City of Heroes - Origins Seminar Information
Dialogue, 2004-06-30

• Future Mission types are going to take the fight outside of the bounds of what we've experienced before. The instanced outdoor zones and other dimension areas are just the beginning. Trips to villain's lairs, fighting out in the galaxy, more dimensions, and fights outside the city are all possibilities.

• The level cap should have been raised to 50 with the Looking Glass expansion. With that raise comes the "Epic" power pool. The epic pool should allow players to move their characters beyond their templates and major/minor pools.

• For those of you who purchased the guide to City of Heroes with the game, the "respec" mission that allows you to change up your powers and enhancements will eventually be in the game. Mr. Emmert stated that respeccing too easily cheapened the effort players put into creating their characters, and wants to make sure that a respec will be appropriate.

• Mr. Emmert was surprised about the popularity of the game. He sees the popularity as a result of the accessibility of the game design and not necessarily the genre of the game.

• The Praetorians, a new villain group, are darkly familiar. The reason for this is that the Praetorians are an alternate universe version of the major plot characters in the game world. They are led, of course, by a dark version of the Statesman.

• The amount of fan input they've had so far (fan art section to the site, player characters in the comic) is just the beginning. As with many comic book lines, they'd like to have a great deal of fan input into the world surrounding the game. At the very least they want to have a fan club and, someday in the future, fan festivals to gather as many heroes together as possible.

• Mr. Emmert attributes the successful launch to the extremely rigorous beta test, the CTO, the Quality Assurance folks, and the networking technology that NCSoft brought to the party.

• If you were curious, the random spawns, drive-bys, and ambushes do indeed have a lot to do with what missions you take on. These are meant to give you a sense of the world around you and make sure that you know the City is watching what you're doing.

• Someday we will have more origins. There is specifically not an Alien origin yet. There will be. "They haven't made first contact yet." He'd also like to see a "lost" race with a completely unique set of power pools to choose from. Perhaps a bird-like race with wings. Like the Atlanteans, only not trite and overdone.

• City of Heroes will have a strong showing at Gen Con - Indy. He plans to have the E3 booth there for people to check out.

• Starting with thiscoming month, the comics are going to be shipped differently. The mangled and mauled books were a huge mistake that they regret.

• The game was the best selling PC game for the last 6 weeks. It was only out for two days in April, and hit the top of the chart for that month. It was also best selling PC game in May.

• They're almost at 200,000 players. There will be an announcement when they make it.

• The Rikti were named after the literary character Rikki Tikki Tavi. Dr. Vahz is named after George Vasilakos, a gentleman who works for the pen and paper publisher Eden Studios.

• Mr. Emmert attributes the hookup with NCSoft to Richard Garriot's vision regarding the game.

• The main goal in design right now is to provide for more than just combat.

• In one of the most interesting parts of the talk, Mr. Emmert discussed the three major principles of the design used to create City of Heroes -
  1. Simplicity with layers of Complexity.
     Essentially, keep the game as accessible as possible. The game should be able to be played by anyone. Many MMOGs are number intensive, but what does it add to the gameplay experience?
  2. The game is all about being a Super Hero.
     Make the player powerful from day one. Killing rats for hours on end is just not fun. Take the player from that level of starting power and only make things more interesting.
  3. Never let the player make an uninformed decision.
     Don't make the player make any decisions he doesn't have background in. Players aren't given access to all the powers and pools at once so that, at every level, the designers can ensure a basic level of combat prowess. "Nobody ever reads anything" so make sure that it's hard to gimp a character. Origins aren't hampered by specifics so that there are no preconceived notions. Elves are elves, but what is a mutant?

• The Titles you receive at 15th and 30th levels are chosen on purpose. The 15 level titles were chosen to be generic and fit almost any character. (With certain words specifically left out to avoid lawsuits.) The 30th level titles are all specific to your Origin. "And if you think coming up with titles for every origin was easy, you'd be wrong."

• No, there are no capes. Basically, they could have done them well or they could have done them fast. They decided to do them well. Mr. Emmert referenced the Sun Tzu Batman game, which had a very good cape. This cape required an entire AI agent to take care of the cape. They *are* going to do capes. Once they have it right, they'll be able to do braids, hair, sleeves, skirts, trenchcoats, and long belts.

• They want to add more NPC interaction. Think NPCs running up to you on the street to thank you for something you did last week. They also want to add more to the info you can get by clicking on people walking past on the street.

• The large playerbase and sales of City of Heroes are even more remarkable given that they have no international presence yet. Given NCSoft's penetration into the world market, that will likely change sooner rather than later.

• Tailoring is cool, but someday we'll be able to customize our powers. Animations are hard to add, but changing colours on effects will definitely be done, and adding new art may be possible. Can you say personalized weapons?
• More power pools for the future - Vehicles and Animal Companions were specifically mentioned.

• Mr. Emmert acknowledged a problem they have where groups of 6 or more take on regular missions. When groups of this size take on regular missions, the difficulty of the enemies are often raised to a level of difficulty that the players can't handle. Task force missions don't have this problem. They're still deciding what to do about it.

• When enemies are defeated in-game, they slump over and disappear. What happens to them is specifically left open for you to interpret. If you want to be a soulless killer, they're dead. If you want to be a virtuous defender, they've been arrested. Opening up the world for maximum roleplaying was part of the whole idea.

• Voice chat will be available natively in-game someday.

• Task Forces are basically for the hardcore. They take a long time to complete, and that's on purpose.

• For those of you who remember the Rikti Invasion fondly, they would *someday* like to do large events again. They're working now to make the events more scripting intensive, and remove the need to have people "run" the events.

• My favorite quote of the day: "Beta Never Ends".

• Mr. Emmert talked a lot, in general terms, about City of Villains. It's not done yet, so nothing is absolutely concrete. Bases will play a big role for both Heroes and Villains. Supergroups will be able to fortify secret lairs with many cool and interesting toys. These include automated defenses and NPC assistants. Villains and Heroes will have henchmen, and these goons will be fully customizable. PvP will have a lot to do with bases and base invasions (think keep sieges). Groups and individuals that don't want to engage in PvP will never have to. You can have a base without engaging in PvP. There will likely be some sort of banking for supergroups in the bases, allowing players to easily share inspirations and enhancements. One of the aspects of the villain side of the coin that most intrigued me was the possibility to join up with a villain group and work your way up from the lowest ranks.

• Beyond CoV, out into the 2nd Year, they're looking ahead to the next expansion. Ideas kicking around right now include "City of Spies" (think SHEILD), a Time Tunnel into a past/future area, or perhaps "Galaxy of Heroes". Nothing has been set in stone yet.