16 hours into this run* and it occurs to me that I've yet to talk, at all, about what I've actually been doing on this particular character.
*Aproximately. CoH doesn't have a /played command so the only way of knowing how long I've been playing this character is to keep an eye on the clock, or in-game to talk to any passing civilian whose name begins with an M. It's a bit of an odd way of doing things.
Mostly I've been punching dudes. A lot of dudes. The core gameplay in CoH, even more than in most MMOs, is very focused on punching dudes (or shooting them, or setting them on fire, or stabbing them, or...)
There's exploration, if you want it, but once you have a travel power it's only as hard or as time consuming to get to the next mission as you want it to be. Even without a travel power the default run speed and jump height is such that you can still cover a lot of ground fast.
There's crafting, but I've never found it worth the investment prior to at least level 25. For now I just let my salvage and recipes pile up for later.
There's costume creation, but... oh okay, fine, that does take up time. A new character starts with six costume slots, and I've filled them all on American Nightmare.
(Curiously that's one thing that's changed somewhat in my playstyle since the game returned. On Live I usually stuck with one costume per character, whereas now I find most have several. Perhaps seeing as I'm sticking with characters for longer periods of time I'm inclined to change up the visuals more often.)
Costume design is a deep rabbit hole to get lost in, as is base building if you're so inclined (I'm not – yet) but the core of the game is combat, and that it doesn't get dull is something I attribute to three factors.
It's fun! City of Heroes is one of the few MMOs I've played where the combat is fun in and of itself. I'd rank Neverwinter and Star Trek Online up there, but not unrerservedly – combat in NW is better at high levels, and combat in STO is better in space.
In CoH the sound and visual effects combine with the fantastic animations to give powers real impact, and the different ranks of enemies are extremely well balanced. Minions fall fast – but not so fast as to pose no threat – and lieutenants and bosses are proportionally tougher – but not so much so that I feel like I'm beating endlessly on an absurdly inflated health bar.
Other things – like the speed of movement and the fact that a character will automatically turn to face a targeted enemy – combine to make the combat feel far more action-y than an oldschool tab-target game with rooting animations has any right to be. CoH, even after all this time, remains my gold standard for MMO combat.
Related to that is variety. There's an effectively endless number of possible combinations of archetype and powerset to play with, and it's not hard to find a combination of primary and powerset that plays drastically different from others even within the same archetype.
Combine that with the huge number of enemy factions – each of which differs in how they fight in one way or many from any other – and the fact that fighting any particular enemy can be a very different experience depending on AT and powers.
The notoriety settings are quick and easy to alter – ramp them up if the fights get too easy to be interesting, ramp them down if they get too hard to be fun.
Finally there's the writing. Sure, most missions do boil down to "Go here, punch dudes" but there's always a reason given and a story to follow, and the story is often very good.
There's no shortage of story arcs, which allow every alt to take a different route through the game, and this time I went with The Hearts of Darkness, a long story arc that is spaced out across the early levels – with new stages opening up at levels 5, 10 and 15.
This was a fairly late addition to the game, going live around the same time as the revamp of Mercy Island. I suppose it could be called an extended tutorial, in that the story takes you on a tour of all the game mechanics and places of interest a new player should know about. On the other hand 'tutorial' implies a degree of hand holding which is nowhere to be seen. If you have bosses enabled (as I always do) there's some very challenging fights in these arcs.
It's extremely well written and the supporting cast of characterful villains each have their own distinct voices and personalities, conveyed almost entirely by the writing alone. Crosscut gets all the best lines and is a hilariously unpleasant individual.
(He's also bloody tough. The last time I ran this arc I got flattened in the first few seconds of one fight where we were allies and lay on the floor* while Crosscut single handedly demolished three bosses.)
*I was running a blaster, naturally.
It's also very well structured. A reveal in the third arc casts an entirely new light on the earlier interactions of Dr. Graves and Dollface, and another reveal at the end makes Scirroco a more machiavellian character than he'd previously appeared to be, as well as illustrating ways in which Arachnos deals with the freelance villains roaming the Isles.
It's interesting. It's funny. A lot of the missions do small things to change up the basic 'defeat all' structure so common to CoH. The mansion where the final fight takes place is an unusual environment I'd never seen before, and after all that the ending – or rather the epilogue, when you talk to the main characters one more time – is effectively eerie.
Oh, and the placement of Dollface in Mercy is simply brilliant. It takes on a whole new meaning at the end of the story.
I hesitate to call CoH the best written MMO I've ever played – there's one other serious contender I'll get to sooner or later – but it's definitely up there, and it's another reason to regret the game was ever shut down, because a lot of the later content, like The Hearts of Darkness, is among the best writing the game ever had.
After finishing that story at level 17 I did the arc from Golden Roller in Cap Au Diable. It's been a looong time since I last did this one, so it came as a surprise when the last mission put me up against Crey. I didn't think they appeared before at least level 20 or 25, and thinking about it I'm fairly sure this is the earliest they do appear in the game, certainly on Redside.
Their agents proved particularly lethal – level 19 is not where you want to be when facing high def mobs – and I leaned on my inspirations tray hard to get through it while keeping my defeat counter in single digits.
(For that mission alone. I've been running +0/x2 since level 5, and while it's surely levelled me up fast it's not been easy. I'm not quite at the 62 defeats I racked up on Time Raider, but I'm not that far off it, with 8 hours to go.)
At level 20 I'm poised to go to Sharkhead. It's been at least 8 years since I was last in this zone, and my recollections of it are hazy at best. I'm looking forward to it.
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