If there ever was a game where someone could sit for hours and create character after character it would be City of Heroes. The rest of the game was a tad too repetitive to have lasting appeal but I’d still love to be able to play with the character creator to this day.
I didn’t really come up with any character concepts in CoH which carried forward. It isn’t that they weren’t ideas I liked but that characters created in a superhero game generally only work in other superhero games. So here are just a few of the more notable characters from this wonderful exercise in creativity.
Shadowraith (2nd Costume)
Shadowraith – On of the rare male characters I played extensively. In fact Shadowraith is my only capped toon in CoH. He’s a teleporting dark/reflex scrapper. Some might think he is a Nightcrawler clone but I the concept in my head was slightly different. His teleportation is really him stepping into an alternate dimension, moving in that dimension and stepping back into this one. Different dimension, different distances and flows of time, yadda, yadda. It is also this same dimension that he taps into for his dark melee powers. He’s short, wiry, with green skin and a noseless, alien like face. I did reprise him shortly in Champions Online.
Kitsume – My cybergoth martial artist from Anarchy Online gained much of her standard looks from the CoH character creator.
Cry of Light – When I finally capped Shadowraith
Cry of Light (1st Costume)
and gained access to the epic archetypes I had to roll one of each. The Peacebringers seemed angelic to me so I turned to comic books once again for inspiration. I decided to emulate the looks of Lisner’s Dawn. He made so many which were fun to express in the CoH character creator.
Darkwraith – My Warshade. A clone of Shadowraithe except his skin is purple instead of green. The idea here was that one of the times Shadowraithe dimension hopped a Warshade came along for the ride. It was exceptionally fun to try to make the two characters as physically close as possible.
There were dozens more, most never saw more than the first zone or two. Some joke toons, some serious which didn’t work out, others which worked only inside the lore of CoH, but none that really have the potential of making into other games.
