We had a chance to sit in on a demonstration for City of Villains, the next superhero game from publisher NCSoft and developer Cryptic Studios, at E3 2005. The new game, as its title suggests, will let you play as a supervillain (rather than a superhero) in a persistent online world. Unlike City of Heroes, which begins your characters' lives in the virtuous town of Paragon City, City of Villains will start your new villain characters in the Rogue Isles, an archipelago where supervillains generally keep to themselves (for now). According to NCSoft designer (and Dungeons & Dragons emeritus) Dave "Zeb" Cook, the studio has four primary goals for the game: to make players feel like bonafide villains; to encourage players to engage in generalized player-versus-player battles; to engage supergroups with all-new base-building gameplay; and to add new graphical features, like light blooming and enhanced particle effects.