Tag Archives: City of Heroes

DC Universe Online: My review after a month of playing

Computer Games, Uncategorized, , , ,

So, recently I went through a couple of games (callout to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn), and after growing bored with those games (or finishing them outright), I found myself looking for something new to play and that’s how I found about Coinlooting.com. As I went through my Steam games, I remembered DC Universe Online was one of those that has been in my folder forever, and I started thinking about looking at it again.

You see, years ago, I fired up that game and played to about level 13 or 14, but kind of gave up there because it was one of those games that had a lot to do up until about that level, and then it basically threw you into the larger world, and all I remembered was being slaughtered practically everywhere I went. There never seemed to be a sense of “go over here and there are mobs and missions of your level” aspect to the game, and everywhere I went was just instant death. So I quit.

This time, I looked at the game and decided I would give it yet another try, and if I ran into the same problem again, at least I would have a few days of putting around before giving up once more.

Now, I’ve been playing the game about a month, and let’s just say that I’m really enjoying it. I’ve maxed out (in level to 30) one character and am about to complete two others in the very near future. But what I’ve discovered is that even though level 30 is the highest level, the end game becomes much about leveling gear than just the character’s level. In order to run higher content, you need higher level gear averages, and then you can compete for even higher gear to continue that type of progression.

But there are a lot of things you can do as you get up there in level and gear. And there’s much more than just simple gear acquisition. There is also base building (their version of personal housing), various types of implants and even ally progression (you get an ally that can jump into combat with you for tiny fractions of time that you can level up to get stronger and more useful).

But what really make the game shine is its coordination with the DC Universe itself. Throughout the game, you interact with the heroes and villains of DC so that you start to feel somewhat like a part of that universe rather than someone living in an amusement park that runs into a glorified version of Mickey Mouse or whomever. Every character chooses from a series of heroes or villains that match the power class you chose when starting your character, so quite often you’re communicating with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Joker, Circe or Lex Luthor. And then you end up interacting with a collection of the rest of the DC Universe as you progress through stories and missions.

Just recently, I discovered the Broker (which is the game’s version of an auction house), and I’m quickly learning the aspects of that part of the universe, having gone from having about $10,000 or so in game money to building a Bruce Wayne-ish level of wealth at about $170 million. Strangely enough, the Broker feels like a game all on its own, and it can be quite addicting.

The one tiny criticism I have with the game so far is that in order to really take advantage of much of what the game has to offer requires you to subscribe and pay their monthly (or in larger increments for more time) fee. I subbed for a year so I don’t have to worry about that, but I can easily see how the game might get really frustrating for anyone who plays it with the hopes of maintaining a free account. But that’s really a squabble for another time because I’m subbed, so I’m having a great time, and honestly, the game developers have to make some money or the game’s just not going to be maintained going forward. So there is that.

But one thing I really enjoy about the game is being a superhero (or supervillain). It was the one aspect of City of Heroes that I truly miss, and one of the problems of superhero games is that there aren’t a whole lot of them left out there, and of the ones that are left, they’re generally not that good. I mean, there’s a Marvel one out there, but I’ve played variations of that, and it is very transaction needy, and it doesn’t really feel like it has much of a story continuity that would keep one returning. Unfortunately, City of Heroes was canceled back in its hey day by a company that just didn’t have a lot of faith in its franchise (although there may have been some intellectual property issues as many players adopted the names or characteristics of well known franchise heroes, and I suspect there were lawsuits in the works because of that). There has been one very recent attempt to recapture the ideals of City of Heroes in a game called Ship of Heroes, but I played during an early beta (or later alpha), and it felt very rudimentary and in need of a lot of growth before it would be a fraction of what was once great about City of Heroes.

For now, DC Universe seems to be able to fill the superhero need, and the developers appear to be interested in maintaining content going forward, so as long as they continue with that trajectory, I suspect the game might be well worth continuing to play.

City of Heroes is back…so it seems

Uncategorized, ,
The protest is getting out of hand

One of the greatest MMOs in history (at least according to my beliefs), City of Heroes, was shut down by NCsoft in November of 2012. It was probably one of the saddest days of MMO history because it was such a wonderful game, regardless of the little nuances that needed to be fixed (but isn’t that the way it is with most computer games?). But Paragon Studios (the development house that maintained the game) was a part of NCsoft, and NCsoft had a history of closing down beloved games (it was only a few years before in February of 2009 that they shut down Richard Garriott’s ground-breaking Tabula Rasa). So, it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that NCsoft was going to be closing down yet another.

The funny thing is that a year or so ago before they closed City of Heroes, I had just gotten back into the game, joined a guild (or whatever they were called in that game) and was playing on an almost daily basis. And then they announced the servers were going to be closing. I was devastated.

City of Heroes was a really unique game. On the surface, you created a custom-made superhero with all sorts of interesting skills, and then you went into the game to stop bad guys all over the city. There were “dungeons” or operations where you went into specific scenarios and fought bad guys. And as simple as it sounds like it was, it was a lot of fun.

A couple of games tried to capture that same kind of spirit (or concurrently attempted to do so), such as DC Universe, Champions Online and Marvel Heroes (remade as Marvel Heroes 2016). A number of superheroes MMOs came along later, but so far, none have matched the fun and complexity of City of Heroes.

One of the things that made City of Heroes (and then City of Villains that came later before it was collapsed back into City of Heroes) so unique was the different levels of play built within the game itself. I don’t mean “easy” or “hard”, but the levels of play designed within the game as in when you’d be playing the game, you might start to discover that there was more under the surface than what you were playing. I discovered this the last time around (I’d quit and restarted in that game a number of times). It’s like the old Everquest where you’d be playing an area for months, constantly grinding the content, only to discover that there was a secret door hidden in a wall you’d been walking by so many times before. And that would open up a whole new way of playing that you didn’t even realize was right there in front of you all along.

City of Heroes felt like that from time to time. You’d be playing along and then suddenly realize there might be more under the surface, and once you found it, your whole concept of the game became that much deeper.

So, for years, we all felt sad as this game was lost to us. NCsoft still makes numerous games that are well played today (I still play Guild Wars 2, another of their titles). So many times I remember reading an essay about how someone wished the game would be remade so we could all play it again.

And then a recent report (see the embedded link) indicated that a pirate server of City of Heroes has been active for years. Keep in mind, this isn’t an official version of the game, but an unauthorized version of the game, maintained by someone who may or may not have been profiting off the game (I don’t know enough about the situation to say one way or the other). And if that’s the case, then there’s a really strong chance that NCsoft is going to crack down on them like Disney going after a company sporting a mascot of a mouse with big black ears or Star Wars after anything involving, well, anything Star Wars-related. Companies aren’t really fond of anyone else using their intellectual property.

So the hope is that NCsoft doesn’t crack down, or even better, realizes that there’s still a strong interest in this game and goes out of their way to give us an updated version of this beautiful vision. But they’re much better at shutting things down, so I’m not holding out a lot of hope.

So, the story is relatively new, which means anything can happen. Which also means that something good can come out of this, and even though the chances are slim, perhaps something wonderful can happen from this.

The Strange World of Free to Play (F2P) Games

Business, Computer Games, Music, Social Networking, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lately, I’ve been playing City of Heroes, which for those who don’t know it, is a massively multiplayer online persistant world game, often referred to as an MMO, or an MMORPG (for role playing game). Years ago, I started playing the game, when I was bored with whatever other MMO I was playing at the time, and recently, I installed it again and decided to pursue its new play model.

You see, in the old days, the game used to cost $15 a month to play. Now, in order to attract more players, the game has turned into a Free to Play (F2P) game, much like the previous success of Lord of the Rings Online, which went to a F2P model in hopes of avoiding going backrupt. And it succeeded, which has breathed new life into other games that don’t want to go the route of Star Wars Galaxies (which closed shop after not being able to maintain a consistent player base.

The way a F2P model tends to work is that you are allowed access to certain areas, and maybe certain characters, but some parts of the world/universe are off limits or you have to pay a little bit more in order to access those areas or use extra characters. Not really wanting to do the barter thing with every little thing in the game, I subscribed to a VIP membership, which is essentially the same sort of $15 a month I was playing before. This gives me complete access to everything, although I have noticed that every now and then I still buy something that is “extra” in the game.

Which brings up a thing that has kind of bothered me about this model. If I’m someone who is a willing subscriber, I really should be given 100 percent access to everything. Yet, I still feel a bit nickle and dimed in this type of environment. But I appreciate the game, so I have been willing to shell out a bit more money just to contribute to the game I hope to be playing for some time.

Which brings me to how this sort of model doesn’t work. And Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 comes to mind. World of Warcraft is a pay to play game (P2P), and that’s fine. But the developers (or owners) have become somewhat greedy. They have continued to insert things into the game that they want you to pay for outside of the game. So, even though they’re making a crapload of money for their product, they’re still trying to nickle and dime people beyond the quarters they’re already getting. And don’t get me started on Diablo 3, which is a game that cost me $59.99 to buy (or was it $69.99?), and then they launched the game with all intentions of adding a “pay Blizzard’s greed” auction house, where you will pay real money to buy things in the game.

Years ago, Blizzard was seen as the good guy when it came to games, but lately, I can’t say the same. Diablo 3, for sake of clarification, sucked. It was a crappy game that wasn’t worth the money, the time, or even the energy. The fact that it had the name of two of the greatest games in history as what it was supposed to be a sequel made it even worse. Diablo and Diablo 2 were both great games. They even made the game required to be online at all times, which I suspect had more to do with hoping to get people to feel comfortable with giving money to the auction house model (single players would have never gone online where they’d have to see the auction house every time they signed onto the game) than it was for security or any other stupid reason.

A recent major name in online games is Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I played when it first released and enjoyed it for the first month or so. The game was missing a lot of needed content, so I gave up on it. Now, it’s supposedly going to be going F2P, mainly because they milked every nickle and dime they could get out of the subscription model. I doubt I’ll ever play it again, even though I had fun with it when it first released. The problem with the game was that it was completely on rails the entire time, and an MMO requires a world where you can go anywhere and do anything. That was never part of the very linear model of SWTOR.

Which brings me back to City of Heroes. I enjoy the game and play it a lot. But I fear that there’s this attempt to make all games so-called F2P, when in reality the companies are hoping to rake in dollars through this model. Bioware has announced that Command & Conquer: Generals 2 is going to be released as a F2P game, yet be online all of the time, and there will be no single player game. I suspect it’s going to be a major failure, but that’s just my opinion. I see the reason for such a release is not because that’s the way the market is going but because executives of gaming companies see this as an easy way to separate people from their wallets. Unfortunately, what they don’t realize is that most people who opt into these dynamics are of the older gamer base, and we’re not stupid or as gullible as they’d like us to be. That’s why several versions of this model will fail.

What a lot of these games are forgetting to realize is that what makes people pay to play these games is that they are designed to be fun, not because there’s a free model that they’re attracted to first. That’s why companies like Zynga and anything affiliated with Facebook is struggling these days. People don’t want to be fleeced by companies using them to make money. They want to have fun. And AFTER they have fun, if they perceive that there’s MORE fun to be add by contributing to the company, they will. But holding out a carrot and then giving nothing but expecting everything is going to be the reason why so many of these future properties fail.

And then we’ll start to read all sorts of articles about how no one is buying computer games any more, kind of like the music industry lamenting about how people aren’t buying music. They are buying music; just not from you.

And that’s our lesson for the day. Now, it’s time for me to get back to my superhero Desktop Support Girl, the savior of all broken computer systems in Paragon City.