City of Heroes

The Hero Genre

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I should have been doing more productive things last night, but I ended up spending the vast majority of my time playing City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ve had all of this nostalgia creep up on me and attack. I guess in some small way I didn’t realize quite how much I had missed having a Super Hero genre MMO. Champions Online was a massive disappointment and while CoH is not exactly a “modern” MMO, the core functionality is still extremely enjoyable. While I have heckled some of the projects trying to recreate this game in the past, I guess having experienced it once more that I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For me City of Heroes was a weird footnote between playing Horizons and getting into the World of Warcraft Beta. Once I moved on to Azeroth I really didn’t spend any time looking back at this game, but I have a feeling that it was to my own detriment.

While I dabbled a little bit with the City of Villains beta, I never actually played that game when it was live. Additionally I have never played any of the more faction based content that came into the game with Going Rogue. The tweaks that have been made are noticeable and interesting, and even in Atlas Park the “newbie” zone I am seeing the beginnings of a larger story arc against the Arachnos that serve as the larger factional villains of the game. The more time spent in the game the more I am remembering about the finer points of questing and how to build a character. I should be playing other things but for whatever reason this is just deeply compelling to me at the moment.

I ultimately went speed for my travel power tree, but I am wondering if I am going to regret this. Teleport Other was one of my favorite abilities where I could “yoink” a single target out of the pack and use it to both pull and give me a head start on burning that target down. Hasten from the speed tree however is the “correct” choice to make for any sort of a melee character, and I ultimately went down the path of the min-maxer instead of following my heart. I managed to get to seven last night before wandering off and picking back up on the FFXIV Main Story Quest. Tonight I am likely going to be spending my time trying to catch up in Wolcen as the rest of my crew has not been nearly as distracted this week as I have and as a result is probably way ahead of me in the leveling.

Paragon City

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Most of last night I spent working in Final Fantasy XIV on the Main Story Quest. I am taking things rather slow and spent a good chunk of the night actually playing with my kitten Josie instead of rapidly going through the quest line. I am enjoying myself quite a bit and finding the story beats to be interesting. I have no clue how big of a story patch 5.1 is but I have a feeling I am nowhere near closed to the end of it. Then I still have 5.2 sitting in front of me, and I have been fervently avoiding reading much of anything on FFXIV to in theory avoid spoilers. I’m also enjoying what little combat I have done with the Samurai and in theory if I do come back for any extended period of time I will likely just be focusing on that job.

However that is not going to be the focus of this mornings post. Last week I talked about playing SWG Legends a bit because Tam has been back playing it seriously. I talked about how I was not exactly sure how big of a component nostalgia had for me when it comes to playing outdated games. While I have been thoroughly distracted as yesterdays post indicates, I also am not sure if I love Star Wars Galaxies. At the very least I do not love the game in the manner that Tam loves the game. I see in him a bit of myself, every time I tried to convince someone how amazing of a game Everquest II was if they would just give it a chance and forgive its rough edges. He looks at this game like I have looked at so many of my passion projects, and without that love and care behind the en-devour I am not sure if I can really latch onto it. What I see instead is a game that is grossly outdated and requires more of me than I am willing to give it other than at a purely casual level.

This however lead me down a path to explore games that I do have deep feelings about. Namely I have known for awhile that City of Heroes Homecoming existed, but have really made no attempts to engage with it. The process for installing the Everquest Emulators have made me gunshy about going down the road to trying out other similar projects. However I originally messed with the EQ Emulators in the mid 2000s and this is now 2020 and thankfully the projects have evolved. Thankfully in the case of COH you have two steps essentially the first being to sign up for a forum account and then create your game login here. Next create a directory on your hard drive that you want to store City of Heroes in, download the Tequila client and run it as administrator. This downloads the game from scratch and will serve as your patcher while playing.

It was not long at all before I was creating a brand new character and poking my way around Paragon City. The interface is a little kludgier than I remember it, but for the time it was absolutely revolutionary. I created a version of my favorite character from live, the Katana/Regen Scrapper and we will see if it is as broken as it was back then. If nothing else it should serve as a good vehicle for exploring the game since it has both decent damage output and solid survival. Nostalgia helps a lot because I was pretty happy to roam around and complete quests, even eventually remembering how to slot enhancements and all of that fun stuff. I barely got a start last night but I expect to be poking around over the next several days at least.

Since I was clearly not in my right mind… I also went through the process of getting set up to play Everquest 1999. I’ve started a Dark Elf Shadowknight and I plan on setting up a second login server account so I can create a Dark Elf Cleric to run with it. I plan on dual boxing a bit because I have honestly missed doing that. I could of course return to my duo of characters in EQ2 live, but part of me wants to see Everquest again in all its early 2000s glory since I have been poking my head around in the game that came after it. I mean I will be hated by most everyone as a Dark Elf, but I never really played that side of the house on live. The other option would have been to create a pair of Dwarves and I legitimately might do that as well to see my old stomping grounds of Butcherblock. I realize this is just further distractions but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is fine.

Fighting Nostalgia

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Familiar Itch

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Over the last few days I have been feeling immensely nostalgic about World of Warcraft.  This tends to happen to me as we near Blizzcon time, and I start to see twitter a buzz with people excited to be attending the convention.  Some of my tweeps have even resorted to Blizzcon countdown clocks, and yesterday they finally reached the 20 somethings in days left til the conference.  With this wave of nostalgia comes the all too familiar desire to re-up my account and play some of it.  It would not have been the first time I did so on a whim, and is more than likely not going to be the last.

However I am wise to this trickery, or at least have a contingency plan in place.  I have come to the realization that I like the idea of playing WoW a lot more than actually playing it.  As a result I keep a trial account at the ready for when of these urges strikes, and last night I patched up my client once more.  I figure if I make it through playing the trial account with the desire to play more WoW… then it is probably time to re-up.  I figure this is a decent litmus test to see whether or not the desire to play is real before I spent $15.

Fighting Nostalgia

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As a result I rolled a brand new Worgen Warrior on my trial account and proceeded to play.  Immediately the buzz of the nostalgia started to wane.  I had honestly forgotten just how spammy playing a low level warrior was, and by example EVERY World of Warcraft melee character.  The unpredictable nature of rage and to a lesser extent energy left me with a decision.  I either spent the entire time fighting watching my bars to optimize cooldowns… or I could just spam whatever basic attack I wanted to ALWAYS go off.  Being a relatively impatient player… I always chose the spam route.

After a few minutes of spamming Heroic Strike… I remembered just how much my fingers used to ache after a dungeon run, always banging on the key I wanted to fire next because I could not be bothered to actually watch my bars.  Basically my master plan of fighting the wave of nostalgia worked, all too well.  I made it to about level 5 on my baby Worgen, to the point at which the forsaken show up… at which point I was supremely bored and logged out of the game.  Having a taste of the gameplay reminded me that it really was not as fun as my mind had built it up to be.

Project Phoenix

projectphoenix

Sometimes a game is much more enjoyable to remember fondly, than to actually play it.  Right now there is a kickstarter going on called Project Phoenix.  The goal of it is to essentially recreate the magic that was City of Heroes/City of Villains.  I had so much fun playing these games, and regularly descend into bouts of nostalgia swapping with another friend of mine on mumble.  The problem is… I think CoH is another game that is much more enjoyable to talk about fondly than to actually play it.  I remember so much about the game, but every time I tried playing it again during its later free to play years the whole experience just felt lacking.

I wish this project the best of luck, but super hero games for me seem like they were a phase of a bygone era.  I have tried Champions Online and DC Universe Online and in both cases… I was carried into them on the nostalgia of City of Heroes but found both gaming experiences somehow unable to live up to my memories and as a result my expectations.  I think World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are both games for me like the original Everquest… extremely enjoyable to sit around and talk about the “good old days” but not really fun for me to play any longer.

Thing is… I think that is perfectly okay.  I think nostalgia works that way, it makes us romanticize things that would now be trivial.  For example I can remember being amazed at just how huge the sandbox that my father made for me was, and how I spent hours playing in it with my Tonka trucks.  However were I to evaluate it from adult eyes, I would likely find it tiny and boring… and be ready to stop in a few minutes.  Often times things we remember so fondly end up tarnished if we go back and re-experience them.  This has been the case for Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft and a long list of other games that I have moved on past… but tried to rekindle that flame.