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Role Playing (Games)

City of Villains and Heroes Combine Monthly Fee 67

Posted by Zonk from the more-cape-for-your-money dept.
JamesO writes "Massive game players will have lots of options. NCSoft has announced that City of Heroes and City of Villains will only require one fee to play both games." From the article: "We know that many City of Villains players will be existing City of Heroes players who are essentially playing in order to access another aspect of the universe they have grown to love ... We wanted to find a solution that would look after existing players, offer tremendous value for money and also encourage new players to investigate the world of City of Heroes. This is that solution."
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City of Villains and Heroes Combine Monthly Fee More

City of Villains and Heroes Combine Monthly Fee

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  • Platforms (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FirienFirien ( 857374 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @08:07AM (#13729144) Homepage
    But are they intending to port it to new platforms? Nope. NCSoft has definitively said that they're not porting its current games to mac, even though the mac population of Lineage 1 was greater than proportional to (all mac users out of all computer users); Blizzard has gone the other way and actively ports all its titles to mac, and has done hugely well from it. Yes, they would have done hugely well anyway - but out of that 3 million, I bet there's a horde of mac users.

    I realise that as the number of major players increases, their individual share would go down - but NCSoft have some good content, and so would be able to draw in a fair market share. Now would be a good time, with the WoW demand finally slowing and people looking around for What's New. Don't let this turn into a mac vs PC thread. You know more players makes a better game, no matter what they're playing from!
    • Speaking as one who finally got bored with WoW content, I would probably go back to CoH if they did a Mac port. ... as long as it isn't a separate Mac Ghetto like Sony did with Everquest. If I can't play the MMORPG along with my Windows-owning friends, then no dice.

      CoH is a great game, but now that my Mac is running the media room (and I have no desire to keep a second computer hooked up to my projector), I've got pretty much zero interest in PC-only games. If it ain't on either the Mac or a console, I'll
    • I thought "City of Villains" was just an expansion to "City of Heroes"...you know, so you could play either good or bad and have great PvP battles between the two. Didn't know it was separate games.

      Sounds boring now.
      • It's a seperate game *and* and expansion.

        you don't need CoH to play CoV or to participate in PvP against other players in the PvP zones.

      • CoV is more of an expansion than a separate game. You can either play it standalone with only the new villian content (new zones, bases, etc.), or you can add it to your existing CoH account and play both games. PvP takes place in special zones and even if you dont have CoH, you can still PvP against heroes with just CoV.

        Still sound boring?

        All of this is in the FAQ: http://cityofvillains.com/faq/faq.html [cityofvillains.com]

      • Re:Platforms (Score:2, Informative)

        by Sinister Stairs ( 25573 )

        I thought "City of Villains" was just an expansion to "City of Heroes"

        If you're already a CoH subscriber, then yes, CoV is like an expansion. But if you don't already have CoH, that's fine -- you don't need CoH to play CoV. So in that sense, it's a separate game.

        I thought...you could play either good or bad and have great PvP battles between the two.

        Yes, you can. PvP battles will be quite prominent (if you choose to participate).

        Didn't know it was separate games.

        Think of it like comic boo

      • it's both, and expansion and a seperate game.
    • one thing the mono platform mmo games don't get -- my circle of friends is fairly well split between mac and windows users. we can't all play together if the game is just for windows. so what do we do? play world of warcraft. no one in my group wants to shell $500 for a PC that can barely play modern games.

      In other words, they miss out on a network effect. I don't know how much of one but they lost 5+ sales within my circle of friends.
    • I bet there's a horde of mac users.

      Gives a whole new meaning to "For the Horde!". As if Mac / PC wars weren't enough, now we can add Horde / Alliance to it...

      And of course the Horde uses Macs - Alliance has all the Gnomes for Tech Support, and do you really expect a Tauren to use a mouse with more than one button?
    • funny that people still support blizzard after their DMCA takedown of the bnetd project.

      seems the users of any platform are still the suckers.

      equating bnetd with "piracy" = equating region-free devices to "piracy".

      artificial restrictions come from the colon of satan.
    • If you want all the games, you play on Windows. This isn't a Windows vs Mac thing, they are both fine OSs. But the number of gamers on Macs often does not justify the costs to port and support another OS. You have no idea how many Mac users it would pull in. They have people to crunch those numbers and if they could make some huge profit (like you seem to think) they would already have a Mac port. If you are a gamer, get a PC...otherwise, don't be surprised if most companies don't port games for you.
      • They have people to crunch those numbers and if they could make some huge profit (like you seem to think) they would already have a Mac port.

        Blizzard also has people who crunch numbers, and they concluded that cross-platform development is worth the money. Seeing how pretty much every damn thing they make becomes a #1 title, maybe some of those other companies should get their people to take a close look at what Blizzard is doing right.
    • But are they intending to port it to new platforms?

      You gotta be kidding - with the speed they are fixing bugs and adding content, they have one person doing the programmer - he wouldn't have time to port anything.
  • I may not be a big fan of mmorpgs, but I've seen ncsofts work, I like a lot of it. And now creating new content and 'giving it away' to people who already pay. Its so refreshing compared to the companies that release expansion packs you have to buy for mmorpgs.
    • eer, on a reread I guess you do have to buy it? Odd, I played lineage II on a free server without having to buy the client, oh well. Silly me :-p
      • You have to buy the expansion, but your subsciption stays the same. This is nothing new to this business...

  • This is only... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shads ( 4567 ) * <shadusNO@SPAMshadus.org> on Thursday October 06, 2005 @08:35AM (#13729331) Homepage Journal
    ... sane, as COV may be a different game, but in reality it's a significant expansion to COH. They interact.

  • Kudos. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kinglink ( 195330 ) on Thursday October 06, 2005 @08:52AM (#13729452)
    If they are completely seperate games (where you interact on the servers) kudos.

    When everquest did this they started charging 150% (I think) rather than the same price. It was kinda crap but also understandable, but here there's two things to realize,

    A. The only change is storage space.

    b. If the world is always the same for both games and you only log on one game at a time, there's no extra load by doing this.

    Overall I'm happy they did this, but it's not going to change anything for me. (The plague in WoW got me into that though so we'll see)
    • CoV is the same codebase and basic system of CoH (it has new features, but it's the same basic engine and gameplay). It is, essentially, a big honkin' upgrade. So they're doing the only sane thing and charging big honkin' upgrade prices but not touching the fee.

      This could work - it might encourage me to put down $50 on it.
      • This is the only way they really CAN do it. I'm kind of figuring that at launch there are going to be a LOT less heroes in the game while everyone levels up their villains. CoV adds PVP zones and high end super base raids which pretty much require an active population of both. Being able to play both sides will be beneficial for the game overall.
        I quite like a lot of the features they are putting into CoV. I think it will be a much needed injection of new content into the game.
    • Sony's station pass is 150% of the cost of a regular subscription, but it allows you to play -all- premium titles that you've purchased, not just a second.

      While players can still only play one game at a time, which means no extra bandwidth, their characters will be on completely different systems, unlike CoV where your villian character will using the same group of machines as your hero character.

      Really, as several others have said this is more of an upgrade than a whole new game. The difference is that unl

  • Wave of the future (Score:1, Insightful)

    by sdhankin ( 213671 )
    As MMORPGs become more mainstream, and there are more and more games competing for the same players, I think you're going to see the big guys doing more of this. After all, it's kind of a no-brainer if one company charges $20/month for their game, and another charges $20/month for their stable of 10 games.

    I'm kind of surprised SOE hasn't gone this route. If they undercut all the competition (I believe right now they charge more than the average monthly fee for a group of games), they could likely force sm
    • It's a matter of game quality, though. SOE's games aren't that good IMO and the subscriber numbers kinda reflect that (probably the best data is here [mmogchart.com]. I'd rather pay $20 a month for one really good game than $20 a month for 4 bad games, 5 mediocre ones, and 1 sorta-good one. If the small operator has a better game than it already has SOE (or whoever) beat. And even if there were 10 really good games on one bill, who would find time to play any more than one of them in this world of 800-hour MMORPGs? Seems
      • I agree completely. It doesn't matter how much they charge for the lot, if none are any good. And there are certainly individual games out there that outshine SOE's whole pack. However, over time that might change, either because SOE adds new games, or because the stablemaster in question is someone other than SOE. The idea is general - SOE was just the example that came to mind. If someone managed to get just 2 top-notch games into a group of several, for the same price everyone else was charging for
    • I'm kind of surprised SOE hasn't gone this route.

      They actually have. [sony.com]
      • Well, yes, as I mentioned in my original post, but they're asking $22 compared with the $13-15 WoW charges, for example. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they charged $15 for the whole bunch.

  • Awesome. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by say__10 ( 768448 )
    Just got my email from Cryptic stating those facts for the American release too, no price increase. Awesome company.
  • A lot of people are really championing this move, while a few are panning it.

    I'm not an MMORPG player, but would someone explain to me what alternatives NCSoft had? Everyone's made it pretty clear that noone has time to play two MMOs simultaneously. So CoH players would have stopped playing CoH to play CoV? That would either cut into CoV sales, or limit the CoH population, neither of which is good for NCSoft.

    I see how this is a good thing for those people who want to play both games, but given that they

    • They could have gone the SOE route: Continue to charge you a monthly fee for CoH, collect money on purchase of CoV plus a seperate monthly charge for that. Then when the player decides which one he/she likes more and tries to cancel one of the monthly subscriptions, continue to charge the player for both subscriptions for 6+ months while they continuously relocate the "cancel" link on the website, all the while sending misinformation to the player who they're ripping off.

      They already decided not to screw ov
      • "expansions", etc..(even charging an additional monthly fee for such "expansions")

        Name the Everquest expansion that includes a separate monthly fee apart from the basic on.

        There isn't one. I'll never understand why people have to lie to themselves and others in order to justify their hate for a game they once loved. You moved on, it happens, get over it.
    • I agree with you that this is the "right thing to do" but, as anybody who's dealt with SOE can tell you, game companies don't always do the "right thing".

      I think giving them credit for thinking in the long term and not squeezing every cent they can from their loyal users is worthy of praise. To me, praising companies that respect their clients is a no-brainer.

    • Well, I expected them to charge a slightly higher fee (not double) if you played both games. If you're paying $14.95 a month now (I actually subscribe six months at a time), then you'll pay $19.95 to play both games. They could have easily justified it by saying, "Even if you only play City of Heroes, you will have access to significant additional content and features by being a City of Villains member, too."

      However, it looks like they're thinking along the same lines that you are: if they had charged a

  • NCSoft didn't make the game, they distribute the little boxes. Give credit where credit is due. (Cryptic Software)

    • Re:Christ people (Score:3, Informative)

      by tuzzyfoad ( 685628 )
      No, NCSoft didn't create the game, Cryptic Studios created it. However, we aren't talking about how wonderful the game itself is, we're talking about the account management side of it, cost of subscriptions, etc..

      things which are controlled by NCSoft. Everything related to your Account(s) in CoH, CoV, Lineage and Guildwars is controlled through PlayNC.com

  • This is nothing more than an attempt to churn up buzz for this game. This question has been asked and answered MILLIONS of times since the game was first announced.

    This isn't current news, this isn't really even news at all.

    • Actually, no, the question has specifically -not- been answered until now. It has been asked and speculated, but nothing has been said until the press releases started going out. It was just announced, which makes it current, it wasn't known before, so it's "news"...

      I was hoping for a small bump in price and access to all the NCSoft games, but this isn't too bad a deal.

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