Retaliatory criticism of CoH

[Creole Ned]

Since I offered a criticism of WoW over in the WoW forum, it is in the interest of fair play that I now offer a criticism of City of Heroes. This will demonstrate that I hate all games equally.

Boy, those warehouse missions can get repetitive.

Thank you for your time!

[Tai]

sure does have a nice costume generator though :)

[Q]

I think I've spent almost as much time in the CoH/CoV costume generator as in the game itself!

[Paladin]

Since my critisim of CoH/CoV in the other thread didn't go over well with Ned, I'll move it here. I feel like I've said this before, but more discussion never hurts. :)

City of Heroes did several things very, very right, and I'll give them credit for it:

The travel powers are excellent, probably the most fun powers of the game in fact.

The costume/character generator is top notch. I suspect just playing with that in the beta was enough to convince alot of the first day adopters to buy the game. It positively spanks every other character appearance customization in any game I've ever played, single player or multi.

Dividing enemies into specific power groups (The Circle of Thorns, Hellions, etc), which I felt really set the comic book tone of the game for me. The sheer number of groups, even from the launch, was impressive as well.

The variety of power sets, and powers within those sets, was cool. Although having said that, I think there were some power sets (especially the sonic ones) which they didn't make distinct enough or balance well enough to make them viable for playing.

Now, the bad in my opinion:

The single worst problem the game has is repetativeness. The missions are all built from the same limited number of tilesets. Having at least some missions in custom instances would have been nice, at least for the Task Forces. I remember Circle of Thorns having a huge, unique underground base, but that's about all I remember as being unique. The WOW moments were too few and far between (like the first time we got ambushed by that giant clockwork after finishing a door mission in one of the early Task Forces).

Second, I never felt heroic playing CoH/CoV. I started out fighting gang members with clubs and guns, and by level 35 I was still getting beat up by gang members with guns and clubs. The game just made them hit harder and have more hit points. I think I said this someplace else, but it just would have been so much cooler if as your levels went up, the game kept throwing more and more low level minions into the missions specifically so you could plow through them like the insignificant ants that they were. Instead, we get more guys with guns who, except for a minor costume variation, look just like those piddly minions but actually match us. It just makes no logical sense to me. A more logical progression in making bad guys which LOOK more powerful to go along with the power increase would help. Or even adding bunches of the low level minions, but giving them weapon upgrades so they could hurt heroes (while remaining fragile targets once they are attacked), would have been a nicer touch. But being able to get to a point where most of what we faced was fodder (xp yielding fodder, though) would have made leveling up FEEL like more and more of an improvement beyond just unlocking new powers.

Kind of going along with that was the complete and utter lack of integration of powers with the game world. Telekinesis is the best example of this. Instead of grabbing and throwing whatever objects were handy in the world, the telekinesis character would summon into existance a pool table, big saw blade or wrecked car to hurl the targetted baddie. I realize that the kind of city destroying carnage movie and comic book superheroes can wreak cannot yet be done in a MMO, but even little touches like if a villian got hurled into a wall with a knockback power, putting a decal on the wall behind him so it looked like the impact cracked and spiderwebbed the surface of the wall would have been nice. Anything to add to the illusion of superpowers being powerful.

My last complaint is the travel powers, which are indeed wonderful for travelling, but they don't integrate into combat. They give no offensive benefit in combat, and they generally allow you to run away from anything too. When I first got the game and was reading about the powers, I saw Fly and and I saw powers that were described as being able to "knock flying targets out of the air", and I had visions of super against super battling high over the city in aerial ballets of destruction, like Superman II (without the environmental destruction). The closest we ever got to that was the first time we got ambushed by the flying robots of the Fifth Column over Talos Island. Even with the addition of other villian groups with flying abilities, the dream of zone-wide aerial dogfights never happened. In fact, outdoor flying battles were among the easiest to run away from because your directions for escape were so less limited than indoors.

In essence, I feel that the scale of the fights is primarily what is missing from the game at higher levels. Fights at level 35 feel just like the fights at level 5, there are just more powers to pick from and bigger numbers flashing across the screen. There are few fights you can't run from, there are no fights against hordes which are singlely insignificant but still difficult and dangerous in huge numbers, and no battles which rage across entire zones. Remember early on before they "fixed" it, how exciting it was to be in a low level area and suddenly find a high level mob there for no apparent reason (usually a high level ambush, it turned out), and those things would hang around forever until enough high-level heroes could be gathered to defeat it? They'd just slaughter any lowbie character who got in it's way. That was fun. That's what I want, and I want my heroes to be on the giving end of the ass whupping against a bunch of lowbie minions from time to time as well.

[Patton]

I agree with everything you said, Pal.

I loved CoH and CoV. I'm a comic book dork at heart, and so I was drawn to it.

But you're right. Leveling up and getting more powers did not make me feel more powerful. In fact, it made me feel weaker. The enemies I was fighting looked the same, but I was getting my ass whooped.

I'm sorry, but if I have energy shooting out of my hands that can knock people off buildings or into cars or whatever, I don't want some putz with baggy pants, a bandana, and an uzi taking me down.

[Circuit]

I'm not sure what either of you are talking about, actually. The difficulty gets WAY lower the more you level up. In fact, I think that's one of CoH/V's main flaws. It's almost too easy.