Slashdot Mirror
City of Heroes MMO Leaps Tall Buildings?
Decaffeinated Jedi writes "This week, GameSpy is serving up a variety of articles regarding Cryptic Studios' upcoming massively multiplayer superhero PC roleplaying game, City of Heroes (following up on its December 2003 preview). The preview offers hands-on impressions of the game, a look at the origin and ongoing adventures of Kingblade (an in-game character created by one of the editors), a roundtable with the developers, several screenshot galleries, and more. City of Heroes is currently in beta and scheduled for released on April 27, 2004. Will it join the ranks of Freedom Force in breaking the legendary superhero game curse? Only time will tell, true believers!" There's more info on this NCSoft-published game at COH Stratics and the official site.
It's a tactical team-based RPG type thing.
A sort of X-Com: UFO Defense - but with superheroes and supervillains instead of marines and aliens.
It was pretty well received despite being aimed at the low-system-requirement market (a bit behind the times graphically). It is certainly a quality title and is only obscure because of a near-complete lack of marketing. Gamer and critical reviews are nearly all praise.
There's a demo (windows-only) you can download when you're free of the fascist-network regime: here.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
The game takes a very tongue-in-cheek approach to the superhero genre. It's set in the 1960s and exhibits the designers' obvious love of Marvel's Stan Lee/Jack Kirby epics of the 1960s.
Personally, I loved the game. There's a sequel on the way in the near future, too.
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
It's a real-time strategy RPG based on parties of a maximum of 4 superheroes. You go against petty thugs and sometimes a lesser boss, then a larger boss at the end of the episode. Great game. It's nice and campy [in a good way -- it's set in the 60s comic era].
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
There's no PvP period, not even dueling. Imagine: no Spidey vs Thor, Silver Surfer, Torch, Daredevil, etc. Heck, no wolverine vs anybody! :-)
I could understand holding off on a Villain engine because it was just too hard to design, but no dueling? C'mon, read a comic book!
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
The problem with the game was that it was too freaking short. I finished it in 4 hours or so. I suppose it's worth it now, for $20, but back when I bought it I was incredibly ticked off that there wasn't any more content.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Actually I've seen several copies in a local EB for $9.99. I picked it up at that price, and it's definitely worth it, especially with the mods available at various websites. Also, the newest patch of the game (1.2?) adds a "Danger Room" feature, so you can easily play around with your own super heroes on several game levels against some customizable AI superheroes. The campaign itself may be short, but the super hero creation system is extremely robust -- it alone is worth the price of admission.
Fortunately, there are a lot of mods for it, with new levels and situations. Many of them are way harder than the original game...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I agree, it's a great feature. Although after reading through the 'features' of the game and their stat system and the 'archetypes' I have to come to the conclusion that it's the same as any other genre of game. In fact, there's really nothing innovative about it at all with regards to other MMORPGs. In fact, it looks lacking.
Archetypes is nothing more than a fancy word for 'class.' Now I've played DAOC before (nothing else) but from what I remember from that game, here's the breakdown for their 'archetype' system.
- The Controller. This is the Bard type. This character mezmerizes or holds characters in place. He does some buffing. This is about it. Aside from the fact that the Controller probably doesn't sing.
- The Tanker. This is the warrior character of the group. It has lots of hps, can do some damage but is mostly around to shield the rest of the group from attacks. Big whoop.
- The Blaster. This is the Mage of the group. Lots of damage, specializes in ranged attacks, lots of damage, low hps. It even says they can look like Drow Elves in the Gamespy article, which is quite funny to me because i mean, it's a goddamn elf mage!
- The Defender. Please. Paladin/Ranger character. Good at defending, some buffing abilities. Might as well give it some shield and scale armor.
- The Scrapper. Paladin, maybe Rogue/Thief character? It also fits into the Warrior stereotype, not much else here.
Now granted, These 'archetypes' are basically it.
Let's look down the road. You're a superhero, you fight monsters daily, not much else. You get powerups every so often, you can fly (so can everyone else at this point in the game). You can't build any new weapons apparently, there's no player vs player, sure xping with friends is probably much more interesting with sidekicks but it seems to me that you're sort of cheapening the game by making a sidekick that powerful.
In the end, I just don't see how this game differs enough to make it interesting.