My latest play time has been spent in NCSoft's City of Heroes/City of Villains (CoX). Developer Cryptic Studios is back in the lab working on a next gen super hero MMOG, Champions Online. As I just upgraded my hardware to the point that it can run CoX, I've been poking around the Islands for the last few days to see the studios past work (Freedom server).The game allows you to create a superhero or villain and enter a comicbook world where you fight thugs, foil crime and battle villains – or do the exact opposite. While there are 11 servers available for North Americans, only Freedom and Virtue appear to have any real population. According to the Dec/07 NCsoft annual report, total membership for CoX sits around 136,000 (thanks, wikipedia). It's no WoW, but it's far from lonely. The game also has a reputation as being the most queer-positive MMOG with a community relations group that actively seeks queer-outreach opportunities and hosted a Rainbow Prom event that was so well attended it took down the server, which is awesome.
The character creation process is extremely satisfying for any superhero fantasies - probably the coolest that I've seen in any game to date. Dangerously seductive. I keep rolling new characters just to see what it can do. I’ll finish a character and not even bother trying to name them or log. I know their name, whether it is available on the server or not.Combat is in the WoW style, as are team roles (tank, healer, dps). Environments are a bit plain, but character, costume and power animations are very pretty. And using gravity power to throw a streetlight at someone is fantastic.
Low level missions are for the most part instanced and lack some polish. I found them a little boring and repetitive - especially the maps - with a lot of jogging and random encounters en route, However, you can make things more interesting by changing your personal mission difficulty, bumping it up to one of five available levels. Sweat more and you don’t notice the landscape as much. Mission instances also scale in response to the number of team members (up to seven). If someone leaves the mission, exiting the instance and re-entering resets the difficulty without reseting the instance mobs. There are raids and PvP zones, but I haven't been round to visit them yet.
There are also some interesting intersections between character experience and social mechanics, most notably the "sidekick/exemplar" (lackey/malefactor for villains) system which permits higher level characters to enter into a relationship with noobs that enables the lowbie to fight at one-level under the veteran, or nerf the vet to one-level above, making it possible for friends at different levels to team up and keep the difficulty level appropriate. This is a stroke of genius and should probably be a standard feature of all theme-park style MMOGs.
In addition, toon defeat in CoX combat for characters level 10 or higher results in an XP debt that means your next earned XP is split 50:50 between leveling and paying back the debt, which is a decent gameplay failure penalty. Debt gets burned faster by picking up a sidekick, encouraging veterans to bring lowbies into teams, and encourages knowledge transfer. Granted, it’s the people that are dying that are so encouraged rather than the ones that survive but noobs can’t be choosers.Super Groups are the equivalent of guilds and allow a membership of 75. Team colours can be chosen and an SG version of your toon's costume can be defined that you can toggle into. This makes for really visible social cohesion, and some great team photos.
Player presence in-game is made more real with customizable SG headquarters. HQs can be decorated, expanded, and enhanced with tools that improve abilities. Sadly, they are instanced rather than actually being part of the geography which would be very exciting (store-fronts in mini-malls become gleaming fortresses in the sky or what-not). Invites to SGs are a common spam.
I haven’t spoken about the economy here because I don’t have a great grasp on “inventions” and “salvage” yet, but when I do, I’ll distinguish that that from the inspirations, enhancements and reputation (read “potions, magic items" and – oddly – "currency”).
For all its successes, the starkness and inaccessibility of the world I find a significant challenge to immersion. Everything is coldly rectilinear, pedestrians and mobs robotic, and the environment is utterly unresponsive to player action. This is standard in MMOGs, but it struck me more acutely in CoX because the game sometimes nods towards the environment being in play. For instance, using my streetlight tossing example from above, I can make the throw, but I can’t tear the lamp posts from the sidewalk. Instead, my powers open a dimensional portal which draws one of a random number of objects through it – desks, streetlights, and something that may be a cubical divider – and that gets thrown at the target. So you have your classic battle-in-the-streets between heroes and villains and you hurl a streetlight at your enemy. The physics and animation of the throw are great. The satisfaction of raising your hands and lifting something huge and mundane and flinging it in combat is so reminiscent of comics that you immediately feel yourself sliding into that world. And then you throw a desk. Why? And then a cubical divider. Where did that come from? Then another desk! If projectiles don’t have to make some environmental sense why can’t I throw a tiger, or an iron maiden, a speedboat? How does someone with gravity control open a dimensional portal, anyway? And what dimension has only streetlamps, desks, and cubical dividers? It explodes the immersive success and is a train wreck for the glimmering hope of character transformation that was won with that first throw.
I can't really get a sense of the over-arching narrative yet – I’ve read that there is one – but I doubt it is essential to the enjoyment. Also lacking have been any highly-public displays of role-playing. The dearth of these things I feel stems from that inability for players to really impact the world. The classic motivator for super-villains is world domination and that is impossible by design. From there, the opportunities for real villainy or heroism roll backwards until you find yourself with muscles bulging in super-saturated tights breezing past the muggings of little-old ladies because they aren’t worth any XP in your level grind.I'm enjoying my time in the land of tights-and-capes and will be here for a while yet, and I have great hopes that Champions Online will be far better still.
Villains: The Raidiologist (Science Corruptor) or Bad Packet (Technology Mastermind), Hero: Housecalls (Science Controller) or Daughter Darkness (Magic Defender). LFT, PST.
