City of Villains So Far

Allow me to introduce you to Thryn. She’s currently a level 4 Magic Brute on the Defiant (England) server. She might not look too evil, but she’ll kick your ass with her Stone Mallet of Eeeevil.

If you’ve played City of Heroes, then City of Villains should be a breeze to figure out. It’s basically the same game, only with darker settings, and with different names for things. At least, that’s the case in the lower levels. Higher levels should present (hopefully) more interesting content (I’m especially excited about the evil lair creations – muahahaha!)

Let’s look at some of the things I’ve experienced so far:

Character Creation Screen: The Archetypes – as far as I can tell – are essentially the same, but with different names (Brute = Tanker, Mastermind = Controller, etc). The Origins are exactly the same (Magic, Technology, etc). The character customizations are pretty much the same as City of Heroes only with some extra “evil” options you can add to your character. Now, I haven’t played City of Heroes in a while (having dumped it for WoW), so I don’t know if all of the options available on CoV are now available on CoH as well, but I did find some nifty new gear. I’m actually quite proud of my skull belt. It’s hawt.

Game Play: Enhancements are the same, inspirations are the same, and the powers are pretty much the same too. If you’re familiar with CoH, the learning curve for CoV should be next to zero. You start out in the Training area, you talk to the contacts, they teach you what everything is, they send you on a quick mission to get to level 2, and then they send you off to the Rogue Islands to level, get new missions, etc. You’ll fight snakes, cops, and yes, even Hellions.

Teams, Supergroups, Chat: Same, same, same. As far as emotes: same dances, same music on the boombox, same newspapers, same cheers … same same same.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I haven’t played CoH in a while, but I admit that I enjoyed my time spent in-game so far. I enjoyed my missions, and had a pretty good time kicking good-people butt (once I got over the reflex of wanting to help them). It was also nice not having to spend some time figuring out how to play the game. I dove straight into it with little to no confusion.

I do think, however, that unless the higher level content evolves into something exciting, that I’m going to end up getting bored with CoV in the same way I got bored with CoH. There was just too much monotony. Too much of the same, same, same from level to level.

I guess we’ll see what the future of the game brings, however. In the meantime, I’m still trying to figure out how to get on the US servers, and I fear I may not be able to accomplish that feat without buying the game again – this time from the US.

Either that, or all my friends are just going to have to move to Europe.