Though I’ve been consumed with World of Warcraft these past two years, my first MMORPG love was actually City of Heroes. It’s not nearly as old school as Everquest or Ultimate Online, but it was my first foray into a world filled with other people. The most online play I had gotten into before that was the occasional Starcraft zerg-fest on battle.net.
I’ve recently gotten the urge to revisit my roots and picked up City of Villains for nineteen bucks. I get a month of free play time with that, so we’ll see if it still has what it takes to entangle me into its web. As I wait for 1.8GB of patches to download, I’m sitting here wondering what it is about CoH that makes me miss it. Would I miss Warcraft in the same way if I were to abandon it as I did CoH two years ago?
Blizzard got a lot of things right with World of Warcraft — over 5 million subscribers for one — but CoH definitely had some strong points that Blizz didn’t bother emulating. The foremost is the character creation system which is almost a mini-game all by itself in CoH. I could spend hours just crafting a character with their character generator. Warcraft’s generator will randomly generate all combinations in just a few clicks.
There’s something to be said for choosing your look before the game ever starts. Every time I start a new character in WoW, I choose carefully to make sure I choose a rare combination. My main is an Orc Female Rogue which is about as rare as it gets (aside from female dwarf anything). In City of Heroes I absolutely never have that problem. Being unique is easy — it’s almost impossible to be the same as someone else unless you’re aiming to do so.
After two years of World of Warcraft, I’ve gotten bored. The only way to even look cool is to raid or PVP for hours upon hours. I can play City of Heroes and start out looking as cool as I can imagine. I’ve gone back for some CoH and discovered all that I missed. Is it a better game? Hard to say. It is a good game, though, and after two years of playing a game where I’m just another rogue it’s refreshing to be something new.
Next up: The feeling of true power that CoH gives the player that WoW lacks.