We're not in Paragon City any more

City of Heroes was the second MMO I ever played, and back then I didn't entirely understand how these games work. Early on I had rolled a villain, and after gaining a few levels I accepted a team invite and was told we were about to go to Atlas Park and rob the bank there. I assumed that it would be THE Atlas Park, the heroside starter zone, and I remember I envisaged running battles with hero players as I and my fellow villains made our way to the bank... and I also remember feeling a brief twinge of disappointment when the mission started and I realised it was an instanced version of Atlas Park, and not the zone itself.

Anyone who has ever played an MMO with opposing factions will already understand the utter implausibility of what I had expected. I don't think I even knew what PVP was at that point, nor did I realise that if we had gone to the actual Atlas Park any passing level 50 hero could have flattened the entire team with a single AoE.

City of Villains takes place mostly in the Rogue Isles, a cluster of islands off the coast of the United States, controlled by the Big Bad of the game – Lord Recluse. It's a bad place full of bad people, and the overall story arc of CoV is that of villains striving to earn the respect of Recluse as, if not an equal, then at least as someone not to be messed with.

A lot of players don't like the Rogue Isles.

There are plenty of reasons why. Even on live the villain zones, aka redside, were always lower pop than blueside, making it harder to form teams. There aren't as many zones, and those that there are often tend to be dark, dirty and demoralising. There's too many fights with Longbow, and not enough fights against actual heroes.

All of which is true, to one extent or another, but it's not the whole story.

That redside is lower pop is undeniable. Rather brilliantly the original villain ATs were all designed to be more self reliant than the hero ATs, though I'm not sure if this was intentional by a dev team anticipating lower numbers of villains than of heroes, or if it was to reflect, in the mechanics, the every-man-for-himself mentality of supervillains. Either way it's awesome.

Likewise it's true that there are less zones. On blueside at any level there's normally at least two zones to choose from that will be on-level. While there's some overlap on redside there are several level ranges – most noticeably perhaps 15-19 and 20-25 are only covered by one zone each, as is 40-50 (excluding co-op zones, but more on them another time.)

I'd argue though that the redside zones are, generally, better than their equivalent heroside zones. As much as I enjoy my forays into hazard zones like Perez Park and Boomtown I have to admit there's not a lot to them in terms of story content. By contrast each of the villain zones are distinct in layout and so full of story that it takes multiple characters to see it all.

Dark, dirty and demoralising? Well, yeah, they often are. Mercy Island, the villain starter zone, is mostly in ruins, but that is entirely by design. It's a testing ground, and the only people who stay there are those who aren't strong enough to get out. City of Heroes has always been good at evoking atmosphere through its environments and casual NPC chatter, and Mercy does it well.

There's so much more I could say about the Rogue Isles, and the ways in which the villain experience differs from its heroic counterpart, but for now I'll just finish off by saying that, for me at least, having the villains of the game distinctly apart from the heroes works, and works well.

Looking back on my early experience now I can see how unworkable it would be for villains to enter hero zones and vice versa, from the point of view of pure game mechanics distinct from the atmosphere of the Isles. Still, that lack of knowledge had its advantages. Everything was new to me, and I had that sense that anything could happen in this game, which was so unlike anything I had played before. I wasn't let down either. I didn't get to run through AP on a villain, but in other ways the game did do things I'd never have expected.

Like the alien invasions. Those I did not see coming.