So I log into CO or the CoH Icon, make this cool character. I have control over every piece, every aspect. He/she does not even have to be human, they don't even need to have flesh and bones.
Then, I log onto a game like Black Desert, WoW, GW2, or even offline stuff like Fallout, that freedom is gone. Even with a great modding community, I could never replicate what I can do in superhero mmo. I feel like superhero mmo have spoiled me, therefore spoiled my gaming experience when it comes to character creation.
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As a child, I thought my name was handsome, cause that is what everyone called me.
I feel this, and it's something that Warcraft has been getting WORSE about. One thing the Legion expansion tried to do, was really bring out class identity. The problem being, people viewed their class differently from others. I never viewed my rogue as a scoudrel, he was faction agent. I never viewed my troll druid as a guardian of nature, he just worshiped the appropriate loa but then WoW said no, you are THE guardian of nature and head of all druids now. Your brewmaster monk can now only use a staff, your windwalker monk can no longer use a staff. Instead of allowing the player to express themselves, you're being told exactly what your character is.
Funny enough, FFXIV is pretty good about this despite the hard locked and focused class rolls. Class stories (at least the ones I've done so far) are more about how you got your training. It says nothing about who you are, just what you did to learn the skills. There's a difference between saying your Priest joined X faction which you became head off, and you learned conjuration from the conjurer's guild (the starting spot for FFXIV's white mages).
It's funny how just having the option to visually hold a mace instead of a sword can change your perception over your character or how he's compared to others.
I'm not sure I'd go quite as far as to say I'd never want to play a non-superhero MMO again but I totally get what you're saying about how much character concept freedom you tend to have in a superhero game setting. Basically you can play almost anything from any genre and there'll probably be a way for that to be "justified" in a game like CoH or CoT. You can even go beyond the bounds of being "human" like you said and play as creatures or ghosts or whatever you can imagine.
I would say the thing that CoH (and maybe CO) "spoiled" me on specifically was how many options its character creator gave us in terms of costume design. For instance I'm looking forward to playing Fallout 76 here in a few weeks. Now I realize that game is going to "force" me to be a human nuclear war survivor who doesn't have any special powers (can't fly, super speed, etc.) but that's not really what I'm worried about it terms of being limited in that game. I can accept a game where I'm basically just a "normal human" by default. My worry is that the costume options in that game are going to be limited to just a few cookie-cutter pants, shirts, hats and that's it. That's the part that CoH ruined me for - the fact that other games don't usually bother to give its players thousands of clothing options like CoH did.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
For me, it wasn't all superhero games, just our old one. After playing that I couldn't enjoy any other superhero MMO at all, and I could play the non-superhero MMOs for just a short time. But it wasn't just the costumes for me: it was the combat and the power trees. I find combat in other MMOs either boring or too frantic, and when it comes to powers so often outside of the old game I've found so many of them -- more often than not the higher tiers -- to be significantly uninspiring. I know I've said it before, but I'm still amazed how few other MMOs out there learned from all the good examples in the old game.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Well, so many of them do their damndest to "innovate" on what they see as a static concept. It's why Guild Wars 2 is a hybrid combat system instead of a tab-target game like Guild Wars 1. I get why, and they're not wrong - tab targeting in MMOs has been around for aaaaaaaaaages, primarily because it's very forgiving of lag and is easy to process for the servers running the game. A lot of people feel it's played out and needs to be adjusted for a modern audience or... something. As many have stated in another thread, CoH's combat managed to hit a nice, striding flow between "slow enough to consider your next move" and fast enough for "Adrenaline high", and I'd hope that CoT recaptures that.
As far as the costume maker goes, yeah, I feel you. Even now, I have a lot of trouble playing games I can't mod or don't have an absolutely massive costume selection, or both, because they stop me from making a character I want.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
I pretty much agree with everyone here.
Innovation does not trump enjoyability. A great song based on a boring old I-IV-V progression in typical 4/4 time (as most of them are) is better than a truly innovative song with a 2 ♭3 7 progression in 7/4 time that sounds like crap (as most of them would).
GOOD innovation is good. Innovation for it's own sake usually isn't.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Couldn't agree more. I'm perfectly happy to be just a plain ol ordinary human, so long as I can make my human look the way that *I* want them to. Games without robust character creators/costuming options really kill a lot of the fun for me, cause on some level I kinda feel like it's not "my" character that I'm playing. It's just carbon copy #337.
Fallout (among many other games) can mitigate that to a great degree with the modding community (though honestly to a far more limited degree for me, someone who plays male characters, than for others who play female characters), but since '76 won't support modding until some nebulous "future" date that's looking a bit dubious for the time being.
COH did make me feel limited on other MMOs when all we had were cookie cutter outfits and I could find a dozen clones of me in the surrounding city.
I expect to be spoiled by COT as well.
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/z9bk1znkb/Black_Falcon_Sig_in_Progess.jpg[/img]
It's been mentioned that the in-game store for Fallout 76 is going to sell only "cosmetic" items - they have specifically said they don't want to cater towards "pay to win" items. This means that the entire Fallout 76 store will likely be dedicated to things like costume/clothing items, weapon skins and emotes. Obviously time will tell just how many options they end up offering, especially since as you said the ability to eventually "mod" Fallout 76 is likely going to be far more limited/controlled than it's been in previous "single-player" Fallout games.
On the plus side I've heard that Fallout 76 is going to allow you to hide most of your armor type items in favor of normal clothes. This means for instance you could wear blue jeans and leg armor and still retain the benefit of the armor while looking like you're only wearing the jeans. I don't think that "trick" with invisible armor is going to extend to wearing power armor which makes sense. Still I would be genuinely shocked if Fallout 76 managed to approach a game like CoH in its overall costume flexibility.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]