The City costume creator is the gold standard. No other MMO (or, in fact, any other type of game I’ve played) offers anything approaching it in customization options. In addition to the vast array of choices you have for clothing, armor, faces, hairstyles, and so forth, you have access to sliders that let you tweak the shape of your chosen face–you can modify the size and shape of the head overall, the chin, cheekbones, brows, nose, and jaw to make a unique face. There are also sliders to tweak body proportions and leg length. They’ve also added the ability to choose an appearance for your weapon, for those powersets that use them, so your assault rifle guy (for example) can have anything from a brass musket to the classic Frankengun (with its grenade launcher and flamethrower attachments). Best of all, you don’t have to sacrifice looks to use or equip anything you find–your appearance isn’t affected by the stuff you have.
You can also personalize your character by writing their backstory (or pretty much anything else you want to say about them) in their bio field, which is readable by other players. I tend to write very comic-book-like origin story recaps.
I’ve tried WoW, LotRO, Tabula Rasa, and Guild Wars, and City’s chat system beats them all hands down. It’s extremely easy to use, flexible, and readable. They also recently added the ability to include links to powers and items, so that you can show people information on things very easily.
Something none of the others have mentioned, I think, is maps. The maps in every other MMO I’ve tried have been an exercise in frustration. They’re vague and uninformative at best. The City maps have much more detail, and allow you to set handy waypoints on spots you want to visit–either defined locations, like zone gates, contacts, or mission entrances, or a spot you define on the map. The waypoints provide clear indicators of direction and distance even with the map closed, so it’s easy to find things. No wandering around aimlessly, trying to find that schmuck who hired you in a city full of guys that look just like him. You just pick him on the map or in your contact bar and fly/jump/run/'port right to him. There’s also an unofficial map patch from www.vidiotmaps.com, which adds even more info to the maps.
The gameplay can be somewhat repetitive, like all MMOs. However, a lot of the meaningless repetition is cut out. No “bring me 10 salamander tongues”…only to discover that only every 10th salamander seems to have a tongue. If a contact asks you to rough up some bad guys, he’ll tell you how many. Even hunt missions like that have been on the decline; they’re much less common in newer content. It helps to read the mission text, too–the “hunt” missions often have a purpose like serving as a diversion for an undercover cop, or scaring information out of the villains Batman-style.
The Archetypes are exceptionally flexible–much more so, in my opinion, than the classes in other MMOs I’ve tried. Each Archetype has a basic role to fill, but there are lots of different way to approach that role within the AT, and each AT has a secondary role that it’s effective in. Someone coming from another game and looking at the description of Defenders would likely think “Priest” or even “Healer”, but both of those labels are much too narrow. Defenders have a nine different primary powersets, each of which offers a radically different approach to protecting your allies and weakening your enemies. An Empathy Defender is about as different from a Dark Miasma Defender as a Priest is from a Warlock in other games. On top of that, they get to choose from eight blast sets that allow them to act as backup ranged damage, or to play solo. That’s 72 powerset combinations in a single archetype; the tasks may be repetitive, but there are lots of different ways to approach them.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Yup; very useful. It turns Superjump into SuperFly, speeds up Fly, makes Superspeed less frustrating.
[/QUOTE]
You can also combine it with Hover to get ghetto-Fly in 30-second bursts at level 6. It’s nearly as fast as base Fly.
