The New Year is always a time for reflecting upon the year past, as well as setting goals and outlining plans for the year to come. In looking back, we feel that 2007 was a banner year for City of Heroes. Three major free expansions, among the 21 total game updates over 12 months, made for exciting times! We added a completely new game system with Inventions, bringing “loot” and strengthening our economy, invited players to fight off an alien invasion and travel through time, among other things! Click the links below for highlights:
• Issue 9: Breakthrough!
• Issue 10: Invasion!
• Issue 11: A Stitch In Time
Additionally, in 2007 we expanded our services by offering Character Renames and Transfers. We are looking to add more such conveniences to facilitate a great gaming experience.
Then, in November of ’07 we announced the exciting news of the consolidation of the City of Heroes franchise under the NCsoft banner and formation of the NCsoft NorCal studio to support it: A New Age Dawns. As Brian Clayton, Executive Producer and NCsoft NorCal Studio Manager, alluded to in his Dev Blog, there are some big plans in the works for the game and the franchise. While we’re not quite ready to reveal the details of those plans, we do have several other short term initiatives to share:
The City Vault
We gave a sneak peak of the new “City Vault” feature at the recent San Jose Meet ‘n Greet. The City Vault is coming soon to the City of Heroes website and will showcase the millions of interesting Heroes and Villains found in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. It will allow you to search for characters by a number of different criteria, and then view those characters, including images of different costumes, powers, badges, friends, stats by zone and other fun information! As we have previously announced, you can manage what information will be displayed through the City Vault for your characters via several in game options.
We will have more details about the City Vault Beta soon.
Double XP Weekend and Server Hardware Improvements
We have another Double XP Weekend coming! Currently we are targeting February for this event. It will be the same format as we have run previously: a weekend long fest of double rewards of experience gain, influence or infamy, and prestige! Double XP is always popular and usually drives our online numbers to record heights.
To better address performance issues that tend to arise under such conditions, we are investing in server hardware upgrades. Technology is always marching forward and we are making this investment back into the game to take advantage of the latest tech and help create the best gaming experience possible for our players.
Our plans are to have all of the new hardware online before the coming Double XP Weekend. We will post more details of the server upgrade schedule, along with the dates of the actual Double XP weekend soon, so keep your eye on the City of Heroes website!
Valentine’s Day Event
Also coming in February, we have an expanded Valentine’s Day Event! We’re adding a few new twists to the previous event and also have a very special surprise to go along with this romantic holiday. More details will be coming soon!
Smoothing the XP Curve
One thing that we constantly examine is the rate of advancement in the game. In a future version, we intend to smooth out the leveling curve by changing how much experience is given out for defeating opponents. The intent is to smooth out the “bumps” where players typically get stuck leveling up their characters. Keep an eye on coming patch notes for specifics.
Real Numbers
As a general quality of life improvement we will be adding new functionality in a coming version of the game to display the “real” numbers behind your characters and their powers. This includes a user configurable display of important characteristics such as movement rate, regeneration rate, resistances and many more! Additionally, you will be able to see how those statistics are affected in real time by buffs and/or debuffs affecting your character.
Fanzine
We have a great vehicle in the City of Heroes Fanzine to showcase art and fiction from the many talented members of our game’s community. We are gearing up to work on the next issue and if you want to submit something for consideration, visit the fan submission page. Act now, as Feb. 11th is the deadline for submissions to the next issue.
Issue #12
While we’re not announcing the specifics of what will be included in the next free expansion, Issue #12, we do want to reiterate that we will continue to add great new free additions to the game in 2008. The team is working hard to ensure our next free expansion will be an exciting, feature-filled addition to the game.
Overall, it is exciting time for the City of Heroes franchise. We are looking forward to bringing the above items to you in the short term, and much more in the medium and long term! As always, thanks for your continued patronage and support.
I was hoping for a system like the vault to recontact friends I'd lost after taking 2 months off of CoH and learning my globals were wiped. This will be a great feature and I have to admit I'm pretty excited for issue 12 and I don't even know what it is yet.
This xp curve leveling sounds interesting. I wonder if its just going to effect the dead level 30's for the better or if it will speed and slow things down. Guess we'll see.
BEST TEST ANSWERS EVER!
"Who was responsible for inventing the cotton gin?"
"I'm unable to divulge that information as it may compromise our agents in the field."
"What was the date of Columbus' journey to the americas?"
"I do not believe in linear time, the past and future are one, existence in the temporal sense is illusionary... this question is therefore meaningless and impossible to answer."
Liberty Quarentine- Arc/ElcMnp Blaster-lvl 24-GhostAxe
Cosmic-Man- Ener/Ener Blas-lvl 6- Sands of Mu
Victory Mr. Hungary- lvl 4 Invln/SStrength Tanker-GhostAxe
His name was Hearthbourne
Plays City of Heroes till the break of dawn
He likes his Scrappers
But will not settle for those Blappers
But when he gets out Thundercharge
Those PvP'ers die in the large
It just seemed like there would be a conflict of interest with Cryptic working on Marvel Universe Online also. So having them seperate means that NCSoft will want CoH to be better instead of Cryptic diverting resources from CoH to MUO.
I would rather see 2 really awesome Comic Based MMOs than 1 really awesome one and 1 they forgot about.
City of Heroes/Villains Onion - L50 - Katana/Super Reflexes/Body Mastery Scrapper Scotch Bonnet Girl - L50 - Fire Aura/Fire Melee/Pyre Mastery Tanker Aurora Australis - L41 - Willpower/Energy Melee Tanker
I know the info they released was very cryptic...ha ha. But I wish to see something giving us a big picture scenario. I want to know if all that has been invested by the player base will get a reward such as some massive expansion or even something on the lines of GW 2.
On Ron's last comment of seeing two great hero MMO's that may never come to full being. There has been much discussion recently that MUO may not ever get made. There have been some development issues that will either delay it significantly or end it all together.
On Ron's last comment of seeing two great hero MMO's that may never come to full being. There has been much discussion recently that MUO may not ever get made. There have been some development issues that will either delay it significantly or end it all together.
Interesting, I was just wondering about things being really quiet on that front of late. Do you have a link to your source?
This would probably be really bad for Cryptic if it happens this way. They don't have a steady cashflow from CoX anymore and even though they probably got a nice bag of money from NC Soft, I doubt it's enough for a completely new MMOG project which they would need to get on asap or default.
I keep expecting Marvel to announce MOU will become the first cross-platform MMOG (I.e. Xbox, PS3 & PC) but I think Cryptic isn't the studio to do that, or not the Cryptic that made CoX. Have they been hiring a lot?
On Ron's last comment of seeing two great hero MMO's that may never come to full being. There has been much discussion recently that MUO may not ever get made. There have been some development issues that will either delay it significantly or end it all together.
Interesting, I was just wondering about things being really quiet on that front of late. Do you have a link to your source?
This would probably be really bad for Cryptic if it happens this way. They don't have a steady cashflow from CoX anymore and even though they probably got a nice bag of money from NC Soft, I doubt it's enough for a completely new MMOG project which they would need to get on asap or default.
I keep expecting Marvel to announce MOU will become the first cross-platform MMOG (I.e. Xbox, PS3 & PC) but I think Cryptic isn't the studio to do that, or not the Cryptic that made CoX. Have they been hiring a lot?
The information I read came out of the latest Wizard magazine, and I doubt it would be on their website. As for 1st cross platform MMO that will actually be not it. I believe there are already some of those...I think a Final Fantasy game. But if they arent already Age of Conan will be. I know for sure it will be Xbox but unsure of PS3.
This link is a few months old but I think it basically says the same thing that I read just with a little more info.
Yah, I'd forgotten AoC did the Microsoft Xbox360 deal.
Guess what I meant was a true cross-platform game. Not Windows & Windows-in-a-Box if you get my point :-)
It's probably not marketable though.
But yeah, MUO dropped of the blogosphere news and only gets the occasional blip from professional News services like Wizard. Not promising.
Any chance you guys might now when that double xp weekend will happen just off guessing. I think it'll be around the third week. Feb 23 24 25.
Don't short-change long-term objectives for short-term solutions" -Commander Edward H. "Butch" O'Hare, MoH
Thanks to Death Fetish for the Awesome Sig :)
01/12/08 12:26
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