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A Mild-Mannered Reporter: Questionable freshness
We've been on a bit of a kick for new players lately, and that's not by coincidence. Sure, City of Heroes has a well-established playerbase by this point, but it's not like the game is exactly hostile to new players. And while I wanted to do another session of questions and answers, I wanted to wait until I had a good crop of questions that pertain to the newer crowd -- players less familiar with the game or with a given archetype, players who are interested in learning more but unable to find a cogent resource amidst scattered threads on the forums and one-off references in posts. Let's face it, after nearly seven years, a lot of us don't need or want references to these things any longer. We don't need someone explaining to us about Enhancement Diversification or why someone other than the healer asks what you need for a wakie when you die. A newer player might have no idea about these things, though, and so we're mixing up the format a bit here. Let's get back to basics and look at some questions that might seem simple if you know the answer -- but don't tend to get answered if you don't.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: In the case of Brutes
It's the start of a new year, and that means it's time to start getting fired up again. I have been taking a little break from being online for the new year weekend -- after all, when you're always online, it starts to wear on you just a little. But now it's time to get back in the saddle in City of Heroes and everywhere else, and I can't think of a better way to do that than to start in on the archetype overviews once again, especially since I had a friend tell me he was looking forward to his current favorite archetype. We're not on that archetype today, however. No, after having taken a look at the Scrapper to kick things off, we're going to be moving on to a character type that's just down the street. It's the second of three archetypes with an offensive melee/defensive secondary mix, it's one of the four heavily melee-oriented options available, and it's the sort of character type that just makes you start hitting until everything is broken in half. That's right, we're looking at the Brute today, for players who are new to the Brute or to the game in general.
BlizzCon 2008: The Art Gallery
It's not the flashiest place at BlizzCon -- until you step inside. While the gameplay demo areas and the developer panels have claimed most of the attention here at the convention, there are a few hidden treasures inside the booths, one of which is the Blizzard art gallery. The art inside spans across all of Blizzard's games, and though their games are beautiful, the art used in designing them is even moreso.Check out the gallery below to see what's in BlizzCon's art gallery -- from the Barbarian brutes of Diablo to the frozen tundra of Northrend and the starscapes of Starcraft, here is Blizzard's creativity and design mastery put into form on the wall. Whether it's concept art, quick sketches or full paintings, it's really amazing stuff.%Gallery-34291%
CoX Issue 12 starts work on improving PvP
City of Heroes Issue 12: Midnight Hour, now in Open Beta, brings with it a vast assortment of Quality of Life fixes and tweaks. One small but highly significant fix slipped through the net and missed appearing in the first round of patch notes: the buildup of Brute Fury in PvP and against Archvillain and Giant Monster class enemies has finally been persuaded to work the way it should have. Brutes gain an additional 5 points of Fury when attacking these targets, which more than doubles their Fury building rate. The short version: a Brute can now kill you far faster than you'd expect, and can contribute more to drawn-out fights against the game's toughest enemies.The Brute community has anticipated this change for a long time now. Without the fix, their viability in PvP was not much to write home about. Now, Castle the Powers Guy has made a lot of Brutes very happy. Kaiserin tells the story best, with a one-shot painted comic strip.
Halo 3 gets its first 'real' Spartans with Brute
The Brutes could actually be Halo 3's true "Spartans" as a recent preview article reveals they take comrades as lovers -- if the audio clip stays in the game. The information comes from a standard preview article where the writer goes into a bunch of audio facts and says, "One Bungie employee slyly asks the visiting reporters if anyone heard a Brute lament the death of an ally with the words: 'He was my lover.'" Apparently Brutes can actually answer the question if their comrade is a better lover than a fighter.Now before the comment threads fill with: "Brutes R teh ghey? I'm not playing this game." Let's just take a moment to go over Halo lore. We checked with our own resident Halo aficionados and even a close Bungie source. Currently in the fiction there is no mention of any female characters in the whole Covenant, so we have no idea how the Covenant reproduce or if they even need females to reproduce. All we do know at this point is that even Brutes need love. Bungie still has bigger controversy to deal with as they still haven't decided if gamers can have a female Spartan warrior voice in multiplayer. We'll find out if Bungie leaves the Brute line in there on Sept. 25 -- hopefully they do.[Thanks Dean]
Today's hottest game video: Halo gameplay remix
Today's most-watched GameTrailers video is a gameplay-heavy remix of the recent Halo 3 brute documentary. Instead of making-of interviews ("Blah, blah, blah") and talking heads ("Is this my best side?"), this edit shows just the good stuff: in-game action. It's like dessert without dinner; who needs to know details about the game when we can bask in this saccharine footage?See the video after the break.
Halo 3 Brute video
With the Covenant Elite saying goodbye as the major enemy in the Halo series, Bungie had to replace them with someone. To replace them, Bungie gives us the Brutes. Their documentary talks about the evolution of the Brutes from the stupid, mindless killing machines of Halo 2 to the more sophisticated enemy worthy of replacing the Elites. The video shows some nice, new in-game footage (which I'm sure is what most people care about the most) that should leave Halo fans wanting more. For those with an Xbox 360, you can get the 720p version from the Xbox Live Marketplace. Enjoy!
