City of Heroes Beta: Hello Goodbye
I got into the City of Heroes beta a whole 48 hours before it ended. I managed to play a little, though. Initial impressions: the combat system is good. The missions system is nicely structured; I never grouped until the end but had a fun and structured time soloing. The embedded narrative (that is, the story on the Web site that is meant to inform our understanding of the game space) is very detailed, and though I’m not close to finishing it, what I have read reads like a symbolic retelling of the 60-70 years of North American mainstream super-hero comics history. The emergent fiction-making — the content, artifacts, meaning that a user can generate and persist in the shared space — isn’t really there yet, unless you count combat. I never thought I’d miss virtual money, but I do… there are power objects called “enhancements”, which are I think meant to be understood as a sort of currency, but I don’t really grok how they work in a market yet. There aren’t really mechanisms for user-created content in game yet, though the message boards actively encourage such content and actively encourage role-playing.
Last night, the end-of-beta blowout, was an alien invasion.
It was a visceral, cast-of-thousands pile on, with superheroes galore fighting Independence Day-style alien warriors. It was pretty much a big stress test: how much combat and activity can we get going in very small areas? Can we handle the spikes without a bunch of lag and failures? The system did really well: even at the craziest I had less lag than I have at the Theed Starport on an afternoon with mild to modest traffic. And everyone enjoyed it: the chat box was full of people who, apparently, decided to buy the game right then. It was truly an example of group spectacle, shiny and flashy and crowded.
And, at the moment it was happening, I felt that visceral energy and had a sense that I was in the middle of something big. The aliens were deadly, our fight was valiant, the explosions were great. But I don’t know if that’s something that could sustain me, not when I can’t build a Hall of Justice, locate my team in a shared history of the space, make a mark in-game beyond NPC’s telling me “You are really some kind of hero, $heroName”.
City of Heroes has superheroes as a genre right: it’s agonistic and colorful and goes boom. Additionally, it has a great system for users to customize an avatar, to contribute individually through character creation. But I think it needs mechanisms for creativity beyond that. It needs more functions to allow players to create, to use that rich communal history of superhero comics reading, response and recreation. Right now, players just bust the bad guys up within the bounds of a fairly rigid and top-heavy story system. There’s not even space for moral ambiguity… you can’t not be a traditional fight-the-bad-guys hero, even though superhero comics have been complicating that paradigm since the 1960s.
This is still fun in the short term, but to use a superhero comics metaphor, it’s not Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman, it’s not even Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It’s like the ad-copy Spider-Man comic you get with a box of cereal, appropriating all the signs and conventions of superhero comics but missing the individual energy that makes a comic good.
Superhero comics are work-for-hire: countless creative minds entering the system and changing it with a constant stream of new content and output. As intellectual property, they are top-down branded systems; as textual forms, they are bottom-up systems of aggregated and continually-aggregating information. If you’ve been a comics fan since an early age, you know that the imaginary stage right after dreaming of being a comic book hero is dreaming of being a comic book maker, of inserting your voice into the system.
The dream of the comics fan is to make good superhero comics, and good superhero comics are riffs on the genre, not passive repeatings of the genre. Riffs here, like in jazz, require spaces where the player can stretch out and innovate from a predefined template. To me, good persistent world games are very similar to comics in this aspect, and the affinity between the two forms makes the current lack of mechanisms for user creation in CoH a sticking point for me.
This is me, though, the guy that thinks SWG is fun.
Alien Invasion Thread on CoH forums
Update 4/26: Wanted to leaven this with the acknowledgement that MMOGs are always works in progress and, in my opinion, shouldn’t be judged too harshly at the moment of release, b/c they’re always going to change significantly in the months immediately following. I think I like SWG so much largely because I came to it later. So I’ll be following CoH with interest, and I think news like this announcement of the upcoming City of Villains is very encouraging.