CoV: Jailbreak!

So, listening to dad talk about Age of Boobs Conan the other night reminded me that, lo, there are other MMOs out there with free trials just waiting for me to have a go. I do this every now and again and have a track record of spending a couple of hours connected to each game before getting annoyed at how not like World of Warcraft it is and logging off. But still, I get the itch to try somehing new about every six months or so.

CoV: Mercy Island

This month’s offering was not, incidentally, AoC but rather NCsoft’s City of Heroes care of that Three Panel Soul comic from the other day. I’ve checked the game out before but it hadn’t been offering a trial at the time, so I was well-pleased on Saturday night to find out that was no longer the case. Two-and-a-bit gig later and I was on. So.

CoV: Mercy Protests

I should probably mention that CoH and its sister-game, City of Villains (they’re really the same thing; think along the lines of the Alliance/Horde distinction in WoW) has what has got to be the most involved character creation process I’ve ever gone through in any RPG, online or off. The first step is easy; hero or villain? Not wanting to bring black shame upon such personal idols as Doctor Impossible and Lex Luthor, I decided to roll a villain.ⁱ It’s interesting to note that the classes for heroes and villains are different, and after some debate I decided to take the plunge with a Mastermind because, seriously! After deciding my Archetype I had to decide an Origin; how did I get my powers? As if that’s a real question! LOLSCIENCE, of course! I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to do, game-mechanics wise, incidentally. Apart from the fact that I can throw sleeping darts at enemies which, okay, is kinda cool. I figured that the minor crowd-control element would be useful for the whole pet-class thing.

CoV: The Other Half of Haven

Speaking of which, I had to choose what pets I wanted. It was tough; Necromancy is always fun, and ZOMG NINJAS! But in the end I took a leaf from the Doctor Impossible guidebook and chose Robotics. Who doesn’t love robots? Unswervingly loyal and not prone to rotting. An excellent choice!

CoV: Stickup!

Choosing a secondary powerset was harder. I’m shaping up to be a mad scientist type, so summoning storms or the powers of darkness doesn’t really feel right. Traps and poison… maybe. Trick Arrow just sounds kinda lame… On the other hand, Force Field gives me the ability to throw shields around my minions. That’d be useful, right? So I’m a telekinetic mad scientist with an unhealthy love of robots; that works!

CoV: The Others

Now to design a costume, and again; holy choices Batman! I’m not really a tights kinda gal, but I figure a nice white-suit-purple-shirt-black-tie combo never goes astray. And, ooh, goggles! And pointy elf ears! And silver hair! And the end result that looks something like the bastard love-child of Sephiroth, Reno, Jak and Lex Luthor. Too bad “Buttsecks” isn’t a Power Pool.

CoV: Flight!

Welcome to CoV, Laucian Rannos.

So. The character creation process is worth downloading the trial for in-and-of-itself — especially if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am — but what’s the game actually like?

I had no idea. Prior to Saturday, my total exposure to the CoH/V francise was a documentary on gold selling and power levelling I watched once (some lady was getting her hero, Chilled Bubbly, power levelled to 30). I’d heard it was kind of grindy (I hate grindy), but that was about it. I knew zilch about the mechanics.

CoV: Minions x2

Well, I can honestly say I really enjoyed the first ten levels (there are about 50, I think). The game is structured similarly to WoW in that you have questgivers — called “Contacts” — who send you off on your standard “Kill All the Rats in the Warehouse” type missions. A neat addition in CoV is the fact that after you’ve suitably impressed your contacts they’ll give you their phone numbers, meaning you can talk to them without actually having to visit them. This is extremely cool. Other extremely cool things include the system for enhancing Powers (I can see where WoW got the idea for Inscriptions from), an ability that lets you up the difficulty of missions, a “sidekicking” system that allows lower-level players to play with higher-level ones (or vice-versa) and the fact that there’s no real gear or inventory management (your costume is your costume; you can change it and get alternate ones, but there’s no equipment as such).

CoV: Environment

Also interesting is the fact that most of the missions are instanced. The towns are communal but once you’re inside that sewer/warehouse/bank/secret lab you’re on your own; Guild Wars does something similar in a less structured way. Actually, CoV reminded me of offline RPGs like Vampire: Bloodlines a lot. There’s that feeling of urban decay, the very genre-appropriate ominous techno music and a whole lot of warehouses full of near-identical enemies.

Ah, I think this is what people mean when they say the game is grindy.

CoV: Stargate

I told someone once that I’m a “completest” gamer. I like to do everything… but I only like to do it once. Nothing turns me off a game faster than grinding. That being said, I’ll generally happily kill the same mobs in the same way over and over again so long as it’s part of a long string of easily obtainable objectives. I don’t do “kill 1,000 mobs” but I will kill 10 mobs 100 times. I could start to feel the CoV grind set in at about level 8, but not in a way that I think is going to turn me off the game. As long as the levelling curve doesn’t force me to grind on mobs “outside” in order to level to complete a mission I’ll be fine.

CoV: Grovel

Did I mention that at level 6 I could learn a flight ability? Okay, it’s slow as hell (”real” flight comes later), but come on! No fence or steep incline can stop me now! And after my first proper bank robbery the game gave me a jetpack! Jetpack!

So, yeah. Overall my impression of CoV has been surprisingly positive. A few niggles with the camera controls aside (I still haven’t figured out how to take a screenshot from the front), about the only criticism I have thus far is that a lack of an auto-attack feature makes combat seem a little slow. Not in the takes-a-long-time-to-kill-enemies way so much as a lot-of-downtime-between-attacks way (your enemies do it too, and maybe it’s different for other Archetypes). Oh, and I find it a bit amusing that almost all my villain missions thus far have had me… attacking other villains. Yuh-huh. Canis canem edit, indeed.

So, yeah. I had fun. Y’all should go download the trial, I think. Paragon City’s banks await!

1. On the Justice server, incidentally. Because I figure even a villain can appreciate justice… at least as it applies to others. ↩

Comment?

This post has been mirrored from void-star.net β. You may comment there using your LiveJournal/Dreamwidth/OpenID URL instead of an email address. Randoms and lurkers are more than welcome.