MMOs, the San Diego Comic-Con, and I

City of Heroes

We sat in on the City of Heroes “Going Rogue” panel, which was mostly interesting for being able to actually see what the various people looked like.  Panelists were Matt Miller (Positron), Melissa Bianco (War Witch), Jesse Caceres (Ghost Falcon), and David Nakayama (Noble Savage)

They went through all the various new features of Going Rogue. They spent a fair amount of time discussing the alignment cycle (Hero becomes Vigilante; Vigilante can become Villain or return to Hero; Villain becomes Rogue; Rogue can become Hero or return to Villain).

Vigilantes or Rogues can visit either Paragon or Rogue Isles, but the intent is not that people “stay” in these transitional forms (even though that means you can GET ALL THE BADGES, except for those that flip between Hero/Villain already).  The incentive to stay (or be) pure is access to custom lounges and extra merits  that give you access to Purple stuff.

It all looked pretty darned cool, and the idea of a new starting zone is very attractive.

The panel was asked by the moderator — Bryan Clayton, the head honcho at Paragon — if they had any comments on the news that NCSoft had registered a trademark for “City of Heroes II”. The panel read off in unison a nicely legalistic disclaimer that said they had no comment but that NCSoft was very proud of the game they had. It was amusing.

One interesting comment  was that Paragon Studios has grown significantly in bodies and funding (such that they are running out of room in their new digs), which is letting them do a lot more stuff than they were able to do in the past.

Margie also hung out multiple times at the NCSoft booth. We submitted some hero screen-caps (Torchielle and Kazima) into a raffle in the hope that they’d be rendered by David Nakayama, who’s the art director on CoX. Alas, they were not drawn (or, thus, drawn), but we had some nice chats with him anyway.

We never did make it to the big NCSoft party the evening it was running; we had Prime Invitations, but since Michelle and Mary were not all that much (or at all) into CoH, it would have been kind of rude to drag them to it (since we were using Mary’s car).

DC Universe Online

We had a couple of exposures to DCUO over the weekend.  The “big” one was the, well, DCUO panel, which featured a cinematic of the “backstory” for the game universe (as written by Geoff Johns).  Marv Wolfman (who’s doing mission writing) and Mark Hamill (who’s doing the voice of the Joker, natch) were there, too.

I didn’t sit through the full panel, as I had to run off to another line (Margie maybe can relate more).

We also played the game out on the dealer floor — a PvP training scenario in “icon mode” (where you play actual DCU characters), in this case, a battle in the Batcave between Batman and Nightwing vs the Joker and Harley.  It was a bit difficult, mostly because the X-axis on the mouse was reversed (we were promised it would be fixed by release), but I ended up (as Harley) defeating Margie (as Nightwing). Go, me!

The game looked pretty decent, but it was hard to judge too much from the limited exposure.

We did pick up cards for beta keys, though …

Marvel Super-Hero Squad

This is a newly-announced MMO, based on the super-deformed Super-Hero Squad figures.  Margie and Katherine played a bit at the Marvel booth — it looks to be very kid-oriented (think Wizard 101) in design.

The game is all browser-based — no client.

Here’s a trailer:

Overall, a pretty good MMO time at the Con. Not what I went there expecting to focus on, but …