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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...
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
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.
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