Mr. StackedMidgets' City of Heroes Review
posted at 11:00 PM on Saturday, March 20th, 2004
| Publisher |
| NCSoft |
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| System Requirements: 800mhz machine, 256 megs ram, GF2/Radon 8500, 2 gig space
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PC
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| Reviewed Using: |
| AMD Athlon XP 1900, Geforce4 4400, 1024 MB RAM |
City of Heroes is a tough nut to crack. Unlike most MMOGs, it’s surprisingly fun to play out of the box. There are no broken classes and no egregious bugs or exploits. It doesn’t bring many new things to the table, but it improves on many aspects of past games. In many ways, it’s far more simplistic (some might call it “streamlined) than other games, completely cutting out the “virtual world” aspect. The game focuses on one thing: making you feel like a superhero.
Everything is instanced. Each zone of Paragon City, where City of Heroes takes place, is split into several instances of approximately 40-120 players each. New instances are created dynamically according to the number of players in each zone. This keeps lag and crowding manageable, but it makes it so that there are no real communal meeting places like Britain Bank in Ultima Online, or Arwic in Asheron’s Call. It can also be a bit of a pain to get everyone in your group or guild all on one instance of the same zone. Now, depending on your point of view, this might be a good thing – after all, couldn’t we do without scary men with beards standing around in white diapers begging for gold in bright yellow, caps-lock-afflicted text? When you play CoH, the focus is entirely on you, your friends, and your guild.
It’s interesting that Cryptic decided to cast out the concept of creating a virtual world. It certainly bucks the current trend of player-run economies, exemplified by Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, and the upcoming MMOGs World of Warcraft and Everquest 2. It’s difficult to justify the massive multiplayer aspect of CoH from a gameplay standpoint. You’re going to be spending the vast majority of your time in solo or group instanced missions, much like the maligned Norwegian sci-fi MMOG, Anarchy Online. The players outside your circle of friends that you’ll run in to in the public city zones add little to the experience outside of kill-stealing, global chat spam and the occasional pickup group. It seems to me that the game would have probably turned out better if had been set up more like Diablo or the upcoming Guild Wars (incidentally also published by NCSoft). Then again, if they had gone down that road, they might have had a little trouble getting people to cough up a subscription fee. By applying the MMOG stamp to the game, it has piqued the interest of the hundreds of thousands of bored, dispossessed and jaded refugees from other games in the genre, while the Superhero theme attracts a more mainstream audience. As the game stands at release, Cryptic has failed to take advantage of arguably the most interesting aspects of the genre. Even Planetside has a more cohesive and interesting society.
The only real player-created content is the absolutely amazing character creation system that puts every other to shame. There are hundreds of thousands of possible outfit combinations, and each part of your clothes is customizable by color and pattern. It’s really mind-boggling. The facial customization options are not as deep as those in Star Wars Galaxies, but it makes up for it in being able to totally customize your costume. I can’t really put into words just how cool this feature is – I only wish that my fashion sense wasn’t so terrible. Screenshots will just have to speak for me. The amount of ability you have to customize is so great, that many people have taken to re-creating copyrighted comic book characters – you know, “Kallel”, the Superman clone, several Punisher clones, many, many Hulks, a thousand Wolverines, The Flash, Leon Trotsky… it makes me feel uneasy as to how Cryptic and NCSoft are going to handle the inevitable legal rumble with Marvel, D.C. and their friends in the motion picture industry. Apparently NCSoft has made some sort of agreement with the comic book companies, but who knows how long that will last? If it somehow ends up in court, how this ends up will be earth-shaking either way in the realm of player-created content in gaming.
Where it falters in creating an alternate reality, CoH succeeds in providing a pretty damn good game – which is what most of the consumers who have quit previous games before the end of their trial month have been clamoring for. Cryptic has been watching the genre for years, and has responded to many of the most common gameplay complaints. From the moment you create your character, you really feel like a comic book hero. Unlike every MMOG yet released, new characters are not obliged to spend several hours mincing magpies, salting slugs or clubbing rabbits before moving on to dangerous foes such as crippled orphans and grumpy voles. Instead, new characters are pitted against sizable groups of gun-wielding thugs, zombies, super-powered bosses and many others. Many of the special abilities that take 70 levels and two years of your life spent on your ass in Everquest to acquire are available within the first few days of play. Solo players can advance at a good pace at any level, but leveling is much faster and more fun with a group.
Paragon City is the best designed series of zones since Everquest. Each city district has a unique feel – and it looks and feels like a real city with colorful comic book grit. King’s Row reminds me of the Bronx, and Atlas Park is pure Justice League. Perez Park is like Central Park gone wrong, with twisted trees and hordes of weird thugs and monsters. Running around the city as a hero feels like playing Grand Theft Auto in reverse. There is auto traffic and well-modeled foot traffic, and many random encounters including thugs beating up people, stealing their purses, hijacking their cars or sabotaging power stations – it’s fun to watch the crime ecosystem. The amount of mobility that characters in CoH have is very refreshing after playing the glued-to-the-ground Star Wars Galaxies for so long. You can fly or super-jump to the rooftops, leap over oncoming trucks and rush through crowds with super-speed. Cryptic could have screwed up the comic book city atmosphere of the game easily, but I can say unequivocally that they have succeeded to a degree in which I did not expect. Where SWG (where random NPC’s stand in one place endlessly waiting for players to deliver widgets to them and there is no vehicle traffic) and especially AC2 (totally empty cities) failed utterly in creating interesting virtual cities, CoH has succeeded.
Although the city zones are very cool, you’re also going to end up spending a lot of time in instanced missions, which are objective-based and not randomly generated indoor dungeon-like areas, with the numbers of enemies changing according to the strength of your group. Some missions are pretty cool, but after a while it becomes plain that the only real significant differences between each mission are the enemy type, how many bosses there are and whether or not each mission is timed. Now, the type of dungeon that you’re in certainly changes gameplay – a warehouse full of crates creates choke points ideal for a kinetic controller to make a barrier, and a mission inside tunnels makes for hairy encounters for flyers – but truthfully, once you’ve played the game for a few weeks, you’ll have seen every mission type. The saving grace of the system is that the combat is so damn good.
The combat system in CoH shares much in common with other RPG-based MMOGs, it’s a re-hash of the same system that’s been around since the original D&D – but it’s the best re-hash yet. The combat is visually compelling; knock-backs send enemies flying, stuns put your character in a comic-book style dizzy animation, and every special ability from fire rain to caltrop-dropping to flight all have unique art and animation. Typical combat breaks down into a brawl with several “minions”, which any character type can solo several at once. In addition, there are more challenging lieutenants who can also have some special abilities, and sometimes there are bosses which have some of the same abilities that players can have.
The artificial intelligence is better than in any other MMOG so far. NPC’s use their special abilities effectively; bosses that can cast mesmerization-style spells will cast them effectively on different members of your party, and creatures that can fly or have other mobility-based abilities will use them well. Thugs will run away when close to death, jumping fences and trying to escape you by running up fire escapes or jumping from building to building. The aggro system for monster hate works, but it’s gentler than Everquest’s: healers don’t get nearly as much “love”, and precedence on the list is given to the character that has hit the NPC last. It’s the first really professional job in terms of AI that I have seen in any RPG in the past few years, and the first MMOG to top Everquest in that area. Despite the professional veneer over the game as a whole, it’s really nothing new. CoH is not the “next big thing”. You’re going to be pressing buttons repeatedly to whack foozles to make your numbers get bigger. Still, the group tactical dynamics are at least as fun as Everquest’s, if not better.
The character archetypes are unique, and there are no “must-have” classes for groups. In fact, the game system is most similar to Asheron’s Call 2, but it’s done much better. As you level, you get more powers and enhance the ones you like. Just about all of them are useful, and none of them make earlier ones obsolete. Primary powers in each archetype are largely similar, much like Asheron’s Call 2 classes – the differences between a scrapper with claws and a scrapper with a broadsword are minute aside from some minor differences (Example: claws have less endurance drain, slightly lower damage and AoE attacks, broadsword has slightly more damage and slower attack speed), but the variation introduced by the secondary power sets more than makes up for this rigidity. Your choice of secondary power will significantly affect how you play – I’ll continue the scrapper examples because it’s what I have experience with. A scrapper with the regeneration power set will be able to dart in and out of a battle after taking damage, regenerating quickly, while a scrapper with super reflexes will be able to dodge many attacks at the expense of endurance drain. Controllers (In Everquest terms, Enchanter/Shaman/Magicians) and defenders (Cleric/Wizards) have more varied primary powers – for example: a kinetic controller is able to “bumper-car” into enemies knocking them in to walls, while a gravity controller will hoist enemies into the air and throw televisions, refrigerators and pool tables at enemies, but conversely their secondary power sets are weaker versions of the blaster (wizard) primary set for defenders and the defender primary set for controllers.
Hmm... How come your tights smell like cat piss?
I like CoH. People in the forums like it too. That’s generally a pretty good sign – but then again, familiarity does indeed bring about contempt. Hammering at the Shadowbane login server at 3 AM during the beta to get back into an intense siege might have seemed strangely romantic at the time, but it got old – fast. While CoH has none of the technical issues that plagued Shadowbane – in fact, it might be the most professionally run MMOG yet released – there’s reason to believe that the game lacks longevity. Supposedly, there are going to be monthly, plot-based global events in the vein of the Asheron’s Call series – and those will hopefully be fun. The end-of-beta event was technically impressive, although it could have been better. Towards the end of the beta, Cryptic released their first “raid” encounter which was designed to require upwards of 40 high-level heroes – and a group of six completed it. That’s a pretty bad omen. Granted, Cryptic will fix those issues – but it bothers me that such a good game overall is rushing an almost untested end game into release.
Now, this won’t matter to the average “casual” player, which CoH really caters to. Through either solo play or through group missions, it’s easy to make sizable headway in character advancement in an hour or much less. In addition, the “sidekick” system enables any character to partner up with a higher level character, which gives the lower level character a huge boost in level while the sidekick is closer to the mentor – a level 1 character could sidekick to a level 40 character and be boosted to level 37 ability. However, after initial quickness, the leveling speed slows down significantly. Now, this won’t matter much to the-journey-is-what-makes-life-worth-living crowd, but to the ultra-achiever-without-much-time crowd, it will certainly piss people off. At least CoH is fun enough so that you don’t compulsively glance at your experience bar every three seconds, eager for your next hit of DING. Super-achievers will probably burn out rapidly, because the raid end game is unfinished. Player retention is probably going to be the most significant challenge that Cryptic will face. Since there is no PvP (although a PvP expansion, City of Villains, has already been announced), there will not be a whole lot to do for the super-veteran aside from rolling up alternate characters or canceling and chasing The Next Big Thing.
Gameplay 4.5/5
Pretty damn good. See above. Half a point off for not straying from the ancient RPG system.
Aesthetics 4/5
The player character and enemy models are well-done and are very high-poly, but the structures and citizens of Paragon city are blocky. Textures are well-done throughout. None of them look egregiously bad, but a lot of them are pretty blurry. They could be better, but they look good enough. The animations all rock.
Extra points for creating the best city atmosphere outside of the GTA series.
Sounds 2/5
There are actually some pretty good music tracks, but there aren’t a whole lot of them, and they aren’t situational. At least they’re not annoying.
The sound effects suck. They sound tinny and often don’t seem to really match the action going on screen. There aren’t enough of them for different abilities for sure. I keep the sound on low.
Value 3/5
I have doubts about how long CoH will be entertaining. The monthly updates might change this dramatically – watch our front page for news and commentary on these. Despite this, it’s the most fun MMOG to come ‘round the bend in years – it’s at least worth $50 and the trial month.
The Verdict 4.5/5
CoH is the best MMOG to come out in years. Its combination of technical excellence, freshened and polished MMOG PvE gameplay and character customization make it an excellent game. Time will tell whether or not Cryptic can keep up the good work.
Special thanks to TenaciousMike, Oxenfree and Tortolia for the additional screenshots.
Additional comments from beta testers coming soon.
Sarcastro is my favorite hero!
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