On the 5th of July, almost 2 months after starting City of Heroes, I deactivated my account. The following expresses my thoughts on the game.

I never expected City of Heroes to be a long-term diversion. At $15 per month (rates are lower when you buy longer blocks of time), that's $180 per year (ignoring the initial $50 to buy the game). While just a minor part of the household budget, that's still a good amount of money I could spend on other things (like upgrading my slow-ass 933MHz CPU). Anyway, even for the money I spent, around $65, I got quite a lot of gameplay out of City of Heroes. The last figure I remember being quoted from the game was 90 hours, and that was well before I ended my subscription. For a modern computer game, that's a really good value. Even if I do a conservative end estimate of 100 hours, that's still only 65 cents per hour. Contrast that with a typical $50 first-person shooter game with around 10 hours of gameplay. That's 5 dollars per hour of play.

But of course, what it comes down to is whether or not each hour of play is worth what you're paying for it. And that's what's at issue here.

I didn't join the game right at launch, but a little while after it. As far as I could tell, the game was very well implemented. It had a very polished feel to it. The interface was slick and fairly easy to use. Yes, I have encountered bugs (mainly opponents getting stuck in walls, though once I was attacked by through walls by enemies who had not even seen me). Still, they were exceptionally rare.

I think the reason that everything went so smoothly was because the game itself doesn't try to do a lot. It is quite simply a combat game. You go in and beat the tar out of a bunch of computer-controlled bad guys. And there's nothing wrong with that. My library is replete with games that consist of fighting and nothing else. And that's good... for a while. Eventually you're going to get tired of it. Most other MMORPG's have a bit more depth to them, economy and crafting being the two major aspects.

Also, they tend to have a bigger sense of community. It could just be me, though. By nature I'm more of a solitary person. In City of Heroes, most of my time was spent solo. I did join in groups from time to time. The problem is, the way I tend to play is sporadic. I'll play while watching TV or eating, and so my attention to the game can vary from minute to minute. This is the way I prefer. Going solo allows me to play at my own pace. In a group, I have to keep up with the rest of the team or fall behind. When I decided I needed a rapid infusion of XP, I'd seek out some teammates and focus on the game. I can't play like that all the time though. It's not how I have the most fun. And while the type of character I played most often can go out and fight on his own, it's repetitive and advancement is slow.

Since I was rarely in a team, the only sense of community came from the chat system. City of Heroes has a, in my opinion, fairly rudimentary communication setup. There are two general "channels" to use: Broadcast and Request. Messages sent to either one will be shown to all players in your current district, excepting those players who have chosen to mute them. There's also a Local chat, which means that only players near your character's physical location will hear what you say. The Tell command lets you communicate directly with any player on the same server, no matter where they are in the city. Team and Supergroup chats let you send messages only to members of your current team and supergroup respectively. Since teams come and go, team chat is mainly for coordinating your current combat without messages getting lost in Local space. Supergroup chat is for communicating with everyone in whatever Supergroup you have decided to join. The final option is Friends, a command that sends a message to every player that you have marked as a "friend". For me, this was both the most useful and most poorly designed option.

The problem is this: let's say I send a message to my Friends list. My friends read it and reply. However, their message, if they use the Friends option, goes to everyone on their Friends list, not my list. So their reply isn't seen by everyone who read my original message. On the other hand, it will go to some people who never saw what I originally wrote.

That's it for communication. It's nice if all your friends are in the same supergroup. But if they aren't, good luck coordinating messages. There's no system of channel creation, like IRC. So with these severe communication limitations, I felt a lack of community in the game. With MMORPG's, the pitch is almost universally, "Come for the fun, stay for the community!" Well, City of Heroes had good initial fun, but little staying power with its rather shallow gameplay. And the community aspect feels a bit weak. Possibly things would have been different if I'd joined an active supergroup. Possibly.

As it is, City of Heroes was a good temporary diversion. It was a good value for the amount of time I invested into it. And eventually it had to end. The gameplay descended into the same thing: scour an area of my approximate power level, find a group I think I can handle, and then follow my tried-and-true routine of double-buff, snipe, power blast, power thrust, etc. etc. etc. Uncovering new blaster powers as I progressed was wonderful. Unfortunately, they were harder and harder to come by as my level went up. Playing other character types let me try out new powers too. The problem there was that the blaster is the most solo-able type there is, so the other character types progressed even slower when I tried to follow my preferred model of play.

It was a good two months, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.