City of Heroes: Power Spectrum and Going Rogue Interview f..

from : http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/71877


Now your powers can look like cotton candy or hellfire, it's your
choice.
If there’s ever a place to talk about super hero themed MMOs, the San
Diego Comic-Con would be it. The biggest and brightest of all the
“comic book” shows, Comic-Con mixes the geek with the strange with the
celebrity, blends it together, and shoots out pure awesome. It was at
this star-studded event that Ten Ton Hammer sat down with City of
Heroes developers Matt Miller and Joe Morrissey to talk about Issue
16: Power Spectrum and their upcoming expansion, City of Heroes: Going
Rogue.

Ten Ton Hammer: What can you tell our readers about Issue 16: Power
Spectrum?

Matt Miller: I’ll give you a little bit of the history of this Issue.
When NCsoft acquired us, we all went into a back room and asked
ourselves, “What do we want to do now that we have all this time and
money and people on our hands?”

I knew that we’d always want to do powers customization, but we didn’t
do it because we never had enough man power. There’s no real technical
limitation, we just need to redo everything that we’ve done already
because the colors were always attached to the powers that we used.

This was over a year ago. At that point, we took a couple members of
the team aside and said, “You’re working on powers customization. Do
what you need to do to make it work.”

So they went off into their own little box, and a couple months ago
they came out of that box. They'd gotten it working, and they were
ready to show off powers customization.

Y'know, we took a look at everything - and it was all great - but the
original way we did the editor didn't quite work with customizing
powers, going back to the custom, switching to different parts, etc.
We needed a less linear way to do it, so we built this functionality
at the top of the editor where you can jump around to any place in the
customization process.

Customizing the powers is pretty simple. You can select from two
different primary colors, and on top of that you can select a variety
of different options for the theme of power you want to see. For each
power you can choose from three different styles to choose from: the
default, bright, and dark. The way the powers are set up is through
additive or subtractive color palletes. So if you select bright, all
of your color options are going to be bright and if you select dark,
they'll all be dark.

At level one, you'll be able to see every single power in your
particular power set and can customize those powers at level one
during character creation. This way you get a bit of a preview of what
your higher end powers are going to look like. For example, you might
get Power Push at level 25, and think, "Wow...that doesn't look very
good." So once you get to that level you could either not take the
power or you could pick a different power set to play with. Now you
can do that without having to level up to 25 and finding out that you
don't really like the latest power.

Ten Ton Hammer: How many power sets have you added since launch? I'm
sure there's a ton, but I was just curious...

Matt: Honestly, I can't really remember. With City of Villains, we
added a bunch, and we've added a couple here and there ever since. A
couple issues ago we also did power set proliferations, where we
basically took a bunch of power sets that belonged to different
archetypes and made versions to work on alternate archetypes.

In Issue 16, we're doing another round of that. So there's going to be
another ten power sets that players didn't have access to before in
different archetypes.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about animations?

Matt: That's something else that we did in this Issue... we've
customized the animations for certain power sets, most specifically
martial arts. The players that used martial arts felt that most of the
power set just involved kicking and there wasn't enough punching. So
now we've changed it so that the different powers in the set can use a
secondary animation instead of their primary version.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you leading the players into the power customizer
in some way? Something besides just a big news blast?

Matt: We expect that there'll be a pop-up in game saying that players
should visit the tailor if they want to go customize their powers. You
can have different colors for your character per costume slot, so that
way your energy blast will match your costume no matter which costume
you're wearing.

Ten Ton Hammer: How'd you come up with the name of Issue 16: Power
Spectrum?

Matt: I really wanted to do Issue 16: When Pigments Fly, because it
played off the saying "When pigs fly." But it was a little too campy
for even us.

The other one we bounced around was Issue 16: Going Rouge, which of
course plays off the misspelling of our upcoming expansion. It was
just a little too confusing for people-

Ten Ton Hammer: That spell rogue incorrectly.

Matt: Exactly.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there any new content going into Issue 16?

Matt: Not really. There are some things going into the Mission
Architect system to enhance some of the elements we've created for
that system.

Joe Morrissey: We wanted to give some more functionality to the
authors and the people looking for particular types of content. One of
the things we've done is add in more dialogue options for your allies.
So for your bosses, there are dialogue options when their health drops
down to a certain level, and now we've attached that to your allies as
well. So now when they get beat up, they can say things as well.

We've also added more of what we call "betrayal" options as well. At
launch we had this system where you could rescue a guy, bring him back
to the mission "door" and he'd turn evil on you. We've put in a bunch
more of those, where you can have allies that are with you and then we
they enter a particular location, they switch sides.

We're continually putting in a bunch of stuff, small things that move
the whole system along.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is the Mission Architect still popular among the
players?

Joe: I think so. Right now there are over 50,000 arcs up on our
server. It has definitely leveled off since the beginning, because at
some point everyone has made their quota of arcs, since there are only
three slots per account. Everyone's pretty much filled up their slots.

We've also opened up the microtransaction portion of this as well,
since players can now go in and purchase up to five slots in the
architect system for a total of eight.

Ten Ton Hammer: What else are you adjusting in Issue 16?

Matt: One of the other things we're changing is the way the difficulty
slider works. Right now you go to a contact and you ask them to
increase the difficulty of the mission, but they use all of these
weird terms like "being invincible" and our players really didn't know
what to make of it.

A lot of our players were playing on the max level difficulty and
still blowing stuff out of the water. So we decided to just redesign
the whole thing. Now going to that same content will bring up more of
a mechanical dialogue box. The contact will ask you what sort of team
size you want to be treated as and making that 1-8 selection will
adjust the mission accordingly. So now instead of "padding" a group
with players to simply raise the difficulty level of your encounter,
you can adjust it through a difficulty mechanic.

On top of that, you can also choose the level of the monsters you want
to face, from 0 to +4. So if you want to fight a bunch of guys that
are four levels higher than you are, you certainly can do that. You
can also choose whether you want to fight archvillains or not. I mean,
you could run through a mission as a single player treated as an eight-
person group with enemies four levels higher than you and have to
fight archvillains as well.

A lot of players are very excited about that feature. And it's not
just because of those players, but also to cut down on the spam of
seeing people trying to pad their groups.

Joe: It also scales down as well.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you talking about Going Rogue at all?

Matt: When it's done, it's done. There's going to be a pre-order and a
closed beta for the game. We're treating it as a full on release. If
you pre-order the game, you'll get into the beta guaranteed.

There will also be a ton of new low level content coming into the game
for people that are making new low level characters. We're also
working on the "Going Rogue" system, so you can switch sides, and
there's going to be brand new level 50 content that is the *hardest*
stuff we've ever put into the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the graphics be revamped?

Matt: I can't officially say anything... but I'm not saying no.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for taking the time to talk to the City of
Heroes fans and Ten Ton Hammer readers!

Matt: Our pleasure.