New Character Creator
Not only does the newly updated Character Creator allow players to jump directly between Archetype, Powersets, Costumes and Character ID in any order without losing progress, but it also allows you to select your colors and theme for each individual power or apply it to the entire powerset. These themes will allow for color tinting of geometry and particle effects such as energy blast colors and force field colors. The primary and secondary colors of any power effect can be changed individually for each power in the set.
Being able to jump between customization areas is a great boon, and being able to test a name right as you start designing a character is way, way, way overdue. The color spectrum choices are well-integrated and versatile; within this area, at least, CoX has leapfrogged past CO.
Customizable Powers
Customizable powersets include Cold Domination, Dark Armor, Dark Blast, Dark Melee, Dark Miasma, Earth Control, Electric Armor, Electric Assault, Electric Blast, Electric Melee, Electricity Manipulation, Empathy, Energy Assault, Energy Aura, Energy Blast, Energy Manipulation, Energy Melee, Fiery Aura, Fire Assault, Fire Blast, Fire Control, Fire Manipulation, Fire Melee, Force Field, Gravity Control, Ice Armor, Ice Assault, Ice Blast, Ice Control, Ice Manipulation, Ice Melee, Illusion, Invulnerability, Kinetics, Mental Manipulation, Mind Control, Necromancy, Ninjitsu, Pain Domination, Plant Control, Poison, Psionic Assault, Psychic Blast, Radiation Blast, Radiation Emission, Regeneration, Sonic Resonance, Sonic Attack, Spines, Stone Armor, Stone Melee, Storm Summoning, Super Reflexes, Thermal Radiation, Thorny Assault and Willpower.
Super Strength and Martial Arts will each receive an alternate animation for their powers, and Stone Armor and Necromancy will include limited customization.
Customizable for most of these means, aside from color, you can choose the animation to use (i.e., don’t like the way Ice Assault looks? Use a different animation choice to cast it). Changes to MA basically let you do fisticuffs rather than kung fu kicks — excellent idea to get around that without having to design a separate power set.
Powerset Proliferation – More powersets are now in the hands of Archetypes who couldn’t use them previously! Blasters will have access to Radiation Blast, Brutes will get their Claws on, Controllers can now freeze it up with Cold Domination, and Corruptors get to feel the “twang” of Archery and Trick Arrow. Defenders can go high-tech with Assault Rifle and Traps, and Dominators can pulverize their enemies with Earth Assault. Masterminds heat things up with Thermal Radiation, Scrappers and Tankers get ready to fry their foes with Electric Melee and Electric Armor, and finally Stalkers get to swing their own mighty Broadsword.
I can understand why there was a desire, initially, to keep CoV and CoH as having separate power features — but that’s pretty much long gone now, and integrating the powers fully between the two is utterly sensible (and makes the Going Rogue work that much more straightforward).
Enhanced Difficulty Options – Players can now fine-tune their difficulty levels by telling the game exactly how they want to be treated. They can choose to be regarded as a specific size team (even if they are soloing), and even have control over the level they are detected to be when it comes to the dynamic spawn system. So if you ever wanted to see if your Scrapper could take on a map that is populated for an 8 person team, four levels higher than your own, now you can! The difficulty settings of the mission owner dictate how the mission is handled, just as before, and you can change your difficulty settings at any Hero Corp.’s Representative in Paragon City or Fateweaver in the Rogue Isles.
This is the one I’m least sure about, if only because I’m not certain the finer granularity will be useful for most people (me). I also think it’s a goofy conceit that you have to go to someone to change your rep/fate.
It’s not world-changing, but the I16 stuff sounds like some good, solid QoL possibiltiies for CoX.