Nerf

Nerf ® originally is a soft plastic foam material for making toys, invented by Parker Brothers, now owned by Hasbro. The idea is that if you replace the wooden toy sword, a toy classic for over 1000 years, with a nerf sword, the child is doing considerably less damage to the furniture and his little brother. Same principle for arrows, boomerangs, balls, and all other sorts of weapon-like or throwing toys.

Now imagine you are a heroic warrior in a fantasy world, and somebody sneakily replaces your magical mithril sword with a look-alike sword made out of nerf. You unknowingly attack a monster you used to be able to beat, and now you do much less damage. You barely escape with your life, cursing loudly. You have been "nerfed". Sounds like an improbable scenario, but in fact it happens all the time in MMORPG. Welcome to the wonderful world of MMORPG nerfs.

In MMORPG the term "nerf" has come to mean "diminishing the power of a virtual object or skill by the game developers". The devs aren't actually using nerf to replace your sword, but it well feels like it. Nerfs are always a result of a bad design decision. A developer designed a weapon, another item, or a character skill/power, and when the players actually use it, it turns out to be too powerful. So it gets nerfed, to balance the game.

It goes without saying that nerfs are hugely unpopular with the players. Game balance is a very abstract concept, and players find it hard to see why their magic sword has to be nerfed for the greater good of all. The human brain is built in a way that is notices the change of a quantity far stronger than the actual quantity itself. So if one guy has $100 and another guy has $1000, and some higher power transfers $100 from the rich guy to the poor guy, the poor guy notices a positive change and is happy, while the rich guy notices a negative change and is unhappy. In spite of the rich guy objectively still being better of with $900 to the poor guys $200. Nerfs are even worse, because one guy gets noticable poorer, but the profit is going to everybody and is unnoticably small.

Because of their unpopularity, developers should use nerfs a lot less often than they do now. There are sufficient examples of players leaving games because their favorite character has been nerfed. Players often take decisions in a game, some of those decisions being irreversible. So if the facts on which those decisions are based change, players might end up with a character that is actually underpowered (a.k.a. "gimped"), through no fault of their own.

Games in which nerfs are frequent acquire some other unpleasant characteristics: People start dreading the next patch. Patches are supposed to be good for the players, fixing bugs and adding content, but if every patch brings one or more nerfs, patches become feared instead of enjoyed. The enjoyment of finding a powerful new item or getting a powerful new skill is diminished a lot if your first thought is "this is good, the devs will soon nerf it". Another unpleasant result is that if nerfs happen often, "nerf wars" break out on the games message boards. Many players, afraid that they might be next to be nerfed, try to avoid that fate by pointing out how overpowered somebody elses character is. Warriors try to get mages nerfed, and mages shout for warrior nerfs. And the developers think that they are just nerfing everybody "due to popular demand".

Nerfs might be necessary in extreme cases, like obvious bugs. Or if one character class is so much more powerful than the others, that it becomes really unbalancing, because a majority of players all play the same class. But power gamers actually enjoy finding the "best" template, and it is impossible to totally balance everything, so just because something is a bit better and a bit more powerful is not reason enough to nerf it.

Unfortunately overpowered things in a MMORPG are a lot more visible than underpowered ones. In their famous defence of nerfs the Verant EQ developers said that if A is better than B, C, and D, it is sensible to nerf A, instead of making all of B, C, and D better. But they had a tendency to nerf A that much, that it actually became worse than B, C, and D. Then they nerfed B next to make it worse than A again, and the game went on a slippery slope downwards. The better method is either to decide that A isn't that much better than B and leaving it alone, or to decrease it power only slightly, so that it is still better than B, but not by such a large margin. And even more important, have a look at D, and power it up at the same time, so the average power level doesn't decrease.

I am thinking of nerfs because in City of Heroes my tanker has acquired a very good new power, Burn, which creates a patch of fire around me, dealing a good amount of damage to my close combat enemies. This power can be abused, by combining it with team members powers that hold an enemy in place. Freeze enemy in place, light a fire under his feet, walk away and watch him burn to a crisp. Now if Verant would handle this, they would diminish the damage of Burn by half or something, making the power relatively useless. But the developers from Cryptic Studios / NCSoft discussed on the message boards that they just want to nerf the interaction with holds, making Burn break the hold. Much better approach, removing the exploit without making the power useless. I hope they manage all nerfs that way. And in the patch notes there are quite a lot of items where underpowered skills were improved. It seems that now that MMORPG left the age of quasi monopoly, they are getting a lot more player friendly. Great!
- posted by Tobold @ 6:21 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Interesting article on MMORPG economy

Sometimes I actually use this blog as a blog, to post links to interesting stuff I found on the internet. This arcticle in Walrus Magazine is about MMORPG economy, with a focus on trading virtual goods for real world money.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:42 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Random Dungeons

Computers are rather good at creating random "dungeons" or whatever the mission areas in your game are called. They consist of hand-designed tiles, each having one or more connection points where you can move to the next tile. In its most basic form this was already used in some board games, where you had square tiles with each side possibly having a connection point. But in computer games the tiles can be three-dimensional, don't have to be square, and the computer still manages to put them together to some sort of connected area, using relatively simple algorithms.

The weak point of that concept is the number of different tiles. For example in City of Heroes, after reaching level 18 of 40 possible, I have only seen 7 different tile set. One very rare tile set, the lab, I only encountered twice. The other 6 were common, a cave, a sewer, an office building, an abandoned office building, a warehouse, and an abandoned warehouse. With the two abandoned buildings being quite similar to their parents, there is not much variety here. The office tile set seems to have quite a lot of different tiles, but the other sets have around a dozen or so. That is hard to count, as you don't see where one tile stops and the next one starts.

The problem here is, as usual, money. Designing tiles and tile sets by hand requires a number of programmers, designers, and graphics artists. The less tiles you can get away with, the cheaper it gets. But for the players this gets repetitive and boring pretty fast. After less than 1 month of CoH, I have already done between 100 and 200 missions. So I've seen the common tile sets 20 or more times already, and the sense of exploration when entering a new mission tends against zero. In comparison, the 2 mission in the lab tile set were a lot more exciting, just because the tile set was new to me.

Anarchy Online suffered from exactly the same problem. I don't remember exactly how many different tile sets they had, but it was the same order of magnitude as CoH. And I don't think that they added any tile sets since the start, although they added several expansion sets and new zones.

Games that don't have random dungeons, like Everquest, manage to provide changing content to their players by forcing them to move to different zones. You rise a level, the monsters in the jungle you are currently fighting are getting too low for you, you move to a zone where the mobs are of an appropriate level, and that turns out to be an icy wasteland. *Poof* Instant change of scenery. And maybe something similar is implemented in City of Heroes, I've seen the lab for the first time at level 16, so maybe new tile sets open up at higher levels.

But I sure hope that future patches and expansions add some more tile sets to City of Heroes. Because this is the first sign of weakness I can detect in this otherwise great game. Everquest did prove that a game can survive mediocre game play, as long as there is plenty of content. Lack of content, even with great game play like CoH, means that a game gets great reviews, and lots of players at the start, but they don't stay all that long. If players have the feeling that they have seen everything in a game, they are easily lured away by the next game to come out. Even if that game is not actually better than the game they are leaving, it is always offering new content.

But there is hope, NCSoft announced the feature list of their first major patch, and it includes random outdoor zones, which presumably work on the same tile system, just a little bit more open.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:23 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Trading Virtual Goods

This blog is hosted by Blogger for free, but of course that means they put ads on the top of the page. The ads are powered by Google, which does a good job of seeing what the blog is about, and then showing ads that are relevant to the blogs content. So my MMORPG blog is usually headed by some advertising for some website selling virtual goods from a MMORPG game. As this is a highly controversial issue, I think its time to discuss it.

Many people buy and sell virtual goods from MMORPG games. The corresponding EBay category had 17,661 entries when I checked today, and that covers only the games where the game company doesn't object to this kind of sales. In some games, like Everquest, buying or selling characters, in-game items, or in-game money, is against the Terms of Service. You can get your account banned for it, and if you try to list something on EBay, your auction gets deleted. But the sellers usually just move to some less populated place, and you can still buy EQ platinum at many places, enter "Everquest Platinum" into Google and you get 166,000 hits. In other games this trade is perfectly legal, for example EBay lists 2,771 Ultima Online items for sale.

I never sold any virtual goods, but I bought a few virtual things on EBay. For some people, that makes me a "cheater". These people believe that MMORPG are competitive games, where your virtual belongings are status symbols, gained by in-game achievements. Being able to buy the same virtual belongings for money they consider "unfair". The argument overlooks the fact that MMORPG are inherently unfair. Your level and belongings in all MMORPG are going up more or less linearly with the time spent online. So somebody with a lot of free time on his hand will always achieve a higher level and better items than somebody who by having a job and a family is prevented from playing that much. Being of high level and having the greatest items is not proof of being a great player, but more likely of spending too much time online.

I'm not much of a fan of buying a complete character, I never did it. But really high level Everquest characters were sometimes traded for up to $1000. The buyer gets the status symbol power of having a high-level character. But obviously he doesn't really know how to play that high-level character well, which can lead to all sorts of trouble with his fellow players. And the bought character comes complete with a given name, and the original player might have made enemies with that name. But the main argument against buying characters is that leveling a character up is often the most fun part of a MMORPG, and the buyer misses out on that.

Buying items or money is a lot less problematic. My very first virtual purchase was a house in Ultima Online. My character did have the means to buy a deed for a house in game. But UO did not have enough flat surface for everybody to build his house. So after running around for 2 weeks in vain trying to find a spot where I could at least build a small house, I went to EBay and bought a medium sized house for $30.

All my other virtual purchases were for game money. My characters are usually low- to mid-level, as I don't have the time to play hundreds of hours every month. And for low- to mid-level characters, earning money in many MMORPG games consists of doing something boring for many hours. Like running from A to B repeatedly to do missions, or "farming" hundreds of low-level monsters that don't give xp any more. But often in the same game high-level characters can make more virtual money per hour. So if a high-level character sells me the money that only took him 1 hour to make, but would take me 10 hours to earn in game, it is a win-win situation.

This is particularly interesting because different people value time and money differently. A teenager might have lots of time, but very little cash, so playing a MMORPG for 2 hours and receiving $10 for it sounds like a dream job to him. Somebody a bit older with a well-paying job would maybe rather spend $10 instead of doing something repetitively boring for 2 hours, as those 2 hours might be all the play time he gets for one day, and he'd rather spend it doing something more fun.

Of course buying virtual goods in MMORPG is not totally unproblematic. Many people wouldn't do it for the simple reason that they don't think that virtual goods have value. Obviously when I stopped playing UO, the house I bought for $30 went up in smoke. But at the time I considered $30 for ending a huge frustration money well spent. And lots of people pay iTunes money for music, which is just a virtual good as well. So for me it is a matter of pricing: How does the price of the virtual game item compare with the time it would take me to achieve the same in game by myself? And would that in-game activity be interesting or boring?

But a bigger problem is the potential for fraud. If the buyer pays money via PayPal and should receive something in-game in exchange, neither PayPal nor the game company have any means of checking whether the other part of the deal took place. So both companies refuse any responsability. If the buyer pays his money and never receives his virtual good, he can not do anything. He can give a negative comment on EBay, if the deal took place there, but EBay ratings are easily manipulated and don't count all that much. The buyer could theoretically go to the police, but who would want to admit that he got defrauded while buying 1000 virtual platinum pieces? This possibility of fraud is why some games don't allow this trade, they don't want to get mixed up in customer complaints.

There are a select few companies that have a business model based on giving away their game for free or very little, and then making money by selling in-game items. But none of them is a classical MMORPG company. This business model exists for some social games, where you have an avatar living a virtual life in a 3D environement, and like in real life you can make your virtual life more comfortable by buying stuff. And of course the same business model is used in online trading card games like Magic Online. It is only a matter of time until somebody at least tries to launch a MMORPG without monthly fees, where you can buy virtual game items for real world money. GuildWars is already half way there, by opening up added content only for money.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:17 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
E-mail Tobold

Up to now I didn't post an e-mail address here, as posting e-mail addresses on websites is a sure way to attract spam. What has changed? Well, I got a GMail account now, which battles spam by the simple method of giving the user enough storage space to enable him to simply ignore spam, without even needing to delete it.

So if you want to send me an e-mail, now you can by using the address
Tobold@GMail.com
- posted by Tobold @ 10:59 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
GuildWars and NCSoft

During the E3 NCSoft presented one of their future MMORPG, GuildWars, which is scheduled to come out in 2005 (well, they still claim 2nd half of 2004, but its hard to believe). An alpha version of it could be played not only at the E3, but could also be downloaded over the internet. Here is my short review of it:

GuildWars is probably closer to multiplayer Diablo than to classical MMORPG games. The controls are completely mouse driven, as long as you don't want to chat. Movement and combat is point-and-click. You even have the classical red bar for hit points, and blue bar for magical energy.

Technically GuildWars is interesting in that it has a very small initial installation, and then downloads the zones when you enter them. On ADSL that is surprisingly fast, taking not more than twice the usual "zoning" time of other games. For an alpha version the game ran rather smooth and bug free. Graphics were nice, but of course the alpha version didn't have all that many monster models and zones yet.

Gameplay is centered around these zones, with each zone corresponding to a mission or series of missions. There are zones where you can simply fight solo to gain xp and loot. But the more interesting zones can only be entered by a group. When you enter the zone, you land in some sort of entry area, where you have to form a group of a specified size to be able to continue into the zone and mission proper. There will probably also be level restrictions, although in the alpha version every player was always level 15. There are zones where your group fights PvE against computer controlled mobs, and other zones that allow you to fight PvP against other players. The zones are "instanced", so in the PvE zones there will only be your group, and in the PvP zones there will only be 2 groups, but these groups could potentially be very large.

One typical mission I did consisted of our group of 4 having to explore the zone, battling minor monsters, until we found the enemy army. Then we had to rush back inside a certain time limit, to warn our army, with the enemy army in hot pursuit. Well done, and interesting.

The business model of GuildWars is also based on these zones. Because this is a MMORPG without a monthly fee. Instead the game you buy gives you access to a couple of zones where you can play as long as you like. But then there will be expansions which give you access to more zones. Most probably the initial zones will be limited to a certain level, and if you want to progress further in levels, you will be forced to pay for the expansions. I just hope that for the expansions you don't need to buy a box with a CD, but can simply buy some sort of access code online. Interesting business model, I like it.

One last thing about zones is that traveling to them is as easy as it could be. You simply open your map, and click on the zone you want to go. No more tedious overland travel.

GuildWars has 6 character professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer. Each character choses TWO of these professions, of which the first choice determines your look. But otherwise a Warrior/Monk is the same as a Monk/Warrior. Your professions determine which skills you can learn. But in any case, to learn a skill, you first need to find the corresponding skill gem, gain a level to have a skill point, and go to a trainer to learn the skill. Once you have more than 8 skills, things are getting tricky. Because only in the non-combat zones (cities), can you change which skills to put in your 8 skill slots. During each mission you are limited to the 8 skills you chose, even if you have already acquired many more. This is supposed to balance things, but as your character level is probably more important than how many skills you have, it still isn't much of an equalizer for PvP.

There are no tradeskills, but there is item crafting. You can salvage many of the looted items into their components, like iron ore, and the build new items by going to a NPC crafter and supplying him with all the components he needs for a specific item, plus some gold.

All in all, some interesting ideas, but too early to say whether that will work together well. The developers call it not a MMORPG, but a CORPG, for Competitive Online Role Playing Game. As I am not a big fan of "competitive" games and PvP, I'm not sure I'll like it. Although the fact that I could buy it and not pay a monthly fee is certainly luring. It seems especially to be designed to have whole guilds or clans battle against each other, but I'm not sure how they solve the problem of guild members differing widely in levels.

With its latest E3 announcements NCSoft is well on its way to become the industry leader for MMORPG games. Well, they'd claim they already are, as their first game "Lineage" with 1 million subscribers is the most commercially successful MMORPG ever. But as Lineage was practically exclusively played by South Koreans, it is their second generation of games that is making a splash on the international MMORPG market. NCSoft wisely spent the profits of their big local Korean success in buying in game developers in the US. They got Richard Garriot, the brain behind the Ultima series, including the first big commercial MMORPG Ultima Online, developing a game named Tabula Rasa for NCSoft, and acting as advisor for other games. And GuildWars is developed by guys that were originally working on Battle.net for Blizzard, which explains the "competitive" approach.

Their other E3 announced games include AutoAssault, a MMORPG where you battle with armed cars, and AlterLife, "a social activity game for trendy female gamers". Good luck with the last one, they'll need it, the competition failed miserably with "The Sims Online", in spite of their big name. Of course they also presented their already released games Lineage 2 and City of Heroes (and expansion City of Villains). With City of Heroes being the top selling PC game in the US in the week ending 1st of May, they at least got one big success on their hands. Which means they are here to stay.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:58 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
The Future of MMORPG

The fun thing of publishing prophecies on a weblog is that you can come back years later, and laugh about how wrong they were. So I polished my crystal ball and looked what the future will bring us in the domain of massive multiplayer online role playing games:

MMORPG will become less buggy. This prediction will probably surprise most veteran MMORPG gamers. Compared with single player games, MMORPG are bugfeasts. But I predict that this bad "industry standard" will become gradually better, until MMORPG have about the same level of buggyness than single player games. This prediction is based on the observation that it is possible to make nearly bug-free MMORPG games. Both Final Fantasy XI and City of Heroes have a very low level of bugs, setting a new example for the others.

What I believe that happened is that at the very end of the 90's lots of executive manager of games companies read the news that Everquest had over 300,000 subscribers paying $10 a month (that later went up to 400,000 subscribers paying $12). That is not only a lot of money, but unlike game sales it is a very steady flow of money, leading to the smoother earnings so beloved by stock analysts. So all these execs called their R&D department and told them to start producing an EQ-beater, and fast. This lead to a lot of games being rushed to the market, and the rush lead to often low quality and lots of bugs.

This gold rush era of MMORPG is nearly over now. The market is flooded with MMORPG, and the less successful ones are starting to disappear. It is now more obvious to the same game company execs that rushing a buggy game into an already crowded market will not be a recipe for success. While EQ could survive with all its bugs, because its customers didn't have much of an alternative, new games can't afford that low level of quality any more. So I believe that SWG was the pinnacle of MMORPG buggyness, and things will become better from now on.

MMORPG will become more innovative. Nobody really knows why Everquest was such a success, least of all its producer Verant. So most games that were designed to beat EQ ended up being EQ clones. Sure, advances in graphics technology meant that many of them were prettier than EQ. And they often fixed failings, or perceived failings, of EQ. But even if they replaced swords and sorcery with laser blasters and science fiction, the basic gameplay was very often far too close to the original. So less people than hoped quit EQ, with all the friends, just to play something rather similar. And few people that already weren't tempted by EQ were tempted by its clones.

Nevertheless some innovation happened. As it is with any bunch of new ideas, some of them simply didn't work. For example nobody managed yet to create a successful space-faring MMORPG. That should be possible, but Earth and Beyond just announced its cancellation for September, EVE Online isn't going well either, and SWG is still grounded. Other ideas did work, but were just small improvements. And as MMORPG can be modified during their life time, Everquest even incorporated many of these minor improvements in patches, making it hard for other games to really differentiate themselves.

The most innovative game I played since EQ is City of Heroes. CoH breaks many of the classic molds of MMORPG games. Game reviewers are enchanted, and the game is well set to become a commercial success. Lets just hope that other game developers take notice what the strengths of CoH are (see below), and not just start producing CoH clones.

MMORPG will become faster paced. The secret of CoH is that it works on a different time-scale than its predecessors. Everquest and its clones can be described as being pseudo turn-based. Combat in EQ is a science, with groups carefully orchestrating moves. Between two hits there are enough seconds to give you time to think. When everything goes right, a full group of 6 people is fighting against only 1 monster at a time. Compared to that, City of Heroes combat is frantic. Instead of battling 1 very powerful monster, a group of 8 is battling up to 20 less powerful monsters at the same time. And those 20 enemies are usually a mixed group with different abilities. Added to that is the fact that you don't have much time to think; you have so many different attacks and abilities, that you end up button mashing in a more or less controlled way.

Now RPG geeks like me certainly see the attraction of pseudo turn-based EQ combat. I generally like turn based games more than I like real time games, both in RPGs and in strategy games. But I'm certainly aware that real time games are a LOT more successful with the mass market and the younger generation. And combat in CoH, wild as it is, is certainly smashing fun.

Another point here is downtime. The general problem in MMORPG is that developers do not want people to advance in levels too quickly, because they fear that people quit the game once they reached the highest level. The makers of Everquest invented the concept of downtime, your character has to rest between combats, or is forced to wait for other things, like a boat arriving. By forcing people to be inactive for certain periods, advancement is slowed to a point where it takes months or even years to reach the top. But players in general hate downtime. I usually have a book next to my keyboard, and managed to read quite a lot of them while "playing" many different MMORPG, which is obviously silly. So City of Heroes more or less eliminated downtime. Rest periods between combats are very, very short, and metros go every 5 seconds, instead of every 20 minutes. You are fighting most of the time in CoH, not sitting. But each fight only gives you a rather small amount of xp, and you need to kill literally hundreds of enemies to gain a level. In the end, it takes you the same amount of hours to reach the next level than it did in EQ, but you were actually playing all of that time instead of resting and reading a book.

I predict that the MMORPG of the future will be fast paced like CoH, with less downtime. That is not only a design decision that will make them more popular with the mass market (where fast First Person Shooters are popular). It is also a consequence of technological advancement. Pseudo turn-based combat dates from the age of 56K modems. More and more people having broadband make faster combat possible. And even for the 56K modem owners, advances in the way games handle data transfer can enable them to keep up.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:59 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
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