Posts Tagged City of Heroes / Villains


The Newb guide to MMORPGs

Introduction

You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first.  And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:

Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)

Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Everquest II

World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)

City of Heroes/Villains

Lord of the Rings Online

Runes of Magic

Ryzom

The Chronicles of Spellborn



Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.

The Scope

Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.


I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.

Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.


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City of Heroes / Villains Review

City of Heroes / Villains

State: Final
Website: http://www.cityofheroes.com
Developer/Publisher: Cryptic/NCSoft
The Pitch: City of Heroes® brings the world of comic books alive in this massively multiplayer 3D online universe.

 

Performance

 

City of Heroes ran pretty much exactly how you’d expect a 4 year old MMO to run on current hardware; very well. I was able to run it with everything maxed out and with Antialiasing on. It was smooth and responsive, with no noticeable framerate dips.

 

Unique to City of Heroes/Villains

 

Theme.This is pretty obvious. Currently, it is the only MMO available that puts you in the cape and cowl of a superhero or villain. Not only that, it makes you feel heroic or villainous.

Character customization. Still the leader in the market in offering you the ability to tweak and customize your character in a near-limitless way. Seriously, I think I spent nearly as much time creating characters as I did playing them. It offers a truly stunning array of options, enough to guarantee that you will never see a clone of yourself running around the world – if you spend some time working at it and if you don’t choose from one of the presets.

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