paid to say this.
CoH was too easy at the start. I remember playing a fire/cold tank and I can kill any non range mob literally, tons of them at once, by throwing down a slippery ice patch around me on the floor. Every melee mob will run to me and keep falling down unable to land a blow on me. All I need is to maintain a firewall around me and my XP rocks.
Same for all those classes that can use smoke, say rifle blaster with smoke grenades. Most mobs are blinded that will almost always miss you, while you can shoot at them point blank or do whatever you want. Pick the right enemy and just roll over them.
Then come the series of nerfing patches along with enhancement. Put it this way, everyone has his views on what is good and what is bad. I for one am not too hostile to most of the changes. The Fire/Cold tank just trivialised the game, so is the submachine gun blaster, and the fire controller you mentioned. What is the point of playing a game, in which you summon 12 imps let them loose and go afk.
They do not always nerf, they did improve the playability of some skill sets such as the energy melee set. Mildly improving it, but that shows the developers were trying to finetune, and not just across the board bashing.
If CoX added DAoC or even WoW style instanced battlegrounds, with various PvP rewards, I'd never leave it. The (incredibly fun) PvE really needed a PvP counter. The way the PvP is instituted now just isn't fun.
As an electric/energy blaster, I remember being able to 5-slot damage with 1 accuracy and actually be able to do damage, not wait for a near-death experience to actually be able to kill something!
I'd hit Aim + Buildup and one shot an even-con Lt. with my snipe attack, then run when his buddies would come after me!
I used to impress the hell out of my teammates when I could hit Aim + Buildup on my blaster and take down a whole mob of Council with one shot of Thunderous Blast! Sure, I could only do that once every 5 minutes, but at least I got to feel really super at least once every 5 minutes. The game doesn't give you that feeling anymore, and hasn't since fall of 2005.
Jon Wood cited the company line when he wrote:
Since all the nerfs have come about, here is how his list should read:
*This is perhaps the funniest and yet most tragic story of how the nerfs affected the weakest, most useless class of all. When ED went live, Emmert and Company realized they had so royally screwed Empaths and other defenders - especially regarding debuffing powers (Radiation set, anyone? Bueller?) - that they built a percentage base to-hit debuff into the mobs so that Defenders wouldn't miss their debuffs so much. (I'm writing this from memory, so don't hold me to the specifics. Suffice it to say that they had to balance down the mobs to make what had been a weak set - weakened further by their nerfs - feel a little more useful in a post-ED world! What an absolute bunch of freaking 'tards!!!)
Emmert used to decry "rinse and repeat" tactics, so his response to rinse and repeat tactics was to make his entire game a rinse and repeat grind-fest! At least in Issue 3, you could alter your gameplay to suit your mood. Now you have no choice but to play a certain way just about every single time you log in. I play Rappelz just to remind me what a gawd-awful grind CoH is!
/endrant