This has been a nightmare for me; COH was my first "real" MMO, and I love love loved it. I just can't seem to like anything else as much. Or at all. I've tried CO, and I find it clunky and inelegant compared to COH. Everything about it just seems so . . . cartoonish. I know, I know, COH was a superhero game, but it was . . . elegant, beautiful. The interface lovely and intuitive. By comparison, CO seems so . . . amateurish. I just can't stand it. I've tried, and I have to say that I like it far better than SWTOR or LOTR, but I just feel so lost, really. I WANT a game that I love to play, but I just can't find one.
I guess that Secret World is the closest thing to being engaging like COH was (only in totally different ways, apples meet oranges), but even there, I'm just not "into it" like I was with COH. I can, however, appreciate it and love much about it. It's by far the best alternative out there as far as I'm concerned. I'm not crazy about much of it, though. I find the skill wheel/tree/rose by any other name a bit tedious, and I hate allotting "skill" points that way (really, can't we move past ancient Diablo skill point allotment? Oh wait, we did, and it was great in COH.). The crafting thing is a mess in Secret World, so much simpler to just have recipes and invention tables. The cut scenes which seem to have become so popular in MMOs are annoying (hated them in COH, too, and was very much behind the changes to stop running them if everyone on a team had seen them); if I want to watch a movie, I'll watch a movie. When I want to play a game, I want to PLAY a game, not sit there through cut scene after cut scene. Team play in the Secret World is a pain with all the required solo missions (another thing that COH started doing and that I disliked, but at least with COH you could skip it). Sigh. I think I'll never get over losing COH. I didn't like that they started modeling the game after those others, but at least it was still, at root, COH. "Those others," as it turns out, can't keep my interest and frequently just irritate me.
Anyway, I guess I'm just still sad and mourning for COH, but that doesn't change the fact that no other game I've tried has come close to measuring up in important ways. I miss, always, the elegance and ease of COH (neither of which I fully appreciated, I think). I loved everything about the game, and what I didn't love, I could "options" out of or just not do. In every other game, it seems that all the things that I hated about COH and either opted out of or tolerated because everything else was so amazing are the actual main parts of the game. Ugh!