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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."
I Love CoX... much better gameplay and mature community than many other MMORPG (at least on the european servers). I also appreciate much the fact that my subscription fee goes to pay new issues that are regularly made available to me without additional charges (14 issues released with a lot of additional content to the game in 5 years and counting...) Way to go NCSoft, I wish you did not suck so much at advertising that game...
I like CoH but it is pretty anemic on content compared to other games, which is fine for what it is. It's about dinking around making new characters and then trying it all over again. But there is far more content in one expansion for the major MMO of your choice than in the entire Heroes game from start to finish, and it's not 900 different versions of the Tech building or the Office building with herds of enemies plopped in by the computer. Plus they still get pretty much the same amount of additional content patched in the interim.
The gameplay is a big draw for me. The one thing I wish they'd do is put in more bosses with interesting mechanics -- i.e. special attacks that require heroes to get out of the way, things like the Hollows trial where you need to split up to activate things simultaneously, etc. Apart from three or four fights in both sides of the entire game the deepest strategy is point the "boss" away from the rest of the team. In a game with as many mobility powers as CoH you can do sooo much better.