I’ve played several massively-multiplayer games in the past — Asheron’s Call years and years ago and World of Warcraft for much of the past several years.  But one of the more interesting games I played was City of Heroes, a game where instead of playing a fantasy character as is fairly standard for MMO-style games, you play a superhero.

The game itself was fairly flawed — there was no loot model to speak of, the advancement was too nonlinear, the content was very limited, PvP was an afterthought, and class balance was a constant problem.  But it was a very fun game to play for a while as well, due to some great strengths:

1. A fantastic character generator.  You could make all sorts of heroes, adjusting almost every last detail of their appearance.  The generator alone was worth paying for.
2. Travel powers that made you feel like a hero.  Superjumping, flight, teleportation, and superspeed were all available and really lent to the feeling that you were playing a real hero.  The world was far more three-dimensional due to this than any game had been before, and aerial tactics were valid and necessary.
3. A wide variety of powers to choose from.  The superhero genre has always had an incredibly wide and creative variety of different abilities.  These were well-represented in CoH and were a blast to play with.

So a couple of friends and I played CoH for a few months, had fun, eventually hit some of the frustrations, and dropped out.

But now, the creators of City Of Heroes are back with a new game called Champions Online.  CO was originally going to be a Marvel Comics game, licensing familiar heroes such as Spiderman, the Hulk, and the X-Men.  But for some reason, Marvel pulled out.  Rather than cancel the game, the producers cut a deal with Hero Games, the owners of the Champions pen-and-paper superhero role-playing game, to buy the Champions universe, the Champions characters, and the whole Champions game.  They then licensed the pen-and-paper game rights back to Hero.

The upshot is that Champions Online is mechanically the same game as originally planned, just with a different set of characters and a different setting.  As someone who played Champions back in high school, I’m actually happy about the change.

And beyond that change, CO looks like it’s going to take where CoH left off and run with it.  They’re implementing features that address pretty much every weak point of the old game, while also building on the core strengths of the genre.

There’s loot now, and player-based crafting.  There are 19 or so mix-and-match powersets, up from about 12-15 or so distinctive sets in CoH.  There are 12 travel powers, up from 4 in CoH (Spiderman fans rejoice, webswinging is in…).  The mechanics of the game have been retooled to be more action-oriented, they seem to have a better handle on the ranged/melee tradeoffs, and the character creator looks far more detailed and powerful than the original.  And the questing and raiding structure is taking lessons from the years of innovations from World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online.  All told, this should be a pretty solid game if they deliver what they’ve committed to.

The game is slated for release in early September, and it looks like they’re going to make it.  I’m greatly looking forward to recreating some of my old heroes and exploring Millenium City and other classic locations from the old Champions RPG in Champions Online!

Tags: Champions Online, MMO