I signed up for the 14-day trial for City of Heroes on Sunday. I'm very apprehensive about the whole MMORPG genre simply because of the monthly cost to play the game outside of the initial purchase of the product. I played in the beta for World of Warcraft and I found it pretty fun, but I also found myself not playing it for days and weeks at a time while the beta was going on (not a good indication if I was going to pay per month to play the final game). I have a copy of the retail WoW, but I have never opened it. I still think about selling it instead of keeping it. Anyway, back to CoH.
For the first day, CoH was pretty exciting. I'm pretty sure I picked the wrong type of class to be (Normal Blaster) if I wanted to do any single playing after I've gone through about the first 5 levels of my character. It's dangerous to put him in close quarters battles while his guns recharge. I got through the initial missions without a problem, but then I was sent to the Hollows and to King's Row and things haven't been so nice since. I get my ass kicked by anyone I run by and the Oscillators are the worst.
In RPGs I tend to want to get things done as quickly as possible. I like to just do my job from quest to quest and I absolutely hate when I have to gain experience points so I can simply continue on. City of Heroes, at least for my character, is a lot like that. In order for me to even GET to King's Row I'm going to have to up him in levels (I'm at Level 6 or 7 now, I forget). Same goes for getting to the second Outcast hideout in the Hollows. I can't fly, so taking those major dives onto another section of roads doesn't help my character in the health department much.
I will say I had a lot of fun on Monday night when I got together with a group and we finished some missions. I mostly stood back and fired off my guns, something I am guessing the Blaster class is quite adept at. Yesterday trying to get to King's Row just pissed me off. They should have had more missions in Atlas Park instead of thrusting you into these difficult ones where you are outclassed by overwhelming numbers and more powerful enemies than yourself. Tonight I will probably create a different class character and maybe I'll check out some primers on the internet to make sure I make the right choice this time. I wanted to be Batman, but my character so far has not turned out the way I thought he would.
T-minus 12 days until deactivation. It could be less than that though with Battlefield 2 coming next Tuesday. City of Heroes has taken my time lately over the BF2 demo (shocking!). Hey, I have to use as much of the 14 days as I can.