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April 27, 2007

I9 Sneak Peak

Beta release of Patch Notes for I9.  I'm going to ignore all the stuff that's already been publicized -- the Invention System, plus the Hammy revamp.  Some other cool bits:

Statesman’s Task Force

Marcus Cole (Statesman) himself now stands aboard a Freedom Corps ship in Independence Port. If you have 8 level 45 to 50 Heroes, you can start the Statesman Task Force and undertake a mission that is of vital importance to the fate of the entire planet. 

  • Your reward for this can be either a Synthetic Hamidon Enhancement (courtesy of Positron) or a random rare Recipe for use in the Invention system.
  •  Each of these rewards can be given out only once every 24 hours.

Looking forward to trying this, assuming we can wrassle up 8 players still ...

Enhancement drop rates have changed and been decreased as you level up. Players at higher levels will no longer receive enhancements that are of no use to a character at that level. Following is the composition of Enhancement drops by level:

o 1 to 12 100% Training Origin Enhancements
o 13 to 21 50% Training, 50% Dual Origin
o 22 to 31 50% Dual Origin, 50% Single Origin
o 32 to 40 25% Dual Origin, 75% Single Origin
o 41 to 50 100% Single Origin

• You should still receive optimal enhancement drops at near, or sometimes faster than the rate you received them in previously.

o For example, if, at level 45, you previously got an SO 25% of the time you got an enhancement drop, you now should receive enhancements 75% less often, but they will be an SO 100% of the time.

Cool.  Less deletion of TOs and DOs.

When the game gives you a reward it will check your free inventory slots and not allow you to choose something if that inventory is full. For example, if you wanted an Enhancement, but your 10 enhancement inventory slots were already full, you would be notified that that inventory is full, and you can not select that reward. Deleting something to free up space will immediately refresh the reward window and allow you to make the choice.

Also a good thing.

• King’s Row :
o King's Row now has Superpowered Field Trainers (NPC Stores)

• Green Line Tram :
o The Green line now runs to Skyway City and Founders' Falls

• Peregrine Island
o The zone now has a Trainer: Castle.

When Margie pointed out the trainer in KR during the closed Beta, I made little happy noises.

Extending the Green Line to FF and Skyway (down by Faultline) is a nice add.

And adding a trainer to PI just makes freaking sense.

New emotes are always good:

Emote Binoculars
Emote Camera
Emote Cellphone
Emote Clipboard
Emote Crouch
Emote Drum
Emote DrumLow
Emote Fishing
Emote FlippingCoin
Emote FloatBooks
Emote Howl
Emote Talk
Emote Waiting
Emote Wounded

Custom Flying Animation Emotes. (These will only interrupt the flying forward animations)
Emote FlyPose1
Emote FlyPose2
Emote FlyPose3
Emote FlyPose4

And, last but not least (and not least overdue):

The Trade Interface now allows for much larger amounts.

It's the little things that count.

Posted by Dave at 8:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Resources & Rules

April 18, 2007

Re(ho-hum)spec

New respec a-coming with the 3rd Anniversary of CoH.

We wanted to let players know that, as part of our celebration of the 3rd year anniversary of City of Heroes, we will be applying a free respec to all characters. So, if you have been wanting to change your powers around a little bit, switch up your power slotting or make other changes, this will be a good time to do it!

[...] The actual timing of when the respec is applied is likely to be shortly after the actual Anniversary on April 28th. We will post here with specific dates when they are available.

To be honest, I've been at it long enough that I have so many Vet Award respecs that ... well ... not terribly meaningful.

But it beats the heck out of not having a respec when desired.


Posted by Dave at 9:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Character Design , Resources & Rules

April 17, 2007

Now with wings!

Interview with Jay Doherty, CoX costume/character artist, on the new wing sets.  Okay, that is in fact one thing I want -- dragon wings for Torchielle.  :-)

It's safe to say that wings are one of the most difficult player costume pieces to make for the game. There are two basic "rigs" for the wings which we call internally "Bat" and "Eagle." Depending on the wing; the proper rig will be used. When designing our new wings, I had to make sure that every wing looks good both in its flying state and resting state (You will not understand the giant pain in the butt it is to do that). The hardest wing to make was the Angel, just because it was the first one I made (we introduced Angel and Demon wings first as part of our Veteran Rewards program). One of the coolest things about being a character artist is making sure everything looks tight and I wanted to make sure that every wing looked different from far away and close up; so to achieve that I tried giving every wing a distinctive Silhouette.

So as I mentioned already, the first two wings that I designed were the Angel and Demon wings. The higher-ups really liked how I and the animation team implemented them so they beat me until they got some more. So to date we have created ten wing sets: Angel, Demon, Dragon, Burned, Bone, Bat, Cherub, Insect, Tech, and Fairy.


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April 12, 2007

From hands-on to stand-off

A lot of what we've done lately has been our Scrapper duo, Rita and Runt (and it is just freaking scary that they are at 33).  It was a very entertaining transition last night to flip over to the opposite extreme and pull out our Mastermind duo, Special Ediucator and Gifted Kid.  Great pair, lots of fun.

Posted by Dave at 12:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Edit
Filed under: Gameplay

April 11, 2007

Mass transit

Not only is the Green Line being extended to Skyway (down south, by the Faultline gate, making Skyway the equivalent of Steel), but the hoi-polloi will soon be tramming their way over to Founders Falls (south of the Pocket D entrance).  Woot!

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Lord Recluse speaks!

Interview with "Producer" Serdar Copur.  Some fun stuff.

arthurh3535: What is the hardest 'programming' thing that you want to eventually add to the game?
Serdar Copur: Blue-sky questions are so much fun. The most difficult thing to develop that I would like to add to our game is a completely new database architecture which allows every single player who plays CoH & CoV to be able to play on the same game server. This means no more server selection screens, no more re-rolling because your real life friends are not on the same server as you, and no more trouble finding a group at 3:00 AM because everyone else is sleeping. It’s not an impossible endeavor but my programming team assures me that there is nothing more time consuming and complicated that we could develop for our game at this point. I guess we can always dream.

That would be kind of cool.  On a related note:

LadyMage: Positron mentioned back in an interview last year about looking into changing SG membership from 75 characters to 75 accounts. Could we get an update on that? Is it feasible, is it coming, is it backburnered or scrapped, and why? It's a feature I know a lot of SGs, preticularily larger ones are looking forward to.

Serdar Copur: Something along the lines of this is definitely coming. In fact, I will go so far as to say that both Supergroups and Bases will be getting some much needed love over the next few updates. We are fully aware that MMOG’s are all about the social element and we want to support that as much as possible.

Not as big a concern of mine any more, but still a good thing.  And:

Cronic-X: On the last ask a dev they hinted that issue 10 was going to add a lot more to the story line of the game. is there a possibility that new AT's for villains and or heroes could be on the way seeing as adding a new AT or villain group would be a big addition to the games story line.

Serdar Copur: Issue 10 is going to be fantastic. It’s true that it will be advancing the story-line. You will probably not see any new archetypes in Issue 10; however there will be a great deal of other fun content to enjoy. I really shouldn’t tell you anything right now because it’s just way too early. Then again….a small hint can’t hurt. Right?
So here it is:

“Issue 10 will focus on a level range that you guys have been clamoring about for a while.”

Let the speculation begin!

I assume it's for post-50 bits. 


Posted by Dave at 8:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Edit
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April 8, 2007

Distant catch-up

Between the trip and other stuff, my CoX play (and CoX board reading) has been pretty limited.  Rectified both today.

First off, it appears the wraps are off on I9 in Test.  Which means I can reveal that Margie was (huzzah!) one of the closed beta testers.   She seemed to enjoy it.  Yay.

Two QoL enhancements, one she showed me and one that I just read on the boards:  To wit, a store in Kings Row and a trainer in PI.  Nice.  Never made any sense not to have them there.

No more ice-skating hunchback roving patrols!  Now they (presumably) just run along like normal.  People are already complaining as bitterly as they did when the bug appeared Way Back When.

Because there's a new Stealth IO, escort hostages will now follow you while you are Stealthed (yay).  The presence of a hostage will debuff the Stealth however (boo).

Lots of stuff about Salvage and Drops and Inventions (Oh My!).  I am possessed by terrific yawning.Note: The purpose of this change is to allow players to not be penalized by new Stealth Invented Enhancement.


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