City of Villains

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City of Villains™ is the standalone sequel to critically acclaimed MMORPG City of Heroes®. Using a staggering assortment of new powers, abilities, and customization options, players can now experience sinister game play from the other side of the mask. With diabolical craft and guile, players forge new super-powered villain characters in an attempt to dominate the world. Heroes and authorities of Paragon City will do all in their power to thwart these evil plans of destruction. It will take a supreme effort for true domination.More information.
 
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Note that City of Heroes and City of Villains are now truly combined. If you buy one of the games, you get both. See the July 16th, 2008 news item.
 
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How is as an MMORPG? comparable to WoW? better? worse? compared too Guild Wars or D2. Can anyone who played it tell a bit more of it? action driven? deep story?

Sorry for all the questions but it always seemed as interesting game but never interesting enough.
 
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I enjoy it greatly. I prefer City of Villains over Heroes, but both sides have their appeal and you get both these days.

It is not deep at all, really. A lot of the story arcs villain side ARE well written if you read the pre-mission quest text, but for the most part if you enjoy teaming you'll blow through levels without ever seeing any of those cool story arcs... teams prefer the random mission generator because it's safer and less time consuming, so more xp per minute.

These days, though, they've added a feature called Flashback. At level 25 or higher you can go back and do any arcs you missed from the level bracket below you and down (so at 25 you can go do any level 1 to 20 arc whenever you want).

The issue updates are excellent and paid for in your subscription... adding new powersets to the game or even just taking powerset from one archetype and reinterpretting it for another -- which adds dozens of new 'classes' to the game.

The game is meant to play a host of characters... though there are things to do at max level now, I find more enjoyment in taking another character up through the levels or flashing back to see stories I didn't.

Additionally, if you're obssessive compulsive, there's hundreds of 'badges' to earn... some of them add cool stuff to your character but mostly it's just for fun/challenge. I've collected nearly 300 with one character.

To be fair, though, the badges and such are distractions from the fact that the game is as hamster-treadmill as they come. It's one of those games where you can either accept that you'll have to kill things over and over again for a few hundred hours to reach the top, or swear the game off forever.

But at least you get to 'grind' by doing things like unleashing a torrent of raw power that sends every enemy in your immediate area flying into the walls, utterly defeated, while shrugging off hails of bullets and atomic blasts from giant robots. Style is everything.
 
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in fact, games nowadays are not quite different from each other. just play a game with your friends together. it will be more interesting for you :)
 
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in fact, games nowadays are not quite different from each other. just play a game with your friends together. it will be more interesting for you :)

City of Heroes/Villains is by far the MMO I've enjoyed the most, and I've played pretty much all of them since Everquest 1 beta. I always played in pickup groups, which many people seem to hate, but I loved specially in CoH. What made the game so exciting and enjoyable to me was playing through missions with different group compositions. Playing with 2 scrappers, a tank and a blaster is a totally different experience than playing with 1 tank, 2 blasters a controller and defender for example. And even then, each class could be any of dozens of variants (like bubble defender vs. empathy, etc).
On the other hand, when I couldn't find or form a big group, and had to do my missions solo, it was boring, so group play here is highly recommended.
 
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Dan is playing City of Heroes & City of Villains as I type! They came as a package and he really enjoys playing as a villain as well as a hero sometimes

I should also say that it takes a lot less memory space than WoW - I just deleted that from the desktop... of course knowing Dan he will want to go back to it now, even tho he hasn't played it for a year!
 
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I always played in pickup groups, which many people seem to hate, but i do really love in CoH.
 
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CoH and CoV were really really great games. I loved my Mastermind with all his minions. You really felt like a boss, if you had your whole group of thugs you could send into battle.
Loved it, will miss it.
 
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There are some things about CoH/CoV that spoiled me rotten. So much so that I don't seem to be able to get into new MMO's. The key thing, I think, was the ability to join up with your friends and play with them whatever they were doing as long as you've got a hero and a villain set up. (Well, almost whatever they were doing.)

Two systems were key to that. The first was the sidekick/reverse-sidekick system. By the end days of the game, everybody was automatically scaled to the level of the team leader. Higher level players had their powers scaled back while lower level heroes were scaled up. The scaling wasn't exact so lower level folks scaled up weren't as strong as a "natural" high level player but it was close enough that they could carry their weight.

The second was the instancing mission system. When you did a mission, it was in your team's own little instance. As you moved along and enemies spawned, the size and power of the enemies was set according to how many people were in your group. Since this happened at spawn time, adding or removing people from the group mid-mission was accounted for fairly well.

So, on a typical night, the east coast folks in your game group(s) would log in first and start doing something or other. As the night progressed, other folks would log in and join up while others logged out for the night. Eventually the west coast folks close out. It doesn't matter when you show up. You probably want to stay through the whole mission but it's not a problem if you decide to leave half way through.

Another important aspect was the variety of characters with their secondary power sets. Almost all teams are viable. You don't HAVE to have a healer and you don't HAVE to have a tank. A lot of people complained about this because they didn't have a well defined role to play in a team but that really wasn't true. Your character has a role to play all right, you just have to pay attention and THINK about the situation because that role is likely to change depending on who's on your side and sometimes even as the individual battles progress.

So you end up with a game where you can play with just about anyone and you can pick just about any character (as long as you aren't mixing heroes and villains - though sometimes even that was possible) regardless of level or class.

The only serious exception to this ability to just drop in and drop out as you like was the Task Force missions. These were a series of exceptional missions that would describe a pretty long story. Once those started, no new players could be added to the team. Players that had to leave for a bit (voluntarily or via a program crash) would fine themselves still on the team as soon as the logged back in.

These days, though, the new MMOs seem to divide players up into two groups: the team players and the story players. If you want to play with your friends then you need to do these two bits of content over and over again. If you want an actual story and a lot of content then you'll need to play a single player game minus the immersion. The City Of games let me do both at the same time.

Guild Wars 2 looked like it would give me some of that but, at least when I played it, the sidekick system went only one direction: down. A high level can travel back and play with a low level character but the reverse couldn't be done. That means a group of friends needs to play at the lowest person's level every night. Get tired of your current character and want to make a new one? Well, you might want to find some new friends. Want to start playing Guild Wars 2 with somebody who's been playing the game a long time? You're asking a lot.

But at least GW2 did something. Secret Wars and Star Wars: the Old Republic didn't even try. I don't expect Elder Scrolls to have anything like that, either.
 
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