Promoting Death Incarnate

It has been almost 3 weeks since Issue 22: Death Incarnate was released for City of Heroes. It is a pretty neat issue update, with a couple of things for both low and high level – although on the high level side, you need to be incarnate (i.e. VIP) to take full advantage of the contents.

One thing that strikes me as a bit odd though is the trailer that Paragon Studios created for this issue. Not saying that it is bad, just not sure which target audience they are aiming for.

The emphasis is on the death of Statesman and the general change that seems to be ongoing for quite a while to put player characters more at the front as heroes (or villains) rather than side-kick roles in relation the signature NPCs in the game – this is certainly noticeable in some the content, but not specific to Issue 22. They also show some glimpses of new powerssets, but two of them (Beast Mastery and Staff Fighting are not part of Issue 22 either). As a side note here – they have actually killed off three signature characters so far, Statesman being the most prominent one.

Compare this to the trailer made by long time City of Heroes enthusiast Samuraiko. It has similarities obviously, but I think also manages better to convery to players what this update is about, even though it certainly does not cover everything.

See both trailers below and judge for yourself.

It is still alive, promise!

I have been somewhat absent from the blog lately. This is mainly because I have lacked motivation and to some extent time to write much – better to shut up than try to force too much uninspired text here.

Most of my play time goes into City of Heroes as usual, although there has been a little bit of time with Champions Online and Guild Wars also.

I do enjoy my time in City of Heroes quite a bit and I also love every time I jump back into Guild Wars – it usually feels quite good to jump back into that game, and fairly easy to dust off the old knowledge again.

Waiting for the new Guild Wars games

Speaking of Guild Wars, as many other bloggers I am eagerly awaiting the releases of both of the new Guild Wars games.  With both games I of course mean Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars: Contemporary Horror/Mystery edition – the latter also known as The Secret World.

At least in spirit and to some extent in mechanics there seem to be a decent amount of similarities between Guild Wars and The Secret World – and that is a very good thing, IMHO. The releases of both these games will probably lead to a break from City of Heroes for me.

Boring brutes and final dings

Just a quite note about kind of a milestone for me – yesterday one of my brutes, Ka-Thud, reached max level 50. This was my first brute ever to reach max level – I usually get bored with brutes and scappers long before reaching the higher levels. He then becomes #18 in my line-up of max level characters in City of Heroes.

I think a reason for lasting all the way to max level do not have that much with powersets or any überness in gameplay – I just simply had fun with the character concept and idea behind him, plus that I like the name.

Ka-thud is supposed to be an evil/mad scientist/mastermind from an alien world, controlling a giant robot/mech warrior vehicle. Only that the mech warrior is giant on Ka-Thud’s planet – not on ours. On Earth the mech warrior is actually rather small, well below average height of a normal person… 

I have had fun with the character and will probably play him more as well, even though he is not in my very top of favourite characters.