ity of Villains is both a sequel to and an expansion of last year's hit massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), City of Heroes. CoH let players take the roles of superheroes defending the fictional city of Paragon from the ravages of a huge variety of villain groups. CoH's success came in part from its simplicity of play. A game for players who didn't like other MMORPGs, CoH launched with a streamlined economy and no player-vs- player (PvP) play. Since its launch, CoH has steadily added content, including very limited PvP. City of Villains brings PvP to the forefront and expands the game-world economy with the addition of player-customizable bases.
Players begin CoV by picking one of five supervillain archetypes (Dominators, Corruptors, Brutes, Stalkers or Masterminds) and then picking a name and costume. The costume creator contains all the CoH options and many more, including (but hardly limited to) animal forms, pirate garb and even simple lab coats. The combinations are effectively endless, made all the more so by the completely customizable color schemes. Once the player has his costume ready to go, he is plunged into the tutorial, a prison break sponsored by Lord Recluse and his Arachnos minions. By the time the player has completed the jailbreak and been flown to the Recluse's stronghold in the Rogue Isles, he has all the basics of the game down and is ready to start his villainous career.
Despite their shared world and servers, no player in CoV or CoH is ever required to PvP against another. PvP happens in one of the three game maps (zones) set aside for it, or in super-group bases. In addition to experience (for increasing characters' levels) and influence (for buying upgrades to the characters' powers), characters now also earn prestige (used to buy and upgrade bases) and salvage (used to assemble special components such as healing beds and teleporters inside bases). Special super-group quests can gain items of power that give bonuses to the whole roster of the group while they are active. The danger of items of power is that they allow other super-groups to raid the base. Such raids can happen only at a time set by the defending super-group, who are given 48 hours' notice of the planned raid.
Villainous, but not evil
The best thing that CoV does is convey the atmosphere of a setting ruled by a villainous dictator and dominated by his minions, without portraying a place where the player's characters can use their powers for harm and mayhem without any limits. Yes, the characters run missions where they rob or kidnap or threaten, but they don't torture or murder in cold blood or simply trample innocents. Most of the mission targets in CoV are actually other, non-player, bad guys or else good guys who knew what they were getting into when they signed on.
Since CoV is set in the same world as CoH, and because there is a limit to what a design studio can do in a year, there is a certain amount of recycled content in CoV. Players will see this almost immediately in the powers available to villain archetypes. There are new ones, but the majority of powers are from CoH. Once players spend some time in the game, however, they find that because of the way the powers have been remixed, and because of the special new mechanic that each villain archetype gets (Brutes, for instance, do more damage with their attacks the more times they are attacked), the villains all play differently than do their hero counterparts. So it is with other older elements mixed into the game; they are there, but they have a new and entertaining twist.
It is worth saying again that despite emphasis on PvP in CoV, no player ever has to engage in it. Skipping it means missing some of the game's content, but there are plenty of other things to do. On the other hand, it is painless to try PvP. Unlike when a computer-controlled enemy kills a player, there is no penalty to dying in PvP. In the PvP zones, and in bases during a raid, all the characters scale to the same power level, so there is no fear of being killed by characters against which the player's character has no chance. At the same time, there is lots of room for tactics and teamwork, and there is the satisfaction of defeating a thinking human opponent instead of a programmed, computer-run one.
All in all, CoV is a terrific MMORPG, whether it is played as a standalone game or as an expansion of CoH.
A very happy carryover from City of Heroes to City of Villains is how easy it is to find people to team up with, and how nice those people tend to be. I was a little worried that the shift to playing villains would bring out unattractive sides of players, but despite their evil-looking costumes, the players are just as eager to team up to do crime as they were to prevent it.
—Eric
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