City of Heroes – Random Thoughts

I’ve shied away from MMORPGs for years, realizing that, with aliases like “EverCrack,” it was likely to be too addictive and too much of a time sink in a life like mine that’s already 120% books. Add to that a distinct lack of interest in most of them (except to occasionally look over th shoulder) and that was pretty easy.
When Doyce, then Jackie, then others I knew started getting hooked on City of Heroes, and when I had a chance to see it, I knew that I was doomty-doom-doom-doomed.

For the uninitiated, the publisher summarizes CoH like this:

Realize your comic book dreams in this massively multiplayer online role-playing game that is home to an entire universe of super-powered heroes and villains. Build your own unique hero from millions of possible character combinations and venture into Paragon City to discover all the danger, wonder, and excitement that await you!

In the rich 3D backdrop of Paragon City, gamers take on the roles of heroes, using their supernatural abilities to fight evildoers. Go up against villains and ne?er-do-wells, alien invaders, evil gangs, and organized crime rings to bring peace and justice to the good people of Paragon City.

Create your character, choosing from many hero types and powers. Then personalize your character?s appearance with the game?s extensive Costume Creation system. This incredibly versatile tool allows you to mix and match clothing pieces, hair, facial features, costume details, colors, textures, and patterns. There are literally trillions of different combinations to choose from, allowing you to create a totally unique character.
I mean — what there doesn’t push a button for me?
Of a mercy, I’ve discovered that I can actually manage CoH in my life. Even with Margie gone, the child and cats got fed, the house stayed clean, I got enough sleep to stay on my feet, and I was in warming up Margie’s side of the bed last night before she pulled herself away from her post-travel e-mail and decompression. Margie’s also suggested some disincentives to my not being in bed at a reasonable hour, and those are hard to argue with, too.
So while I probably won’t have too many 6-hour CoH sessions any time soon, I should be able to get in an hour or two, here or there, as schedule permits and as inclination allows.
So why am I enjoying it so much, beyond what’s obvious above? A variety of reasons.

1. When it comes to computer games, I’ve always favored First Person Shooters (FPS) to others, and CoH definitely fills the bill here. It has the advantage over most of the ones I’ve played or seen that it’s highly playable in either solo or multi-player mode — you can do a lot of what you want on your own (esp. if your time is limited), but there’s also lots of opportunity (and even requirement, on some levels) to team up with others.
   The biggest dis-ad, related to that, is that it’s an online game. That makes its performance dependent on your network connection. And CoH seems to be notoriously sensitive to certain network connection problems. I’ve had periods of repeated Mapserver Disconnects. Not enough to make me drop the game, by any means, but annoying (and likely a combo of the wireless/router/cable connection I’ve got going).
   Most online FPSes work in an arena or mission mode — you’re one of a few people running in an isolated setup. Most MMORPGs use, instead, an isometric view, as you look down on an abstracted, wide 3/4 perspective on the character. By running in a FPS mode, though, CoH is as close to immersive in an MMORPG as you can get. You can actually toggle into a through-the-eyeballs mode (though I find that limits your field of view), and in cases where you want something more than the over-the-back mode you can swing around to get different perspectives, but as it stands, it does just what I want.

2. The control interface is pretty clean — a limited amount of keys to do things, with the capability of doing most else via on-screen tabs or through macros. I find the online chat interface to be difficult to master (probably one of those “with practice” things), and while you can limit your messages to an individual, a team, a super-team, your local vicinity, or global, it’s far too easy to do it to the wrong audience. For me, at least.
3. I love that you can design the costumes, and that the costuming tool is so easy to use and flexible. One of the few quibbles I have with the game is that once you’re in a costume (including appearance), you’re pretty much locked in until you are a high level and have a lot of Influence to spend on a cosmetic change. I understand the game (and metagame) rationale for doing so, but some sort of minor tweaking would be awfully nice (especially when you discover that you’ve forgotten something, like, say, a tail on your cat-girl). Some sort of minor limitation (X amount of change per Level) would address a lot of this.
   For that matter, it would be nice if CoH allowed you to design/review characters offline, outside of the bounds of the server. There may be game security/hacking issues involved, but it would be nice to figure out some character design stuff outside of Actual Play Time.

4. I like the heroic aspect of the game. While it’s possible to portray yourself as a grim-and-gritty character (through costuming, naming, etc.), you really can’t do much more than whomp on the bad guys. And even then, all those blasts and blows and other bits of game violence are part of “arresting” them (they are, evidently, automatically teleported away to a holding facility once subdued).
   This is one reason why, conceptually, the upcoming City of Villains doesn’t appeal to me. I like being a hero. I don’t need to be able to destroy property or rob people or stuff like that to get my vicarious jollies. Or, as G’Kar put it (in the B5 ep “A Late Delivery from Avalon”), “By G’Quon I can’t recall the last time I was in a fight like that! No moral ambiguity, no hopeless battle against ancient and overwhelming forces. They were the bad guys, as you say, and we were the good guys! And they made a very satisfying thump when they hit the floor!”
   I like making for lots of villainous floor thumps, though there are plenty of Ancient and Overwhelming Forces out there waiting to deliver to me the same.
   For that matter, I like it that you never really die (another fine comic book convention). Instead, unless you are revived by one of your team mates, you get resurrected back in a hospital. At early levels, this doesn’t do you any harm; as of 5 or so, you start incurring “debt” that slows your advancement

5. I like the civilians. I like that they run around in panic about the bad guys (except, perhaps, for the cops, who are generally useless and are just as likely to run away even from simple gang members). I like that they come and thank you profusely when you save them. I like that, though they are often threatened, they are never actually shown being hurt.
   As you rise in levels, you fairly quickly get to the point where certain opponents aren’t worth going after — they don’t add anything to your experience or your influence for defeating them. Which does lead to some oddly disconcerting moments when you find your hero running past people being robbed or threatened with assault without doing anything about it. The game rationale (you have bigger fish to fry and more lives to save) and metagame rationale (leave ’em for the noobs) don’t fully satisfy. I almost wish that the game would mask out the gray villains from sight.

6. Though listed as a MMORPG, there isn’t much “role” there beyond what you project. Everyone is, for the most part, a pragmatically fearless hero, and there are no specific rewards for “good role playing.” There are said to be some of the CoH servers where there’s more done in a role-playing way, but I haven’t searched it out (and, to be honest, aren’t much interested in this context for doing much more RPing than I throw in with my origin stories and typed accents).
7. I love the array of powers available. The balance of game play makes some things (like flight) a lot less common than in actual comics (meaning you spend a lot of time running from one place to another), but most any power you can imagine from the comics (except wings and shape-changing, and even that’s just a sorta thing) is available.
   The wide array of power combinations and growth paths and enhancements to powers you can buy makes for a huge variety of characters, even leaving off the costuming issues. That makes for ongoing fun game play, as you try out different combinations of heroes you’ve always wanted to be/see/run. (It also makes for a huge body of “gaming the game” knowledge — “this power is better than that power, especially if you tweak it with this enhancement and go on this mission at that stage and …” — of the sort that I prefer not do dive too obsessively into.) It makes things much richer than one might imagine, and makes the more repetitive bits (repeated missions, standard set pieces) the more noticeable but endurable.
   That said, the environment is amazingly rich. Detailed city maps, with different areas and sub-areas being more or less dangerous, more or less associated with certain groups of baddies — each of which behaves differently, has its own motivations, its own meta-plot (which might intersect with yours more or less depending on the type of character you are — magic-based heroes will tend to encounter or be directed toward different villains than tech-based heroes). The layers of depth and breadth to the overarching tale of Paragon City is breathtaking, and you can participate in or ignore it however you wish. Triffic stuff there, even if things can seem a bit repetitive at times.

8. The interaction with other players give the game a complexity that a stand-alone game couldn’t provide. Teaming up can be a lot of fun, but it can also be terribly frustrating if you have a leader who doesn’t know what they’re doing, or team members who can’t maintain unit cohesion and discipline, or just folks who don’t understand basic tactics.
   And let me say, just as a side note, that one advantage we have of not living in a world of supers is that we don’t have to put up with folks who really, truly, cannot come up with decent or original or correctly-spelled aliases/personae. Except for folks in the hip-hop/rap industry, of course.
   (Some spelling bits are workarounds to the rule that hero names have to be unique. So if Shotgun is already take, you might try Shot-Gun, or Shot Gun, or Shot.Gun, or Mr. Shotgun, or Shotgun Man, or The Shotgunner, or (and this is when it starts to get goofy) Shotgunn, Shottgun, Schotguun, or Shahtguhn, or other things that start to create questions as to whether you actually know how to spell the word (or whether you shouldn’t just give up and come up with a different frickin’ name).
   It’s great fun, though, when you encounter someone you’ve met before (“Yeah, that was a good run in the Hollows. Wanna team up again?”) or even when you stumble across someone you know in RL. I was standing around, waiting for the rest of a team to finish up doing something, when a passing creature said, “Dave?” And, again, “Dave?” “Yeeeeaaaahhh?” I replied, not quite knowing how someone would recognize me.
   Turned out it was Lee, who had seen a screen shot of the character I’d sent to Doyce, and had recognized me. We had an abortive chat, as I had to run off with my team, but it was really cool being recognized. And it was even more cool Saturday night when he and Doyce and I teamed up on a fun mission, and I felt I was able to contribute and hold my own. Yay.

Stuff like that.
CoH isn’t without flaws, but it’s a lot of fun, too, and worth the time I’ve put (in a managed way) into it. I look forward to it being more fun for some time to come. And, I suspect, to making more comments about it here.