City of Heroes First Impressions

The holy grail to which all MMORPG marketing departments look, is the game that has an appeal to the mass market. Up to now, MMORPG are more for the hard core gamer, being both complicated and more expensive than a typical single-player PC or console game. Up to now, the MMORPG game with the most mass market appeal was Star Wars Galaxies, which is played by a great many Star Wars fans with no previous MMORPG experience. But while SWG is "easy" when you consider monster toughness, it is "hard" if you consider complexity. SWG is full of millions of numbers and statistics, writing macros is an exercise in programming, and new players are easily overwhelmed. SWG is also full of bugs and problems, which gives new players a bad impression of MMORPG games.

I only played City of Heroes (CoH) for the last two days of the open beta, but already I feel that this game is much closer to mass market appeal than SWG. City of Heroes compares to other MMORPG as the original Diablo compares to the single-player role-playing games of that time. Purists will say that Diablo was not a RPG, and CoH is missing many of typical features of a MMORPG. But nobody can deny that Diablo was a mass market success that made a lot of players play the first "RPG" in their lives. City of Heroes could well have that sort of success, because it is simple, but fun.

CoH is managing this, by losing a lot of the old baggage that MMORPG have carried around with them since the beginning. Character stats? There ain't any. Inventory, weapons, armor, loot, tradeskills? Don't exist. Bind points? Not in this game. Each of these things that seemed so essential in every other MMORPG has been replaced by something much simpler. Want to know what the difference between the Blaster and the Tanker character class is? The game simply tells you that Blasters have high offence and low defence, while Tankers have high defence and low offence. Crystal clear to anybody, without having to use stats like "strength" or "dexterity" which end up doing the same thing.

There not being a character inventory, no items at all, and correspondingly no tradeskills to make items, is even more surprising. But CoH manages rather well without them. Instead of items, CoH has Inspirations and Enhancements. Instead of gold pieces CoH has Influence Points. Inspirations work like "potions" would in a fantasy RPG. They either heal your hitpoints, or endurance, or they give you a temporary boost ("buff") in attack power, accuracy, defence, and so on. Enhancements are more permanent. You attach them to your superhero powers, to make that power stronger, or faster, or more accurate, and so on. Both inspirations and enhancements can be bought and sold for influence points, and you can only carry around a limited number of them. The higher in level you are, the more inspirations you can carry around with you, and the more enhancements can you attach to your powers. The system ends up to be fun, and surprisingly strategic. Which of your powers do you want to boost? Do you want to make the power faster, or do you prefer it to deal more damage? Instead of having to make that choice in an indirect way, by choosing dagger or sword as your weapon, you can modify your powers directly.

The death system of CoH is more conventional. There are no bind spots, but when you die you can get teleported to the nearest hospital, unless you can get a raise from somebody (there even is a "raise self" inspiration). Low level characters get no disadvantage from dying, except having to run back to where they were. Later each dead gives you an experience point "debt", a feature shared with some other games, generally thought to be preferable to actually losing xp.

Technically CoH is getting good marks, for delivering nice graphics with a minimum of bugs and lag. Paragon city looks convincing and alive enough, with lots of civilians and cars. You can see civilians wave to you, while the cars change lanes so to not hit you, and other nice touches like that. Frame-rate only visibly drops when approaching really large crowds of players. In two days of beta I didn't encounter a single bug, except minor graphical glitches. And the game does that with a minimal footprint on my hard disk of below 1 Gigabyte, less than half the size of Lineage, and only one-fifth the size of Final Fantasy XI.

Combat in CoH is similar to most games, except that there is no standard auto-attack. You can set one of your attack powers to auto-attack, but which one is your choice to make. I recommend setting one of you melee attacks to auto, because if you set one of your ranged attacks to automatic, you might well end up accidentaly attacking some mob you just wanted to check out. CoH combat is fun, because even at low level you already have the choice between several powers to use in combat. Some powers are attacks (or heals) that need a certain time to recycle before they can be used again. Others are switched on or off, like for example a fire aura burning your close combat enemies. All powers use endurance, so having more powers gives you more choice, but if you activate all of them you risk running out of steam too soon. Having to make choices, and those choices having a meaningful impact on the game, is the essence of fun.

CoH plays in a near-future big city, full of enemies ranging from normal criminals, to super villains and their minions, to aliens. You can simply run around in the city, and you will soon find a thug trying to steal an old ladies handbag, or commiting another crime. You can click on the criminal to see both in color code and numeric his level, and if you feel strong enough, you can clobber him. Beating the criminal will not only make the old lady thank you for rescueing her (nice touch!), but also get you influence points and experience points. If you are lucky, you will also find an inspiration or an enhancement. If you are tired of the city streets, you can also roam the sewers, which act like a "dungeon", with a higher concentration of enemies.

Another possibility is doing missions. Missions are given by contacts, which are marked in your address book. Nobody but your contacts are giving out missions, so there is no running around talking to all NPCs hoping for a quest. You start with just one contact, but that contact will introduce you to other contacts later. This makes the quest system a lot more linear than other games, which is not necessarily a bad thing. At least you only get missions that you are able to finish, although some of them are a bit tough and you'd better level up on street thugs before tackling the mission. Your contacts, the mission targets, as well as trainers, hospitals, metro stations, and everything else important is clearly marked on your map. And outside the map you also get a sort of beacon with a distance marker showing your current target. That still gives room for exploration, as in a city the straight line is not always the fastest connection between two points. Sometimes your way is blocked by a house, sometimes the straight line crosses criminal infested backyards, so you have the choice between following the reasonably safe main roads, or taking the more interesting scenic route.

All very playable and intuitive. I am happy that I followed my instinct and already pre-ordered CoH before playing the beta. Unfortunately NCSoft offers online buying only for Lineage II, which comes out on the same day as CoH, but not for CoH. So I will have to wait for by boxed CD being shipped from DVDBoxoffice from Canada, as it isn't released at the same time here in Europe. Well, release days are often a bit rough in MMORPG, so maybe having to wait 2 weeks is not such a bad thing.

While I am looking forward to playing this, I am not so sure about CoH's long-term interest. That is always the big question mark with games that are a bit simpler than the others. Will I miss tradeskills and such in the long run? I will have to see.

The other thing that scares me a bit is the way power selection works in CoH. There are 5 character classes, each with a selection of different primary and secondary power sets, each with a series of individual powers. Character class, as well as primary and secondary power sets are chosen right at the start of the game, and can't be changed later. Meaning that if you ever feel that you have chosen the "wrong" power set for any reason, you can only start over. Fortunately individual powers you didn't chose can still be chosen later, but if you chose a power that turns out to be not to your liking, you wasted one of these rare slots. So the game has lots of possibilities to paint yourself into a corner. It is well possible that for example a Defender that didn't chose Empathy (Healing powers) as primary power set will have troubles finding a group. But somebody tweaking his powers to be maximally useful in a group, will then have big problems whenever he wants to solo. The same problem exists in other games when chosing a character class, healers and other support classes generally are bad soloers and popular in groups. But if you count every possible combination of primary and secondary powers, CoH has hundreds of "character classes", with a Defender chosing Dark/Dark notably different from one chosing Empathy/Radiation. I can just hope that whatever choice I make doesn't end up having hidden negative surprises, like "Fire" for some reason being much inferior to "Ice" or the other way round.

But, all these long term fears aside, for now I'm looking forward to playing City of Heroes soon.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:19 AM Permanent Link