Help me decide: Champions Online vs. City of Heroes/Villians

The Game Room
1

So the itch finally got me again, and I’m looking to play a really fun superhero MMORPG once I get back to the states. The problem is, I haven’t kept up with any of the recent games, so I don’t know where I should look. From what I recall, there are two mainstream games to chose from: Champions Online (I liked the flexibility of character designs, but didn’t like the lack of instances) and City of Heroes (liked most of it, got annoyed that what you did at level 10 was identical to what you did at level 40).

So I would love to hear opinions/experiences/recommendations for either game or an alternative. I’m pretty flexible, but my major criteria for choosing are:

  1. It has to be reasonably friendly to casual gamers- I probably won’t have more than 3-5 hours/week to put into it, and it’d be nice to be able to easily keep up with friends/acquaintances I like grouping with.

  2. It would be nice if the playerbase was reasonably mature. This is why I’m leaning toward CoH/V right now: I played and liked that one about 3 years ago, and one of the things that amazed me was that the vast majority of players were polite, articulate, and honestly fun to group with- I think I only had 2-3 bad experiences with pickup groups in the year I played.

So, given my hilariously specific requirements, does anyone have any recommendations?

2

You’re in luck- I’m currently playing both. Champions Online, hands down.

I’ve been playing CO ever since it was in beta. I played CoX back in the day, and when we saw, at PAX, what they’re going to be doing with it in Going Rogue*. It’s going to look pretty cool, I think, and they’ve added a lot of features I like… so when my wife won a signed copy of the game, we figured it was a sign that we should take another look at it.

Well, that lasted for about an hour. I’d forgotten how *clunky *the game is. The biggest surprise, though, is that City of Heroes is a friggin’ ghost town- we played for an hour, and I saw a grand total of six other people (and two of those were AFK). Now, it’s possible that our old characters are just on a low-population server, but it’s still very disheartening. As I understand it, most players are powerleveling in player-made missions, so good luck trying to get anyone to help you with tough “real world” missions.

Contrast that with CO- which, at times, can feel downright crowded. And I haven’t noticed too much immaturity in CO’s community… well, as long as you ignore zone chat. The problem with CO, of course, is that there isn’t really enough content. If you’ve played one guy to level 40, odds are you’ve seen 95% of the quests in the game, which makes alts kind of boring. CO’s population took a hit due to the whole Vibora Pay fiasco, but it seems to be relatively stable, now.

Of the two superhero games on the market right now, I’d highly recommend Champions Online. We should start hearing more about DC Universe Online, soon, but as that’s on a console I’m not holding high hopes for it.

*[SUB]Why do game developers insist on using the word “Rogue”? It’s always misspelled as “rouge”, which makes the CoX update sound like it’s going to be “Superheroes in Drag”.[/SUB]

3

I prefer City of Heroes/Villians. Mostly for it’s various abilities being much more interesting. Playing Champions online it seemed like every time I got a new ability to choose after level 10-12ish I would look through the ability list and find they all did the same thing as the abilities I already had making the choice rather boring. The way you level up the abilities and the consignment house in City of X is also much better than Champions. On the other hand Architect Entertainment pretty much ruined the economy of City of X and made, as Lightnin’ pointed out, the rest of the game a bit of a ghost town. Since you can easily level to 20 or higher in AE missions in just a few hours. But I haven’t played City of X since a few weeks after AE came out so maybe they figured out a way to fix it a bit. And even if not simply having more interesting abilities and build options makes City of X win for me. Champions couldn’t even hold my interest for the 1 month that came with the game. I got bored and stopped playing after less than two weeks.

4

Hmm, okay, I despise power-leveling and so it it looks like Champions online it is! ^^

Given that, I have two quick followups:

  1. 30 seconds on google reveals several complaints from january that CO is massively laggy, with a few zones being outright unplayable- did they ever manage to fix this?

  2. What sort of builds are the most desireable for teams? I’m hoping to be useful enough to be able to find a team quickly, since I’m kinda opposed to hanging around in a safe zone for 30 minutes looking for someone to play with.

5

City of Heroes/Villains has an expansion (“Going Rogue”) coming in June or so that adds a faction which is independent of Heroes or Villains, allows existing Heroes and Villains to complete a story arc that lets them to switch sides, adds two new power sets (dual pistols for Blasters and Defenders; demon summoning for Masterminds), actual end-game content (the long talked about Incarnates), a graphics overhaul, and I’m sure there’s some other stuff I’m missing.

6

The devs have been coming down hard on AE farming.

7

There’s little AE farming these days. As Lute Skywalker said, the devs have nerfed farming/PLing in the AE hard. The main population “problem” is that so much of the game occurs in instanced missions that most of the population is out of sight at any given time. But, especially on the higher population servers, there’s still a lot of people around. People-watching in Atlas Park is still a viable hobby on most servers. Virtue & Freedom have the highest populations.

I won’t comment on the OP since I’ve never played CO so I can’t make a fair judgment on which one Omi no Kami should play. Since he played CoX once upon a time, I’ll mention that Issue 17 is now in open beta and will include the “Ultra Mode” graphics update to the game world. It’s mainly a lighting/shadows/water/reflections sort of thing (as in it doesn’t change the actual architecture) but it goes a long way towards making the game look better.

8

I’ve played both games. Currently only subscribed to CO. I’ll be moving back to COH soon I think.

CO’s combat is more fun, at first, but once you figure out how to make a build, it basically boils down to: 1) build energy, 2) fire off your strongest power, 3) win. By the time you reach level 30, it gets boring. The combat is faster in this game though, which would make it so much more enjoyable if they made you use your entire arsenal.

COH does everything else better. Most importantly, you really feel you are getting stronger with each level. Each power you pick becomes so important, you wonder how you ever lived without it.

CO has a lot of potential, but I don’t know if it will ever come close to reaching it. If I understand correctly, their subscription numbers don’t look good.

COH has been around for so long and it really benefits from all that time and so many upgrades. Plus the new expansion is coming soon.

I would recommend COH in a landslide.

9

I haven’t played Champions, and what I know about it comes second-hand, so take my opinion with a hefty grain of salt:

CO is an MMO with its gameplay designed to be played with a gamepad. It was to be the first ‘true’ MMO that could be played on the 360. Yet, last I heard all plans to put it on the 360 were completely scrapped. Speaking just for myself, I can’t find the interest to play a game created by a team capable of mismanagement like that. (Cryptic claims it’s Microsoft’s fault, but I’m still bemused that Cryptic couldn’t satisfactorily design for the existing infrastructure.)

It’s also being created by the same lead developer who created City of Heroes, and from what I hear he really hasn’t learned from his mistakes. Meanwhile, the current dev team for City of Heroes have been working hard to fix or at least smooth over those mistakes. They’re not infallible, and they’ve made some questionable and bad decisions themselves, but they’ve done more good than bad and on the whole I think they know what they’re doing.

10

I also haven’t played CO, only CoX so my perspective is naturally one-sided. However:

As said, CoX almost always looks less populated than it is because most people are in instances. And right now, a lot of people are on Test fooling with Ultra Mode and Demon Summoning. Plus, there’s the standard before-next-issue slump. Numbers are down a little as far as I can tell, but it’s nowhere near a ghost town.

CO from what I’ve heard appears to be neglected with its funding siphoned off to other projects like Star Trek Online. I’ve heard claims that the Atari/Cryptic plan is supposedly to pump out new MMOs every year and a half or so, which implies they aren’t going to put much into any single one.

I’ve noticed quite a few people who tried CO and ran back to CoX.

CoX has all sorts of new things in the pipeline; the paid Going Rogue expansion especially (it has a home page here; some cool pictures, videos and background). Which includes not 2 but 4 new powersets; Dual Pistols (real pretty, over-the-top gun-fu animations), Demon Summoning for Masterminds, Electric Control and Kinetic Melee. CO apparently is content-starved on the other hand.

Architect Entertainment farming/powerleveling was really bad for a while; but as said the devs stomped hard on it and the economy has normalized.

If you do decide to try it again, avoid Freedom since that’s where most of the powerlevelers hang out. When you open the server screen, your last server is top of the list; the other servers are listed in inverse order of their server load (which roughly correlates to population). So, look to the servers listed on the bottom for the most people.

Also, if you do decide to play join a global channel; that’s the best way to find a team.

11

Forgot they’re making that separate from Going Rogue.

A demonstration of the difference between Very High and Ultra can be found here.

12

I have yet to get to 15 in CO but this has pretty much been my experience. CO is quite fun at the start but that begins to wear off in the second zone after the tutorial.

Its character creation rivals CoX: 4 colors instead of two but not as many costume parts to choose from.

Getting a travel power right out of the tutorial is a blast but some of them (e.g.: Tunneling) are poorly implemented.

Your build needs to include an AoE by the time you get out of the first zone after the tutorial. Otherwise you’re toast unless you team up and–from what I’ve seen–virtually everyone solos unless there’s something they can’t handle alone (e.g.: Teleios’ Tower).

There are no problems with unique names in CO becuase everyone’s handle is part of their character name.

The lack of instances can be detrimental at times, particularly in full shards. Too many people trying to achieve the same objective always results in someone waiting for the objective to respawn, sometimes only for another player to swoop in and achive the objective–several times.

IMO, CO is…well…different; not a step forward or backward but sideways. I’ve called it CoH2: The Prequel due to its reported similarity with the first CoH beta.

13

Heh. Repetition is really the besetting fault of MMOs, they all suffer from it.

I do play COH/V. I haven’t played CO, so can’t “compare and contrast” usefully. I have nothing against the CO team, however, and am a longtime fan of the pen-and-paper Champions franchise.

I am surprised to see people touting CO’s combat as “faster and more fun” than COH/V’s, since speed and flashiness are hallmarks of COH/V’s fighting. Does CO have the “ragdoll” physics when enemies are knocked back or defeated? That’s a near-constant source of amusement in COH/V that never seems to get old to me. :slight_smile:

If you are still open to the idea of COH/V, I’ll point out a few things.

I personally am unable to find the “ghost town” effect; last night I was trying to set some bids in the market and kept getting asked to join Task Forces and missions by various strangers and acquaintances. This is probably partly a factor of my being intentionally social – I try not to leave tells unanswered and I make a point of participating. The game now has a nifty feature called “player notes” where you can attach a brief note and/or a star rating directly to a player’s global identity. This is a great memory crutch – I get a tell from some name I don’t recognize, and I can click on the sender’s name in chat and open any note I personally made on this person before, even if we were both on different characters when I made the note. If I see “begged for influence” or “was very cool despite a difficult Task Force” I will be better able to respond thoughtfully. My seeming to remember everybody tends to foster relationships and probably artificially inflates my number of invitations (assuming the other players like what they see in the notes they made about me, which I am unable to see, of course). I want something like this in real life now, when an obscure co-worker calls me by name, or at parties and events with people I barely know.

Last I had to decline three or four invitations in the space of less than an hour, and I did NOT have a team flag set (meaning I was not advertising to be invited). About half the time I log on, I get invited to something while still staring at my screen trying to decide what to do today.

Which brings me to my next point – there’s now so much to do in the game that I have alts who have never seen huge swaths of the game, and sometimes a friend suggests doing something I’d completely forgotten even existed. It’s hard to do everything in the game on one character, because there’s so much content and so many little things to add to a character.

Lastly, partly because the game can seem so big and complicated, the COH forum community has started a “Mentor Project” to help newcomers get comfortable in their spandex tights.

14

Just remembered something. The key difference between CoX and CO? In CoX, you feel like you’re a flesh & blood (or metal & hydraulics, as the case may be) superhero (or villain) whereas in CO you feel like you’re a superhero in a comic book.

15

There’s also a collection of Ultra Mode pictures ( and some before/after pictures, starting with the first) in this thread on the CoX forums. Since Ultra Mode is about lighting effects, shadows and water effects the change can range from barely noticeable to spectacular, depending on what and where you are looking at something. And also if your card/computer isn’t good enough it won’t be able to handle it; but Ultra Mode is actually a collection of options and sliders, so you aren’t stuck with all or nothing if your computer can’t handle full fledged Ultra.

16

Yea I have played them both and I haven’t played CoX in over a year but I’m thinking about returning to one of these games but both have Thier faults.

I tend to like to solo. I know it’s an MMO and teaming is always encouraged but I like having the option. I mean I’m a super hero. superman and spiderman do just fine without a squad backing them up. I found in CO to be quite easy to solo for the most part but CoX pretty much forces you to group until at least <30 and even then certain archtypes pretty much are never really efficient solost.

Which brings me to my next gripe which are archtypes. In CO u can really make the hero u really want. If I wanna be a flaming ninja that shoots lightening bolts and creates forcefields no problem. U definitely won’t be as effient if you spread out your talents as if someone that focuses but again it’s about having that option if I so choose if not purely for the RP value. CoX a defender will never have super strength and a scrapper will nvr shoot energy bolts which is kinda frustwring going into a super hero game knowing I will be limited like that. CO the combat is far more fluid and interesting. The graphics are superior and you don’t have to go to that same damn office/warehouse over and over and over … Most of the quest are out in the open so anyone passing by could conveniently just join in and help you out which is a good and bad thing. Over all I see CO as a superior game but then again I haven’t played CoX since like new years of 09 so maybe all of these updates I hear about have really brought it up to speed…

17

Sorry, but that simply isn’t so. I mostly solo from 1 all the way to 50. It’s a very solo friendly game.

18

I haven’t played CoX in yoinks (my lifestyle of jumping countries is incompatible with their payment methods) but back when I did I had no problem soloing. All the grouping I did was because I was feeling sociable at the time.

19

My point is, u aren’t gonna accomplish much in an hr with a lvl 10 emp/whatever solo or at least not nearly as much as you could with a CO hero with a similar build.

Least I couldn’t lol maybe I was doing something wrong…

20

CoX may be solo-friendly, but CO is, if anything, almost group-hostile. One common complaint against CO is that grouping really isn’t necessary until you get into the five-man instances.