Replayability
Filed under Soapbox on April 20, 2007
Keywords: City of Heroes, MMORPGs
I’m coming up on my 4 month “anniversary” in City of Heroes. I’m a little late to the party–CoH is celebrating their 3rd year this month. There is still an active community and the developers continue to add content.
This is my first experience with a MMO, but reading through others’ comments on the CoH forums has allowed me to compare the game with its contemporaries. For the most part, MMOs present a static environment for the players to interact with. Patches will update, revise, delete or add content, but on a daily basis, the same content is available to every player regardless of what type of character they build.
To encourage players to create different “toons”, the CoH devs have instituted a system of level-based missions. While a toon is within the level range of a contact, they can obtain story arcs or other special missions. However, once the toon advances beyond the level range, the contact will no longer give them missions. Supposedly, there is enough content that a toon should not be able to experience everything the first time through. (I’m currently testing this theory.)
Based on my gaming experience, I think this mechanic is a poor one for encouraging replayability. Replayability is a measure of a game’s ability to provide enough variety in the player’s experience so they will be willing to “complete” the game more than once. Forcing players to miss content is one way, but has the potential to frustrate players (particularly this player) rather than encourage them to come back and try again.
In any game where the player is given choices on how to build their character, the obvious answer to promote replayability is to base the content experienced on how the player builds their character. In CoH, players choose an origin, or a general description of how their heroes got their powers. As I mentioned earlier, missions are handed out by contacts the heroes are introduced to. It would naturally follow that, in order to promote replayability, the contacts a hero is introduced to should be affected by their origin. However, only the first contact is based upon origin. All starting heroes are introduced to one of two “origin” contacts, depending on what zone they chose to start in. After that, any contact can introduce any other contact.
A related mechanic would be that the contacts offered different missions based on the hero’s origin. So if Superbob, a Natural origin hero, talks to Contact A, he gets mission X. However, when Captain Johnny, a Science origin hero, talks to Contact A, he gets mission Y.
The second way to promote replayability is for content to be accessed organically based on previous gameplay decisions the player has made. This model is frequently used in RPGs, and is conceptually like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. One drawback to this method, though, is that unless the player likes to roleplay or is consciously making decisions to access new content, they will likely follow the route that aligns with their natural tendencies every time.
CoH broke new ground by introducing the first superhero-based MMO, but the fundamental gameplay mechanics remained the same. It’s time for some developer to move along the evolution of the MMO to include true replayability.
Related Posts
- Champions Online unveiled
- I wanna be a superhero
- Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
- New Year’s layoffs
- City of Heroes free trial
April 20th, 2007 at 9:52 am
I’ve been playing Guildwars lately, and they do have exactly this kind of content in class-based quests that can be obtained. The overall storyline is based on misssions, and those are always the same, but many of the non-mandatory side quests in the game are dependant on the class you take on character creation.
I understand that at some point there is a way to change your secondary class, so it is possible to get all quests with the same character (with the exception of the “introductory” area that isn’t accessible once you leave it). You just have to go back to the areas you have already been through to get the quests when you get a new secondary. But in general it seems most people choose to create multiple characters to go back and experience the game and new quests (it is likely also faster, because you can take an entirely new primary and secondary class).
I wanted to try the new LotR MMORPG beta that is being advertised now, but unfortunately even though my machine meets their listed system requirements, they’ve implemented their code to require a few Intel processor specific APIs, so my Athlon won’t run it. Wasted many hours downloading the thing just to find that out. GRRRRRR.
By the way, I never got City of Heroes to run either. Support was responsive, but once my trial expired they were just as happy to write me off without any offer of resetting the trial or continuing to work with me to find a way to reproduce the issue so they could fix it. Kind of disappointed in that.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
That’s too bad. One thing that I really miss in CoH is having friends to regularly team with. I’ve joined a couple different supergroups (one per each of my toons), but I’ve found either no one is on or their on with their high lvl characters.
If you’re still interested in trying, they now have a referral program where players can send friends trial codes. I’d also suggest posting your dxdiag log and a description of the issue in the CoH technical issues forum. The players are pretty helpful and responsive to posts, and there are some pretty hardcore hardware geeks.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
Yeah, I did that. In fact, I posted my dxdiag log several times for the support folks too, and they had me download a bunch of different diagnostics tools. Nothing ever helped, the tools all stated I should have been able to run the game.
I hear you about not many to play with. In GW I’m trying to level up my toon as fast as I can so I can play with friends, it’s not as much fun going it alone.