Having spent most of the weekend actually out of character creation and playing the game, I'm now starting to get a much better idea of what City of Heroes is really like. Mind you - still couldn't resist making up another couple of heroes with the outstanding My-Little-Superhero Dress Up Playset they've tacked on the front of the thing.
Compelling stuff, and it's just as well you get so many character slots really. Clearly both CoH and CoV are an Alt-o-holics nightmare, and a certain degree of focus is needed to actually pick one and get on with it, but as mentioned before, I've only two weeks, so from here on in, I shall be continuing with The Tundra Templar, my magic tanker, described previous.
A quick run through the side-street tutorial and it was off to Atlas Park, and the beginning of the real game. This saw me arrive at a large plaza with a big statue of Atlas, complete with globe-on-shoulders, and into a quite remarkable scene. All about the place, below the statue, the plaza is vibrant with Superheroes. Most standing about chatting, some dancing or playing music via the quite elaborate emote system, a few training up levels with Ms Liberty, some buying and selling Enhancements at the other superhero trainers.
There's an air of indolent ease to the whole, and I find myself just standing about too, watching the assembled groups. Part of this could be attributed just having come from Auto Assault last game, where the most other people I saw in one place ever, was three, causing me to panic a bit and race away in confusion. Mostly though, it's the costumes and names.
I'd have to say that in all my long years of MMO wanderings, CoH easily wins the 'most customisable avatar' prize, by a country mile, and crucially, your look has nothing (or very little) to do with your stats. This is a wonderful way to do it, and ought to be added to more games. As far as I know, only Neocron 2 really does this as well - keeping it's stats on a hidden, invisible underlayer of 'body armour', and leaving the exterior visible look of the avatar a totally cosmetic choice. Guild Wars has taken recent steps toward this direction, by making any set of stats be added to any of the armour variants, via the Insignias, but I'd like to see more titles divorce the stats from the look.
Game after game, I go to the Main Bank, and am disappointed by the often very small range of possible character appearances; where everyone who is anyone, is all wearing the same set of 'Endgame Armour of Class-Specific Uberness', with the same textures, etc. I suppose the argument for this is that 'How else are you going to spot the noobs?', but that's exactly it. In CoH, you can't - not just by looking at someone anyway. Right from the word go, the player gets the whole dressing-up box to choose from, and enters the game someone unique as a result. Well - mostly unique anyway; you're still going to get the odd Batman or Spiderman knock-off, of course, but the point is that in no other game have I seen a newbie starting area with such a huge and pleasing diversity of avatars.
Even Second Life, a game almost entirely about avatar customisation (and some might say, very little else), doesn't come close, largely because to be unique there, you need to either a) be very good at Photoshop UV Map Texturing and actual clothing design concepts, or b) endure the Death of One Thousand Micropayments, in order to build up a respectable wardrobe, along with the associated hunting for shops to find it all.
Back in Atlas, there were angel-things, motorbikers from hell, half-man half robot hulks, pixies, fairies, ninjas, pimps, werewolves, manga-esque pointy-hair folk, and any number of muscular men and women in masks and spandex, all in a riot of colours, patterns and textures. Looking down at my Lv1 newbie self, I was pleased to see that I was as different to them, as they were to each other. Character creation as self-expression, in and of itself. Bravo!
The first couple of missions were easy enough, introducing me to a city with a lot of troubles. Seems like on every street corner, some Wrongdoing was taking place, and here's me with a licence to dispense vigilante justice with none of that piddling 'Due Process' or 'Innocent Until Proven Guilty' nonsense. Have at it, thug! Eat the Icy Fist of Justice! POW!
The city, as seen in Atlas Park and in subsequent zones, is very well done, creating a real feeling of a dense metropolis, huge in scale, and far more realistically proportioned than the sorts of city you find in other games. Often 'Cities' in games are actually about the same size, like for like, as a small village in real life, and purely exist to give the bank and trainers somewhere to be. Paragon City is huge, diverse in sub-district design, and most importantly, very busy, with literally scores of pedestrians, gang members, cars and police, all in sight at any one time, all doing their own thing. Still, as far as I can tell, there aren't many 'The Mountains of Mystery', 'The Swamplands of Sagaciousness' or 'The Jungles of Mak-A-Thak-Maar-Taaaaar-Tan' types of zone here - the City is the game, so one would expect it to be a well-realised and detailed construction, and it doesn't disappoint.
I'd barely gotten through the first 'go over there and beat on ten random thugs' mission, when the first group invite happened. I wasn't particularly flagged as LFG - it just popped up out of nowhere. Fair enough, I thought, and soon found myself part of an eight strong team of similarly low-leveled super-powered misfits, inside this warehouse mission area. It was that kind of chaotic gleeful fun you get when you know your group is obviously, and even -gasp- inefficiently overpowered for the job at hand, but you're having too much fun to care. Just as the cosmetic outfits are so varied, so too are the Powers - the basic hotkey superpower actions that make up the bulk of the gameplay.
I'd gone with a variety of Ice-based Armours and Melee Attacks, most of which cause some kind of taunt effect, so I just charged into the front and started smacking hoodlums with my icy fists and sword, but all around me, people were setting fire to stuff, poisoning people, unleashing boiling dark mists, sonic booming, mental stunning, healing, throwing really big rocks, using a variety of good old fashioned guns, axes, swords and fists, and I swear, one chap in a blue and brown bodysuit appeared to have a ... er ... photocopier as a pet, which he would periodically throw at the badguys. Mayhem, and I suspect the thugs were really not expecting a simple warehouse robbery to go quite that spectacularly wrong, to be honest.
And this seems to have set the pattern for my time there really - an almost non-stop succession of group invites, usually out of the blue, and so far, I think I've spent more time in groups, than solo. Very odd. I don't know what stops me from my usual habit of 'Thanks, but no thanks!' and then just vanishing off into the wilds, but it really does seem to be the 'done thing' here, more so than in other games I've played. Can't quite explain it, but I would imagine soloing would get quite samey very quickly, given the nature of the basic missioning and random 'jog-by' criminal beatdowns. It's quite clever really; because the players are so diverse in themselves, every group becomes fascinating and it's interesting just seeing who this new lot are and what they can do.
When not smacking people For Great Justice with total strangers, it's been a number of highly entertaining and amusing romps around the city with the newly formed 'Disconnectables', an elite crack team of superheroes consisting of: The Tundra Templar, a feisty arctic warrior maiden with the powers of The Glacier, and the wits to match; The Chained Reaction, a goggled pyrokinetic pyromaniac with a nasty habit of vomiting fire, causing it to rain fire, shooting balls of fire, and sometimes, just for variety, exploding in fiery shockwaves; the Mumblebee, a short, rotund and stripey dispenser of essential wisdom, healing, ineffable truths, fortune cookie insights and christmas-cracker puns, some of which are delivered with enough volume to shatter bones and liquefy brains, and the Slush Puppeh, a wandering iced-cordial treat purveyor who travels from town to town, righting wrongs, mostly by throwing said iced-cordial treats hard enough to drive badguys through walls, and still leave a nasty chemically aftertaste of blue raspberries in the mouths of all who would defy Justice!
Our first outing saw a number of laggy linkdeaths, hence the name, but that since seems to have settled down, and we're finding a good complementary style to the fighting, but more importantly, it's a lot of fun!
As several folks had warned me, the Tanker is well, just that - a tank. I do fairly low damage, making soloing take a long time for those occasions when I have tried it, but by god, can I go the distance! In many cases, where facing a cluster of white (even) and yellow con enemies, with all my Icy Defence powers running, I tend to naturally regenerate health faster than they can score damage on me. One of my ice auras acts as a short ranged snare, which also taunts, and we've developed a brutally simple technique. I leap into the middle of the cluster, hunker down and snare/taunt them all into a tight cluster around me, beating their fists at my icy cocoon. I sometimes even swing my icy sword, mostly for the look of it all. Then The Chained Reaction lets rip with a number of cluster-bomb type airstrikes, all from the unhampered hovering safety of the sky some feet away, neatly targeted on the big, frost-snared mob of ne'erdowells. It's working very well. The Tanker is hard work form a solo perspective, and perhaps less satisfying than just flying in and setting fire to everyone, or going all 'Agent Smith' with the Kung Fu, but as a group-based tank, (i.e. keeping the fragile DPS folk safe while they do their thing), it does exactly what it says on the description, and very well indeed. I've been a 1-60 Warrior in WoW, including some instancing work, and I've never come across a more dependable aggro control method. Simply me being near them annoys the hell out of them, which says a lot really...
Lots of fun so far. More about economies, enhancements, number anxiety, viability, medals, other zones and adventures with super-dooper zero-gravity jump packs, next time...