Super Boosters and beyond in City of Heroes
Massively recently had the chance to talk with City of Heroes executive producer Brian Clayton and Lead Designer Matt Miller about a multitude of CoX topics. One of the points we covered was the downloadable optional content, such as the recent Cyborg Pack.
Massively: The recent changes in the studio, the additional bandwidth you were talking about: would you connect those to the changes you've made in pricing, with the additional purchaseable content? Or is that more a direct result of NC NorCal coming into its own?
Brian Clayton: It's a little bit of both, to be perfectly honest. We certainly have huge plans, plans that go over the next five to ten years, for the City of Heroes franchise. So we certainly need to ramp up for that. But we also feel that by providing the Super Booster packs and things like that, it's a win-win in that it helps grow the studio internally to provide more things for our community, but it also helps us to justify those costs and build for the future. I think that's certainly a part of it, but there are larger initiatives again that we can't fully go into detail about, for the future of the franchise.
Massively: So has the Cyborg Pack been well received? And are you guys planning more content along those lines?
Brian Clayton: It's been very well received. I'll let Matt talk to you about the future of those sorts of packs.
Matt Miller: Yeah, we were hoping that the Cyborg Pack was going to be as well received as it was, and actually it was received beyond even our expectations, in how well the community accepted that pack and what we gave them. In doing so, we've kind of branded those packs now, with the Super Booster brand. The Cyborg Pack was Super Booster number 1, and so of course we have plans for 2, 3, 4 and so on, as we go down the line.
So players can expect more packs along those lines. Some really cool, specifically tailored content that may not apply to every character out there, but we're hoping that everyone finds something appealing in at least one of these packs to make them want to go out and improve their character – give them a kind of unique look, or get that unique power that just dots the I's and crosses the T's on exactly what their character was supposed to be like.
Massively: So are they going to be more general like this, when they were themed to a character ideal, or are you guys going to be looking to do additional event-based ones like you did with the Wedding Pack? Will we be seeing holiday packs, at all?
Matt Miller: The first few packs are going to be themed along the lines of the Cyborg Pack. The holiday things – they work at one specific time of year, and then the rest of the year they just sit around and look silly on the store, so if we do a holiday theme pack it'll probably be just a whole bunch of holidays in one.
Read the full interview with Brian Clayton and Matt Miller, and see what they had to say on the coming changes to City of Heroes PvP.
