Champions Online

City of Heroes never really broke subscriber records, but it's certainly qualified as one of the game industry's most notorious "cult classics" in its former playerbase's nostalgia.
(Like me. I'm one of those nostalgic players. In case it wasn't clear. Obvious Werwolfe is obvious.)
It left an internet void upon shutting down which nothing has managed to fill, though not for lack of trying.
No
less
than
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fanboy-fictional copycats promise up and down to bring back the magic, and this year has seen an unauthorized revival of CoH by fans who got their hands on the game code. Yet what hope have they, quoth ye Wolfe, to match CoH's success (less address its many glaring flaws) when even the old game's own developers couldn't manage an encore?

This is a mission map in Champions Online, Cryptic Studios' attempt at a competing title after breaking away from NCSoft's mismanagement of CoH.

Yes, that is the mission map. The entire robot mafia... I mean, the entire mission map. And sure, most of them aren't that small, but when half your content consists of linear series of 10x10 sized rooms with an orc guarding a treasure chest, you're not exactly earning your pay.

To a limited extent, this game fails because it's a microtransacted modern title and thus seems to have invested most of its development time in churning out endless funny hats for its cash shop, to be bought by moronic scum desperate for status symbols. You can't walk two feet without being hit in the face with cash grab boxes requiring keys made of solid currency. Still, given that playing dress-up was always a major draw in CoH, this doesn't hit it quite as hard as it does other titles. It's also blown impressive amounts of development time on overextended (and low-quality) cutscenes which have no place in a persistent virtual world to begin with.

But mostly, Champions Online fell prey to the post-WoW trend for Simpler!Faster!LOUDER! entertainment to try to appeal to retards, a.k.a. "a wider audience" and everything from punching to landscapes reflects it. Fewer types of abilities, little to no crowd control, no specialization, regeneration by powerups, instant teleportation to instant quests with instant teams and no teamwork, just aimlessly bullrushing a map marker while ignoring the map.

Oh, and of course a looming GIGANTIC FLOATING ARROW above your head to order you this and that way so you need never be aware of your surroundings. Aaaand to save the developers the trouble of fleshing out those surroundings appropriately.

Before it too succumbed to the instant gratification of grinding "door missions" City of Heroes caught our eye back in 2004 for making a fair attempt at obeying the first and most important point of my MMManifesto: the world is the game. Paragon City's neighbourhoods each had its own theme, from drugged-out street toughs to mobsters on the docks to cyber-punks roaming industrial decay. You could catch thugs in the act snatching purses, breaking locks, trying to kidnap innocent civilians for nefarious experiments gone wrong. CoH (at least pre-release) still remembered that "super" is a relative term, and the truism of every superhero comic that the superhero is the special one, contrasted not only to villains but to mundane humanity. While these elements are present to some extent in Champions Online, they're wholly effaced by the swarms of inexplicable enemies on every street corner. It's not hard to find streets like this one completely devoid of life, and in contrast even the city center is littered with transdimensional robots and demons. Mission maps fare no better, lacking the detailed decor of CoH and resolving more often than not to a simple series of boxes. When the entire universe is built around superheroics, they simply cease being super, or heroic.

Sure, I could bitch some more about combat / itemization mechanics and whatnot, but the truth is Champions Online doesn't entice me to even get far enough to fiddle with minutiae, because it fails as a virtual world.