City of DC Champions

Indistinguishable.

I can't see how any of these games can flourish. I assume City of Heroes will come out ahead because they were first and already have a fan base. Thoughts?

I don't think they're that similar, without playing DC Champions though. From what I've read it's much more 'twitch' oriented than City of Heroes. Also, there are no archetypes. Less accessible powers (remember this is a multi-platform with consoles, needs to be able to play with gamepads).
In fact, I'm not really interested in DC Champions, while I loved City of Heroes to death.

So are X3, Tie Fighter, and Master of Orion all pretty much the same game because they all center around spaceships?

Champions and DC are going to be a lot more 'actiony' games. I think you'll end up with a lot fewer powers but you'll use them faster. There should be quite a battle between DC and Champions on PC but I wouldn't be surprised if DC gets most of its money from PS3 sales and Champs gets its money from XBox sales.

Meanwhile, City of Heroes seems intent on matching everything Champions is going to do. Paragon Studios just announced a week or so ago that they are going to allow color customization on powers, for instance.

Originally Posted by Zloth
So are X3, Tie Fighter, and Master of Orion all pretty much the same game because they all center around spaceships?

In TIE Fighter there's no trade at all, only missions. And plot, of course, a far better one than in X-Wing. So it's rather a "combat simulator" than anything else, whereas the X series and Master of Orion seem to rather focus on trading.

Actually, there's no trading in Master of Orion, but it's definitely a very different game. That's my point. People seem to be thinking that City of Heroes must be very similar to DC/Champions because they are about superheroes. That's just not so.

Honestly, when you get right down to it, the setting is one of the least relevant things to a game. A wizard shooting a cone of flame out of his staff, a superhero spitting fire, a space trooper shooting a high tech flame thrower…. it's all the same thing, really. Fire based cone attack. When I'm evaluating a game, setting doesn't matter nearly as much as the style of battle, depth of lore, team sizes, and things like that.