City of Villains

So I bought City of Villains last month, and one of the reasons you haven’t seen so much of me online lately is that game.

Really, I only posted this to post the following quote:

I know there are other ways to do player versus player in a more controlled manner. You can have safe zones for new folks and/or danger zones where such combat takes place. Dark Age of Camelot seems to be using this latter strategy fairly well. But that kind of solution doesn’t work for City of Heroes. Maybe if we had two cities – one full of villains, the other full of heroes – warring with one another, it might work. But that would be a very different and, in my opinion, very silly game indeed.

Silly game indeed. This quote was from one Rick Dakan, lead designer for City of Heroes prior to Jack “Statesman” Emmert. Aww, Rick, we miss you, really!

For a “silly game indeed”, it sure is a heck of a lot of fun. One of the aspects I’m enjoying about it is the player-vs-player aspect. They toned down a lot of the characters (like my overpowered Fire/Ice tanker, Crimson Fantom… well, he’s no longer anywhere near the tough tank laying the smackdown like he used to be) in order to make all character classes feel useful and needed in a group, and this had the side-effect of making some PvP battles more interesting.

Tanks still take a long, long time to whittle down in PvP. Blasters are still all about demolishing another player in the shortest possible time. But it really makes that stuff fun. There are missions and objectives which give your “side” of the fight all kinds of bonusses, and wars fought to try to swing the balance of power. Terrifically good fun, though my chosen “main” class of Mastermind is pretty darn weak at it. I usually find a good team, buff the heck out of them, and then retreat into my “happy fun ball” (Personal Force Field, an ability preventing me from doing anything except run around invincible for a while) using my secondary power of force fields.

The Arena battles can be interesting, too. There’s a “gladiator” mode where you control small armies of villains/heroes you’ve defeated in the Player-versus-Environment mode to try to defeat an opponent. Very real-time-strategy-ish. The Arena is a much more controlled, rigid sort of PvP, where you can set and abide by certain rules, such as “no travel powers”. I don’t enjoy Arena much with people I don’t know, but with people I do know, it’s a lot of fun.

So what games are you playing these days, if any?