14 DAY TRIAL // It's been a busy late 2007 for City of Heroes/City of Villains. On November 6th, NCsoft, the original publishers of the game, bought the intellectual property rights from developers Cryptic and then created a new NCsoft studio, called NorCal, with a clear mandate to further develop the game both in terms of balancing and in terms of adding new content.
The first update under NCsoft steering of the project is dubbed Issue 12: Midnight Hour, in keeping with the games tradition of naming updates as new comic book issues. As the name implies, the first addition is that of a new super hero group, called The Midnight Squad, that has access to a time-traveling artifact which they plan to use in their fight against an epic enemy that dwells in Roman times. Players will be able to join with the group, pop back in the Roman era and fight with the best Rome has to offer to unlock new costumes for their characters, based on Ancient Roman armor.
Two new Evil archetypes for characters that reach level 50 are also being introduced, modeled after the earlier Epic archetypes. The villain epics will be called Wolf Spiders and Blood Widows, although the in-game back stories for them are not yet known. Also, all archetypes will have new power sets made available. That doesn't mean new powers altogether, but rather power sets that were previously unavailable.
Apart from these major additions, there are plenty of other tweaks to the game, designed to make the experience more enjoyable. Power sets will not be more accessible in the middle of a fight, leveling up will automatically refill health and endurance bars and numbers will be more widely used to judge the level of some powers, where until the patch only vague descriptions were available. This should make it easier to know who to go up against and who to run from in-game. Some interface-related improvements will also be available, like redesigned contacts and chat windows.
No clear release date was announced for Issue 12: Midnight Hour, but late spring is a good guess for eager players of City of Heroes.