Considering the influx of new player since the Steam re-release, I decided that I had procrastinated enough and finally started a series of CO articles on a blog I write for. The idea is to do an overview of CO based on my experience as a player, mostly with the goal to talk about various aspects of the game for new and ex-players and maybe offer an interesting read for current ones. I'll be covering things like the Nemesis System, character creator, endgame and so on in separate articles.

Part 1: Past and Present

Part 2: Gold and Silver

Part 3: C-Store

Part 4: Costume Creator

Part 5: Nemesis System

Part 6: Adventure Packs

Part 7: Endgame

Part 8: PvP

Part 9: Community and Communication (final part)

Very well written. Good article. Can't wait to see more!

Fantastic article Sekimen.

I have to agree on a lot of your points. The game is making great headway, and in fact has become my main MMO; something that if was told me at launch I would have :rolledeyes: and wanted to know what you were on (I freely admit I fell into the "h8er" camp at launch).

But I am loving my CO, I wish they would add some more trivial things like hairstyles, hand options (I miss my big, roundy robot gloves from CoH), and new environments. But otherwise they are going in a positive direction IMO.

Nice article. I completely agree with what you say about Cryptic learning lessons along the way. Sure they've made some spectacular mistakes, some of them breathtaking in their stupidity, but they do learn and they have made huge efforts to engage with the community and show that they actually listen to concerns and suggestions.

On just about any gaming site you can mention, as soon as the name Cryptic comes up the message boards instantly fill up with hate posts and hyperbolic accounts of badly handled episodes as if that is the company's daily MO. Increasingly, though, that's not the Cryptic I recognise.

Over time I think F2P will help redress this dissonance between perception and reality as more and more players pass through CO to find that it's so much better than they expected. I hope so because Cryptic are turning it round like none before and CO is shaping up amazingly well.

Good article.

BTW, that's one helluva mouthful of a name you got there, Sek.

What? That's not bad, seems like a regular slavic name to me :)

I do agree on the "good article" though, and hope we'll see more soon!

Not really - it has less than a dozen syllables. :D

Great article. Lots of salient points clearly expressed without hypebole.

I'm not really sure of the nature of the nerf, other than knowing it existed. I have come across comments on this forum and other sites where people kept referring to it in a not-so-positive manner. Regardless of the nature of the nerf, you'll always have people who will be upset over it. I think this got such a vocal reaction due to the scope of the nerf. But like I said in the article, it was before I started playing, so other than it happening and referencing other players' reactions, there's not much I can say about it.

I think another problem with the "grind to level" is that places where you could do missions at any given moment weren't as obvious, and the Crime Computer was something most people found out about via other players. This is one of the reasons I completely missed Stronghold when I played the game the first time.

Thank you for the comments everyone. I'll prolly cover Silver and Gold accounts in my next article (I'll try and maintain a 1 article per week pace), seeing it's something that might interest new players the most.

Nice work, Sekimen. A good read.

As for leveling content. There is plenty. You just have to know where to look for it. I reach level 40 shortly after reaching Vibora Bay with most of Monster Island and Lemuria still not completed. It took a bit for me to figure out the optimum playthrough, though. Some sections have no quests linking to them, while other quests send you to sections that are above your power level and require much more time to wade through than if they had been taken at their appropriate level. This is why I created an optimum playthrough chart listing the regions in the order that they should be completed. In a second playthrough, I have started adding the level that your character should be when starting the region.