Of the new zones that were introduced to City of Heroes with Going Rogue it's Imperial City that feels most like a taste of what might have been had the game not been shut down in 2012. As the 11-15 zone it's a bridge between the utopian grandeur of Nova Praetoria and the starker and colder environments of Neutropolis. As a modern metropolis it's the district that invites the most direct comparisons to Paragon City, and as such shows off not only how far CoH had come, but how far it might have gone in the future.
In a way Imperial City is reminiscent of Evendim – having just come from that zone in LOTRO I'm very struck by the similiarity – in that the park in the centre of the district opens up views across the zone in much the same way that the lake does in Evendim. The skyline of Imperial City is often in full view, even from street level, and it's quite something to see.
This isn't to say that Paragon City wasn't well done back in 2004 – it was, and it's actually a great achievement that Cryptic/Paragon Studios managed to make each of the many urban themed zones unique in style and layout and even, in a way, how they play. Travel in Kings Row is a different experience from travel across Steel Canyon or Skyway City.
In the rendering of these new zones the Paragon Studios team took full advantage of the graphical upgrades that had preceded the launch of Going Rogue (there's a reason there are so many reflective surfaces incorporated into the architecture of Praetoria) and in Imperial City in particular they created an environment that was at once familiar and new. Combine that with the new tech that allowed – for the first time – a view of adjacent zones* and it's hard not to look at Going Rogue and see the future of the game we could have had.
*It may not sound that impressive now, but it was a huge thing in CoH back then to be able to, for example, stand on a rooftop in Imperial City and look back across to Nova Praetoria. Certain landmarks, like the huge tower in the centre of the Magisterium, seem to have been designed in part to show off the unprecedented view distance, being clearly recognisable from a long way away.
There's a lot in Going Rogue that inspires this regret for the loss of what might have been. If the expansion in 2010 had been a disapointment or even just average then maybe I'd have looked on the shutdown in 2012 with some degree of equanimity, seeing it as the end of a game that had already had its best days.
Going Rogue didn't feel like an ending, it felt like a new beginning. Aside from the visual improvements I've already mentioned there was also the new enemy groups – diverse, interesting and challenging to fight – and the brilliantly conceived and implemented new side-switching mechanic, which tied in so well with the themes of the new setting and the stories told there.
I'll have more to say about the writing in Going Rogue before the end of this run – I'm intentionally holding off on that until I can look back on the full arc this character is following – so for now I'll just say that while I still consider Secret World Legends the best written MMO of all time I do think that City of Heroes, at its best, runs it a close second, and Going Rogue is CoH at its best. It's as much a step up from the writing of CoV as that expansion was a step up from the original launch content of CoH.
I have trouble thinking of any real criticisms of Going Rogue, so it's no wonder I can so easily dream of a lost possible future for City of Heroes that would have seen Paragon Studios continue to deliver such excellent content. Of course there's no way of knowing if that is how the game would have continued to develop in the long term, and there were things about the direction of the game post-GR that I definitely didn't like. Mostly to do with the Incarnate system.
Incarnates felt like a solution to a problem that didn't altogether exist, and if it was also an attempt to broaden the appeal of the game by making it more like every other endgame focused MMO I don't believe that it could ever have done so. Even then CoH had been running for more than half a decade and like every other MMO does it had peaked in terms of how many people were still actually playing the game. Sure, you can win some players back, but never enough to return to where they once were. Even World of Warcraft is now a long way from the glory days of Wrath of the Lich King.
The Incarnate system, with its emphasis on repeating a small selection of group content over and over again, felt like a step away from what made City of Heroes the game it was. I can't say if it was so when the game was Live (I was away from the game for a lot of the last year or so) but since its return I've definitely noticed a new emphasis on power playing, including a lamentable fixation on the holy trinity of Tank/Healer/DPS that never existed before the Incarnate system. The trinity is not something that CoH ever needed, and now that it is a thing this game, and the player community, is not the better for it.
Still, even with what I personally consider misteps in development Paragon Studios did at least avoid going all in on the endgame to the exclusion of anything else. Even toward the end of its run on Live new content was still being added across the level ranges, including an excellent reworking of Kings Row, a level 5-10 zone. It's hard, therefore, for me to seriously consider the idea that future development would have gone so 'wrong' that I'd have no longer found anything to enjoy about the game. At worst I expect I'd have found more to like in some Issues than I would have in others, and that's how it always was.
That would certainly have been better than what we did get, which was nothing.
Meanwhile my experiment in raising my notoriety lasted for exactly one mission, during which my defeat tally for this run went from 4 to 10+. Some encounters I could handle, but as always in CoH levels 10-20 is where accuracy takes its most severe hit as the initial low level boost wears off, and if I lose control of even one lieutenant mob they can often smash my health bar to bits in seconds. I don't doubt that in time this will be a powerful character...
.. but not yet.
Comments
Post a Comment