As I’m sure you may have heard by now, City of Heroes: Freedom has launched and is now free-2-play for everyone! As you may have remembered, I was pretty excited for City of Heroes to go F2P back in June. Now it’s here, and it’s all FREEEEEEE!*

* Note: All content only available to current VIP (very important players) subscribers, with a recurring charge of $14.99 a month. Cash or credit?

All hail the might F2P gods! Now, where are my microtransactions at?

I downloaded the new installer yesterday and then proceeded to patch the game from there. The whole patching/installing process was generally quite speedy and I was able to play within two hours of patching. I could have opted to play sooner too though, because new to the patched is an option to play while installing, much like how WoW’s installer works nowadays.

The game, as expected, is largely unchanged. There’s a new main menu and hero creation interface which is a great improvement, although I’m not a fan of the new menu music. I always thought City of Villains had freaking awesome music, but it’s gone now. Ah well. Also new is a short tutorial in which you will determine the alignment of your character by deciding the fate of this one guy. Yeah, I have to admit, that felt a little out of place. I get that Going Rogue let you walk/cross the line between good and evil, but when applied here once it feels out of place and insignificant. Unless of course, there are more alignment choices further down the road after the tutorial ends. There’s also a brief boss battle you’re thrown into towards the end of the tutorial that could have been cool, but kinda falls flat because the guy just sits there, letting you wail on him until he finally drops dead.

Grrr! I am a tutorial boss! Punch me in the face as often as you like! I might ocassionally try and fight you.

The first thing I did was log into my “Bearded Slayer” character, who was level 15 in the Praetorian zone. That was the last time I had played CoH, because that expansion was pretty disappointing. I had never reached level 20 and completed the main Praetoria storyline because the repetitiveness of the missions had totally turned me off from the game back when it released. So I played him for a couple levels, joined by some other players who had the same idea. We romped around for a while, doing missions and generally kicking ass. It was good for me, because not only did I have to learn how to play CoH again, but I had to learn how to effectively tank – it’s been a while since I last played an MMO of any sort. I failed eventually and got beat down, but luckily my teammates had me covered and were patient enough to deal with my untimely death. The way dying works in CoH, by the way, is pretty nontraditional. If you have a certain inspiration (power-up) you can self-revive or a teammate can give you one. Otherwise, it’s straight to the emergency room for your bloody, beaten ass. If you go with the latter, you take on debt which has to be repaid in the form of experience points. Luckily for me, I didn’t incur any debt for some reason… perhaps the game wanted to welcome me back in the most friendly manner possible.

I then decided to create another character to join up with WhiteSword’s super group on Triumph. Feel free to join us! I’ll post screenshots of my characters next time I play.

So yes, City of Heroes is back! I definitely recommend you give it a shot if you haven’t already played CoH in the past. I’ll be playing this for a while and may even resubscribe at some point – I saw some game time cards last time I was at Wal-Mart for super cheap. With three months to go until The Old Republic, it’ll be a good distraction for a while. Though really, there are so many other games coming out this year that I wonder how long this game will keep me occupied. Hopefully somewhat long, because I love me some City of Heroes. By the way, I’m downloading the sweet, sweet Battlefield 3 open beta right now. Praise Jebus!

-rav4ge