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City Of Heroes Talk Reveals Plans, Subscription Success

Posted by simoniker on from the ragnar's-human-rinds dept.

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."

7 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. This games success by arieswind · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This games success by Drawkcab · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What game are you playing? It is a grind. Missions are cool, but you'll run out of them, and they can be a grind too when you get used to them. I think its a cool game, but it got to be too much of a grind for me. I made it to 16 pretty quickly and enjoyably, but had to grind to 19, where I got bored and quit. And playing other characters even at low levels is all grind since I've seen it all before. I can still see the appeal of the game, but its too much of a treadmill for me.

  2. Plans should include d/l'able trial version by Dachannien · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:The new bar has been set for MMORPGs by laiquendi · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Players now expect a higher level of polish to MMORPG titles at launch.

    Polish is insignificant next to game design. I played Shadowbane for a year and a half, including beta, and came out with some good memories, despite the bugs, crashing, and incomplete endgame. WoW, despite already having more polish than SB ever did, kept me entertained for all of two weeks.

  4. Standard Windows Rant by droleary · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Standard Windows Rant by droleary · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I feel for you, I do, but I think the whole MacEQ thing will keep MMPOG off the Mac for a while. Lets face it, Mac users are second citizains when it comes to games.

      Being "second-class citizens" is better than being denied entry at the border. The big mistake of MacEQ is that it wasn't just EQ. I knew a guy who only had a PC with Windows to play EverCrack and first thought MacEQ was going to be the perfect way to get it and Unix on the same system without rebooting. Then he discovered that he was going to be jammed into a ghetto and never get to play with all his regular EQ using friends. He ended up still switching to the Mac and ditching EQ completely. If they'd done it right, I'm sure he would have suckered at least me into playing with him. Instead they started losing subscriptions across the board.

      So, no, there is no expectation on my part that CoH/CoV will ever see light on the Mac, but I'd still like them to just come out and say that. I can at least count on id putting out DOOM III on the Mac, so I've set aside the money. Without any announcement about CoV, I won't budget for the game at all so if the do decide to make a port then suddenly I'm one less person who will play the game when I would actually have loved to have given them boatloads of cash. Another huge mistake.

  5. What I like about higher-level play by shumway · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:

    The other thing that I didn't understand is the extent to which playing with different groups reveals really crucial interdependencies. I'll talk about that some other time, but the more I play, the more I think that "teaming" is actually the purpose of their entire game.

    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).

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