First Five Minutes: WoW vs CoH
I wrote this in March 2008. To my knowledge, with the likely exception of the find-a-friend incentives, neither game has changed.
It seems to have become an accepted truth in the MMO community that you can’t compete with WoW. It has too much money thrown at it. Too much market share. Too much presence. Be happy fighting over the scraps, that’s what they say. But why is WoW successful, really? Because it’s *good*. More importantly, it’s good right from the start, allowing time for the natural compulsive effect of character progression and community responsibility to kick in.
Let’s compare the first few hours of World of Warcraft with City of Heroes and see whether WoW comes out on top simply as a matter of budget, or whether there’s actually some (easily replicable) merit in there somewhere.
1: The Pitch
I’m going to make a big assumption - MMOs spread by word of mouth. WoW didn’t achieve 10 million subscribers by people spontaneously buying it on a whim because they liked the box art. A lot of those 10 million are non-gamers, and those non-gamers didn’t spontaneously decide to buy it because they heard a news story about how everyone’s children are playing it. I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption. After the (very small) community of gamers who are really looking for an MMO to play (people who have been at it since the MUD days, or would have been if they’re been old enough at the time), people get into MMOs because their friends convinced them to. So the first thing an MMO has to do in order to be popular is encourage their friends to get them into it.
1.1: Filthy Incentives
WoW offers you 1 month’s free play if you recruit a friend with a free trial and they pay for one month (plus a copy of the game, of course). It also offers you the same deal if you get someone to re-subscribe. Recuiting a friend is almost free for 40 days.
CoH offers you 1 month’s free play if you recruit a friend and they pay for three months (plus a copy of the game). Bad deal.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
1.2: I’m Better Off If You Play
WoW is a pain in the ass to play with mixed levels of characters. I can run you through an instance, but unless you’re obsessed with gathering loot (which you won’t be if you literally just started and/or are new to CRPGs or computer games in general) it’ll be no fun whatsoever for you. High-level players only mechanically benefit from the addition of low-level players once they’ve invested months and got up to the same level.
Thanks to its sidekicking and exemplaring CoH is simple to play with friends. With a couple of idiotic exceptions, your fresh, level 1 trial account character can come with us to the highest level, ass-kickingest content and have a great time (and for what it’s worth, get an enormous amount of xp). New player = new party member, straight away.
WoW: bah!
CoH: yay!
1.3: It’s Awesome, It’s About…
WoW is about fantasy. This isn’t as nichey as it used to be, thanks to the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s not going to get anyone who’s not already into fantasy interested. CoH is about superheroes. This isn’t as nichey as it used to be, thanks to Hugh Jackman, but it’s not going to get anyone who’s not already into superheroes interested. Either is a lot less obscure than EVE Online, but really you’re not going to be pulling in non-gamers with “It’s awesome, you get to fight orcs with your sword!” and “It’s awesome, you get to punch villains who wear tights!”
WoW: bah!
CoH: bah!
Stage 2: Character Creation
2.1 Starting The Game
WoW, like everything Blizzard have ever made, has a solid, chunky interface right from the word go. It fills the screen like rugged Duplo, reassuring you that everything is going to be okay. Installation and patching is a pain, of course, but no worse than any other PC game.
CoH is flimsy. Its installer feels like it’s going to snap in half. Little touches like there being no focus when you start the game up (the WoW login screen places focus on the user name field so you can start typing immediately) leave you with the impression that you’ve got a slightly unprofessional product.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
2.2 Server Selection
Both WoW and CoH immediately present you with a choice of which server to play on. No explanation of what this means, or why you should pick one over another is offered. If your friend who introduced you is sitting right there, he can talk you through this, but otherwise you’re in trouble. The chances of you picking the same server your friend is on by chance are pretty slim.
WoW loses out slightly to CoH here by actively hindering you - it will recommend to you a server based solely on population, without explaining to you why it is making this recommendation. The chances are - even if you don’t have a friend waiting for you on a different server - that this server will be the wrong one for you. Maybe it’s an RP server. Maybe it has a huge population of Spanish players and you’re not Spanish - or maybe you are Spanish, but the (unlabelled) Spanish server is not the one being recommended.
WoW: big bah!
CoH: bah!
2.3 Race/Class/Faction/Oh My!
WoW’s character creation screen is - of course - chunky and sturdy. Here are some big buttons, and here’s a big picture which not only shows your character, but shows you immediately and graphically the differences that your choices are making. Of course, your choices are pretty slim. Race/Gender/Class/Earrings. But this is a good thing, not a bad thing. Gnome? Hey look at that crazy little guy! Female orc? Wow, she mings. Click “paladin” and suddenly your guy is toting a hammer. Change his hair to blonde, give him a creepy angry face, click “mage” and suddenly your guy is still blonde and angry, but wearing a dress. We’re not dealing here with RPG veterans who want to be bewildered with a million irrelevant details. We’re talking about the general public. Your mum. Your sister. Big. Chunky. Choices.
WoW gets two slaps on the wrist - one for how it’s not really obvious that the Alliance and the Horde are different sides in a war and you won’t get to play with your friends if you pick the wrong one, and one for how easy it is to accidentally give a female character a really ugly nosering that you won’t notice for 30 levels.
CoH’s character creation is like open source software by comparison. It’s filled with exciting details. It’s kind of shonky. You can’t really tell what’s happening as you’re doing it, and the function of anything is less than obvious. The one thing it does right is asking you whether you want to play a hero or a villain. These are iconic, meaningful words even to someone who’s never read or seen a superhero story in their life. It’s also reasonably intuitive that heroes and villains are not “on the same side”.
From here it goes downhill. Pick a character class - great. Words. Where is my picture? Where is the picture of the “Tanker” to give me some kind of immediate visual feedback on what I’m choosing. Of course I can figure it all out from context, or by reading the descriptions, but pictures are important. I want to see a default picture of a big, chunky guy wearing armour so I know that this is the “big chunky guy wearing armour” archetype. Pages filled with words do not the happy non-gamer make. They didn’t in the 1970s and they don’t now.
Onward! Origin? Origin is baffling for anyone who’s not a superhero afficianado, and the way it’s implemented in the game is pretty baffling even for someone who is. Skip it. Powers! Here’s the meat of it, but still, words. When you take into account that the text is pretty poorly written, and that many of the powers are fairly homogenous, it’s difficult to imagine what a new player is supposed to think here. Do you want to be an Earth Controller, a Fire Controller or an Ice Controller? Uh… dunno. Once again, this needs pictures. Select Earth Controller and watch great rocks shoot out of the ground. Select Ice Controller and see the screen fill with cooling mist. Oh so *that’s* what an Earth Controller does.
Whereas WoW has 9 chunky choices of character class, and the subtle distinctions are drawn later (much later), CoH has 10 classes, each of which has to pick one of two very similar sounding powers from two selections of power sets from twelve or so - phew!. All of this with very little feedback on who you are and what the hell is going on. This is all fine - or even awesome - for the RPG veteran, but the RPG veteran is in the Age of Conan beta hoping for the next big thing. To the non-gamer, this is baffling, inscrutable and offputting.
Of course, CoH’s costume creation screen is a thing of legend. A huge variety of choices. Body shape. Individual, colourable shin and shoulder pads. Recently, a choice of different looking guns. Spandex. Skulls. Chains. Barbed wire. Kind of a Todd MacFarlane fetish, actually. Now I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, but my experience so far has been that this whole process make non-gamers love the costume creation screen, but not the game. For whatever reason, it doesn’t seem to produce the sense of investment and ownership, and above all urge to see the character in action that you would expect it to.
Creating a character in WoW is slap-bang, into the game. Creating a character in CoH is an end in and of itself. You could spend hours testing out powersets (because there’s no way to see what the choices you’re making mean until you’ve seen them in the game), carefully crafting an appropriate outfit and writing a backstory. That’s all well and good, but that’s never going to sell to 10 million people.
One final mention: WoW doesn’t allow character surnames, encouraging you to type incomprehensible gibberish into the character name box because the first dozen things you could think of were already taken.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
Stage 3: The Tutorial
3.1 Introduction
WoW - big, swooping cutscene with vague fantasy words to set the scene. It’s not the greatest cutscene - in fact, it’s pretty rubbish - but by the end of it, you know that a Tauren is like a Red Indian and you’re ready to start hunting buffalo.
CoH dumps you on a street, staring at a policeman. Who? What? Where?
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
3.2 Look And Feel
I’m in WoW. My feet are touching the ground. When I push forward, I walk forward and just like in real life, my feet make measured, even strides instead of slipping and sliding all over the place. Since I’m a non-gamer, I don’t even notice this. Subconsciously, I’m aware that everything is chunky and “feels real”. If I experiment with conventional PC controls (such as clicking the button and moving the mouse), I find that moving the camera around to look at my awesome character is pretty easy. I’m also being harrassed by little popup help tips which I immediately ignore, adding at least an hour to how long it takes me to figure out how to interact with anything.
I’m in CoH. My feet are touching the ground. When I push forward, I slide forward like I’m on ice, and unlike real life, the animation of my feet doesn’t have anything to do with where they are in relation to the floor. As a non-gamer who isn’t looking for specific criticisms of the animation, I’m not really aware of what’s going on other than a lingering sense of “wrongness”. No matter how hard I experiment, I can’t get the camera to move around and show me my awesome character. If by some chance I do accidentally stumble across the right combination, I then find it almost impossible to get the camera straight again.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
3.3 First Quest
The first quest you get in WoW depends on your race, but in every case it’s to walk up to a nearby group of obvious, chunky looking baddies and nobble some of them. The quest is presented “in character”, immediately setting the fantasy theme. It’s not the greatest fantasy literature ever written, but it doesn’t need to be. Kill you some kobolds? Okay! What’s a kobold? It’s that thing over there with “kobold” over its head? Got it.
The first quest you get in CoH depends on your faction, but in both cases it’s to walk up to a boring-looking character, click on them, read an immense wall of text in different colours that hurts your eyes, and then walk to three or four more people and do the same thing. Let’s be serious here - I’m a text reader. I’m not afraid of reading. I’ll read quest descriptions. I’ll read journal entries. I’ll scroll back up through the chat log to make sure I understood what the boss just shouted at me. There is no way in hell I’m reading all that crap that policeman just spouted at me. Wander around for five minutes or so and you’ll eventually be told to go and kill a couple of guys. Okay, got it.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
3.4 Fighting
Neither WoW nor CoH are tremendously difficult to figure out. There are buttons on the screen which you will find eventually through experimentation. The buttons in WoW have better pictures on them. When you click them, something happens. Through experimentation you will find out what each button does and when you should push it.
In WoW, your first ability is “spammable”, which is to say you can use it again as soon as you’ve used it. In fact, the more you spam it the better! Shadowbolt! Shadowbolt! Shadowbolt! Shadowbolt! This is not exactly the epitome of challenging gameplay, but it *is* totally awesome, at least for as long as it takes you to complete the first quest, which should be a couple of minutes.
In CoH, your first ability will have a reasonably long delay before you can use it again, depending on the choices you made during character creation. A couple of abilities are more or less spammable, but the rest have noticeable two-three-four second delays before you can use them again, during which time you can stand around doing nothing. You can throw punches in too, mostly in order to give yourself something to do, but the punches are ineffective and underwhelming. Cooldowns are boring immediately, and remain boring until you get enough abilities to form an attack chain, which will take you several hours.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
3.5 Rewards
Hand a quest in in WoW and - DUN-DUND-DUN-DAHH - inverted mastermind theme, you’re rewarded with numbers which mean nothing (but numbers are clearly good) and a choice of items which feels incredibly important at the time (a good thing) and doesn’t matter in the slightest in the long term (a very good thing). The function of items of clothing is simple and intuitive - you wear them. Even if you dismiss the pop-up instructions on how to do so, it’s not *that* hard to figure out. Bam! You’re wearing a new piece of clothing, and some value on your character sheet has just gone up. Depending on your character and the piece of clothing in question, you can even see yourself now wearing it. Progress! Upgrades! Visual feedback!
Even better than this, if you kill one or two more baddies than you were told to during your first quest, you will have levelled up - cue swishy noise and quest to go and talk to level up guy, who says “Wow! Have a new ability!”. This new ability jumps right onto your bar next to the one you need to have found to get this far, so if you haven’t figured out how to open the spellbook, you can still just go right on playing.
We’ll skip over the first five minutes of “quests” in CoH and get to the point where you actually kill a couple of guys. What’s your reward? Nothing. In principle you get some XP, but in practice that XP is irrelevant since you can’t actually level up until you complete the entire tutorial. So, you get nothing. You do get told to walk to someone else, and they want you to kill another couple of guys (after reading another two or three walls of multicoloured text). At this point, you get given a thing. A what? An enhancement. A what? It’s like uh… it’s like a thing that makes you better. A what? It’s like a little red circle, and you put it in your power, and it makes it better. Oh. A circle. Also, it runs out in a few levels time, so you’d better have a new circle by then.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!
3.6 Finishing off
By the time you’ve finished the “tutorial zone” of WoW, you’ll have completed six or seven quests, received five or so choice-of rewards, picked up a few pieces of loot, and be about level 5 with three-four abilities to play with. You haven’t had to walk very far yet, but you’re about to be dispatched to an exciting new area which is terrifyingly large and where they give you a small reward just for turning up.
By the time you’ve finished the “tutorial zone” of CoH, you’ll have compleyed one actual quest, received two enhancements, and levelled up once, with one additional ability to play with. Worse, levelling up in CoH requires you to make (almost) permanent character choices the moment you leave the tutorial zone, the effects of which you could feel for weeks or months of play to come. Thus far, you’ve spent more time walking around than you have actually doing anything.
WoW: yay!
CoH: bah!