Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

By Carl Cascone

In April of 2004 a new phenomenon hit the MMORPG industry.  Primarily dominated by the fantasy genre, the world of online gaming received its first smell of old newsprint, and $0.65 serials.  There is no doubt that City of Heroes (published by NCSoft and developed by Cryptic Studios) bashed in the portcullis of the fantasy genre’s hold on MMORPGs.  Here is a game full of clichés, and though it is often a bad thing, comic book clichés are just what you need in a game focusing on a comic book universe. What would a descent comic book MMORPG be without villains that gloat to the heroes, brilliant scientists that help the characters, and a full blown metropolis?  

And you can’t leave out the most obvious cliché: super tight costumes that, for some reason, people who develop superhuman powers feel they just must have in order to fight bad guys. City of Heroes did not leave that one out either and their character creation system has been a model for every high end RPG to follow.

City of Heroes (and its sister game, City of Villains) is a title where creating the character is as exciting as the end game itself.  Literally hours can be spent just designing the costume of a character. If you ever wanted to try your hand at fashion design while playing a video game, sit right down and play City of Heroes.  For the less patient gamer, or those stricken with Attention Deficit Disorder, there is a brilliant random function, which will place features together and allow you to scroll through various possibilities, so fear not.  Costume design can be as complicated or as simple as one would want.    

Though costume design can be complicated, the character creation process is simple and easy.  If jumping into the action and skipping fluff is the goal, a player can be in the game in less than five minutes. 

To start a player must pick an Origin.  Simply this step determines how your character (or “toon” as it is referred to in CoH and CoV) received their powers.  Was the character bit by a radioactive arthropod?  Did someone kill the character’s dog, motivating him to work out and kick tail?  Maybe a bullet lodged in the character’s spleen dooming him to a trait-boosting metal suit?  Could be the toon was just born that way.  There are 5 possible origins, and the one chosen affects what kind of items or enhancements you can use later in the game.  So the origin phase is more than just fluff.

The origins are Natural, Science, Mutation, Technology, and Magic.  Natural characters train themselves to be the best; think of the Punisher, Batman, or Submariner.  Aliens like Silver Surfer, Superman, and Venom would also fall under this category.  Science origin characters have been altered by a scientific process.  Again, radioactive arthropods come to mind with this one, or a family of four just out joy riding and getting belted by cosmic rays like the Fantastic Four.  Any of the classic characters altered by science in some way would fall here like the Hulk or Captain America.  The Mutation origin involves a character that received their powers through the genome.  If you really need examples, think of Gambit, Rogue, and Cyclops.  A character of Technology origin would get powers from devices or inventions.  Iron Man, Cyborg, and Ultron are 3 examples that come to mind.  Finally there is the Magic origin, which grants power through items, spells, deities, or extra-dimensional pacts.  Example characters would be Thor, Dr. Strange, or Wonder Woman.  

The next step in character creation is to pick an archetype.  The archetype determines what type of character you play, and there are strategies that work for each archetype.  The archetype is the most important factor in terms of character development.   City of Heroes and City of Villains each have a set of 5 archetypes that you can play.  Heroes have the archetypes of Blaster, Controller, Defender, Scrapper, and Tank.  Villains have the archetypes of Corruptor, Dominator, Mastermind, Brute, and Stalker.  Each archetype has a Primary power set and a secondary power set.  No two archetypes have the same Primary power set, but the secondary set of one archetype might be the primary set of another.  The Scrapper and Tank are good examples of this.  The scrapper has a primary set of melee, and a secondary set of defense, while the Tank’s primary is defense, and its secondary set is melee.  Characters achieve the highest ranking power of their primary set earlier than the higher ranks of their secondary set.  Furthermore, the magnitude of primary powers is greater than the magnitude of secondary powers.  So a Scrapper with the Broadsword’s HACK ability will deal more damage than a Tanks with an Axe’s CLEAVE

Once the general character has been created, the true fun begins.  The last phase is when a player gets to fully determine what their toon will look like.  Every aspect of the character is considered:  head, face, accessories, torso, devices, belt, gloves, and boots.  The individual parts are all menus so there is a finite amount to choose from, but the combinations possible are astronomically numerous.  Also you can add tails, ears (i.e. cat, elf, demon), strange noses, and other sorts of prostheses.  The face menu gives faces of general appearance which you than can alter through distorting some aspect of the face.  The face generator is no where near the complexity of Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion but many would consider that a relief.  Each individual part has a menu for detailed trimming.  As an example you can have a character with a suit of tights, or a suit of robes, and Celtic knotwork detailing all of it. If you wanted to you can mix mech armor with superhero tights. There is also a menu of 160 shades of colors, for each part of the toon and each accessory. Each accessory or part has a major and minor color.  For hair color, shades can be mixed, giving a range of color not present in the human genome. The generator is the same for both CoH and CoV, so those players wishing to get the full menu options available for their toons will want to purchase the City of Heroes: Good vs. Evil edition.  Some examples of menu items are chaos leather, barbed wire, chains, monster and zombie parts, and medieval armor. All of these capabilities make an almost infinite number of combinations, from pretty girls in skimpy bikinis to huge 9 foot tall mechs.

Before entering the game, the player can write their character’s origin if they so desire. This written origin story can be changed or written at any time throughout the game.

The fun with costumes does not end at 1st level.  Many heroes need a costume change at some point.  After all Spiderman traded the red and blues for black.  How many times did Tony Stark improve his armor?  Even Steve Rogers needed a new costume after he was stripped of the Captain America title and just became the Captain.  This is mimicked in CoH after a character reaches level 20.  At that point, the player can design an entirely new costume.  The old one does not go away; 20th level characters can switch costumes at will.  After 20th level there are 3 more points at which a character can get a new costume.  Eventually the player will be able to switch between them all at will.

The costume generator is what has the most impact on the MMORPG industry compared to other parts of CoH.  The CoH generator is state of the art as far as generating avatars is concerned.  In early 2006, with release of the Korean version of City of Heroes, the character generator was released alone without the game, and placed on the internet.  Many people that had no interest in CoH downloaded the generator and spent hours making up toons.  This prompted Marvel Comics to bring a lawsuit against NCSoft, because Marvel Comics charged that their copyrighted intellectual property could be duplicated with the software.  NCSoft won the lawsuit, but there are strong warnings in the user agreement that copyright infringement is not allowed.  It is not possible to reproduce a published character’s name or image in the CoH game.

CoH, while a great MMORPG, has its strongest point in its costume generator.  In the future, fantasy games with the depth of Warcraft should utilize similar models. The depth of CoH coupled with the character generator, truly makes CoH and CoV hard hitters in the gaming industry, as well as good alternatives to the pure fantasy genre.

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