CoV: The Tedium Creating New Characters

I've been playing City of Villains now for a couple weeks, and I have to say, the game really is great. With the added models/skins/classes/etc they've provided, its even more fun to generate villains using the in-depth character creation tool. I've been really enjoying making new characters too; when I only have a short time to sit in front of the PC, instead of jumping in the game I fire up the character generator to see what I can create. It's a lot of fun to see if you can envision a persona and then create it.

However, there's something lacking in the game; creating new characters can become annoying after a while. Cryptic Studios ought to better use the addictiveness that their character generator feature offers.

Here's my biggest bone with playing with the character generator; you have to choose a name for the character before it is 'saved'. I understand that a character needs a name in order to be played... so why do I find this annoying? Well, I have to get to my other issue to better explain.

The other sore point is that you have to choose a server before you can start generating a new character. These two issues, to me, detract from the coolness and usefulness of the character generator. I really wish I could create endless numbers of characters and save them locally. If I chose to not use that character, ever, then it'd never need a name, would never need to be uploaded to Cryptic's servers for storage... it'd just be some art that I created on my home PC that I may or may not use at some later time as a played character.

As things stand right now, I already have more than half of my slots taken up for the server that my friends and I play on. The slots are getting filled with villains I've created but have not played... and I may never play them. That being said, they look cool enough I'd like to be able to keep them... somewhere.

I get really annoyed when I am put on the spot to think of a name; and since the names clash with both City of Villains and City of Heroes, sometimes it takes longer to come up with a cool name than it does to come up with a cool-looking character. You are forced to commit the design to a name right then and there, and if you can't come up with a cool name you've pretty much wasted your time because you do one of two things in this case; you either decide to not save the character, or you pick a name that your are less than satisfied with. In both cases, the chances of you playing the character is reduced to zero; I mean, who wants to play a character that has a crappy name?

If I were Cryptic, I'd change the to allow the players to generate as many characters they want; allow them to re-load them as they choose, modify them some more, maybe 'clone' a template to build off of to create permutations to see if you can create something that looks cooler than the current one and then compare them all side-by-side. Don't force them to choose a name, perhaps not even force them to choose an archetype.

When the player does decide on a server, then prompt them for archetype (usually the look helps dictate the archetype in my case... I often have to press the back-arrow to change the archetype, powers, etc after I've created the costume), then prompt them for a name. They might get more enjoyment from this simple change, and it might also increase the longevity of their subscription since they might be generating several non-played characters that they decide to move onto when they are getting bored / tired of their current main. Sometimes players just 'quit' when they get tired, but if they knew they had a cool looking hero/villain ... they just might fire the game up and commit the character to a server and give it a name.

I might even be tempted, as a company, to take things a step further. I might allow the user to pose the characters they make, perhaps even allow them to place the characters in pre-determined sets, and maybe even allow them to pose enemies to recreate battle scenes for cool screenshots. The sets don't need to be spoilers for in-game content either, you could make small simple sets from existing game architecture/art for the player to create a scene... I could imagine myself doing this for countless hours to be honest; screenshot-taking can be a whole lot of fun sometimes.

Anyways, that ends my little rant on CoV/CoH - both are fantastic games, I just wish they'd allow me to play with the character generator in a more free-form fashion because I find the character generation portion of the game a whole lot of fun.