Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I was thinking about blogging about this weekend in City of Heroes being one of those double-XP-and-reactivate-all-old-accounts weekends that MMOs like to throw… but the news breaking on another interesting initiative pushed possible into definite. You’re aware that the Cities games have a level designer function, allowing players to design their own arcs? Well, since this is flexible and accessible enough, Paragon have started a Guest Writer program where they bring published authors to do a mission. The first four – from Bill Willingham (FABLES), Rooster Teeth (RED vs. BLUE) and Scott Kurtz (PvP) – debut on Tuesday, and you’ll find the details below…
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From the very first moment I heard about superheroic MMORPG Champions Online, I had one question – could I recreate my beloved City of Heroes character The Entomologist in it? With the open beta now live (rather unhelpfully, only so long as you’re a Fileplanet subscriber or have preordered), I finally got to find out. Live, little man, live!
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Presumably as part of a major fight back against its own upcoming spiritual sequel Champions Online, NCSoft’s venerable superfolk MMO City of Heroes/Villains (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – still the most fun I’ve ever had in an MMO, even if it’s a rare day that I venture back into it now) has announced a big-ass new expansion, Going Rogue. One that purports to fills in that morally grey gap between hero and villain. I always thought that was ‘politician’ or ‘gym teacher’, but seems as though it’s a little more complicated than that.
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This has been a long time coming, but the City Of Heroes (& Villains!) mission architect is now in open beta, for testing before it launches into the full game along with Issue 14. (Test server details here.) It’s looking brilliant, with players about to control everything from “environments, mission objectives, and enemies, to written fiction and character dialogue”. And these aren’t just single instanced missions, we’ll be able to deliver mission arcs with multiple stages. NCSoft report that players can create wide ranging adventures, so they “story can have up to five chapters or missions and each mission can hold up to a maximum of 25 achievable goals.” Apparently the player scenarios will be launched from an in-game browser, and ranked by a player rating system. The best missions will enter a Hall of Fame decided upon by the devs. Apparently players will receive “in-game benefits” for making content that is rated highly by the community.

Following on from our recent Hinterland diary, we now yield RPS’ floor to another agreeably garrulous developer. This time it’s NCSoft’s Bruce Harlick, who’s Senior Game Designer on City of Heroes/Villains. Below, he writes about the process of designing lore and missions for the splendid superheroic MMO, the drawing board stories behind the upcoming Issue 13 update and a ghost named Sybil. Off you go, Bruce.

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So, gaming on Apple machines. Clearly Paganism of the most heinous order, but as it’s nearly Halloween let’s deign to acknowledge it. Anyone do it? Happy stories/horror stories? Despite owning a (hilariously battered) Mac myself, it’s not something I’ve ever especially considered. I was fairly surprised to walk into a computing store in Canada last year and see ranks and ranks of slightly old or slightly silly Mac games there, so I know there is stuff available, but personally I’d stuck to oldies – I’ve got Mac copies of the first two Fallouts – and, er, casualies. Woo Peggle, etc. That, I’d surmised, was pretty much the outer limit of it, at least unless I had one of those hilariously costly high-end Mac desktops that people with tiny beards and expensive spectacles buy. Two Macish stories which suggested the more mainstream Apple systems are rather game-blessed of late caught my passive eye today, though.
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I’ve been meaning to post that the twelfth expansion (”Issue”) for City of Heroes was about to go live for a while now. In fact, so long, that it has gone live, and anyone can actually play it. It’s called Midnight Hour and introduces a new organisation (”The Midnight Squad – aka The Midnighters, which the Authority may want a word about, so we’ll move swiftly on before someone gets their brains punched right out). To celebrate, beneath the cut we have its promo videos, our first impressions from our City-of-heroes insider and a completely gratuitous Wilson Pickett song.
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(Sorry for the hideous pun – I’m still badly jetlagged).

News reaches us, via Eurogamer, that RPS’ favourite MMO (Jim’s Eve obsession being obscured by a shallow veil of democracy), City of Heroes, is due for an intruiging new update. Always a game that’s struggled to offer long-term appeal for its less devout players, it’s had a few goes at adding a bit more meat to its big bones – but somehow crafting, auctioneering, veterans’ rewards and even PvP haven’t quite mustered the variety it badly needs. Perhaps, though, its newly-announced upcoming feature will. Read the rest of this entry »

A quick note on two two new word-pustules I’ve affixed to the internet’s mottled hide. First, Eurogamer’s new MMO channel is foolish enough to let me celebrate my beloved City of Heroes character, The Entomologist, for 2000 words. In theory I’m talking about how COH’s character editor and class structure offers a degree of self-expression no other MMO can touch, but mostly I’m jaffing off about my 4ft tall, power-jumping energy blaster. I also rope in comments from Jim and Kieron about why their COH characters warm their heart-cockles, and say things like this:

“Alright, so your Level 70 WoW Night Elf means a lot to you. He represents all your time in the game, a visual and statistical incarnation of all your achievements. His armour is his battlescars, a sign for other players to respect or fear him. But he isn’t you. He’s just a template someone else made. The Entomologist is me. I made him. From his appearance to his powers to his nebulous personality and back to a thousand new appearance tweaks later on, Ento is my proudest MMO achievement.”

Meantime, PC Gamer throws up an Aliens vs Predator retrospective I wrote some time back, this one focusing on the game’s dismemberment physics and the timeless nature of the Alien as a foe.

“That’s why playing as the Marine, which on paper seems to be defaulting to a stereotypical FPS experience, is the smart thing to do in AvP. The blip of the motion tracker, the trustiness of the Pulse Rifle, it’s like genetic memory, an experience utterly familiar and all the more effective for it.”

City of Heroes/Villains is moving house. The super superhero MMO IP has been fully bought up by NCsoft, who formerly shared ownership with the games’ developer Cryptic. But unusually for a publisher buying a game from its developer, this doesn’t seem like it’s bad news at all.

According to Cryptic, NCsoft have offered everyone on the CoH/V team a job, and indeed a few of the top dogs have accepted. So lead designer Matt Miller, lead engineer Aaron Brady and lead artist Ken Morse have all made the transition.

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