City of Heroes

City of Heroes is a MMORPG based in the clasic four-color comic book genre.  The heroes of this game start in Paragon City either in the tutorial district called outbreak, or the districts of Atlas Park or Galaxy City.  The heroes then commence to pwn'ing the lowlife scum of the city and earning experience points that collect in order to gain levels.  As a hero gains levels, more super powers become available for selection.  When a character is first selected, the player must choose one archetype from a list of five (seven if the player has unlocked the keldian archetypes by getting a hero toon to level 50, five more if the player has city of villains).  The five basic hero archetypes are the Tanker, Scrapper, Defender, Blaster, and Controller.  Each archetype has a list of power pools available for a character to choose from.  THe player must choose one power from two power pools, these power pools are from where the player will choose future powers from as his toon gains levels.

I have just started playing this game again after taking over a year off from it in orer to play World of Warcraft.  Fantasy roleplaying is alright, but I have always been more fond of super hero pole playing, after all:  Champions RPG >> Dungeons & Dragons RPG.  If I were to design a super hero MMO however, I would avoid using archetypes, and opt instead for either a point based system or a tier based system.  Regardless of my predjudice over an archetype based super hero RPG, I still find City of Heroes to be the greatest computer game EVER!