I was playing City of Heroes since Beta .. off and on for years and always came back to it . I will be honest it was one of the few games that actually had my attention compared to many who now wander trying to find one game to call home . I missed it and its funny all the good games we enjoyed seem to go by the way side
As for what I loved about the game... the community feeling. NO game that has come out since has given that same feeling of community that City of Heroes/Villains gave.
Pocket D.. Where Hero's And Villains can come together and take a break from thwarting each other and some times, Putting aside those differences to Save the World, TOGETHER.
I was in the second wave beta group and played the game right up to the F2P conversion. After that i sort of drifted away and only logged on from time to time.
But to this day no game have even come close to CoH when it comes to making "my own" characters. I have very fond memories of this game and while i wish the fan projects the best of luck... They have some mighty big shoes to fill.
I tip my hat to Jack, Rick and Matt and all the people who made thie game to alive and kick so much behind.
Originally posted by Fendel84M Agreed, some how Champions Online never felt as good as COX. I really can't explain why.
For me, it was the lack of freedom with my powers that remains to this day. But also there was a lack of community, even in NPC's.
I wanted control over what powers matter in what way in my arsenal. Despite being limited to the Marvel universecharacters, even Marvel Heroes does that better than CO. Given that the PnP Champions Universe pretty much allows you to build anything, it's a tragic irony.
As a long-time comic book and sci-fi fan, CoH was my virtual Home Away From Home. The pre-existing storylines were fun to experience (and by using different ATs or Powersets the same story could be experienced in many ways.)
Even at it's most aggravating (and I'm a soloist by natural temperment), the CoH community was a joy to belong to, whether running a regular team or just helping out a randomly mixed PUG.
I never gave much credence to the argument about the game's engine being horribly old and outdated, since the basic engine had been overhauled and updated quite a few times since it's premiere 10 years ago.
The game broke the "Super-Hero Curse" that had haunted so many other attempts in the years prior to it's release, and has yet to be matched, much less superceded by any of the current crop of pretenders to the throne which it had reigned upon for nearly a complete decade before being consigned to the large pile of NCSoft's cyber-trash games.
I'm looking forward to testing / evaluating the upcoming crop of sucessor programs being devised by the various fan-based development teams, and hope for the best in the near future.
But City of Heroes will always hold a special place in my heart for the fun times I had there whether running with real-life, close in-game friends, or complete strangers who needed a hand for a short time.
Like you, I was there from the beginning but migrated to City of Villains. CoV archetypes were somehow more dynamic. They had weaknesses that you needed to plug up, and that made them more interesting. CoH archetypes were more obviously powerhouses that didn't need much help.
Regardless, I loved the game. I loved planning out builds and character design, and slowly making things come to fruition. I played things first when accolades had to be obtained at the lowest level in case you exemp'd down (they later changed this so it didn't matter) and liked the fun mind-game of getting them at the lowest level possible.
All in all, I loved that the game let me do what *I* wanted to do, on *MY* own terms. Too many games seem to try to force me to play them "their way" but CoX let me do whatever I wanted to do and have fun with it.
I got a lifetime subscription to CO when it came out, but it was never the same. CO lacked the tension in designing builds. You just got some attack powers at first and then rounded them out with the same combination of overpowered buff powers you could use on all of your characters. The free-form design on CO made it, confusingly enough, much more homogeneous since all characters could use the overpowered-buff-powers-of-the-month on their bars. Also, CO wasn't as faithful to comic ideals in character look, to me at least.
I have high hopes for City of TItans but this seems like a Herculean task for a home-brew dev team to manage. I wish them luck and think they are very hard working and dedicated, but it just seems like so much to do...
I have fond memories of CoH, taking a group of friends and pulling hundreds of mobs to aoe down. It never took itself too seriously, but was difficult enough to keep you on your toes. Are there any games out right now that feel like they're from the same vein as CoH?
Bravo, Michael -- great article. This brought back some great memories of a game that's still close to my heart. I was one of those "Cradle to Grave" veteran CoH players: I was there during Beta, straight through until the lights went out. I still haven't found another game that's brought me as much fun and as many great friends as City of Heroes. And, sadly, probably never will.
Oh, for anyone who's interested who might not have seen this, Matt Miller has been writing a yearly set of City of Heroes Lore Q+A documents that delve into stuff that was planned but never finished (or cut short), or CoH lore background secrets that had never been revealed. A really fun (but bittersweet) read:
How i regret i never game this game more time then i did. I loved this game, but always subbed for one month every now and then. Back then i was still to much addicted to WoW and other games suffered greatly from it I really regret it, cause by the time i broke free from WoW and subbed to CoH/CoV they announced it was gonna be closed down.
I remember the first time i played it. CoV wasn't announced yet, and still my first Hero looked like a evil bad guy. Darknecro his name was, and my god i was amazed with how many options you had in creating your character. He looked so badass with chains around his wrists, spikes at his shoulder, a hood to cover his face and a awesome ballistic armor so he could take a punch.
I never got far into the game, but i loved it. Running around the city doing your thing. I tried Champions Online and i tried DC Universe. But those games miss a certain charm that CoH/CoV had to me. Maybe it feels like they are more limited then CoH/CoV. Champions Online also didn't run very well on my pc, I'm not sure if it was on my end or just the game being poorly optimized. Everything felt way to stiff and the framerate was horrible, no matter what graphic settings i used. And back then i could run Crysis on the highest settings without problems. Haven't tried it anymore the build i have now cause the game never felt like CoH/CoV. I can't really explain why both Champions as DC don't feel right, they play much like CoH/CoV, but it just doesn't work for me.
"What I don’t miss are the players who took Flurry and Jump Kick from Super Speed and Leaping, respectively. Anyone reading is sure to remember those guys from their ‘favorite’ PUGs. I cringed every time I saw a Jump Kick go off."
Oh, I can only imagine how much injury you suffered over people in an online videogame made *different power choices than you*
The problem with bad PUGs wasn't sub-optimal powers, it was people who went AFK half the mission without bothering to tell anyone, it was leeches standing at the door, it was the intentionally disruptive player who collected the last glowie in a mission you had set aside for farming. The snobbery over something as trivial as Flurry is what I won't miss.
One of the things which attracted me to it was that it was casual friendly. The combat system was easy, and missions could often be completed in 10 minutes (with a scrapper, and assuming they were in a reasonable map, not "defeat all enemies" in a cave or CoT map). So while I certainly had sessions of several hours, I could also get my fix quickly. In other games of the time 10 minutes was just a fraction of the time it took to get to the location of some of the missions. Yay for CoH travel powers. Well, okay, low level CoH wasn't any better, with The Hollows and Perez Park and no travel powers, but once you got to level 14 everything changed.
The costume creator was great, of course, but also the fact that you could create a hundred characters. I never did, but I never felt restricted. If a character didn't please me after a few levels, I could leave it around just in case I might better connect to it later. It really freed my imagination.
What possible kept me playing though was the story based gameplay. When other games asked me to kill some animals to help a lazy guy, CoH gave me story arcs. At level 40+ I even finally started feeling like a superhero.
I think that Marvel Heroes Online now is one constantly growing game. And in fact that it is only 10 months old but has so new features make the game really great. And also I think that the game has one of the best communities in the world of online games.
Loved City of Heroes, played it for six years off and on throughout its life. Hoping for the Titan project to carry it on, or at least a decent superhero mmo to come out, maybe I should check out champions just to get the superhero fix although I really don't like Cryptic at all. Rip City, maybe ncsoft will grow a brain one day and bring you back in some form.
Best character creator EVER in any game. Period. It was a game in itself.
It was an altaholics dream. The game had so much going for it in powersets and replayability.
Even though by today's standards it was "grindy", back then it was so "casual player" friendly that it was shocking. Coming from a game where you absolutely HAD to have a group being able to solo missions at any level was a revelation.
And travel powers? Talk about an eye opener after plodding across gigantic maps for hours with trains of mobs chasing you in other games.
Its the only game I ever played where I didn't find myself thinking, "Boy if it only had this it would be awesome." It had everything you wanted to do in it, including PvP if you wanted to PvP. There was always something to do.
In the end though, if you role played even in the most superficial way this game was made for you. Without an official role play server, Virtue became the de facto one. That's the home of my all time favorite character, Nox Noctivagus. He was the hero that opposed Lord Ignotus and his Order of the Fang (I beta tested CoV and spent a large amount of time there. Of the 50s I had in the game, two were Heros and five were Villians.
Over the course of my MMO career this is the game I kept coming back to over and over. When I was sick of another game and it's community I'd fire up CoH and I always had a blast with the game and the people playing it. It was one of the only games I've ever played where the community just took you as you were (Jump Kicks and all if that was your thing) and PuGing was actually a pleasurable way to meet new people because no one was too stressed out about getting this or that pixelated prize.
And that's the finest epitaph any game can have, I think.
Best, most helpful, welcoming and friendly community ever in any game, bar none.
/salute all those who played CoX.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
@Fendel - probably because the combat was just a lot clunkier. I really hated all the power-building and charge-and-release mechanics of their combat system. I also thought their writing was relatively bad (as in, just not at all memorable). Maybe it's that it never felt like there was any real progression. At L34 or so, my force character felt pretty much the same as he did at L6. CoH there were really power plateaus you could look forward too - often the L32 or L38 powers, or slotting your purple sets, or whatever. Later on, of course, the Incarnate powers. That whole system was a blast (except for the complete failure of the LFG tool).
I still can't believe the game died off the way it did. With such a rabid following of players - they could have at least used a skeleton crew to keep the lights on. They could have sold it on the cheap just as a gesture to fans.
I, at least, will never buy an NCsoft product, ever, and I ask other people not to also. It's one thing to axe Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault, games that, while they had fans, never really hit their stride. It's another to axe an 8+ year old game that was a huge hit and had a lot of pretty loyal players.
I 100% agree with you that nothing has taken the place of my beloved COX.
I can answer the article on one part though. The reason why the game never took off properly was because cryptic in the first year or even two of its life focused solely on powernurfs and tweaks. Instead of worrying about content they were too worried about that regen scrappers were too OP or that Fire Tanks and Blasters were too OP. Instead of bringing all skill sets up to a fun level they just nurfed into the ground some power sets so then something else took its place spines/dark scapper anyone!
It was not until NCSOFT took over the game that it did start to shine with the lead devs really striving forward with a great vision. Cryptic choked the game which it could never really survive. It was a niche product with no brand attachement.
If they focused on content content content (content being king), the game would be one of the continuing rising stars today.
Players really enjoyed having fun together but once their toys were broken they drifted off and rarely came back.
The game was still profitable, I do not understand why NCSOFT killed the game. Perhaps it was to streamline everything into GW2 and now Wildstar. Ill take my chanced with project titan over those 2.
I was looking through my closet the other day and found all my box sets from the game. Got a little sentimental about it. I loved the game.
No game has ever matched the teaming system in COH in my opinion. I had the best environment to team up with others, and have a good time questing with friends. I'm playing Elder Scrolls Online right now, and teaming is a nightmare with the phasing issues. Why can't game developers get this right! COH will always be my favorite game because of this one feature done right!
Comments
Remember City of Heroes?
Pepridge Farms remembers.
I was playing City of Heroes since Beta .. off and on for years and always came back to it . I will be honest it was one of the few games that actually had my attention compared to many who now wander trying to find one game to call home . I missed it and its funny all the good games we enjoyed seem to go by the way side
Did someone say, Wintery Slopes!
And Pocket D.
As for what I loved about the game... the community feeling. NO game that has come out since has given that same feeling of community that City of Heroes/Villains gave.
Pocket D.. Where Hero's And Villains can come together and take a break from thwarting each other and some times, Putting aside those differences to Save the World, TOGETHER.
i still miss it ... i loved just flying around ...and creating characters mixing powers.... /cry....
RIP COH
I was in the second wave beta group and played the game right up to the F2P conversion. After that i sort of drifted away and only logged on from time to time.
But to this day no game have even come close to CoH when it comes to making "my own" characters. I have very fond memories of this game and while i wish the fan projects the best of luck... They have some mighty big shoes to fill.
I tip my hat to Jack, Rick and Matt and all the people who made thie game to alive and kick so much behind.
May City of Heroes rest in peace.
This have been a good conversation
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
I still believe that NC shut down CoX in an attempt to shuffle players to GW2.
Boooooo to NC
For me, it was the lack of freedom with my powers that remains to this day. But also there was a lack of community, even in NPC's.
I wanted control over what powers matter in what way in my arsenal. Despite being limited to the Marvel universecharacters, even Marvel Heroes does that better than CO. Given that the PnP Champions Universe pretty much allows you to build anything, it's a tragic irony.
As a long-time comic book and sci-fi fan, CoH was my virtual Home Away From Home. The pre-existing storylines were fun to experience (and by using different ATs or Powersets the same story could be experienced in many ways.)
Even at it's most aggravating (and I'm a soloist by natural temperment), the CoH community was a joy to belong to, whether running a regular team or just helping out a randomly mixed PUG.
I never gave much credence to the argument about the game's engine being horribly old and outdated, since the basic engine had been overhauled and updated quite a few times since it's premiere 10 years ago.
The game broke the "Super-Hero Curse" that had haunted so many other attempts in the years prior to it's release, and has yet to be matched, much less superceded by any of the current crop of pretenders to the throne which it had reigned upon for nearly a complete decade before being consigned to the large pile of NCSoft's cyber-trash games.
I'm looking forward to testing / evaluating the upcoming crop of sucessor programs being devised by the various fan-based development teams, and hope for the best in the near future.
But City of Heroes will always hold a special place in my heart for the fun times I had there whether running with real-life, close in-game friends, or complete strangers who needed a hand for a short time.
Thanks for the article!
Like you, I was there from the beginning but migrated to City of Villains. CoV archetypes were somehow more dynamic. They had weaknesses that you needed to plug up, and that made them more interesting. CoH archetypes were more obviously powerhouses that didn't need much help.
Regardless, I loved the game. I loved planning out builds and character design, and slowly making things come to fruition. I played things first when accolades had to be obtained at the lowest level in case you exemp'd down (they later changed this so it didn't matter) and liked the fun mind-game of getting them at the lowest level possible.
All in all, I loved that the game let me do what *I* wanted to do, on *MY* own terms. Too many games seem to try to force me to play them "their way" but CoX let me do whatever I wanted to do and have fun with it.
I got a lifetime subscription to CO when it came out, but it was never the same. CO lacked the tension in designing builds. You just got some attack powers at first and then rounded them out with the same combination of overpowered buff powers you could use on all of your characters. The free-form design on CO made it, confusingly enough, much more homogeneous since all characters could use the overpowered-buff-powers-of-the-month on their bars. Also, CO wasn't as faithful to comic ideals in character look, to me at least.
I have high hopes for City of TItans but this seems like a Herculean task for a home-brew dev team to manage. I wish them luck and think they are very hard working and dedicated, but it just seems like so much to do...
Bravo, Michael -- great article. This brought back some great memories of a game that's still close to my heart. I was one of those "Cradle to Grave" veteran CoH players: I was there during Beta, straight through until the lights went out. I still haven't found another game that's brought me as much fun and as many great friends as City of Heroes. And, sadly, probably never will.
Oh, for anyone who's interested who might not have seen this, Matt Miller has been writing a yearly set of City of Heroes Lore Q+A documents that delve into stuff that was planned but never finished (or cut short), or CoH lore background secrets that had never been revealed. A really fun (but bittersweet) read:
2012 CoH Lore Q+A
2013 CoH Lore Q+A
2014 CoH Lore Q+A
Repeat Offenders, represent!
How i regret i never game this game more time then i did. I loved this game, but always subbed for one month every now and then. Back then i was still to much addicted to WoW and other games suffered greatly from it
I really regret it, cause by the time i broke free from WoW and subbed to CoH/CoV they announced it was gonna be closed down.
I remember the first time i played it. CoV wasn't announced yet, and still my first Hero looked like a evil bad guy. Darknecro his name was, and my god i was amazed with how many options you had in creating your character. He looked so badass with chains around his wrists, spikes at his shoulder, a hood to cover his face and a awesome ballistic armor so he could take a punch.
I never got far into the game, but i loved it. Running around the city doing your thing. I tried Champions Online and i tried DC Universe. But those games miss a certain charm that CoH/CoV had to me. Maybe it feels like they are more limited then CoH/CoV. Champions Online also didn't run very well on my pc, I'm not sure if it was on my end or just the game being poorly optimized. Everything felt way to stiff and the framerate was horrible, no matter what graphic settings i used. And back then i could run Crysis on the highest settings without problems. Haven't tried it anymore the build i have now cause the game never felt like CoH/CoV. I can't really explain why both Champions as DC don't feel right, they play much like CoH/CoV, but it just doesn't work for me.
"What I don’t miss are the players who took Flurry and Jump Kick from Super Speed and Leaping, respectively. Anyone reading is sure to remember those guys from their ‘favorite’ PUGs. I cringed every time I saw a Jump Kick go off."
Oh, I can only imagine how much injury you suffered over people in an online videogame made *different power choices than you*
The problem with bad PUGs wasn't sub-optimal powers, it was people who went AFK half the mission without bothering to tell anyone, it was leeches standing at the door, it was the intentionally disruptive player who collected the last glowie in a mission you had set aside for farming. The snobbery over something as trivial as Flurry is what I won't miss.
For me too CoH was the MMO I played the most.
One of the things which attracted me to it was that it was casual friendly. The combat system was easy, and missions could often be completed in 10 minutes (with a scrapper, and assuming they were in a reasonable map, not "defeat all enemies" in a cave or CoT map). So while I certainly had sessions of several hours, I could also get my fix quickly. In other games of the time 10 minutes was just a fraction of the time it took to get to the location of some of the missions. Yay for CoH travel powers. Well, okay, low level CoH wasn't any better, with The Hollows and Perez Park and no travel powers, but once you got to level 14 everything changed.
The costume creator was great, of course, but also the fact that you could create a hundred characters. I never did, but I never felt restricted. If a character didn't please me after a few levels, I could leave it around just in case I might better connect to it later. It really freed my imagination.
What possible kept me playing though was the story based gameplay. When other games asked me to kill some animals to help a lazy guy, CoH gave me story arcs. At level 40+ I even finally started feeling like a superhero.
I loved this game.
Made a City of Heroes send off video. I had 11 level 50 characters. Check it out!
NCSoft shut this down for no good reason with 14 servers still running. Sad sad day in gaming.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/CoH was my second MMO after DAoC.
Best character creator EVER in any game. Period. It was a game in itself.
It was an altaholics dream. The game had so much going for it in powersets and replayability.
Even though by today's standards it was "grindy", back then it was so "casual player" friendly that it was shocking. Coming from a game where you absolutely HAD to have a group being able to solo missions at any level was a revelation.
And travel powers? Talk about an eye opener after plodding across gigantic maps for hours with trains of mobs chasing you in other games.
Its the only game I ever played where I didn't find myself thinking, "Boy if it only had this it would be awesome." It had everything you wanted to do in it, including PvP if you wanted to PvP. There was always something to do.
In the end though, if you role played even in the most superficial way this game was made for you. Without an official role play server, Virtue became the de facto one. That's the home of my all time favorite character, Nox Noctivagus. He was the hero that opposed Lord Ignotus and his Order of the Fang (I beta tested CoV and spent a large amount of time there. Of the 50s I had in the game, two were Heros and five were Villians.
Over the course of my MMO career this is the game I kept coming back to over and over. When I was sick of another game and it's community I'd fire up CoH and I always had a blast with the game and the people playing it. It was one of the only games I've ever played where the community just took you as you were (Jump Kicks and all if that was your thing) and PuGing was actually a pleasurable way to meet new people because no one was too stressed out about getting this or that pixelated prize.
And that's the finest epitaph any game can have, I think.
Best, most helpful, welcoming and friendly community ever in any game, bar none.
/salute all those who played CoX.
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
I still can't believe the game died off the way it did. With such a rabid following of players - they could have at least used a skeleton crew to keep the lights on. They could have sold it on the cheap just as a gesture to fans.
I, at least, will never buy an NCsoft product, ever, and I ask other people not to also. It's one thing to axe Tabula Rasa or Auto Assault, games that, while they had fans, never really hit their stride. It's another to axe an 8+ year old game that was a huge hit and had a lot of pretty loyal players.
I 100% agree with you that nothing has taken the place of my beloved COX.
I can answer the article on one part though. The reason why the game never took off properly was because cryptic in the first year or even two of its life focused solely on powernurfs and tweaks. Instead of worrying about content they were too worried about that regen scrappers were too OP or that Fire Tanks and Blasters were too OP. Instead of bringing all skill sets up to a fun level they just nurfed into the ground some power sets so then something else took its place spines/dark scapper anyone!
It was not until NCSOFT took over the game that it did start to shine with the lead devs really striving forward with a great vision. Cryptic choked the game which it could never really survive. It was a niche product with no brand attachement.
If they focused on content content content (content being king), the game would be one of the continuing rising stars today.
Players really enjoyed having fun together but once their toys were broken they drifted off and rarely came back.
The game was still profitable, I do not understand why NCSOFT killed the game. Perhaps it was to streamline everything into GW2 and now Wildstar. Ill take my chanced with project titan over those 2.
I was looking through my closet the other day and found all my box sets from the game. Got a little sentimental about it. I loved the game.
No game has ever matched the teaming system in COH in my opinion. I had the best environment to team up with others, and have a good time questing with friends. I'm playing Elder Scrolls Online right now, and teaming is a nightmare with the phasing issues. Why can't game developers get this right! COH will always be my favorite game because of this one feature done right!