Colorful Future-Issue 16

Anoirte

Let me start by saying that at first I was prepared to consider Issue16 a "light" issue for me. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Ithought it might be disappointing, but the biggest feature of the issue- powers customization - is one on which I never placed muchimportance. Obviously, many other City of Heroes players have talkedabout it, wanted it, for years now. For me, I always thought that thedevelopers' time could be better spent creating "real" content for thegame instead of just giving us the "fluff" of recoloring our powers.However, I realized the need for City of Heroes to include this featurebecause something very similar is a big selling point for newcomerChampions Online.

Wow. After seeing powers customization in action, I cannot believe Icould ever have been so indifferent. The feature breathes new life intothis game, just in time for the arrival of its first real competitor inthe superhero MMORPG genre. There are an incredible amount of optionsfor nearly every power in the game, and the interface with which yousort through these options is done really well. From minor tweaks tomajor makeovers, everyone is sure to find some use for powerscustomization to bring their character closer to what they envisionthem to be in their minds. The screen on which you pick colors andalternate animations for your powers also gives you a preview of theanimation for each power, so you can see from character creation howevery power in your chosen powersets will look.

Powerscustomization brings with it a redesigned character creator. City ofHeroes already had the best character creator among MMORPGs, and nowthe best just got better. Champions Online may have more costumeoptions, but that's the only area of the character creator that'sarguably better than City of Heroes. City of Heroes' character creatorhas always been easy to use to generate a unique, nice-looking hero orvillain. With Issue 16, the interface gets tweaked to allow jumpingbetween any portion of the creator without losing progress. Want toselect your power colors before your costume? You can do that. Need tocheck to see if a name is available before you get too far in thecreation process? Now you can do that from within the character creatoritself. Decide on a different powerset? You can go back and pick adifferent one without worrying about losing the incredibly detailedcostume you just spent a half-hour putting together.


Speakingof picking powersets, Issue 16 includes the next phase of powersetproliferation. Introduced several issues back, powerset proliferationmeans opening up existing powersets to archetypes that previouslydidn't have access to them. Issue 16 features Radiation Blast forBlasters, Electric Melee and Electric Armor for Scrappers, ThermalRadiation for Masterminds, Archery and Trick Arrow for Corruptors, thelong-awaited Claws for Brutes, and much more. With fourteen powersetsnow in the hands of archetypes that couldn't use them before, combinedwith powers customization, there should be no problem in finding acombination with which to create new characters.



Ancillary and Patron Power Pools (special "fifth" power pools heroesand villains gain access to at level 41) have been redesigned somewhat.They each now have five power choices. This is an attempt to balancethe pools against each other, as some had powers that made themobviously much better than the other choices. There's also been a newAncillary Pool created from scratch for Scrappers, who had less poolsto pick from than other archetypes. Blaze Mastery is the perfectcomplement to Fire/Fire Scrappers, or any Scrapper who just wants toadd a little sizzle to their power selections.

Another bigfeature in Issue 16 is the so-called "Supersidekicking." With thisfeature, putting teams together is easier than ever. There'll be nomore "mentor Tetris" as people try to make sure they have the right mixof mentors and sidekicks for everyone to get experience. WithSupersidekicking, everyone on the team is sidekicked or exemplared tothe team leader or mission owner. To facilitate teaming with members ofvarious levels even further, the developers are doing away with levelrequirements for most "hazard zones." A side effect of Supersidekickingis that bridging - having members of specific levels in order topowerlevel the lower-level characters - will be a thing of the past.

Thereare yet more features of Issue 16, including enhanced difficultyoptions and changes to the Mission Architect, but suffice it to saythat this is a much bigger issue for which I at first gave it credit.Not everyone is going to love everything about Issue 16 (some people,especially those who utilized bridging or the MA to powerlevel theirfriends, may even hate much of it), but overall this is a huge issue interms of quality of life features. Between this issue and the upcomingGoing Rogue expansion, City of Heroes fans should have stuff to keepthem busy for a good long while.