City of Heroes! - EverCrest Message Forums

Author

Topic: City of Heroes!

Khyron

Hello, my mushy friend...

posted 04-24-2008 11:25:45 AM

It's been a while since we had a thread about this, and the game's been changing pretty rapidly. It's no longer even close to the entity it used to be, so I thought I'd start up a discussion on it.

What's new? TONS of shit! I'll start from Issue 9, the Invention Issue.

Loot (Inventions) - They finally added useful loot to the game, allowing people to finally put the billions of influence/infamy to use by buying and selling recipes for new Enhancements. IO's can either be 'vanilla' io's like accuracy, damage, etc. or set IO's which provide multiple effects (Acc/Dam, Dam/Recharge, or special bonuses like a chance to inflict extra damage, a chance to stun, a regeneration/recovery boost, etc). Set IO's can also confer set bonuses when you slot multiple sets in the same power. Some costume recipes, even a respec recipe was added.
Veteran Rewards - The longer your account is active, the more bonuses you get. You unlock new powers, free tailoring sessions, new costumes, respecs, even some non-combat and team-buffing pets for time played.
Auction Houses - Buy and sell recipes, salvage, enhancements, and inspirations. Pretty self explanitory.
More High-Level Content - They've been focusing heavily on new content, by adding new Task Forces for levels 35-50, soloable task forces for 35-50 players, and they turned the old Rikti Crash Site into a new 'War Zone' where heroes and villains can cooperate on missions and a special cooperative Task Force. They've also added all-level content in the form of alien invasions in random zones upon completion of the Rikti War Zone task force.
More customization - Aside from all the new costume pieces they're always adding, they created weapon customization. Assault Rifle users no longer have the giant supersoaker fugly gun - they can choose between the old style, mercenary style, M16, 'futuristic' style, etc. Longswords, Maces, Rifles, Katanas, etc. can all have new custom looks.
More Powersets - They added new powersets for villains, with Thug Masterminds, Electric Armor/Melee brutes, Dual Blade sets for Scrappers/stalkers/brutes, and a new 'Willpower' armor set which is a good combination Regen/Resist/Defense set.
Flashback System - They added a system where you can go back and replay missions and story arcs to receive badges or souvenirs you missed. You can also adjust the difficulty of missions or add in special conditions to them.
Levelling Curve - The levels have been adjusted to provide a more smooth curve from 1 to 50. Certain levels were considered 'hell levels' since they lacked content, or were between important powersets that significantly slowed levelling. So they added more content during those levels and added XP bonuses fighting certain levels, to make the 1-50 progression more smooth with no hell levels.
Real Numbers - Since so many players were using external tools and guides to get the actual numbers behind powers, the devs figured why not just show everyone. Now while you play you can pull up a 'combat attributes' page which describes your current health, regeneration rate, recovery rate, movement speeds, Defense, Resistances, accuracy, etc. When fighting you can see your combat rolls (IE : You had a 75% chance to hit the target, and you rolled an 80 so you missed). Helps a lot for figuring out how effective your enhancements are and how to plan out your slots.
Character Transfers and Renames - They cost money, but they're available now.

And what's coming up on Issue 12, the next major update?

Villain Epic Archetypes (VEAT) - Villains can pick between starting as an Arachnos Wolf Spider, or an Arachnos Blood Widow. Wolf Spiders get a mix of ranged rifle attacks and grenades and some interesting defensive powers (status resists at level 1, sweet). Blood Widows are kind of a stalker/scrapper with some ranged 'dart' powers that remind me of spines or thorns. At level 24, however, they branch out into two specialized classes - Bane Spider/Crab Spider for the Wolf units, and Night Widow/Fortunata for the Blood Widows. Band Spiders are kind of stalker/scrapper mix who use the Arachnos mace for their powers, and Crab Spiders get the bigass backpack. Night Widows are Scrapper and psi blaster mid, while Fortunatas are more Dominator-ish.
Powerset Proliferation - They're expanding the powersets that classes have access to. Not adding new ones (Beyond the VEATs) but giving classes access to sets they didn't have before. Tankers can use Dark Armor/Melee, Scrappers get Fire Melee/armor, Masterminds get storm control, Controllers get Plant and Thermal, etc.
Additional Character Slots - Everyone gets 2 extra character slots, and an additional slot every year as a veteran reward. Extra slots can also be bought, and you can potentially have 36 characters per server.
Accuracy boost for low-level characters - One of the biggest complaints to levelling is that before you get Dual-Origin enhancements, your accuracy kind of sucks. Your misses mean more of a blow since you don't have access to stamina and all the defensive options that become available later. So the devs implemented a curve, where you start out with 90% accuracy at level 1 and slowly drop down (About .75% per level) to the normal 75% accuracy at level 20. From there on it's the same as always. This just helps people start out.
All the usual shit - New costume options, tweaks to zones and some minor power tweaks to help balance the game, bug fixes, all that shit.

There's also talk about new branching dialogue trees - nothing new to other games but new to CoH. Here's the example they gave :

quote:
[Positron's] also excited about the addition of traditional RPG branching tree dialogue, something they didn't have in City of Heroes until this Issue and will now begin to use quite a bit.
"In this issue it's just the test bed for it, we got the tech late into the development process so we were not able to use it everywhere we wanted to," said Miller.
This allows them to put options into conversations or theoretically do things like present players with situations like which wire to cut when defusing a bomb.

All in all, pretty amusing. Some old gripes (PvP Balance) are being worked on but still have issues, but there's a LOT more to do at 50 now and a lot more incentive to branch out and try all the different characters without having to replay hell levels and shit.

All I could really ask for now is more mission variety - my only real gripe with the game anymore is the fact that you're still running very, very similar instanced offices, warehouses, and caves. If they'd put more variety into the missions to make them feel less generic and more varied it'd be perfect.

Khyron fucked around with this message on 04-24-2008 at 11:33 AM.

Khrynn - Mage, Goon Squad, Mal'Ganis