City of Heroes EU Release Date Announced

GamesIndustry.biz has the news that NCSoft will be releasing City of Heroes in Europe on February 4th. The EU customers get all sorts of fancy doodads to offset the delayed release. From the article: "European customers will receive a special deluxe edition of the game, which includes all of the content updates to date, an 88 page comic, and a number of serial codes which unlock special items in the game."

Comments

Re:Infomation for us! \o/

[Squatchman]

1. Up to your preference. It reminds me of a Massively Multiplayer diablo 2. take it as you will
2. I've already met players from the UK and EU so they're out there. This is probably going to give them their own servers.
3. Monthly cost is about $15USD. Updates are usually pushed out before they're released and then activated after an incremental issue fix so the servers don't get bogged down while every member in the game downloads the monthly update all at once. As well, there have not been any gameplay expansions that one would have to buy like in Everquest. The monthly update includes new areas, missions, task forces(large quest?), and usually new enemies.
4. It's not that difficult to get into, but your overall experience of the game will be much better if you find a group of people who play at the same time as you do. A group of four can be rounded out enough so handle just about anything for the bulk of the game.

Re:Infomation for us! \o/

[slaker]

CoH is exactly the MMO I want to play.
There is no crafting. There is only the barest notion of "treasure" (bad guys sometimes drop enhancements to your powers). There is no notion of "camping" as I understand the EQ definition.
It is very easy to just load up CoH and PLAY, without worrying about the secondary and tertiary activities that seem to overwhelm the actual game in UO or Everquest or SWG.

I've played with folks from Quebec and from Finland. Players on the coh.com boards occasionally mention their foreign locations. I don't believe the game is available yet in the UK, but some players there HAVE gotten it.

City of Heroes to date has had three free updates, each of which has added content (new city zones and bad guys). The most recent update added addition powers and character classes for the high-level folk. Minor updates are normally issued on Tuesdays, and consist of ~5MB downloads for game patches. Major content updates (called "Issues") seem to happen roughly quarterly, are free of charge, and represent a fairly substantial download. The client runs a patcher prior to the start of play, while the Issues are available for download several weeks prior to their going live.

The game costs $15 a month in the US. I have no idea what pricing will be in Euroland.

The player base is generally friendly and talkative in my experience. Almost no one roleplays on the server where I spend my time.

Near optimal CoH-playing experience requires 1GB of RAM (EQ players have needed a Gig of RAM for a couple years IIRC) and a Radeon 9600 or 9800. The $400+ cards from ATI and nVidia add nothing to the game at the moment, and anecdotally I understand that nvidia hardware seems to have more display bugs in CoH. The game will run on 256MB, but I wouldn't suggest trying that.

Gameplay-wise, the best advice I can give is that you take things slow, read the clues you get in missions, and work with a team. There are a limited number of indoor settings, which is a little bit of a disappointment, but over time the devs have done really great work to make the settings for important missions more and more unique (e.g. the burning building in the "Bonefire" mission almost everyone gets at level 6).

Someone looking to make friends in-game would do well to make an Empathy (Healer/Buffer) or Radiation (Healer/debuffer) defender, or a Tank of some kind. Those two types are almost ALWAYS in demand for grouping, and Tanks are pretty easy for beginners.