Stex Toys

I presently don’t play City of Heroes, and haven’t done since before Christmas. However as always I’m still actually paying my subscription fee

Now the Architect release, which for those not up on CoH news allows players themselves to create missions in the game, selecting locations, NPCs, and I believe awards, for other players to experiance, is out. I’m tempted to boot it back up, purely to look into this potentially important point in MMO development.

Of course opening up a game to user created content, as the likes of Little Big Planet has done, will always lead to a huge amount of crap, but amongst all this effluent you’ll inevitably find some complete gems. Making sure these gems can be sifted out of said crap is the real key to making any system such as this a success, so I’ll be interested to find out what rating system, or other method has been implemented. Gamasutra are already writing up articles on this but there’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself.

Gamasutra – News – City Of Heroes’s Mission Architect Births 20,000 Arcs In First Week

We are, that is my Fiancee and I, approaching the final levels with our latest mains on City of Heroes. Neither of us have gotten this high before, that being level 41 out of 50 possible levels. We did once before obtain top ranking in World of Warcraft, although that was back when the top level there was 50 also.. or was it 60.. whatever it was originally.

Unlike in WoW however we are starting to actually experiance some of the End Game content. I chose my first ‘Epic’ powerset skill last night and we’ve been taking on some Arch Villians helping others in the Supergroup to ding 50. (I just went to look for a Wiki page on ‘Dinging’ in MMOs and there isn’t one, I am somewhat shocked!) This is helped by the wonderful SideKick/Exemplar feature in City of Heroes, allowing either players who’d levels are lower then the team to be boosted up to just one level below whoever they are sidekicked by, or Exemplar for someone and have their level reduced to that of the team. This makes it far easier than and other MMO I’ve played to get a team together, and especially from ones own Supergroup, or Guild/Clan to give it a more generic term.

As we start to get through some of the more interesting areas I’ll put down my thoughts on what NCSoft have gotten into the game for those that make it all the way to the top, besides unlocking the two new character classes, or Architypes as CoH calls them.

Well it’s been a long time coming, but it had to happen eventually. World of Warcraft is no longer my most played game! Over the weekend City of Heroes finally passed the 280 hours I had logged with X-Fire and is now shooting up the 300s!

Xfire stats as City of Heroes passes WoW

To be fair I didn’t have X-Fire installed since the beginning of WoW play, so in reality it’s probably still had more time sunk into it, however I have to take X-Fire as my official timings as i have no idea how many additional hours where wasted, erm, I mean enjoyed in the lands of Azeroth.