Thomkal
04-13-2004, 09:45 AM
For anyone that might be interested-City of Heroes, the superhero Massively Multiplayer game I've been harping about has gone gold! It's due out on the 28th of April. The NDA has been lifted which means I can finally talk about it after having been in the beta for about a month.
Here's a review of the current beta game that explains things better than I can:
http://coh.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=36&id=171&colid=2459 (http://coh.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=36&id=171&colid=2459)
How do I like the game? I have mixed feelings about it. The City is incredibly alive and full of details. I love the fact that you can "chat" with the people walking down the streets and watch the cars dodge and citizens run away as you are fighting some thug in the middle of the street. The costume generator has quite a few options, but still needs more. Power animations are mostly cool and fun to watch.
But the designers vision in terms of grabbing new players interest as soon as they start the game is lacking. Though they are working on it a bit. You start off with a good (and for now mandatory) tutorial, which gets you to level 2 quickly. Then you start out in one of the newbie zones. You can go patrol the streets against various street gangs or get a mission from your initial contact. (you get more contacts as you go along). Do your first indoor mission...hmmm that warehouse/office (and soon cave) is looking awfully a lot like the inside mission you do at the end of the tutorial isn't it...yes it sure is. They use the same tilesets over and over again ad nauseam and that quickly gets boring. Even if the mission suggests a bit different atmosphere-like breaking up some gang fight at a rave-you'd expect to find an actually rave in process when you get there, but all you get is another boring warehouse. This game has been in development for almost three years, they could have made more tilesets I would have thought?
Another problem with the designer's visions is the low (and even mid and high) level "mobs" you will face. This is a City of Heroes right? So you'd expect to be facing villians with superpowers right? Guess again. You get instead a couple of street gangs (Hellions and Skulls) as one of your main opponents who don't have any superpowers that I've seen so far. They attack you with knives, guns, baseball bats, and the occasional flame thrower...yawn excuse me. There's also the 3rd Column, a Nazi leftover "gang" that I find the most interesting to fight of the low level gangs.
You do get a robotic "gang", the clockworks, that shoot lightning at you, so at least it feels like a superpower being used against you. And fairly soon thereafter you have the chance to go up against the Circle of Thorns, a magic using "gang". And there's the zombies "gang" (can never remember how to spell it, most call them the Vaz)-they vomit on you which is always fun. And some of their guys shoot crossbows at you. I purposedly didn't play any of my characters to high level, but I've read that things do get a little better in this area. But even low level indoor missions with a "boss" fail to produce a supervillian. They just seem to hit harder/have more hit points than the usual gangster.
I just don't get how they completely missed the boat with this-superheroes fight supervillians in the comics, so wouldn't you expect it in City of Heroes?
You can solo in the game (which I like to do), but especially at low-levels you'll probably have more fun with grouping. It's the usual mass chaos as you fight bunches of mobs in the same old buildings, but at least if you are in a good group you can have fun chatting during it all. And I never did get to experience a "Hazard Zone" or a "Task Force Mission" for groups since I concentrated on low-level characters.
The game's stability has improved since they went to a second server and should improve more when they take off some of the testing programs they were using on the main server today. You still get some "mapserver" disconnects which normally are temporary, and you "rubberband" a bit coming out of them, but now that I've installed new video drivers, I haven't had any complete game crashes like I did before. And I'm on a 56K modem. Other's people mileage may vary. They've squashed a lot of bugs and did a lot of work on balancing powers and such, but that will never be perfect and will continue upon release.
The development team has been very forthcoming in answers/updates, etc and many who have done betas before are saying it was the best beta they've ever done due to the stability and dev response. They already have a large update ready to go once the game goes public and will continue updates at a rapid pace it sounds like as necessary.
I'll still be playing the game come release day, but in some areas the game is a large disappointment to me. If anybody is interested in this game still, I'll try to answer any questions about it.
Dan
Here's a review of the current beta game that explains things better than I can:
http://coh.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=36&id=171&colid=2459 (http://coh.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=36&id=171&colid=2459)
How do I like the game? I have mixed feelings about it. The City is incredibly alive and full of details. I love the fact that you can "chat" with the people walking down the streets and watch the cars dodge and citizens run away as you are fighting some thug in the middle of the street. The costume generator has quite a few options, but still needs more. Power animations are mostly cool and fun to watch.
But the designers vision in terms of grabbing new players interest as soon as they start the game is lacking. Though they are working on it a bit. You start off with a good (and for now mandatory) tutorial, which gets you to level 2 quickly. Then you start out in one of the newbie zones. You can go patrol the streets against various street gangs or get a mission from your initial contact. (you get more contacts as you go along). Do your first indoor mission...hmmm that warehouse/office (and soon cave) is looking awfully a lot like the inside mission you do at the end of the tutorial isn't it...yes it sure is. They use the same tilesets over and over again ad nauseam and that quickly gets boring. Even if the mission suggests a bit different atmosphere-like breaking up some gang fight at a rave-you'd expect to find an actually rave in process when you get there, but all you get is another boring warehouse. This game has been in development for almost three years, they could have made more tilesets I would have thought?
Another problem with the designer's visions is the low (and even mid and high) level "mobs" you will face. This is a City of Heroes right? So you'd expect to be facing villians with superpowers right? Guess again. You get instead a couple of street gangs (Hellions and Skulls) as one of your main opponents who don't have any superpowers that I've seen so far. They attack you with knives, guns, baseball bats, and the occasional flame thrower...yawn excuse me. There's also the 3rd Column, a Nazi leftover "gang" that I find the most interesting to fight of the low level gangs.
You do get a robotic "gang", the clockworks, that shoot lightning at you, so at least it feels like a superpower being used against you. And fairly soon thereafter you have the chance to go up against the Circle of Thorns, a magic using "gang". And there's the zombies "gang" (can never remember how to spell it, most call them the Vaz)-they vomit on you which is always fun. And some of their guys shoot crossbows at you. I purposedly didn't play any of my characters to high level, but I've read that things do get a little better in this area. But even low level indoor missions with a "boss" fail to produce a supervillian. They just seem to hit harder/have more hit points than the usual gangster.
I just don't get how they completely missed the boat with this-superheroes fight supervillians in the comics, so wouldn't you expect it in City of Heroes?
You can solo in the game (which I like to do), but especially at low-levels you'll probably have more fun with grouping. It's the usual mass chaos as you fight bunches of mobs in the same old buildings, but at least if you are in a good group you can have fun chatting during it all. And I never did get to experience a "Hazard Zone" or a "Task Force Mission" for groups since I concentrated on low-level characters.
The game's stability has improved since they went to a second server and should improve more when they take off some of the testing programs they were using on the main server today. You still get some "mapserver" disconnects which normally are temporary, and you "rubberband" a bit coming out of them, but now that I've installed new video drivers, I haven't had any complete game crashes like I did before. And I'm on a 56K modem. Other's people mileage may vary. They've squashed a lot of bugs and did a lot of work on balancing powers and such, but that will never be perfect and will continue upon release.
The development team has been very forthcoming in answers/updates, etc and many who have done betas before are saying it was the best beta they've ever done due to the stability and dev response. They already have a large update ready to go once the game goes public and will continue updates at a rapid pace it sounds like as necessary.
I'll still be playing the game come release day, but in some areas the game is a large disappointment to me. If anybody is interested in this game still, I'll try to answer any questions about it.
Dan