Slashdot Mirror
City Of Heroes Talk Reveals Plans, Subscription Success
Thanks to MMORPGDot for a report on the recent City Of Heroes MMO seminar at the Origins gaming convention in Ohio. The piece, arriving just after a useful overview-styled review, also on MMORPGDot, includes comments from lead designer Jack Emmert on the game's success (he was "surprised about the popularity of the game. He sees the popularity as a result of the accessibility of the game design and not necessarily the genre of the game"), and subscription numbers ("They're almost at 200,000 players. There will be an announcement when they make it"), as well as general info on the City Of Villains expansion: "Bases will play a big role for both Heroes and Villains. Supergroups will be able to fortify secret lairs with many cool and interesting toys. These include automated defenses and NPC assistants. Villains and Heroes will have henchmen, and these goons will be fully customizable. PvP will have a lot to do with bases and base invasions (think keep sieges). Groups and individuals that don't want to engage in PvP will never have to."
I've been playing more than I should since the day it came out. And they have done a wonderfully professional job with this title.
1- it worked the day it came out, stable, and you could actually log in.
2- they install patches on Tuesdays.. rather than on Friday and hose it for the weekend.
3- you can solo or group...
4- you can quit with only a few minutes notice
5- its actually fun.
Notice how those contrast with EQ...
I think a lot of this games sucess is because it doesnt rely as much on the leveling treadmill type of mmo that pretty much all others are based off of. This opens the game up to the casual gamers, a group that is many times the size of the fanatical, play 10 hours a day, kind of gamer, that are willing to put in the massive amount of time required for the other games.
City of Heroes is a game that knew what it wanted to be and launched as a very polished product. This is the new gold standard for an MMORPG launch.
If you compare it to other MMORPGs it doesn't have all the bells & whistles. It doesn't have player crafting, housing, pvp, an economy, character stats, complex skill trees, or rare uber "mind control mask +10."
The devs didn't fall into the trap of providing everything to everbody upfront. The game is very accessable, focused, and stable. The concept (super heroes) brings in the customers, the polished gameplay makes them stay. Contrast this with last year's hyped up Star Wars Galaxies, which has all the bells and whistles, but suffered because it launched in a beta state and alienated its customers.
EQ2 and WoW will be judged in relation to CoH at launch. Players now expect a higher level of polish to MMORPG titles at launch.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
I'd very much like to try out this game, but already being a subscriber to two other MMOGs, I don't want to spend $50 on a box for a game I won't play past the trial period.
I mean, EQ is finally letting you download the original game and first two expansions for free, plus giving a free month to go along with it. CoH could make some serious inroads in dissatisfied players of EQ and other games if they quickly followed suit.
CoH deserves almost all the praise people give it. It's very pretty, it excels at what it does, it's execution (coding etc) is more solid than average, it's an excellent game, and the developers did very well....for what they did.
However, they are also charging more than any other MMORPG to date, and from my perspective offering less.
What does CoH offer? An excellent costume designer and an unprecedented degree of activity and action in combat. But what else? That's the problem, there's nothing else.
The way CoH is designed, it could actually work just fine in a NWN type of customer hosted mini-server scenario.
You form up a group of 8-10 people and someone starts a 'listen' server. Then the 10 of you fight random battles in randomly generated missions, for random rewards of disposable power-ups, etc and so forth.
The only 'persistance' in the game is that the numbers (dmg dealt) get higher, and the mobs have different names.
I'm not saying it's a bad game. I think it's an excellent game, but I don't think it's worth MORE than actual persistant online worlds, where you have services that can't be duplicated by customer s hosting thier own small game.
That, I consider a universal flaw. I think CoH should have come out with a monthly charge LESS than the normal MMORPG to match it's bragging about a reduced and refined feature set.
I also thing there are other flaws in it's design, but I think these are more preferential. I cancelled my subscription because there was no way I was going to pay $15/month for the equivalent of a co-op quake server, but I actually stopped playing the game before my free month was up.
The problem is that this action that it does so well at is ALL IT DOES. There is NOTHING short of of that action, and very quickly, that action turns into 'wrote memerization' (sp). Depending on your character type, the keystroke to defeat your first enemy are exactly the same as the keystrokes to defeat your hundredth enemy, and your thousandth. Target, perform attack A,B,C, repeat if necessary, find new target. Some archetypes are more interesting than others.
I found myself creating new characters and playing 2 levels and then creating again. Then, I skipped the levels, and just started playing full-time with the character editor, only saving the characters that looked really good.
To follow up my long story with a short story...they did some things VERY VERY well, but they left out too much, and it makes their MMORPG only half of what it needs to be to be worth the monthly fee. (The same thing happened with ATITD. It was EXCELLENT at what it did...but it's what it didn't try to do that made it 'not worth paying for' to the majority of it's would-be audience.) (gee, that statement's quite broad.)
My prediction...this rapid build-up of subscriptions will shortly be followed with a rapid decline in subscriptions. I also predict that the follow-up game "City of Villains" will see all those people coming back. They will be thinking, (like I am) 'It was a good game, if only...' and they'll check out CoV to see if the 'only' is there. Whether they stay depends on CoV.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Nowhere do I see anything about whether or not they'll bring this to a non-Windows platform (hell, I can't even find the system requirements on their web site). I'd probably give these guys hundreds of dollars playing CoV if it supported Mac OS X. As it stands, DOOM III is the only release I'm really looking forward to this year.
I've been on board since launch, and in the scant hours between raising a toddler and working 60 hour weeks, I've brought my character (scrapper) to almost lvl 30.
Team battles - I hang out with different people depending what time of day I'm on, and the composition of your team and that of the different enemy groups makes for plenty of variety (and lots of well-animated chaos). Soloing can definitely get repetitive, but finding a fun group makes all the difference. Quoth Tycho:
Environments - The zones start out nice, and get cooler as you go. The scale of the damage in Faultline, the creepy atmosphere in Dark Astoria, and the Nazi base and Underground City indoor zones are my favorites so far (I haven't played or seen anything from the First Update yet). Although everyone is sick of warehouses and office buildings, all of the outdoor zones are huge, have their own unique feel, and the enemies make sense in their environment (mafia fighting triad for control of the docks, mystics performing rituals in graveyards, gangs stealing purses less than a block from superhero HQ (maybe not so much the last one)). Fantasy games just have a much more limited choice of settings.
The Writing - I strongly recommend reading all the "Clues" that advance each story, and always talking to your contacts. They've put a lot of effort into the content, and it is very entertaining. Doing missions with a group is much more rewarding than random patrols IMO. Plus I enjoy "events" like alien invasions, no matter how embarassing it is to get killed by an albino space chimp.
The Future - They are saying all the right things about where they want to take the game, and I am very curious about the higher-level content that is in the game now. I signed up for 6 months at once (it lowers the monthly rate to $13), and if I've seen all there is to see by then I will happily stop (hello WoW?). I'm not looking for a game to play forever (says the guy with active Diablo II accounts from like 5 years ago), but so far this has been fun every step of the way, unlike Lineage 2, which won't let you do anything fun at all until you are 80 hours in (I tried to enjoy the beta, really).
Exact same as PC version.
-I am an elective eunuch.
RedAssedBaboon has an interesting article talking about how they plan to embed reporters in MMOGs including City of Heroes. I think it's a great idea.