Thinking about getting one or both. I know they are free and I can try them but I was curious about opinions of either from people who have played. Thoughts?
I’ve played both, they are completely different. I’m still playing MH, haven’t played Neverwinter in several months. Not that NW is bad, but I love ARPGS and the Marvel IP.
Before NW came out I hadn’t played a 3rd person MMO in a long time. I had a lot of fun and found I preferred the action combat more than traditional tab targeting.
I’ve been playing MH since closed beta (end of February). It is be no means perfect. There are still balance issues, and optimization issues. You complete the story around level 25 and have 35 levels of end game. No raids yet. It’s boss runs and a public combat zones with mobs out the whazzo and multiple bosses. I believe the marketing people forced the game to be released before it was ready, and the devs are still in the recovery process. The largest patch to date is coming out in a week or two and has multiple changes in store: new defense system, more end game content, new difficulties, and new hero, and more. It sounds like I’m giving the game a bad rep, but I really enjoy it. Like I said above: ARPG + Marvel = Win for me.
I have not played either, but I would not be inclined to choose Marvel Heroes. I’d rather play my own character in an MMO than Spider-man 1209 of 3151. That may or may not be an issue for you.
I’ve been digging Marvel Heroes, but I haven’t had much time to play.
I played some Neverwinter during the open beta and was generally disappointed with it. I was hoping for a real D&D experience, but instead got a fairly generic fantasy setting with a D&D flavor.
Cracked article: The 6 Weirdest Choices Marvel Made In Their Online Game
I know this article is written tongue-in-cheek, but I’ll defend MH as best I can.
-
Yes, there are other heroes who look just like you, but that’s true in just about any MMO. Once everyone gets the best gear, they all alike. So, it’s best to think of the heroes as classes. There are costumes to buy in MH, so your Iron Man may not look like my Iron Man.
-
Yes, there are still balance issues.
-
Sure Hulk should be the biggest, baddest, strongest character in the game. But if he kills everything in one punch then everyone would play him, and the game wouldn’t be very fun. Hulk has great defense, Hawkeye kills him in DPS.
-
No, you are absolutely not under constant pressure to spend real money. The only time you see anything that has to do with spending money is if you open the store. There is no advertising and no pressure.
-
Your user name shows above your head - big deal. the mobs don’t see it. Probably the dumbest thing on the list.
-
Wow, an ARPG where you mostly grind for loot. That’s unheard of! :rolleyes: FWIW, while repetitive boss runs are put of the game, there are plenty of muggers, mobsters, bank robbers, terrorists, and other general baddies to defeat.
The article did not say he should curbstomp everything, it said he should curbstomp mooks. And he should - making the Hulk struggle against ordinary pickpockets is as abnoxious as other MMOs pitting armed warriors in a fight to the death… with a rat.
As rough around the edged as SW:TOR was, the one thing it did absolutely right was having huge mobs of weak mooks instead of one-three tougher mooks. Marvel Heroes really should have just had you constantly fighting like 50 guys at once unless they were supervillains. Where the only real danger is attrition due to extreme prolonged chip damage.
They are both fun for a little while. They are both free also so there is no harm in trying both. Neither is either exceptionally bad or exceptionally good, both are ok at what they are trying to be.
That’s one thing I liked about City of Heroes; you could have any costume you liked regardless of your Enhancements (CoH’s equivalent of gear). It was actually quite rare to see two people who looked alike.
Agreed! I was going to post something similar.
This is also true for DC Universe Online and Champions Online. You have the option to lock your costume so that your gear doesn’t actually show. This is important for superhero games because costumes are such a huge part of character identity.
I just can’t buy into the whole concept of treating the heroes as classes. If I’m playing Hulk, I absolutely don’t want another Hulk running around with me. It feel weird. On the other hand, if I’m playing DCUO (I don’t because it’s kind of awful), I’ve got no problem with seeing two or three or twelve other characters who have the “huge guy” body type and the “brawling” move set because they all look different.
Missed the edit window:
If this game were less of an MMO where “classes have been replaced by heroes” and more of an online version of Ultimate Alliance, I would be 100% all over it.
Yeah. I would play that game for enough hours to potentially be problematic for me, marriage-wise. Just saying.
…Although I don’t think they match the sheer diversity of costume options, archetypes, and powersets City of Heroes permitted.
Hell yes.
Speaking of character identity, one of the best features of COH’s characters was that every player character had a short biographical space permanently attached that you could open in-game while looking at the character. It permitted just about 1024 letters/characters, which, although small, had the virtue of enforcing refreshing brevity. I remain amazed at the level of creativity people displayed in using this small space to further define and personalize the characters. With a right-click, even passing strangers and idling afk players could share something neat about their characters with you.
A similar sort of logic applied to City of Heroes’ naming policy – each character on a given server had to have a unique name. Over the years there were lots of complaints from people who wanted to use a name already in use, and they constantly asserted it would not take anything away from the game if there were four Wolverines and three Batmen on a team. But as you see, that sort of thing does detract, especially because uniqueness is fundamental to the superhero genre.
It could work, but it would have to be tightly controlled. For example, you could have a team of six guys called Multiple Man, all with identical bios and starting builds. Or a hero and a villain, identical except for the goatee.
Actually, it does work in Champions Online, and is something I wish more games allowed. Even if you did see two people with the same name, usually they looked so radically different (and often used different powersets) that it wasn’t distracting at all.
The primary exception that I can think of was Brigade (and later Myriad, his female counterpart), where everyone who played him used the same name and costume, and often ran around as a group…oh the adventures (and spontaneous dance parties) we had. It wound up being distinctive enough that we gained some rather small amount of recognizability in-game from the community. So it can actually be done well.
And yes, Champions also allowed for bios that could be read by any passer-by if they wished.
Sorry to the OP for continuing the hijack, though I suppose there is some relevance: I believe that Neverwinter is being produced by Cryptic, the same company that created Champions and Star Trek Online. (As well as CoH, right? I never played that one, though.)
Heh, I did something similar to that in CoH. May I introduce Argentina’s very own Tríos del Colores:
http://mister-rik.com/hosted/coh/colores.jpg
From left to right: Colores Secundarios, Colores Primarios, and Colores Neutrales. (Secondary Colors, Primary Colors, and Neutral Colors). Triplet sisters with superpowers! w00t!
It was a royal pain to get that screenshot. I had to create three characters on three separate accounts (one on my main paid account, and two on free accounts). Log one in on my Mac, and then launch two separate instances of the game on my Windows laptop, log into a different account under each instance, and finally log in the other two characters. I had barely enough time to get them positioned side-by-side and snap off three quick screenshots before the laptop crashed