Pucechan.co.uk

City of Heroes Redux

After a hard day tackling The Family in Independence Port I came across a bunch of heroes taking on the giant octopus, Lusca. I decided to help them out, besides I could do with a few favours.

As you can probably tell I’m still playing an awful lot of CoH, according to HeroStats roughly 5 hours a day at the moment, Daemonstorm is currently level 27 (out of a maximum 50) so he isn’t doing too badly.

Daemonstorm is a Scrapper, which is one of the CoH melee types (the other being a Tanker, which, believe it or not, is the main Tank class), I opted for the Katana/Regeneration combo with Daemonstorm. Katana mostly just because swords are cool, especially lightweight slim ones and I chose Regeneration because it fit with the ideas I had for the character when making his outfit. Think Spawn with a trenchcoat and you are almost there.

The amount of versatility you have when it comes to design in CoH is incredible and it still outclasses many MMOs that I’ve seen to date despite originally coming out in 2004.

Issue 10 is out soon (it’s currently in closed testing, soon to enter Open Beta) and includes the now infamous Rikti invasion event (which they used at the end of the original Beta test to kill all player characters) along with a new high-end zone (where both heroes and villains will have to work together) and Task Force (a Task Force is a sequence of themed missions that have to be completed by a group over a long period, 2 – 5 hours is typical). There will also be new costume parts and presumably other new elements as well.

As it stands I’ve hardly seen much of the content already in the game with so Daemonstorm better hurry up and find some more cool PUGs to do missions with.

Tags: city of heroes, mmo

My return to Paragon City

I just thought I’d post some thoughts on my impressions of City of Heroes now I’ve been playing for a few days. It has evolved quite a bit since I last played with some major client and gameplay changes.

• Graphics – These have had a bit of an overhaul, supporting complex shaders (i.e. Water Effects, Clothing and Building Bumpmaps, Reflections etc.) It almost looks like a different game.
• General “Quality of Life” Changes – Global Chat (Add people rather than characters so you can chat regardless of who they are logged in as) and LOTS of general interface improvements.
• Crafting (Invention System) – This was one thing missing from CoH at launch (due to CoH not really having “loot” in the traditional sense). Some of the enhancement sets (and costume pieces) you can make from crafting are worthwhile and from what I’ve seen so far it seems a good system.
• Auction System – Along with crafting comes the auction system, this too is new and very well done. It works on a hidden price system so the auctioning player sets a price, then bidding players bid blind (although they can see how much the item has sold for in the past). If the blind bids are above the set price the bidding player wins it. Easy, simple and fun.
• Police Band Missions – Police Band missions are missions available at any time from various zones so you always have something to do. Kind of similar to Anarchy Online’s random mission generator.
• Safeguard Missions – Safeguard missions involve preventing a bank heist (and other side events) that take place on destruct-able versions of the city zones, they generally provide a useful temporary power as a reward (for example, Zero-G Jump Pack).

As well as these there have been a constant stream of free expansions, which are known as issues in CoH, the tenth of these is currently in testing and includes a whole slew of high-end content.

The game is just as fun and entertaining as it was when I first played it 3 years ago and the amount of content that has been released and is still being created is great.

I’m really enjoying my stay in Paragon City, I can’t wait to see what content lies ahead on the Rogue Isles.

Tags: city of heroes, mmo

Paragon City needs YOU!

Fixed the times for the event and included UK times…

I first played City of Heroes just over 3 years ago when it was just starting out and recently I’d been thinking about reactivating my account, mostly because of all the new stuff that has been added, there have been nine free expansions since it started with a tenth on it’s way. On a similar note, last night Joanne was thinking about buying Lineage 2 so she could play on the official servers, rather than the privately ran ones that we’d played on before (with varying degrees of happiness).

We decided that we’d purchase Lineage 2 and City of Villains using the official PlayNC online store. We’d both used the store before, myself when ordering City of Heroes originally in 2004 and Joanne purchased all three Guild Wars titles earlier in the year, so we weren’t expecting to have any issues. But, as you’ve probably guessed, we did have some.

For some reason when we tried to order on Joanne’s PlayNC account using either of our cards it would just flag up an error message saying there were too many online codes bought on this account and that we couldn’t have anymore, suggesting that we purchase it from another online supplier, or a retail store. The weird thing being that only Guild Wars was on that account, and even including the expansions that only makes three codes.

So it seems NCSoft only allow you THREE Online Code purchases from their store before flagging your account. That to me just seems crazy.

So, disappointed that we couldn’t get a Lineage 2 code online we decided we’d nip into Lincoln this morning to grab it, Joanne made a post about that here.

I purchased City of Villains with no such drama and linked it with my existing City of Heroes account. Above you can see my current characters, Captain Puce and Pucechan were still there from 2004 and Daemonstorm is my new Hero.

I’ll post more thoughts on City of Heroes (and City of Villains) as I get further in, but so far the improvements made to the game in the 3 years since I last played are dramatic and include improved graphics (now using bump-mapping, shaders and BLOOM ), Auction Houses, Crafting, PvP and much more.

This weekend (June 15th 8:59am PST – 17th 8:59pm PST) is a Double XP event and I have 3 10–day trial codes to give out, so if you’ve ever wanted to be a superhero, now is as good a time as any. Leave a comment if you’d like to give it a try.

For anyone in the UK that makes the event times 15th June 14:59pm – 18th June 02:59am

Tags: city of heroes, mmo