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Review: City of Villains
- Title: City of Villains
- Developer: Cryptic Studios
- Publisher: NCSoft
- System: PC
- Reviewer: Zonk
- Score: 8/10
One of the elements that set City of Heroes apart when it launched last year was the complex character creation system it shipped with. Even at launch it was possible to create an extremely elaborate costumed crime-fighter. Several body shapes and accessories made it possible to create anything from a hulking strongman to a sickeningly cute cat-girl. Since the game's launch new additions to the system, like capes and the ability to change the proportions of body areas, has only added to the system's versatility. All of these improvements and even more textures have been incorporated into the City of Villains character creator. New elements includes monstrous textures like wolf heads, scarred and disfigured facial textures, and even (for the pirate in all of us) hook hands and peg legs. The new elements are terrific and I've had numerous friends spend time at my PC just creating characters, with no interest in actually playing the game.
Once you're on the street and looking tough, you'll start getting a better feel for the role you chose during character creation. Characters fall into one of five archetypes, and although four of them are similar to what you'd find in City of Heroes they're all different enough to feel fresh. The Brute is the front-line melee fighter, but while CoH's Tank is meant to take damage the Brute is better at dealing it out. In fact, the more damage he takes and inflicts, the more powerful he becomes. This is actually a good general rule with the new archetypes: CoV characters really adhere to that "the best defense is a good offense" rule. Stalkers fill the high-damage output role, with the ability to cloak themselves for a critical first strike being their signature power. Dominators are all about controlling the battlefield, with powers designed for crowd control and damage over time. They also build up strength as they go, and unleash it in a flash of light with the 'Dominate' power. While Dominating they do more damage and their holds last longer, a powerful element in a boss fight. Corrupters are long-range and buff/debuff specialists, with the ability to suck an enemy dry of health very quickly once they've begun taking damage. The final archetype in City of Villains is entirely new, and extremely cackle-worthy. The Mastermind is a 'pet class', a character that can summon NPCs to do his bidding. There are four types of minions available: robots, ninjas, mercenaries, and zombies. While the lack of pirates is saddening, Masterminds also generally have access to buff/debuff powers of the Corrupter archetype. In a group they act as a sort of glue, fleshing out the ranks and ensuring that party members do their jobs more effectively. The decision not to use the same archetypes as in CoH was a great one, and more than any other element in the game helps to set the new apart from the old.
The job, of course, is crime. Doin' crime in the Rogue Isles requires connections, and CoV provides those to you out of the gate. While initially you'll just be doing jobs for some two-bit crook in an alley you'll eventually have several contacts, all of whom have tips on thuggery. A great improvement over the CoH mindset is "paper missions". Some contacts only give you missions occasionally; in order to convince them you're worth the effort you have to do some petty crimes first. You find these quick, in-and-out-grab-some-xp missions in the newspaper by checking out the articles. A mention of a valuable artifact sends you on a shopping spree, or an article about the release of a former cellmate has you looking for revenge. Overall the quality of the missions is higher than in City of Heroes, with the violent and petty nature of criminality making your actions a lot more sensical than in some CoH missions. A big complaint I have, though, is the lack of variety in the early missions. While City of Heroes offers you several mission tracks out of the gate based on what kind of character you are, CoV has only one track that very quickly gets old when playing new characters. This is somewhat alleviated by a great improvement: allowing missions to 'count' for more than one character. If you and another player have the same mission, completing it will prompt the other player with the message "Do you want this to count for your mission as well?" This way, groups don't have to be constantly redoing missions to ensure that everyone is on the same page. A very nice addition that partially offsets the repetitive nature of the early game.
Doing your thing alone is never all that fun, and CoV introduces some great new elements for supergroups. Bases are the big draw, allowing organizations of supers to finally have a place to hang their hats. They're as customizable as characters are, and have a host of functional elements as well. Bases link zones, act as hospitals, and allow access to the limited crafting added to the game. They are also mustering points for Player Vs. Player (PvP) action. While PvP has been in City of Heroes for a while in the form of combat Arenas, City of Villains introduces entire zones for PvP action. The results are mixed. Like with any game designed for Player Vs. Environment play (PvE), PvP added after the fact has forced some serious balance tweaks to powers and enhancements. Initial reports seem to indicate that PvP is a good deal of fun, and the clash of fully powered heroes and villains is just as explosive as you'd expect from the pages of comic-dom.
The comic look that Cryptic managed fairly well has been expanded and refined in the level design utilized in City of Villains. The Rogue Isles look terrible, in a good way. Even the first zone, Mercy Island, is a twisted rubble of burnt-out buildings and industrial sprawl. In sharp contrast to the cleanly orderliness of Paragon City, the Isles are dark, dirty, and filled with naughty people doing naughty things. Mission design is much improved over the launch of CoH, as well. CoV incorporates the lessons Cryptic has learned in the last year, and mission spaces are quirky and interesting. Some of them are downright jaw-dropping. My teammates and I spent a lot of time during a mission against the military Council agog about their massive base, which evoked James Bond, WWII bunkers, and Star Trek all at once. Additional minor graphical elements have also been added, like an extremely appealing water effect and sometimes-hilarious ragdoll physics.
Overall, minor elements seem to be what separates City of Villains from its goody-two-shoes neighbor. CoV is a dark and gritty version of Cryptic's first offering, for better or worse. If you quit City of Heroes months ago because you were tired of instance, instance, rinse, repeat, City of Villains may offer you some fleeting fun because of the new setting but probably won't hold your interest over time. On the other hand, if you enjoy City of Heroes you're just going to love City of Villains. The people are bad, the story is good, and there's just as much to see and do in the Isles as in Paragon City. What's more, if you are already subscribed to City of Heroes you can double your content without increasing your monthly fee. One subscription fee allows you access to both CoH and CoV. If you've always wanted to leap tall buildings or find the idea of a world-spanning empire of evil appealing, you can do a lot worse than the world NCSoft is hosting online right now.
I think playing a villain sounds much more fun than a hero. It may be human nature to want to smash stuff once in a while, and I'd rather take it out online than in meatspace. I'm really a nice guy on the inside. My mommy said so.
Why not combine the two games into one? Let CoH characters play against CoV players. That would be pretty cool. I know this will never happen for many reasons but it's still a cool idea.
Bradley Holt
That's most unfortunate. I loved City of Heroes, was in the Beta for a week or two before it was released, and played it from release in several different classes. Mostly I'd reach a travel power, and group with friends from the Super Group, but ultimately what drove me to cancel was the lack of variety in quests. I value my game dollars, and full anticipated buying CoV even after cancelling my CoH account, but I probably won't now. I can't reason myself into buying a game that suffers the same lack of longevity as it's predecessor.
Now, people who post demeaning and sweeping generalizations on the internet...
Nerf Shammies!
It's a question, but as a gamer who only enjoys the game when it brings misery to others (hah!), how good is the PvP?
I am personally waiting for the game that takes into account the player's skill at the game itself instead of having XXX level will beat XXX-1 level, or YYY class will always defeat YZY class. It's idiotic and boring, and brings little to tactics in games of scale.
I am still watching for DarkFall Online as it seems to be the only game that will combine the elements of PvP I'm looking for, but still I'm curious... how does PvP in CoV stack up? I haven't played CoH since there was almost ZERO PvP, but now with the expansion I wonder how the combat system takes into account any type of player skill, or is it just another XXX and YYY game?
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
... when we all said "worst... MMO... Ever..."
-everphilski-
I briefly beta'd during the stress test. I was unimpressed.
The character creation process was the only truely interesting part of the game. The rest was utterly repetetive to the point of boredom. Kill all enemies of type X from location Y. Now do that for the next 10 missions. Now do the same thing with a different enemy type for another 10 missions.
The engine is also horrible. It requires a ridiculous amount of memory (You get tons of swapping on 1GB of RAM, so really you need 2GB), and has insanely low framerates for an engine that doesn't look much better than Quake 3 with greater viewing distances.
The boredom combined with painful performance turned me off of the game.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Overall the quality of the missions is higher than in City of Heroes, with the violent and petty nature of criminality making your actions a lot more sensical than in some CoH missions.
Sadly, the majority of the enemies you face in CoV are *still* villains (I've made it to 30 and only seen 3 total hero groups, and only one shows up with any frequency), and you have lots of missions with goals like "rescue the Wretch" and "stop the intruders", that are passed off as villainous only because you are being paid to do it, or because it will raise your standing with some villain group. For example, I once rescued a guitarist for some band, and it told me it would raise my standing with Lord Recluse. I guess it was his favorite band?
You do get to rob banks on occasion, but the police officers guarding it are the corrupt Rogue Island Police.
Overall, it really makes you feel more like a vigilante on the level of The Punisher, rather than a villain such as Lex Luthor or the Joker.
I'm pretty sure the reason you don't get to fight many heroes or perpetrate many real evil schemes is so that the game can maintain its Teen rating.
It is a pretty game with a nice theme, but that is just not enough. Oddly, the day they upgraded CoH with the CoV content, I could no longer run CoH smoothly on my Radeon 9800, and was faced with the choice of upgrading my computer to have a smooth (still mindnumbingly repetitive) play experience.
Granted as a gamer I might drop a couple hundred to bring my computer up to snuff for a game, but not this one.
That's not entirely true. When you are a member of a Super Group, you can play in SG mode -- basically, wearing the colors and insignia of the group to 'show the flag' as you defeat heroes/villains. In SG mode, you get a reduced amount of influence/infamy (the 'currency' of the game for buying enhancements for your character), but acquire Prestige for your group, which can be used to build or expand your group's base -- and you occasionally collect Salvage of various kinds (weapons, armor fragments, etc.) that can be reworked at crafting workbenches in your base into other components, which can be made into equipment for your base. So there's no crafting that directly affects your character, but you can craft things that will benefit your group, which will help you acquire Items of Power, which provide in-game bonuses to everyone in the group (having Items of Power in your base does, however, make you vulnerable to having your base raided by other groups trying to take them; some of the things you can build for your base are improved defenses).
I loved City of Heroes. It was a beautiful feast of pure joy.
:(
For about half an hour.
It became pretty apparent that there is only one mission: Go beat every one up. That's it! Oh, I forgot: You could also find some things by clicking on boxes as you... went to beat every one up. That by itself is fun for a couple of minutes.
Now, EQ and WoW both got dropped by me due to the grind, but there were at least places to explore, puzzles to solve, things to learn... In other words, there were things to do.
City of Heroes had nothing else, excepting the opportunity to look at the (gorgeous) scenery and earn the next superpower. I kept playing after hearing tales of the game play, social interaction, and mission variety opening up after a certain point. I found none. My contacts and missions looked different, but acted exactly the same.
Had there been more social interactions that were relevant to game play, or game play designed to really let people feel in-character... Or any number of things, it could have been better. The entire time I played, I felt like I was playing an engine demo released before their content.
City of Heroes brought to the table the BEST game in years... that gave me no compelling reason to play.
Can you name your character CmdrTaco?
I'm not sure what the secret to success is, but the secret to failure lies in trying to please everyone -Bill Cosby
I played CoH for 1.5 years and was in the CoV beta.
My main problem with CoV, and the reason I didn't end up subscribing, was that most missions had me fighting other villains. Sure, villains engage in some in-fighting, but in 16 levels of leveling up a Corruptor in beta, I fought non-villains in exactly three missions:
1.Fought guards in the tutorial mission.
2.Fought heroes in the first mission.
3.Fought guards in the bank heist mission.
Everything else was fighting the same old villains from CoH -- Hellions, Skulls, Lost, Family, etc. Sure, the mission text may say "kidnap" rather than "rescue", but I was only ever "kidnapping" someone from another villain group, and it sure felt like a rescue. Sure, I steal valuable items, but only from other villain groups -- never from museums, offices, mansions, and the like.
It just seemed like a massive waste of an opportunity. There was even a 40+ page thread on the CoV beta forums titled "CoV Just Not Villainous Enough"? That thread never saw a single developer response, and appeared not to impact the game in the slightest.
Which is fine, really, if the developers' definition of "villains" is just "heroes who don't get along". I'm sure lots of people will dig it because of the new archetypes, zones, powers, and PvP potential.
For my money, though, I expected something very different from a game titled City of Villains.
First, the writing. The writing in City of Villains is a notch above City of Heroes. While many contacts in City of Heroes were memorable, most of the best were in the high-level content (Crimson and Indigo, for example, were 40-44 and 45-50 level contacts). In City of Villains, you're struck early and often with the quality of the writing. I've been doing almost all contact missions, almost all solo, and at L26, I've run into a half dozen contacts now that I already remember better than most City of Heroes contacts. These ones are not just giving out missions, they are telling a story; or rather, inviting you to participate in their stories. From a uniquely quirky "MBA-turned-Arachnos-operative" contact who talks about your "synergy" together as you kidnap people and trash enemy bases for him, to the Superheroine who lost her powers in a friendly fire accident and is out for vengeance against the "friends" who "abandoned her", you'll feel like the contacts are a lot more alive. Fundamentally, they're all just standing in one place doling out missions, but their stories and speech are much more engaging and of a higher quality.
Second, the mission system. Street hunting is fine, but several "issues" ago, Cryptic raised the xp from mission completion, to encourage doing story-laden missions as opposed to random street hunting. City of Villains makes this better in several ways. First, newspaper missions: entering a zone you can immediately take "newspaper" missions from anywhere, without needing to visit a contact. Every so many missions, you build enough reputation with a contact to get a "special" mission offer which you have to see them in person to get. But this helps drastically minimize the travelling.
Next, contacts dole out their cell phone numbers a lot faster. In City of Heroes, you had to complete roughly 2/3rds of a contact's missions before you got a Call button for them. In City of Villains, you typically complete 2 missions and then receive their Call button, cutting down drastically on dull travel time, and further distancing CoV from MMOs where travelling becomes a major hassle and upgrading your modes of transportation (*cough* epic mount *cough*) becomes an overwhelmingly important goal simply because the walking is boring. It means the game is that much more fast paced.
Next, CoV missions are usually located in the zone you acquire them in. All newspaper missions are, and MOST contact missions are, unless there's a compelling story reason to have them be elsewhere. (For example, the ominous Aeon corp is located in Cap Au Diable, and so if the mission involves breaking into their corporate headquarters, there you go - but in 26 levels, I've only been sent out of zone perhaps 4-5 times)
Finally, CoV further improves by having a LOT of story arcs. It seems like I'm always doing one. Unlike one-shot missions, story arcs have, well, story behind them. They're more entertaining than one-off missions. If you continue to seek out contacts and work for them, you'll get souvenirs out the wazoo. I'd guess at 26 I probably have at least 15, if not 20 or more. I stopped counting. I've gotten more than one story arc from some contacts. Also, Arcs tend to be a bit shorter, with less "filler" material, whereas in CoH there were a lot of "now, do this" missions which didn't really move the story along very much. In other words, the content is thicker.
Unlike city of heroes, however, your starting missions are currently the same regardless of Archetype or Origin. Whereas CoH content differed for the first 5 levels or so based on Origin, everyone in CoV starts with Kalinda and the same set of missions. Devs have already said new starting content is coming, but... well, coming is not here.
Third, the Archetypes. As Zonk points out, the Mastermind is a unique experience. Overall, however, I think all the Villain ATs have a unique flavor. The least unique is probably the corruptor, which plays essentially like a defender with their power sets reversed. They don't do enough damage to
Early on that's true - you spend the first few levels fighting almost all villains. Later on, you run across a lot more good and neutral factions. Longbow and the like, as well as a lot of Elite Bosses which are basically hero builds. There's also the striking dockworkers on Sharkhead.
You must have been skipping content also, because there are some other early missions you fight heroes in - I think you're L6 or less when you go to defeat the sea witch, who is the first "hero" sort of enemy (Although she's only a boss at low levels, you encounter her again in the low 20s as the first actual "Hero" you fight (which is the CoV equivalent of an Archvillain)).
Once you get to the high teens and 20s you're also fighting Aeon corp, which is seedy but "legitimate" on the surface.
Not that your objection is wholly out of place. But I think it makes sense; villains fighting villains is going to draw a lot less hero/law enforcement heat than villains assaulting the innocent.
I too have Beta'd this game, and I was wholely unimpressed. I was among the many people to Beta and play CoH when it first came out. I had fun (before it got repetitive) but really yearned to be the villian. I remember shouting out in most of my groups "I want minions!" So, now that CoV beta is available, I'm finally getting my minions. But that's about it. CoV did not do a good job at making me feel like a villian. I just felt like a hero in a black costume, something I could have done in CoH. Everytime a member of the old CoH gangs would attack me, I was upset. "No! I'm a villian too! We should join forces to over throw the Patriot!" The game wouldn't even allow me to attack citizens. What kind of villian am I, if I can't pushish the people onece in a while? All is all, it's CoH with a different name, and a very small number of costume changes.
To conquer death, you only have to die
Are you people ever going to learn how to write? "allowing players to create their own superhero." No. It should be "allowing players to create their own superheroes." The plural noun "players" has to be matched with a plural noun: "superheroes". They're not all working on the same superhero. Why has fourth grade English become so damned challenging? Go ahead. Mod me down. I dare you.
If you really want a 4th grade English lesson...
You should always precede quotation marks with a comma. The second and third time you used them, you should have used parentheses. Also, since you're making specific corrections, it should read,"...has to be matched with the plural noun 'superheroes'." You're citing a specific replacement; the colon was unnecessary.
You can do better. See me after class.
My comparison of City of Villians, coming from World of Warcraft:
There are NO items, just experience points to get you additional powers. No goofy loot system.
Each spell gets a number of buff slots, and as you kill mobs you get buffs to apply to your powers. (i.e. +heal, +dmg, +accuracy) You can do `instances' (kill quests) with 1 person, 3 people or whatever. It will scale difficulty automatically and spawn more mobs. No sitting around waiting for people shouting LFG.
If your buddy just started the game at lvl 2, he can help you with lvl 10 quests by making him a sidekick.
He will then be 1 level lower then your level. Same thing, you can help a lvl 2 guy with his quests by being his "malefactor"
You can summon people across the map with just yourself. Travel powers kick butt, teleport, portal, fly, hover, the whole gambit.
The UI is streamlined, and took some time to get used to coming from WoW. I'm not sure entirely if I like the chat system yet though. Thats all I can think of for now.