Back in early 2004 the first superhero MMO, City of Heros created by Cryptic Studios, was released and from what I can remember with decent reviews. The game has done pretty well peaking around 200,000 users at its height and as of Sept 2008 had around 125,000 subscribers. Not a huge success by any means but enough for other developers to throw their hat into the superhero MMO rink.
Marvel at one point had a deal with Cryptic Studios to create Marvel Online, but has since been canceled. Instead Cyptic is now working on Champions Online, the unofficial sequel to City of Heros/Villains. Then we have Sony (SOE) working on DC Universe Online. Considering the age of CoH it’s about time we had a new superhero MMO on the market.
DC Universe Online
From what I’ve read and heard about this MMO it’s sounding pretty good, but there’s still not enough information out there for me to get really excited. Here’s a quick list of some of the key features.
- Highly customizable characters. You can even base them off of DC characters with 1 click of a button, then modify them if you want.
- PvP Combat in a Open World.
- Quests are called Cases and Capers depending if your a Hero or Villain.
- Fighting along side or against some famous DC characters. Superman, Batman, Joker, etc.
- Environment Manipulation, stuff like throwing cars
- Fast Movement/Traveling, depending on your powers
From those features nothing really jumps out at me as ground breaking. I think the most interesting is how the Cases and Capers are going to work. Basically if you’re a hero you might get a case where you have to protect someone, but a villain might get a caper where they have to kill that same person. So now you have a quest that turns into a PvP fight, which sounds pretty cool to me although I’m not exactly sure if that’s how these quest will work. I do know that I’d much rather be fighting a real person then NPCs all day. For a peek at the actual gameplay, checkout this video out at Allakhazam.com.
Champions Online
- Cross-Platform gaming between X-box360 and PC
- Highly customizable characters
- Your own Nemesis! A villain the becomes part of your storyline
After watching the gameplay and interview with Design Director Bill Roper on G4, I was not very impressed by the game. (Videos: Part 1, Part 2) In fact it game looked pretty boring. Being a big fan of PvP I wasn’t able to find much about how Champions will handle PvP, but from my search I get a sense that this game will concentrate more of PvE sorta like LoTRO. Another thing that struck me as I watched some of the footage is that it doesn’t really feel like a Superhero game. I mean “Monster Island”, sorry but is this Godzilla? I don’t want to fight random monsters on some random island, I want to be in a big sprawling city where most comics take place. Looking through the sceenshots at Champions-online.com I don’t see one city pic, only forests, mountains and indoor locations. To be honest, nothing at all about this game made me interested in it.
Even thought both games are pretty far from release, I’m definetly in DC Universe’s corner right now.
A biased review, or is this even called a review? Giving your opinions in such a case that you haven’t even played both games yet. Did you even learn how to make a review? You have to EXPERIENCE it first before you give your comments. DUH!
@Tim Dean: Thank you for the entertaining comparison between blogging with journalism.
@everyone else: Thanks for wasting fifteen minutes of what little time I get to myself these days. I had hoped for some face-saving link towards to bottom of the comments with which I might have had a better comparison of the two games. Yet I feel that in the time it took to SKIM through your inane banter for a reaching bit of useful information, I could have simply downloaded and played the games for myself.
@Lorehound.com: Don’t you review your articles before releasing to the public? This is my first time visiting your site, and based on this article, I honestly believe that you would be okay with allowing any twelve-year-old with a keyboard to represent your internet presence like LHStaff(Mike) has done. Please exercise better quality control.