One important thing to remember is Valiance Online is going to have to be able to please more than the die hard City of Heroes veterans hoping for a new home.

In order for any MMO to succeed it will need to reach out to its larger audience, and for VO that target audience is Super Hero fans everywhere.

I hope the developers are keeping this in mind, that while creating a game to capture the spirit of City of Heroes, all they need to do is make a game which captures the spirit of Super Heroes, and then the business will come.

Focusing on making the game just for the City of Heroes fans will not be enough to succeed. the City of Heroes community is a drop in the bucket of the larger market of super hero fans out there.

I am of course not asking for them to ignore the input of City of Heroes fans. What I'm trying to say is, the secret to creating a successful modern super hero game, is to look beyond that formula, and improve on it.

I agree with you.

I am both a super hero fan as well as a City of Villains/Heroes refugee. I'm literally waiting for my launcher to download files and get into Alpha as I type this... but everything I have read leads me to believe this game is different enough to capture new audiences as well as refugees from retired games.

I know it isn't a good idea to place all of your eggs in one basket, but the subscriber base to City of Villains/Heroes was a devoted and unwavering force... so recapturing those numbers wouldn't be a bad idea of course.

We have been very active in noting that we are going above and beyond what coh had and I think nearly any system or feature we have mentioned expresses this. We are not interested in recreating CoH, we are very interested in providing a home for players that enjoyed CoH and that never experienced it.

Jaximus wrote:
And I can't wait to see how it turns out!

While I agree catering to a larger audience is certainly in the game's interest, there is a bunch of superhero games out already, all trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. The die-hard CoH fans, while a smaller percentage of players for sure, is pretty much a no-brainer. As this Alpha, and the City of Titans kickstarter have shown, there is a lot of CoH fans willing to throw money at things that promise a new CoH-esque gaming home to fill the void they feel since CoH left. If it's too different, the game (Edit: might not) maintain a sizeable portion of those gamers. Personally, I thought Champions Online would fill the gap after CoH shut down. I was wrong.

I would like to say that I have played many games since leaving CoH and although I have had fun playing them and many of them had better graphics than CoH had and better in depth stories the one thing I have never found was the community that CoH had. The ability to team up and make friends with people that I am still friends with today out of the game was something special. A community like that within a game seems hard to find, at least it has been for me so far just playing in VO Alpha is better than most games I have played in.

Champions Online only failed becuase it was pretty much abandoned a couple years after release, and remained that way. The only devs it has now are like a total of 2 utter novices with no experience, and they get almost no resources from the parent company.

Personally the only reason I was into CO initially and flirt with going back time to time is because of one character. He had Force powers or something and I was able to use those and TK powers to make a custom set. Then being able to change the power colors made all the powers look as if they belonged together.
I really got no other joy from that game and only wish to go back to get a quick capture of the powers.

I'm glad they are working on catering to everyone. You can already tell from the devstreams that it is CoH-esque but the differences are beneficial and exciting, such as the third archetype pool.

Rednecksavage wrote:
This is how I feel. I've played lots of MMOs. The community of CoX was like nothing else I've ever found anywhere. Maybe that's why the game has made such a lasting impression on me. For me, that's one of the things I miss the most...not the combat, or the powers...the feeling of belonging to something.

Lots of times I would login to CoH with my empath, and just fly around Atlas Park healing lowbies for an hour. No real reason to do it, and I obviously could have been doing something else, but I just wanted to actually feel like a superhero.

Of all the MMO I played, and still play, if they all shut down tomorrow, I would move on to something else, and it wouldn't bother me. But when CoH shut down, it did bother me. Even now, years later, I look back on the time I spent there, and there is sadness and regret that the game is no longer with us. This game, and this community actually had an effect on me, and continues to do so to this day. I just want some semblance of that back.

LOL I'm rambling now, but I know I'm not alone in feeling like this...

DefiniteLy not alone in that.

captain_karate wrote:

I definitely feel the big draw for CoX was the community. For me it was the first and only MMO I played for a longtime and I made some good friends there. Building a community should be a priority for this game and I strongly feel the VO team is doing that. Also just making as kick-ass a game as you can will draw newbies in and people looking for something unique in an enviroment still over saturated with WOW clones.

The other superhero MMOs have missed the mark. DCUO is loaded with loot horders and advertisements for the next (paid) DLC, Marvel Heroes you can't have your own story just play as someone already established and CO... SMH... loot boxes, cash shops, repacked powers advertised as 'new'! OMG! Terminally broken and unbalanced with no attempt from the developers to advance the story of the game or work to fix the story that's there. CO was in the best position to carry the legacy of CoX but all it did was feed off the community with no satisfying game experience in return. Zee I know you said the team at the head of CO right now are novices but that doesn't excuse their ignorance to what's wrong with the game and turning it into a customization cash shop clearly isn't the answer.

OK, I'm rambling I guess my opinion in making this game succeed is don't neglect the community, and make the game truly alive always growing and maturing story wise or adding new areas to explore to the point that each character you make has there own individual experience. Make the game stand out but approachable and word will spread people will see what the hype is about and they'll probably stay.

p.s. NO ^%$*ING LOOT BOXES!!!

Zekk wrote:
I could not agree more. My first MMO was CoH and while there was a LOT of gameplay issues i didn't like, I kept coming back because of the community. Pickup Groups in CoH was one of my favorite things about the game. People actually talked to each other and helped with missions (Okay, I might be biased from nostalgia), and I've never seen that in any other MMO since. Not WoW, where people don't care about the leveling journey, not CO, which is just a huge mess, not DCUO, where people don't really team up for anything else than taskforces.
I think that's going to be the appeal of VO - that teaming really makes a difference and is loads of fun. City of Titans gives me a feel, that they are trying to get all the roleplaying-people (based on how much they are building the lore).
I cannot stress how much I am looking forward to release of all 3 Superhero MMO (SHMMOs) - Valiance Online, City of Titans and Ship of Heroes. I hope there is room in the SHMMO community/playerbase to allow all 3 to flourish and learn from each other/compete with each other.

Damn, I wanna play so badly..

ZeeHero wrote:
i won't say the ONLY reason they failed, but that was definitely a large part of it. the community had begged since its inception for Cryptic to add their foundry tech that they made in STO to give the game a CoX-like mission architect system. I remember at one point they went so far as to offer to run a kick starter to give cryptic the funds to do it, still with no success >.<

it was pretty depressing. there was a lot of good stuff to the game, but a combination of mismanagement and apathy ruined it.