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[Column] City of Heroes: Thank You, City of Heroes
BillMurphy
Former Managing EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 4,565
The 10th anniversary of City of Heroes’ release came and went with not much more than a whisper. The game is dead and so the usual jubilation and of course, events to go along with such a momentous occasion, were nowhere to be found. It’s a bittersweet thing to reflect upon. There just wasn’t anything like City of Heroes, and to this day, there still isn’t.
Read more of Michael Bitton's Thank You, City of Heroes.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Comments
I was really holding out hope the studio would be able to make a sequel and get a second chance to make a first impression. City of Heroes got sort of swallowed up in the World of Warcraft hype train in 2004, I think.
I hope the fan projects do well, too! But I really just wish I could login and play my characters again.
Out of all the MMORPGs I've played, this still stands as my all time favorite. I played the last week of beta and was heart broken that the beta ended just before I was able to get my first travel power. After the game's release, even though I would often sojourn to others (WoW and LotRO being prominent), City of Heroes was the game that I always went back to, year after year.
Quite honestly, I put most of the blame for myself not being satisfied with MMORPGs on CoH. Not only is it the only MMORPG I've ever played where I genuinely enjoyed the combat system, but it also had pretty much everything a roleplayer like myself could ever want. While I know that Champions Online was made by several of the same people, and is similar in many ways, for some reason it just doesn't click the way CoH did.
RIP, City of Heroes. You were a true hero to the genre.
"What do you miss most about City of Heroes?"
To me it was the innovation. Cryptic (and later Paragon) brought so many great and new stuff in it, that still today they're among my favourite teams just because of the memories of CoH / CoV. Powersets, almost limitless character looks and customisation, exemplar / sidekick system, Architect (no matter how "alpha-stage" it was compared to STO's Foundry), day jobs, task forces, heck even the police radio...
There's a much better compilation of those above, in a vid which was made after the shutdown: http://youtu.be/pGcFC197rfQ
(from about 2:00)
edit: khm... just red the question... I ment with the above, innovation was the strongest part, obviously that's not what I miss about CoH... my bad, sorry, not native english here
so, what I miss the most, I think my characters. I remade most of them in CO (yep, I was a renegade who switched to CO after that launched), but still, the CoH ones were the original.
I played since early beta, this amazing game for an altoholic. The combinations and suits you could make up... I have no idea how many characters I made. But when I played, probably an average of one new character a day. But I never got hooked as a hero. It was fun, but not... it could not keep me hooked. Then... City of Villains. NOW I was home. THAT was the game I was longing for the whole time. I resubbed immediatly, built me a robot Mastermind, with my little robot minions, and started creating havoc. It might not have been a deep game, a complex game, a (insert popular phrase here) game, but it was a FUN game. Incredibly fun. Jump down into a group of dogooders and innocent bystanders, then mayhem. No long exhausting fights with one mob standing in the wilderness mashing buttons like a crazy person, but take on 5-10 people and monsters and Kapoow, Blam blam, Whoooosh, Thud, Kabooooom and everything flies! Just pure unobstructed fun.
"This is not a game to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown with great force"
Never played this but many of the people on the old Venus Rising forum who I got along well with, originally came from CoH.
No one ever told me this game had such a large erotic community behind the scenes.
I have to admit that out of all the MMO's I have played this game was one I came back to Time and Time again. One of the first games, if not THE first game, with a daunting amount of character customization. Hell I can remember making characters taking hours cause I couldn't figure out a look I loved or found to many...
One of the few games where I made a ton of characters and tried some many different power sets. It was so great, my friend and I would always go back to that game when we were both bored with other games and play together.
The grind did get annoying at times, but in the end the game was just sooooo much FUN that it really took your mind off of it.
I have played the other Super Hero MMO's that are out there and none of them compare at all. CoH was such an innovation and I really wish they would make a sequel or at least something very close to it. That's something I would sub again whether I had another sub or not, the game was the good.
RIP CoH, we miss you!
CoH just couldn't compare to the WoW raiding and end game of that time.
I will never forget the joys of being a Dominator in one of those bank missions when your dork team mistakenly set off too many alarms.
There was a HUGE feeling of satisfaction when you know you played your Dom right to help control what would have been a horrible trap.
I miss spending hours upon hours with the character editor trying out new color schemes and styles.
The grouping in that game is what made it so special. So many different combinations would result in such different group dynamics.
I wish they would come out with a part two. I've yet to experience a game where PUGs were regularly as fun as in CoH/CoV.
The thing I loved most about CoH was it's ability to let you design a concept and run with it, then make a fully functional and viable character. In some cases it might have taken them a while to fully expand the power bases to do it, but they did keep expanding them. I had my cyborg sniper, with technology Rifle/Gadgets blaster. My non-super archer with natural trickshot/archery defender. My librarian by day axe wielding super woman by night with magic invulnerability/axe tanker. Then they kept adding more options. Willpower, Dual Wield, Shield, Psyonics, Pistols.
The story of my archer took her from being a normal texas girl who was very athletic and good with a bow to being a mutant and developing strong telekinetic abilities. She was abducted my red caps and in escaping learned arms training, when she came out I had added identical versions of her with willpower/dual wield tanker and sword/shield scrapper. Eventually she developed her powers and skills enough to become archery/telekinetic blaster. She never had any movement powers, athletics was her movement, and while it made her slower on the streets she was fast in a mission and could jump from building to building and across a 4 lane highway in a single bound. It wasn't until her last power on all four versions that she developed enough to pick herself up and learned hover.
I've never played another game where these stories really work across multiple characters. Also the shear amount of customization was always a treat. Not being beholden to what gear you pick up and making your character be literally anything you want and to look however you want was amazing.
CoH had things I have yet to find in other MMOs. Things like decent character customization, too many MMOs are gear oriented so your character is constantly changing and you have to work to keep your look consistent. Even then most of the time you can't alter more than the face because each individual piece of gear just HAS to be shown just right.
The story arc missions in CoH were better too. I went to Oroborus several times to do them over again. Lately the missions just feel same-y with little variation on your enemies. There is also the setting itself. I remember flying through Steel Canyon and the gambling district in Rogue Isles (it's own little Vegas Strip).
I'd still be playing it if it wasn't shut down.
I'm not saying it was perfect. The crafting could have been done better but then few MMOs have done crafting right. Besides given how much variety there are in superheroes/villains it's hard to have crafting period. I thought they did a good job with what they had (but it could be better).
Nope, we'll probably never see a game like it again and the world is poorer for it.
I looved this game with a passion, up until they broke the Invuln tanks. I still played it with a gusto, but not as much as I had before the patch.
This was one of the first games where both myself and my wife played together, and later on, my Daughter started playing as well.
This was probably one of the best MMO's out in the world ( aside from Earth & Beyond) and its sad that its all gone
CoH is tied for first place with WoW as my favorite mmorpg of all time. What CoH lacked in raiding and pvp, it made up for with an impressively robust character creation system and fun achievements.
No other game has had as extensive a character creation system, overall, as CoH/CoV.
I also loved the bio feature for characters, though it was limited. You could click on someone's character and read a small story about who that character was. Some people really put effort into this feature, and made sure their character's bio, look, and power set all matched. I really miss this.
I remember fight clubs on top of skyscrapers.
I remember the dread of seeing an energy melee/fire Blaster super speeding towards me and the golden flare followed by the crimson burst of dual powerups heralding the imminent beatdown I was about to receive lol.
I miss my Necro/Dark Mastermind. Fear, wiff..wiff...disembowl+headsplitter crit.
I miss my EM/INV brute. Nigh invulnerable to most content.
I miss my stalker. PLACATE! swoosh.
I miss a lot of things about CoH/CoV. It was my first mmorpg and will always stand in the front line of mmorpg's for me.
HEEEYYYYYYY!!!! I took Jump Kick a couple of times and never regretted it.
Some players just don't understand.
Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.
that feeling when you have a new hero idea to create and take through the game, then you realize it's impossible now
though they sort of shot themselves in the foot by introducing MI, allowing all players to bypass the majority of the content through power leveling
Mystery Bounty
This is the only mmo that's shut down that I really feel died before it's time. In the end I may not have been able to play every month but it was a game that I always loved to come back to. The combat, crafting, farming was all fun and the community was one of the best. It's the only mmo I miss playing, the only one I wasn't done with and can't go back to.
Even if the fan projects actually launch it will never be the same. My heroes wont be there and my memories of the game will still be about another game.
The thing I miss most about CoH is the sheer variety it offered. I'm one of those people for whom leveling alts is my entire endgame, and no MMO has ever offered the enormity of choices that CoH did. Not only were each of the archetypes entirely different, but each of the powersets within those archetypes were entirely different. A dark/dark defender played entirely different than a FF/Radiation defender. It was glorious.
As great as the ability customization was (especially later with crafted enhancements), the avatar customization may have been even better. Soooo many costume options, hundreds of badges you could find (each of which gave you a title to display), the ability to create your own backstory and display it in your character panel, the addition of day jobs/secret identities, and so on and so on.
The thing that made the biggest impression on me, though, was the joy of PUGging in CoH. I'm a solo player; I'm fairly certain that I was born with wiring in my brain that guaranteed I'd never like grouping. City of Heroes is the only game that challenged that belief. I loooved joining PUGs in CoH, and a lot of that had to do with the build variety. You could succeed with almost any mixture of characters, and you never really knew what mixture you were going to get. Every group was its own thing, sometimes they were incredibly successful, sometimes they were horrible failures, but they were always interesting.
CoH wasn't my first love in MMOs, it wasn't my last, it wasn't the game I played the longest, but it was the game I always went back to. It saddens me that I'll never be able to go back to it again.
8 man defender statesman tf, priceless.
coh really was set apart from the rest, looking back now- dated perhaps, but when ncsoft decided to milk it for all its worth they should have invested in a new engine and kickstarted teh game right back up.
nothing has compared to it, in the same way nothing rvr compares to daoc, city of heroes brought so much more to a 'class' that 7 years on we were still playing the 'class' and finding new cool stuff to pull off
I loved COX...
Joined a super group called "Heroes are us". Name was hookey but it was my #1 Guild experience ever!
+1 on all those who claim it was their fav of all time...