Yeah, CoH wasnt just good, it was the best MMO I ever played. And I've played a TON of them.
I mean, I could ramble on about it's merits for ages. Hell, the way it handled non-damage attacks. In other MMOs, you just have stat debuffs to hit enemies with. No proper "status ailments" like in a JRPG or anything. Debuffing is usually a little boring in MMOs, and alot of players dont like doing it. CoH did this differently. One of the game's big things was big, heavy effects; these werent just random armored idiots you were playing as, these were freaking superheroes. Their attacks were big and epic. One character I had was based on sound attacks. He was a Blaster, a class similar to a glass cannon (yet, not quite). I set up his ability slots to basically create a build that was focused entirely around fighting entire waves of foes at once; not as good against single ones. There was this one attack that just fired this huge wave forward, and anything caught in it would literally be FLUNG backwards. Enemies would end up flat on their backs (needless to say, they cant attack in that position), and then I'd be free to make a heavy damage attack against anything strong enough to resist it, by shooting what was best described as an orb of concentrated shrieking, which made the awesomest noise ever. Could take on HUGE numbers of enemies at once.
I actually got into ridiculous situations with groups of players that didn't quite understand the benefits of this, because I could hold and control more enemies than the group's tank could. One group actually kicked me because of this. The tank was supposed to tank! I was ruining everything! Because, you know, keeping control of 15 damn enemies at once and COMPLETELY preventing them from damaging anyone by constantly hitting them with steamrollers made of screaming (preventing them from even getting to attack the tank) was a bad idea, because it focused all the enemies on the blaster (me) instead of on the tank. That's not how MMO groups work! I facepalmed pretty hard at that. But it WAS hilarious. And you couldnt just do that stuff by JUST speccing your character, you had to then be skilled at using all of that.
And I think that's what would really fix MMOs for me: not having JUST the stats make the character work. Make the player have to use ACTUAL SKILL to win fights. It creates more challenge, and if the player is good enough, they could get more satisfaction by defeating horribly dangerous things by being just that damn good. How is this NOT a good idea to have in a game? I mean, seriously? This sort of thing isnt rocket science. Alot of games that are ALMOST MMOs do EXACTLY this, and prosper greatly from it, such as Monster Hunter, which is basically based entirely around this concept, and it's bloody fantastic.
Just... ugh. The lack of that in today's MMOs bugs the hell out of me.
Or another thing that would be nice: Creative classes. I dunno if you ever heard of a game called Anarchy Online (futuristic sci-fi thing where "magic" was made of hyper-advanced nanobots, because... freaking nanobots!), but that was my OTHER favorite. No game did character classes like that one did. It wasnt AS skill based as CoH, but it still had some of that. Moreso though, the classes were interesting and unique. The most unique of all of them was the Agent. The Agent had the unique ability to transform, for 30 minutes, into any other class in the game. THey'd become a somewhat weaker version of that class, but would gain access to all of that class's abilities (provided they had BOUGHT them, you had to buy skills/programs, you didn't just magically get them). You could do some very strange things with an Agent, yet they were never unbalanced despite the "do literally anything" aspect; they were very hard to use but awesome when used right.
Other games though? Cookie-cutter ideas. Nobody does unique classes. But that sort of thing wasnt THAT uncommon back then. Hell, Guild Wars 1 sure as hell did "unique", didn't it?
I could ramble on about THAT issue all day really.
Though you wanna hear about a *really* unique MMO? There's one I consider more unique than any other: Earth and Beyond. That one game is the ENTIRE reason I hate EA so much. They killed off Westwood Studios, and that game went with them. That was possibly the angriest I"d ever been at a game company. They've done all sorts of other crap, as have others, but that one is by far the top of the pile to me. Even moreso than the Simcity fiasco. Look that game up if you want to see what I mean. There was nothing else like it, and there never will be. Nobody has the skill to match that anymore. God, I miss it.
Now as for GW2, honestly, I think alot of that "MMO for people that hate MMOs" was mostly just marketing hype. And I have to wonder if maybe the game STARTED OUT geared towards that idea, early in development... until the devs were forcibly pushed to copy the norm more and more, because you know, players are allergic to new ideas. So it turns into the mess it is. That happens in development sometimes, sad as it is, and MMO development is the messiest of all. And it's hard to blame them... selling something different is just too freaking risky now, with development costs so high. As with every other genre, the MMO genre is in a rut, and it's going to be very hard for it to ever get out of it.
Also, the CoH servers closed down... after a very long time (it originally released JUST before WoW did)... because the game was getting a bit old, and as happens eventually with MMOs that arent freaking WoW, the player count was shrinking just too much. But it sure did last a LONG time. It was one of the few that actually survived the coming of WoW for more than just a short time.
