SLURRRRRRRP!
May. 18th, 2004 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterThat sound you just heard was the loud sucking sound of all my free time being sucked away.
See, there's this game, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG for short, that a bunch of my friends—both on the private chatservers where I hang out and on LJ—have been getting into. It's called City of Heroes, and unlike all the other MMORPGs that have come down the pike, this one is a comic book superhero game.
I swore up and down that I would never get into a money-and-time-suck game like a MMORPG, and up to now, it's been pretty easy to do. I beta-tested both Neocron and The Sims Online and never had any real urge to pony up the cash for either of them. Those, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars Galaxies—my willpower was mighty: I could resist them all. I didn't want to have to deal with the griefing, the hunt for J. Random Specific Artifact that I needed to power up, the frustration of losing a zillion experience points (and whatever items I might have on my body) whenever I died: in short, the problems inherent in all MMORPGs I'd ever heard about or experienced prevented me from getting into them. After all, if I was going to pony up a monthly fee to participate, I wanted to be paying for something I'd enjoy, and none of the current contenders provided that.
Until now.
Up to this point, my preferred mode of gaming was online multiplayer, team based. This is why I play mods like Team Fortress Classic (and Counterstrike, but CS is a bit too frustrating for someone with my lack of aiming ability) and Starcraft, where folks can work together as a team. The experience was okay, but suboptimal in that we were always paired up against real people, who were often capable of working as a team better than my team could. What I really wanted to do was play through a versus-computer mission in cooperative multiplay...but the only first person shooter I had which could do that, System Shock 2, had very shoddy multiplayer code. (I would have liked to do it with Halo, but for whatever reason the PC adaptation left coop-multiplayer out.)
Now, enter City of Heroes. Aside from the general source material on which it is based (superheroes! yay!) CoH's biggest appeals to me are two-fold: first, it's designed from the ground up to promote team play. When you join a team, people with complementary powers to yours can make up for your own character's weaknesses, and vice versa. If you have a ranged-weapon blaster, you can work side by side with a melee fighter to defend you close in, and a healer to restore hit points to both of you when you need them. Also, team participants get experience bonuses, certain superpowers work to the benefit of your entire team, and if a high-level hero takes a low-level hero on as a "sidekick," the sidekick gets to fight almost as well as the hero during their period of association.
Second, target acquisition is done in the RPG style: you select a target, have a specific chance to hit him, and let the computer arbitrate the hit. The quick-reflexed and the slow are placed on a level playing field.
All those other problems I mentioned? They're fixed, too. CoH has no PvP (yet), the most grief another player can give you is to kill the monster you're fighting out from under you...and there are so many monsters around, even that isn't a major hassle. There are no artifacts or items in the usual MMORPG sense (magic swords, suits of armor, etc.); there are your super-powers, which become available level by level on a set schedule; Enhancements, which are power-boosters that allow you to improve your powers and are frequently dropped by monsters ("mobs") or available in shops; and Inspirations, which are single-use power-ups that are available in the same way.
When you die, you don't lose any of your items, and you don't lose any of your experience, either. What happens is that you go into "experience debt"—part of your experience bar changes color to brown, and the debt takes half of the experience you get from then on to clear it. And it's not even all that much, either—the debt per death is equal to 1/10 of the amount it would take to get you from where you currently are, XP-wise, to the next level. And no matter how many times you die, XP debt will (currently) at worst end at the level-up point. The thing that drove me to quit text MUDding way back in the early days was losing half my accumulated XP with every death and being faced with the prospect of having to earn a zillion XP in order to get back to where I was. This is so much better than that that it's not even in the same ballpark.
All of a sudden, there aren't enough hours in the day, and I almost find myself wanting to order some ProVigil from a mail-order pharmacy just so I can spend every weekend hour in the game, levelling up. (Any other CoH players want to go in? Just $7 a pill in lots of 30, less if you buy in more bulk... :)
Anyway, if any of my LJ friends or acquaintances who play CoH would like to adventure with me, look up Serena Chow on the Protector server (Yeah, I play a female character on-line. What of it? It's not really any different from a novelist writing about a female protagonist. Besides, the third-person viewpoint is scenic :) or let me know who you are on whatever server you play and I'll make a character. If you're lower-level, I can sidekick you, or if you're higher level, you can sidekick me. As Serena is a Technological Assault Rifle/Devices/Leadership Blaster, a character with Empathy and particularly Teleportation would make a good partner.
See you in the comic books!
See, there's this game, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG for short, that a bunch of my friends—both on the private chatservers where I hang out and on LJ—have been getting into. It's called City of Heroes, and unlike all the other MMORPGs that have come down the pike, this one is a comic book superhero game.
I swore up and down that I would never get into a money-and-time-suck game like a MMORPG, and up to now, it's been pretty easy to do. I beta-tested both Neocron and The Sims Online and never had any real urge to pony up the cash for either of them. Those, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars Galaxies—my willpower was mighty: I could resist them all. I didn't want to have to deal with the griefing, the hunt for J. Random Specific Artifact that I needed to power up, the frustration of losing a zillion experience points (and whatever items I might have on my body) whenever I died: in short, the problems inherent in all MMORPGs I'd ever heard about or experienced prevented me from getting into them. After all, if I was going to pony up a monthly fee to participate, I wanted to be paying for something I'd enjoy, and none of the current contenders provided that.
Until now.
Up to this point, my preferred mode of gaming was online multiplayer, team based. This is why I play mods like Team Fortress Classic (and Counterstrike, but CS is a bit too frustrating for someone with my lack of aiming ability) and Starcraft, where folks can work together as a team. The experience was okay, but suboptimal in that we were always paired up against real people, who were often capable of working as a team better than my team could. What I really wanted to do was play through a versus-computer mission in cooperative multiplay...but the only first person shooter I had which could do that, System Shock 2, had very shoddy multiplayer code. (I would have liked to do it with Halo, but for whatever reason the PC adaptation left coop-multiplayer out.)
Now, enter City of Heroes. Aside from the general source material on which it is based (superheroes! yay!) CoH's biggest appeals to me are two-fold: first, it's designed from the ground up to promote team play. When you join a team, people with complementary powers to yours can make up for your own character's weaknesses, and vice versa. If you have a ranged-weapon blaster, you can work side by side with a melee fighter to defend you close in, and a healer to restore hit points to both of you when you need them. Also, team participants get experience bonuses, certain superpowers work to the benefit of your entire team, and if a high-level hero takes a low-level hero on as a "sidekick," the sidekick gets to fight almost as well as the hero during their period of association.
Second, target acquisition is done in the RPG style: you select a target, have a specific chance to hit him, and let the computer arbitrate the hit. The quick-reflexed and the slow are placed on a level playing field.
All those other problems I mentioned? They're fixed, too. CoH has no PvP (yet), the most grief another player can give you is to kill the monster you're fighting out from under you...and there are so many monsters around, even that isn't a major hassle. There are no artifacts or items in the usual MMORPG sense (magic swords, suits of armor, etc.); there are your super-powers, which become available level by level on a set schedule; Enhancements, which are power-boosters that allow you to improve your powers and are frequently dropped by monsters ("mobs") or available in shops; and Inspirations, which are single-use power-ups that are available in the same way.
When you die, you don't lose any of your items, and you don't lose any of your experience, either. What happens is that you go into "experience debt"—part of your experience bar changes color to brown, and the debt takes half of the experience you get from then on to clear it. And it's not even all that much, either—the debt per death is equal to 1/10 of the amount it would take to get you from where you currently are, XP-wise, to the next level. And no matter how many times you die, XP debt will (currently) at worst end at the level-up point. The thing that drove me to quit text MUDding way back in the early days was losing half my accumulated XP with every death and being faced with the prospect of having to earn a zillion XP in order to get back to where I was. This is so much better than that that it's not even in the same ballpark.
All of a sudden, there aren't enough hours in the day, and I almost find myself wanting to order some ProVigil from a mail-order pharmacy just so I can spend every weekend hour in the game, levelling up. (Any other CoH players want to go in? Just $7 a pill in lots of 30, less if you buy in more bulk... :)
Anyway, if any of my LJ friends or acquaintances who play CoH would like to adventure with me, look up Serena Chow on the Protector server (Yeah, I play a female character on-line. What of it? It's not really any different from a novelist writing about a female protagonist. Besides, the third-person viewpoint is scenic :) or let me know who you are on whatever server you play and I'll make a character. If you're lower-level, I can sidekick you, or if you're higher level, you can sidekick me. As Serena is a Technological Assault Rifle/Devices/Leadership Blaster, a character with Empathy and particularly Teleportation would make a good partner.
See you in the comic books!
