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City Of Heroes Beta Evaluated As Game Goes Gold
Thanks to GamersWithJobs for its detailed impressions of PC-based superhero MMORPG City Of Heroes, given just after the game reached gold master status, with an "official launch [of] April 28", and a (slightly inflationary?) "monthly subscription fee of US$14.99." The preview, from a "long time tester and fan of the game", notes: "When I entered City of Heroes for the first time, one of the things that quickly grabbed my attention was the scale--the towering statues, the twenty story buildings", before discussing the action-oriented gameplay: "Unlike almost every other MMORPG out there, combat in City of Heroes is designed to be fast paced and fun" The author concludes: "It's not a perfect superhero game, but it's a very good superhero MMORPG."
The wild success of games like The Sims which lack PvP seems to strongly indicate that while a vocal minority of hard-core gamers demand PvP, the vast majority can live without it just fine and would rather see efforts focused on other areas. Small wonder that developers chose to focus on the desires of the majority.
I'm playing in the Beta and am having a really fun time with the game. I'm impressed with the stability and what has been worked into the game so far, and I'm more than patient to see what other cool things they work into the game in the future. A game can't support everything from the offset, gotta have some room to grow, so I'm not concerned about the lack of PvP and other things that seem to bother a lot of people.
The one thing I am concerned about though is the price. I'm not really interested in dishing out $49.95 for the game (and one month of playtime) and then $14.95 a month thereafter. That's just too much for cash for me to justify. I'm not anywhere close to poverty stricken, I make good money and can afford to spend that much on a game. Unfortunately as much as I'd like to participate I don't see it as *worth* my money. Am I alone in this thinking?
Droping $49.95 and having 3 months worth of online play, that seems worth it in my books (I'm still thinking high, but I'd pay it), but this cash grab just strikes me as unreasonable.
I'm currently playing the online version of the Lord of the Rings CCG. This game does have the unfortunate CCG pricing model (i.e. the more you pay, the better options you have) but it's certainly possible for a player with a good idea of what they want to get a tourney winning quality deck for around $50-70. (This approach requires lots of camping in the trade lobby to find people willing to give you stuff you need for the limited stuff you have, but that time investment is no worse than any other MMO.)
Anyways, the good news to the otherwise somewhat newbie-unfriendly pricing is that there's no mandatory recurring fee to keep the collection that you have. (There's an optional $10 monthly membership that gives you more than $10 worth of stuff and is intended essentially as a loss leader, since members get a 20-40% discount on further purchases, encouraging you to spend more. The membership pays for itself for anyone spending at least $10 a month on the game, but again, is optional if you know you won't be playing for a few months and want to cancel it until you come back or just want to cut yourself off.) This means that I'm not getting significantly worse value for my money dollar for dollar than the people who spend hours and hours playing, as one does in a monthly fee use it or lose it payment scheme.
The CCG model does require a certain resignation that every so often you'll face someone who destroys your puny deck with their massively larger collection. This also, from what I hear, is common on PvP MMO's (LOTRO is PVP only, there are no AI opponents yet, even for tutorial). But at least here once you get started, all that matters is how well the ~70 or so cards you brought to the table work together to win you the game. Not how much time you've spent (though playtesting will help you pick which cards to bring), not how much the 70 cards you have are worth, and DEFINITELY not how much the cards from each of your collections that aren't being used this game are worth. Knowing you've beaten someone who spent 10 times as much as you on the game? Priceless.
Alright then, go ahead and start building a server farm to host the tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of users who will be playing online at once. Take over the development necessary to improve gameplay and add new worlds/zones. As the game becomes more popular, pay for even more rack space and servers to load balance the MMORPG. What you don't understand is, all of this requires money. Money to pay for rack space at a Network Operations Center, money for the servers, money for the huge amount of bandwidth, money for the sys admins, money for the developers to improve the game, etc. If you can provide all of that for them, I'm sure they'd be all for no monthly fees.