Monday 7 February 2005

Pic of the day: Even though Paragon City is unabashedly American, there is still room for ethnic minorities, like for instance this Norwegian.

CoH Europe

Quietly, like the moon rising while the sun is still in the sky, was the European release of the online game City of Heroes on February 4th. There are several good reasons why there was no more festivities, but that doesn't mean it is all doom doom doomed.

First off, there is the fact that Europe just doesn't have the same tradition for superhero comics as the USA. Most superhero comics are written by and for Americans. The way I see it (and some others too), superheroes fill the role that mythology play in older countries. The USA being such a young nation, born after the dawn of rationalism, it never had its own myths. Well, until Orson Scott Card wrote the Tales of Alvin Maker, but it is still somewhat unsure if they will take hold as public myths. Probably not. Although it has some of the same qualities. The superhuman who can change the world for the better, but who is also disguised as a normal person and suffers from a loneliness that can only partly be filled.

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Europe simply never went down that road in comics. Belgium has the famous Tintin with semi-realistic stories, and its humorous competitor Spirou. Well, that's how they look to me. The Germans, meanwhile, had farting elephants. Well, that's all I know about from that quarter. I'd encourage my German readers to correct me, except that I have no German readers. I seem to have regular readers in Malaysia, Japan, and even France. (So much for the theory that the French can never learn any other language than French. Or perhaps they really really like my pictures, week after week. Yeah, right.) Anyway, Germans and Swedes stay away with almost religious thoroughness. This is no big surprise. The big surprise is that there is actually a German- language CoH server. I don't see why they didn't make it in Dutch in the first place. Surely it must be the Dutch who are playing there. Now that's a people who know how to have fun.

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The third reason why CoH Europe is conspicuously absent from the front pages even of the computer entertainment magazines: World of Warcraft. Back when CoH was a spectacular hit in the USA, WoW was not even in beta. Now, WoW is released less than a week after CoH, and it is the cult hit of MMORPGs. Blizzard had something like 20 servers which just collapsed under the burden of hundreds of thousands of slavering fans trying to play day and night. The greatest rat hunting game ever made, so it seems. And for some obscure reason, it seems that some people would rather play it than City of Heroes. As if these were competitors. What competition can there be between a medieval fantasy game and a 21th century superhero game? It's like, I don't know, perhaps "Wonder whether I should read Superman or Prince Valiant". Uhm. Yeah. Right. Well, there is a competition because the day has only 24 hours. Actually that's including the night, but when you play either of them, "including the night" goes without saying.

Anyway, there are two British-language servers, one German-language and one French. Actually I happen to know that quite a few Europeans played on the US servers already, and I suspect we will continue to do so. The time of day when we can be online is quite a bit less crowded than the prime American playtime, and so far this has been a good thing. It may be harder to find a team, but teaming is much less problematic in CoH than other games due to the strong "sidekick" feature, which now works two ways. A lower level character can be sidekicked up to one level below the higher level hero – or the higher level hero can "exemplar" down to the same level as the lower. (Exemplaring gives no experience points, but it burns off debt at double speed or converts experience to influence, which is the currency of the game, so it is still an attractive option. Not to mention that sometimes you just want to have fun rather than level up. Well, I do, your mileage may vary.)

I don't really feel like moving to Europe at the time, and frankly I'm not sure why there would be British servers in the first place. But I wish them all luck, and they also have a nifty website you may go visit. If you do that, I can get back to the game, OK? ^_^