City of Heroes/Villains Interview

Boomtown had the opportunity to chat with Cryptic Studios designer Melissa Bianco during a recent City of Heroes/Villains press event.

Q: One of the themes of issue 8 seems to be rewarding long-term players with various funky upgrades for example wings? How are you planning to expand the content for newer players?

A: That’s a good question. The thing with veteran rewards is that it is basically meant as a thank you, so if you have put your time in it’s a thank you. With new players what I did was I went back to some of the old zones that we had already done and I went back to the first 5 zones and kind of gave them a face-lift. When we first created City of Heroes we had maybe twenty animations to play with and so it’s like (oh another purse snatching oh another purse snatching). So I went back in there and I said lets give this more atmosphere, I’m really big on the atmosphere, it’s not just what you fight but what is going on around you. A lot of the stuff that I did was very functional so things like pulling spawns away from mission doors, adding new encounters that were kind of unique and interesting. Just to give it a big WOW factor so when you first lit up the game you go (oh wow) this is really cool look what they are doing and then hopefully that will engage people to keep playing and check out all the other stuff that they could see.