CRAFTING AND ECONOMY
When City of Heroes launched, there was no gear, no crafting, and no real reason for heroes to have a bank account. It turns out that players really missed this layer to the game, and in due time Cryptic added a crafting system and an auction house to the game. Learning from their past mistakes, Champions Online launched with both crafting and auctions in the game. Missing from Champions Online however, though it was only added after launch to City of Heroes, is a guild (or Supergroup) housing system. The developers have marked this feature down as something they'd like to do in the future, but that doesn't change the fact that migrants from Liberty City might miss their old super-hangouts.
CHARACTER CREATION
Quite possibly the most revered standard set by City of Heroes was its in depth character creation system. Colors, shapes, sizes, and hundreds of stylistic options are at the player's disposal in order to make sure that no two heroes look alike. When Champions Online launched, you bet your cape it had to be on par with what players of City of Heroes expected. CO's creator took customization to a whole new level. Though the costume options are less than what's available in its five year-old cousin, Champions Online allows far more diversity in terms of everything from the size of a hero's ears and hands to the way they stand and move. I'd like to see someone create a demon-clown-wolf-robot in City of Heroes. Add in the classless power system that Champions Online has in place, allowing for a remarkable number of combinations of superpowers, and I dare say Champions Online wins in this department.
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CONTENT
This is a topic that is kind of unfair to draw comparisons on. City of Heroes has the advantage of five post-launch years of development. They have the advantage of the Mission Architect system that allows players to create new missions from scratch. There are two full games worth of content if a player owns both the Hero and Villain side of things. This doesn't change the fact that Champions Online has the edge in terms of less repetitive quest content, more diverse locales to adventure in, and the added boon of the Nemesis System which allows players to create their own archenemy and face them throughout the life of their character.
PVP
City of Heroes added in a fairly successful PvP system when City of Villains launched. Akin to Freeport versus Qeynos, or Alliance versus Horde, Heroes and Villains clash in the open world and in super-arenas fighting for rewards and the ardor of the public. Champions Online launched with PvP in the form of The Hero Games, a sort of publicly run superhero sport where heroes face off against each other for in-game currency to be spent on numerous bonuses. This may seem like a copout, but let's call this one a toss-up. City of Heroes has world PvP and arena battles, while Champions has only a handful of different scenarios, but only Champions allows players to become zombies and kill zombies while fighting each other.
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CONCLUSION
A lot of players once dismissed Champions Online as the unofficial sequel to City of Heroes. But such a comparison is similar to calling Warhammer Online a sequel to Dark Age of Camelot. Surely both games are created by the same development studio, and indeed they share a lot of similarities, but when playing each it's not hard to find the differences in controls, content, and general feel of the two games. The biggest disparities lie in the breadth of the game world, the mission content, the combat, and the player-created content. Depending on a player's taste, each game offers something unique to the superhero MMOG. The only question in my mind after extensive time with both is what will DC Universe Online bring to the table to make itself stand out, or will its more familiar intellectual property be more than enough?
