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Jacobkosh
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
Gamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderator mod
City of Heroes is an MMO that ran from 2004 to 2012 and was, and remains, one of my favorite games ever.
I recently wrote a long email to a friend about why I liked the game:
Freedom Rider - Street Justice/Willpower Scrapper hero. An all-American daredevil biker who fights for justice! These are his regular, civilian, hazardous environment armor, and dark 90s outfits.
The Last American - Dual Pistols corruptor, Praetorian Resistance, going to turn hero. The Freedom Rider from the dystopian alternate universe of Praetoria! Seen here in postapocalyptic survival mode and shiny battle gear.
Technique - Staff Fighting/Regeneration Stalker, Praetorian Loyalist, going villain. An alternate universe douchey French gymnast who got kicked out of competition for doping with an experimental mutagen and decided to go work for the fascist regime instead.
Master Magus - Mind Control/Dark Blast Dominator villain. A disreputable psychiatrist and hypnotist who learned the dark arts from a demon that had been the true cause of one of his patients' problems. He possesses people's bodies to do his dirty work, and when his Domination power activates, he morphs into his final form.
Brutella - Super Strength/Invulnerability Brute, Praetorian Resistance going villain. A self-centered, lazy, amoral slacker signs up for medical trials and gets dosed with a super soldier formula that makes her huge and aggro. Now she runs around smashing things for the alternate universe freedom fighters/terrorists.
Edison Swift - Robotics/Force Field Mastermind, Praetorian Loyalist, going hero. A dorky but well-meaning genius inventor currently working for the fascist regime. He's eventually goign to get woke once he learns the truth.
I recently wrote a long email to a friend about why I liked the game:
Oh hey I've been meaning to do this for like a week now. I wanted to gab at you about CoH! I'm just going to list off some random thoughts and feels and hopefully some of them will be helpful? Anyway, here goes:
!) People always talk about what a great, passionate community it had. But a big part of the reason it had that community was, I think, because it put fewer barriers to playing with and getting to know people than almost any of its competitors at the time or even now.
Right from the beginning the game had sidekicking, letting lower-level players team up with higher-level mentors and earn XP and loot as normal, with restrictions (originally it had to be 1 sidekick to 1 mentor, the two characters had to have more than a five level disparity between them (so a 10 couldn't sidekick a 14), the lower-level person couldn't enter level-locked zones or participate in raids or other level-specific content, and it only worked upward - my level 50 couldn't help my level 5 buddy with his mission). Later on, almost all of those restrictions were lifted, in effect dynamically leveling everyone in a team up or down to match the level of a mission. You didn't even have to think about it.
Also from the beginning, the game encouraged alting with its robust costume options, lack of endgame gear type stuff, and large number (I think 15 originally?) of slots per server. In a lot of MMOs, rolling up a new character to play with low-level friends is kind of a chump activity, or a chore. CoH made it easy and fun to alt and a lot of even longtime players were serial alters, never taking a character to max level because they were always working on their next concept.
Finally, the game introduced very early on a global chat handle system so you could always talk to your friends and keep track of each other regardless of what characters you were playing. This amazing yet basic-as-shit concept eluded other MMO makers for a decade plus! There are games that came out in like 2012 that don't have that feature, and as a result, I'd just log in and a friend I'd made ingame would be...gone, and I'd never see them again. WOMP WOMP.
2) Despite being a low-budget title that couldn't compete with something like WoW in terms of raw graphics or features, the game boasted a lot of quality of life features. From the beginning it had rescalable, tintable, moveable UI panes so you could get your whole interface where you wanted it without installing a bunch of jackass mods. Chat channels were easily organized into customizable tabs, so your hot XXX RP chat wasn't rudely interrupted with system notifications or "you earned 11 xp" or whatever. There were a bunch of control and graphic options to really finely-tweak your experience, which is why I can still play it now, despite my handicap. And this is a game that came out in 2004, and there are games in 2019 that still don't do that.
The chat typing field was pretty responsive, which you would think wouldn't be some big achievement but then you play some other MMOs and your letters only appear 5-10 seconds after you type them and it's like...oh. Oh my.
3) Gameplay wasn't a revelation by MMO standards - it still involved standing still and hitting number keys to activate abilities in a tray - but it had a lot of features that reinforced the theme and added to the fun for me. Combat felt weighty; physics stuff like pushes, knockdowns and knockbacks were a significant part of gameplay, so you and the bad guys would be hurling each other across the room, faceplanting into the concrete, etc. It felt kinetic and like it had actual oomph, instead of the kind of weightless plink-plink of something like TOR.
You had diverse powers, each of which had big, tangible effects (knockback, stun, immobilize, blind, etc) on enemies instead of kind of piddly-feeling "minus 0.5% accuracy debuff for 1.36 seconds" sort of things. Gradients in power were "chunkier" - bigger and more noticeable. When you enhnaced a power's damage or recharge or whatever, you got a 15$ or 25% or 33$ boost instead of something where you stack hundreds of tiny 0.0001% accumulations.
Encounters were designed around BIG groups of enemies. In a normal MMO, you fight like one or maybe two enemies max at a time if you're not a tank. You have to carefully manage aggro so you don't accidentally piss off a *third* enemy, becaus that guy will come over and ruin your day and there's nothing you can even do about it; you can't run away, because aggroed enemies will follow you to the other side of the map. (This drove me fucking insane in TSW, btw, and is like the #1 reason I fell off the wagon in that game.)
But in CoH, you were a superhero. You ate mobs of three or five dudes for breakfast, and adds were a fun extra challenge instead of a death sentence. I have screenshots of my tank characters where it's just an entire screen full of dozens of Nazis or aliens or whatever and then, in the middle of this huge dogpile, my guy's head. And that wasn't hax or me using some kind of cheese build; that was how the game wanted you to play.
That kind of leads into point 4.
4) ...which is that CoH worked hard to minimize the dreaded ludo-narrative dissonance. The game told you it was a superhero game and then worked at every point to reinforce its superhero theme, to make you feel like an actual good guy, instead of being a kind of nameless, goalless accumulator-of-loot.
You fought big combats against lots of enemies. You rescued citizens from muggers, cults, and aliens, you put out fires and defused bombs. You went to very theme-appropriate places like warehouses, factories, dockyards, and alien dimensions. I never got what you were supposed to *be* in a lot of fantasy MMOs - a burly fighter person, who sometimes fights dragons to save people but other times does lolrandom wacky things, or else fishes, and also collects bear asses? I guess? In CoH you were just...a superhero. And you superheroed 24/7.
This was reinforced by the game's heavy use of instancing. Most of your storyline-crucial things happened in your private missions instead of out in the world. You never had that situation where you were supposed to beat a big bad guy but had to stand in line between 20 other people waiting for it to spawn. Playing the game felt very much like it was your hero's story, your saga, but with a cast of thousands of background extras all doing their own thing outside of that; having those hundreds of other players around added flavor instead of making you feel like some run-of-the-mill clone. This is a really delicate illusion and I'm not entirely sure how the game pulled it off but part of it is definitely the instancing, part of it is the diversity of costumes and looks (you never have that moment where you're like "oh, another level 30 jedi wearing the same armor as me").
And all of this was held together by strong writing. With not many storytelling tools at their disposal - no voices, almost no real cutscenes, just 2004-era graphics and text - the devs created an original world with an original feel: strongly superhero-y, but not like either Marvel or DC. The world had lots of mysteries layered into it and one of the biggest joys of the game, for people who got deep into it, was learning the answers to some of the big questions and uncovering the hidden connections that had been laid down between all the game's seemingly disparate elements.
----
Essentially, at its best, CoH let me get together with my friends fairly painlessly and without too much hassle and let us pretend to be superheroes (and express ourselves through appearance, power choices, the ingame bio you could write (why do so few other games let you do this??)) and actually *feel* like superheroes sometimes, and it was happening in a world that was interesting and that I wanted to learn more about. And that, to me, more than made up for the fact that the game was janky and the graphics weren't superhot and there wasn't as much Content(tm) and endgame grinding and so forth as other MMOs. It was still press button make number go up, but done in a way where sometimes I actually felt something beyond just "ooh, number got bigger."
Freedom Rider - Street Justice/Willpower Scrapper hero. An all-American daredevil biker who fights for justice! These are his regular, civilian, hazardous environment armor, and dark 90s outfits.
The Last American - Dual Pistols corruptor, Praetorian Resistance, going to turn hero. The Freedom Rider from the dystopian alternate universe of Praetoria! Seen here in postapocalyptic survival mode and shiny battle gear.
Technique - Staff Fighting/Regeneration Stalker, Praetorian Loyalist, going villain. An alternate universe douchey French gymnast who got kicked out of competition for doping with an experimental mutagen and decided to go work for the fascist regime instead.
Master Magus - Mind Control/Dark Blast Dominator villain. A disreputable psychiatrist and hypnotist who learned the dark arts from a demon that had been the true cause of one of his patients' problems. He possesses people's bodies to do his dirty work, and when his Domination power activates, he morphs into his final form.
Brutella - Super Strength/Invulnerability Brute, Praetorian Resistance going villain. A self-centered, lazy, amoral slacker signs up for medical trials and gets dosed with a super soldier formula that makes her huge and aggro. Now she runs around smashing things for the alternate universe freedom fighters/terrorists.
Edison Swift - Robotics/Force Field Mastermind, Praetorian Loyalist, going hero. A dorky but well-meaning genius inventor currently working for the fascist regime. He's eventually goign to get woke once he learns the truth.
Jacobkosh on
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Look at those defined thighs and really just the whole character design from top (heh) to bottom (heheheh)
and the gengars who are guiding me" -- W.S. Merwin
Except for Edison Swift, must skip leg day.
how can you edit a post
if there isn't an edit button
Just gonna slip a mod a couple bucks here and
i remember there was some plate- maybe it was a cake or bread pudding or something that came with a small side of melon sorbet? whatever it was, i loved that melon sorbet. and we were about ready to leave but i was like hey server friend, i know it's off-menu but would i be able to just... order some of that sorbet? and i will never forget the obsequious, hand wringing urgency with which he was like oh yes sir of course whatever you would like is something we will make happen
i just sit here sometimes and think, every day could go like that for me if i had a lot of money
meet me behind the Circle K
designing a horny mad max amazon = living my best life
edit: "are you kidding me" as guy mouses over the phrase "4th British Liberation of Montana"
tl;dr half of my city sits in a prehistoric lakebed
I spent about an hour playing which means I didn't finish with the character creator
Bloody, one of those Johnny Rockets is in my first alarm district at work.
Dare I... Fly so close to the sun?
Come Overwatch with meeeee
go with god
I slept 10 hours today before coming back to work
She saw it at a Legoland Discovery Center months ago and drooled over it. 4080 pieces. The instruction manual is 492 pages long...
It is hard to hide a box that big in a house for a month from an adult.
Dammit BioWare, stop making huge, boring party selection options
@cb557 When you create a character, they can start in the Ciry of Heroes (Paragon City, Rhode Island), the City of Villains (the Rogue Isles, an anarchic, hypercapitalist Caribbean island chain that a Bond villain spy organization has taken over), or Praetoria, an alternate Earth where after a global crisis an alliance of heroes and villains, the Praetorians, took over the world to restore order and established a seemingly beneveolent high-tech dictatorship.
When you roll up in Praetoria, your character can opt to serve the technocratic regime as basically a superpowered cop, or join the resistance against it. If you join the Resistance, you get recruited into one of two factions - the Wardens, who want to work conscientiously to restore democracy, or the Crusaders, who are basically terrorists willing to use any means necessary to overthrow the emperor. Whereas as a Loyalist (the cops), you can follow the path of Power (using your status to enrich yourself at other peoples' expense) or Responsibility (working in good faith to keep citizens safe from the assorted actual real threats).
Also, you can take one of those paths but actually be a double agent working for the other side (eg, a Resistance member doing Loyalist missions). Also also, at the culmination of various mission chains, you get moral choices and other situations that will allow you to change your approach (eg hardening from Warden to Crusader) or switch sides entirely.
At level 20, for story reasons, your character has to leave Praetoria for the normal Earth and you decide whether you go to the City of Heroes or Villains.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So we have some high school athletes from Toronto here, guess one fainted at their game today and at some point he called his parents, and they drove all the way here and dont even know what room hes in and its like
folks I cant help you, I'd be fired in a fucking instant if I gave you any information.
this is a very reasonable standard, but what about if the sport is an intensely obscure one
the obscurity increases the chances of a right swipe until a hard inflection point where it crashes. curling? sure, i'm curious. quidditch? man. man.
Mm. Agreed.
but I don't follow it, per se
but that time with friends in our cabin where we went from "man curling is boring and weird" to standing in our chairs shouting at the TV, much helped by a lot of alcohol, triggered a love of that ridiculous game
It’s was awful, but I survived. I’m still exhausted, but nothing like last night. I honestly shouldn’t have been working but *shrug*