Sneak Peak of City of Villains

[bean19]

Wegamer (http://www.wegamer.net), a South Korean gaming site is hosting a video (http://www.wegamer.net/SSI/coh_fan/streaming/coh_showcase_vol1.wmv) taken at yesterday's media showcase of City of Heroes and the upcoming City of Villains.

Show some patience or skip ahead to the good stuff. The first five minutes show fairly standard footage of City of Heroes gameplay but there are som interesting close-ups that show Korean translations of the user interface. Patience pays off in this case; City of Villains fans will be excited to see some footage of the still in development pet-centric villain archetype, known as the Mastermind, summoning a Malta robot and engaging in battle against some feirce-looking snakemen. The video also offers closeup footage of the base-building interface and some of the art that will be available for heroes to customize bases. If you stick around long enough, you even get to see Korean girls cosplaying as superheroes.

This is a must see for all fans of the CoH franchise, superheroes, snakemen, big freaking robots, and Korean girl cosplay.

[BalekFekete]

Just...can't...wait.

CoH has been an awesome game from launch, and I'll go out on a limb and say that CoV will just add loads to the franchise. Will it be the next WoW? Of course not...thankfully not. I like it as it is...small niche game with a solid player base and great support by the devs.

B.

[Thenetcase]

A small niche with over 150k active subscribers.........................

:P

[QueQueg]

If Cryptic's recent "balance" updates to CoH are any indicator, CoV will start out really fun, then slowly become a different, much-less-fun game.

I know I won't be able to stay away from the beta, but after that, all bets are off.

In closing, fuck statesman in the ear.

[Thenetcase]

Wow those girls are retarded looking. Statesman looked like a freak.

City of Heroes has been ballanced. People complain about the nerfing only because they want to be able to blast through levels with out stopping to actually think, strategize or watch out for danger. The "nerfs" in Issue 5 solve that problem and make the game far more interesting over all.
The characters that have been nerfed were already obscenely powerful. So much so that level 35+ characters will get a bunch of people on their team just to boost the level and amount of mobs in a mission (even beyond the hardest mission level).
If the ballancing makes the game less fun for you, please cancel your account ASAP. Someone who has a brain will replace it soon enough.
I actually am one of those people who came BACK to CoH when they started ballancing it out and making ALL powers more useful instead of just a select few.

Peace,
-TNC-

[QueQueg]

I cancelled my account last week. Why bother playing toons that are destined for total mediocrity?

The I5 balance updates didn't just effect overpowered Tanks and Controllers, no, they pretty much fucked everybody. The global reduction in defensive effectiveness hit everyone equally, and some ATs even more so (Ice tankers, SR scrappers were already gimped, did they really need another kick in the nuts?) Was a level 35+ Ice tanker "obscenely" powerful? Hardly.

The dev response was that all these changes had to be made to achieve thier original vision of balance. Why the hell they coudn't find this balance during the beta period, I have no idea. At least then, the game that I bought would have been less fun from the beginning and I wouldn't have been working under the false assumption that we were supposed to be powerful super-heroes. I'd have dropped it in a month and moved on.

[BalekFekete]

/me passes QueQueg some cheese for his whine.

Jesus...adapt, overcome. None of the items *that are on the TEST SERVER* are gaming breaking, period. Will they make it more difficult to just roll up a FOTM character and breeze to 50? Hell yes. Is that a bad thing? HELL NO.

They continue to balance on the test server to date, and haven't released anything yet. Will there be nerfs? Absolutely. Will there be people who don't like them? Sure. But rest assured that there is always that cancel button for those people who can't deal with a little change in their virtual lives. Glad you found it rather than just hanging in a game that you don't enjoy. Makes more room for people who do appreciate the game for what it is...one of the better MMOs on the market.

B.

[bean19]

A small niche with over 150k active subscribers.........................

:P


Well, they are about to release in Korea and City of Villains will get them some lime-light with players who may have grown tired with WoW's instance grinding (not that WoW is a bad game).

Balance in Issue 5 - They made it so that tankers can endure huge mobs of like ten bad guys at once. . . Even Colossus or other comic book tanks wouldn't be able to withstand the huge 100+ mobs that powergamers were pulling in order to exploit game mechanics. Basically they plugged up some crazy overpowered builds that margenalized the difficulty of the content in the PvE game and made for unbeatable opponents in the PvP game.

When you nerf a game and more than half the player base applauds the fact, it's balance. . . True nerfs are when they kill leveling speed. Personally, I really appreciate the fact that they raised mob xp by such a large amount. Sure I can't get a high level controller to pull everything on screen, debuff it, and have me go to town against them while they are held, but I can do normal missions and expect to level nightly.

The changes make it so that teaming and doing missions do not make the game slow xp in compairson to exploits (that they are now disabling with the changes), and I don't feel that my choice of heroes is as limited. . . I don't have to only play "PvP builds" now.

[Kefkataran]

In closing, fuck statesman in the ear.

Well, Statesman isn't lead dev for City of Villains, so there's no real guarantee it'd take the same path if you think he's the main problem.

Bean19: Great first news post and great, well-thought response too! I hope you stick around here!

[bean19]

Thanks Kefka. I'm a long time reader. This is a great gaming news site. . . especially for the obscure.

[Kefkataran]

Well, you have my vote for president. Or news poster. Or whatever. But yeah, lots of good stuff gets posted here and most the community is great.

[Savok]

So much so that level 35+ characters will get a bunch of people on their team just to boost the level and amount of mobs in a mission (even beyond the hardest mission level).

Exactly.

Problem with CoH's balence is no one really knew how to play the game until I2 or so, (the devs knew the basic mechanics worked, they just didn't know how exactly) and by that time it was too late. After that the devs have tried to patch things, added the new difficulties for the bored power gamers, nerfed this and that, reworked that.

None of it has really worked, so the devs have to do what they've been trying to avoid because they know a lot of people won't like it, drastically alter some of the basics, In the long run it'll be good for the game.