Going Rogue and the 11th final ding

Game time this weekend was pretty much exclusively with City of Heroes. The Going Rogue expansion was released earlier in the week. As it should, this has caused more activity in the game. There ae more people running around in the areas, more people in chat channels than I have been used to lately. And if nothing else, the server list looks slightly different:

City of Heroes European server list

In the over four years that I have played the game, the number of times I have seen server load go up to two dots can be counted on one hand – and that might still leave unused fingers.

Choices and consequences – Going Rogue

When I came home yesterday after this week’s work I noticed that it seems the NDA for the City of Heroes: Going Rogue expansion has dropped now. So now I can finally start writing a bit more about it 😉

I got in the closed beta at the point when everyone and their dog joined; i.e. when everyone who is some form had been tagged a “loyal customer”. This was about 3 weeks ago. From a technical point of view it was quite stable for me, but there were some content and graphical glitches here and there.

The very quick summary is that I quite enjoyed the content and I am looking forward to play it after it is released.

Now time to go into some more details.

A regular street in Praetoria

Pigs in space

No, this has nothing to do with the Muppet Show – it is about the news that space combat in the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic game may possibly not be a big deal, as reported by Massively. This should not really come as a surprise, looking at a quote from when space combat was announced, from Shacknews:

Space combat is an alternative gameplay experience to the primary game of storytelling, questing, and ground-based combat.

Note her the keywords alternative and primary. Gameplay that is not primary and is also referred to as alternative is not really something that they put much focus on. Instead this seems to me to be on par with the focus that crafting got initially in Tabula Rasa, Star Trek Online and Champions Online – well, perhaps slightly better.