City of Heroes

I don't like the mouse controls. I'm sure that if I spent a while trying to figure it out, I'd be able to swivel around and look at my character's face, but I haven't been able to yet. It's pretty annoying, I want to see my character in action, and not just from behind. I have the nagging suspicion that it's totally disabled because they didn't include any facial expressions. Oh well.

I haven't yet tried the architect feature, which I will probably get to tonight. I made a couple of characters last night, one of which I kind of like, a little dwarf brick with a mace and shield. Combat is a little clunky, but the character movement takes a lot of getting used to. Using both mouse buttons to run triggers autorun, and the key movement doesn't always do what I expect, with the strafe keys changed up, etc.

I had to crank down the graphics settings when I was in the city center because other people make me lag. The rest of the city and graphics is fine, but when other players show up it slows down. The power animations are nice, and the sound effects are suitably comic bookish. The music gets pretty annoying pretty quickly.

The architect feature is the star of the show here, and I need to get to the point where I can start using it. Apparently it requires me to find a building in the city and interact with it to open up the design menu. But reading the help gave me a few pieces of information about it to begin with. The primary worry with player-created content isn't anything like economics or balance or behavior, but data. Everything a player does has data associated with it, and every piece of data is multiplied against the entire playerbase for storage and access concerns.

CoH has limited the number of story arcs and missions (dungeons) that you can create per account. You get three story arcs with five missions each. With the amount of detail that each one can include, that sounds like a pretty generous allotment. Tonight I'll try this feature out to see how it was implemented and it should give me something to think about while playing WoW.