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

[Jean, Yannick]

Michael Hartman wrote:
<mlist at thresholdrpg.com> said:
> 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.
> 
<snip>
> 
> 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.
> 
<snip>
> 
> 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.

Were back on our discussion about depth. CoX focused on giving a fun
"super hero" experience at the expense of depth.

On the bright side, they found a good amount of subscribers willing to
pay for this kind of games. This include my two suscribtions since
launch, one for me and my wife (who is not interested in any other
MMORPGs). CoX still offers the most satisfying casual experience in the
MMORPs market in our humble opinions.

On the other side, the veteran gamers craving for depth and strategy,
will quickly get bored at the lack of depth and leave for other, more
"hardcore", games.

Bottom line, choosing to give your player a game experience without much
"depth" may very well be a valid decision, just make sure you understand
the pros and the cons of it.