City of Heroes vs. Champions Online - The Data

[Rathulfr]

19 hours ago, Blastit said:

I do rather like the blocking system, though. I also liked that you could tweak CO controls to the point of essentially fighting by using a targeting reticle instead of tab targeting. Made for a very dynamic feeling.

You just explained why I loathe Champions Online.  I prefer tab-targeting, and despise blocking systems.

[Rathulfr]

19 hours ago, Ultimo said:

CO has better graphics, but somehow is less realistic and immersive than CoH.  I can't even put my finger on why.

Because CO utilizes more "realistic" human proportions found in many standard game engines, instead of the highly-stylized super-heroic proportions employed by comic books.  My characters in CO always seemed like "shlubs": too short, too slouchy, too paunchy, too pudgy, by default.  I had to really tweak the body sliders to get them to look more heroic.

 

The human models in CoH represent the "idealized" human form, and are reminiscent of Silver Age comic books (circa 1960-1990), which I love.  I often just leave the body sliders alone when I created characters in CoH, because they don't usually need much tweaking at all, IMO.

 

Edited March 21, 2020 by Rathulfr

[Frostbiter]

There are some things that CO does right. Gap closers for melee, the Powerhouse and the way you can respec for free out of your last power choice, and the open-raid Cosmic Monsters ( but not the cosmic currency) are all things done pretty well. The Powerhouse feature that lets you try different powers before you finally pick one is sorely need in CoH. We have far more powers than CO.

[_NOPE_]

Guess what, @Ultimo, you already CAN do a lot of what you're talking about in-game. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It's called Architect Entertainment. You can make a nemesis, you can make missions where you're a REAL villain and work towards global domination. The tools are there. Sure, you can't make changes to the ACTUAL game world, but with AE you can "pretend" any storyline that you wish. 

[nightroarer]

26 minutes ago, The Philotic Knight said:

Guess what, @Ultimo, you already CAN do a lot of what you're talking about in-game. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It's called Architect Entertainment. You can make a nemesis, you can make missions where you're a REAL villain and work towards global domination. The tools are there. Sure, you can't make changes to the ACTUAL game world, but with AE you can "pretend" any storyline that you wish. 

What "pretend?" I treat good stories in AE just the same as any official missions. I just use a different teleporter to get there. :)

[_NOPE_]

I mean, technically, isn't ALL of this pretend? 

[Jaguaratron]

Jack Emmert always hated what COH became, CO was his do-over and it was poor, a parody of a game which tries and fails to be funny with a clunky build and power system that feels hemmed in and small at every corner.

[Jaguaratron]

1 hour ago, Rathulfr said:

Because CO utilizes more "realistic" human proportions found in many standard game engines, instead of the highly-stylized super-heroic proportions employed by comic books.  My characters in CO always seemed like "shlubs": too short, too slouchy, too paunchy, too pudgy, by default.  I had to really tweak the body sliders to get them to look more heroic.

 

The human models in CoH represent the "idealized" human form, and are reminiscent of Silver Age comic books (circa 1960-1990), which I love.  I often just leave the body sliders alone when I created characters in CoH, because they don't usually need much tweaking at all, IMO.

 

You may want to look at real people sometime..... also note how they move then tell me CO uses more "realistic" proportions...

[_NOPE_]

I always thought the CO characters looked more like apes than people. 

[Frostbiter]

No, there's definitely something off with COs character proportions. Of course CoH still suffers from mitten-hands.

[Sovera]

Mentioning how powers don't have cooldowns reminded how my builds there were always just one ST attack and one AoE. At one time I just played with their equivalent of our KO Blow. And lets face it, it hits like a truck, it does KU, it has no cooldown, why wouldn't we do a build that is nothing more than slamming it?

 

...which wasn't as fun as all that. 1111111111111111111 until thing is dead. 222222222222222 until everything has been AoEd down. Possibly 333333333333 to recover HP if having worked in a leech power that did damage while it also healed.

 

I tried coming back to it, and I would really really like the more complete models (ACTUAL FINGERS!) but the community and game weren't interesting, and the nickel and diming, the thumbing of noses for F2P players to collect 8k of currency if they wasted two hours doing dailies while things cost 100k was just nah.

[Ultimo]

The problem I found most in CO was that there was simply nothing to do, even in groups.  90% of the time, you would enter a mission and some guy with super speed would outrun everyone and attack the nearest group of bad guys with one of a few types of attacks (usually a toxic cloud or spinning dual pistols), instantly killing everything.  He would then do the same at the next group and the next, then finally kill the boss off before anyone else could even GET to him.

 

I did like being able to test builds and powers before locking them in.  THAT was very valuable, and I'd love to see something like that here.

[Solarverse]

The game failed for me when you could use the same AoE over and over and over (with no recharge time) and do more DPS than anyone else on the team,. The game also got lost with me when you queued for some action and it only lasted a couple of minutes. The game also died with me when zone teaming suddenly stopped in favor of the mini-game queue system. It was great in concept, but simply was not very well thought out.

 

P.S. I asked for Energy Blast powers from the beginning in that game, and here we are today, still, without Energy Blasts. Add on top of that the bug with Force's Aura power that depletes and does not recharge for as long as you are using powers BUG, that was introduced over 6 years ago (or longer) and still exists today. I honestly could not find a single reason to continue playing it...even before CoH came back out.

 

And Like @The Philotic Knight said, you simply just can't reinvent the wheel.

[Blastit]

3 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

I always thought the CO characters looked more like apes than people. 

❗ People are apes. ❗

[GetRidOfWires]

CO's costume system and freeform character building are great. The ability to try out powers before you permanently take them is also great. The story lines frankly suck, are uninteresting, and haven't been updated in years. After you hit top level the only thing to do is the Ape, the Dino and the giant in the Canadian wilderness. If you can get in the zone, which is limited. Over and over, until you'd rather play Superman 64.

 

CoH makes you feel like a hero. CO makes you feel like an MMORPG player.

[DR_Mechano]

5 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

I always thought the CO characters looked more like apes than people. 

When playing CO the FIRST thing I would do on making a new character would always be to shorten the arms because of this. Mind you in CoH the first thing I do on female characters is shorten the legs because I swear the leg proportions are off in CoH, especially if you make a max height female character it feels like they become 80% leg.

[Ultimo]

For me, it's less the characters than the environment.  Paragon City just seems more "real" than Millenium, though I can't say why.

[@Ghost]

The body proportions and art style always wigged me out about CO, though the faces bothered me the most.

 

Infinite customization to bolt on as much junk as you could possibly imagine to a vaguely humanoid shape, but unfortunately the face budget was misallocated to yet more lootboxes.

[Blackfeather]

8 hours ago, Rathulfr said:

tYou just explained why I loathe Champions Online.  I prefer tab-targeting, and despise blocking systems.

I much prefer tab targeting myself - my reflexes can't handle something more dynamic! 😅

[nightroarer]

7 hours ago, The Philotic Knight said:

I mean, technically, isn't ALL of this pretend? 

Wait, what???

 

Oh, great! Now you've blown my reality matrix.

[The Bobby Llama]

2 hours ago, GetRidOfWires said:

After you hit top level the only thing to do is the Ape, the Dino and the giant in the Canadian wilderness. If you can get in the zone, which is limited. Over and over, until you'd rather play Superman 64.

Sounds like you haven't played in a long time.  They've added some more max level stuff to do - a small Qliphoth (i.e. hell dimension) zone and a pretty tough dungeon, Teleios Ascended.  Possibly more since I stopped playing.

 

 It's not enough to really call an endgame, but much like in CoH, the real endgame is making more alts. 😁

2 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

When playing CO the FIRST thing I would do on making a new character would always be to shorten the arms because of this. Mind you in CoH the first thing I do on female characters is shorten the legs because I swear the leg proportions are off in CoH, especially if you make a max height female character it feels like they become 80% leg.

Oh yeah, people have freaky long legs in CoH.  If you ever pick the Average body slider preset, it puts them at nearly the minimum length.  As for CO, I don't get the guy who said the proportions are more realistic there.  I was never able to make a male character that didn't look like a mutant.

[Narrator]

In case anyone has never seen what the Cryptic Marvel game was supposed to be like:

 

 

Edited March 22, 2020 by Narrator

[kiramon]

On 3/20/2020 at 10:02 PM, biostem said:

My thoughts, (in no particular order):

 

1. CO's freeform system is a double-edged sword - I find myself constantly tempted to just create tankmages all the time.

 

2. Because CO has you take an "energy builder" attack, you're basically shoehorned into a fairly boring attack, until you have enough energy to fire off the attack you actually want to use, (not always a big deal, but it's there).

 

3. With very few powers actually having a cooldown, it isn't uncommon that you pad out your build or otherwise take other powers, until you can get the actual attack power you want, and just spam it over and over again.

 

4. While the block mechanic is quite nice, I find it rarely rewarding to take an additional power to replace the default block.  There are a few that provide a bonus while you are using other attack powers, but they tend to cost a lot of advantage points to obtain said benefit.

 

5. There are many fantastic costume options and a wide ability to customize your character, but regular human faces just look off and the facial expressions system they have look awful.

 

6. Mez effects are nearly useless in CO.

 

7. Being able to target yourself, like point 1 above, is a double-edged sword;  Buffing abilities are generally balanced with this in mind, and rarely last more than a few seconds, and provide buff values that aren't that significant.

 

8. I love the variety of travel power available, but their function, (like how rocket boots have a faster in-combat & top speed, but need to ramp-up to their maximum speeds, while others can be charged to instantly put you at their maximum, but are slower in combat), means that if you want faster in-combat speeds, you must select certain animations.

 

I'm sure there are more, but I'll leave it at this for now...

1. Is a meta game problem. They didn’t have enough side effects/ additional effects on powers so they were really easy to min max

 

4. Is pretty wrong, as most builds take a block power. They’re really strong/ which is really boring for the non min maxxer

 

6. this was a huge miss... they went from controllers being one of the most unique and loved classes in MMO history (next to Illusionists in EQ really) to useless abilities even if they weren’t horrible to use (too fast paced)

 

which leads into 

7: they also neglected buffs as a whole- so their supports became basically “healers” only... 

 

I mean my bard character has to spend money to get an item that gave 3% damage just to have a “singing” ability... 

[Sovera]

14 hours ago, DR_Mechano said:

When playing CO the FIRST thing I would do on making a new character would always be to shorten the arms because of this. Mind you in CoH the first thing I do on female characters is shorten the legs because I swear the leg proportions are off in CoH, especially if you make a max height female character it feels like they become 80% leg.

To me it's increasing the waist. If it's not maxed it doesn't look right to me.

 

I have a friend with whom we play a game of 'spot the thirsty guy' by pointing characters with min slider waist and max slider breasts.

[Dreamboat]

6 minutes ago, Sovera said:

To me it's increasing the waist.

I always do this.