[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] City of Heroes tangent (was: genre vs creativity)

[Michael Hartman]

cruise wrote:
> Thus spake Jeffrey Kesselman...
>
>> The big issues I have with CoH are reliance  on combat and leveling as
>> the only "game supported" form of gameplay and the boredom of the
>> level treadmill.
>
>
> Criticisms of CoH's treadmill gameplay always confused me. Yes, combat
> is all there is to do - but most mainstream MMOG's up until that point
> had relied heavily on combat anyway. All CoH did was strip out many of
> the "downtime" elements and concentrate on making the combat as good as
> possible.

They stripped out more than that. They stripped out EVERYTHING.

Honestly, once you've done a couple of missions, you have pretty much
done everything there is to do. The "trials" are very, very, very minor
variations on the theme - and that includes everything up to their
newest SHOE (Synthetic Hamidon Origin Enhancement) trial.

No crafting. No loot gathering. No dungeons. No quests. No mini-games.
Nothing.

You just grind the same mission over and over and the environment
doesn't even change. You navigate the same office complex/warehouse/etc.
over and over and over. It uses the same graphical skin and the same
handful of map layouts from level 1 to 50.

CoX is fun, and their exemplar/sidekick system should be copied by more
games. But it really shouldn't be a subscription based game. There isn't
anywhere NEAR enough content, and it is far too heavily instanced. It
feels and plays more like a peer-to-peer non-subscription game where you
find friends to play with in some kind of online lobby (the
non-instanced portion of the game is little more than a lobby, after
all, since virtually nothing happens there).

I venture the opinion that it would have sold at least 10-100 times as
many copies, and made more money in the process, as a non-subscription
based game that simply sold periodic expansions (at nearly the rate that
they release their "issues"). As an added bonus, by doing it that way
they could avoid the silly time sinks and let people focus on making
tens if not hundreds of different characters (which is the best part of
the game anyway) instead of the MMO-standard hundreds of hours of
grinding.