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

[Abraxus]

Simply put, CoH is a unique game, in that, it is a rare instance of something greater than the sum of its parts.

[Judasace]

I'm sure no one's reading at this point, nut here are mine:

 

1-Feel. I mean the literal tactile feel. The animation and graphical/audio immersion are such that I can nearly feel everything from a punch to landing a superjump. CO feels...thin, weak I don't feel any tactile connection between myself and the character.

 

2: All powers in CO are basically the same with different graphics.

 

3: CO feels like cheap, slippery money grab, more like a mobile game than a real PC  game.

 

4: The CoH animations are superior

 

5: The CO graphics are too cartoony

 

6: The lore, missions, worldbuilding, etc. all feels cheap, like some late 1990s Marvel/DC wannabe like Silverwolf Press or any of those other publishers that sprung up during the Black and White craze.

 

7/ The writing in CoH isn't the best, but it's yards ahead of CO.

 

8.Lack of AE. Not for farming, but I don't care if people do farm. Giving player modding tools is always better than not doing do, IMO.

 

9. Smaenes: a;; the villains feel the same. Nothing, other than visuals, distinguishes the various villain groups. Play CO for 15 minutes and you've played it for 100 hours.

 

10: Animations: The CO animations just suck compared to CoX.

 

 

11. The voice acting in CO is horrific. Either go whole hog, make it consistent and well done throughout or don't do it at all.

 

12. In CoX I feel like a Superhero. In CO I feel like I'm playing a a generic character in a mobile game.

[PaxArcana]

I'm sure no one's reading at this point, nut here are mine:

Plenty of us are still reading.

 

By the by, it's spelled "pseudo", not "sudio".

 

:)  See?  Reading!  :)

 

11. The voice acting in CO is horrific. Either go whole hog, make it consistent and well done throughout or don't do it at all.

.... yeah ... ye gods, Defender, in the original Tutorial ... ::sigh:: ...

 

12. In CoX I feel like a Superhero. In CO I [don't]

YES, this, in so many ways!!

[AckImDead]

$300 for full unlocks? I... have no words. Nor any interest in continuing - especially when it seems I can't customize the keyboard layout to ESDF like it should be

[Judasace]

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.

 

Not to mention when CO was released Gaming was seen as a niche geek hobby. Not many serious publications were writing about it at all. It was shit like Gamergte and just the general penetration of geek culture into the mainstream,  spearheaded by the MCU, that made gaming something people took more seriously and started talking about other than something lonely dudes did in the ir parent's basement.

[Adeon Hawkwood]

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.

I was always kind of pissed off about those because they did them in a way that made them superior to the in-game IOs. I didn't really care about the basic concept (since it was pretty easy to get the inf for IOs in game) but the fact that the ones being sold for real money were better did irritate me.

 

I'm glad that Homecoming made attuned IOs easily available in game.

[Xaeon]

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.

If CO had a nine figure budget and was the tentpole release for one of the big five publishers of the entire year it'd have made headliens too.

[Odhinn]

I was part of CoH from Issue 1 to sunset.

I was also a Beta tester for CO and played it as well.

 

CO did some things right. As an Invul SS tank main I really liked that there was a strength stat and that it meant something.

I did like the variety of environments. After cell shading was turned off and graphics were tweaked it did look nice.

 

But, something always seemed a tad "off" if you will. The default proportions on the characters were a bit odd. Though there were many options in the costume creator many of them felt garish. At early levels the game already wanted you to have equipment and to start crafting for better equipment. CO simply reverted to far too many of the standard MMO tropes that CoH averted. I preferred the lack of standard tropes in CoH.

 

The biggest difference, as far as I am concerned, though is Statesman. I do realize that Statesman is a fictional character of Jack Emmert's. From what I remember Statesman started out in Villains and Vigilantes (a game from 1979) then the character became a Champions character. (I seem to recall an interview or the like where he even quotes the "Arggh I missed" line from the V&V rule book.) From what I have read Statesman was a character he played a very long time perhaps decades. It seems to me that long time role playing characters like that have a way of becoming a part of you. Largely because you have put a part of yourself into the character for hundreds of hours. Statesman created CoH and CoH brought Statesman to life. CoH was crafted to let us place a bit of ourselves into our heroes and those heroes into the world Statesman helped create. City of heroes allowed us and encouraged us to be heroes in ways previous games hadn't; we weren't just power hungry dwarves and elves looking for that next sword. That desire to be heroes is what led to the game having such an amazing community. I know I played with dozens of others who made their PnP characters into the game.

 

(DISCLAIMER: I have never met Mr. Emmert and do not pretend to know him or his thinking in any way nor am I trying to armchair pop-psych 101 anything.)

 

CO, by comparison, feels a bit soulless. A make your toon, one of many hundreds, and go get gear kind of game. It always felt to me like Jack Emmert moved to another game but Statesman stayed to live in Paragon City.

 

 

 

 

 

[Blackbird71]

I can't really offer a fair comparison, as I personally never played CO.  I can only say that I've thoroughly enjoyed nearly everything about CoX, both during Live and new that we have a second chance to return to Paragon City, and that is a rare thing for me to say about a computer game.  I didn't play continuously throughout the game's run, but it was the game I always came back to.

 

For those like me who may not have experienced CO, or those who just want to enjoy a fun read, what I can offer is a link to the first article in Shamus Young's Let's Play CO series, the adventures of "Star on Chest":

 

A Star is Born:  Lets Play Champions Online Pt. 1

 

This series was the closest I came to ever experiencing CO.  If you've never read these, it's a great series of articles with Shamus' own brand of humor.  Mr. Young excels at finding the flaws in games, both in gameplay and in story/internal logic/etc., and then poking fun at those flaws.  As a result, the series doesn't exactly paint CO in a positive light (it captures many of the issues that others have mentioned in this thread), and to be fair I have no idea what he would have said about CoX*, but it is most certainly an entertaining read. 

 

Here is just one brief snippet from the first article (who has not had this moment in character creation, in either CO or CoX?):

 

ME: Lets see does the nose look more heroic at 10% width or maybe a little closer to 14.5% width? MY WIFE: Are you still staring at that man?

 

So if you find CO a less than perfect game and wish to enjoy some humor at its expense, or if you like CO but don't take it too seriously, or you've never played CO but want to see one critic's humorous perspective, have fun reading during the next server downtime.

 

Disclaimer:  I am in no way affiliated with Shamus Young, other than just being a fan of his work.

 

*He did review a few aspects of CoX in a handful of articles, but no "Let's Play" series.

[KalSpiro]

CO never managed to keep my attention.  It was too easy.  And it all just felt slapdash.  The world, which has so much actually going on in it, felt dead, slow, and unemotional.  Freeform allowed for exceptionally broken character designs.  I recreated my AR/Dev blaster in CO, he had the Robot shield, Regen and bunch of gun powers.  He was effectively invulnerable.  The shield could mitigate most damage and anything it couldn't he regenned in an instant, then he'd go into gun kata and be able to fight indefinitely because most of his hits procced energy return.  Just keep doing that indefinitely.  It's cool, for a little bit, then it's not anymore.  The missions always felt too impersonal, even though they're meant to put you into the action more. 

 

I had over 20 CoH characters, doing the same content over and over, and I would enjoy it each time because the combat feels meaningful.  When I do something it's concrete, the maps are similar but different each time, even for the same mission, they're not even in the same place each time.  Hes, there are still some fairly broken builds, but it's much easier to balance one set on a handful of classes than a power across all possible combinations of powers.

[honoraryorange]

This is an interesting one, and I find I don't have an answer for it really, aside from as many others have said.. the feel.

 

I enjoy City of Heroes. I'm not a massive fan of its lore, stories, heroes or villains though. I wouldn't even say I'm a huge fanboy of it. I simply enjoy the way the game plays, I enjoy the classes, and powersets, and mechanics. It is fun to log in and 'do things'.

 

I tried CO with a very open mind, as I said I wasn't married to CoX. I wasn't looking for something to replace the Heroes genre for me, I was looking for a new, fun MMO and the fact that it was based around comics was a bonus.

 

But I just couldn't get into it. It didn't feel right. The powers didn't feel like they had the same umph. I didn't enjoy my characters as much (and I'm not someone who enjoys 'characters' with crazy back stories or concepts, I just mean fun in general). It just didn't hold me. And I think the same goes for most people as you could see from how quickly its playerbase fell off.

 

So as I said, I don't have an answer, except its implementation just wasn't fun or catchy to most of us.

 

[Therumancer]

  I think there were a lot of problems from the beginning. To begin with I think the devs really wanted to create a "Marvel" game as they originally advertised, but when they couldn't get the licensing and DC was already doing it's own thing they settled for what was probably the biggest super-hero RPG of all time, because it was larger than any of the smaller comic companies they might have been able to use, and had an installed fan base of a sort (or so they thought). At the end of the day I think a big part of the problem was they could never made the world "live" because it really wasn't what they wanted and they had lost their original IP. Since the devs weren't exactly into it, this reflected on their quests, world, and everything else. That there was going to be a lack of content was fairly obvious from the beginning, at least to me, and even now with CO still being one of the biggest MMOs on ARC it doesn't exactly seem to get a lot of attention from the people that created it. A bunch of unenthusiastic devs trying to work with a world that was designed to knock off what they actually wanted to do as closely as possible without getting them sued was probably never going to work out.

 

I gave CO a good number of chances as I am a lifetime subscriber, and I have a fair number of top level characters, though how many are still functional given the way they re-wrote game balance a few times is beyond me. For me the real death knell was when they implemented their vehicles system, which I enjoyed. As I got a bunch of free points for being a lifetime subscriber and had taken a long break before that I had a lot of them to spend towards getting one of the really fancy vehicles right off the bat, and I spent a ton of resources upgrading it. I even build a character specifically around the vehicle I was going to use of course. Cryptic at the time said they didn't want vehicles to be a premium feature and despite the way they launched things they always intended top end vehicles to be obtainable during game play. To put it bluntly there were game balance issues, and all kinds of things,but in the end what they decided to do was pretty much lock vehicles out of most of the maps/issues/etc... and make them only viable in very specific places so of course anyone who invested heavily in them lost out, to my knowledge they never exactly made high end vehicles obtainable to everyone which was a big part of the problem as well. It wound up becoming a largely wasted subsystem unless you wanted to pretty much just roam the streets firing at packs of mobs for your kill counter... and even then it seemed like people were screaming because of the way you could one shot entire groups with the right weapons.... assuming of course you found anyone on the increasingly empty server.

 

 

I will also say that while I don't think CoX ever had the most amazing graphics out there, even for it's time, I thought they were decent and I liked how much you could do with the characters. On the other hand I think CO had disgustingly ugly graphics, I understand what they were trying to do, but I think it failed on pretty much every level. I never had as much fun making my CO characters as I did doing ones for CoX.... and the entire game as much as I enjoyed some of the mechanics occasionally wanted to make me barf while looking at it. I've had people watching me play it literally say "why the heck would you ever play something like that" and these were people like me who will argue graphics aren't everything and who even play entirely text/ASCII based games (Nethack anyone?). I know a few people here have mentioned this too, but I think this was one of the game's biggest problems when you get past everything else... I think people were driven off by a butt ugly game, being RPG fans all the "graphics aren't everything" people gave it a shot, and well... most of them left. I weirdly think they would have done better to make it as a MUD (pure text) than to have released it with those graphics, to this day I cannot fathom exactly what they were thinking when they looked at these graphics designs and felt they were okay, even for the year it came out.

 

 

 

 

 

[Vadavim]

I think the fact that this thread contains 18+ pages of passionate replies really shows how special CoH was! Here are some of the things that made CoH feel unique to me:

 

Roleplay

This was the first time I actually tried roleplaying in an MMO, and boy was it great: Pocket D was amazing, and it still is in Homecoming! Roleplaying really felt like a game-within-a-game, to the point where it was all I'd do some nights. Add to this a bunch of awesome super groups and bases where we could hang out, and it was incredibly immersive.

 

Unique Roles

I absolutely love controllers (and dominators). They provide an experience that I haven't been able to recapture in other MMOs. You really felt like you could control the battlefield, with so many ways to disable enemies. I think this role has long since been forgotten in modern MMOs in the name of "balance" (when's the last time you saw a class that could completely disable groups of enemies for more than a few seconds?). Other support roles also felt amazing. Buffs and debuffs feel so meaningful in this game. They're not just tiny stat boosts you can grant for a short period of time. With a team of support characters, you can turn of zeroes into a team of heroes!

 

Creativity

People were (and still are) incredibly creative with their choice of power sets, costumes, and character names. It makes teaming up together so much more fun! Every character felt unique, and their costumes weren't constrained by gear, race, or class choice (unlike many other MMOs). You could have a stylish character at level 1, whereas in other MMOs, style usually was more of an endgame thing.

 

Chaos

This has been mentioned before, but there's really nothing quite like running a bunch of radio missions and things like it. It's a lot of chaotic fun! I can't think of another MMO where you constantly fight crazy amounts of enemies. Bodies flying everywhere, big explosions, hurricanes, snow storms, the whole shebang. Some of the most fun I've had have been in teams where there isn't a tank, chaos erupts, and we're all fighting for our lives. Suddenly we get ambushed and it turns into a full out brawl. Ahhh! Because revival is incredibly easy in this game, no one's afraid to get their hands dirty, so this can lead to some crazy (fun) scenarios.

[Vareos]

To low degrees I can tolerate cell shading but I prefer it be very minimal. I do understand CoX has it in some areas to certain degrees and you can increase it if you like but I simply can't and wont play any game with heavy degree of cell shading, it triggers migraine which means nauseous and no thank you I'm out and not coming back. That in and of itself ruined any chance I would  ever play CO. Though it isn't just CO I have the issues with games like borderlands 1 &2 , the Crackdown series of games. They might all be great games but cell shading is a hard no for me. Then later on to see CO went with pay walls which hit me as damn mobile game gimmicks killed any chance I would ever do anything with that game short of maybe use a hard copy of it for a drink coaster.

[DoctorHugh]

A lot of it is a matter of taste, and taste is often most strongly influenced by what you get used to. I've played both games, as well STO and Neverwinter and EVE and LotRO and pretty much every decent MMO that's been out there. CoH wasn't my first MMO by a long shot, so that wasn't where my tastes were created.

 

Many comments in the thread are bang on. But discussions of 'how powers are selected' and 'combat animations' etc. tend to fixate on mechanics, and mechanics aren't why we play games, for the most part. We play games because of the way they make us feel.

 

For me, the difference comes down to this, at a high level:

 

- CoX feels like a not-very-well rendered vision of an extensive 'real place and time', what is often called 'world-building' in fiction.

 

- CO feels like a fairly well rendered version of a very limited, fake place. A minimalist caricature of a snapshot of a reality.

 

In a novel, that would make the difference between a well-envisioned world, that you get immersed in despite some noticeable flaws; vs. a technically well-written book that you just can't get in to because the characters are all 2-dimensional and lack real depth and motivation.

[Neuronia]

Played both, prefer CoH for most stuff.

The grind in CO used to be run Alerts to 50, then run Fire & Ice and Sky Command and others for Destrum BEarings et. al., then they changed the grind for that gear and I lost interest.

 

Having farm maps available in CoH is much, much better. I can have a new concept to 50 in under a day, then another day or so to get the Accolades. There aren't really any accolades in CO, so my characters never really feel really powerful. I do love the Nemesis system in that other game though, and the depth of costume options. It just wasn't enough to keep me going for more than a month or so, even grinding lootboxes got old fast once my friend and I got all the vehicles and auras and stuff we wanted.

 

 

[incantation]

I tried to play Champons after COH ,and just couldn't do it.

 

The graphics, character selection, and power sets just didn't compare in my opinion. It felt very cookie cutter to me.

 

To each their own.

[ZeeHero]

I'll be brutally honest, CO's combat is miles better than COH gameplay, and CO isnt a high bar -AT ALL-

 

however COH is just beyond measureably better in every non directly combat gameplay related way.

 

in CO maybe 10% of your concepts will be powerful in endgame, in COH thats 90%.

 

CO's freeform sucked, it was 95% false choices, COH's system is actually far superior in every way for builds.

 

That's just scratching the surface. the "Salty vets" people on CO whine about are RIGHT. CO sucks compared to COH in many more ways than a few. there are a couple things CO does better, but not enough.

[Frostbiter]

I like CO's combat but it's not really that much better. I like the tap/charge powers stuff but blocking is very pingy and button tapping to get out of holds felt very annoying and useless.

[Hyperstrike]

I prefer CoH's combat and customizability to CO's.

The main problem is, because of so much shared codebase, the two games feel really similar.

That's what REALLY aggravated me in CO.  If felt, simultaneously REALLY familiar, and REALLY alien at the same time.

I was in the friends and family Alpha, and was submitting feedback, suggestions, etc.

Pretty much all of which got ignored.

And, eventually they banned me.  Supposedly for "leaking".

CROCK
OF
**POOP!**

[ClawsandEffect]

I played CoH for 7 years before shutdown. I played CO for.....maybe a month tops. 

 

A ton of reasons for that. I'll summarize. 

 

1) Combat. I've heard people say that combat in CoH feels slow and clunky. These people often say that it would be SO much better if it were an "action oriented" combat system where you actualy had to block and move out of the way of attacks. That would fail spectacularly for one major reason: The average CoH player is significantly older that the average player of most other games. I'm 40 myself, and I grew up playing video games so a twitch reflex based system would be no big deal for me. But there are a lot of players that are significantly older than me and just aren't physically capable of reacting that fast anymore. 

 

Combat in CoH doesn't need to be fast and twitchy for the main reason that it emphasizes the last 3 letters of MMORPG that most people drop nowadays. It is at it's core a ROLE-PLAYING game, and not an action game. 

 

2) Writing. 

 

CO's writing is just bad. Full Stop. 

 

Don;t even try to defend it. It has racist stereotypes galore (which has been mentioned earlier in the thread), and you just can't take anything the characters say seriously. CoH's writing tried and (mostly) succeeded in capturing the Silver Age comics feel. It has stories that I remembered for YEARS after the game shut down. CO on the other hand....well my wife asked me what the mission I just did was about after I logged off....and I couldn't remember 5 minutes after I finished it. CoH's stories had gravity to them, and you felt like what your character was doing actually mattered.

 

3) Community

 

This is the big one. 

 

I met my wife in CoH, and a good number of people I consider close friends even though we've never met in person. With the new crop of players showing up there's more toxicity than there was on live, but it's still for the most part a friendly and welcoming game. Hell, go down and look at our Archtypes forums literally right now. Skim some threads and see if you can find anyone just outright being a dick. There's very little of the "git gud noob" mentality in this game and a whole lot of people who want to HELP you get better. 

 

CO's forums were a frigging cesspool. It seriously made me wonder if everyone who got banned from CoH's forums found their way over there. 

 

 

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

2 hours ago, ZeeHero said:

I'll be brutally honest, CO's combat is miles better than COH gameplay, and CO isnt a high bar -AT ALL-

 

however COH is just beyond measureably better in every non directly combat gameplay related way.

 

in CO maybe 10% of your concepts will be powerful in endgame, in COH thats 90%.

 

CO's freeform sucked, it was 95% false choices, COH's system is actually far superior in every way for builds.

 

That's just scratching the surface. the "Salty vets" people on CO whine about are RIGHT. CO sucks compared to COH in many more ways than a few. there are a couple things CO does better, but not enough.

Necro much?

[ZeeHero]

1 minute ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

Necro much?

Didn't notice the dates.

[TraumaTrain]

11 minutes ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

Necro much?

It'll be okay.

[Bill Z Bubba]

On 5/2/2019 at 11:59 AM, The Philotic Knight said:

 

A THOUSAND times THIS.

 

Yea. @marcussmythe that was a damn fine post.