See here.

For those not familiar with City of Heroes, this is basically a system where you can temporarily boost someone’s (your sidekick’s) level to be just one under you. If you’re level 22 and your friend is level 8, you can sidekick him so he’ll fight as if he was level 21.

This does wonders for socialising with friends in game, which improves the overall gaming experience.

Sidekicking –> Improved Socialisation

When I play MMORPGs, I typically play with a group of friends in real life, but we tend to play at different speeds. In COH this wasn’t a big problem though due to sidekicking, and I could continue to group up with my real life friends which continued to make the game quite fun.

Surprisingly World of Warcraft didn’t include this at all - it probably didn’t fit with other areas of the design - but what I found here is I’d very rarely group with friends due to the ever-increasing differences in levels. The end result? I got bored of the game quicker due to the lack of in-game socialisation.

How to Implement Sidekicking

Unfortunately implementing sidekicking as easy as it sounds, and requires other changes to your game design. The main ones that come to mind are:

So in a typical fantasy setting, you may want to adjust a few things. It would be better if abilities were never redundant - eg if you get a firebolt spell at level 5, at level 25 you shouldn’t give them a super-firebolt spell that makes the first one redundant. To accomplish this you probably need to make different abilities have clearly different effects (this does fire damage, this does ice damage), but have the effectiveness based on level. This way you can scale it.

Similarly with items, you’d need to move away from the “this level 4 sword does 3-8 damage, and this level 44 sword does 23-45 damage” system, as this too doesn’t scale well. A possible alternative would be to have some base weapon/armor effect based on the character level, then have the individual weapon/armor used give a % bonus to this.

Not a bad effort — but will it last? More than any other MMORPG I’ve played, WOW was the most fun and addictive out of the box, but after several months it got really tiring… grind, grind, grind, without enough innovative gameplay and without enough depth.

Will be interesting to see when the subscriber numbers start to trail off… but for now, congrats.

Check out this excellent site if you want to see some comparisons: mmogchart.com

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