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Alien Invasion Ends City Of Heroes Beta
Thanks to the City Of Heroes forums for its reports on the Rikti alien invasion which signaled the end of the PC MMO's Beta phase. Elsewhere, there's also a large gallery of screenshots from this major Beta-ending event involving "a major [alien] strike... against Paragon City", and starring the other-dimensional villains from Cryptic Studios' superhero-based MMO game, which officially launches on April 28th. The event coincided with the wiping of the Beta characters - hence high-level alien-inflicted carnage, with "75-100 [heroes] just lying dead in Atlas Park", as well as the original poster's delight that he "managed to organize a mass suicide jump... before the Beta ended. About 20 of us jumped off the tallest building... [but] we all just sat at 1 HP." Update: 04/23 18:55 GMT by S : A press release from NCSoft regarding their E3 line-up announces plans for first expansion pack, City Of Villains, which "will allow players to take on the role of villain in Paragon's modern metropolis."
I for one, welcome our new alien overlords.
while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
Too bad the name reservation waffling pretty much ended up pissing off a good portion of the customer base twice.
Also, the removal of certain colors from being used on your uniforms pretty much punishes the wrong people (some idiots were creating 'nude' uniforms, basically: instead of banning those people, they removed flesh tones from the possible uniform colors).
The beta ending event didn't work across all zones, either, but heck, it is a beta.
Still, despite all that, the beta was a blast and I can't wait for the game.
Back in the day, there was a Spider-Man game released for the Sega CD that hinted at this type of possibility. There were levels where you had to run left to right and defeat an end boss but along the way there were old ladies getting mugged on the street that you could save. The most recent Spider-Man video games have focused solely on guiding you from the start of the level to the end boss, with no time to just wander around the city. I'm thinking that if City of Heroes takes off, clones and variants may spring up and provide me with this type of gameplay - which I think a lot of people would enjoy, based on how well GTA sold and how well superhero movies have been doing lately.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Guess it's too much to ask for. And yes, I realize this was just the way to end the beta.
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
I was only able to participate for a half hour or so, but here's what I saw.
As soon as I logged in, I went to Atlas Park (the hub/newbie zone of the game). I looked up and sure enough, hanging in the sky right above the giant statue of Atlas was a large ominous sawcer. Very Independance Day-esque. I flew up closer (I play a lvl 24 blaster with flight) to the alien ship, and noticed there were little green flicks and flashes coming down from parts the ship. The Ritki aliens were dropping to the surface.
I flew down and saw what I did not expect. Hundreds of heroes banded together to form a line of scrimmage, using unprecidented organization to fight off one or two aliens at a time. The aliens were all 'conning' purple to me (meaning they were tougher than me, I suspect they were around level 30 apiece), so some aliens took many heroes to take down.
The wave of heroes moved forward until we had resecured the capital building from the alien onslaught. We then huddled around Ms Liberty in a mass of flying, jumping primary colors, and defended against another wave of alien attackers.
I probably hit the screenshot button more than the shoot button during this event.
I'm running an Athlon 1700+ with a gig of ram. I have a GeForce4 Ti 4600 with 256 megs. It was slow and choppy during the real heavy parts (I was getting about a frame a second whenever someone did a 'mass heal' to a batch of 50 heroes), but still remained stable and playable. I was still able to put some hurt on the aliens.
It was a very entertaining event, a successful stress test on the server (and the clients), and it definately made me eager to start playing an official character on Sunday.
If you see Kid Gizmo in the mix, send me a tell!
Hot Soup - Lethal Doses
I'd just like to point out that this event wasn't all peaches and cream. I've got a less than spectacular PC, and 100+ heroes within a 100 yard area is not a good thing. Lag and framerate issues made it impossible for me to even take part in the event, and I really hope Cryptic will do better in the future. What they could have done instead of having them all show up in the same place is just to temporarily replace the normal thug spawns with alien spawns, but I guess that would have made too much sense.
Please let there be an OS X version soon! Oh please! Oh please!
This just looks amazing! OMG! Who wouldn't want to be a Super Hero?!?
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Fargo from gamespy has also put up his (rather entertaining) account of the event:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/508/508603p1.html
Newsie, Moderator, www.tauniverse.com
-cough-
I'm sorry, but I was in during the event too, and this wasn't that cool. I was in Steel Canyon, with my Level 9 Scrapper, Iron Chef.
Heroes were getting obliterated by the dozen. On my Athlon 1900+ and my GeForce FX 5600 with 256MB I was getting 1 frame a second. Since I wasn't a long range blaster this made it impossible for me to actually engage in combat.
I think I hit maybe, 6 of the hundreds of Rikti invaders. This isn't killed, mind you...I was doing around 11-17 points of damage to these guys while they were hitting me for upwards of 200. These guys were spawning in groups of 25-30, and I was able to target and touch 6. There's something wrong here.
Unless they work these lag issues out (I mean...it's just me, but if I was a citizen in the midst of an alien attack I couldn't possibly defend myself from, I'd probably stay the hell indoors, and not be all hustling and bustling outside. I certainly wouldn't be out robbing people.
To end it all, I was in Atlas Park as the big Rikti Spaceship loomed threateningly over City Hall, and then dramatically...disappearing.
I was up on that 20 story building before the others organized the mass "suicide" jump hoping to see some cool explosion or something, but no...poof.
The most entertaining moment of the evening was after it all ended people starting logging in and asking where all the aliens were.
Aside from that it was just a bunch of lag for me and the other close ranged attackers. I considered just logging out because I couldn't do anything, and then just decided to stick around to see if there was some cool finish to it all, but there wasn't even that.
It's been a pretty clean beta, with the exception of the last couple days where it's been hit by INSANE lag. I really like the game so far, but I'm being VERY cautious now.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
My favorite is this one which shows how big the ships were compared to, say, really tall buildings.
Great game, I'm going to enjoy playing it live, also.
Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison
Some Random UI Hacker
We had less than 100 heroes total and most of us were upper 20's - 30's or sidekicked up to that level.
We routed the invaders time and again with fairly minimal losses.
A real-life person was controlling the commander. He had some special powers and was very difficult to bring down, but eventually we did.
I was level 20, but sidekicked up to 34 so I did my fair share of damage to the ungodly invaders. Took a slew of shots of my team (3 beauties plus little old me). Good time had by all. Much less laggy than similar events I participated in back in the early days of Asheron's Call.
I recommend COH to casual gamers who don't want to twist their real lives around to have fun playing a game. I was always able to play 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there and feel like I was making progress and having fun.
They got to a) stress test the servers and b) kill of everybody's beta characters (in a way that made sense with the story and all) in one fell swoop. If that's the kind of game design CoH represents, well, I'm going to buy it soon. And City of Villains! They actually listen to the players!
What would've been really cool is if all the heroes somehow beat all the aliens, like how some people in EQ beat an "unbeatable" dragon, etc.
How much will the expansion cost?
To all the people who beta tested COH, do you think the combat system dicates a fast paced pvp battle or do you think it can achieve strategic paced pvp battle? After testing the game it feels like it might become a 15-20 sec battle on a 1 on 1 basis. I would like to see 2-3 minute battles myself.
Release The Dancing ZODS Of WAR! maniacal laughter
What's the point of a city full of super heroes if there are no civilians to protect? (None of the screenshots show civilians).
Chances are those dancing Zods are duped. Most high runes are.
Kneel before me AC!
Kneeeeelll before Zod!