First view of Going Rogue

A thread on Champions Online on Massively had a link to a keynote speech at HeroCon where the City of Heroes/Villains Going Rogue expansion was presented (thanks to backlash for that link). The presentation talks a bit about what is in the Going Rogue expenasion:

• A number of new zones for Praetorian Earth, a parallel universe which is ruled by emperor Marcus Cole (the evil twin counterpart of Statesman in the regular City of Heroes).
• Heroes can become Vigilantes, gradually becoming more evil – if he/she chooses. A vigilante can visit the Rogue Isles and team with villains.
• Villains can become Rogues, gradually becoming more good – if he/she chooses. A rogue can visit Paragon City and team with heroes.
• New characters can start in Preatorian Earth as well and choose to align themselves with the Loyalists (villains) or the Rebels (heroes) – or somewhere in between, it seems.
• Travel back and forth between Preatorian Earth and Primal Earth (our Earth) is possible.
• Two new powersets, dual pistols and demon summoning
• Dual pistols is a blaster/corruptor/defender powerset, with selectable ammo choices – standard, cryo, incendiary and chemical.
• Demon summoning is a mastermind powerset, also includes flaming whip (!) as personal weapon for the player
• A couple of new enemy groups in Praetoria and a graphic refresh of a number of characters from Praetorian side.
• A new graphics setting – Ultra Mode

The Ultra Mode graphics setting is what the majority of the presentation covered, with in-game display of a small part of Praetoria. They have done a number of improvements in terms of shadows and reflections and other bits and pieces, making the game look better. The quality of the YouTube video is not the best, but the differences are very much noticeable, especially when they did turn on and off this Ultra Mode.

The good thing is also that this new settings works for all content, both old and new. They showed some views from the old/existing zones with Ultra Mode turned on/off  - quite nice.

They also had a combat demo with dual pistols – certainly fit with the notion of a super gunslinger.

Release date for Going Rogue is preliminary set to some time in the second quarter of 2010, with closed beta starting in early 2010. 5-year veterans, those that are in the loyalty program and HeroCon attendees are going to be invited in waves to the beta.

I think it looks promising so far. I will certainly turn my villains and heroes to rogues and vigilantes – my view of them in general has always been somewhere in between pure villan and pure hero anyway. And this also has the bonus of being able to travel anywhere in the game. Good work, Paragon Studios!

State of Sente

I have been a bit quiet in terms of blogging lately, which mainly a matter of a bit less game-related time, so most of that time go to playing rather than blogging.

The main game at the moment is Champions Online – great fun and a nice place to handle my altoholic tendencies. A bit of time is also spent in Fallen Earth, I do like the post-apocalyptic setting and I enjoy playing it every now and then. It fulfills a different type of game activity from Champions and they complement each other nice, I think.

I have been in a bit of a “fantasy rut” for a while now and I have very little interest in any current or new fantasy MMOs. For me the specific mechanics and features of a game may be a primary motivator, but rather the setting and how it has been used. I am a little bit surprised but also relieved that this may be the case – if the mechanics were all that mattered I think it would be very easy to lose the enjoyment of playing these games.

City of Heroes/Villlains has not seen much play either. It has been very much about the people for a long time there and with most in-game friends gone or in other games, there is little on the team-play part that keeps me around. Creating Mission Architect story arcs is still a very enjoyable solo experience, but I have been a bit discouraged by the lack of people playing the missions I have created and some of the things Paragon Studios has done here lately. When the Going Rogue expansion releases it will likely be more play, but right now I have a rather low attendance in the Rogue Isles and Paragon City.

One activity that has increased lately has nothing to do with games – mentalism. I have been a magic enthusiast and occasional hobby magician for more than 30 years. Over the years my interested has shifted a bit more towards mentalism, at least when it comes to performing. It is a branch related to entertainment through magic, but still a bit different. It is on the borderline on exploring our own inherent capabilities as well as taking a bit extra step to provide entertainment miracles. It is that border area of what is a real capability and what might not be, plus a high degree of audience participation that makes it such an interesting area.

It requires a lot of time to become really good (practice, practice, practice), although it is more a matter of sleight of mind rather than more traditional magic entertainment, which may be a bit more sleight of hand.

So, still around but remains to be seen how much blogging it will be in the near future.

It is that double XP time again

Paragon Studios has announced that it is time for a double XP weekend in City of Heroes/Villains again, between October 8th and 11th. This time it also includes a reactivation of inactive accounts over the weekend.

So it can be a good time to play around a bit with some old villains and heroes, put some new colours on their blasts, pets and other powers. Or perhaps try the new sidekicking system or try the new difficulty settings and take large hordes of enemies, even if solo or in small team.

Double XP weekends usually make servers a bit more busy than usual, which can be nice in itself – depending on server and which side you play (red/villain or blue/hero). For me that is the main draw with such events; it usually brings back some old friends and others to visit the game over the weekend, if nothing else.

In my case I thus find it a bit unfortunate that I will be off over the weekend to a magician’s convention precisely that weekend. But on the other hand I will be meeting even older friends at that place, so it will still be quite good.

Issue 16 is live!

The newest update of City of Heroes/Villains, Issue 16, is now live! While this issue does not bring any new content in the form of new missions or zones, it does provide a set of improvements and changes – some of them certainly due to the competition with Champions Online.

The release notes can be found here.

I am mainly positive about the changes, but not all of them.

1. Custom colours for powers. This has apparently been a huge effort to accomplish and I think it certainly is a nice option for those who want to be creative with their character apperance. Seeing some of the creative uses in Champions Online for this type of feature I think it may provide interesting new views in City of Heroes/Villains. The coloring options may even be better here than in Champions. Probably noth that will convince someone to go with CoX instead of CO in itself; rather something to perhaps keep old players.

2. Super-sidekicking. The old sidekicking pairs are gone and a much more flexible system is not in place, on par with Champions. Together with some of the other team-related options CoX would be the better one for team play in comparision with Champions. Part of this revamp is also that players can still earn XP even if they are changed to a lower level – before the only earned influence/infamy in that case. That will certainly make more of the content interesting for people to play regardless of level.

3. Personal group size settings and wider range of difficulty settings. Instead of the 5 difficulty settings that were before it is not possible to have a wider range of level differences for enemies and it is also possible to trigger mob group sizes and spawns based on a virtual team size. So even if you play solo one could potentially get spawns for a full 8 man team. This will provide better options to set the difficulty that suits each person or team and will make play more fun for many I think.

4. If enemy groups in Mission Architect missions do not have minions, lieutenants and bosses in them, then XP will be reduced – if they are part of regular group spawns. This certainly is aimed at taken the edge of easy farming missions. It does not include boss fight objectives. I can think of some legitimate non-farming situations when not all three of those types have been used, so I am not all positive about it. But this particular change may perhaps bring more good than bad overall.

5. XP reduction for custom mobs and limited enemy group compositionsin Mission Architect missions. This one I do not like. Custom enemies have three difficulty settings – standard, hard and extreme for each of their powersets. However, even on standard setting custom enemies have often been more difficult to fight, in particular for lower levels. But now XP is reduced unless enemies are set to be hard/hard at least, plus there are no XP bonus here for them to be harder.

This is most likely some attempt to deal with excessive farming in Mission Architect, but I think it will mainly hurt those who use it the way it was intended. Already before this change XP was in practice lower with “normal” usage and teaming more complicated to deal with than with regular missions and not it is potentially lowered even more, if custom enemies are included in the story arc. I do not see that this would hurt the excessive farmers much but I think most likely make people less inclined to play Mission Architect missions they way they were intended.

To be honest, while many people like good stories they will in many cases not go out of their way to experience those – better XP and rewards will have higher priority for many players, as have been seen over and over again in many MMOs. A great story has limited value for both author and player if no-one experience it and the mission architect system already suffers from too many arcs in comparision to the number of people playing them.

I would like to be proven wrong here, but I suspect there will not be more people playing Mission Architect arcs they way they were intended. It may reduce farming, but will likely not increase story-oriented play. I hope I am proven wrong here though.

Power Spectrum announcement

Paragon Studios have provided soem more information on what the next content update for City of Heroes/Villains will contain – Issue 16: Power Spectrum.

The characer creator seem to be getting an update with a few changes, including the ability to determine the colours of the powers used. So energy blasts may not be blue:ish anymore, fire may look differently, as well as ice, psi etc. Each power can have its own primary and secondary colour.

I think it will be a safe bet that we will see a lot of pink stuff, perhaps combined with signal green and any other annoying or unorthodox combination people can think of. Scare enemies into submission by horrible colour combinations. But some will probably also use to make great colour combinations.

The power profileration also continues, so each of the archetypes seem to get some more of the other archetypes’ powersets.  Only one new powerset for dominators, which mean I won’t feel obligated to make a new one just yet.

It is also interesting to see that they will allow more tweaking of the difficulty settings for the missions – up to now mission mobs scale according to group size and difficulty level set. This will be welcome by people who have found the game to be too easy nowadays, with all the invention sets etc in place to improve characters – plus of course good team compositions.

Nice changes overall, but some people are not going to be happy if there are no new zones or perhaps revamps of old content (some of the older content would need that).

Myself, I am more bothered with that they call it a “free content update”. It is not free, far from it. I pay 65 Euro every 6 months for this game, plus extra costs for booster packs etc. Let’s be honest here instead of some kind of marketing spin.

Short cuts

I decided to just put up a post with various small notes and items all blended together.

NCSoft has announced that they are selling additional slots for Mission Architect story arcs. I would buy more slots, even though I think they are a bit pricey. But they are not available yet as far as I can see. They do not seem to have put much effort into the already defined venues of allowing people to get more story arcs slots – Developer’s Choice and Hall of Fame. The latter is depending on player votes though, but they (NCSoft/Paragon Studios) do set the rules and conditions.

Reading some forums for MMOs that are in the pure micro transaction payment model, I find some parts a bit fascinating. While the type of discussions are pretty similar to any MMO forum, the games that comparisions are made with can be quite different from when you read a subscription-based MMO forum. It is almost as if there are two quite distinct groups of MMO players which only on occasion play the same games.

What is better, story or social interaction? Looking at a few of Western MMOs they have in some cases a large focus on trying to provide some interesting combat and a related story. But the mechanics and systems in place for social interactions (guilds/clans, friend lists, party search, community oriented activities etc) are in many cases more weak. Some Eastern MMOs have more grindy and boring combat and stories in comparision, but at least some have more developed mechanics for social interactions in comparision. Is that a result of more PvP focused gameplay or more general focus on social interaction?

In City of Heroes/Villains one of my heroes (Tsu Hon, martial arts/regen scrapper) is getting close to max level. I have not played much of the high level hero-side content, but decided to follow a few of the regular story arcs there. Some of the missions provided by contacts Tina and Unai have some real head-banging qualities – I would really like to bang my head against the wall rather than play those missions. It was a relief to be able to head to Architect Entertainment for some alternative missions.

I recently reactivated an EVE Online account of mine. I have two and this time I managed to remember what my first account was. It had been deactivated January 2nd, 2004. In my mailbox I had some unread emails from late summer/autumn of 2003, my character seemed to be member of a company I did not recall joining. I have not actually started playing yet, not sure if I am going to do something with my old character or just keep him in retirement.

3 months of user created content – a view of Mission Architect

Three months ago Paragon Studios released Issue 14 for City of Heroes/Villains, Mission Architect. The major feature in this update were the Mission Architect system which allowed players to created their own story arcs. A story arc consisted of a number of instanced missions, with a large part of the maps in the game available, most of the enemy groups and enemies were available and players could also create their own enemy groups.

And Mission Architect provided regular XP also for the missions and had its own reward system (architect tickets), similar to the merit rewards in the regular game. There has been a fair share of controversy and issues around the system, in particular due to the rampant powerlevel/farming that some players were able to create and (ab)use.

So now 3 months after the release I decided to do a follow-up on the statistics I collected a few days after the release of Issue 14. What is the state of the Mission Architect system now? The numbers will not tell the whole truth, but there may be some interesting observations.

First of all, there are over 50000 published story arcs in the system today. At the low end it would mean 16000-17000 players that have created story arcs and the high end around 50000 players. The actual number of players will likely be somewhere in between.

First piece here is to look at ratings for the story arcs.

Story Arc Ratings

City of Heroes/Villains issue 15 is live

And so has the issue titled Anniversary been released, although a little bit after the actual anniversary… But close enough though. This issue is considered a small update by many people and the excitement is perhaps not at top. Still, I think the update contains a number of neat features.

For me, the Mission Architect improvements is a major piece here. The improved search and categorisation capabilities are going to be intresting to see how it works out. The Mission Architect toolbox is a neat addition for mission testing and the various improvements for level ranges, power customisations etc provides some welcome additions. Just before the update a set of video tutorials was published for Mission Architect. I think it is a bit unfortunate though that they did those for the feature set in Issue 14 and not Issue 15. While the fundamental basics are the same, it would have been nice to include some of the new features as well.

I also like that they have added more costume change emote and made these new ones available to everyone – the first emotes of this kind that was introduced were only available through the magic booster pack (bought separately).

The new strike/task forces are also going to be fun to try out. I am not a task/strike force regular – I do them from time to time, but not very regularly. It is a bit like raiding in some other games; I have no interest to do them regularly to get some kind of reward. But for a bit of fun with some friends perhaps it can be a nice evening session from time to time.

There are also a number of new faces and some new costume pieces to choose from. More choices here are always welcome.

But the update is certainly thin on content that is not Mission Architect-based. However, one can only assume that the majority of the effort is going into the future Going Rogue expansion.

But for me now is the time to dive into Issue 15 and play around with the new Mission Architect features!

One new big happy family of heroes and villains

It seems that there will soon finally be time for the City of Heroes/Villains players to actually get one official community focal point, NCSoft will now be merging the forums of the European and American communities and upgrade to some new forums software.

Not a day too soon in my opinion – if people play the same game I do not see a reason to split up the communities, as long as any language issues can be dealt with in a reasonable way.

Now my wonder is also, when will everyone be able to actually play with each other? The single world approach that Champions Online seems to be taking is quite enticing.  And if you have played games like EVE or Guild Wars which handle this also, you really miss that feature in other MMO-type games.

Perhaps the future competition with Champions Online will help the motivation to make such a change for City of Heroes/Villains? I certainly would not mind that.

The colour of the game

A recent post in the City of Heroes/Villains forums provide a hint on some things that are coming in Issue 16, with Issue 15 soon to be released now.

Issue 16 will not be the issue when the new expansion will be released and the post just shows two pictures. But given the names of those pictures they do hint at a new customisation feature – colour change of pets and powers. The pictures show a fire controller and a fire dominator, but with new colours for their pets and their firepower.

That is a pretty neat thing, even though it might not be something to scream and shout much about too much outside the core fanbase.

More information will be coming for Issue 16 in July, which my guess is means that it might be released some time in September.