Uh, yeah, okay, I should probably elaborate on this, now that it's not eight-friggin'-thirty in the morning.

I'm not particularly looking forward to Champions Online, for the following reasons:

1) A lot can happen between now and fall 2009. A lot.

2) Contrary to popular hype, CO is not being developed by "the City of Heroes people". With the exceptions of Jack Emmert and those who had already left Cryptic Studios before NCsoft bought out CoH, "the City of Heroes people" still work on City of Heroes.

3) Pretty much any time Jack said anything in public about his game design philosophy while he was on City of Heroes, my reaction was, Oh, so that's why that's lame.

4) Twitch combat in what purports to be an RPG. No thank you. Combat in an RPG is supposed to be about what your character can do, not whether you can out-twitch a 12-year-old jacked on Red Bull.

5) Console version of the client. See 4) above.

6) I don't need two superhero-themed MMOs. Hell, I don't need two MMOs of any description. Thus, either City of Heroes would have to have folded, or Champions Online would have to be so much better that I'd be motivated to switch after, by then, about five years of play. See 1) through 5) above for reasons I don't consider that likely. (Plus, I don't team up with strangers, so many if not most of the CoH players I know outside the game now would have to switch as well.)

7) I never played the Champions pen-and-paper game, so the brand's cachet, if it has any, will play no part in potentially swaying me, as described in 6) above.

So, yeah, not really on my radar, except that the collateral effect of a little competition ought to be good motivation for the City of Heroes team, and I think CoH is better off without Jack.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
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