So I don’t think many people will argue with my assertion that City of Heroes is the gold standard for developing a superhero MMORPG. I don’t just mean that in the sense that it was the first and it was what all superhero MMORPGs will be compared to; I mean that it is the unambiguous top of the pack. It still stands as the gold standard for making a superheroic MMORPG that’s fun and beloved to this day. And that’s interesting because it should not be like that.
No, really. I find this interesting in part because CoH should have long since been dethroned from its current position, and it is uniquely placed on that pedestal. So why is that? I think the key is to start by understanding all of the ways that its status as being the best is unique, starting with the obvious fact that the game did shut down.
By pointing out that the game shut down, I don’t mean to say it deserved it; rather, I’m saying that usually, a game shutting down just does not still get to hold on to the title of being the game to beat once that happens. But that never really mattered. Ship of Heroes and City of Titans were both always conceived of as improvements on CoH, and in fact a big part of what made SoH a rough launch to start with was the fact that it came out after CoH had come back. That shouldn’t have just knocked it out immediately, but here we are.
You could argue that it was the first, sure, but that usually doesn’t matter all that much. Fantasy MMORPGs are more common than science fiction ones, sure, but whatever you’d like to call the first science fiction MMORPG is not still hailed as the gold standard of what the genre can be. If you want to mark Anarchy Online as the first of that breed, for example, the game still has its fans and few would claim it’s somehow diminished by its age… but I don’t think most people would say that it set a height that nothing else ever approached.
And it’s not as if there haven’t been other superheroic games. But none of them have hit that same point as CoH. None of them have produced the same fervor. If DC Universe Online shut down tomorrow, I do not think it would be getting years of protests about its closure.
The obvious refuge would be to claim that CoH hits a perfect point of balance and mechanics, and that would make me begin laughing without stopping until I am taken by the doctors to another location. We have talked plenty about the state of balance in the current game, and while I think it has issues, I also think it’s important to note that this has always been the state of affairs. Balance has never been this game’s strong suit. Basically anyone with a strong enough opinion about the game’s balance is longing for the days when the game was unbalanced in favor of X instead of Y.
“Well, it’s because superhero fans are -” I’m going to go ahead and stop you right there, because while I know people who are big fans of superheroes and big fans of CoH, I also know lots of CoH fans who, at best, have ambivalent feelings about superheroes as a genre. There are loads of folks who love this game for whom the superhero draw isn’t really it.
So what is it about this game? What makes it uniquely suited to stand as this high-water mark, a game that never mastered the art of hands that weren’t mittens or faces that weren’t flat JPGs? Because it’s gotta be something, right?
I think it is, and I think that the superhero element of it does have an important part to play, but it’s not because it was a superhero game. Rather, it’s because it mastered something almost by accident that superhero games struggle with, and that’s the fact that superheroes do not make any amount of sense.
That’s not “they’re unrealistic,” either. I want you to think about Daredevil. By all logic, Daredevil should not be a superhero. He’s a lawyer who is blind, but because of the accident that blinded him, he’s… not blind, actually. That isn’t a superpower. That shouldn’t make him a superhero. And yet he is, and not because his ability to see is technically different than having functional eyes; it’s because he’s a fascinating character who is deeply rooted in a sense of guilt for what he’s doing, waging a one-man war against crime as a vulnerable human being, serving as a symbol even as he hates himself for it.
Superheroes include guys like Daredevil and guys like Spider-man and guys like Iron Man, and all of them live in the same dang city half of the time, and yet somehow Daredevil can keep punching muggers while Iron Man literally could unleash an army of police robots at any time. Why doesn’t that fix everything? Because it doesn’t make sense.
CoH is a game that has crafting, which was added in a kind of slapdash system ages after the game had already been live and it also kinda rules and is a fun part of the game no matter how much it changed the fundamental nature of the game’s gearing system. It has housing, which was at one point meant to be part of a PvP mode nobody liked, and people love having heroes and villains and yet the PvP isn’t a thing and nobody cares. It is an unbalanced mess and people roll things that are not meta all the time because who cares if it’s unbalanced? It’s fun. Chill out.
You can make your radiation characters look like they’re shooting fire and your fire characters look like they’re dripping with poison and nobody thinks this is weird or inexplicable; it’s actually all super cool. There are about nine million different ways to level your characters, and you can, if you want to, do so in a way that barely ever involves actually getting into real combat scenarios.
The reason that people like myself love superhero comics is that they are a mishmash of wild creativity, and you can absolutely just have your team go fight in a fairy kingdom for no well-explained reason for a couple of months. CoH still holds that spirit up. It doesn’t worry about whether or not it feels appropriately “like” the superhero stories it’s based on; it is happy to just do all of this stuff. There’s a whole set of missions taking place in an ancient Greco-Roman dimension where the Greco-Roman villains are teaming up with Nazis. How is that a thing? Why is that a thing? Who cares because it actually rules.
It isn’t trying to be anything other than a fun game that lets you do fun things at this moment, and in that, it captures the spirit of what makes superheroes fun in the first place. No other MMORPG in the subgenre has managed that, often getting lost in the weeds of trying to be CoH again. And that’s why CoH still stands tall. It casts a long, impressive shadow because its would-be competitors keep getting lost in its own details, and it still just says, “Hey, want to fight some bad guys on the moon?”
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Eliot Lefebvre and Justin Olivetti covering superhero MMORPGs, past, present, and future! Come along on patrol as Into the Super-verse avenges the night and saves the world… one column at a time.
