Leaving the City of Villains

For the past month, I've tried my best to stay interested in City of Villains. I even purposely stopped my WoW subscription in order to give this game a fair chance. Needless to say, I still barely played the game. It's just not that much fun. I found the missions to be repetitive. Every mission is "go here and kills all these mobs" for whatever reason seems dandy at the time. Occasionally you'll get to "collect" items for your mission giver, but even then the mission itself is basically the same kill everything style. From what I'm told, this mission style is the same as City of Heroes. While CoH was a great MMO, one must remember that it came out before World of WarCraft. City of Villains could have taken the successful CoH and improved upon it by adding some WoW-like features (or more of them, depending on how you see it). In order to be successful in this post WoW MMO genre, you can't simply re-release last year's game with a minor graphics update. You have to take what innovations you can from that other game, and try to improve upon it.

That kinda leads me to my next gripe about CoV. You just don't feel evil. You want be become a member of Lord Recluse's army... for some unknown reason. Alternatively, being a hero is easy - all you have to do is stop evil doers from their insane schemes. And since CoV is essentially CoH with a new coat of paint, your supposed villain is acting more like a hero to the bad guys rather than a bad guy to the heroes. In order to be a successful villain, you have to have some schtick, a reason for being bad, some overall grand scheme to take over the world... hell, even simple revenge would work. That being said, CoV's story structure is just too generic to achieve the feel of being evil.

Whenever I did play CoV, I found myself wishing it played more like WoW. I wanted the Stalker class character I created to play like a Rogue from WoW. I wanted the UI to be more friendly and simple, just like it is in WoW. Okay, I'll admit it. I wanted WoW in comic book form. Oh well, time to cancel my CoV subscription and resubscribe to WoW.

Lesson learned: When you release a stand-alone expansion pack, it had better be vastly improved over the previous title. Otherwise it'll feel dated. Oh, it'd also help that a game about being a bad guy makes the user feel like they're being evil.