Thursday 24 February 2005

Pic of the day: Turncape? Not this hero! Screenshot from City of Heroes, of course.

WoW vs CoH

This may be too early, but if so it will surely be entertaining to read later. I've played World of Warcraft for a week and a half. Admittedly that's ridiculously short for such a grand game. Still, it's enough that I've stopped thinking about the interface, enough that I automatically adjust my play style to the class I'm playing at the moment.

And playing different classes is what I do. The game encourages creating lots of "alts", alternate characters, and parking them in an inn while you log off. When you come back to them several days later, they are "rested" and get double XP from fighting mobs for a while. The longer you have rested, the longer you get double XP, within limits (about a work week, I think).

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When I say "fighting mobs", the word mob is short for "mobile", meaning a computer-controlled character that moves on its own. It doesn't mean an angry group of people, much less a criminal syndicate. And this is a notable difference from City of Heroes, where a mob can be any or all of the above.

World of Warcraft is surely the best rat hunter game ever made. But at heart, it is still one of those, although the rats are called "kobold vermin" and have a roughly humanoid shape. Then again, they had in Dark Age of Camelot as well, where they were called "rat boys". I remember, I used to call them "frat boys"...

WoW is, if anything, the height of xenophobia as entertainment. In this respect it is very similar to DAoC, where members of non-allied races were enemies by default and to be killed wherever found. This is the case also here, and in addition the land has many lesser races of near-humans, such as kobolds and troggs and spinebacks. It starts to dawn on me why our subspecies is the only member of the hominids still alive. It is probably related to the "uncanny valley" in robotics, where people who have liked robots more and more the more human they become, suddenly find them scary and loathsome when they start to approach a real human look and behavior, but have not reached it completely. In the past, there must have been tons of near-humans, competing not just for food but for mates as well. Without the instinctive disgust for near-humans, our species might have been reabsorbed into the grunting hordes. (Ooh, I said "horde"!)

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OK, that may be far-fetched. But this kind of artificial racism is a really huge part of both DAoC and WoW. In contrast, City of Heroes is about fighting villains, or at worst robots and undead controlled by villains. Your initial opponents are not rat boys, but human vermin: Photo-realistic human purse-snatchers, muggers and drug dealers. It is not about killing someone who is born into the wrong race, but about defeating people who have chosen to go down the path of evil. This is why, pretty or not, WoW doesn't really satisfy a certain need in me.

At the outset, the gameplay difference is not so great between "defeat five gangsters" and "kill five kobolds". Admittedly, to me at least there is a much greater satisfaction in setting bullies on fire and then pounding them into the ground with my bare hands; it is something I truly enjoy. (Not sure what that says about me ... a great thinker claimed that men never do evil with such joy and thoroughness as when then do it for a good cause.)

But the follow-up to the hunting quest betrays the fundamental difference between the games again. In WoW, you get quests to retrieve items from the kobolds or gather certain objects they tend to carry around. Then you are rewarded with gold and perhaps some powerful item. In CoH, the interrogation of the badly injured gangsters may lead you to their hideout where you look for more proof, beating up a ton of villains along the way. The missions are not quests you perform to get some impressive item; there are no items as such in CoH. Your powers are not bestowed on you as rewards, nor are they taken from the fallen enemies: Your powers are your own, a part of you. And you do your missions because you are a hero and this is what heroes do, fighting crime and keeping the city safe. (That, and you like being famous and hear people praise you, I guess.)

The whole tone of the game is different, in short.

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Technically, the games are also taking a fundamentally different approach. In my judgment, WoW is technically superior. It runs more smoothly on affordable equipment. City of Heroes is optimized for the nvidia graphics chipsets, and on the more common ATI boards (not to mention the built-in Intel in some machines) the performance is less than stellar. WoW does much better on these; the only lag comes from the Internet connection, and at least for me this was rare and very small.

Another difference is that WoW doesn't have zones. In CoH and some older games you have different maps that need time to be loaded. In WoW (and DAoC, which I believed was the first to do this) you gradually load new areas as you move in their direction, in the background. (The massive single-player RPG Morrowind also tries this, but instead you get frequent brief stops unless you have a super-fast hard disk.) In WoW, the loading is so smooth it feels as if the game is always playing from main memory. Even the initial start of the game is almost instantaneous, whereas I can go make myself some chocolate milk while starting any of my other recent computer games. Not just CoH and DAoC and Morrowind, but also games like Sims2 or Civ3 have a substantial load time. With World of Warcraft, I barely have time to get out of my chair and stretch. Whatever they do in terms of disk handling is awe-inspiring, and they ought to license it to the rest of the world's software developers.

WoW has a huge game world with varied landscapes. In comparison, City of Heroes is, well, a city. It does have the occasional park, and even the actual city zones can be rather different: Some industrial, some high-rise, some smoking ruins. There is a lot of variation, but it is variation on a smaller scale. No matter the count of actual unique graphic elements, the experience is a more varied world in WoW.

On the other hand, WoW is not particularly realistic. City of Heroes (and DAoC as well) are so lifelike that you could pass off a screenshot as a photo if you take it when no supernatural elements are present. (A caped crusader tends to ruin the realism in almost anything.) CoH looks and sounds like a real city. You start up the game, and you are there, in the city. It is an irony that a game that is based on comics and cartoons should be so lifelike, whereas a game that has no such background should look so cartoonish.

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Will I continue to play WoW after the "free" month that comes with the purchase? Probably, although I will take care to avoid its Player vs. Player elements. Even on the non-PvP servers, there is a lot of dueling and even all-out raids. (Raiding on these servers is limited to killing off NPCs temporarily, unless you can goad the local players into attacking you – which they usually do. I find this awkward and want no part of it.)

Will I continue to play CoH even though I now have the cult hit WoW on my computer? Yes, I already do. Two evenings this week Moekoi, my fire tanker, has been online and helped level up one of the defenders in my supergroup, Zutto Yume Mamotteru. If I can do this the first week with a new game, I'm sure likely to do more in the future, if any.

I will run with the graceful Night Elves in their enchanted forest and drink in the enchanted atmosphere of their feminist paradise. I will wander among the snow-clad peaks where Dwarves and Gnomes dig for precious metals. I will stroll through the orchards where medieval men and women harvest nature's bounty in a land clad in green and gold. But I will move through all these places as a tourist or at most a welcomed guest. My home is in Paragon City, where I am a citizen, a hero in a City of Heroes.

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Turncape is a real word! Although I only found 3 cases of it on Google, they all had the same meaning: Someone who turns traitor when the other side seems to get the upper hand. Have I picked this up from yet another language? In Norwegian we don't have this as a word, although we have the expression "to turn the cape according to the wind". Yes, the normal English word is "turncoat", but coats are not available in CoH until Issue 4 at best. ^_^*