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City of Heroes Going Rogue With New Expansion
NCSoft has announced a major expansion to City of Heroes, titled Going Rogue, which they say will "blur the line between heroes and villains." It is set in Praetoria, a parallel universe governed by an evil version of Statesman, the game's lead hero. As part of a new alignment system, "hero characters can become villains and vice versa, enabling hero archetypes to cross over to the Rogue Isles and villain archetypes to experience Paragon City." Brian Clayton of Paragon Studios said, "For years, players could choose between playing as a hero or a villain. Now we will present a third, malleable path where players can be affected by the results of their actions."
Good to see the game continuing to grow and change. They've come a long way from a studio that, in 2006, was cut down to just 15 people maintaining the game.
My biggest problem with CoH is that you can say "this powerset combination doesn't really become fun until 20/30/40" for so many different ones. They really screwed up the low levels. I get that they want you to have progression but ideally you're having fun from the word go on a vast majority of characters. This is especially damning in a game whose high level content is essentially nonexistent. Actually it's even worse, since a large part of the endgame is exemplaring yourself into lower level content that you didn't complete and experiencing the pain of losing the powers that make it fun.
The great thing about City Of Heroes is the flexibility in getting a team together. If you want to run dungeons in World of Warcraft, you need a healer, a tank, and three others to fill out the team. In City of Heroes, if you want to run a task force with your blaster, and two scrappers (all DPS classes). You've got all tankers? That'll work too. Most of the "Defender" class don't concentrate on healing, some of them can't heal at all. Missions and task forces scale to your team size, so you don't have to wait on getting the last man to fill out your team. Then there's the sidekick system that lets your friend play with you, even if he's much lower in level.
For what it's worth, Champions Online is coming out pretty soon, but the lead developer is the same guy who developed City of Heroes, so don't expect major differences between the two. From what I've heard, a lot of the old disgruntled CoH players that went over there are hopping mad at how the game has turned out, since they left CoH to get away from the very conventions that are starting to show up in CO.
I read the internet for the articles.
According to MMOGChart.com, City of Heroes/Villains has an active subscriber base of 140,000. A lot more than 20k. That places it as the 11th most subscribed MMO (as of April 2008)