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.

Comments

Re:No bad guys?

[Acts of Attrition]

I have been following this game for a bit and the design team for the game, Cryptic, has considered a villain aspect. However, they are going to wait until they have a solid way to implement it. It's really not as easy as you would think to have both heroes and villains and have it fun to play for both.

How do you make villain players fun to play against instead of the villain just being controlled by some jerks? How do you keep the balance between the two sides? Do villains get rewarded just by the amount of evil acts or HOW they do the evil? It's really an entirely different game and would take time to do it right.
In future expansions Cryptic also plans to add a PVP arena for heroes to fight heroes.

Re:No bad guys?

[JasdonLe]

Wow... Sorry, true believers, this sounds like the setup to a major failure... No villians in a superhero game? I'm sorry, I wouldn't even consider playing it for that very reason; and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Cell Shading

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with your analysis of the graphics style. I am quite surprised that this game did not take advantage of the Cell Shading techniques used in some recent games. It is clear that cell shading techniques give the graphics a more "comic book" style look. So many people have complained about cell shading in games where they want photo-realism, and now we have a game that could not be more perfectly suited for cell shading, and they go the way of photo-realism...

Re:Freedom Force

[Gothic_Walrus]

It's also worth mentioning that the game will have a sequel coming out later this year. The storyline is still under wraps, but I've heard that the plot's going to involve traveling back in time to World War II. Could be a great game...

Too bad it's MMO

[slaker]

I'd *love* to have a super-hero game universe under my control, but I won't play online with other people.

I was really excited and interested in this game until I found out it was a monthly-fee-scam kind of thing. It'll turn into yet another low-positive-feedback-by-levelling thing, I'm sure, and it'll be set in a fairly generic universe. No licenses (would it really be that hard to snag, say, the Malibu or New Universe license from marvel, or Wildstorm's world?)

What I was hoping for was something along the line of NWN - anyone can run a server, build his world and offer no-fee play. Heck, I would've even taken a single-player game like Freedom Force, if I could make my own game.

So we'll have this generic world, where it probably won't be possible to be "Deena" from Powers or, based on the archetypes they list, someone with non-obvious powers like Longshot. Would Batman - world's greatest detective - even be any fun to play in an MMO world where muggers are probably the equivalent of rats and spiders?

One of the knocks I had against Freedom Force was that it was relentlessly upbeat and really forced one into a Lee/Kirby-style semi-whacky flawed-but-noble hero mode. It captured the comics of 1963 very well, but there wasn't room for anything else; no "normal guys" or detectives or anti-heroes or cosmic bad-asses. No shades of grey, either. I want to play in a world where I can be a regular bank robber or Green Arrow or Captain Marvel (any of 'em) or Silver Surfer and have all of them be fun and challenging.

Anyway, I think there's a million and one ideas for something besides Stupendous Man and his sidekick Super Lad, contending with a million and one clones of Wolverine, which is what it looks like I'll get with City of Heroes.

I think I'll wait another decade for the day I can finally build Jokertown and play with the people I choose to play with.