Wednesday 7 April 2004

Pic of the day: It is all too easy to go wild in the crayon box when you create a charcter in City of Heroes, as evidenced by this heroine fittingly called "Rainbow Girl".

CoH review 2

In today's review, I will look at character creation, both the actual powers and the costumes. The array of possible combinations is virtually limitless. Barring outright copying, it is likely that every human being on Earth could play CoH all their life and not come up with two characters exactly the same.

When you first start playing, you start by choosing your origin and archetype. There are five of each right there. Origin has currently very little influence on the game, though. It is more part of your backstory. But it does determine your initial contacts and therefore your missions for the first part of your career, and it also decides what enhancements you can use later in your life. So it is not entirely irrelevant.

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The archetype is like class in other role playing games, in that it decides what role you play in a team, if any. To a large degree, they follow existing comic book conventions. The archetypes are Tanker, Scrapper, Blaster, Defender and Controller.

The big, strong guy or gal is the tanker, who can take a lot of beating without going down. The Hulk, Superman, Hercules and the Thing all fall into this category, although the tanker in the game does less damage than these guys can do. (Then again they are all very high level.) Tankers like to be up close and personal when they beat someone.

Scrappers also fight in close quarters, but they are better at dishing out damage than taking it. Still, they are also reasonably resilient. Wolverine is the typical scrapper. Snikt! Most superspeed characters from comics probably fall in this category as well, along with martial artists.

Blasters do damage from a distance, and lots of it, but they don't react well to being hit. (Although all heroes in this game are super, and can take a few bullets from a common gangster without too much discomfort. Supervillains is another thing, though.) Cyclops from X-men is a blaster, probably the Human Torch as well. Or Dave from College Roomies From Hell!!!.

Defenders are sometimes confused with healers, clerics etc. Indeed this archetype has the best of the (relatively few) healers in the game. But some of them can only heal by drawing energy from opponents in combat. Others defend in other ways, such as force fields. Defenders are a fairly balanced class and can survive without a team as easily as tankers and scrappers, unless they specialize heavily in support functions. They have ranged attacks like blasters, only fewer and weaker, and usually have some self protection.

Controllers are the most specialized support type. Their primary powers capture or slow down opponents but do little damage. Their secondary powers are group support powers, similar to the defenders but less powerful. Fighting alone is painfully slow for most of them, but they are life savers on a team. A shy and insecure player should avoid this archetype, as it depends on interacting with others and using powers in a creative way.

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Once you have found your niche, you specialize further by choosing your primary and secondary power set. The power sets available depend on your archetype. The primary power of a tanker is to resist damage, while the secondary is close-up damage. With scrappers it is the other way around. And so on ... each archetype can choose from sets that suit their role.

The power sets further defines you as a superhero. They are visually different, of course, but there are also secondary effects. For instance a fire attack will continue to do some damage in the seconds after it hits, while ice will slow the opponent down and poison spines will do some of each. Electricity will drain the opponent and make him tired, while energy attacks are likely to send him flying. The defensive power of an invulnerable tanker makes attacks do less damage even if they hit, but a martial arts scrapper relies on dodging the attacks in the first place.

Each power set has 9 powers in it. Over the 40 levels available at release time (later to increase to 50) you get 20 powers, so you will need to take at least two that are not from your starting sets. However, the first powers are the most crucial. The powers you have at level 4 will likely be used 80% of the time at level 40 as well. Later powers are more for special circumstances. A healing defender may be able to fully restore an unconscious person, for instance, but hopefully this is not something you do every few seconds. (Heroes never die, they just go to the hospital unless there is a sufficiently advanced medic nearby.)

At security level 6 you can start to open the "power pool", a wide array of powers not reserved for any one archetype. Some of them are very similar to an archetype power set (invisibility comes to mind, as does medicine) but these are weaker than the archetype powers. Transport powers are only found here, such as flight and teleportation. Each pool has 4 powers in it, and the more advanced powers are only available at higher levels and only after you have taken a weaker power. For instance you can get hover (self levitation) at level 6, but only at 14 can you get "fly" with its great speed. And so on.

If you think you are unique now, wait until you get enhancements. Each power can be augmented with at least one set of enhancement. This could be accuracy, added damage, less endurance cost or faster reload ... it depends on the power, really. Every other level you can add some new enhancement slots. You choose what powers you want to develop, and you choose whether to develop them broadly with different enhancements or narrowly by specializing. You could for instance have an attack with both accuracy and damage, or you could put two damage there instead, hitting for more when you actually hit but missing more often.

So we have an impossibly large number of possible combinations, enough for each hero to be unique like a snowflake (but harder to melt). And that's before we start on the costume.

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I could easily spend a few more pages describing the costume generator. Or appearance generator, would be more correct. But I won't go into that much detail, as you simply have to see this to believe it. So there will be screenshots. Oh yes, there will be screenshots. But a brief introduction can hardly hurt.

There are 3 basic meshes: Heroic male, heroic female and hulking male. (The last type is to emulate the grotesque muscle mountains that have become popular in some comics.) You can decide size both horizontally and vertically within limits. Then you select the actual appearance, including skin tone, face (a bit too few of these in my opinion) and of course your clothes.

You do not need to have a typical superhero uniform like the JLA or Legion of Superheroes used to have. There are some pretty near everyday clothes, from sweaters to jacket with tie. (There are no long skirts for women, though. You want skirts, you keep them short. I guess running in long skirts may be a bit over the top. Still, it would be nice to see them a bit longer than mini.) For the furries among us there are a decent selection of tails, but cat ears are only available to women at this time, and no other animal ears. There are plenty of horns though, and a few antennae.

Robotic parts, medieval armor and martial arts belts are all available, along with gas masks and camouflage gear. There is no reason to look like a Superman clone unless you wish to. However, for those who want to stay in the style, there are tights galore, matte and metallic, with or without fins for your boots and gloves. A rich selection of emblems and symbols for your chest, although you won't find the trademarked ones like the Superman symbol. And of course you can select up to two colors for each piece, with a wide selection of patterns and mixes. Some people play in there for an hour before they emerge into Paragon City.

I hope that has given you a taste of how to start life as a superhero. And the game has not yet begun.