I should have been doing more productive things last night, but I ended up spending the vast majority of my time playing City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ve had all of this nostalgia creep up on me and attack. I guess in some small way I didn’t realize quite how much I had missed having a Super Hero genre MMO. Champions Online was a massive disappointment and while CoH is not exactly a “modern” MMO, the core functionality is still extremely enjoyable. While I have heckled some of the projects trying to recreate this game in the past, I guess having experienced it once more that I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For me City of Heroes was a weird footnote between playing Horizons and getting into the World of Warcraft Beta. Once I moved on to Azeroth I really didn’t spend any time looking back at this game, but I have a feeling that it was to my own detriment.
While I dabbled a little bit with the City of Villains beta, I never actually played that game when it was live. Additionally I have never played any of the more faction based content that came into the game with Going Rogue. The tweaks that have been made are noticeable and interesting, and even in Atlas Park the “newbie” zone I am seeing the beginnings of a larger story arc against the Arachnos that serve as the larger factional villains of the game. The more time spent in the game the more I am remembering about the finer points of questing and how to build a character. I should be playing other things but for whatever reason this is just deeply compelling to me at the moment.
I ultimately went speed for my travel power tree, but I am wondering if I am going to regret this. Teleport Other was one of my favorite abilities where I could “yoink” a single target out of the pack and use it to both pull and give me a head start on burning that target down. Hasten from the speed tree however is the “correct” choice to make for any sort of a melee character, and I ultimately went down the path of the min-maxer instead of following my heart. I managed to get to seven last night before wandering off and picking back up on the FFXIV Main Story Quest. Tonight I am likely going to be spending my time trying to catch up in Wolcen as the rest of my crew has not been nearly as distracted this week as I have and as a result is probably way ahead of me in the leveling.
I should have been doing more productive things last night, but I ended up spending the vast majority of my time playing City of Heroes Homecoming. I’ve had all of this nostalgia creep up on me and attack. I guess in some small way I didn’t realize quite how much I had missed having a Super Hero genre MMO. Champions Online was a massive disappointment and while CoH is not exactly a “modern” MMO, the core functionality is still extremely enjoyable. While I have heckled some of the projects trying to recreate this game in the past, I guess having experienced it once more that I absolutely understand where they are coming from. For me City of Heroes was a weird footnote between playing Horizons and getting into the World of Warcraft Beta. Once I moved on to Azeroth I really didn’t spend any time looking back at this game, but I have a feeling that it was to my own detriment.
While I dabbled a little bit with the City of Villains beta, I never actually played that game when it was live. Additionally I have never played any of the more faction based content that came into the game with Going Rogue. The tweaks that have been made are noticeable and interesting, and even in Atlas Park the “newbie” zone I am seeing the beginnings of a larger story arc against the Arachnos that serve as the larger factional villains of the game. The more time spent in the game the more I am remembering about the finer points of questing and how to build a character. I should be playing other things but for whatever reason this is just deeply compelling to me at the moment.
I ultimately went speed for my travel power tree, but I am wondering if I am going to regret this. Teleport Other was one of my favorite abilities where I could “yoink” a single target out of the pack and use it to both pull and give me a head start on burning that target down. Hasten from the speed tree however is the “correct” choice to make for any sort of a melee character, and I ultimately went down the path of the min-maxer instead of following my heart. I managed to get to seven last night before wandering off and picking back up on the FFXIV Main Story Quest. Tonight I am likely going to be spending my time trying to catch up in Wolcen as the rest of my crew has not been nearly as distracted this week as I have and as a result is probably way ahead of me in the leveling.
Most of last night I spent working in Final Fantasy XIV on the Main Story Quest. I am taking things rather slow and spent a good chunk of the night actually playing with my kitten Josie instead of rapidly going through the quest line. I am enjoying myself quite a bit and finding the story beats to be interesting. I have no clue how big of a story patch 5.1 is but I have a feeling I am nowhere near closed to the end of it. Then I still have 5.2 sitting in front of me, and I have been fervently avoiding reading much of anything on FFXIV to in theory avoid spoilers. I’m also enjoying what little combat I have done with the Samurai and in theory if I do come back for any extended period of time I will likely just be focusing on that job.
However that is not going to be the focus of this mornings post. Last week I talked about playing SWG Legends a bit because Tam has been back playing it seriously. I talked about how I was not exactly sure how big of a component nostalgia had for me when it comes to playing outdated games. While I have been thoroughly distracted as yesterdays post indicates, I also am not sure if I love Star Wars Galaxies. At the very least I do not love the game in the manner that Tam loves the game. I see in him a bit of myself, every time I tried to convince someone how amazing of a game Everquest II was if they would just give it a chance and forgive its rough edges. He looks at this game like I have looked at so many of my passion projects, and without that love and care behind the en-devour I am not sure if I can really latch onto it. What I see instead is a game that is grossly outdated and requires more of me than I am willing to give it other than at a purely casual level.
This however lead me down a path to explore games that I do have deep feelings about. Namely I have known for awhile that City of Heroes Homecoming existed, but have really made no attempts to engage with it. The process for installing the Everquest Emulators have made me gunshy about going down the road to trying out other similar projects. However I originally messed with the EQ Emulators in the mid 2000s and this is now 2020 and thankfully the projects have evolved. Thankfully in the case of COH you have two steps essentially the first being to sign up for a forum account and then create your game login here. Next create a directory on your hard drive that you want to store City of Heroes in, download the Tequila client and run it as administrator. This downloads the game from scratch and will serve as your patcher while playing.
It was not long at all before I was creating a brand new character and poking my way around Paragon City. The interface is a little kludgier than I remember it, but for the time it was absolutely revolutionary. I created a version of my favorite character from live, the Katana/Regen Scrapper and we will see if it is as broken as it was back then. If nothing else it should serve as a good vehicle for exploring the game since it has both decent damage output and solid survival. Nostalgia helps a lot because I was pretty happy to roam around and complete quests, even eventually remembering how to slot enhancements and all of that fun stuff. I barely got a start last night but I expect to be poking around over the next several days at least.
Since I was clearly not in my right mind… I also went through the process of getting set up to play Everquest 1999. I’ve started a Dark Elf Shadowknight and I plan on setting up a second login server account so I can create a Dark Elf Cleric to run with it. I plan on dual boxing a bit because I have honestly missed doing that. I could of course return to my duo of characters in EQ2 live, but part of me wants to see Everquest again in all its early 2000s glory since I have been poking my head around in the game that came after it. I mean I will be hated by most everyone as a Dark Elf, but I never really played that side of the house on live. The other option would have been to create a pair of Dwarves and I legitimately might do that as well to see my old stomping grounds of Butcherblock. I realize this is just further distractions but I am enjoying myself so I guess that is fine.
Featuring: Â Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk a bit about Monster Hunter World Winter Star Event and how maddening the Tempered Kirin is. Â From there we talk about the closing of MMOs and specifically the loss of Wildstar. Several of us have returned to Final Fantasy XIV as is often the case at the end of an expansion. Â We briefly talk about some frustrations with World of Warcraft and then go into a discussion about puzzle games you can zone out while playing specifically Tetris Effect in VR and the amazing Lumines.
