‘Ultra’-heavy beat
I like many other City of Heroes/Villains players am becoming excited about the upcoming expansion that due to arrive in July (on last update), but with all that anticipation it’s easy to overlook another important update that the game is having sooner.
The next free update (Issue 17 : Dark mirror) looks set to land very soon and it’s going to arrive all guns blazing bringing with it a revamp to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles with the new “Ultra mode” graphical setting.
It won’t take you much searching to find many gamers comments/thoughts & reactions to the game to all be of a similar nature, the game looks old and out-dated. A fair comment considering that the game is about to celebrate it’s 6th anniversary and the technology it was designed for is so far from cutting-edge it’s scary.
I thought I’d look at the specifications needed to run the game if you bought it now:
- Minimum : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce 2 Series, ATI™ Radeon® 8500 or Intel® i865G Series Video Card
- Recommended : Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6200
A quick peak at the latest Steam hardware survey and it’s easy to see that many people have hardware that is capable of doing alot more, so a move to improve the existing games graphics is one that can only be a benefit to all players old and new.
I’m looking forward to seeing the game through enhanced graphics and judging by the screen-shots it’s going to be very nice indeed, the development team have been busy working on the new expansion and retro-fitting the existing game. Not a small task when you think of all the textures and effects that can be found in a single zone.
Image from : http://eu.cityofheroes.com/en/news/article/ultra_mode_issue_17_and_going_rogue
Oh and remember there is a Double XP an account reactivation weekend from the 4th to the 7th of March
Issue 16 lands
Before a start on the main topic there is a small point that I would like to cover regarding the City of Heroes/Villains major game updates or as those familiar would know them ‘Issues’. When the last issue was delivered there were many people thought Issue 15 was rather limited in the amount of content that was delivered, it is true that the amount given in the Anniversary update was small in comparison to other updates.
Of course there are many reasons for this, I would imagine the primary ones being Issue 14 (Architect) which wasn’t a small update by anyones standards. Now outside of bug and quality of life improvements the additional content that is delivered.
If you took all of the free updates to the game in the last 2 years alone, you soon see that the volume of content is on-par with what some other games would refer to as Expansions.
I really don’t have any problem with no free updates as long as any bug fixes are the primary focus but apparently some-people believe that free content is owned to them just for subscribing.
I appear to have digressed a little from the topic in the title, so onto Issue 16.
Issue 16 is a great update to the City of Heroes game here is a quick run down of the main areas that have been updated:
- Power Proliferation (including 1 new set)
- Power Customization (Colourisation)
- Pets will finally zone with masters
- Enhanced Difficulty Options
- Super sidekicking
Now the first 2 options appeared the most interesting to me, but then the Super sidekicking was announced and I can’t decide which feature is most exciting. I think that being able to team with anyone at any level is going to open up alot of options for players. Not longer will you have to deal with friends leveling away from you and being too far ahead to group with.
The bulk of the Issue is around the powersets but there are some smaller changes that are equally as cool, such as:
- Additional Tool tips and a re-organisation of the options panes
- Character selection at logon displays the last costume they were wearing
- Brawl no longer has an endurance cost
- A settings to only allow email from those on your friends list and those in your SG
There are notes over at paragon wiki http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Patch_Notes/2009-09-15 for easy reading and quick reference.
NPC Me
Just when you think a good day that got massively better wasn’t likely to improve again, something rather cool happens like this. Those that attended the City of MiniCon at Omega Sektor last year have had their surnames added to the NPC name generator for Rikti War Zone and Shadow Shard.
Ok so it may not be a huge thing to everyone, but us EU gamers frequently feel left out of various game bonuses that are offered at the State-side based conventions. So a big thank you Melissa “War Witch” Bianco (who can also be found in those zones too) for adding these.
After flying around for a little while I stumbled across the NPCs named after Rachy and I, also I spotted a couple of other names that sounded familiar.
Now I’m in a game, am I like immortal now or something?
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- Me
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- Rachy
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- Stephen
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- Jörg
