Mark Miller has been announced as the new lead developer for CoX. Here’s a nice interview with him. A few excerpts:
In the next update, Issue 8, we will have a new system that gives us the ability to make your level 50 characters better. That means we’ve abandoned the idea of raising the level cap to 60 for now and instead will give you the option to make your level 50s better, then better again and then even better. That process will last a lot longer than additional 10 levels, which just create a new problem: What to do after hitting level 60?
Nice. It keeps the “Hero of the City” title from being devalued, but actually gives you some non-exemplar, non-cleanup stuff to do with your 50s.
Why are you raising the difficulty of archvillains and monsters?
Well, monsters were supposed to get an entire zone buzzing. Instead they are currently treated like secrets. If a group spots a monster, they take it down themselves before someone else notices it. Archvillains were not enough of a challenge, but we are still looking very closely at them on our test server to make sure they don’t get too tough.
Hmmm. So what they really want is “Oh my God, Lusca!” and get everyone in the zone coming that direction. It might be interesting if they could sort of dynamically scale it (above a certain level) based on the availability of heroes in zone. I know they’re spreading the wealth re monster rewards, but it needs to be spread even further — if you participate (and run a risk), you should get something for it.
We’ll have veteran rewards, which you’ll get every three months of payment and I’d like to stress here that the three months don’t have to be continuous. There’ll be lots of fan requested items and I can tell you that a trench coats costume option will be the first reward that we’ll hand out. The rewards are account based, thus players won’t have to decide which character they want to use them on. Some of the other ideas we’re toying with are base items, free respecs and temporal powers. There’s even a chance we’ll see the beloved Christmas jet pack again. An expanded version of the Halloween event will also open this year giving newer players are chance of getting those cool badges.
Again, nice. You want something that people will value, and that can be achieved, but not something that dramatically affects gameplay.
Trench coats …
The [planned retail] expansion will let heroes and villains team up against a common foe. It can be run from any of the games and there will be no extra subscription fee. It’s also build into the system of making better level 50 characters, however there is going to be content for all level ranges. There will also be a new power set for each of the existing archetypes including tanks and scrappers.
Again, thsi sounds good.
Issue 9 will include a rebuild of a couple of City of Heroes zones of which one is getting a major face lift. I can give you a hint though – it’s the one “we never play” (Faultline, -ed). We’ll also open a City of Heroes zone for villains.
Excellent.
What is the status of the option of transferring characters between servers?
That’s a thing we plan for Issue 8 or around that time. There will be a charge for the service, though – some kind of micro transaction. I don’t know the details but it’s because such a transfer is very taxing on the database servers, there’s certainly much more to a server transfer than you’d think.
Hu-freakin-zzah! Dearly love to be able to do that. And the micro-payment system makes sense — not so much because of the database transfer, I suspect, but because otherwise folks would do it a lot.
A few things confirmed not happening (or not happening soon): the archenemy system, and switching betwen hero-villain, and personal apartments. Which, frankly, is mostly okay (though the archenemy system, conceptually, is cool). I8 is scheduled for 3-4 months after I7 (since it’s not a technology change), so we’re talking September — I7 being predicted “before the end of May.”
(Hrm. Bad timing for us, vacation-wise.)
Lots more in the interview (as much as I quote). Good stuff.
(via Doyce)