Cycopl

City of Heroes

New flavor of the month.

Yeah, so I'm pretty sure I'm quitting FFXI and I'm definitely quitting AC2, since my friends from AC1 that I was playing AC2 with quit the game. Not that it really matters, AC2 cost me 12 bucks and I'm still on the free month. It's just not that much fun when you're not playing with friends.

I got into the City of Heroes beta a couple days ago, and I wasn't extremely impressed at first, but after I started grouping up with other people it became extremely fun. The game seems to have some of the best features that MMORPG's can have. First of all, it allows you to solo effectively. Grouping isn't REQUIRED to level up, which was my main turn-off for FFXI. Grouping is encouraged, though, because you get XP faster and it's just more fun grouping up with other people. Like FFXI, the game has a "party seek" flag, so you can get into a group easily or put one together. And it's not like FFXI where you put up your flag and then just sit around and wait for a group, you can actually go out and solo badguys while you wait. This just seems so great to me.

The theme of the game really intrigues me too. In pretty much every mmorpg out there, or at least every fantasy based mmorpg, the world is structured like this: You start in a town, and right outside the town gates are the weak monsters. Then further out, they're a little stronger. Further out, they're even stronger. In essence, City of Heroes is like that, except the whole world is pretty much one giant city, that's cut into different sections. When you start, you can choose between starting at the town hall Atlas Park or Galaxy City. Hunting for XP is pretty much running around the city, looking for thugs doing bad things. And usually they're stealing a purse from a woman, or next to a car stealing the car (or stealing something from the car, I don't know), or they're just standing around looking mean. After you beat all the bad guys, the citizen they were harassing runs up to and thanks you and says something like "Wait till I tell my friends about this!" and then they run away. Pretty awesome stuff, being a superhero is cool.

A handful of the missions that you get from various contacts (I'm not sure how many contacts there are in the game, but I'm sure there's a lot) involve actually going into the buildings and sewers of the city, so it's not just the outside of the city that you're running around... there's a lot of abandoned offices and sewers to go through too. And from what I've seen, pretty much all of the buildings in the city are scalable to the top, whether it be by fire escape staircases or flying. Not all of the buildings have staircases leading to the top, but I think you can fly to the top if you give your hero the flying ability. Yeah there's a flying ability and it pretty much permits you to fly freely anywhere within the boundaries of the map. Yeah, that's awesome.

So I'm pretty sure CoH is gonna be my main mmorpg, at least until WoW comes out. I really hope i get into the Wow beta so I can try the game out. I never really buy MMORPG's without trying them out first, so if I can't try out WoW then I might not even play it at all.

Oh yeah, the character creation is so awesome, you have so many choices in how you want your character to look, it's really really really hard to make a character that looks like somebody else unless you're intentionally trying to copy off of an already popular comic book hero or action hero. I made Elle Driver from Kill Bill through the character creation and I think it's pretty awesome. She even uses a katana to fight, how awesome is that? Oh I'll answer that. Very awesome.

Posted by at April 23, 2004 02:25 AM