My favorite game, City of Heroes, is closing down this month. It came out eight years ago, in 2004, and I’ve had a subscription the whole time. There have been times when I’ve played it a lot, and times when I’ve not played for weeks, but it’s always been there. It’s the first game I’ve installed on every computer I’ve bought or built since I started playing it, and the fact that there is a Mac client for it was a big deciding factor in whether I was willing to purchase an iMac as my main personal computer.
I’ve dealt with a big loss recently, with my brother Michael’s cancer diagnosis and death. Perhaps because of that, losing City of Heroes is hitting me hard.
My wife Christina and I have been playing it together since shortly after release, and when we learned that it was closing down, she immediately decided she was not going to play any more and needed to find a new game. The one she found is World of Warcraft, which we’ve played before. I renewed my subscription, and spent some time playing, but as of today I haven’t played in weeks, and I’m not sure that I’m going to.
I’ve quit WoW twice already, both times in frustration over the fact that it’s less of a game than a second job. This time, while that’s a factor, it’s also that it’s not giving me what I want from a game.
I want to fly.
I realized this morning in an IM conversation with my friend John what’s been bugging me.
I’m comparing WoW to the game I want to be playing, and it’s coming up short in pretty much every way.
The chat transcript captures my thoughts really well, I think.
kmatheny: good morning
nihilix: I think my rogue has leveled a bit beyond you guys on Azuremyst…
kmatheny: yeah, I have not played in weeks
kmatheny: Christina has been playing a couple of other characters
kmatheny: I’m not quite sure why I am not playing
nihilix: You’re just not that into it?
kmatheny: yeah
kmatheny: The game I want to be playing, if I am playing an MMO, is City of Heroes
kmatheny: and I won’t be able to do that any more in a couple of weeks, and that sucks
nihilix: mmm hmm. so you take it out on poor WoW, which isn’t CoH but you hold that against it. It’s a natural reaction…
kmatheny: not taking it out on WoW
kmatheny: It’s just that I quit WoW before, for good reasons
kmatheny: and I had no intention of going back, but Christina wanted to play something, and WoW is something she knew
nihilix: Well, some of them (overly ornate everything) have gotten better.
kmatheny: and when I play, I remember why I quit
kmatheny: I can’t *fly*
kmatheny: I can’t *run*
nihilix: Ahh.
kmatheny: Everything takes FUCKING FOREVER to do
kmatheny: I can’t just play the damned game, I have to spend hours twiddling knobs and mousing around
nihilix: Well, I’m 8 levels from flight.
kmatheny: After how many hours?
nihilix: Fast riding helped.
nihilix: I dunno! But definitely some.
kmatheny: CoH has fly at level 6 now.
kmatheny: WHich is like 45 minutes.
kmatheny: Sigh.
nihilix: yeah, but that’s a genre thing, too.
nihilix: Superheroes fly. Bilbo doesn’t.
nihilix: Unless he’s being picked up by an eagle, and that’s a cutscene
kmatheny: Yes. But I don’t want to play Bilbl.
kmatheny: Bilbo
kmatheny: I want to be super. I’m a comic book guy at heart. I want larger-than-life heroes with amazing powers.
kmatheny: WoW is cartoony enough that it feels like it should be larger-than-life, but it’s not super. It’s fantasy stories.
kmatheny: And while you eventually get to big powers, it takes a long long time
nihilix: You do get more kickassy, but it takes a while.
kmatheny: and you never really get control of how you look.
kmatheny: You can be a gnome fighter, but you’re going to look like every other gnome fighter in the game
kmatheny: and the number of build choices is pretty small
nihilix: Three.
nihilix: Really.
nihilix: Costumes are possible. I saw someone in a pilgrim’s outfit in the bank the other nite.
kmatheny: Yeah. Compare with 10 archetypes, each with at least 5 choices for primary and 5 secondary power sets
kmatheny: But they’re full costumes – not individual choices for each part of your outfit
kmatheny: partly because of PvP – gear matters, so it should be visible
kmatheny: I just never get to the point where I care much about a WoW character – it’s not really mine, because I’ve made very few choices
nihilix: mm mhmm
kmatheny: At level 6, every Night Elf is wearing the exact same pair of jade green Boy Scout Lederhosen
kmatheny: Fighter? Lederhosen!
nihilix: But you spend so little time at 6
kmatheny: Shaman? Lederhosen!
kmatheny: Relatively, yes.
nihilix: And lederhosen are an important part of night elf culture
nihilix: Representing the close, sometimes too close relatioonship between the local fauna and the Elf
kmatheny: But you don’t get to make choices based on what you look like pretty much ever
nihilix: ?
kmatheny: You’re always wearing gear based on its stats, not its looks
nihilix: Town suits are supported; costume shifts.
kmatheny: it’s not like the bike shorts phase ever ends – you can swap outfits for non-combat, sure, but that uses up inventory slots
kmatheny: so you can deliberately suboptimize for role-playing purposes, but that’s not the same thing as giving me real control of what I look like all the time without penalizing me
kmatheny: The primary nod to player control of look is that there are “show helmet” and “show cloak” options
nihilix: Well, you won’t actually feel the slot loss at higher level,
nihilix: so the optimization hit is really minimal.
kmatheny: Yes, but if you want me to engage with my character, the time to do that is at the lower levels, when slots matter a lot
kmatheny: Eventually I get Sprint. Eventually I get enough slots that I could do some extra work to customize my look when I am not in combat. Eventually I get to feel powerful.
kmatheny: Eventually.
nihilix: And you want it now!
kmatheny: It works for a lot of people. Just not for me.
kmatheny: I want to fly.