Monday 27 June 2005

Pic of the day: A somewhat more difficult indoors mission. The green leg warmers flying in the upper right corner belong to Booster Paque, the faithful kinetic defender that keeps my tanker alive most of the time. In this picture you can't look up her skirts, but that happens too. She has bright green panties. ^^

CoH: Train mission & reputation

I'll let you in on a shameful personal secret: Even though I have played City of Heroes almost daily since the invitation beta, I have never had a level as high as 25 until just recently. Given that there are 50 levels, and they take progressively longer time to get through, that says something about my ability to come up with new characters every few days or at most weeks.

At the start of the game, the levels fly by. As well they should, because you get a new power every other level, and you need a selection of them to function well as a hero. But soon the progress slows down. That's when I go make something else. For this reason, there is a lot I don't know about the game. On the other hand, there's a lot I know about being a newbie! ^_^*

So now I finally got into the mid 20es. And for the first time, 7. Juni (my "invulnerable" energy tanker) got a train mission. I don't remember when these were introduced, but it was in one of the expansions I think. What happens is that you get a new option on the railway's destination menu. In my case it read, after the usual list of stations: "Omicron Point (7. Juni)". The whole team got the same option. Actually the whole team was just him and the defender, Booster Paque. The two of us are made for each other. (The characters, not you and me. Or in the latter case, please tell me.)

Where we stepped off the train, there was no train station anywhere. We were in an open landscape, mostly grass and cliffs and sea. Our task was to stop the battles between the Warriors and the Tsoo, two gangs that are active at that level. This was the Warrior turf, so there were gangs of them scattered around. We beat up all we found because, well, beating up gangsters is the heroic thing to do, right? Besides, we were both in debt after being overconfident in an earlier indoors mission. More about that soon. Anyway, it was a pretty big territory so it took quite some time to find all the battles and arrest everyone. I even went back once and sold enhancements. At first I did not know that we could go back, since there was no train station. But when we came back to where we started, there was a big transparent red box which I could only see when I came close. When I walked into it, it took me back to the train station I had left from.

I like this type of mission. To me, it combines the best of the outdoors and indoors missions: You get blue sky, a varied landscape, and freedom to move around. At the same time, you have the area completely to yourself, and the number and type of enemies is assigned according to your team and your level. I wouldn't mind if they had introduced this type of mission earlier in the game, but on the other hand I can see the point of making more interesting missions available later in the game. After all, since leveling is so slow, there would be no reason to continue playing unless interesting things happened.

One other thing I noticed about this mission was that it did not seem to take into account my reputation. Reputation is also a feature that was introduced in one of the expansions (which are incidentally all free and downloaded automatically). There are several levels of reputation, and you can change them at an analyst. (If you play a low level character, you will eventually get a mission that introduces you to this feature. But it doesn't explain very well how it works.) Everyone starts at the lowest level of reputation, "heroic". By talking to the analyst and paying an amount of influence,you can essentially make the missions more difficult. At the first higher reputation from heroic, "tenacious", you get more villains in the same area. I am not sure if you get actually twice as many, it is at least no more. The effect is much the same as going up from one to two team members. On the next level of reputation again, the number of enemies is back to normal, but they are all one level higher than normal. With the next step up, you get once again the higher number of enemies, but they are still one level higher. (This is the reputation I have chosen recently.) It continues like that for two more levels of reputation.

In the first mission after I changed my reputation, I underestimated the effect it had. As a consequence, both of us were defeated and had to go to the hospital. Once I stopped taking the usual risks, however, we had no further problems. The missions had become increasingly easy for us, now they are back to how they used to be when we were "young". With one notable exception: At the train mission I wrote about above, the villains were once again my own level. Since this was my first mission of that type, I cannot say for sure whether there were more of them than it should have been, but I doubt it. I suspect this also shuts down the rumor that your reputation influences the size and level of the random mobs that show up in the street.

And that was all for today! Two nifty features that have been added to City of Heroes after it was released. They keep doing this, even to the point of adding new zones from time to time. And despite this, the price is the same as for other online games where you have to buy the expansions separately.

This entry was NOT sponsored by Cryptic Studios and NCSoft. More's the pity.