City of Heroes
23:49 CET - Thursday, Apr. 22nd 2004

Yeah, the NDA has been lifted. Today is the last day of beta testing. Even Penny Arcade is talking about City of Heroes now, even though Tycho doesn't quite know what he's talking about, but it was still an interesting read and I agree with a lot of it. I'm going to write down my thoughts about CoH here, mostly as a memory exercise. Sometimes I think I'll forget my whole life if I don't write it down.

Anyway, CoH. I was quite surprised when I got the invitation to the closed beta, since I had all but forgotten having signed up for it in the first place, in spite of all the strips I've made about the game. I jumped into the game and made Jibril, a blaster with a magic origin (although I intended on playing him as a fallen archangel). His battlecry was "Repent, sinners!", which he would exclaim while pointing at his foes. I played a few missions with him and quickly realized that this game is the only MMORPG I have ever played that doesn't lag horribly. Since I mostly played solo, I would at times totally forget that I was playing on the Internet. Sometimes I got a bit of rubberbanding, or the occasional ominous "Mapserver Connection Lost" message showing up only to disappear again and the connection restored like a bad April's Fools joke. Keep in mind, however, that the developers were constantly putting artificial stress on the one server we were all playing on, to find the limits of their server code and to further optimize that code.

After a while, I got bored with my blaster. All he did was hover around (once he reached level 6) and blast things. My general impression was that he missed a lot and took a lot of damage. Blasters don't handle damage very well. In fact, if you look at a blaster's jaw, you will find the actual prototype used to decide the metrics of the term "glass jaw". So I started playing a technology defender called Billion. His concept was simply that he's this very rich guy who has spent all his money on devising a helmet that allows him to control people's minds, proving once and for all that money corrupts all. I originally wanted to call him Billion Dollar Bill (hence his dollar bill colours), but that was too long for the silly character creator, so it's just Billion now.

Speaking of the character creation, I think Billion's costume came out pretty cool. There were a lot of options in the costume editor (except for the ever elusive and ever requested capes and trenchcoats) but I generally found that almost half of them just looked silly. There's something for everyone, I guess, but that doesn't mean there's a lot for you. However, I liked my character so much I decided to jump on one of the bandwagons and create a comic book cover. Then I made another one.

So, I played my new character Billion, which was an interesting experience since I was a defender pretending to be a blaster. Defenders heal people, buff their attacks, stuff like that. I didn't do that, I just blasted mobs. I still mostly played solo and healed myself, so most of my powers were attack powers. Why? Because I wanted Billion to be a psychic blaster, it was his concept. I had seen people blast things with their minds, and I wanted to do that too. For some reason, that ability is reserved for defenders. Even though it looks and acts much like the fire, energy and ice blaster powers, it's not one of the choices for blasters. That was one of the design choices that seemed very arbitrary to me.

As it turns out, I eventually started to enjoy playing in teams and healing people. Well, not so much the team-play as the healing. Other superheroes would naturally patrol the city, squashing evildoers and stopping muggings, but after I got sick of the fighting (which didn't take long) I started patrolling the town and healing superheroes that were low on health. This was especially fun when I had reached level 14 and got the ability to fly, which was all I ever wanted. I don't need to play the game anymore, I have attained the power of flight. I saw a similar opinion on the beta boards concerning the superleap power. A guy said that he can't gain any more levels because it's too fun to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I'd expect the same to happen for superspeed and teleportation. Level 14 is the cut-off for me, so now I'm done, I finished the game.

In conclusion, I don't like MMORPGs. They're too repetitive for me, and the one thing that makes them less repetitive is the interaction with the other players. Well, I don't much like other players.

- jg