City of Heroes

Hmmm. I have to confess that my personal feeling is that if it's only half as innovative as their MMORPG then they're in a lot of trouble! CoH is one of the least interesting games out there. I don't deny that the central concept is great (who wouldn't want to be a superhero), but the gameplay didn'tt bring anything original to the field at all.
And a superhero CCG now has to compete with the VS system on the one hand, and HeroClix on the other, both of which have established good reputations.

Then again, the whole field of personalising your avatar within a CCG hasn't really been explored, so perhaps there's some space there (we've had quite a few "customise your party/crew/team" systems but not one in which you give yourself the various abilities. At least not one I can remember of the top of my head.)

I have two accounts, 40 heroes and been on since Beta. Its a great game, and their numbers show it, I think what some people from the world of EQ don't quite get is that this is a comic book universe. You don't go fishing or crafting in the comics, you gain powers and beat up bad guys. And the patches (issues) are amazing. On the latest we just gained hundreds of new costume options.

I will definitley be checking out the CCG and the Heroclix crossover that is rumored.

Still how does this apply to traditional media games? I mean, what's to make a City of Heroes Heroclix different from regular Marvel or DC heroclix? What's new there? New Characters? Big deal. That's the reason, we as board gamers, aren't too thrilled with this crossover. Other than a slightly different background theme, what's going to be new? There have already been several superhero beat-em-up board games released, some within the last few years. So what new and innovative ideas with this supposedly bring to the table? My guess is it will be more of the same.

-Darke

As a long time player of a few CCGs (MTG, Netrunner, B-tech, L5R) I do think it would be interesting to see a superhero based CCG. I guess my main problem is though that most companies nowadays won't take the time to let a game build a fanbase. If a game doesn't hit it big quick and then continue big for the first few expansions, that game is gone. Initial D from Alderac seemed to follow this pattern most recently, I met John Williams (one the head AEG guys) at kublacon in '03, he was testing out a draft of the Initial D game, I got to watch him play a few games and it looked kinda cool. Go to Alderac's site now and there isn't anything on the game, it's gone and I know that it was released. Now alot of that is just good business, a CCG is a complex time consuming monster. You have to have the first expansion ready at the printer by the time the core set hits the shelves b/c if it does hit you have to have those cards to the shelves in 3 months! SO, if it doesn't hit it big, you've already "wasted" the time for a core set, all of the first expansion and maybe more. Of course I think most new CCGs are doomed from the start. There just isn't the player base to support all of these things. the folks that buy alot of the cards on a regular basis are the tournament players, these are the bread and butter for these games. The casual players out there just don't buy enough. The tournie guys will buy 1 to 2 boxes of a new set, maybe more, every 3 months. The casual folks buy a few boosters and then wait for the next one. Well, unless you have a ton of cash, most folks can only afford to play one of these games at a time, in a competitive way, which as I said, is where the company gets the majority of thier money. SO most of the time you have to get folks to drop whatever game they were already playing to play a new one. That just doesn't happen enough to allow these games to get a foothold in enough areas to sustain themselves. I always scratch my head when I hear a new CCG is coming out... you'd think the companies would learn, but I guess the chance (and cash) of another big hit is to great.

My two cents from the soap box, please take w/ a grain of salt, maybe two!