City of Champions

[Eoraptor]

Okay, so I'm trying to figure this out... but I can't quite put it into words, nor can I quite put my finger on what "it" is precisely.

Many of us who played and loved City of Heroes because it was a superhero RPG, largely shunned Cryptic Entertainment's followup effort "Champions Online."

Even now, with the death of Paragon City, many of us play CO only begrudgingly it seems.

Now, I can identify some things I don't care for, such as the RPG-inspired numbers management system, and the cheesey voice acting which stands out because there is so little of it and it is of only middling quality. (the limited character archetypes bums me too, but that's because I can't pay-for-play)

but none of these things should explain why it is that I pine so dearly for Paragon City but would be fairly unconcerned if Millenium City were to burn. The basic writing and story telling is of roughly the same level in both games... and yet, one game compels me to want it back, and to want to explore more... the other is only on my hard drive at this point because it's margnally less depressing than the ghost towns of SEGS and Icon.

What about you? How does C.O. make you feel? do you like it or now? and can you articulate that?

[LaughingAlex]

I like the freeform system, but hate the archtypes.  I hate the way support is handled, so limited are the variety of powers that crowd control.  People who say it exists never played a game with 10+ powersets DEDICATED to crowd control.  They're definition of crowd control seems to be "Well if your a mind player your supposed to be crowd control, if your crowd control your supposed to be a mind player."

And it's sickening.

Understand, I like the rpers who don't focus so much on that, but I find people just don't get variety.  They don't understand it at all in reality when it comes to CO.  They're definition of balance has become the very thing they didn't want to begin with, the "you play the way I want to, you don't make the champion you want." mentality has taken such root in CO that I feel ashamed of whats happened to it.  I feel like the holy trinity has taken root in CO in the worst way; people feel balance is you HAVE to have X for a team, which is honestly the worst form of fake balance i've ever seen in my life.

Understand at the same time, I enjoy CO itself, because you can make quite a few different types of characters in it.  But like the original poster says, it's a bitter relationship now.  If the game got the foundary i'd appreciate it, but the thing I'd need from it is being able to introduce real difficulty, which brings me to the next problem of CO, it's TO EASY.

Mobs do very little damage in CO, even on elite mode a decent leveled toon can demolish everything fast enough without losing much health.  Then I get trolled for doing that when I complain on the forums about the weakness of the mobs saying "well don't min max.".  I shouldn't have to gimp my character to get a chalange in a game, if anything I should have to min/max a little to meet the highest challenge levels I feel.  Then you have the idiots who think the game has to be so stupidly easy because of the "casual player base", when in reality the casual player base only plays lower difficulty settings anyways when they find higher settings are harder, they rarely care and are not discouraged from playing just cause they cannot play the highest settings.  The highest difficulties should be for advanced players, but it's as if they cater even elite mode to mediocre equiped archtypes.  CoX had demonic spiders, but those demonic spiders not only had counters to them, but allowed enough challenge to keep the game interesting.

[houtex]

I quite simply can't stand it for a variety of reasons.  So I don't play it.  Simple as that.  Interface was the number one insane driving thing, followed by the look, then quite a few other things that I won't get into.

I'm glad others like it, but much like 'what kind of car should I drive' is never a question to ask anyone else*, C.O. and me don't get along.

/*- the obvious answer is a custom short bus.  Those are cool.

[ukaserex]

Well - let me see if I can articulate this clearly. Who knows, maybe I'll even understand it myself.
With CoH, there was a great deal to learn, and I learned a little bit at first, and really, at the games closing, I was only just scratching the surface of figuring out how to get the most out of my characters, given my clumsy fingers and a distaste of using a mouse to click on a power to execute the attack.

With Champions, the interface is ...well, it's just different. Not hugely so, but I can't use my keys to travel the same way, so movement is not second nature yet. It will take a great deal of time to relearn movement in such a way that moving is second nature, instead of having to look down at the keyboard to see which key to press.

Also - the very largest difference for me is the lack of the LB channel(Liberty's badging/taskforce/iTrial/all around teaming channel) from CoH. Even though there was a great deal of drama on the channel at times, it was like a very large supergroup, in which you could pick and choose who you wanted to join you for whatever task or trial you had in mind. I realize that there's a couple of CoH channels in Champions, but I won't know those names the same way that I knew them in LB or even LFA, and a couple of the other private channels. (and thus far, I've only played a couple of characters to level 6, and I think I've only done one instanced door mission to date so I havent' even learned anything about how to slot a power, or even if there is slotting. I see a grid, but I've yet to figure out its purpose. The terminology is different, and the in-game explanations must have been boring or something, because after 8 years of doing things one way, I think I'm forgetting to look for the answers.

CoH also had an incredible amount of blind invites, or even tells before an invite - and Champions doesn't appear to have any kind of teaming option - which is fine, because I'd be quite useless, as I still need to go through the tutorial another few times, or spend hours in the champions forums to pick up various tips and such. After all, that's how I finally learned what hold magnification was, and why it was different across archtypes. One just doesn't typically pick up things like that casually playing. That kind of information must be sought after, searched out. And, since I no longer have 1000's of hours invested in the game, nor any badges (that I know of), there really isn't any compelling reason to play.
All of my characters that I created were made to make my main a better character. I made the brutes to farm so my main could afford all the goodies and tidbits to make him as good as I could make him. I made the controllers to better understand hold magnification and the chaos that handling pets provides so that I could better understand the archtype as a whole and thus make my blaster a better blaster. Same with the other ATs - learn them so I could play my blaster better. Just a shame I'm more than just a little obtuse and need to prove things to myself rather than just read what someone said and take their word for it. I was just at that point where I figured out I knew a whole lot less than I thought I did. The idea of putting all that time into a character who is coming into existence well after the games creation and missing out on the beginning stages, well, there's really no motivation to put all that time in. The game just isn't fun without the familiarity of CoH. At least, not yet. Maybe in the future, as I figure more things out, I'll like it more.

[Kyriani]

I tried 3 or 4 times to play CO... every time i uninstall it... last time I got past the tutorial and was able to fly around a bit.

I can't stand the aesthetic. Everything looks like cartoony exaggerated crap... and the fact that its a "newer" game than city of heroes and actually looks WORSE (to me at least) says a great deal about how I'm going to react to it. My city of heroes characters look amazing, heroic, imposing, detailed, more like a model and less like a cartoon. Sure we didnt have individual fingers or moving eyes/mouths, but coh characters still look miles away BETTER (imo) than anything you can make in CO.

Here's a comparison of the aesthetic issue:

My namesake character Kyriani from COH                                                                                 VS
VS

Now tell me which looks better?

Just that fact alone makes it nearly impossible for me to tolerate looking at the game for extended periods of time. If I dont like the way my character looks my investment in the game is going nowhere. I couldnt even play skyrim till I got mods that made it so I could make a character that didnt like over 40 with dirt all over him if that tells you anything about me.

Gameplay in CO... its different. I wont say better or worse than COH cause it's just so different. I didnt care for the lack of CC in the sense of COH. I also didnt care for the builders/spenders gameplay or the fact that pretty much every character had a similar power allotment/setup.

Basically its just not for me and I end up uninstalling it. I want COH back and I'll keep lurking here until the day someone finally posts a private server I can play on or a solo play client I can run on my own. Until then I'll keep on wishing and hoping and praying that those smarter-than-me-coder-types never give up working on bringing COH back.

[Brou]

That's okay. This game is its own thing. It will never seek to be CoH. You'll be disappointed if you come looking for that.

But I know people will try.

[JaguarX]

Well CO and COX I found, to be two different games. Tow of the same genre, but different in so many ways, I'm not sure if either is better or worse or the same. They are just different for me.

There are many things COX got that I liked. The character creation default seemed better but with CO the character default can look weird but once I got the hang of the sliders and proportions thing, I can create way more different looks than I had in COX. Some characters I couldn't figure out how to make in COX I was able to finally make in CO.

I do like freeform a lot, makes COX seems a bit too restricted to me.

COX combat system to me was good and got the job done, that is until I played CO. Faster, not much recharge, not much hit rolls, more enjoyable to me. Way better than *whiff* *whiff*  *whiff* Hmmm says here I have 95% chance to hit.  Then later, Hey they added streak breaker. *whiff* *streak breaker* *whiff* streak breaker *whiff* streak breaker*. If tha twas an actual comic or movie people would probably be howling for their money back if say the Avengers missed their attacks half the time while trying to hit a stationary box.


COX did have more leveling paths and more things to do. In CO, it's Poe again? jeebus. not sure if I want to make another toon only to fight Poe for the thousandth time.

COX-Hey hey, the devs are working on some good stuff. Man cant wait for updates. Man, look at these dev notes.
 CO-*crickets* crickets* Crickets* "Hello? Anyone work here? I heard there were rumors of a dev hanging around? Hello?"

But I think they could improve CO in many ways but probably wont make it any closer to COX or anything. While at first I had quizzacle thoughts of why they didn't jump on the opportunity when COX closed, but then I realized it would have been a waste. Many ex coxers are there only as a pit stop so it would be a total waste to build and cater to them if they are going to be gone anyways in the next years with risk of alienating the people who like CO for what it is and not improving on the good stuff that made CO, well, CO. But one thing that helped when I went ot CO was remember it's champions online not COX 2 or a supposed to be COX. In hindsight it's a good thing too for me. As after playing CO for a while and trying out COX again, fond out the little niggles that I used to just "deal with" ended up more like "how the pancake did I put up with this? Really? AM I playing a game or slot machines?"

[Todogut]

Many of us who played and loved City of Heroes because it was a superhero RPG, largely shunned Cryptic Entertainment's followup effort "Champions Online."

My cousin's son gifted me with two codes for a free trial to try out Champions Online back when it was in beta testing. My City of Heroes friend and I used the codes to play CO free for a month.

We recreated our favorite CoH characters in CO. I liked the way my main toon, Red Dragon, looked. I could create a dragon mask in CO's costume maker that was better than anything I could come up with in CoH.

My friend and I explored the Millennium City tutorial and the Canadian Wilderness and Desert crisis zones. But, long before the free month was up, we returned to CoH. One night, while playing CoH, we discussed CO: We agreed, it's a good game; but, we didn't feel compelled to keep playing. CoH offered so much more in terms of systems, content, and play experience because it was so much more of a mature and developed game. CO felt like it was just starting out and needed much more development.

We hadn't yet exhausted CoH's voluminous content, so why switch to a new game with growing pains?

Even now, with the death of Paragon City, many of us play CO only begrudgingly it seems.... How does C.O. make you feel? do you like it or no<t>? and can you articulate that?

Of course. If CoH had not been taken away, I would not have returned to CO. I like superheroes better than fantasy or sci-fi, and CO is pretty good. It just needs to be further developed.

Sadly, it appears that Cryptic/Perfect World does not intend to put much development into CO. Even the recent announcement of a Seattle-based office that's devoted to CO doesn't give me much hope for the game's future. CO seems to be a training ground for new hires, while Cryptic's major resources are allocated to Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and at least one unannounced future project.

Still, CO is fun enough for me. I've played through almost all of its content, but now I skip the vast majority of the standard missions because I consider them dull--lots of "defeat X number of Y villains" and "collect X number of Y objects". I continue to play alerts, adventure packs, comic series, crisis zones, lairs, and nemesis missions.

CO had a tortured development:
- Cryptic had been working on Marvel Universe Online, which was canceled. Reportedly, some of this aborted development was redirected into CO.
- CO was originally to be published by 2K Games, then Atari, and now Perfect World.
- A version for the Xbox 360 hardware platform was in development and was hyped as the first MMO for console gaming; however, Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert stated that the console version was indefinitely delayed by Microsoft's indecision on how to implement MMOs across Xbox Live, and eventually the Xbox 360 version was canceled.

The way I see it, Cryptic had to make CO different from CoH. They succeeded in creating an action-oriented MMO with kinetic combat similar to console gaming. I like the fun, light-hearted tone of the content and art (some would say "cheesy"); but, I'm an old-school fan of cheesy, silver-age comic books. (Modern comics have long since passed by me.)

It's too bad that, due to business pressures, Cryptic had to largely abandon CO and move on to new properties. CO's unfulfilled promise and potential makes me feel appreciation for CoH.

Still, with CoH gone, I'm enjoying CO, and I root for the game's circumstance to improve. Give us the Foundry!

But, I hold almost no expectations for CO's future. I'm just happy to play the parts that I like.

Edit: I should add, play for free. CO's free-to-play system is great. Free players get a limited number of characters and limited choices for archetypes; but, otherwise, you pretty much get the whole play experience including end-game. Plus, I can earn Questionite while having fun playing the game, exchange it for Zen, and then buy whatever I want in the Z-store including additional character slots, archetypes, costume sets, travel powers, hideouts, and even a freeform character slot.

For me, CO is not developed enough to be worthy of a paid subscription; but, it's good enough to play for free.^*

_{*Probably, most MMO players would not agree that it's good enough--not even for free.}

[Dollhouse]

I played CO from beta through the first six months after the go-live...and for another three months or so when CoH shuttered. There are things I like a lot about the game: the combat gameplay, the fact that I could simulate a shooter-style reticule in the interface, some entertaining travel powers, etc. However, the game's caricature-like (read: cheesy) approach to the genre was a complete immersion-killer.  Sure, it's a silly genre, to be honest...but they took it much too far. It's like the game was trying to be "The Tick Online," only without the clever writing...

There were some other issues, like the very linear progression, relatively limited content, poor teaming mechanics, and so forth...but for me the dealbreaker was always that the heavy cheese factor made the game non-immersive.

[Thunder Glove]

Incomplete powersets that restricted concepts.  In CoH, if I wanted a Fire-based character, I could be anything but a Stalker or Mastermind - Brute, Blaster, Dominator, Controller, Corruptor, Defender, etc.  One theme, but many different ways to execute that theme.  In CO, if I want a Fire-based character, then I can shoot fire, period.  That severely limits my character concepts.

A buggy character creator that would tell me I had access to parts when I didn't (only letting me know when I was done painstakingly making a character and tried to enter the game).  It would just dump me back to the character select screen with "Creation failed!"

A focus on stats and gear rather than individual powers.  In CoH, I could improve my Invulnerability powers directly by slotting them.  In CO, I had to hope that I found a piece of gear that enhanced the right stat that would in turn enhance my Invulnerability.

An extensive number of "collect 10 bear ass" missions.  I much preferred CoH's instanced missions.  CO has a few instanced missions, but it's much less common.

No interesting low-level content (the Purple Gang arc was it), and no way to easily skip past it (like DFB).  Combined with...

All low-level characters feel samey.  When you first get to the Ren Center, you have an energy builder, one "real" attack, and maybe a passive, and it's exactly the same for all characters.  It's nothing like the difference between, say, a Scrapper, a Mastermind, and a Controller, which are all completely different right out of the gate.  Combine that with the lack of different low-level story arcs (and the costume bug), and I simply didn't see the point in making multiple characters, unlike my severe Altitis in CoH.

An important one: I never felt "in control" in CO the way I did in CoH.  In CoH, I was much more in control of the flow of the fights, thanks to much more powerful hard and soft mezzes, much more powerful mez protection, and much much more powerful defenses in general.  I hated the Block mechanic, forcing me to have split-second timing if I didn't want to go sailing across the room or get frozen in place, flailing on the Z key in a panic.  (If any of the "Spiritual successors" want to hook me, this is the aspect of CoH they most have to duplicate)

Bizarre and frustrating difficulty spikes. I'd be going along, spending hours playing through an arc, tearing through Henchmen and Villains like tissue paper, then I'd hit a brick wall in the form of a Master Villain I couldn't beat at all.  (One comes to mind immediately - in Resistance, I couldn't beat Warden Arcane at all.  I was playing my Silver character, a Glacier, and I just couldn't damage her enough before she just healed herself to full health, over and over and over and over again.  I wound up never finishing Resistance)

Finally:  No.  Native.  Mac.  Version.

Don't get me wrong; it did do a lot of things I liked (I particularly liked the way it handled respecs compared to CoH), and I've been feeling lately like I might go back and give it another chance, if only because, despite its flaws, every other game I've tried is worse, especially the part about feeling in control.

Edited to add even more reasons I stopped playing CO.

[InOnePiece]

I don't want to bash CO, because I know lots of people love it. I'm just not one. Like someone else said, I've found I'm a COH player, not an MMO player. I like CO much better than DCUO or any other super hero MMO out there I've found so far.

I like the fact that in CO your character name is unique to you, not the entire server. I also like the fact that you can jump in with a random team and quickly beat up a big bad guy and automatically disband. Some of the scenery is interesting. I also like how big the zones are, though they are a pain to traverse at times.

What I don't like, at all, is the need to manually block stuff - in fact, I usually just don't bother, much to my detriment. Or, having to hold a key down during combat to charge a power before executing it. Or, having to worry as healer about whether I am targeting a teammate or myself. I haven't found a way to make macros to target teammates, at least not in the quick team up missions, and honestly I don't care enough to research it much more than I have. I also don't like worrying about the stats that much - I'm not a min/maxer or anything, I just want to play a fun character. My primary in COH was an Emp/Elec, for crying out loud.

My tolerance for the players is much worse, too. I was on a quick team one time and the only thing any player said was "HEAL!", and I just lost interest. That sort of thing happened in COH, too, but there was usually discussion before, discussion after, etc. And, most times, you were fine to say back to them that they might want to reconsider trying to solo a mob.

I did play CO one time with someone who was very nice and very helpful, but she was definitely the exception. By and large my experience has been that they're not a particularly friendly group. So much so that I usually just solo, which gets boring.

I checked last night, and it's been 62 days since I played my CO primary, and almost a year since I played my other character. I almost went into the game to play a bit, but I just couldn't do it.

I really miss COH, and I fear that even if it does come back it won't be the same.

[SARobb]

I really miss COH, and I fear that even if it does come back it won't be the same.

Yeah... this.   

[JaguarX]

Bizarre and frustrating difficulty spikes. I'd be going along, spending hours playing through an arc, tearing through Henchmen and Villains like tissue paper, then I'd hit a brick wall in the form of a Master Villain I couldn't beat at all.  (One comes to mind immediately - in Resistance, I couldn't beat Warden Arcane at all.  I was playing my Silver character, a Glacier, and I just couldn't damage her enough before she just healed herself to full health, over and over and over and over again.  I wound up never finishing Resistance)

i][/size]

On the Resistance, when you fought Warden Arcana and she was healing multiple times, was this after she  summoned the black ghost thing? I think this is the last portion of the the fight. First it's normal fight, you damage her a bit, she then summons a rift, beat of the minions that spawn to defeat (close) the rift, then the fight starts again, get her about 1/3 of the way down, she summons the black demon thing. And then each time ya get her about 1/3 way down (about 3-5 times I forgot to count yesterday), she heal herself back to full health off this demon. The demon gets smaller and smaller until she use it all up. Then you can beat her senseless.

Unless you ran into a bug. Mechaniste someone bugs out in the same manner.

[MWRuger]

Most of my complaints/problems have been covered above but here are a few that really bother me:

Lockboxes - Most of the rewards/drops that are significant are in Socrates Data Caches. These little jewels contain random gear, mods, costume pieces, drifter salvage. To open you have to have a Cosmic Key of Power. Which do not drop ever, under any circumstance and can only be purchased in the C-Store for Zen.

That's right, you have to spend real world money to open the drops you've won. You can grind through some daily missions and get questionite, which you can then refine and then convert into zen. It's not a great exchange rate and you will probably get more drops than you can afford keys to open.

Also, there is some kind of purple legendary gear that scales to your level so most people hold off on opening them until level 35 up.

Multiple Currencies - I thought COH had too many and CO is actually worse.

First, there are three different resource types: Global, National and Local, think 100 dollar bills, dollar bills and pennies.

Then there are these:
Recognition
Questionite
Drifter Salvage
Acclaim (PVP pay)
Cryptic Points (Essentially Zen)
Nemesis Tokens
Perk Points (obsolete)
Snake Gulch Snakebucks
UNITY Intelligence
UNITY Merits
UNTIL Tokens

Just too many types. Makes it very hard to build up a stack of any particular kind.

I am playing and since this is my first toon to play through in a few years everything is still new. But once I 've done my main, then what? It is better than nothing, but it could so much better. I hope it;s gets some dev love or I will run out of things I want to do.

[Thunder Glove]

On the Resistance, when you fought Warden Arcana and she was healing multiple times, was this after she  summoned the black ghost thing? I think this is the last portion of the the fight. First it's normal fight, you damage her a bit, she then summons a rift, beat of the minions that spawn to defeat (close) the rift, then the fight starts again, get her about 1/3 of the way down, she summons the black demon thing. And then each time ya get her about 1/3 way down (about 3-5 times I forgot to count yesterday), she heal herself back to full health off this demon. The demon gets smaller and smaller until she use it all up. Then you can beat her senseless.

Unless you ran into a bug. Mechaniste someone bugs out in the same manner.

I tried to ask for help, but nobody seemed to know the exact specifics.  I kept getting killed anyway.  The combination of the Warden and her pet Demon attacking me from both sides wore me down even with Invulnerability (since Invuln just reduces damage, it doesn't negate it.  And with no heals and no natural regen, they still wore me down)

... that's another thing I miss.  CO characters seem to be built entirely for straight-up offense, with defenses, buffs, heals, and pets all being distant second, and crowd control trailing far behind those.  It's very difficult if not impossible to get the sort of layered defenses that you could easily get on a CoH character (especially if you want to stick to a character theme, and not just pick random powers from unrelated frameworks), and tricks like distracting foes with pets or knocking them down or lowering their damage barely work.  So when there's an enemy that straight-up offense can't beat, I die.

[JaguarX]

I tried to ask for help, but nobody seemed to know the exact specifics.  I kept getting killed anyway.  The combination of the Warden and her pet Demon attacking me from both sides wore me down even with Invulnerability (since Invuln just reduces damage, it doesn't negate it.  And with no heals and no natural regen, they still wore me down)

... that's another thing I miss.  CO characters seem to be built entirely for straight-up offense, with defenses, buffs, heals, and pets all being distant second, and crowd control trailing far behind those.  It's very difficult if not impossible to get the sort of layered defenses that you could easily get on a CoH character (especially if you want to stick to a character theme, and not just pick random powers from unrelated frameworks), and tricks like distracting foes with pets or knocking them down or lowering their damage barely work.  So when there's an enemy that straight-up offense can't beat, I die.

Playing an AT?

Freeform give you more ability to choose more defense, especially picking a heal. Think Power armor set where invul is located have two that category alone. Sounds like picking up a heal, if you can, would do wonders for you.

[Xev]

One of the toughest things for me to get over at first was ... No insps (in CO). Insp combining/spamming in CoH could be highly entertaining.

I had a hard time with the different graphics models in CO at first, too, and now that I've tweaked the settings and played long enough to get used to things I have the opposite reaction. The graphics are very immersive, for me, but I generally judge them in combat. I'm ok with CO babes now too, which is one of those reversals  : ) I thought the mobs were *way* too easy at first in CO but that fades with levels if you do challenging things. I'm ok with the lighthearted/cheesy approach they take to .. everything.

I judge the game mainly by: do I feel cool and am I having fun. Check, and check. *shrug* I'm easy, ask Ukase.

I've played The Mind to 40 and Radiant to.. 20ish (no other support toons) and if this is any indication how the rest of the support toons function in CO, I can see why people who prefer playing support toons, like I mainly have in the past but I'm still in my melee/dps phase lately, are disappointed with CO. This is one place where CoH dominates CO so far in my experience. There are a lot of powerful and creative options for playing a support toon in CoH in comparison to what I've experienced so far in CO. Melee & DPS (especially) & Tanking (in my limited experience so far, and I know there are gripes) has been just peachy.

Heya Ukase  : ) I miss LB too although I'm not sure how much it misses me.

[Cinnder]

I played for 4 days when the longing for a superhero game got really bad after the shutdown.  4 days is all I could stand.  I have 3 basic but all-permeating complaints:

1)  Combat.  Despite the claim on their web site that CO has "intelligent combat" I found it to be mainly twitchy and something that rewards spamming attacks rather than thoughtful tactics.  CoX got me used to doing a lot of thinking in combat, and this actually hurt my chances when I came up against tough bosses.  When I got stuck on the one that splits into 3 copies of itself, I eventually looked online for hints, and the most common suggestion was to just spam my best AoE.  And this worked!  Literally just clicking my AoE attack over and over till the enemy was defeated.  That, combined with the "energy builder" attack made combat extremely boring to me.  I want something for my brain to do when fighting, not just my mouse finger.

2) It's caricature nature, as Dollhouse said above.  It's like they are constantly saying, "We think this is a stupid genre, don't you?" I never felt that way in CoX.  Well, except when doing the Twinshot missions...

3) As others have mentioned, lockboxes you have to pay to open.

In summary, the whole game just feels to me like it was designed by a 12-yr-old boy with ADD -- from the combat to the "humour" to the civilian women all looking like pole dancers.  I still can't believe this game came out after CoX; it seems like a step backwards in so many ways.

[Eoraptor]

I am definitely seeing a pattern developing here, and it is one I agree with. While the graphics ENGINE is superior to that found in CoX, (I do like that you can make actual facial expressions and not just choose from static face graphics) the graphic STYLE negates much of those advancements by choosing kitsch over quality.

Likewise, the comments others have made about the playstyle. So much of the game is geared towards melee and offense. (particularly in the freebie mode) a distant second is healing and blasting powers (note the tutorial is very badly crafted for playing a blaster or a blapper) and crowd control/pets/support is all but nonexistent.

Worse though is that once you choose an archetype, that's that. if you chose archer at the start, you're an archer for the entire run of the character. the powers don't tree or diversify as you level up, they just rotate to more complex variations on the theme. in CoH, if you chose to start as an archer, you could always then later add in crowd control or healing abilities and transform the makeup of your character completely within just ten or twenty levels.

and yes, the monetary system is so completely FUBAR it goes beyond description; I had to go and find a third party guide just to explain the thing to me and I am still not entirely clear on things. and the for-pay boxes are just an insult to every player out there. if I earn something in game, give it to me. or don't give it to me. don't give it to me contingent on a ransom demand.

in short... City of Heroes seems to have been a hero MMORPG which was geared towards role playing and story telling and character creation, in other words, more in the old school. CO seems to be an MMO (no RPG) geared towards grinding and spiff earning and first-to-the-top like Warcraft.

but that's just IMhO and YMMV

[Kaiser Tarantula]

I.  Despise.  Archetypes.

One of the nice things about CoH was that its 'archetypes', while they dictated what powers were available to you and when, they weren't the sole deciding factor in what powers are available and when.  Your powersets chosen also affected things (and a dark/fire brute was very different from a martial arts/willpower brute), and even then, you have some choice about when to take which powers, and you could even skip powers in your powerset entirely if you wished.  And this was a free feature, part of CoH's most basic gameplay.

CO doesn't allow that.  Your archetype determines everything - from the powers you have to the powers you can have.  It locks in most of your choices for you.  Your only customization options when it comes to powers, as a silver player are a couple of binary choices between two powers, and your choice of travel powers.  Moreover, half the archetypes are locked behind a pay-wall - compared to CoH that only locked two.

Freeform slots (which basically cost more than subscribing to the game unless purchased with zen earned from Q), and subscribing (so that all of your characters can be freeform), alleviate this, but still - CO is charging me for stuff COH would give me for frickin' free.

They say, "oh, archetypes are a great way to learn the game and archetype characters are viable even at high levels."  The first claim is dubious, the second one is a flat-out lie.  I took a Glacier archetype and a Grimoire archetype to the level cap, and there was never a point where my Glacier was a more effective tank than a hybrid freeform.  My Grimoire character fared a little better due to my ability to jump into different roles as the team needed them, but more often than not I was only appreciated on teams where all the bases were already covered.

No archetype character will ever be central to a team where freeforms are present.  After a while playing an archetype, you hit a wall where there's no way to improve.  At that point, it's just not worth it to continue.