Issue 16 Reinvigorates 5-year-old City of Heroes… or Does It?

Issue 16 reinvigorates 5-year-old City of Heroes… or does it? By Cecil Adkins Cecil Adkins is a fiction writer and covers MMORPGs for Examiner.com.  He is an active player of City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and several other MMOs.  He can be found on the web at www.ceciladkins.com.

I've said elsewhere that I was prepared to dismiss the latest update to City of Heroes, Issue 16: Power Spectrum, as a light, perhaps even disappointing issue.  I know, I know.  Powers customization is a big deal, and it's inarguably the biggest requested feature since the beginning of the Paragon Studios superhero MMO.  It also required a massive amount of work to implement, some of which is detailed by a post from the lead animation developer on the official forums.  So don't think I didn't realize how much a lot of people wanted the feature, or how much work would have to go into it, especially since at one point there were statements from the developers pretty much saying that it would be impossible – or as close to impossible as you could get without actually being impossible – to implement.

City of Heroes - Issue 16: Power Spectrum Trailer

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It's just that, for me, I believed that the developers should be working on creating new actual content instead of just giving us a way to recolor our powers.  Over the last year or so, there hasn't exactly been a tremendous amount of developer-created content released.  Issue 13 had a handful of new Cimerora missions.  Issue 14 was almost entirely about the Mission Architect, which was great in terms of new content, but it wasn't developer-created content and has caused or exacerbated several problems in its short lifetime.  Issue 15 featured new Task Forces with some cool elements, but they initially had severe continuity issues (some of which continue to this day) to the point where one has to wonder if they were written by anyone even halfway familiar with game lore.

So when I realized Issue 16 wasn't going to have much, if anything, in the way of new developer-created content, I initially felt let down.  That was, of course, before I got my hands on the new features that Issue 16 has introduced to the game.  Powers customization is the biggie, of course, but Supersidekicking, the new exemplar mechanics, and the enhanced difficulty settings are better additions to the game than I realized they would be.  Not everyone agrees with me, of course (one of the global channels that I pay attention to, within the first few minutes of me logging in after Issue 16, was filled with DOOOOOOMM chat from other players about how Issue 16 has killed the game, and there are similar threads on the official forums), but since this is my article and not theirs I can feel free to be as opinionated as I want to be.

Not only does powers customization allow you to make pretty pink force field bubbles or green fire, it can also lead to new character concepts previously impossible to realize.  As part of Issue 16's powerset proliferation, Radiation Blast got ported to Blasters for the first time.  Now, there's not actually a Radiation-based secondary for Blasters, so at first glance it might seem tough for hardcore "concept" people to find something to pair with it.  However, when you can simply recolor things like Energy or Fire Manipulation to match the greenish-yellowish Radiation Blast, you can suddenly create a secondary that's tailored to your image.  So now I have a Radiation Blast/"Radiation" Manipulation (really a recolored Energy Manipulation) Blaster, and you can't say I don't.

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Supersidekicking and the new exemplar mechanics make teaming and doing missions better and easier than ever.  With the new systems, you never have to worry about having enough mentors for lower level sidekicks, and you never have to worry about not progressing your character while exemplared.  Supersidekicking effectively brings everyone on the team to the level (or one level below) the mission owner (or team leader if the team is not in a mission) so that everyone is fighting at around the same combat level.  A side effect of the Supersidekicking system is that bridging – the process of sidekicking a low level character up to within five levels or so of the mission in order to maximize their experience gain for powerleveling purposes – has been eliminated.  It was by no means the only way to powerlevel a character, but it was probably the most popular, at least until the Mission Architect and its associated exploits came into play.  The elimination of bridging has been one of the sources of the aforementioned DOOOOOOOOOMM, but when I see people getting upset about it I can't help but laugh a little.