Wolf Bonne

I was in the very early beta for CO, had high expectations, it was some of the same people behind it. It became apparent to me how thrown together CO felt, it was as though they made the whole thing within a year of maybe using half scrapped content, it was also apparent that they weren't as tuned into what CoH vets wanted out of a next gen superhero game with missions to kill wolves and originally starting in either a desert or a winter wilderness setting. The interesting thing to me is that it uses an upgraded version of the CoH engine, and there was for a brief moment some design docs that leaked for a City of Heroes 2, but no way to confirm how real that is. I don't hold a grudge against CO, I'm indifferent to it and occasionally check in on it to see what's up out of curiosity and boredom.Just thought I'd put that here. When I saw that the CoH source code existed and there was a private server somewhere in the wild, I had to step back and ask myself what it was that made this game special to me, what made it work. Cuz, as much as I love City of Heroes and have many fond memories, I also disliked a lot about it. I get critical when I invest a chunk of my life into something, I suppose. Anyway, here are some thoughts: It's funny playing this with my partner (her first time) and finding out just how slow and plotting it is to solo and duo. You're limited in the early game with power selection. You can't hit crap reliably. There is a lot that makes you weak, but that is also a bit of the charm. Harder doesn't mean better, it's a different experience, a game that came out pre World of Warcraft, pre the idea that you should be able to solo at all in an MMO. My partner and I are playing a Blaster and Controller respectfully, we just hit the late teens in Praetoria, we struggled through each mission, but something clicked at 18 when I started to get the hang of the game's nuances again. Line of Sight pulling is a massive thing, stacking our -To Hit debuffs, utilizing stealth abilities to run past groups, syncing up our steps to effortlessly go from one mission to the next. We felt powerful and both useful. There was a real since of progression through our characters gaining power, and us gaining power through learning. City of Heroes is an old, clunky game, with a clunky control/camera setup that feels stiff, movement that feels a bit off these days, it's got some cruft. But it also has a lot of ideas and mechanics that are largely unique to City of Heroes and pre WoW MMO's, the whole mission system is inspired by Anarchy Online's kiosk system, if I recall. Having regular teams of up to 7 other people in a group with you was novel in 2004, it's still novel now. Each person with different powers and costumes, some having written biographies you can read while you wait for people to run across the zone to get inside the mission. And speaking of other players and their creative characters, CoH is a fully original IP. It's heavily based on Champions, the table top game, but it's wholly unique (though I do know they did buy the Champions IP when making CO). They had legal issues with Marvel, but there really wasn't a middle man telling them what they could or could not do. Every member of every villain group has a short piece of lore attached to them, a whole rogues gallery of arch villains and heroes. Writing done by a small, intimate team, some of whom did both the writing and the actual zone design. Not to hype CoH's writing, it has its limitations, I think it handles certain topics and politics with a bit of flippancy, and sometimes it can be pretty dry in the grand scheme, but it's still cool that it's all original, all done by a fairly small team over 8 or so years. Also as a random aside, I am totally enjoying the cel shaded visual options that make the game pop, imo. They're well worth messing around with. It's also wild to me that people think CoH is realistic looking, I always assumed it wanted to have a comic book-like appearance, but were always a bit limited, and the stacking of visual options over the years made the game look increasingly weirder to me, and harder to run with the aging 32bit systems.