City of Heroes Going Rogue With New Expansion

NCSoft has announced a major expansion to City of Heroes, titled Going Rogue, which they say will "blur the line between heroes and villains." It is set in Praetoria, a parallel universe governed by an evil version of Statesman, the game's lead hero. As part of a new alignment system, "hero characters can become villains and vice versa, enabling hero archetypes to cross over to the Rogue Isles and villain archetypes to experience Paragon City." Brian Clayton of Paragon Studios said, "For years, players could choose between playing as a hero or a villain. Now we will present a third, malleable path where players can be affected by the results of their actions."

Comments

Re:Reliable Entertainment

[Endo13]

I don't PvP and generally view PvP as an anti-social behavior, or at least an anti-social player base.

I more or less agree. But then, you don't *have* to PvP in either game if you don't want to.

Mostly what I see about travel in WoW is that it's some kind of punishing time sink. I rather like being about to move so freely about the game world as I can in CoX. Christ. Players in WoW can't even walk faster.

The difference though is that the world you're walking through in WoW is actually interesting.

CoX also has the Mission Architect now, which is the ultimate creative outlet for players with such urges, and we have the ability to redesign our avatars, right down to the size, shape and placement of our noses.

That beats fishing any day.

Huh? CoX has always had the ability to redesign avatars right down to the size, shape and placement of noses. And MA, while a great idea, is unfortunately so limited in CoX it almost doesn't matter. Really, the only real benefit of the MA is the fact that you can keep doing missions right in the same building, without ever needing to go anywhere. Now, if they let players design mission maps like you can SG bases, and place items and baddies exactly where you want them, and have some options for new/different objectives, you would be right. Is it better than fishing in WoW? Perhaps. Neither one is going to appeal to everyone. The point though is that Fishing is lite content that you can do in a few minutes of spare time, that requires little thought.

Also, CoX has about 100,000 subscribers and an astonishingly loyal player base; unlike a lot of MMOs, people who subscribe tend to stay subscribed, while Fantasy MMO players frequently switch from whatever game has the most scantily clad elves or whatever.

You may be right about the amount of subscribers, but honestly I don't think so. The last time I saw numbers on current subscribers, it was a lot lower than I had expected. I somewhat agree with you about the loyal player base. WoW also has a fairly loyal player base.

To make something clear, I don't play either game any more. I've become bored with both. But I have to admit, it took a lot more hours to get bored with WoW. CoX was always the "other" MMO for me; a game that's great fun for a few hours at a stretch here and there as a break from other more serious games.