Here. Or, rather, Over There, since it was in Europe …
Lots of Faultline stuff.
What has been your proudest achievement that you were involved in with City of Heroes/Villians pre-issue 8 and with issue 8 as a designer?Well lets see pre-issue 8 it had to be Striga, Striga is my favourite zone and I populate a lot of the city of heroes zones so I’m proud of all of that but Striga was the zone when Archon Vos came on board Thomas Vos, we just started a whole different way of building a zone. We said you know what missions by neighbourhood so you’re not being sent to the other end of the zone; we got patrol technology so you have the council patrolling on the ground you had the sky raiders flying in the air. I got a lot of new
animations for spawns so I have a lot of creativity in that zone that I really didn’t have the time for in the previous zones we really had a lot of time for that one so that’s one of my favourite zones mostly because of just the standard that set with that one. And then anything going forward it was just a whole different way of putting it together.In Issue 8 obviously I’m very happy with Faultline, Faultline was a beautiful zone but it was very difficult to play in, you know the deep crevices and you started in that zone at level 11 at best if you were a flyer you had hover so we actually bumped the level of that to 15 to 25 so we could get people with better travel powers. We basically, (I could go on and on about this) tried to make it a lot more travel friendly obviously it’s a very vertical and creviced zone but we actually filled in a lot of those
crevices the zone was flooded there’s a story line with the flooding of fault line and we put in elevators like in Grandville except there construction elevators. I think there are 12 of them in the zone plus a lot of cat walks to get over those crevices so its a lot more travel friendly than it used to be and we added villain groups to it we put in missions we switched it from a trial zone which is just large groups of villains to a city zone so now you’ve got an underpass to get there, there’s a hospital there
now, stores, missions there obviously and even an entrance to pocket D.What we also did was we opened up the dam, you could never get to the dam you’d go I can see the dam but you could never get in there. So we have opened it up and made it a hazard area so it’s a little tougher than the rest of the zone but it’s really cool. We also brought in a whole bunch of new villains you’ll see Arachnos in there you find out Arachnos has been there for a little while and they have been sifting through the wreckage underneath fault line looking for technology that lord
recluse can use.So we also brought in the PPD, so if your going to bring in the PPD you have to have a donut shop so there is a donut shop with a big donut on top of it and longbow are there too, they have a small presence there but basically your trying to have the heroes patrol the area, I wanted to keep their presence small but enough to add a lot atmosphere to the zone.
Freakshow are there now, the Lost have made their way in and their presence is very significant, we still have the clock work and Vazihlok are still there but I think that you’ll find that it’s a lot more dynamic. I got to write a dialogue for it so you’ll see my signature dialogue in there. So there’s a lot more variety going you don’t just have a big clump of guys standing there waiting to beat the snot out of you so solo’ers can play solo’ers and small groups.
And “newspaper mishes” …
Is there anything on the design side being developed or in issue 8 which you feel would attract more subscribers?Lets see, Issue 8 we have the police band missions, which are kind of like the hero version of the newspaper missions the broker missions and obviously fault line. We have the safeguard missions which are I don’t want to say hero equivalent of mayhem missions which were all about destruction and evil whereas the safe guard missions are all about oh stop the villains from destroying paragon city property or stop them from robbing a bank. So it’s a very kind of a OOO tense way to keep the villains from getting
away with what they want to get away with, to stop them from knocking over the bank or whatever. I think those will be interesting too those should be fun and of course they span the level ranges so right from the beginning you can play them and I think that will be pretty cool.