The first steps into a larger world...

So I've been playing City of Heroes again for the past month or so. Just a little bit here and there, maybe 6 hours a week or so. I hadn't planned to get back into it until Going Rogue comes out in July, but Dave had mentioned wanted to get back into it and that itch suddenly needed to be scratched. So I immediately dumped my Star Trek Online account (much to my relief) and got it reinstalling.

Now, my City of Heroes account was started in October of 2004. The only other game I've habitually gone back to in that kind of time frame is Diablo 2. In that time CoH has improved and changed so much that looking back I can't imagine actually playing the older iterations of it. The thing that keeps bringing me back isn't necessarily the game-play, which is passable and often fun, but not great.

It's the character creation system. I can't think of any other game that has such a robust character creation system. There are a few omissions in it (like Brutish Female Models, think Giganta) but in general I've been able to create any character I can think of in a satisfactory fashion.

The downside is that there are very few people who are playing CoH right now. I only know one person who plays at the moment and the servers seem to be generally empty. I'm hoping that when Going Rogue releases it'll pull in old and new players and beef up the player base. I really hope that some day they'll be able to consolidate down their servers so increase the number of players per server.

Also, Lord of the Rings Online is going Free to Play this fall, which I'm really excited about.