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."

Comments

Good Idea

[Lifyre]

And like most good ideas it depends on implementation. If the path to Good from Bad and vice versa are nontrivial actions then this stands to add a significant amount of replayablity to characters and personal attachment to a character.

A well thought out quest path that leads to the opposite faction with good story lines, moderately difficult to difficult quests, and tangible rewards can make this a tremendous addition to the game.

If NCSoft has made the path back and forth a toggle switch then it becomes just another piece of fluff that adds little or nothing to the actual game istelf.