by Jeff Woleslagle on Apr 28, 2009
Welcome to the 1,067th Edition of Loading...
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news and commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
City of Heroes celebrates it's fifth birthday today, and we'll walk down memory lane and look at the many ways this innovative MMO franchise impacted not only men and women in tights, but also the entire MMORPG category. That plus links to some great new Ten Ton Hammer articles and guides and your daily real world news and epic thread fix in today's Loading... Five Year-Old Superheroes!
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The Pulse
First, you vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Hammer Pulse (What is Pulse?). Here's the top 5 this week:
World of Warcraft EverQuest 2 Age of Conan Aion: The Tower of Eternity (UP 21!! - Why?) Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (down 1)And here are the biggest movers in the Top 20 this week:
EVE Online (down 14 to #18) Champions Online (UP 3 to #8) Lego Universe (UP 3 to #13)Loading... Daily
Five years ago today, NCsoft did what so many companies have tried to do - create a totally new MMO experience that grabs you from the moment that you log in. Though the developer's name on the box has changed to NCsofts Paragon Studios, City of Heroes continues to innovate - making user-generated content a significant part of the gameplay experience for the first time with Architect Edition.
CoH did more than show us MMORPGs could mean more than orcs, eleves, and the increasingly tired fantasy pastiche, it expanded what we all thought MMORPGs could do. Instead of the being born into the game world wearing a ragged novice tunic and a rusty sword, we had a complete costume put together from literally hundreds of options. We had a personality, background, and abilities to match. And soon enough we had extremely cool superpowers, like honest to goodness, not-on-rails flight for the first time in an MMO (it took the rest of the industry three years to match that feat, not counting Dark and Light).
Then, in lieu of a paid expansion, we got City of Villains introduced a slightly darker side of the game. The expansion boasted a business innovation, was that your CoH subscription covered what was essentially an entirely new game, and plenty of gameplay innovations too. "Recluse's Victory"was the only top-tier MMO sporting a zone that actually changes in appearance depending on which side is in control (the buzzword was "dynamic instancing" or "phasing" once upon a time) until Mythic insituted the approach for when cities changed sides and Blizzard used the approach for parts of Northrend and Ebon Hold.
Perhaps one of the few criticisms that ever stuck was that we were given too much at the start of City of Heroes; that one of the biggest ways MMOs keep you playing by making you earn your appearance. But Cryptic knew that there's no such thing as a newb-ish looking superhero (well, aside from Robin) and the number of costume options has continued to grow. And like any classic MMO, City of Heroes / City of Villains has plenty of deeply ingrained personality - Pocket D and the Ski Chalet are just two exampled of how the dev team has fostered that sense of uniqueness and charm.
Happy birthday, City of Heroes, and here's to many more under Paragon Studios. And it might be CoH's birthday but you get the gift: tune in for a special free reactivation week to check out all the latest changes.
And did City of Heroes or City of Villains make an impact on your gaming history? Share your memories in the Loading... forum, or feel free to email me.
Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day3 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 127 in April! 514 in 2009!
New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]
World of Warcraft: UI Mods and Addons for the PaladinReal World News
Horse and buggy involved in fatal crashThanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!
-- Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team