Month: June 2009

Summer is marching boldly onward, which means that we’re rapidly approaching Champions’ release date.  Will it be more of City of Heroes “sameness”?  Will it excell and win the hearts of a new generation of superheroes?  Or will the critics be vindicated by their grinchy predictions?

I don’t really care — I just want a new set of tights.

Oddly enough, the most exciting news to me is that Cryptic listened to and finally addressed a huge issue with the current build: the limitation of only seven slots on the power tray.  This was causing a huge stir in both the beta and non-beta community, with the average reaction being “why are they limiting this when practically every other MMO under the sun (except Guild Wars) allows multiple power trays?”

So they’re giving us new 14 power slots per tray, as well as multiple “builds” that essentially allow you to swap out different setups according to whatever role you want to play.  Great move in my unhumble opinion — in fact, let’s just go ahead right now and say that unless a MMO in development has a really, really good reason for regressing a feature that comes standard in other games, then they shouldn’t do so.

It’s also a Bio Break thumbs up that they’re spending time talking about the design philosophy behind the different powersets-slash-power themes.  Check out a couple good reads about martial arts and energy projectors, as well as devs’ personal favorite sets.  I gotta say, I really love reading posts like the last one, because it helps to see the devs as players too, and I enjoy getting something other than an official company memo from them.  However, there’s never a dev post that players/fans/critics won’t be able to twist and use against them, and stuff like this has the potential to be inflammatory.  How so?  Oh, just wait until the game launches and then players who are overly tied up in a certain powerset will quote this article as “proof” that devs only care about set X and hate set Y.

A new State of the Game has a few interesting tidbits, including this quote:

You should also be seeing another related (and very nifty) bit of polish in the game. Enemies and heroes that use powers which grab chunks of the world to hurl at their targets, those chunks will be representative of where they are. Concrete with steel pipes in the city, brownish rocks in the desert, ice floes in Canada, etc.

There’s also some good stuff concerning crisis zones and open missions, two features that I don’t exactly know a lot about, but I’m going to do my homework and figure out soon.

Bill Roper wants you to create Facebook pages for your Champions superheroes.  Because we’re not big enough nerds already.

Oh, and did we mention that the open beta is “penciled in” for the middle of August? I thought I did.  But you already knew that, didn’t you?  I’m still waiting for Cryptic to take advantage of my trusting nature and wing some swag my way for a contest or two.