Review of City of Heroes, comparing it to Asheron's Call

by Roger Bourke White Jr., May 05

Introduction

I played Asheron's Call from 1999 to 2005, then gave it up just before returning to the US. I gave up Asheron's Call because I was getting more and more unhappy with how the game was evolving, and because it was taking up too much of my time. Ironically, my good friend Richard, who introduced me to Asheron's Call, was right there at my return from Korea to show me a new game: City of Heroes. I played that from March through May 2005, then gave it up, too, for basically the same reasons. This is a review of City of Heroes (COH) comparing it to what I experienced when playing Asheron's Call (AC).

The best part of COH: costume designing

By far the best part of COH is what you do at the very beginning of playing: the costume designing. The costume design mechanism allows the user to make a lot of interesting costumes. The pictures here show some of them.

This was the first costume I generated. The easy way to use COH's costume generator is to sort of "go with the flow" of watching various costume choices flow by, until one comes up that strikes your fancy. This is how "Cyreenik", pictured here, was created. I started with an interesting looking random choice, then made a few changes to make it better. (In Cyreenik's case, the random choice came up with the blue-veined outfit, and to that I added the dark skin, bald head, polka dots to the face, the shoulder rings, belt and the antennae. I also made her very short.)

After a costume is assembled, you pick a name that seems appropriate to the costume, and you can add a short biography. The name "Cyreenik" just seemed to fit what I had created here.

Going with the flow is the easy way to use the COH costume designer, and it works well.

Cyreenik's Bio:

0100010100100111010101... [Oh, sorry. In English] I'm from the white noise world of Nassheera.

My turn-ons are switches, toggles and flip-flops. My turn-offs are flip-flop, toggles and switches

I'm told I'm 120 and 240, but frequency is what really counts.

Herr Pie was another early design. In this case I took more control of the system. I knew I wanted "a suit", and I knew I wanted a very subdued look because I was going to role play him as a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant to Paragon City.

Note that like Cyreenik he is a monochrome with a second color as accent. This is what the basic designer creates when you ask it for a random choice.

Herr Pie's Bio:

I just got off the boat from the Old Country. I'm here for The Dream, but before I can have it, I must deal with The Dream's Dark Side.

I guess I first knew I was different when I looked people straight in the eye, like my father told me to do, and they screamed in pain.

I designed Zelta with comic book beauty in mind, and I think she achieved that well. I was able to pick the face, add the blue eye shadow, and give her some lip gloss of a different color. The most amazing part is that the big mohawk works. I would not have predicted that. Once again, she is essentially a monochrome.

To give you an idea what is easy and hard with the designer, finding the "metallic" top she is wearing was easy, but finding bare arms and bare feet to go with it was difficult.

Zelta's Bio:

I'm a powerful mage-warrior. I was teleported to this world unexpectedly. This is my second experience with being teleported unexpectedly to a strange world.

Good girl... bad girl... I have the fire!

Zelta's second costume.

Graphic Renditions: better, but not as good as they should be

Another, expectedly, good part is that the graphics renditions in COH. These renditions are much more literal than those in Asheron's Call. The game is, after all, six years newer. But... the terrain COH attempts to portray is much less varied that the terrain Asheron's Call attempts to portray. Much of Asheron's Call is wilderness, and the AC designers did a wonderful job of portraying many different kinds of wildernesses -- deserts, mountains, forests, badlands, fertile fields.... COH's "wilderness" is only city streets and city parks -- very limited by comparison. Also, the city doesn't really seem to have "old" and "new". It has residential and commercial and industrial areas, but all seem to have been built with the same materials in the same era.

A related issue is the ability to travel over the terrain. Something all the newer generation games seem to be, but Asheron's Call is not, is too "vertical". In Asheron's Call it was fairly easy to run from Point A to Point B on the map, no matter where A and B are. There are a few impassible lakes and cliffs, but not many. There is an essential feeling of freedom of movement. In Asheron's Call 2: Fallen Kings (AC2), World of Warcraft (WOW), and COH (and Peter Jackson's second and third Lord of the Rings movies, for that matter) this essentially free movement is lacking -- the terrain is much more constraining. In these games there are lots of impassible cliffs and almost everywhere you can move is a deliberately designed path through carefully designed impassible cliffs. The designers of these games are fascinated with things vertical, and they use that verticalness to tightly control "right ways" and "wrong ways" to get to places. I don't like this "social director" mapping concept. I like to feel I am discovering things, not being shown things.

Thanks to characters being able to fly, and the fact that the map is a cityscape, COH is better in this regard than WOW or AC2, but it's still very vertical.

Points of View: where is everyone?

A surprising weakness of COH is it's point of view. It takes a first person, over-the-shoulder point of view, as AC does, but it's lacking in two areas compared to AC. First, the camera angle will not adapt to hilly terrain (AC's does). This means if you're running or fighting on a slope, the camera angle will not adapt to point up or down more, and you're either blind, or you have take the time to manually adjust the camera angle.

A related weakness is that there is no "radar screen", which means you don't know what's happening beside or behind you in COH. This means that if you are running, you have no idea what monsters are following (unless you run backwards, which is a viable tactic over well-known terrain), and if you are leading a team into battle, you have no idea who's following... you have to hope someone is. It also means that "select nearest monster" will only select from those that are in the field of view.

Treasure and Buffing: surprisingly well handled

MMRPG game designers don't like treasure. It takes up disk space to store it, it takes up screen space to organize and manage it, and it makes a game complex because players who have a lot of treasure want a habitation to stow it in. Sadly for game designers, players love it! AC has a lot of treasure compared to COH. As a result of not having much treasure, COH does not have housing, or trade 'bots. COH's cumbersome log-in, log-out procedure has the side effect of effectively doing away with "muling" (moving treasure from one character to another on the same account). So, COH has solved the "treasure problem" pretty effectively. The tradeoff is that treasure doesn't mean much in COH, you have to look elsewhere for acquisition gratification. In COH a lot of that is supplied by getting "badges" for various accomplishments instead of "useable" treasure.

Likewise, COH has managed to avoid the big problems with buffing spells that AC has fallen into. Plentiful and long-duration buff spells in the AC world drove the development of third-party buffing macros and "buff 'bots", and those are now essential parts of the AC environment (even though AC designers act as if they are still optional). Even with the good third party support of buffing that has evolved in the AC environment, buffing is still a problem for the game, not an enhancement. It is a problem because an AC character still spends five to twenty minutes out of each playing hour standing around getting buffed.

Purple Pizzazz... what can I say! He was another character, like Cyreenik, who just sprang into existence as I twiddled the Costume Designer. He's been a lot of fun to play.

Purple Pizzazz's Bio:

Recently returned from Altair 6, home of Dr. Morbius and the Krell Mind Enhancer, Purple Pizzazz found his intelligence permanently reduced by 100% after watching reality TV for two weeks.

El Badasso was a name I created in Asheron's Call, and moved to COH. He was created to play with characters my AC friends also moved from AC to COH.

The Basic Black outfit came out well, but it was in designing him that I began to notice what the Costume Designer can't do well: it can't create a preconceived idea well. If, for instance, I decide I want to do an old Chinese monk, the designer doesn't help me do that easily -- I have to work it hard, searching almost at random, to find the right costume pieces to produce what I have in mind. Often, I can't find the right pieces, so I have to abandon a "look". This happened to the name Wu Doggie -- I could never design a character who looked like a "Wu Doggie".

A related problem is that because the name is picked after the costume is designed, one often finds the name has already been picked. In my case, good costumes for the names Doc Feelgood, Jailbait and Morbius (of the movie Forbidden Planet) all ended up in the bit bucket because the names were already being used.

Dungeons: Ho-hum...

Dungeons in COH are called "door missions" because you open a door to start them (the converse are "street missions" which are missions (quests in AC terminology) that don't require going through a door.). Behind the door is the dungeon. COH dungeons have technically good graphics, and their layouts are very three dimensional. They should be interesting dungeons. But, in reality, once you have experienced the "wow" of the graphics, they become very monotonous. This is because the designers have relied too heavily on a small set of geomorphic blocks in their design work. After you play the dungeons a few times, the block parts become very familiar, and they don't change much with level or mission.

The story threads that are supposed to tie together the missions are ho-hum. This ho-humness is made even worse because only the person who picks a particular "mission" gets to hear the story -- those who team up with this person get no story information at all, all they get are doors to open and monsters to kill. The handling of story lines is still one of the MMRPG genre's weakest links.

The COH dungeons are also fairly ho-hum in the handling of the fighting process. If there are different tactics for dealing with different dungeons, the differences are very subtle. There really aren't different tactics for dealing with different monsters, either. Tactics depend mostly on the team composition, not on the monsters or the dungeons -- Does the team have a "tank" character? Does the team have a healer? How big is the team? These are important questions to determining tactics. Answers to the questions of: What kind of monsters will we face? and What kind of dungeon will we be going in? have little effect on tactics. This is not good. This is the root of the monotony.

Finally, most of the dungeons are too big (take too long to complete), and there's no way of telling a big dungeon from a small one when the mission is being handed out by a contact. (although in the long run you do learn a lot about dungeon sizes because you go in them many times as a teammate.)

Command and Control: whoops!

COH follows the "latest style" in screen layout, which means overlaying the main view of the world the character exists in with translucent "heads up" displays of things such as chat windows, maps, target descriptions and command bars. The theory is that these translucent display overlays allow the "main window" to be bigger and show more. The reality is that when you have to use your mouse to pick things, and an object to be picked on the main window is overlaid by an object to be picked on a command window, the system fails miserably. (Which one should the mouse pick? In a real world "heads up display" -- such as the view of a helicopter pilot flying a mission -- the pilot can't pick things from the "main window", so this ambiguity of what to pick is not a problem.) Because of this ambiguity problem I much prefer the AC-style layout where the main window is "main only", and the command and control windows live in their own space beside the main window. It's a lot cleaner; a lot faster.

These overlapping windows also make good screen shots hard to take -- you can't zoom in close enough to get good shots, and the COH mechanism for changing point of view is so clumsy that it's really hard to master simultaneously fighting and shooting pictures -- something I mastered handily in the AC environment.

One thing that is well handled in COH is flying. It's easy to control and relaxing to do.

Audio: Hums, hums and more hummms...

COH has some decent music tracks and some reasonable combat sound effects. But, they fall down badly when it comes to managing background spell noises. Many continuous running spells, such as Super Speed, Stealth, and the Aiming Device, come with their own humming sound effect. When a few of these get running at the same time, all the humming is annoying. When a few hums get running on a few characters and monsters each, it's really annoying.

It's so bad that I deliberately turn my humming spells off when I'm playing solo. When I'm playing with a team, I find it most comfortable to turn the speakers off entirely. Attention COH designers: If your users are turning off their speakers entirely, it's a sign that your sound management is seriously flawed.

This problem gets worse with higher levels because higher level characters have more spells. A related problem: when higher level characters are meleeing with monsters, there are so many spells flying and adding to the visual effects that you can't see -- there is a literal "fog of war". I don't like this, so I find playing low levels more pleasurable than playing high levels. Once again, this is a case of management, in this case, visual management.

Alstore was a serious attempt to design a costume. I wanted to make a costume that was good looking and used more than one or two colors. (Note that Cyreenik, Herr Pie, Zelta and Purple Pizzazz are all one or two color costumes.)

It took quite some time to assemble Alstore. The face, in particular, took time. The yellow and red antenna and the yellow face whiskers are all different choices, and Alstore is three colors... I couldn't get any more to work well together.

The name was, once again, spontaneous. When he was finished, he was "Alstore."

Story line: why hide it from teammates?

In both AC and COH the story line is spectacularly feeble. In the case of COH part of this feebleness is because only the character who has selected the mission gets the full information of what NPC's are saying and what clues are being found.

The second weakness is that the clues are meaningless to the player -- a player cannot make any choices -- good or bad -- based on the information revealed by the clues. This means the clues are meaningless. This is a serious flaw in all the MMRPG games I have played to date. Because the clues are meaningless, the stories being told by the clues are meaningless, and the dungeons are simply places to hack and slash and gain XP.

Quality and Customer support: well... it could be worse, it could be raining

I played in both "Issue 3" and "Issue 4" (COH is modeled after a comic book environment, so the major updates are called issues.) Issue 3 was satisfactorily stable... not perfect, but satisfactory. Issue 4 was not. It had many bugs in the graphics display, and the "client" (the part running on the PC) would crash regularly on two of the three machines I played on. This instability put me in contact with Customer Support.

Whooeee! what a procedural fortress the Customer Support people have built around themselves! First off, you can't talk with them without an account name and password that are distinct from your user account name and password... and it just gets worse from there. <sigh> The capper in my eyes is their e-mails back to me which say, "If we haven't heard from you about this problem within the next seventy two hours, we will assume this problem is solved." Well... that's certainly a good way to make your "problem solved" statistics look like "100% solved.".

Good looking statistics are the virtue of having Customer Support inside a Mighty Procedural Fortress. The vice is that Customer Support is off in La-la Land somewhere, and never knows it because most customers give up on trying to reach them.

Anyway... I worked with them for a while, but finally decided that I would let my problems become "100% solved" by closing my COH account. Here is how the last exchange went.

"Response (John) - 05/31/2005 08:22 AM

Hello Roger,

We regret to hear you have found our customer support unsatisfactory. We hope you one day decide to play our games again.

Regards,

PlayNC Tech Support

Customer (Roger White) - 05/31/2005 03:14 AM

Ladies and Gents,

This is just to let you know that I'm voting with my pocketbook. I've found your customer support to be unsatisfactory. And... I'm out.

Your problem is "solved", as your last e-mail to me puts it, because I'm no longer a paying customer.

Better luck with your other customers,

Roger"

	Glatu Seemee started as a name. She came from the famous Mae West saying, "Is that a mouse in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?" I wanted the name, and I wanted the Egyptian headdress. What you see came from those beginning constraints. She is a good healer, so many teams are glad to see her at their side.
	Glatu Seemee's Bio: I am the demi-dieity of Courtesanship (in it's formal meaning). My worshippers have a cult: The Glatu Seemee. The cult greeting is, "Is that something in your pocket or are you Glatu Seemee?)
	This is the side of her that I see the most, so I wanted this view to be long-term pleasing.
	And when she's flying, this is what I see.

Summary

Both of these games have provided me with many hours of enjoyment
COH definitely has better graphics, but COH's Command and Control system (in particular the psudeo-heads-up display) is not as easy to work with as AC's. Also, the lack of a radar screen (awareness of nearby objects not in the field of view) is a big problem.
Both are severely ho-hum at telling a story.
The COH dungeons are even more ho-hum than the AC dungeons because they are so monotonous in layout and monster actions.
COH has managed to avoid "the treasure problem" and "the buffing problem" well.

All-in-all, I found both games to be about equally playable, but AC was a lot easier to report on (build a web site around) because it was easier to shoot pictures and because the treasure system was richer.

YoMomma, my last creation, was an attempt to push the costume design envelope in a new direction: I wanted something uniquely hideous. So, I basically pushed all the controls in the direction opposite of beauty.

And... this is the result. To my mind she's an overage, twenty dollar whore with absolutely no sense of taste. As one player who saw her put it, "Yomomma looks like she dressed after the lithium kicked in."

Yo Momma's Bio:

Yo Momma is the loins from which superheroes spring. She has decided that the only way to properly raise a superhero is to be one.

Bad boys.. it's shudder time!

Frankly, I expected to dump YoMomma before she got to third level (about two hours of play), as I have many of my odd experimental creations.

But, to my amazement, she became rather popular as a teammate.

Everyone agreed that she'd been, "beaten with the ugly stick"

But, when I had her shout out things like,

"EAT YOUR VEGETABLES!" and

"Have you done your homework!!"

she was seen by many players as matronly rather than hideous, and she was accepted as a fun team member. It took only three days (real time) to advance her to 12th level.

After a lot of searching, I finally came up with a Wu Doggie costume, and here it is.

Wu Doggie Bio:

From the days when Beijing Duck was a Shaoulin Temple fighting technique comes Wu Doggie!

Love child of Librace and Yo Momma, he bites, he kicks, he scratches... and that's just getting him dressed in the morning!

Put your hands together for The Pill... I mean Pearl of Paragon...

WU DOGGIE!!

Fermiana is the latest team member: a pretty face with a powerful electical punch.

Fermiana Bio:

In their never-ending confrontation with the Hadrons and Mesons, the Fermions were going in circles. They needed something to give them a sense of direction.

Fermiana is Princess of the Fermions, but she doesn't know it yet.

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