Doom 3 vs City of Heroes
I disagree. I’ve been playing City of Heroes, and I’m convinced COH is the better game.
In singleplayer Doom3, you play alone. In COH, you can play alone, but you get the best gameplay experience playing in a group.
Doom3 is very predictable, with the same monsters spawning in the same places at the same time, every time. COH missions can be linear, in that certain bosses will always appear in certain missions, but in general the mobs are different every time.
Doom3’s story line and gameplay is very linear — there is one exit; get to it. COH is very open-ended — there is no set way to play, and there are many ways to achieve goals.
When you die in Doom3, you have to reload from a save. This seems to cheapen the experience for me, since there’s no penalty for doing something stupid. “What happens if I shoot this barrel while standing on it?” In COH, death is much less of a stumbling block. At worst, you wake up in the hospital. However, you’re penalized XP, so you have to work for a while regaining that lost XP. At higher levels, going into “XP Debt” is a very good incentive to try to stay alive.
My other gripes about both games are: I don’t like that COH forces you to pay for the game, then for monthly fees. I guess that’s what it takes to keep the developer releasing updates and expansions on what seems to be a tri-weekly basis.
Doom3’s environment is basically: scared. You’re running through what seems to be the same industrial level for hours on end, in what the game developers intended to be “edge-of-seat panic”. Unfortunately for them, humans can get used to anything. After about the first half-hour of “OMGWTF?!!”, I just got used to it. “Creeaak.. THUMP!” “Great. Demon at 6 o’clock. Boom. Next.”
My prediction: Doom3 will end up rotting alongside of FarCry on my hard drive. I’ll get to a point where I’ve reloaded the same quicksave ten times, get frustrated, drop to console, and type ‘God’. I’ll play as an invincible deity for another hour or so, and then I’ll just lose interest.
Meanwhile, my COH character will continue to go up in levels.