Tuesday 11 January 2005

Pic of the day: The giant snowman towering over a few hapless heroes is called the Winter Lord. This is particularly ironic since my main character, which I played while talking this screenshot, is named Winterlord... The game has a few such events, typically lasting a few days, themed to the season. The previous was Halloween. I wonder if there will be giant chocolade monsters for Valentine's? ^^

CoH expansion: Issue 3

City of Heroes has launched its third free expansion. These are pretty big, and it would not have been uncommon for this type of game to sell them separately. On the other hand, that would mean having to handle some users being able to go places and see stuff that other could not, so I guess it makes things simpler to give it to everyone. Still, it is a selling point. By the next expansion, the game will have doubled in size since its release near the end of April 2004.

In Issue 3, a new city zone is made available. The island of Striga is best suited for heroes from security level 20 to 30. I have one hero in that range, but I have not been there so far. Getting there is not obvious, and it is not like there is a lack of villains around my level in other zones.

Striga is the home base for a new villain group that is being phased in. The Council is gradually replacing the Fifth Column. 5th was very much Nazi-inspired, and with the release of the game to the European market including Germany, it was probably no longer feasible to have villains with German titles. Not to mention that the accountants probably would dislike losing potential customers by reminding the Germans of what their country really is famous for in the world.

Be that as it may, the Council seems to be winning the power struggle with the 5th Column. One reason for this is their extraterrestrial support. It turns out that two factions of alien energy beings have actually been hiding out on Earth for a while. They are able to bond with a human host, which gets some spectacular energy powers. Recently, one faction has dabbled in this Council, and their more friendly competitors have offered their services to help protect the Earth. So experienced heroes (level 50, the highest level so far) are able to start a new character who is such a mixture of human and alien. They are not extremely powerful, but pretty good, and very original. This is a big part of Issue 3, the new "Kheldian" races. They are the first epic archetype. There will supposedly be others in the future, which you qualify for by some other achievement than just plain leveling. But this is the first, and it makes sense. For people who like to see something new, hitting 50 can be the beginning of the end. Unless you open something unique for them to sink their time into.

Not that I expect to ever reach 50 in this game. Then again, I thought the same about Dark Age of Camelot. But there it kinda just happened. I found a class I really liked (Paladin), a server I really liked (the cooperative server) and a guild I really liked. This is a rare thing indeed (and the guild is long dissolved, but I have kept the character). In CoH it has not happened at all, but it could theoretically happen. So far, however, Issue 3 has actually powered down the "class" I preferred, the "Invulnerable" Tanker.

Of course, no character can be really invulnerable. But this particular brand of tanker (robust character) has a better defense than others against physical damage. (On the other hand, they are utterly helpless against psychic attacks.) Probably the most nifty power in that set was "invincibility" which increased your defenses a little for each enemy within brawling range. So if a pack of villains swarmed you, you actually grew harder to hit than if you fought one on one. This may sound kinda unbalanced, and I guess that is why it was changed, but as a tanker you could only advance pretty slowly anyway, since you don't do much damage. Now my tanker needs to use more defensive powers to survive.

Luckily the new issue included a free "respec". This re-specification basically means that you go back to level 1 and then add each level anew, selecting the powers you could have selected at each level, and then adding enhancements to them. Since selecting powers is the strategy part of the game, it is a pretty important event. I used this opportunity to get Stamina, a power that makes my character less likely to get tired. (Sadly it does not spill over into the real world...) I had to give up some other nifty powers for that, so I am not entirely happy. On the other hand, Stamina is a pretty liberating power, freeing the player from having to constantly hold back to save energy. It also comes with a "health" power which lets the character heal faster, always a useful thing in a world full of comic-book violence.

Overall, I am sorry to say, I would personally have preferred to play without Issue 3. But for the game overall it adds quite a bit of content and advances the storyline of the city, so I guess it is a good thing.

The game is running even more slowly than I remember on my main machine now. This machine uses an ATI graphics card, and CoH does not officially support those. Because ATI cards use the same basic functions as nvidia cards, they tend to work anyway, only slower and with more bugs. But by now, the slowness is enough to interfere with the enjoyment of the game. I may buy a modern nvidia card, but I am not sure how much of a priority it is. CoH is my favorite game as it has been since March, but not as intensely as it used to.