I don't get why this is so much better than CO

[Sunsette]

The two biggest issues are content and the disaster that is freeform, imo.

 

CO barely has any content and it's not engaging. I don't think COX has great content aside from a few parts -- it's more "fine" with a few standouts -- but in CO there are no engaging storylines, the world feels plastic, and CO didn't get anything mechanically difficult and meaningful until very recently. Cosmics are boring for everyone who's not a tank or CC, too, I'd say.

 

Second, freeform just gives too much freedom. None of it is meaningful, and there are huge disparities in performance for making builds that fit to a single or handful of themes.

 

I do miss CO's better character creator but a lot of it was locked behind a ridiculous amount of cash.

 

I do like the block mechanic a lot, and the swinging travel power is a lot of fun. Combo powers are a great thing. Inspirations are more engaging as drops you have to tactically move around the battlefield for than as potions that sit in your inventory.

 

But because freeform gives such ridiculous variance in powers, it's hard to make any content that is meaningful gameplay. The alerts are largely boring, and while I like the idea of the rampages and Teleios Ascendant, it's very hard for most players to get meaningfully involved with them.

 

And I'd like to take a minute to just really hammer how bad a setting Millennium City is. They took Detroit... and it's nothing like Detroit. It's not even really a bad copy of NYC. It's just the vague idea of a big East Coast city. With the exception of Vibora Bay Apocalypse, almost nothing in the game seems to take itself seriously as anything more than a reference to better settings.

[Clave Dark 5]

So very many people - me included - expected CO to wind up being a "City of Heroes II"; to take all of the awesomeness that was CoH and update it (especially graphics) to be newer, shinier, better.

Oh, I remember that hype,  Some of it was self-generated by players on their pre-opening forums; I spent some time there thinking about switching over when it came out, if it was going to be a newer, better game.  A number of posters were of course CoH ex-pats who were really invested in knowing this game would be better and that the previous company was a bunch of hateful snakes (which might have been true for all I know as I wasn't following too much of the politics behind the scenes).  Something about that community, or that segment of it, chased me off even before the game came out, and the more I heard afterward, the more I was glad I'd not bothered.  I kept thinking about loading it up F2P, especially after CoH shut down, but... never did.

[Legree]

I think the queuing mechanic allows for very fluid and smooth combat, which to me feels "faster" than it might technically seem based on the animation times.

 

Agreed.  It also helps that your character automatically turns to face an already targeted foe when they trigger a power, regardless of which way they were facing when they trigger it.  Not having to manually turn allows for a much more fluid style of play, especially for ATs like Blasters and Dominators who weave in and out of melee range.

 

The fact that most enemies have both melee and ranged attacks helps as well - in a lot of games once a mob runs up to you it'll stay there until you go down or it goes down.  Not so here, with ranged mobs like snipers retreating out of melee range, and if you kite a melee mob it'll often take a ranged shot at you before chasing after you.  The morale mechanic, whereby mobs will actually break from combat also adds to this.  For all that City of Heroes' animations lock down a character when in progress the actual fights, I find, are a lot more mobile than in most other MMOs I've played.

[srmalloy]

I do like the block mechanic a lot, and the swinging travel power is a lot of fun.

 

I don't remember the specific comic that the panel was in, but years and years ago, there was a Spider-Man comic where he'd wound up riding vehicles in a chase well out of the city, and he'd resolved everything, waved a farewell to the victim he'd rescued, and fired a webline to take him away... and the panel had him standing there in a suburban tract full of one-story buildings as his webline arches over and descends, with no tall buildings to attach to; you could almost hear the 'Wah-wah-wah-wah' sad trombone slide. Pointed up how location-dependent that type of mobility was.

 

Found it. Spider-Man #267, page 10, panel 3. And the kid's comment is just rubbing salt into the wound:

[justicebeliever]

I do like the block mechanic a lot, and the swinging travel power is a lot of fun.

 

I don't remember the specific comic that the panel was in, but years and years ago, there was a Spider-Man comic where he'd wound up riding vehicles in a chase well out of the city, and he'd resolved everything, waved a farewell to the victim he'd rescued, and fired a webline to take him away... and the panel had him standing there in a suburban tract full of one-story buildings as his webline arches over and descends, with no tall buildings to attach to; you could almost hear the 'Wah-wah-wah-wah' sad trombone slide. Pointed up how location-dependent that type of mobility was.

 

Found it. Spider-Man #267, page 10, panel 3. And the kid's comment is just rubbing salt into the wound:

 

That's hysterical...+1 Inf

[PaxArcana]

For CO travel powers?  I really liked Hoverdisk.  Actually, I liked that they had several varieties of flying (Hoverdisk, Flight, Rocket Boots, and wasn't Jet Pack a separate power itself?), and that they all worked _slightly_ different from each other.  A is a bit faster, B accelerates to top speed sooner, B is more maneuverable, and so on.

 

Acrobatics was pretty cool, too - a halfway compromise between Superspeed and Superjump.

[Sunsette]

I do like the block mechanic a lot, and the swinging travel power is a lot of fun.

 

I don't remember the specific comic that the panel was in, but years and years ago, there was a Spider-Man comic where he'd wound up riding vehicles in a chase well out of the city, and he'd resolved everything, waved a farewell to the victim he'd rescued, and fired a webline to take him away... and the panel had him standing there in a suburban tract full of one-story buildings as his webline arches over and descends, with no tall buildings to attach to; you could almost hear the 'Wah-wah-wah-wah' sad trombone slide. Pointed up how location-dependent that type of mobility was.

 

Found it. Spider-Man #267, page 10, panel 3. And the kid's comment is just rubbing salt into the wound:

 

Hah! Nice.

 

The swinging power in CO just doesn't bother looking for anything to attach to, if you look up high enough it's attached to an invisible anchor point. Fly, Acro, and Teleport were always the movements of choice for one type of gameplay or another, but as much as I stan flying conceptually, the swinging power was legit just fun to play.

 

I got more fun out of swinging in CO than any combat gameplay I ever did there except maybe the final fight of Fatal Err0r: Cybermind.

 

Maybe.

 

Kind of a sad statement really.

[Locsmith]

CoH was an original idea.

 

CO was born out of the idea that a Superhero MMO was commercially viable (the success of CoH), and it was based on a pre-existing IP (PnP Champions had been around since the early 80s). 

 

Based on those factors, I guess they thought they couldn't lose -- unfortunately, CO was really nothing like CoH, and it was nothing at all like PnP Champions, so right off the bat, you alienated two different potential fanbases.

 

Just to put a little finer point on this.  The original CO was built to be a Marvel based MMO.  If you squint and tilt your head just right, you can still see the Marvel influences poking through:

Dr. Destroyer is very like Dr. Doom in looks.

Grond is the Hulk – big, green, radioactive, lives in the desert.

The aliens in the tutorial always reminded me of the Badoon.

The super smart Gorilla is very like the Beast.

 

I get the impression that when Marvel saw the product in development they pulled out and went with a Diablo clone instead.  It just feels like after Marvel left, the Cryptic guys just threw up their hands and kind of gave up.  To keep thing on track Cryptic scrambled to get the Champions IP and apply it as best they could. 

 

So, to address the OP, in my opinion, that is the major failing on the part of CO.  It was designed to be one thing and switched to another late in the process and feels like it.

 

I’m c’mon, Quijybo as a zone boss?  A one line cast off from the first season of the Simpsons?

[Ideon]

I don't remember the specific comic that the panel was in, but years and years ago, there was a Spider-Man comic where he'd wound up riding vehicles in a chase well out of the city, and he'd resolved everything, waved a farewell to the victim he'd rescued, and fired a webline to take him away... and the panel had him standing there in a suburban tract full of one-story buildings as his webline arches over and descends, with no tall buildings to attach to; you could almost hear the 'Wah-wah-wah-wah' sad trombone slide. Pointed up how location-dependent that type of mobility was.

 

Found it. Spider-Man #267, page 10, panel 3. And the kid's comment is just rubbing salt into the wound:

They referenced that Spidey needs tall structures to swing on in Spider-Man Homecoming where Spidey shot web into the open air on a golf course and next scene was him having to run gasping "this sucks!", haha

[RedwoodElf]

COH has engaging storylines and deep lore. CO Doesn't.

[Williwaw]

COH has engaging storylines and deep lore. CO Doesn't.

 

I think it's worth noting that CoH "feature characters" were intended to be the World's Greatest Heroes from the start (most of them being the player characters of the devs themselves in a Mutants and Masterminds game), but the Champions Lore all comes from the original sourcebooks, where the titular team was very much *not* supposed to be the World's Greatest Heroes , instead being just very average characters used as examples to explain game mechanics, just like Rath the Dwarf in D&D 2e or Bruenor the Dwarf in D&D 5e.  ("Who?", you may ask — exactly)  So making Defender out to be Statesman II and his team to be the next Freedom Phalanx just feels... off, and is, indeed, probably just a holdover from when it was intended to be a Marvel MMO.

 

(Also, I see from skimming the source books as I write this, that every character in Champions has a magic-based origin, regardless of how that magic manifests.  Mutants had their genes changed by the ambient magic of the world while in the womb, and the same ambient magic allows super-science and super-technology to work, though none of them are considered "magical" characters. I wonder if that's what the "Origin of Powers" arc in CoH was inspired by)

 

Anyway, due to using these characters who were never intended to be deep or complex as the main focal point of the lore makes the whole world feel shallow.  You're playing the Superfriends MMO rather than the Justice League MMO.

[Sailboat]

Just to put a little finer point on this.  The original CO was built to be a Marvel based MMO.  If you squint and tilt your head just right, you can still see the Marvel influences poking through:

Dr. Destroyer is very like Dr. Doom in looks.

Grond is the Hulk – big, green, radioactive, lives in the desert.

The aliens in the tutorial always reminded me of the Badoon.

The super smart Gorilla is very like the Beast.

 

Tabletop Champions player & GM from way back -- my real name is listed as a playtester in the 4th Edition big blue book.  I had the good fortune to be friends with Rob Bell. None of that gives me any credibility regarding the computer game, which I never played, except to note that Dr. Destroyer and Grond waaaaay predate the computer game.  They might have been Marvel homages at creation, but their presence more than a decade later in Champions Online doesn't imply any Marvel involvement.

[Locsmith]

Just to put a little finer point on this.  The original CO was built to be a Marvel based MMO.  If you squint and tilt your head just right, you can still see the Marvel influences poking through:

Dr. Destroyer is very like Dr. Doom in looks.

Grond is the Hulk – big, green, radioactive, lives in the desert.

The aliens in the tutorial always reminded me of the Badoon.

The super smart Gorilla is very like the Beast.

 

Tabletop Champions player & GM from way back -- my real name is listed as a playtester in the 4th Edition big blue book.  I had the good fortune to be friends with Rob Bell. None of that gives me any credibility regarding the computer game, which I never played, except to note that Dr. Destroyer and Grond waaaaay predate the computer game.  They might have been Marvel homages at creation, but their presence more than a decade later in Champions Online doesn't imply any Marvel involvement.

 

Understood, but I was thinking the influence went the other way.  I pulled this from the CO Wiki page:

+++++

The game's announcement followed the cancellation of Cryptic's Marvel Universe Online as well as the sale of their Intellectual Properties City of Heroes and City of Villains to developer and publisher NCsoft in November 2007

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_Online

+++++

 

I always got the impression that they had built an MMO with the Hulk and then had to look for a Champions equivalent.  That they had Dr. Doom and looked for a Champions equivalent and so on.  I won’t speculate on whether or not the Champions RPG characters were (or were not) inspired by the Marvel comics (how meta would that be).  Comic tropes are comics tropes so there will always be some overlap in character design and power sets.

 

But my overall point is that that Cryptic had the start of a Marvel MMO but when that went away (instead of starting over from scratch) they grabbed the Champions IP and kind of stretched it over the existing framework.  And that goes back to the original question of why I think CoH/V is better than CO.  It just seems more complete and thought out.

[Jaguaratron]

Marvel made a sound decision to pull out of the deal with Cryptic given the end product they released with CO. It had potential but the key thing about designing a game is to NOT design it according to your own ideals and dreams because you are not going to be your core demographic.

 

CO is just so.... put downable....

[Hyperstrike]

Okay, tried this a couple days ago and it wouldn't post through.

 

The only reason I still maintain a CO account is that I traded for an LTO .

So it costs me nothing.

 

Anyhow, why CoH is superior.

 

1: Nicely configurable UI.  Not PERFECT, but you can tweak stuff easy.  CO, you get the default UI and you gotta like it or lump it.  *

2: Better teaming.  CO maxes at 5 players.  A team in CoH is just larger and more capable.  And if that isn't enough?  LEAGUES.

3: Cryptic SUCKS at maintaining systems.  Half the cool systems in CO are just BROKEN.  And it's been all "lick and promise" for fixing them for most of the last 9 years.

4: Limited content.  There's lots to do in CO.  Sure.  But I've effectively done EVERYTHING in the game several times over.  CoH still had the edge in total amount of playable content.  THEN they added AE, and content options effectively became unlimited.

5: The conversion to lockboxes.  At this point, CO is clown shoes about it.  It's such that much of the best stuff is locked up in Lockboxes AND account-bound.  So they just crapped all over the Market.

6: Literally NO balance in the game.  The various ATs are okay at most of the standard content.  But some of the content goes from "Standard" to "Rip Your Head Off And **** Down Your Neck" with no warning.  And in a lot of cases, it can be unsurvivable for many ATs and even a lot of Freeforms.

7: Shit content design.  I can understand that they didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg thrugh content.  But with some of the epic content consisting of boss fights that can take 30-60 minutes, player lockouts are Just Effing Dumb.  So if you go into a pickup group with people who haven't got any ally rezzes, you either die and lay on the ground with your *AHEM!* in your hand.  Or you rez, then wait outside the fight with your *AHEM* in your hand.

9: * Console compromise.  Basically there are various areas in the game (as noted in #1) where compromises were made in anticipation of a console port.  As such, PC players were artificialy limited in their choices for a console port that never actually came to fruition.

 

 

In the end, for CO, Cryptic took every lesson they learned building and maintaining CoH and SHITCANNED it in favor of Jack's preference for "fuzzy numbers".

 

Oh well.  At least the Champions RPG got a cash infusion out of it...

[echosam]

I don't know if I'm repeating myself, but to me it feels like CoH was made by people who love comics and superheroes and made a game where they could express that. CO feels (felt) like a game made by people who realized they could cash in on peoples' love for comics and superheroes but didn't really love that stuff themselves.

 

IMO, the intangible here is what you have pointed out - CoH was made with passion for the end product, not the rewards for creating it.

When you have that great meal, play that great game, etc., the ones you remember are the ones 'made with love'.

Humans can make magic.

 

Another way to say it is... CoH: developers tried to make a great game that they, and hopefully a lot of others, would love, and hopefully make some money off of it. CO: Developers designed the game to make a lot of money, and hopefully it was fun, too... CoH was designed primarilly to be a great game, CO was designed to maximize profits.

 

A lot of games these days are making the same mistake. How much money can we bleed out of our costumers? Not, lets make a great game and the players will come.

 

Blizzard (WoW), created a great game, blew up to 12 million subscribers. Then Blizzard decided to maximize profits per player, and lost 80+% of them since.

 

Build a great game, they will come.... Build a money sink, they will not stay.

[Jaguaratron]

I don't know if I'm repeating myself, but to me it feels like CoH was made by people who love comics and superheroes and made a game where they could express that. CO feels (felt) like a game made by people who realized they could cash in on peoples' love for comics and superheroes but didn't really love that stuff themselves.

 

IMO, the intangible here is what you have pointed out - CoH was made with passion for the end product, not the rewards for creating it.

When you have that great meal, play that great game, etc., the ones you remember are the ones 'made with love'.

Humans can make magic.

 

Another way to say it is... CoH: developers tried to make a great game that they, and hopefully a lot of others, would love, and hopefully make some money off of it. CO: Developers designed the game to make a lot of money, and hopefully it was fun, too... CoH was designed primarilly to be a great game, CO was designed to maximize profits.

 

A lot of games these days are making the same mistake. How much money can we bleed out of our costumers? Not, lets make a great game and the players will come.

 

Blizzard (WoW), created a great game, blew up to 12 million subscribers. Then Blizzard decided to maximize profits per player, and lost 80+% of them since.

 

Build a great game, they will come.... Build a money sink, they will not stay.

 

I wouldnt say CO was designed to maximize profits, at least at launch, to maximise profits you want as many people as possible but instead they made a weird parody niche of a superhero MMO with styling that would alienate a good portion of the potential customers as well, as subs collapsed THEN they tried to squeeze the remaining loyal playerbase for every cent they could get with cash shop junk.

[Myrmidon]

I don't know if I'm repeating myself, but to me it feels like CoH was made by people who love comics and superheroes and made a game where they could express that. CO feels (felt) like a game made by people who realized they could cash in on peoples' love for comics and superheroes but didn't really love that stuff themselves.

 

IMO, the intangible here is what you have pointed out - CoH was made with passion for the end product, not the rewards for creating it.

When you have that great meal, play that great game, etc., the ones you remember are the ones 'made with love'.

Humans can make magic.

 

Another way to say it is... CoH: developers tried to make a great game that they, and hopefully a lot of others, would love, and hopefully make some money off of it. CO: Developers designed the game to make a lot of money, and hopefully it was fun, too... CoH was designed primarilly to be a great game, CO was designed to maximize profits.

 

A lot of games these days are making the same mistake. How much money can we bleed out of our costumers? Not, lets make a great game and the players will come.

 

Blizzard (WoW), created a great game, blew up to 12 million subscribers. Then Blizzard decided to maximize profits per player, and lost 80+% of them since.

 

Build a great game, they will come.... Build a money sink, they will not stay.

 

I wouldnt say CO was designed to maximize profits, at least at launch, to maximise profits you want as many people as possible but instead they made a weird parody niche of a superhero MMO with styling that would alienate a good portion of the potential customers as well, as subs collapsed THEN they tried to squeeze the remaining loyal playerbase for every cent they could get with cash shop junk.

 

That “cash shop junk” had Store Bought IO sets, which allowed me to completely avoid the Invention system on live, so it wasn’t all that bad.

[Liam1986]

I played CO from the jump and weirdly enough I sent repeated reports to admin from the game about the predatory and gross behavior or the ''Furry'' contingent who would disregard peoples privacy and essentially say the nastiest stuff in open chat rather than take it to tells or do their sick roleplay somewhere else.

 

After repeated reports to admin they suspended my account for supposed ''harassment'' seeing as 60 people mass reported me i didn't have much of a leg to stand on...I really should of been smarter about it on forums but suffice to say they figured out who i was in game and on forums and began a campaign of antagonising myself and Friends I'm no saint if i see 6 Wolf looking dudes saying awful stuff in public chat i'm going to use a Little french to hammer home my displeasure.

 

Theres some self confessed antifa/furry supporter on this game who basically is one of those people and their twitter is a cesspool that openly advocates violence and the abject shut down of free speech and yet admin even here have no qualms about it...but i have yet to see a bunch of furries in Atlas Park being sicko's so I'll say GMs are doing a bang up job and I give them high praise for doing so.

 

I guess it was easier to ban one guy then nuke 60 paying creeps accounts.

 

As far as the game itself CO's PVP was far superior imho you didn't need 400mil plus build and even then some FOTM set could ruin you after a patch CO's pvp was more kitey skill based as for PVP there really was less divergent builds for PVE i love strange builds but in PVP especially on CO you had to run a certain way and i did like that because you knew someone was likely one of 6 types of fighter....on this i got no idea and even when i'm evenly matched theres a discord coordinated gank squad ready to pounce from what i see as a giant dead map.

[srmalloy]

7: Shit content design.  I can understand that they didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg thrugh content.  But with some of the epic content consisting of boss fights that can take 30-60 minutes, player lockouts are Just Effing Dumb.  So if you go into a pickup group with people who haven't got any ally rezzes, you either die and lay on the ground with your *AHEM!* in your hand.  Or you rez, then wait outside the fight with your *AHEM* in your hand.

 

Heh. "Didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg through content." Sounds kind of funny in the face of Jack Emmert's direct statement that 'fun', for him, was throwing yourself at the big boss again and again, getting defeated over and over and over again, until you figured out what the one tactic that would let you defeat them was. Which is a little ironic in the age of the internet, where when a solution is found, it's all over the net in days at most, and the challenge switches to how effectively you can follow the go-by -- and how well you can recover when something goes Tango Uniform in the process.

[Hyperstrike]

7: Shit content design.  I can understand that they didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg thrugh content.  But with some of the epic content consisting of boss fights that can take 30-60 minutes, player lockouts are Just Effing Dumb.  So if you go into a pickup group with people who haven't got any ally rezzes, you either die and lay on the ground with your *AHEM!* in your hand.  Or you rez, then wait outside the fight with your *AHEM* in your hand.

 

Heh. "Didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg through content." Sounds kind of funny in the face of Jack Emmert's direct statement that 'fun', for him, was throwing yourself at the big boss again and again, getting defeated over and over and over again, until you figured out what the one tactic that would let you defeat them was. Which is a little ironic in the age of the internet, where when a solution is found, it's all over the net in days at most, and the challenge switches to how effectively you can follow the go-by -- and how well you can recover when something goes Tango Uniform in the process.

 

EXACTAMUNDO!

[Xaeon]

Because CoX was the Warframe of its genre and CO was the Anthem.

 

 

[TheOtherTed]

CoH was designed primarilly to be a great game, CO was designed to maximize profits.

 

Yep - not only that, but Cryptic Studios was pitching itself as a sort of MMO factory at the time.  I remember the phrase "from concept to game in under two years" being bandied about (though I can't find a link at the moment).  Cryptic fanboy that I was, that made me cringe a bit.

[retiarius]

CO, for whatever its flaws, doesn't really come close to the disaster that is Anthem, does it? 

 

I mean, I never read an article in Forbes about just how much Champions Online sucked.

[PaxArcana]

CO, for whatever its flaws, doesn't really come close to the disaster that is Anthem, does it? 

 

I mean, I never read an article in Forbes about just how much Champions Online sucked.

 

Even before Free-to-Play, CO sucked WORSE than Anthem.

 

The reason Forbes wrote about Anthem, and not CO?

 

Anthem is published by EA, which is enough of a Big Deal to be on Forbes' radar.

 

CO was published by a "little startup" with only one prior game, and was therefor too insignificant for Forbes to even notice it existed.