![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On one hand, I don't want this to become the All City All The Time Megablog Deluxe.
On the other hand, City of Heroes (and Villains and Going Rogue) has been gone a long time and I've got a lot of feelings and emotions backed up about that, so let's look a little more at what I've been doing the last few nights.
For the most part, that's solo activity. I like grouping in City of Heroes, one of the few MMOs where I can genuinely say that, but for the most part CoH is a solo game, maybe a lightly co-op game for me.
I skim a section of the city looking for contacts who'll give me missions. Sometimes these are individual missions, other times story arcs. Sometimes I use the radio or newspaper, which gives me randomized missions or bank robberies/protection missions. Then I go off into a building or hop a tram to an outdoor area and I just trash the place with whatever power sets I've picked.
In my mind, City's always been an arcade game of a thing, like the belt-scrollers Capcom and Konami used to make. Powers and punching and endless mooks all jumping up to get beat down. (You never "kill", you merely "damage so much the hospital teleport system kicks in" or "send them to jail", depending on how edgy your hero may be.)
Paragon Wiki has an example here of the various hero "Story Arcs" available in game, although this of course only covers linked missions. Look at the number of "door missions" climb over time. That's a lot of doing "the same thing" over and over, and that's what kills the game for a lot of people.
Oddly, it never killed the game for me. Even after starting hundreds of characters over the years, most of them played to level 20-30 or so before I moved to the next, I never wanted to stop. Each character's power combination was interesting and fun to play with, and I could always ... say, go do virtual reality missions designed by players, or go do a Trial Zone instead of the door mission stuff, or at the very worst, sweep up and down the streets a while.
There's also novelties, and giant monsters, and ... Well, things like this, for example:
(click to enlarge if desired)
Here's a room from the "Frostfire" arc in the Hollows zone. There's ice down a flight of stairs, that leads down to an upward-sloped ramp. This was a fairly iconic room for "emergent gameplay" make-your-own-fun back in 200X.
What you do is, you jump down from the balcony above the stairway, ssshoooossh down the stairs and up the ramp, and land on the second floor. If you had super-speed going, you could often shoot your way up to the third floor that way.
It sounds small and dumb, but it was enough of a "heroes giggling like children" derail-the-mission thing that they later re-used the ice stuff elsewhere, including to make a ski run in the backyard of the shared villain/hero nightclub "Pocket D".
This was before naming a nightclub "Pocket D" had weird implications.
Next time, if there's a next time, maybe I'll talk more about the subplots and villain groups, the metaplot of the early zones, how things changed over time both in-game and "in-game"...
I have a lot to say about this game, but I don't know if anyone really wants to hear it.
On the other hand, City of Heroes (and Villains and Going Rogue) has been gone a long time and I've got a lot of feelings and emotions backed up about that, so let's look a little more at what I've been doing the last few nights.
For the most part, that's solo activity. I like grouping in City of Heroes, one of the few MMOs where I can genuinely say that, but for the most part CoH is a solo game, maybe a lightly co-op game for me.
I skim a section of the city looking for contacts who'll give me missions. Sometimes these are individual missions, other times story arcs. Sometimes I use the radio or newspaper, which gives me randomized missions or bank robberies/protection missions. Then I go off into a building or hop a tram to an outdoor area and I just trash the place with whatever power sets I've picked.
In my mind, City's always been an arcade game of a thing, like the belt-scrollers Capcom and Konami used to make. Powers and punching and endless mooks all jumping up to get beat down. (You never "kill", you merely "damage so much the hospital teleport system kicks in" or "send them to jail", depending on how edgy your hero may be.)
Paragon Wiki has an example here of the various hero "Story Arcs" available in game, although this of course only covers linked missions. Look at the number of "door missions" climb over time. That's a lot of doing "the same thing" over and over, and that's what kills the game for a lot of people.
Oddly, it never killed the game for me. Even after starting hundreds of characters over the years, most of them played to level 20-30 or so before I moved to the next, I never wanted to stop. Each character's power combination was interesting and fun to play with, and I could always ... say, go do virtual reality missions designed by players, or go do a Trial Zone instead of the door mission stuff, or at the very worst, sweep up and down the streets a while.
There's also novelties, and giant monsters, and ... Well, things like this, for example:
(click to enlarge if desired)
Here's a room from the "Frostfire" arc in the Hollows zone. There's ice down a flight of stairs, that leads down to an upward-sloped ramp. This was a fairly iconic room for "emergent gameplay" make-your-own-fun back in 200X.
What you do is, you jump down from the balcony above the stairway, ssshoooossh down the stairs and up the ramp, and land on the second floor. If you had super-speed going, you could often shoot your way up to the third floor that way.
It sounds small and dumb, but it was enough of a "heroes giggling like children" derail-the-mission thing that they later re-used the ice stuff elsewhere, including to make a ski run in the backyard of the shared villain/hero nightclub "Pocket D".
This was before naming a nightclub "Pocket D" had weird implications.
Next time, if there's a next time, maybe I'll talk more about the subplots and villain groups, the metaplot of the early zones, how things changed over time both in-game and "in-game"...
I have a lot to say about this game, but I don't know if anyone really wants to hear it.
