As part of my job helping to design an MMO game, I obviously need to become more familiar with MMOs. Duh. Though I have dabbled in MMO games for a while, my real experience pretty much begins and ends with Guild Wars. So over the last few weeks I have signed up for City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, as well as Disney's Toontown. (Seriously, that's about as much MMO as one person can handle.) So without further ado, I present:
Paragon City in City of Heroes was my first stop. I created my first female character, a hot "magic tanker" named Molly Hatchet. During my initial login, I soloed for a little while to get the lay of the land, and got myself up to level 2 or 3. (I also got myself lost and wound up in a high level area. Whoops!) My impressions were definitely positive; the game has solid controls and the powers system is really interesting and intuitive. When I logged in a second time, I teamed with a bunch of guys on a "sewer mission" -- the sewers are one of the low-level areas near the start of the game, heavily populated with weaker enemies. I spent a couple of hours with this group, and they were all really nice. We were ushered through the environment by a level 32 guy who kept us healed and buffed, so before I knew it, I was at level 7. There was no cursing or noob-bashing. When I said this was my first character, the high level hero told me to add him to my friends list and look him up any time. This was easily the most fun I've had with a bunch of strangers in an MMO environment.
Now it was time to try WoW. After debating Horde vs. Alliance, I decided to go with Horde, as the undead race was too tempting to pass up (I love zombies). Since I almost always go with the "meat shield" warrior class, I decided instead to try a caster class. Hence, my undead warlock named Mordux. He has a big "X" on his face and looks like a badass...for a walking corpse, at least. Moving through the environment for the first time, I was immediately impressed with the design and level of detail in the art. Though it's no Guild Wars, the colorful variety of the environments and monsters (even in the first undead city) was impressive. I tooled around a little bit and killed some guys. Another undead player came up to me and offered me some magic water for a copper. Sure, why not? A little bit later, the same dude came up to me and offered me the same deal. Uh...no, thanks. About five minutes later, the guy challenged me to a duel, which I declined. So he challenged me again. DECLINE. He walked up to me, whispered "pussy!" and took off. Gee, thanks.
So, as you can see, my City of Heroes experience has been significantly more fun than my initial impressions of WoW. You obviously have to give these games time...and I don't have a ton to spare. Complaints about both games: the patches took FOREVER to get me up and running -- in City of Heroes case, over an hour. Also, the essence of any MMORPG -- fighting monsters to level up -- gets old quick. As a single-player guy, I find the combat in both games pretty boring. Perhaps it is the superhero setting, but I liked playing City of Heroes a lot more. The other thing about CoH that I appreciate is the lack of micromanagement of items. Instead, you manage your powers. This is cool. Not so much in WoW. During a few hours of WoW, I collected bat toenails and wolf pelts and worn boots and a bunch of other crap, all of which possesses little, or at the very least, questionable value (until you learn the game's crafting system). It wouldn't matter it I could hold onto all that junk, but my inventory filled up after about five battles. This kind of stuff drives me mad -- I hated it in Guild Wars, too.
Anyway, the MMO genre will never be my favorite, but I can certainly appreciate it more having dug a little deeper into a few of the more popular games. If you have a positive community experience (an MMO's biggest selling point), then you will likely have a grand time and forget how boring the actual gameplay can be.
See you in Paragon City!
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