City of Heroes Going Free-To-Play Late 2011

Paragon Studios’ superpowered flagship MMO City of Heroes is surfing the ever-growing trendwave of paid online titles moving into the free-to-play market. The developer has announced City of Heroes Freedom, a free version of the seven-year-old game which will launch later this year. The MMO will follow an increasingly popular model, giving free players access to a partial list of areas and features available to paid subscribers — however, in an unusual twist, free users will be able to pick and choose exactly which features and areas they want to access.

Premium subscribers get access to the whole kit and caboodle, as well as special rewards they’ll be able to choose from every month. These include new costumes, consumables and power sets, almost ensuring their supernatural superiority over their free-to-play counterparts. Basically, they’ll be the Justice League to the free players’ Alpha Flight.

Continue reading City of Heroes going free-to-play later this year

Source

City Of Heroes ‘Mac’ Open Beta Has Arrived

The City of Heroes Development Team and TransGaming Media are pleased to announce that Mac users will now be able to test out City of Heroes for the Macintosh.

Lead Designer, Matt “Positron” Miller made an Announcement today on the Official City of Heroes Forums that Open Beta for Mac has now begun.

We’d like to welcome Mac player’s to the City of Heroes Open Beta. You can learn more about the Mac Special Edition at http://www.cityofheroes.com/macbeta/

Source: CityOfHeroes.com Read more

Cryptic Studios Aquired By Atari Parent Company Infogrames

MMORPG developer Cryptic Studios has been acquired by Atari parent company Infogrames, the companies have revealed. The announcement specified that Atari will now be able to “create unique, high quality MMO games on 18 to 24-month cycles.”

Cryptic Studios, which developed City of Heroes and City of Villains for NCSoft, had been known to be developing Champions Online and Star Trek Online, but today’s announcement also reveals development of a third project.

The untitled game is scheduled for 2011, according to GamesIndustry.biz, following Champions Online in 2009 and Star Trek Online in 2010. “This is exactly the type of company we wanted to acquire in order to build Atari for the 21st century,” said Infogrames CEO David Gardener.

Infogrames is paying $26.7 million right away, with an additional $20 million in stock or cash heading Cryptic’s way if revenues of Champions Online and Star Trek Online hit certain targets.

Source: ShackNews.com

City Of Heroes Free Weekend Thru Sunday, December 7th

To celebrate the release of Issue 13: Power & Responsibility the City of Heroes Team would like to welcome back all previous subscribers to try out the new update.

All players who had retail accounts that are in good standing will be able to access our live servers starting now through Sunday night at 11:59 PM EST.

As well, all players logging into City of Heroes will see the following goodies as a result of Issue 13.

• One Freespec Token for each character, to find out more about Respecification check out the Paragon Wiki Article at the Titan Network.
• One Costume Tailor Token for each costume slot, per character, to find out more about changing your costume read up on how to do this here: Costume Section of the Paragon Wiki.
• Prestige Refund for Bases. This refund is a one time granting that will be activated the first time someone enters your base after Issue 13 has gone live.

We look forward to having old and new players join us in celebrating Issue 13: Power & Responsibility.

To find out more about some of the great features check out this full list of Issue 13 guides and resources.

Source: CityOfHeroes.com

City Of Heroes Issue 13 Goes Live!

Months in the making, delayed when the Mission Architect was pushed to next year, finally finally, City of Heroes Issue 13 is live! Yesterday saw the servers go down for one of the largest content pushes ever by the NCsoft development team. The patch notes are up on the official site, and they’re simply monsterous. We’ve been through this list before, but it’s worth going over again: new story arcs for the Midnight Squad, new story arcs for Cimerora, the all-new Merits reward system (which was featured in an exclusive interview here on the site), Day Jobs, new powersets, multiple builds, a huge PvP revamp … it’s exhausting just to mention, let alone consider playing.

For a ‘thousand foot view’ of Issue 13 and its philosophy, be sure to check out our extensive interview with Brian Clayton and Matt Miller all about the “Power and Responsibility” super-patch to this venerable superhero MMO. During that chat we also talked about the future of purchaseable content packs in the game, something we think we’re likely to see new talk of soon. Be sure to check out the links above, read up on the full official patch notes, and dig in to our coverage of City of Heroes Issue 13.   Excelsior!

Source: Massively.com

City Of Heroes Issue 13 Enters Open Beta

A message from Positron:

Good day everyone!

As you can all see now, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility is now in Open Beta. This means that anyone and everyone who has an active City of Heroes account can try out the issue on the Training Room server. We’re just a few short weeks away from releasing this to the Live servers, so we are hoping you will all try Issue 13 and report any bugs you find so we can have a smooth release. If you aren’t familiar with connecting to the Training Room Test Server, you can find instructions on how to do that on the Training Room Forums.

I’d like to take this time to go into more on the designs for some of the new stuff in Issue 13.

Patron and Epic Power Pools:
First off, we’ve made some changes to the Villain Patron and Hero Epic Power Pools. We know that these have been out of balance for a while, so in bringing Patron pools up to the same level as Hero pools, we’ve made a lot of changes to both side’s high level powers. We did extensive datamining on power choices, how they were being utilized, and damage outputs. In the end we tweaked several powers and removed some, replacing them with (what we think) are far more useful ones. We were very cautious in removing powers; it’s not something we ever do lightly. We only do it where there was a huge disparity in how often it is chosen over another power. That to us points to severe problems with that power even being in that pool to begin with.

Merit System:
Next up, we have a new Merit System for playing through content in the game. Players will no longer need to “farm” particular missions or Task Forces for a specific IO. Now you can accumulate Merits and simply purchase that IO outright from the new Merit Vendors sprinkled throughout Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Practically everything you do in the game earns you Merits now and the amount you earn is based on our datamines on how long particular things take to accomplish in our game. This means that really fast Task Forces or Trials will earn you fewer Merits than ones that take longer to complete. Merits don’t have a level associated with them either, so you can earn Merits in your low-level career, and save them up to purchase IOs that will be most useful when you are level 50. The choice is now in your hands, and out of the random drop tables these missions had previously.

Bases:
We’ve made some changes to the way players deal with bases. Overall things got a lot less expensive, Prestige-wise, in bases. This means that smaller SGs should be able to accomplish more with their bases now. If your SG wants to take advantage of the new, lower, prices, you’re going to have to do a little work in selling the older items, and buying the new, lower priced items. It’s an unfortunate artifact of the way the base system was designed that we can’t just refund your SG the difference straight away. We’ve also eliminated the need for Base Salvage. Now everything in bases can be built with Invention Salvage. You will even be able to convert all that extra Base Salvage into Invention Salvage to help get rid of the extraneous items your SG has probably accumulated. This change will help smaller SGs build cooler stuff faster, as well as give large SGs a benefit for all their hard work so far. Don’t worry, the storage containers in bases will now be able to hold a small amount of Invention Salvage as well now.

Read more at CityOfHeroes.com Read more

City Of Heroes Coming To The Mac!

Today, October 30th, 2008, NCsoft announced a partnership with TransGaming, Inc. to bring the award-winning City of Heroes franchise to the Apple® Macintosh® computer platform for the company’s western territories. The Mac version will be available for public beta testing with the release of the game’s thirteenth free expansion, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility this fall. The official launch of the Macintosh version is planned to follow shortly thereafter via a special digital-only edition.

For more details, please click here to read the full press release. Here’s an excerpt:

“Players will soon be able to join the battle of good versus evil in the most popular comic book MMO on both the PC and Mac platforms…and in the same game world,” commented Brian Clayton, executive producer of City of Heroes for NCsoft West. “Given Mac’s fame as a platform for creative people and City of Heroes’ unprecedented character customization options, I think City of Heroes is a perfect fit for the Mac gaming community.”

For anyone interested in pre-ordering the Mac version of City of Heroes, please visit Gametree Online.

Additionally, If you are interested in getting an early look at the Macintosh version of City of Heroes by taking part in the open beta test, click here to sign up!

Source: CityOfHeroes.com

Zombies Ravage City Of Heroes For Halloween

Halloween has come early to City of Heroes. Among the now-traditional trick or treating, collecting temporary costume powers and hunting down roaming giant monsters, the dead have risen from their graves and are devouring the living. Both Paragon City and the Rogue Isles have been affected. Reports mention tattered undead who have a strange resemblance to real-life celebrities, as well as Elite Boss ‘Nightmares’ who seem to be in command.

Players may be wondering why this sudden outbreak of ravaging zombies has happened with Halloween still some time away. An eyewitness from HeroCon has shed some light on the timing of the invasion: ‘After dinner, Positron got up and told us that there were lots of cool things ahead–but he couldn’t tell us about them. Everyone was calling him a big tease. So in order to placate the mob, he turned to Heather and asked if she could call Ops and have them unleash the zombies right then.‘

Source: Massively.com