Blog of Heroes

Got in a little more gameplay last night on the VIP nights for COH:Freedom.  More early impressions …

• Atlas Park sure is prettified.
• The initial mission arcs in Atlas are also nicely crafted (even tying into the Galaxy events, as should be).
• There are a lot of open zone/instance hunt missions (“Hunt 10 Skulls [in this area where they will regen moderately quickly]”).  It has a different feel (not necessarily good) from the traditional hunts for some reason, perhaps because so many others were hunting there, too — largely because the proposed area to hunt is now highlighted on the maps.
• I do like the giant arrow coins over the heads of the contacts, rather than just a colored circle at their feet.  Less realistic, sure, but it does make them easier to see.
• There are several early adventures where you end up split up as individuals on a team (single-person instances, run in parallel).  Which is great, but at present buggy — every time, the mission didn’t give credit to the non-leader on the team, and we had to rerun it.
• In addition to an Icon in Atlas, Ms. Liberty also lets you buy costume tweaks.  It looks like there are 5-6 slots you get through the normal means, and then another 5-6 you can buy (if you are really into costume changes).  This is actually a nice feature, to allow this at such a low level, since  what looked good in the costume maker doesn’t necessarily look good once you’re running around staring at the toon’s butt the whole time.
• It’s still possible to make a lot of money very quickly at Wentworths.  If one is so inclined.

Travel Powers:

Okay, my life is much easier because of two costume packs I already had purchased — Steampunk has a jet pack, and Animal pack has the most excellent Beast Run.  Those become available at lvl 4 — which is the point that the Power Pools become available.

All the Travel Pools now have five powers.  The first 3 come up at lvl 4, which removes that problem, the 3rd of them being the traditional travel powers.  However, there is now a 5th Travel Pool power that comes available at 14 (if you’ve chosen two in the pool already):

• Afterburner (Flight): Increases your fly speed and makes you much more difficult to hit for a time.  However, you can only use self-directed powers while it’s running.  This should be cool.
• Spring Attack (Jump): Heavy damage attack where you land in the middle of a crowd, knocking them down (“boom” for jumpers).  Looking forward to this, too.
• Burnout (Speed): In exchange for a big Endurance hit, you recharge all of your powers.  Not quite as usable as the others, but I can think of a few situations.
• Long Range Teleport (Teleport): Increases TP range, including across zones.

Interestingly, these extra Travel powers counteract the recent trend, where (a) you could get the real Travel power without any prerequisites (besides level) and (b) the Fitness pool became automatic.  Suddenly, I’m eyeing what I’m going to want to take in the way of powers, and when, and realizing I’ll have to compromise.

Good stuff so far.  A very nice issue.

I’ve had near-zilcho time to take advantage of the VIP Head Start to City of Heroes I21 / Freedom / new-shiny-coolness. So some very few notes on it:

1. The new character creator is very nice. There are some bugs in how easy it is to browse through stuff, and there are still odd disconnects where it’s not clear why an option is or isn’t available for certain classes of costume parts.  But the overall looks is nice, and the mere fact that you can check and reserve your name while just starting off your character is truly awesome.
2. Splash screens, illustration style, and updated character creator music are all pretty spiffy.
3. The new Galaxy intro is fun, exercises basic combat skills and is overall a Good Thing — certainly more heroic than slugging Infected.  My main problem is that it is way too reminiscent of the intro setting for Champions Online — you’re in a city, devastated by an ongoing alien invasion, with voices telling you which way to go and what to do.  I was just waiting for someone to tell me to “Launch the Ironclad Defense!”
4. That said, the “morality mission” part of the intro is a bit … lame.
5. There’s now an Icon in the very attractively redressed Atlas Park.  Hurrah!
6. No email before level 10?  That’s weird.

And that’s about all I’ve done (thanks to a malfunctioning client that hadn’t been keeping me patched).  But I’m looking forward to more.

So Margie and I play CoH off and on fairly regularly, rotating through a variety of duos. This week we shook things up a bit, though, and had our daughter, Katherine, play as well.

I’ve been eyeballing the F2P option coming up in City of Heroes for a bit, thinking that would let Kay play at will, rather than waiting until one or the other of us is off. But as we looked at the options, we realized that a purely F2P setup was going to place just too many limitations — including not being able to join a supergroup. We realize there will be some limits, but we didn’t want Katherine to feel too gimped.

So we went ahead over the weekend and opened up an account for her and got her set up in it, and then spent most of Sunday running a new trio through Praetoria (or least through ten levels of it) — Margie with a broadsword scrapper, me with a grav/rad controller, and Kay with a ninja/bubbles mastermind.

Fun times, though Katherine was having some performance problems with her machine that I need to check out, as well as just her having to deal with the learning curve (and the kibbitzing from the parents). It was kind of cool having a third member of the party, too.

One thing that stood out, though, was her lack of veteran award status, and how much that shapes our early game — e.g., getting full travel powers at 6 (vs prerequisited powers at 14), Nemmy staff / Blackwand / Sands of Mu options, etc. Plus we have some costume packs we’ve purchased — Mystic, Mutant, Beast, and now Steampunk — that provide some added bonuses (travel powers, in particular).

Fortunately for the travel power glitch, we can also do Assemble the Team. 🙂

The plan is to maintain her account for a few months, then switch over to F2P when Freedom comes out. That will give her some extra benefits. Or, if playing with her becomes a new norm, we might maintain her as a VIP account. We’ll see.