The start of 2010 has become a busy time in the world of City of Heroes/Villains. That being said, I thought this would be a great time to get everyone caught up on the latest happenings in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles.
Last month saw the annual Spring Fling event seasonal arrive where heroes and villains get to team together on missions in the shared zone of Pocket D. For those who are not familiar with Pocket D, it is a zone in the game where both heroes and villains can meet but cannot fight each other. During seasonal events there are usually missions that force both sides to complete a mission for rewards of badges, temporary powers or costume pieces. As usual it was fun mixing archetypes on missions and allowed for some interesting team ups while trying to defeat the every annoying Snaptooth and his minions.
Things really did not slow down after the Spring Fling with the announcement of Double XP Weekend that took place this past weekend, starting a day early on Thursday. This was followed very closely by the announcement of the release date of the Going Rogue expansion in July and more information on the coming free update Issue 17: Dark Mirror scheduled to arrive in April.
When it comes to Issue 17, like any new update, there are things I am looking forward to and some I don’t think I will get a lot of use out of. Even though the game has given you the ability to add tails to your costume they have always been, like the hair in the game, very stiff and don’t react to what the player is doing. Now with this release we are supposed to see tails that will react to movement by swaying or swishing. I think this is a great improvement and will give some new life to some costumes. Hopefully hair animations for characters will not be too far behind.
Dark Mirror will also feature the debut of Ultra Mode which will give a heightened level of detail in lighting, reflections, shadows and water effects in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Users will only be able to access this if they current video card meets the requirements. A few years ago I noticed a huge difference on how the game looked when I upgraded from an old C.R.T. monitor to a flat screen display. I saw colors that did not exist for me before and details I was sorely missing due to my old display. Even though my video card in my desktop computer is not the latest and greatest on the market, I still hope my hardware will be good enough so I can enjoy this enhanced look of the game. There will also be a way to send either influence or infamy (the in-world currency) form one character to another through in-game emails. Even though a hero cannot send money to a villain or vice versa this will allow some of my more wealthy higher level characters help out my lower impoverished ones.
Other noteworthy improvements include active missions increasing from 3 to 7, new story arcs for levels 20 – 30, strike and task force updates, epic archetypes unlocked at 20 instead of 50 as well as the usual new batch of badges and player emotes. This will give players access to Peacebrings, Warshades, Arachnos Soldiers and Arachnos Widows that they have been waiting for. The Mission Architect mode, which allows players to create custom missions will be getting new additions such as maps, giant monsters, escort missions and forcing player to leave the mission manually upon completion. While I have tried the player created missions I really have not gotten into actually making them, so all of these improvements won’t really affect my game play much at all. Overall it looks like an exciting new update that I look forward to playing when it hits the live servers in a few weeks.