As the small boat made its way through the pitch black night, we glimpsed our destination: the desolate and rocky island fortress of Alcatraz. Home to some of the best-known villains of the modern age, the legendary prison was both alluring and foreboding, a grim anachronism amid the distant sparkling lights of the shrinking San Francisco skyline.

That was the appropriate setting of a recent NCsoft event showcasing Cryptic Studios' City of Villains, the upcoming sister game to last year's well-received City of Heroes. That game, an MMO casting the player as a superhero out to cleanse Paragon City of evil, is probably best known for its incredibly deep and open-ended character creation system, which offers a startling breadth of body styles, costumes, colors, powers, gameplay styles, and so on. With this level of customizability, it's no surprise that one of the most frequent questions Cryptic has received since that game's launch is "Can I be a villain?" The option to pursue supervillainy was something the studio wanted to include from the beginning, but they also wanted to ensure they had enough content and features for a satisfying experience, and so it was planned for its own game.