Many of us who played and loved City of Heroes because it was a superhero RPG, largely shunned Cryptic Entertainment's followup effort "Champions Online."
My cousin's son gifted me with two codes for a free trial to try out Champions Online back when it was in beta testing. My City of Heroes friend and I used the codes to play CO free for a month.
We recreated our favorite CoH characters in CO. I liked the way my main toon,
Red Dragon, looked. I could create a
dragon mask in CO's costume maker that was better than anything I could come up with in CoH.
My friend and I explored the Millennium City tutorial and the Canadian Wilderness and Desert crisis zones. But, long before the free month was up, we returned to CoH. One night, while playing CoH, we discussed CO: We agreed, it's a good game; but, we didn't feel compelled to keep playing. CoH offered so much more in terms of systems, content, and play experience because it was so much more of a mature and developed game. CO felt like it was just starting out and needed much more development.
We hadn't yet exhausted CoH's voluminous content, so why switch to a new game with growing pains?
Even now, with the death of Paragon City, many of us play CO only begrudgingly it seems.... How does C.O. make you feel? do you like it or no<t>? and can you articulate that?
Of course. If CoH had not been taken away, I would not have returned to CO. I like superheroes better than fantasy or sci-fi, and CO is pretty good. It just needs to be further developed.
Sadly, it appears that Cryptic/Perfect World does not intend to put much development into CO. Even the recent announcement of a Seattle-based office that's devoted to CO doesn't give me much hope for the game's future. CO seems to be a training ground for new hires, while Cryptic's major resources are allocated to Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and
at least one unannounced future project.
Still, CO is fun enough for me. I've played through almost all of its content, but now I skip the vast majority of the standard missions because I consider them dull--lots of "defeat X number of Y villains" and "collect X number of Y objects". I continue to play
alerts,
adventure packs,
comic series,
crisis zones,
lairs, and
nemesis missions.
CO had a
tortured development:
- Cryptic had been working on Marvel Universe Online, which was canceled. Reportedly, some of this aborted development was redirected into CO.
- CO was originally to be published by 2K Games, then Atari, and now Perfect World.
- A version for the Xbox 360 hardware platform was in development and was hyped as the first MMO for console gaming; however, Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert stated that the console version was indefinitely delayed by Microsoft's indecision on how to implement MMOs across Xbox Live, and eventually the Xbox 360 version was canceled.
The way I see it, Cryptic had to make CO different from CoH. They succeeded in creating an action-oriented MMO with kinetic combat similar to console gaming. I like the fun, light-hearted tone of the content and art (some would say "cheesy"); but, I'm an old-school fan of cheesy, silver-age comic books. (Modern comics have long since passed by me.)
It's too bad that, due to business pressures, Cryptic had to largely abandon CO and move on to new properties. CO's unfulfilled promise and potential makes me feel appreciation for CoH.
Still, with CoH gone, I'm enjoying CO, and I root for the game's circumstance to improve. Give us
the Foundry!
But, I hold almost no expectations for CO's future. I'm just happy to play the parts that I like.
Edit: I should add, play
for free. CO's free-to-play system is great. Free players get a limited number of characters and limited choices for archetypes; but, otherwise, you pretty much get the whole play experience including end-game. Plus, I can earn
Questionite while having fun playing the game, exchange it for
Zen, and then buy whatever I want in the
Z-store including additional character slots, archetypes, costume sets, travel powers, hideouts, and even a freeform character slot.
For me, CO is not developed enough to be worthy of a paid subscription; but, it's good enough to play for free.
**Probably, most MMO players would not agree that it's good enough--not even for free.