Wednesday 30 June 2004

Pic of the day: Winterlord in "The Makeover". Combined screenshot from City of Heroes.

CoH: Through the looking glass

The first free expansion for City of Heroes has arrived. At a time where most games would have plenty enough with patches, CoH introduces a wheelbarrow of new content.

Two new city zones are open for business. They are both high-level zones, and at this time the upper limit for player character is raised from 40 to 50 levels. This was a strike of genius, as the first month allowed them to take note of people who reached level 40 in unexpectedly short time. The powers that are over-represented in that group of players have been tweaked downward, so that from 40 to 50 they will have to compete on an equal footing with other players. A beta test can never compete with the sheer quantity of players in the released game, so some thing will always crop up after release, be it bugs or exploits.

There are also some new twists on missions. In addition to a couple new building types, you may now get outdoors missions where only you and your team are present, no risk of other players interfering. There is now a risk that defeat could lead to capture by the villains rather than just a trip to the hospital. And you now sometimes get the chance to experiment with scientific or magic equipment in missions. The effects could help or hinder you, and there is no telling which until you try.

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A much anticipated feature is the tailors. At levels 20, 30 and 40 you can get a second uniform. It is not really a secret identity, as your name will still show up, but you can for instance get civilian clothes if you only have a uniform, or the other way around. You cannot change gender or body type, but theoretically you may have a robot look, an alien look, a civilian look and a classic superhero look for the same character when you've passed 40. To get the second uniform slot you need to do a mission (quest) for the tailor. It is no worse than the other missions you get at that level, or at least my level 20 quest wasn't.

Even without this, however, you can change your basic costume. You just can't change back and fort. But if you discover that you colors just don't look right in daylight, it is fairly cheap to change just colors. The price is paid in influence, the currency of the game. This makes sense this time, since changing your uniform will make you harder to recognize and will devalue your "image". Those of you who remember the electric Superman will no doubt agree. Or Spiderman's black uniform.

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As I said, most of the new content is high-level, so I haven't seen it and probably never will. I am, after all, known as "The Eternal Newbie"! But there are some new, tougher enemies for the 40-50 heroes to handle, and one of the new zones has the headquarters of Portal Corp, who make gateways to alternative worlds (some of you may know them as "elseworlds"). It has been hinted that this will be where much of the new content comes in the future ... rather than adding new zones to the existing city (which would be kinda strange in the long run) there will be other locations with very different challenges. So it seems CoH won't be as easy to outgrow as some people have expected.