here are more persistent shared worlds (PSWs) available to players online now than ever before, and many more of them are on the way. For publishers, these games have two enormous advantages over traditional games: The companies can charge players a monthly fee, and PSWs are immune to piracy, because accounts can't be duplicated the way software can. Despite an already crowded marketplace, these advantages are only going to ensure that the number of PSWs, and thus players' alternatives for playing online, are going to continue to expand. Despite all those market forces, City of Heroes is not just the first PSW that allows players the chance to take the roles of superheroes, but also seems to be the only one that will be on the market this year.
Although it's billed as a role-playing game, City's gameplay has more in common with Planetside and Counter Strike than it does with EverQuest or Final Fantasy XI. In the realm of character creation, however, City simply annihilates those other games. Players can and will spend hours creating the look of their characters, which can be anything from very close copies of any character ever created in the comic-book genre to totally new and different heroes. The process is more than just putting different outfits on different human torsos. Players can create robots, mutants and aliens, or combine parts of each. The only thing that is missing from the costume-making palate is capes; City is a cape-free game.
In addition to their characters' look, players also select one of five classes: blasters, tankers, scrappers, defenders and controllers. Each of those does what you'd expect: blasters use ranged attacks, tankers take a lot of damage, scrappers battle hand to hand, defenders specialize in healing and controllers affect villains in ways beyond knocking down their hit points. Once a character starts in the world, its look and its class never change. As characters gain experience points and go up in level, they gain new powers and improve their existing ones, but once the player assigns these changes, they are irrevocable.
Gameplay in CoH is very straightforward compared to other role-playing PSWs, which is why it brings to mind fighting games like Planetside. City is all about fighting, and starting characters don't have to cut wood or chase rats before they can do it. A new hero jumps right into doing good and can take down low-level criminals right from the start of the game. All the criminals are computer-controlled; there is no player-vs.-player element to the game. That will be in the expansion.
Characters count
In many PSWs characters can learn crafting skills, and there is often some sort of eBayish marketplace to let them sell what they create. In Star Wars Galaxies, for example, characters can pick a crafting or artists' class and earn money and experience without ever shooting a blaster. The heroes in City do not have this option. What little "money" the game has is called influence, and it can be spent with nonplayer characters for temporary improvements in the character's powers. These buffs can also be captured from criminals and traded among characters, which is the closest City comes to having an economy.
The lack of a complex economy is a good thing in the short term and a bad one in the long. It means that starting characters can join in more easily because there are fewer details to master and nothing to equip once character creation is over. In the end, however, characters can't build anything in Paragon City except their heroes, who never change visually. They can't rent apartments, buy cars or even trade for a new set of wings.
Besides building a virtual home on the web, the thing that keeps players paying their monthly fee for a PSW is the friendships they form, and City has a unique and very cool mechanic for helping friendships along. High-level characters may adopt lower-level characters as "sidekicks." Being a sidekick allows the lower-level character to fight as if they were nearly the level of the original hero as long as they stay within a short distance of that mentor. This is brilliant, because it opens up even the hardest parts of the world to relative newbies as long as they can find an experienced character to be their guide.
Other than capes and player-vs.-player conflict, the only disappointment in City is that there is very little interaction with the environment. In Freedom Force, a single-player superhero game from last year, the characters could break anything on the map and pick up and use nearly anything as a weapon. This doesn't happen in City. The special effects for the powers look great, and villains will drop with appropriate violence when struck, but the telephone pole also caught in the blast will be unharmed, as will the street, the walls, the trash cans, etc. In the street, cars will hit heroes that get in their way, but it doesn't hurt the car or the hero.
Overall, City of Heroes is a fun multiplayer game of superhero combat, with great character design tools, that may not hold a player's attention for months on end but will certain entertain them through all of their initial 30 days.
The long-term viability of City of Heroes, at least until the expansion is released, probably depends on the developer-initiated special events such as the alien invasion that ended the beta. That was done so well that those who experienced it are still bragging about being there for it.
— Eric
Back to the top.
