Does Longevity Matter?

Here is a conundrum: I sincerely believe that City of Heroes is the best MMORPG currently on the market. And I just cancelled my account for it, as it is becoming boring, after having played it for little over 3 months. Does a MMORPG have to keep you playing for a year and more to be good? Does longevity matter?

Take single-player games for comparison. I am sure you can remember several great games that you consider shining examples of what makes a game fun. But how long did you play them? Even great role-playing games can often be finished in less than 100 hours, and you are not that likely to play them twice. But does that make them bad games?

The previous business model of MMORPG seemed to be one of fun dilution. You could achieve great things, but it took ages to do so. Kill rats for a month and sell their furs, before you can replace your pointy stick with a rusty sword, and got enough levels to kill an orc. Continue for a year before you reach the level where you have a shiny sword and can kill something really impressive like a giant. You'll never be powerful enough to kill a dragon, but with great effort you can organize a group of 50 players that do this together. And by making everything take so long, the game company continues to recieve monthly fees from their players for a long time.

But that business model went out of the window once the market became flooded with games. Why play game A for a year, just to be able to reach the high-level content, when you can instead switch to game B, and get instant access to lots more of new content, even if it is low-level?

And then City of Heroes comes, and offers a game which is undiluted fun right out of the box. Even at level 1 you can already take on a typical group of 3 criminals robbing an old ladies handbag. And after 2 months of playing, at only level 19, I had already killed my first arch-villain, the evil Dr. Vahz, who is responsible for infesting Paragon City with zombies. After 3 months I am already at the sort of content that in other games is reserved for high levels, even if I am just over half way to the maximum level. I did super-quests (called Task Forces), where a group remains together for a string of quests lasting several hours. And so I've "been there, done that", and ready to move on to the next game.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing, not even for NCSoft. Because I am leaving them as a happy customer, willing to recommend their product, and willing to buy their next product. They got my money for the CoH box and then around the same amount again for a 3-months subscription. If I leave and somebody else takes my place, they earn as much as if I had stayed for another 6 months.

By not diluting the fun, by offering it immediately and not only after several months, CoH is also attracting the sort of customers that the other games just can't reach. The mass market, the casual gamer, the player who is either not willing or not able to spend hundreds of hours on the level treadmill before getting anywhere interesting.

I sure wish that City of Heroes would have remained fun for longer than 3 months. I would have liked more different tile-sets for the instanced dungeons. I would have liked other things to do than just combat, for example tradeskills. But that doesn't substract from the fact that the content that CoH already has is of excellent quality. If you haven't played CoH yet, and you are looking for something to play before EQ2 or World of Warcraft comes out, there is no better game than City of Heroes. Just don't expect to be playing it for years.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link