City of Heroes Review

I'm still having a lot of fun playing City of Heroes (CoH). And while thinking about why CoH is so much fun, I considered the different features of MMORPG in general I previously discussed in this blog. So here is, in no particular order, my review of CoH sliced into sub-components:

Character development: Sid Meier, one of the most creative computer games gurus, once said that a good game is all about a series of interesting decisions. And the one thing that differentiates role-playing games from most other computer games is that a significant portion of these interesting decisions are concentrated in the development of your game character. City of Heroes certainly got that part right. It already starts interesting; you do not simply get the choice between 5 character classes at the start, each class also has 5 different primary and 5 different secondary power sets, so you can have 125 different combinations. Each choice of power sets gives you a slightly different character, and you can even mix roles.

I'll try to explain on the example of my CoH character, Hydrogen Man. Hydrogen Man is a tanker, meaning that his classic role in a group would be to draw all the monsters on him, let them beat his especially big hide, survive due to lots of armor and hit points, and let others deal the damage to kill them. Now that role is nice to play in a group, but sometimes a bit annoying when soloing, as a tanker usually has problems killing the mobs. So I decided to make the most aggressive tanker possible. That makes me a bit less ideal as main tanker in a group, but a lot more viable in solo combat. In other games I would have problems creating an aggressive tanker, but in CoH I was able to do so by chosing power sets accordingly: Fiery Aura as the most offensive possible primary power set, and War Mace as secondary. The very first power in the Fiery Aura set is a Blazing Aura, engulfing me in flames that burn my melee opponents, but not offering any protection. That makes me a very different tanker than somebody who has chosen the Invulnerability or Stone Armor primary power set, both of which are highly defensive and deal no damage at all. My secondary power set, War Mace, was chosen because it is one of the more damage dealing sets, and does not have knockback effects which would push the enemy out of my Blazing Aura.

Character development decisions continue in every level of CoH, which makes it a lot better than many other games, where you get new skills or spells only every couple of levels. In other games you also usually don't get much choice, you simply get a new skill, or the ability to learn a new spell, when reaching a certain level. In CoH you have to choose a new power every even level. And you have enhancement slots to distribute between your powers every odd level. Chosing new powers is not trivial. Sure, as elsewhere you can only chose certain powers starting from a certain level. But besides your primary and secondary power sets with 9 possible powers each, starting from level 6 you also have access to 10 power pools any hero can choose, which have 4 powers each. So at level 40 (current maximum level) you have chosen 20 powers out of 58 different possibilities. That allows even two characters with the same character class and primary/secondary power sets to be markedly different. And don't underestimate the distribution of slots, as they can have a significant impact on your character.

Back to our example, Hydrogen Man, who is level 12 now and had already some tough choices to make. The majority of his chosen powers are from his primary and secondary sets, as these are the combat powers, while the power pools offer more of support functions. I took all possible War Mace powers open to me, and I distributed most of my slots among these aggressive powers. From the Fiery Aura primary set I only took the Blazing Aura, Healing Flames, and Consume. With these powers I can damage my opponents, heal myself, and recharge my endurance, which allows me to fight longer than most other characters. I did not take Fire Shield, Temperature Protection, or Plasma Shield. These defensive powers did not fit my "aggressive tanker" style. And they have some significant disadvantages anyway: If you turn all of them on, you run out of endurance very fast. But each of them only protects you against certain types of damage, and as in CoH you are often fighting against large, mixed groups of enemies, you can't possibly always just have the "right" shield up. If had chosen those powers instead of others, I would have created a very different fire tanker. Of the power pools I up to now only took Hover, a very slow form of flying. You need to take one of the two lower powers in a pool to be able to later take the higher ones. I'll be able to get real, fast flying power in level 14, which will be useful for faster traveling. But note that for travel powers I could also have chosen an improved jump, faster running, or even teleportation. And thats just the travel powers, I could also have chosen powers like invisibility, fitness, or leadership from the general power pool. Alas, one can not have everything. I hope this example demonstrates how interesting character development is in City of Heroes.

Combat: The "basic repetitive unit" of City of Heroes. Instead of offering several different basic repetitive units, like combat and tradeskills, the developers chose to offer only one, and do that one well. Now at the heart of it, combat is identical in all MMORPG. You can set one of your attack powers to auto-attack and continually whack the same enemy with it until either he or you are dead. But this is already the first small variation, you have to chose yourself which of your attack powers to set on auto-attack by CTRL-clicking on it. Auto-attack is a MMORPG necessity, due to the very real possibility of lag. But while in most other games the auto-attack is the main attack, and you occasionally get to use a special attack, in CoH you will most likely have very many possible attacks, only one of them is on auto. At level 12 my tanker has 4 different attacks, one which every hero gets at the start, and 3 chosen from his power set. These attacks deal different amounts of damage, cost different amounts of endurance, recycle at different speeds, and have different chances to inflict disorient status on the opponent. So my main damage attack, Pulverize, which deals the most damage, is very much different from my Clobber attack, which recycles slowly, deals little damage, but has a high chance to disorient the opponent. With so many attacks you rarely find yourself not able to do anything. Combat is very active, and not a "start combat and go for a coffee" affair like elsewhere.

Downtime between two combats is refreshingly low in CoH. In other games you would often have to rest after each combat, or you would spend a lot of time either running to find another mob to kill, or waiting for a respawn. In CoH you can kill quite a number of enemies before needing to rest, and enemies are never in short supply. Crime is happening at every corner even in the most peaceful city zones, and the "hot zones" are packed with mobs.

Quests: One reason you never have problems finding an enemy is that most of the time you are on a quest. Finally, a game which makes finding appropriate for your level quests easy, without using terminals to generate random quests. In CoH you start out with one contact, who will introduce you to other contacts as you level up. Each contact has a series of quests for you that are connected by a story line. Story lines are long, I haven't finished a single one yet at level 12, so there is always a mission to do. You even get a "souvenir", kind of a badge of honor, if you complete one. You can have up to three missions from three different contacts at the same time.

Where it gets really cool is that when you are in a group, the group leader can chose any one mission from one of the group members as the group mission. Many missions are "indoor" missions, that create a random "dungeon". If you play solo, only you can enter this mission area, but when your mission is chosen as the group mission, the whole group can enter. And the whole group gets the mission reward, so doing missions is what groups do most of the time. When a group enters a mission area, the level of monsters is still appropriate to the level of the character who took the mission. But the number of mobs is increased with the number of members in the group.

Playing with others: That neatly brings us to the theme of playing with others. City of Heroes by far has the best grouping system I have ever seen. Level difference does not play such a big role, because a higher level character can form a team with a lower level "sidekick", which promotes the sidekick to the level of his mentor minus 1. Groups can be up to 8 people, so if the higher 4 level members sidekick the lower 4 level members, you end up with a group with not too much level differences.

The beauty of the system is that any size of group with any composition is playable. There are many games where your group HAS to be the maximum size, and you NEED at least one tanker, one healer, one damage dealer, etc. But in CoH the character classes are nicely balanced, and if you adjust your tactics to your group composition, you can manage with whatever you have. This makes playing with your friends, your guild (called super group in CoH) a lot of fun, because nobody is ever excluded from playing with the others for having the wrong class or level. And you can even change the color of your costumes to a common super group color set, and actually LOOK like a group of heroes belonging together.

Size: And getting to your friends is easy in CoH. The city in the games title is divided into zones. Each zone is hand-crafted, well designed, and often beautiful, not just randomly created. Zones have a good size, not too large to cross on foot, not too small to be crowded. If for some reason one zone gets too many players, the game simply creates a mirror image of that zone. That has the minor disadvantage that to meet your friends you have to say "meet in Atlas Park number 2", and the major advantage of zones never becoming overcrowded, always having enough mobs for everybody to kill, and not having too much lag.

You can travel from zone to zone on foot, or you simply take the metro. Add in the fast travel powers you can get as low as level 14, like flight, or teleportation, and gathering your group together becomes a breeze. Very nice is to have one person in the group with teleportation, as he can teleport his team mates from anywhere in the zone to him.

Loot and Player Economy: I left the probably most controversial feature of City of Heroes for the end. The fact that CoH does not have weapons and armors, does not have "phat l00t", and does not have tradeskills, is perplexing to many a veteran MMORPG gamer. But I would argue that CoH has something better. In my piece about a player-based economy I talked at length about the problems that having a "sword of uberness" in a game can bring. City of Heroes solves that problem by not having a "sword of uberness" or any other sword. Instead CoH has Inspirations and Enhancements, the basic concept of which I already explained in my first impressions of CoH.

Inspirations are nice, because you can collect a bunch of them. You start with 3 slots for inspirations, but that goes up quickly, and at level 10 you already have 10 slots. Inspirations work like quick boosts of power for a limited time, or they heal your hit points, your endurance, or even resurrect you. So if you have your 10 slots nearly full with inspirations, and stumble into a big fight, using this stored up boosts of power can often make the difference between winning and losing.

But even more important in the game are the enhancements, as they are more permanent, and give you the possibility of tweaking your character even further. I already mentioned that every odd level you get 2 slots to attach to your powers. And those slots can be filled with enhancements of your level plus or minus 3. So my level 12 just learned to use level 15 enhancements, which happens to be the first level where "dual origin" enhancements become available. At lower levels there are "training" enhancements, which everybody can use. Starting from level 15 there are "dual origin" enhancements, which only characters that have chosen an origin (from 5 possibilities at the start), that corresponds to one of the two origins of the enhancement, can use. Dual origin enhancements are more powerful than training enhancements of the same level. Even later the even more powerful "single origin" enhancements turn up.

Enhancements are used to improve one aspect of one of your powers by a certain percentage. So adding a level 15 damage "training" enhancement to one of your attack powers makes it deal 15 percent more damage. "Dual origin" are supposedly delivering twice their level in improvement, but I didn't get around to actually verify this yet. Every power starts out with one slot for enhancements, and you add slots as you level up. You can fill the slots with several copies of the same enhancement, so filling 4 slots with a +15% damage enhancement will increase your damage by +60%. But you could also use different enhancements, for example my main attack has improved accuracy, reduced endurance drain, reduced recycle time, and increased damage.

If you find an enhancement that you can't use, you can either trade it with other players, or sell it to a shop. There is no bazaar or anything, so trading between players is not that common right now, but might increase later in the game when more players reach the level of the dual and single origin enhancements.

Enhancements drop randomly when you kill a monster, and are randomly distributed between the players. In groups of friends people often give away looted enhancements they can't use to other group members. The random drops mean that there is no "camping" special mobs for special loot in this game. The level of the mobs you fight determines the level of the enhancements you find, which turns out to be the hidden advantage of being a sidekick. Being Robin and not Batman might sound to be not very glamorous, but you end up with an even share of Batman-level enhancements, which are a lot better than anything you could have looted on your own. I'm not there yet, but it is said that the type of mob you fight later determines the origin of the dual and single origin enhancements they drop. So the Clockwork type of mobs drops technology origin enhancements, Circle of Thorns drops magic type, Vahzilok zombies drop science, and so on.

So, there IS loot in CoH, it is just not of the traditional type. And instead of the "sword of uberness", which basically just deals more damage than another sword, you get enhancements that make your attacks deal more damage. Same thing, different packaging, and giving you a lot more options. I like it. Even if it does mean that there are no tradeskills in CoH, which I usually enjoy doing.

Summary: Right now I'm rather happy with City of Heroes. It has many of the features I always asked for. But obviously any game also has its downsides. For example random dungeons created from half a dozen different tile sets become repetitive after some time. There is a limited number of zones (17), a limited number of different mob classes (20), and a limited number of levels you can reach (40). So the long term playability will depend on the ability of NCSoft to add expansions that increase those limits. A patch to increase the maximum level to 50 is already planned, but I don't know if it will add more zones and monster types. An expansion set is also already announced, City of Villains, which will enable players to become super villains, thus enabling player versus player (PvP) combat. While this is becoming every developers solution of choice for introducing cheap high-level content into a game, I'm personally not much of a fan of it. Fortunately the developers already announced that it would not be free-for-all PvP, but consent-based, which reduces the problem of players griefing low level newbies.

And there is always the chance that I won't be playing CoH any more by the time City of Villains comes out. The longevity of MMORPG has decreased markedly, due to the simple fact that there are so many more of them around than 5 years ago. Especially World of Warcraft is looming large on the horizon, as is Everquest 2. These are the kind of "can't miss" games that draw a great many players away from other games. And due to monthly fees and MMORPG being very time intensive and immersive, players rarely play two or more MMORPG at the same time.

But right now I find that City of Heroes is the game to play at least for a couple of months until the big games come out. Being a super hero has a special appeal to many of us. I don't think many of us played "wizards and orcs" as little kids, that sort of setting is more for the teenage and adult geek crowd (to which I definitely belong). Super heroes are closer to our childhoods. And running around Paragon City looks closer to real life than running through fantasy worlds, which makes suspension of disbelieve a bit easier. Recommended.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:23 AM Permanent Link