That sound you just heard was the loud sucking sound of all my free time being sucked away.

See, there's this game, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, or MMORPG for short, that a bunch of my friends—both on the private chatservers where I hang out and on LJ—have been getting into. It's called http://www.coh.com, and unlike all the other MMORPGs that have come down the pike, this one is a comic book superhero game.

I swore up and down that I would never get into a money-and-time-suck game like a MMORPG, and up to now, it's been pretty easy to do. I beta-tested both Neocron and The Sims Online and never had any real urge to pony up the cash for either of them. Those, Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars Galaxies—my willpower was mighty: I could resist them all. I didn't want to have to deal with the griefing, the hunt for J. Random Specific Artifact that I needed to power up, the frustration of losing a zillion experience points (and whatever items I might have on my body) whenever I died: in short, the problems inherent in all MMORPGs I'd ever heard about or experienced prevented me from getting into them. After all, if I was going to pony up a monthly fee to participate, I wanted to be paying for something I'd enjoy, and none of the current contenders provided that.

Until now.

Up to this point, my preferred mode of gaming was online multiplayer, team based. This is why I play mods like Team Fortress Classic (and Counterstrike, but CS is a bit too frustrating for someone with my lack of aiming ability) and Starcraft, where folks can work together as a team. The experience was okay, but suboptimal in that we were always paired up against real people, who were often capable of working as a team better than my team could. What I really wanted to do was play through a versus-computer mission in cooperative multiplay...but the only first person shooter I had which could do that, System Shock 2, had very shoddy multiplayer code. (I would have liked to do it with Halo, but for whatever reason the PC adaptation left coop-multiplayer out.)

Now, enter City of Heroes. This game is set in a fictitious city with almost as many heroes as, and many many more thugs than, ordinary citizens ("They warned me about this city, but I didn't believe them," one NPC says when you rescue him from hordes of undead zombies). You take on the role of rookie heroes stepping into the shoes of the lamented dead who fell stopping an alien invasion. Your heroes roam the city killing "mobs" (MMORPG-speak for monsters) and taking on missions from friendly NPCs to gain experience.

The world feels huge and expansive. The city is built to real-world scale, divided into "zones" a couple of miles across. Some of these zones look bright and well-kept, like the starting areas of Atlas Park or Galaxy City; others have degenerated into gritty, decrepit slums like King's Row; been taken over altogether by villains, like Perez Park; or been destroyed altogether, like Boomtown. The characters have to traverse these on foot or with the aid of teleportational, super-speed, jumping, flight, or other locomotive powers.

The graphics work in support of this scale. If you are at one edge of a zone and have a clear view of landmarks some distance away, the contrast fades until very distant buildings, particular those in another zone, are barely outlines against the overhead sky. The graphics in general are crisp and sharp; one can make out the smallest details on nearby characters' costumes or on nearby buildings. Power activations look really good, glowing auras or clouds or energy blasts that englobe characters or monsters as numbers indicating damage effects appear overhead and fly upward in the RPG tradition.

Sound also works well in this game. Certain areas have musical soundtracks that sound good (though thankfully not all areas) though they do tend to get a little repetitive after a while in the game. Certain game occurrences, most notably levelling up, have a specific musical sting that plays when they happen—and, in a particularly nice touch, this is audible to other players in the area, so when you level, your teammates are apt to congratulate you. And, of course, the powers have activation sounds—often quite loud ones. Sometimes shooting off your powers is less an exercise in combat than just a chance to bask in the lights and sound effects that come out of them.

And the character generation system goes "The Sims" about fifty times better. As one of my friends who was playing the game put it, it's a good enough system that it could be sold all by itself. Skin color, hair color, costume color...every aspect of the hero's appearance is customizeable. It is possible to have hours of fun just sitting there and doodling with what your hero ought to look like.

Aside from the general source material on which it is based (superheroes! yay!) CoH's biggest appeals to me are two-fold: first, it's designed from the ground up to promote team play. When you join a team, people with complementary powers to yours can make up for your own character's weaknesses, and vice versa. If you have a ranged-weapon blaster, you can work side by side with a melee fighter to defend you close in, and a healer to restore hit points to both of you when you need them. Also, team participants get experience bonuses, certain superpowers work to the benefit of your entire team, and if a high-level hero takes a low-level hero on as a "sidekick," the sidekick gets to fight almost as well as the hero during their period of association. This also takes care of another big problem of prior MMORPGs: members of a group that started out together falling far behind on their levelling and not being able to adventure with the rest of their peer group anymore because they die in one hit.

Second, target acquisition is done in the RPG style: you select a target, have a specific chance to hit him, and let the computer arbitrate the hit. The quick-reflexed and the slow are placed on a level playing field.

All those other problems I mentioned? They're fixed, too. CoH has no PvP (yet), the most grief another player can give you is to kill the monster you're fighting out from under you...and there are so many monsters around, even that isn't a major hassle. There are no artifacts or items in the usual MMORPG sense (magic swords, suits of armor, etc.); there are your super-powers, which become available level by level on a set schedule; Enhancements, which are power-boosters that allow you to improve your powers and are frequently dropped by monsters ("mobs") or available in shops; and Inspirations, which are single-use power-ups that are available in the same way.

When you die, you don't lose any of your items, and you don't lose any of your experience, either. What happens is that you go into "experience debt"—part of your experience bar changes color to brown, and the debt takes half of the experience you get from then on to clear it. And it's not even all that much, either—the debt per death is equal to 1/10 of the amount it would take to get you from where you currently are, XP-wise, to the next level. And no matter how many times you die, XP debt will (currently) at worst end at the level-up point. The thing that drove me to quit text MUDding way back in the early days was losing half my accumulated XP with every death and being faced with the prospect of having to earn a zillion XP in order to get back to where I was. This is so much better than that that it's not even in the same ballpark.

All of a sudden, there aren't enough hours in the day, and I almost find myself wanting to order some http://www.provigil.com/ from a mail-order pharmacy just so I can spend every weekend hour in the game, levelling up. (Any other CoH players want to go in? Just $7 a pill in lots of 30, less if you buy in more bulk... :)

This is not to say that everything is rosy. To a certain extent, City of Heroes suffers from the same general problem that after a while, the game becomes a "level treadmill"...and after you've reached the last level, what then? Also, some of the in-game mechanics may not be explained adequately well leading to new players wasting their money on items they cannot actually use. (Though this is helped out by all the community webpages, such as http://coh.warcry.com, that have free strategy and explanatory guides.)

Another problem is that while there are about a zillion different power sets, and they are all nicely varied and well-balanced, they are not all-inclusive. By the very nature of a computer game, it is not really possible to simulate all possible superpowers, the way a pen-and-paper game like Champions can. There are no shapeshifters in the game, for instance. No "elastic body" powers like Mr. Fantastic or Plasticman. No secret identities, either. While you can mix and match power sets to your heart's content, when all is said and done, everyone is going to end up with the same powers to choose from.

I also have a few pet peeves about the user-interface, which can sometimes lead to having windows over a significant portion of the screen. Not all the windows can be resized, and some of the hotkeys are ambiguous (or nonexistent). However, there is an extensive system of bind commands, so perhaps this can be remedied if I take the time to work out how. And some of the mouse buttons do not lend themselves to remapping for some reason.

Finally, aside from the $50 cost to buy the game itself, it is $15 per month to play it—that's $180 per year (though you can get discounts if you buy multiple months at a time), a substantial chunk of change if you take it as a whole. Not everyone will feel comfortable chipping in that kind of money to run around a virtual world in tights.

If none of the MMORPGs you've ever seen have appealed, or you're looking for something different, give City of Heroes a try. See you in the comic books!

Recommended: Yes