General Discussion

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.

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.

A very nice review. Two thumbs up!

LINK

Originally posted by lmzz

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

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.

Originally posted by Gnomig

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.

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".