Where did you go post-Sunset?

[Skyhawke]

I tried Champions as well, got to the "end" and just got bored. Same with DCUO. I pretty much just moved to console gaming after that. 

 

5 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

Seems a lot of you went to Champs and DCUO. Nobody mentioned the Marvel MMO written by Bendis based on Diablo. Personally I couldn't ever get into it. I did try pretty well all the MMOs mentioned but I never found something as good as CoH.

 

Marvel Heroes Omega! I played the hell outta that one on Xbox and even spent money on it! I was bummed when that one sunset. 

[Rishidian]

I tried Champions, but couldn't get into it. Too close and too different.

MWO was too complex for me (not that coordinated to be able to rotate in 1 direction and move in another). 

Tried D&DO - It was OK to start, but I found you had to do the same mission 3 times on 3 different settings, which means 9 times, for some reason I can't remember.  It didn't scratch my role playing itch. 

I have an account with SW:TOR that I keep alive in case I get CoX burnout.  It's different enough to require a little relearning, and it satisfies my Star Wars cravings.

 

I also have been known to play Fallout 4 when I feel someone needs killing.

 

These are all from the dark times without CoX.

[WanderingAries]

I think I did some DCO for like a day or two. That Marvel MMO that died not too long after beta (?). Some Destiny (console). And a lot of Single Player stuff at that point. I really don't do MP / MMO and especially not on PC anymore. Partially because controllers are less painful to use and most of the MP games online have kinda crap people (Read: Jerks) playing them.

[BrandX]

Champions, WildStar, Blade & Soul, TERA and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

 

 

[WumpusRat]

I've played dozens of MMOs over the years. There are a few I still play from time to time, or that I'll drift off of one game and start playing again as my "main" MMO.

 

Currently I'm playing EQ2 again, and still log in to DDO and LotRO now and then when they come out with new content. 

[ZekeStenzland]

A lot of WoW and FFXIV. 
 

A fair amount of Conan, Secret Worlds, Lord of the Rings Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, EverQuest, and some Russian MMO where you play a divinity or immortal or something. 
 

Dipped a toe into Path of Exile and Diablo III. 
 

I still log in to FFXIV, EQ, GW2, ESO, and LotRO on occasion. I miss WoW’s graphics, but for now have no plans to return. I’ve run through the tutorial zone of Conan maybe 5-6 times, but never graduated out of it. 

 

[OmegaOne]

I went to Star Trek Online for a good while. Unfortunately as time went on they just started piling on the multiple currencies, veered hard into gamble boxes, they actually removed content etc. At some point I was just logging in to grind the dailies and it became like a second job, so I dropped it.

 

Tried Champions but could never get into it - it had some good points but anything of any worth was placed behind a paywall.

 

I mostly just concentrated on single-player games and avoided MMOs for the most part.

[Snarky]

funny, i was thinking we could use another super hard to get currency here.  find what you like, watch them change it into something else.  great for AH players anyways

[Lazarillo]

A bit before the original loss of the game, I started playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Particularly, I got into it because I didn't like how a lot of late-original-CoH wrote its story arcs, and SWTOR was more to my liking on the writing front.  Somewhat ironically, by the time CoH resurfaced, SWTOR had started doing the same things in terms of storytelling that CoH had done before its original shutdown, and so these days I tend to bounce more between the two.

 

Also, though not an MMO, but possibly from leaning into Bioware due to SWTOR, I got on a real Dragon Age kick for a while, too, to sort of satisfy my love of creating new characters.  That's another I've somewhat fallen out of love with though (or at least, with the third, and likely any hypothetical future games in the series).

[kelika2]

Warcraft up until time traveling as main focus > bounced between project1999 and swgemu >sprinkle in 1000+ hours in each morrowind, oblivion, skyrim and new vegas.  but only 400~ hours in fallout1+2+3 combined > april 2019 happened

 

i tried dc online but got bored after making a naked female character and running up a few walls

never could get into champions and thats literal, the launcher never worked for whatever reason

[UltraAlt]

17 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

It got me wondering what most of you chose, did you go for something as similar as possible or quite unlike?

 

I played Marvel Alliance on the PS2 ... and way too much Dynasty Warrior (various ones) ... I probably played a bunch more PS2 games during the "downtime" but I can't remember which ones during that time period.

I tried Champions Online, but didn't like it enough to get past the tutorial.

I'm still logging in to DCUO. I don't spend all that much there. first 30 levels are more old school stuff (Marv Wolfman and Jim Lee were working on DCUO when it was first being designed) - storylines from before the bad changes brought in by Dan Didio and Geoff Johns. Unfortunately, a lot of the DCUO stuff apparently tries to be "current" so most of it isn't much to my liking ... but, you know, I built characters over there. So I play some.

I tried Everquest 2, but that game appears to be mostly still around for end gamers.

I started playing Planetside 2 as well as it was part of the Sony/Daybreak "All Access" package, and I played a whole lot of Planetside 2 between the year before the Sunset and joining up in Homecoming.

Also played Card Hunter and checked out Legendary Marvel.

[Akisan]

Gods, what didn't I play?  CoH was nearly impossible to replace, so... off the top of my head:

Diablo 3, Path of Exile, Minecraft, Terraria, Mabinogi, Champions Online (very briefly), Dungeons and Dragons Online, Tera, Starcraft 2, Spiral Knights, so many Steam games, several Legend of Zelda games, Pokemon SoulSilver, and the Metroid Prime trilogy.  I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones I remember.

[FrauleinMental]

I tried EVE Online, but just couldn't get into it.  You almost have to get into a guild to survive, and much as they tout the offline training the game is still like a second job...and I had a PhD dissertation to write. 🙂

 

I had lifetime subs to Champions Online and Star Trek Online.  Played CO long enough to get my main to max level and then quit.  Eventually got into a STO guild and was playing that pretty regularly; loved the starship system but hated the ground combat system.

 

Tried DCUO a couple of times and hated the UI and the WoW-like "costume loot" system.  For that matter, played WoW for a while but hit a wall at Northrend (level 60-ish?).  Tried Rift and Secret World but never got very far.

 

I did play the Marvel Heroes MMO game quite a bit until I got back into SWTOR.  Played SWTOR at launch long enough to grind a Jedi Sage to 50 (and it was a grind).  Went back to it later and played it until Homecoming launched.

[tidge]

I never went back to MMO. I did a lot of 4X (Civ, Galactic Civ) and did quite a bit of immersion into/replays of Deus Ex. Also lots and lots of pub trivia.

[Robenix]

I had found a disc copy of Champions Online at Best Buy for 13 cents CAD in the summer prior to the shutdown announcement and officially started it that September, and was logging in fairly regularly until 2021-2022-- I only really stopped because Thundrax's player, someone who I had also came to know decently well IRL, passed away and it just made it mentally hard to look at the game the same. While there definitely came a point over the years where I cared less about actually playing the game and more about RPIng and character concepts (despite being much less alt-heavy than my time in CoH), I genuinely came to appreciate and prefer my time in CO a lot more.

I also was really heavy into FFXIV once I upgraded my computer in 2014 from the potato that it was. (And technically still going if it weren't for digital time codes being "out of stock" on the SQEX store right now...)

[nihilii]

CoH was lightning in a bottle. Other MMOs lack the mechanical depth. Many confuse "difficulty" or "reward gating" for "mechanical depth", but IMO they're unrelated. Difficulty and reward gating are just vehicles to force the players to engage with the mechanics. Whereas CoH is a very easy game with profound mechanical depth, which you're free to explore at your own pace. It's not just combat. When you think about it, even the costume editor has layers and layers of interesting play space.

Uh, which is to say... I dropped out of the MMO genre because it falls flat in comparison. The best I could muster was a brief stint in GW2. That game had beautiful artwork to run through once.

This quest for meaningful systems drove me into roguelites, Binding of Isaac in particular is the one I can play forever. I also managed to get into Dark Souls completely blind, a fascinating experience which more or less amounted to my childhood dreams about video games becoming true. Been a lover of the series ever since, although I make it a point to avoid interacting with anyone else except close friends (who also follow the same self-isolation), so we experience each new entry like an immersive adventure, no spoilers.

In truth, maybe NCSoft did me a favor because CoH was too good a game. Opportunity cost was real. I've talked about games above, but "freeing up" all those Paragon City gaming hours also pushed me to make radical strides in real life. Back then with the constant updates and the size of the community, you could have CoH as a "lifestyle", and I did, and objectively that was a little too much. Much more fond of the relaxed pace we have here now.

 

 

 

[arcane]

I didn’t play games for awhile then someone told me to get GW2. Played GW2 for a couple years then played ESO for a couple more years, where someone told me about Homecoming in 2019.

[American Decoy]

CoH was my only mmo.  Worked, played with kids, and grandkids, and lots of single player titles in steam.  Love Fallout 1-4, and Total War junk, but CoH was only MMO that could keep my intrest past charactet creation.

[srmalloy]

On 12/4/2023 at 7:24 PM, Lazarillo said:

A bit before the original loss of the game, I started playing a lot of Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Particularly, I got into it because I didn't like how a lot of late-original-CoH wrote its story arcs, and SWTOR was more to my liking on the writing front.  Somewhat ironically, by the time CoH resurfaced, SWTOR had started doing the same things in terms of storytelling that CoH had done before its original shutdown, and so these days I tend to bounce more between the two.

I took up SWTOR after the shutdown, but started becoming disillusioned with the storytelling after I'd gone through all eight subclasses. The stories were engaging... the first time; looking down and seeing the rails each class' story ran on ground off some of the shiny, but it was still Star Wars... and then the old-school MMO design barriers became intrusive. My Jedi Knight can leap 80' straight up to attack someone, but can't leap a 20' gap if there's no enemy on the other side. Then there was my Trooper's first companion, Aric Organ, talking about his time as a sniper and making a 900-meter shot, while my Agent Marksmanship Sniper got an extra 5m range, giving her a whopping 35m maximum range on her attacks. And the map design, where your destination is literally fifty feet away from you, but you have to go a mile out of your way because there's a twenty-foot-high unclimbable rock formation between you and your destination. And then the devs gave up on class storylines, rolling everything into the one 'Outlander' storyline as you got pitted against Valkorion and his Eternal Empire of Zakuul.

 

The group I was playing SWTOR with introduced me to ESO, and I've continued playing that (albeit hugely reduced since I found HC); it still has a lot of the 'restrict movement with map design' issues that MMOs that don't have travel powers like CoH impose, but I've found ways around some of them, and there's an entire subcommunity that seems to be focused around "how do I get there, when it won't let me go there?" But it has a lot of the open feeling CoH has, where you can ignore the main story line and go off taking side quests almost forever.

Edited December 6, 2023 by srmalloy

[JasperStone]

I was a Champion players as well, but always felt ...meh..

 

I tried Dungeons and Dragons Online ... tried. Spent my whole time solo lol.

 

I played a ton of games on Steam:

• Marvel Heroes Omega 
• Elder Scrolls Online -loved and went all in. But CoH came back, have not played since
• Bioshock Infinite - awesome
• Tomb Raider - man I suck 
• Valley - Amazing world and soundtrack. Peaceful compared to most games
• Wolf Quest - .... you are a wolf 🙂 

 

[Seed22]

Pretty much hit all the big ones during my time out:

• WoW: Got me a lvl 75 or so druid. Very fun and pretty decent at PvP on that toon. Then came back again in WoD(hated it) and got a priest to the late 60s before quitting
• SWTOR: Made an inquisitor and a counselor. It was okay, except for the whole nickle and dime thing they did with power trays.
• CO: Ended up here the longest. Got a lifetime sub and honestly didn't hate the experience completely. Very holy trinity garbage and constant nerfs later on though. Kinda makes me paranoid when I see lots of nerfs lobbied for here, as well as my fear initially for HM being holy trinity WoW experience(it's mostly just a zerg with 7 corrs and a scrapper/tank, so not sure if that's better really)

Honestly, as controversial as it may be to say, I enjoyed my time away from CoH. It provided me with a lot of time to reflect, and forced me out of my socially awkward phase of my life. The best thing to ever happen to CoH was the shutdown, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

[HunterMS]

Champions Online, DCUO, and Secret World.

 

[GoldenAvariel]

Our group went to Guild Wars 2 which came out about the time the close was announced. I (solo) went to Star Trek. We quit GW2 after a year or two, I'm still playing STO.

 

I also played a little Champions, Everquest, Secret World... I think that was it. I was SO glad when Homecoming came along. I sat in the line to get in as it first went public. 🙂

[Captain Fabulous]

Champions Online (played less and less as the years went on, stopped playing altogether when they started deleting earned tokens)
Star Trek Online (still play)

Guild Wars 2 (played for a few years and got bored)

DCUO (tried twice to get into it, just couldn't)

Marvel Heroes (loved it, hated the last patch, but played until it was gone)

various Marvel and DC mobile games (will NEVER play another one ever again, they're ALL P2W garbage)

Path of Exile (never got too far into it)
Neverwinter (was into it for awhile, too many changes over the years, not worth rebuilding every character)

[Techwright]

Went back to the long-standing beta for Firefall until the new, weird parent company, The9, ruined everything.

 

Then did a circuit of MMO games (not necessarily in this order):

Champions Online (bored quickly)

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Lord of the Rings Online

Star Trek Online

WoW

DC Universe Online

WildSTAR

 

By about 2016, I was getting fed up with what I perceived to be mediocrity in the MMO genre at the time, (more like I just didn't emotionally connect to any like I did CoH, Firefall, and the other failed one, Tabula Rasa from 2007-2009), so I started looking into other game types until a friend in 2019 let me know CoH had been revived.