A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Six (years) in the city, part 2

Factions
There have always been factions in Paragon City, but originally there was only a single faction that could be played. (If you're not sure what that faction was, boy, I don't know what to tell you.) And yet more or less since launch day, people were speculating about the possibility of creating villainous characters, until it became a reality a year and a half after the game's release. The first (and presumably only) "expandalone" for the game, City of Villains was initially treated as something of a separate entity — although the games coexisted, they could be played separately and didn't require one another to function.

Since the launch of the Rogue Isles, the game has featured a segregation between the factions — PvP takes place only in designated areas and between consensual opponents. ("Consensual" being a broad term here, essentially meaning "don't step in the tiger cage unless you want the chance to get eaten by tigers.") The Pocket D clubs, as well as the Rikti War Zone and the (much later) Cimerora, allow the two sides to team up peacefully and perhaps even develop a friendship, following the time-honored comic book tradition of villains teaming up with heroes for "the greater good."

And it's going even further in Going Rogue, naturally, where you can mirror comic book characters such as Venom, whose morality varies based upon who's writing the book in a given month. Or you can have someone redeem themselves or fall from grace a single time, but where's the fun in that?

Costumes
There is no justice in this world, and as a result, the best-known superhero is Superman rather than Mr. Immortal. (Even I couldn't put Bouncing Boy there with a straight face.) That's probably not the reason why capes are the iconic symbol of a superhero, but it certainly doesn't hurt. Not that you could replicate it at the launch of the game — capes weren't added in until September, almost six months after launch.

While the capes haven't been vastly expanded since launch, the variety of costume options available have slowly accumulated over time, thanks to a development team with full knowledge of how important looking cool really is to their players. We've had free pieces added, Veteran Rewards, Super Boosters, unlockable pieces in-game, and other bits of visual candy that have no actual in-game effect but are still sought out with a fervor.

Sadly, we're still largely denied buttcapes. But progress is being made.

Issues 11 and 16 both expanded our costumes in a major way. 11 allowed us access to the weapons that no shortage of heroes and villains carry around, letting us customize our implements of justice or mayhem as we saw fit. And 16 let us customize more or less every non-Pool power in the game, giving our characters more visual punch and individuality than ever before.

Powers
Tweaks and balance issues aside, powers are one of the systems that has remained largely intact since the game's launch. Every archetype has a primary and a secondary, and... yeah, okay, you know all of this. Other than the Epic Power Pools that were added roughly nine months after launch in Issue 3, the overall workings of powers and what characters have access to what has been fairly straightforward all along.

There have been wrinkles, though. Issue 3 also added the first two Epic Archetypes, which have access to a sharply limited set of powers but far wider variety in those same power sets. (Villains, despite coming out a year and a half later, had to wait two and a half more years before they would get their own Epic Archetypes with Issue 12.) There's also powerset proliferation, put to task in both Issue 12 and Issue 16, which expanded both primary and secondary sets for nearly every archetype.

And then there are the new powersets. Proliferation created some new sets to fill out the gaps between existing sets, but there are others that didn't exist until well after the game launched. Archery, Trick Arrow, Sonic Resonance, Sonic Attack, Dual Blades, Willpower, Shield Defense, and Pain Domination... all new powers added after the fact, not to mention proliferated powers that came to the older archetypes which didn't exist prior to City of Villains. The added powersets for Going Rogue round out characters to have a huge number of options, and allow players to be any hero they want, from Superman to Batman to... okay, not Mr. Immortal exactly, but Regeneration gets you close.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...
So what does the future hold for our beloved game?

Well... a lot of things. In fact, there are a lot of things that it needs to hold. For starters...

Actually, we're not going there yet. Because while there's a nice big article to be written about what the future should hold and needs to hold for City of Heroes, this article is already near double the length of a normal installment. And so while next week will be our monthly installment of questions and answers — which will aim to be at least slightly more informative than the recent developer chat — the week after that, we'll start looking into the future.

No, you may not use Ouroboros to get a peek.

Until then, feel free to mail me any questions, concerns, interesting forum threads, or grotesque factual inaccuracies at Eliot at Massively dot com. And keep your eyes peeled in the game, as I've heard tell some pretty awesome stuff is coming down the pipe.