20th Anniversary Q&A Responses!

[Arcanum]

Hi everyone!

Here are all of the original team's responses from our Q&A at the beginning of the month! We hope you enjoyed the anniversary celebration(s), and look forward to many more years!

Thank you to all of the Original City of Heroes Team Members for taking the time to join us for our in-game events, and provide answers to your questions!

 

There were a LOT of great questions and not all of them could get answered, but we appreciate everyone who participated!

 

---

 

The most important question, first:

🏆 Pepperoni or Pineapple (Pizza)?  🍕

• Pepperoni - 
  • Kevin "Freitag" Callanan -  Pepperoni. Please, let's not be barbarians.
  • C.W. 'Pohsyb" Bennett -  My children enjoy pineapple, I think I may need a paternity test.
  • Melissa "War Witch" Bianco -  Pepperoni
  • Sean "Dr. Aeon" McCann -  Pepperoni.
  • "Dark Watcher" -  Pepperoni.
  • Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney - Pepperoni. No cute addendum here.
• Pineapple
  • Nellie Hughes -  Pineapple
  • John "Protean" Hegner -  I will happily eat both, but if both are present I'll usually take the pineapple because I know more people will eat the pepperoni and I want to make sure everyone gets to enjoy their 'za.
  • Christopher "Back Alley Brawler" Bruce -  I like 'Hawaiian' pizza. But my favorite is thin/crispy crush with as many toppings as I can get.
• Both:
  • Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid -  Why not both?!?
  • Floyd "Castle" Grubb -  Philistines. The proper answer is "Both" but only in the correct context. If you have a good spicy sauce and spicy Pepperoni, then and only then does Pineapple get added to the pizza. The contrast of sweet and spice makes for a wonderful taste experience. If you have mild sauce or bland meats (Canadian Bacon? Ugh) then Pineapple being added is just a travesty.
  • "Fireman" (aka Bass_Ackwards) -  Pepperoni pineapple pizza. Sweet and savory. Yum!
  • Phil "Synapse" Zeleski -  YES. Put stuff on pizza and I will eat it. There is no OR here.
  • Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee -  Yes

Okay, here are the rest!

 

---

 

 Melissa "War Witch" Bianco:

 

Spoiler

• I went by Liquid on the old forums (name was taken here), and I had an interview that I bombed hilariously for the position that I believe Phil Zeleski wound up getting (and wow did that turn out to be the right choice).  Maybe it will jog your memory that I wore a sport coat, which, according to Matt Miller, was a first for the building.  Anyway, after failing to recognize the doorbell as a doorbell, I yanked on the door hard enough to get it open, and later found out it was supposedly locked -- did I break the door lock?  
  • LOL   I'm pretty sure not.  I would have noticed.  But that is AWESOME.  How did I not notice the sport coat and the He-Man Door Yank (tm)?

 

• What were some of the biggest leadership challenges you faced as the game transitioned through management (and revenue generation phases), and what strategies did you adopt to help overcome them?  

  • I'd worked my way up from an Associate Designer and so when the opportunity to switch to Production presented itself, it made sense to me.   We had already, or were already in the middle of switching our subscription model, so that was in the works.  HOWEVER, the biggest challenge I faced, quite frankly, was Imposter Syndrome.  I was absolutely positive that someone was going to figure out that they'd made a bad call putting me in charge of the project and I was going to make a mess of it. 
    
    We had a situation where Marketing wanted an incredibly aggressive MTX deliverable schedule and Costumes (a great seller) was big on that list.  But the schedule was way out of scope of our current resources and output ability.   But you can't just "say", that doesn't work for me and expect that'll work.  (So after I freaked out internally, went home, and hugged my cat for a while, I went to the data.)  You can't argue data.  
    
    I grabbed all the historical data we had on how long costume sets typically took, and plotted out a "real" timeline that revealed expectation vs. reality.   The expectation vs. reality was weeks off.   I presented the schedule to leadership, argued my point, made some recommendations for alternate options, and - because I worked with smart and reasonable men - my concerns were validated, we updated the schedule to be more realistic, and I was very happy.  (And relieved.)  

 

• I used to (and am now again) playing Green Taipan....many years ago now I made you and the lovely player of Sister Flame custom action figures (shown here) way bac. I even have the letter in a document form expressing how much of a lifesaver the game was for me then, and how such a fond welcoming back it's been to play again. Two part question if you'll indulge me: did you wind up hanging onto the custom I made for you? And what's your personal head canon you'd like to see for War Witch today? I don't know if Sister Flame has returned here, it'd be great if you caught up again  

  • I kept literally every single thing a player sent me.  (Ascendant O's, War Witch doll, Sister Flame action figure, Labradorite, pizelles, etc.)  Unfortunately, during my move from California to Idaho, we lost some boxes and my CoH box was one of them.  I don't even have my City of Heroes t-shirts, beach towel, etc. anymore. (To some people that may not be a big deal, but for me -- the girl who kept gravel from her old house she grew up in "so she wouldn't forget where she lived" - this was utterly devastating to me.   Moreso because it was player made and I always appreciated the time players took, not minutes, but HOURS or possibly days to come up with an idea and turn it into something real, and then take the time to send it to me.)  Man, I can't even really properly express what that meant to me.  My desk was a shrine to that.

    As for WW, I would have loved to see her resurrected as HERSELF (not Sorceress Serene) somehow involving a descendant of Requiem.  (Positron could have figured out something amazing, I'm sure, for how to make that happen.
     

• ..what's your favourite joke or Easter Egg in the game, and are there any still to find after all this time?  

  • Hmm...well, I had a great time doing Faultline easter eggs.  Bianco's Italian Restaurant "eat here or else" was kind of on-the-nose, but I didn't care.   Plus, the little dev area.   Plus some of the contacts are named after my step-children. 🙂

    I don't think anyone caught the NPCs with numbers for names.  If someone were, perhaps, to to go to their phone and plug in said numbers, they'd notice those numbers spell words 😉  (But I'm pretty sure I alluded to that ages ago.)
     

• What was it like working on a superhero MMO RPG, does it somehow felt different in comparison to other MMO's?
  • Well, City of Heroes was my very first (and only) MMO job in the industry.  After I moved on from CoH, I ended up working on another Superhero game, but it wasn't an MMO, it was co-op.   BUT...since I'd been playing MMOs since Meridian59 and they were mostly fantasy (with a hint of sci-fi: Anarchy Online and Earth & Beyond), playing a "realistic" modern-day game with heroes was incredibly new and exciting for me.  We had a great personal friend, who has since passed away, and he made a comment wayyy back in the early days how he'd stand in front of one of the garbage cans with the fire in them and just watch it burn.  It was unlike anything he'd seen in games to that point, and he was mesmerized.  So there's definitely a hint of modern-day "fun" that you can get up to with the benefit of being set in a universe where nearly anything is possible.  That, to me, was incredibly exciting and it allowed for a huge canvas for storytelling

 

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?
  • I wanted to be able to ride a horse.

 

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?
  • When Paragon Studios shut down back in 2012, I wanted to "give back" and so I went back to school, got my Medical Administrative Assistant certification and went to work in hospice for 4 years.  It was incredibly rewarding (and so very challenging), but it's a tough job emotionally.  Not all hospice patients are elderly, unfortunately, and after a while, my heart couldn't take it any longer, so I came back to the gaming industry and have been working in games every since.  

 

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched? 

  • Wow, the industry was so small when I first started back in 2002.  I don't want to say we all knew each other, but this was before mobile games took off and over the last 20 years studios have cropped up all over the place.   I knew that you never wanted to burn a bridge when you left a studio because you never knew who you might be interviewing for.  
    
    I think some studios and communities have changed over the years as corporate has become more bottom line and players don't have the extreme loyalty that we experienced on CoH.  I could probably accuse myself of that, now that I think of it.  I don't have the patience that I used to for letting a game grow and become what it probably had intended to be in the first place.  I'm like a locust sometimes where I'll move through a game and move on.  A select few games, I'll go back over and over and cherish.  I don't play MMOs anymore, I'm much more of a solo player these days just because I don't have the time to gather up like I used to -- not as many hours in the day somehow. 🙂  (Plus my husband says I drive him nuts because just as we're getting int

 

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂
  • Aw, thank you for asking!  I'm really good these days.  I've been working in a Christian mobile startup for the last three years.  Family is good -- when I started on CoH, I had 3 step-kids living at home and they've all moved out, and the oldest has kids of her own.  I started a personal challenge back in January 2023 to walk 10k steps a day and I haven't missed a day since then.  (Unfortunately, I like to eat as much as I like to walk, so...hey...what ya gonna do?)  But signs point GO on all fronts.  (What a sweet question.)

 

• What are you reading?
  • The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

 

• How do you explain the excitement and continued interest of players for this game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year?Could you predict this popularity at the time?
  • I still can't believe the amount of love that CoH has gotten, but I still think it was the right game, with the right team, at the right time.  We hit a perfect moment.   And, obviously, players who have been so loyal is a big part of that.   CoH fans were always ALWAYS the most passionate, positive, and loyal.   That's my thought on why the game endured.  (The fact that we had 10 years to add to it was huge because it allowed us to keep adding features that would benefit the player or just add dimension to the game.)

 

 

---

 

 Christopher "Back Alley Brawler" Bruce:

 

Spoiler

• Should Kick have a lower animation time that makes it as viable as Punch? Also, shouldn't Kick's animation not force a weapon or shield to be put away, since the alternative animation for Brawl that looks identical does not force this behavior? 
  • I don't think the original designers for powers really considered animation times as part of the balance equation. When animators would set the number of frames that an animation needed to play through before another animation could interrupt it, it was based on how it felt and how smoothly it would interpolate into other animations.
    I remember noodling around a lot with those values trying to figure out some way to balance things better after the fact, but really it needed to be a more formulaic way. Animations either needed to fit very rigid timeframes or power values needed to be adjusted to fit animation times. 
    But, that just wasn't how the game was built from the start and trying to 'fix' things after the fact, more often than not, just upset because their favorite build got nerfed.
    If there's another power that uses the same animation in a way that works with weapons and shields, and it still looks okay, then I'm not sure why Kick couldn't do the same.
     
• I heard that you fine folks did animation work for the game in 3DS max. If true, why was 3DS max chosen and how was it working in it? With my limited experience in it i can't imagine it was pleasant.  
  • 3DS Max used to be the industry standard at one point in time, particularly when working with Character Studio/Biped. I've been working with Maya for many years now and to be honest, both systems aren't fundamentally all that different under the hoods. Everything boils down to working with matrices and quaternions. There's almost nothing that can be done in one DCC package vs another.
     
• We know the game from 2004 came with several system/platform limitations. Were there any things you'd really wanted as far as effects, animations, or designs, but couldn't just due to tech of the time? 
  • CoH's VFX system was actually *extremely* flexible. I never felt constrained by the system itself as much as the time and number of people on the project. A lot of compromises and re-use of things were done just because we didn't have the time to make everything from scratch as a one-off. Especially since we needed to retarget almost everything to 3 different rig types.
     
• Was there a particular art/comic style you were looking to emulate/pay homage to, when coming up with the look & feel for City of Heroes?  

  • Mainly anything that was cool: Comics, movies, anime, etc. I always tried to match the particular style of the rest of the game. The core idle and movement sets were established, so whatever we were doing had to blend out of and back into those animations, matching the timing, poses, and overall feel of everything else in the game.

    The style is hard for me to define really. It's just something you develop a sense for after playing and seeing everything for thousands and thousands of hours. A mish-mash of golden/silver age comics as well as playing with common tropes & archetypes.
     

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?

  • I always wanted flight to be much faster. But superjump and superspeed needed to be even faster for balance, and superspeed was gated by client/server latency.
     

    I was able to get weapon customization and power customization added to the game. It would have been nice to continue down that pathway and have more animation customizations in how characters would idle, walk, run, jump, etc. Basic mobility sets. That was more a time constraint than tech constraint.
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • These days, Ibuprofen
     

• Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?

  • I'll never forget the first time I saw a player transformed into the Kheldian squid in Atlas Park just floating there. They had just been released and were one of the first people to hit the level req for that power. They had a crowd of like a hundred people standing around going "OoooooooOooooo".
     

    Immediately made a Kheldian character and started leveling her. Ended up being by 2nd favorite character to play.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • Still working in video games. Went back to Cryptic after being laid off from Paragon to work on Neverwinter and a few other unreleased titles.
    
    I moved to Volition to work on Agents of Mayhem and Saints Row. Wanted to move out of California and be as close to our aging parents as I could manage.
    
    Now I'm at Blizzard working on the Overwatch 2 team.
     

• What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? 

  • Weapon Customization and Power customization. Both were things that couldn't be done due to time/budget/tech constraints but damnit, we figured out a way!

 

• Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses
  • I'm not fighting anything the size of a horse!
     
• How difficult was it working with the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes and what were some unusual ways you overcame those difficulties to make it do what you wanted?
  • All code becomes 'spaghetti code' unless you're working on it by yourself. Then it's *your* spaghetti code.
     
• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂    
  • It's been a rough few years, but I'm still hanging on
     
• What are you reading?
  • Right now, this question. And now my answer to it.
     
• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?
  • CoX being build in 2024 would be an entirely different game I think. It would definitely be more of a love letter to MCU than golden/silver age comic books.
     

• If you could design a power set, what would it be and for which AT? I vaguely remember reading there was a planned way for Hamidon to be taken out and that no servers or only one was able to perform it. Was this true and if so, how was Hamidon designed to be fought?

  • I assume you mean original Hamidon. I remember that rumor too.

    
    This was actually one of my guilty pleasures getting to look at the actual power and stats of Hamidon when I started on the dev team. I still don't understand how it was intended to work, but I get the sense that however it was originally designed to work let it be too exploitable, so they changed the mechanics to something to prevent that. That gated everyone into doing one thing that still required a lot of time and cooperation to pull off, and that was considered good enough.

    
    I mean, if he wasn't perma-held by reaching that threshold it was just death for everyone.
     

• What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

  • Green Goo avatar *with* a shield *as* a shield.
     

• Are there any major easter eggs on the level of the Grandville dev dungeon that have yet to be discovered (or publicly discovered at least)? (I know about the hidden message in the Invention tutorial text as well, though that isn't on the wiki)

  • I believe I left something in there that was never discovered...

 

---

 

 Floyd "Castle" Grubb:

 

Spoiler

• I went by Liquid on the old forums (name was taken here), and I had an interview that I bombed hilariously for the position that I believe Phil Zeleski wound up getting (and wow did that turn out to be the right choice).  Maybe it will jog your memory that I wore a sport coat, which, according to Matt Miller, was a first for the building.  Anyway, after failing to recognize the doorbell as a doorbell, I yanked on the door hard enough to get it open, and later found out it was supposedly locked -- did I break the door lock?  
  • Not that anyone ever told me.
     
• If you had to list the top 3-5 powersets (including Force Field) that needed fixing, which ones were they and in which order would you fix them? Which power sets are you most proud of?  Were there any powersets that you thought "the community will love this", but the takeup was meh or worse?

  • Fixing:
    Radiation - it was always OP compared to other Defender sets but every time I pitched changes, the idea was shot down. 
    Stalkers (general) - Great concept characters that had a design meant for a game with different play sensibilities. I consider them a learning experience - always make content for how the game is played, rather than just what you think is cool.

    
    Powersets I am Proud of:
    I really liked the VEATS, especially the Blood Widows.

    
    Community Response:
    See "Stalkers" above
     

• What were the plans for the rest of the Incarnate powers? (Genesis, Mind, Vitae and Omega)

  • As far as I recall, those never got finalized. There were a few different pitches, but, sadly, I don't recall enough to speak to them.
     

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?

  • Moon Base! Also, Illusions that copied the caster/targets costuming.
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • Fixadine. Who wants to be Green?
     

• Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?

  • Space Calamari is delicious, if you can get past the moral quandary of eating sentient beings.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • After Paragon, I've worked on Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars II and am currently on Diablo IV.
     

• Was the team opposed to creating more power sets with a distinctly magical or technological theme? 

  • My philosophy was that Powersets needed to be neither Tech nor Magic inherently. The players Origin and backstory determined what their powers were narratively and we needed to support that as much as possible. Yes, we had Assault Rifle and Gadgets, but those pre-dated me. 
     

• The never-implemented EATs. (Coralax, Blood of the Black Stream, Incarnates, Avilians.) Was there any more of a foundation somewhere in the back of folks minds for their backstories and what they would be like from a lore and player-accessible-AT perspective, or did they pretty much stay "It's an idea?" And/or - since we obviously got Coralax in game as an enemy group, so I suppose with that specifically - was getting them in the game as NPCs adding to or taking away from the chance of having them as EATs? (IE, when they came up with COV, was the Coralax EAT brought back up as "OK, we should work on that too" or "OK, they're in the game, that does everything we really wanted to explore with them" - or was there some other issue, such as "how do we deal with an underwater set of races" with them and the Virtea, that prevented them from becoming an AT?

  • I had a fully fleshed out design for Blood of the Black Stream, but was never able to find time in the dev cycle to implement it. As I recall, we had a pretty solid idea of what we wanted to do with Coralax, too, but it never got out of paper design for the same reasons. As far as story goes -- that was more the writing and encounter teams deal, so I'm not certain what they had planned, if anything.

 

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • I'm most proud of being able to continue development on a game that I loved as a player before I began working on it and delivering a lot of content that most players enjoyed. I can't really point to a specific thing and say "This is the best thing!" because there was so much I touched. If I were forced to pick, it would be completely rebuilding an Archvillain and their encounter mechanics from scratch over a weekend because as designed it simply didn't work and the person responsible for it was in Europe and could not be reached.

    
    Thing I wish never landed in CoH/V - PvP. The game was not designed for it and trying to shoehorn it in created more dissatisfaction than it provided enjoyment in general.
     

    My favorite enemy: Lusca. Was she the most fun encounter? No. Was she rewarding? Also, no. But the creativity that went into that encounter was wonderful and I appreciate that!
     

• Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

  • Ducks: Dunno...what am I armed with?
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • I'd have not put the time and resources into the PvP Revamp in I13
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • CoX was designed by people passionate about games and comics. It was not designed by MMO veterans. They solved problems based on how they thought things would work best rather than what industry standards were. That resulted in some amazing innovations and one or two stumbling blocks.
     

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched?

  • One word - METRICS! For better or worse, we can actually look at data and see how players are interacting with the things we build and use that information to create better content in the future. Metrics rarely tell the whole story, but damn if they aren't helpful!
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea? Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • I really wanted to do Blood of the Black Stream
     

• As far as the comic book runs, did you guys have any input on those? or the TCG/CCG? When I first learned about CoV, I thought about a Raid or SF/TF where a team of CoH players would have to deal with certain objectives that would culminate into say breaking into Arachnos Lair with the aid of Manticore, Stateman, etc... All the while there would be CoV players who would be trying to stop the heroes from completing the objectives and ultimately if they failed to do so, it would lead to defending the lair with Arachnos and his team of villains. Think Conquest mode in the Battlefield franchise.  Did you all have any planned content where CoH and CoV players were pinned against each other outside of just PVP zones?

  • Comics/Cards - Sean "Manticore" Fish was in charge of interacting with the folks who did the comics, TCG, Hero Clicks and TTRPG (which I think never shipped?) I don't think any of the rest of us did.

    
    One of the big goals of PvP was what we called "Base Stitching" - Attackers and Defender bases would be linked together and you would go in and fight. The goal was to take Artifacts from the Shadow Shard from one another. There was a LOT of design and engineering time put into this, but it never panned out.
     

• What games do you play in your free time?

  • Rocket League (nearly 2800 hours!), Valorant, Diablo IV, Baldur's Gate 3 and Age of Wonders IV

 

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂

  • I'm doing better now than I have since leaving Paragon! Live is good.
     

• Players have been wanting an arcane/ mystic powerset for a while now. Did you have any plans on making or had planned on making a full magic-themed powerset to accompany the sorcery power pool?

  • I would never have greenlit a purely magical powerset, sorry. See my earlier answer about my philosophy of such things.
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • When I first heard there was a grey server for CoH, I looked it up, learned about it and even made an account and logged in...once. However, for various reasons, I never went back, although I did sort of keep an eye out on things. 

    
    When I heard Homecoming was given a green light, I was quite pleased! I love the fact that people who love the game and are devoted to it are keeping it alive.
     

• What are you reading?

  • The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker
     

• Who hated and rejected BRB (Big Red Ball)? It would have been glorious! Did you also tear up when you heard the music for the first time logging back in?

  • The Big Red Ball is, was, and always shall be too incredible to be adequately captured in game. 
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? 

  • People passionate about the subject matter who created a tool for player to create their ideal Hero and then use that hero in a world where they could matter.
     

• How did you resist the urge to do "A Little Bit More" on various parts of the game? It honestly astonishes me how you can make something this complete over twenty something releases.

  • Schedules. We had deadlines to meet...and that does wonders for capping the scope of what you're doing.
     

• Was Officer Daniels in the tutorial a Nemesis plot?

  • Of course. Everything is.
     

• What's your favorite thing you worked on that never made it live? And if possible, can you tell us why it didn't happen?

  • Blood of the Black Stream. It never made it live because of schedules. Specifically, we had a full slate of storylines planned and introducing more EATs required a lot of support in terms of story and mission. There was just never a good "space" for them.
     

• Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us?

  • My favorite CoH memory is from the first Beta weekend and hooking up with Kiyotee, Phantasm and Lightwave to run missions.
     

• For people interested in game design, a lot of people point out that you don't actually want a perfectly balanced game, because perfect balance stops being fun. But we also kind of intuitively know that you still want to shoot for a "balanced level of imbalance". So for designing powers in City of Heroes (or maybe even other games) is there a certain benchmark you use as a general guide for "the right level of overpowered" when working on a power conceptually before you push it to beta testing? (And on that note: to what degree should a power be built around the "fantasy" (this is the Grenade power set), and to what degree should it be built around the "mechanics" (this is the Knockbacks And Fire Damage set)?

  • So, CoX used a balance formula that was flawed. Add in that I, as a designer, didn't understand some aspects of what the balance formula was until after CoX shipped and that compounded things.
     

    Philosophically, you want a game to be as balanced as possible while still allowing player decisions and actions to matter. CoX never really got there...but what it did do is get close enough that most players enjoyed their characters. By the time I left Paragon, I was pretty happy with that state of affairs. 
     

• What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band? If you have an ingame character/nickname what is their favorite music/style?

  • I have moderately eclectic tastes in music, but my favorite genre over the last decade or so has been Electro-Swing.
     

• How do you feel about AE and fire farming?

  • Given the opportunity, some players will optimize the fun out of a game. There's a reason I always advocated for the Mission Architect missions to only give cosmetic or non-permanent rewards.

 

 

 

---

 

 Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney:

 

Spoiler

• What were the plans for the rest of the Incarnate powers? (Genesis, Mind, Vitae and Omega)

  • Oh, if only I had access to the Confluence docs which had the notes on these things. I remember a few general things to mention about Incarnate powers.

    
    There would have been a slow roll-out of future Incarnate Powers as we were running up against limitations in fulfilling certain ideas. Ion Judgment, Vorpal Judgement, and Titan Weapons were examples of where we were trying to pull off an idea that we barely could based upon the tech. We had developed lua scripting to replace/supplement event content and were just starting to think about how we could use it to get some more scripted boss and powers behaviors, and that would have heavily influenced what things we tried to get up to with the Incarnate slots.

    
    Initially all of the slots would have gone along with the Praetorian content, but that plan was revised before Going Rogue launched, and we knew at the pace we could deliver we wouldn't be able to do justice to all the slots simultaneously. It's likely that the remaining slots would have all been reserved for the Battalion content arc and might have featured heavily in countering Battalion content.

    
    I may be completely misremembering, but I think Genesis's "theme" would have been summoning pseudo-pets - like Lore but physical objects, like turning a location into a Volcano. As in "the Genesis device" from Star Trek. One of the ideas we were interested in was multi-part entities, that could have independent attacks, so large and possibly multi-stage summonables could have come from that.

    
    I think Mind's theme might have been Control centric, and I seem to recall it would be less "a big nuke" and more of a lingering effect.

    
    Vitae I really don't recall, it's possible that it and Mind might have served more of the "counter the Battalion bad stuff" role in our future plotting than just making players even more powerful.

    
    At least one of the slots we had speculated that what we wanted was a collective usage mechanic - that when the team activated the Incarnate power it would trigger everyone else's in the slot at the same time, with an increased effect for each. We were a bit wary of ever handing out a bunch more individual nukes like the Judgment slot.

    
    Omega's were definitely all going to be simply "rule of cool" and likely unbalanced. There was some thought about Omega not automatically recharging, but rather that each use of your Omega was really a reward treat for completing the toughest content.

    There was one idea that I'm not sure would have ever gone through, which was that Omega boosted the whole city, rather than a personal tool. Think like the Onyxia head in WOW. The idea that now you would be lending your power out to others in a similar way that say, the Patron Powers seemed to work. There was even an idle idea that at the Omega level you could retire your character and "ascend," becoming part of some memorial in the server. As is probably obvious, all those ideas were far from fully formed when the studio closed.
     

• If you had to list the top 3-5 powersets (including Force Field) that needed fixing, which ones were they and in which order would you fix them?

  • In terms of "baked into the cake" balance problems, defense and resistance really ranked up there - I think it's fair to say that if I was to try to "fix" any amount of powersets (which was not really a priority at the time compared to new ideas) it would have been those defense sets like Invulnerability, Super Reflexes, (and as you say, Force Field) and try to come up with a way to make them more fun overall.

    Of the offensive sets I think Super Strength was the one that I really would have been interested in addressing.

    I will say that because of how invested players were, there was not a great deal of stomach for wild changes that would have lessened player impact. The Fitness change, for instance, really was more of a concession that players would simply have more fun if we took the Stamina meta off the table as a question, but I doubt there would have been significant hunger to really look at "fixing" sets and possibly igniting a firestorm of controversy when we could possibly add new sets or player experience/QOL instead.
     

• Which power sets are you most proud of?

  • I wasn't in the driver's seat for any of the big powersets but both Dual Pistols and Titan Weapons were a real joy and was one of those examples of where we were pushing the boundaries of what we could do with the tech.
     

• Were there any powersets that you thought "the community will love this", but the takeup was meh or worse?

  • I think I'd say Dual Pistols. I think Phil would have more to say since it was largely his creation, but I think overall it was kept fairly tame in terms of raw power expecting that the flexibility would make up for it, and that wasn't the case.

 

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?

  • Many things. In fact, I had a Confluence page for several years titled “Things Tim Wishes He Could Do,” though I did manage to cross off a few by the end.
    Powers had very limited ability to calculate and perform logical effects. For instance, “do X if the target is afflicted by a dot” or “telegraph action X and then perform it” (as you might want a Boss to do) was relatively impractical to implement (though we did leverage a lot of reward tokens and pseudo-pets to try and get there anyway), or a power which impacted the behavior of a mob.

    
    One of our ultimate goals was to make content that felt more intentional than a bunch of mobs using their powers at random. There were elements of that which emerged (usually via aforementioned hacks) but we didn’t expect we would be able to do justice to them until we had the ability to make an AI behavior or a power execute a server side script, which might have happened within a year or so of closure had things progressed. That would have been the “omni-tool” in the box that would have opened up a lot of possibilities.
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • Fixadine, I just have more connection to the Praetorian content than the rest since I joined the studio during Going Rogue’s development.
     

• Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?

  • We did sometimes bat around the idea of doing more “play as character X for a short bit” which might have worked for doing more Kheldian content, possibly in flashback. It would have come up more when Battalion content got developed, it was not very far along when the studio closed.
     

    If it’s a mature Kheldian of sound mind, you have their consent, and it’s in service of good, then consuming them would not be morally wrong.
     

• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?

  • I found out that Null the Gull had its powers extended which filled my empty heart with joy briefly.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • I’m still in the games industry as a technical designer / engineer. My current work is at Schell Games, maker of fun adventure VR games like the upcoming Silent Slayer: Vault of the Vampire which you should totally check out! (/plug)
     

• Some gods are actually incarnates and some incarnates are gods. For the ones that aren't, how did they come to be, and what were other planets gods like? 

  • Not really responsive to your question I’m afraid, but AFAIK there was never an internally official “this is what Incarnate nature means and how it works.” Everyone is likely to have their own interpretations, so this is just my own:

    
    An incarnate taps into part of the collective spirit of a community (maybe planet, maybe culture, maybe city, maybe multiverse) and draws power from that community. The part the incarnate “owns” most often looks something like an ideal or a symbol, which becomes so associated with them that they come to share an identity with that ideal.

    
    That ideal can as the community changes, but new ideals can pop-up all the time as well. What makes the ideal and the collective spirit behind it more or less “powerful” isn’t simply the scale of the collective, but something else. 

    
    The secret is that “incarnate-ness” isn’t a binary switch for a special elect. We only really know the capital-I Incarnates because their amount of this property becomes undeniable.

    
    But every player character was already an incarnate in a small degree as soon as they started out, of whatever ideal(s) they chose for themselves at character creation.. As their character became “more” within that community, that power they could draw on increased until it too became undeniable and obvious. All of the origins “work” to make heroes and villains of great power, but they only “work” in this multiverse because of this collective spirit.
     

• Was the team opposed to creating more power sets with a distinctly magical or technological theme? What were upcoming powersets going to look like, theme and mechanics wise? 

  • Since Magic and Technology were both origins, having at least a plausible way to match powerset to any origin was preferable. Some sets like Devices really challenged this rule, though, so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

    
    I do struggle to think off the top of my head though what we would have done on a powers side for a “magic” or “tech” themed set that wouldn’t also be amenable to being flavored in either direction by the choices of the player and their costuming.

    
    In Freedom there was a definite attraction for more visually stunning sets whose animations could stand out, that’s why you saw things like Staff Fighting. I don’t know exactly what was in folks heads, but that was where we were headed.
     

• Incarnates. I know they were initially mentioned *way* back when as EATs, and became the system we ended up with. It always felt... a little tacked on, to me, as it was. So, three questions related to that... *was* it kind of tacked on, at what point (if anyone recalls) was it shifted from "EAT somewhere in the way back burners" to "post-50 power and leveling system," and if you'd been given the go-ahead and funding for a COH 2, would you have created a similar system that meshed more into the game?      

  • By the time I showed up (Aug 2009) it looked very much like the system we ultimately shipped with, though we did restructure to the tree method of acquisition and not release all the slots at once.

    
    The different pitches for COH2 differed widely enough that you couldn’t really connect their endgame advancement ideas to Incarnates, but they were all thinking more about what an “endgame” looked like compared to the original, that’s for sure.

    
    If you want to say the Incarnates looked tacked-on, I think that’s a fair opinion to hold. It was certainly attempting to make an endgame / alternative advancement system that wasn’t part of the original systemic vision with limited resources.
     

• Other than the moon 🙂 were there any ideas for expanding the COH world out into other locations- Egypt (yes, still thinking of BotBS,) South America, Antarctica (secret villain lairs!) , Cardiff - or would that have been something that, if done, would have been more of a COH 2 thing - or was it thought of at all?    

  • Whatever we needed for “Battalion Worlds” would have been our shot at a truly alien “Avatar-like” environment set, and probably taken most of the resources that would have been available for that.

    I had previously worked on the Stargate Worlds MMO so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that I would have pitched a crossover set - that we would make the Battalion ship interiors look like a high-tech temple and at the same time get most of the way to an ancient temple set in the process. I think that could have been a cool pitch if we figured out a way to make it visually look like “Battalion/COH” rather than a cheap rip-off.
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? Favourite enemy?

  • Basically whatever we would have come up with in 2013. Powers and behaviors able to invoke lua scripts would have been a massive tool in the toolbox.
    
    I helped a lot of people make a lot of cool things, and we were able to “archaeologically” restore some things which had passed out of living memory in the studio (like superbase items).
    
    At a certain point the development of the game nearly came to a halt. I came in when Paragon Studios was ramping up, and that was great, but I wonder what would have happened had it not gone down that way.
    
    In terms of dark horse enemy groups, I really liked the Goldbrickers and the Sky Raiders and their aesthetic. I think story-wise Carnival of Shadows / Carnival of Light always made me smile.
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • Hero Merits / Villain Merits. They were the solution to a problem I’m not sure would have ever existed and probably caused more in the process.
    
    The way Incarnate powers got unlocked with the XP tracks and the Salvage. It better fit the original plans for Incarnate content and when those got downscoped we probably should have revised / reduced these instead of leaving it in as that part was mostly done already.
     

• Why was Statesman chosen to be killed?

  • Because if you’re going to call something a “Signature Story Arc”, something rather impressive better happen in it.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • It came out at a time where player expectations of what a game looked like allowed for implementation of things like the costume creator - you could throw literally hundreds of simple tint, mask, or decals on top of a simple 3d mesh and you could do that *cheaply* and you wouldn’t give your art director a heart attack. Even towards the end of the game’s development the changing tastes of the audience meant that that initial amount of raw customization power & freedom was not something we could deliver to the same degree.
    
    Every pitch for COH2 like games had to really scope down the character creator process and powerset count because otherwise it would have bankrupted any studio trying to do that to PS4 fidelity. And today? Forget it. As long as you have to hit that idea of “what a 3d game looks like” you’ll never be able to afford making another COX. 3d games just got too good looking.

    
    I wasn’t in the industry when COH launched, just a player, but it’s a wild and giant place today. Impossibly good things are very common, yet it’s as hit-driven and seemingly unsustainable as ever. Some things are easier tech-wise, but expectations have risen far outpacing technical advancement. It’s never been easier to make a game, and it’s never been harder to make money making a game.

    
    We had a task tracking flag for “Moonbase” for things we wanted to do, but were not sure if we would ever get to do them or not. It was a goal, but the route to it was not obvious.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea?

  • I had a wacky plan to provide Masterminds with a pet customization feature by redirecting one of the costume change slots to be used on their pets instead of themselves. It didn’t go anyway.

    
    After we did the doppelganger work I also wanted a Mastermind set that could target other player characters and summon small doppelgangers of them.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • The lua scripting work was just about to go live. When we heard that we were shutting down, I actually asked if we could just push the beta to live early so we could run lua scripted zone events live – since we had the ability to run a lua script directly from the console buffer, if we had Accesslevel on live we could have done some interesting things in those last months, but it was shot down (for sane reasons).
     

• How difficult was it working with the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes and what were some unusual ways you overcame those difficulties to make it do what you wanted?

  • I got very good at understanding the old code and what it was trying to do even though the original engineer was far removed from us. I spent a lot of time hypothesizing how to do “X” with what we had, or the smallest “want of a nail” thing that would get us.

    
    Vorpal Judgement for example, leveraged the fact that the FX system had the ability to know the enttype of your target when it chose which FX to play. It had to do that so that it could draw the right size of FX for say, a ice hold, when targeting male, female, or huge bodytype. We simply added a single flag to flip that logic from target enttype to source enttype, and boom - Vorpal Judgement could spawn the right “humanoid” FX shadow of “you” when you attacked with it.

    
    Titan Weapon and Street Justice also did a lot with “buffs” and stacking even though the original system had never been designed to work that way, and lacked a lot of the sophistication you might want in a buff system.

    
    We had *loosely* speculated that after ending the Battalion arc it would probably be close for the game to EOL itself, and therefore the idea of Ascending/permadeathing/hall of faming characters when they got the end of the story was not immediately shot down, but it was far, FAR from an active plan.

    
    The simpler answer would be that a lot of the post-Tyrant Incarnate slots would have had a much more impressive effect vs Battalion than in ordinary play.
     

• What were you planning on adding to the game before shut-down?

  • More lua scripting. Boss fights and powers which leveraged lua scripting. Digging into Superbase code. Woofers & Null the Gull Task Force.
     

• When I first learned about CoV, I thought about a Raid or SF/TF where a team of CoH players would have to deal with certain objectives that would culminate into say breaking into Arachnos Lair with the aid of Manticore, Stateman, etc... All the while there would be CoV players who would be trying to stop the heroes from completing the objectives and ultimately if they failed to do so, it would lead to defending the lair with Arachnos and his team of villains. Think Conquest mode in the Battlefield franchise.  Did you all have any planned content where CoH and CoV players were pinned against each other outside of just PVP zones?

  • I’m not aware of plans at the end to look at PVP. Like several other elements of the game, it had no resources or free folks time to invest in it.

    
    The idea of a competitive level Incarnate Trial might have been something we would have considered as part of the next wave, though.
     

• What is the one powerset you guys were mostly against adding but the powers that be pushed it or your least favorite? Which is a powerset that was in the works and you all would have loved to have seen? Lastly, why did you all not consider adding Swinging as a travel power or tunneling?

  • Swinging might have seen life one day as a special flavourful power, but for a game that had a lot of interior map content I don’t think there would have been enough way to do it. Sides of walls had collision, but no navmesh capability, so trying to do “wall crawler” type effects would have required a vast amount of new work and since it wouldn’t be re-usable in many contexts it would probably have never gone forward.

    
    Tunneling in the sense that you could move around as, say, a ground effect, but ultimately following similar rules to Super Speed would have been doable, but for balance of content you’d still need to be able to be hit during it, which means we would have had to pop you out. So I suppose we would have considered if it was worth it to the players at that point. I don’t know how else we could have conceptualized Tunneling in a way that didn’t add a major core system to the game just to support it.
     

• What do you all think of skunks? They're pretty nice animals. More importantly, were there other animal heads, like the monster ones and the piranha/bull/eagle ones, planned for the game? If so then which one was next to be added before the shutdown occurred, and what were long term planned additions?

  • My knowledge of likable skunks begins and ends with Pepe le Pew. Product development / marketing would have been the drivers for new animal heads. My understanding is that we certainly would have done new packs but at a longish cadence to avoid burning out the interest.
     

• Since Wells are species/planet based, how does it work for aliens? If an alien character comes to Earth, do they switch to drawing from Humanity's well, or do they still draw from their own? What about Kheldians? Do they draw from humanity's, the kheldian one, or both?

  • In my conceptualization, an alien can either be tied to their original collective spirit well or adopt the community of Earth. Kheldians as well implicitly have that kind of choice, it depends on where the heart is.

    
    Being the “sole survivor” or a refugee doesn’t preclude one from tapping into the collective spirit well, since those spirits are eternal. Being the single beneficiary of the collective spirit well of a whole species, though nearly extinct, can be quite potent indeed.
     

• There was mention about how the idea was the Battalion would go around hijacking other planets Wells. What'd happen to the species they took it from? Would their tech/powers/etc still function, or would stuff start shutting off?

  • Think of it as a metaphysical imperialism. Your ideals become one with Battalion, which results in more and more people thinking that Battalion is right. Your culture is assimilated, your religions syncretized, your tech is “re-understood” to be an expression of the same principles that Battalion uses, your language becomes merely a dialect of theirs, and so on. It’s insidious.

    
    Some individuals might be able to harbor / safeguard portions of that collective spirit well in them, some remnants of the original uncorrupted power, but now might be the only living tie back to a nearly extinct psyche. At least at the time of our story the process has never been reversed. If you want an example of something similar in fiction, look at how Sanderson’s Mistborn series deals with the idea of a great power “rewriting” reality on a cosmic scale and the terrible struggle to put it back.
     

• If all of humanity were to suddenly die off, what'd happen to its Well? Would it still be there, or would it peter off with them gone?

  • Collective spirit wells are eternal. If there were absolutely no living participants it would be cut off, but it would still exist in some unchanging pocket, possibly to be rediscovered some day. If it was truly forgotten and unreachable it may as well not exist at all (see Jim Bucher’s Dresden Files for a treatment of this concept.)

    
    Why “unchanging”? Because the idea that “the dead do not change” is something of a lore bible concept in the COH universe, and that would seem to apply to the wells of “dead” collectives as well.

    
    However, there’s precedent for a “nearly dead” well being revived from the small traces it left. See the Circle of Thorns backstory for that.
     

• What was to come after defeating Tyrant? 

  • The threat of Praetorian Hamidon would have been real once the regime collapsed, so the idea of Praetorian refugees en masse coming to Primal Earth would have been a possible storyline, especially as they interact with the Primal Earth groups. There might have been some novel combinations of Praetorian and Primal situations.

    
    The main plot would have shifted to Battalion’s introduction and possibly we would have had more “cosmic” or “interplanetary” type of stories happen as a result.

    
    A living universe where sub-50s are dealing with the influx of Praetorians and 50s+ are fighting Battalion would have been an interesting and potentially viable mix of “low and high” which we were aiming to keep rolling as a concept, so that not all new content was coming out at the top end.
     

• Was there ever plans for Infernal Trial? (We never fought him at all)

  • Not that I know of.
     

• What was your best accomplishment while working on COH?

  • Really I loved the fact that I was able to do so much to help save time and frustration among so many of the dev team that we got a lot more efficient and creative with our reduced staff right up until the end. We fought very hard to push back against the feeling of “decay” or “futility” that was the budget versus our ideas.
     

• What games do you play in your free time?

  • Quite a bit of mystery games / VNs - Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Zero Escape, When They Cry Series (esp Umineko). Strategy games - lots of Hearts of Iron IV and Stellaris recently. Classic adventure games that I missed growing up. I play some mobile gacha games too, primarily Azur Lane.
     

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂

  • I love my current job and I’m grateful to still be doing what I love and helping other people make great games. Still have my health too, which is not a given in this industry.
     

• Were their any plans for Black Swan? She was one of the last Praetorians remaining who hadn't had her story closed. I'm aware that Praetorian Fatigue caused a lot of plans being canceled or postponed but if there was anything in the works for that I'd love to know.

  • We left a couple Praetorians on the shelf so we could either kill them off as a way of establishing Praetorian Hamidon or Battalion as a thread or (more probably) use them as a focal point for the Praetorian refugee / re-education storyline.

    
    There was a sense that once we destroyed Praetorian society, we wanted to at least start down the road of offering something better (at least from the hero POV). If everything we idly speculated about came to pass, that would have culminated (after a very, very long time) in a rehabilitated Tyrant taking up the mantle vacated by the deceased Statesman.
     

• Why was Reichsman not given for the position of Champion by the Well of Furies? He seemed to fit the description pretty well.

  • Reichsman was best enjoyed in small doses, imo.
     

• What was the deal with Praetorian Hamidon being so much more of a threat than the Primal version? Was he stronger or just more driven or both?

  • I think one plot thread here was that Tyrant had made a deal with the Hamidon early on so that he could exploit the Hamidon threat to seize more power - only to be betrayed by the Hamidon who had used the time to expand its power beyond what Tyrant could actually control. If he had instead fought immediately rather than making a bargain it would have turned out more like Primal Earth’s situation.
     

• If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • Basically doing COH2 would have been the biggest change I would have wanted. I think there would have been a world where COH2 launches and then COH gets all its data and databases ported to the COH2 engine after a time (kind of like what WOW Classic did).
     

• Were there more plans for doing things in the Shadow Shard?

  • I think only as one-offs. Certainly would have been involved in Battalion stuff at some point even if only as a place to go for intel.
     

•  I remember it being noted once that costume pieces connect to a limited number of nodes but a few were empty and reserved for future additions.  What update to the costume system do you most wish could have been added to the game?

  • A pathway to player generated costume parts would have been the biggest “magic wand” thing I can think of.
     

• Which zone do you most wish got a chance to be revamped and why?

  • Perez Park, because of all the zones it was the single most frustrating one I played as a player.
     

• Players have been wanting an arcane/ mystic powerset for a while now. Did you have any plans on making or had planned on making a full magic-themed powerset to accompany the sorcery power pool?

  • Answered a bit elsewhere, but conceptualizing enough “magic” for a full generic powerset that didn’t feel like a reskin of parts of others was a bit of a challenge. It would have actually been easier to some degree to have done a magic EAT instead.
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • It was lovely to hear. I think I left the #SaveCOH hashtag on my Twitter icon since the beginning. I hoped that everything would stay positive, which at least from my pov seemed to bear out.

    
    When NCSoft provided a license I was elated, really. It was very gracious of them to alleviate the risk that the fans were taking. I thought it was a very bold move and I hoped that it meant good things to come.
     

• What are you reading?

  • The many, many novels and novellas and anthologies in Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire (1632) series. Can’t recommend them enough for people who like alternate history or history of technology type stuff.
     

• Do any of you play Homecoming?

  • Sadly, no, I’ve long since lost the time to commit to an MMO in capacity. I’m hoping to be more involved with the community in the future, though.
     

• What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming?

  • Clown Summoning
     

• What powerset do you think could use an overhaul?

  • All defense sets and Super Strength.
     

• Who hated and rejected BRB (Big Red Ball)? It would have been glorious! Did you also tear up when you heard the music for the first time logging back in?

  • I did feel quite emotional when I logged in! I don’t recall BRB at all, though.
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players?

  • It came out at a time when customization could be wild and vast with an IP that didn’t have the same constraints that would come with a major IP. This lets the community really feel like part owners in its existence, rather than simply passive consumers. In some ways, it was the last wave of that entire era of video gaming (at least talking about a non-indie game). It’s never to be replicated no matter how many iterations of the “superhero MMO” is tried. Superheroes as an IP itself is radically different than in 2004, and you can’t put it back the way it was. But COH still exists from that moment in time, and because it didn’t have to be forced to “evolve” in all the ways that matched the trends, it remains something apart.
     

• Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • Hahahhahahaahaha (deep breath) ahhhahahhahahah. No. I have further comments on this elsewhere but no, the idea that you could get funding to build something like CoX today is just laugh-inducing to me (and not in a good way.)

    
    Heck, there wasn’t the funding to build something like CoX in 2012, and things in the superhero biz have only gotten more mega IP and mega budget driven.
     

• To everyone: How did you resist the urge to do "A Little Bit More" on various parts of the game? It honestly astonishes me how you can make something this complete over twenty something releases.

  • I gave into it a lot. I did many things simply because I wanted to prove I could, or to help someone out, or to learn something new. I was young and absolutely overextended myself on occasion.
     

•  Were there any plans to give Praetorians the option of going straight to First Ward as part of the storyline instead of going to Paragon/Rogue Islands first?

  • I think we always wanted to keep the “landing” arc intact to anchor the eventual resettlement of the Praetorian refugees as part of the storyline.

    
    Behind the scenes, First Ward had been cut before Going Rogue shipped, and when we were able to put it and Night Ward back in (which would have been definitively the last Praetorian zones for a long time) it was improvisation rather than planning.

    
    Could we have in the fullness of time moved the “landing” arc to the end of Night Ward? Maybe.
     

• Was Officer Daniels in the tutorial a Nemesis plot?

  • Either that or a very, very oblique Star Trek: Enterprise reference.
     

• Was going to space ever on the table for the dev team, especially during live days?  I always had hoped before Praetoria, that there would be another planet, perhaps similar to the Praetoria direction, but with alien race and new archetypes that would be in direct conflict with both the heroes and the villains in the other factions.

  • Absolutely wanted to do it. Would have been part of the Battalion arc if we had done it. Would there have been the money to do it? /shrug
     

• How does it feel seeing how all the work you did when the game was live has been appreciated by so many people and impacted us in such a way that the game was essentially resurrected? 

  • Brings a tear to my flinty, salty, jaded dev eye.
     

• What feature, power, story arc, content, etc that you worked on are you most proud of?

  • The lua scripting backend which never came out, followed closely by all the dev efficiency improvements that let us pump out interesting content in the last two years.
     

• And lastly, the question all of us are wondering: If you could nerf anything in the game as it stands right now, why would it be regen?

  • Having all health regeneration implicitly scale by the size of your health meter was a systemic idea that proved foolish with the benefit of hindsight and has to die.
     

• Are there any progression, itemization etc. systems or ideas from other games that you have worked on since or have played since CoH's development that you can see working in City of Heroes? 

  • WOW going more heavily into account-wide / account-bound as a concept. COH would have dramatically benefited from more account-wide concepts, given how everyone had a million alts.
     

• Do you have any advice you'd give to the current people supporting the game, or things you'd personally like to see, whether as a player or former developer?

  • Stay positive, and don’t add something big until you can think of a handful of different ways to use it in the future (no uni-taskers!)
     

• The Well is the source of not only immense power but also endless questions. While I have some head-canon of my own I'd like to compare it to the "Official Version".

  • I only have my own head canon, as it happens. I have no idea how close it is to the Official Version.
     

• According to Prometheus the Well is a person, and a man. Who is that man?Is there a Well for each multiverse, or does one Well serve up power to humanity across every dimension?Do alien races have Wells of their own or is it a uniquely human concept?

  • In my head canon this is somewhat misleading, as the power is ultimately coming from the collective spirit, but it manifests in individuals. Power pools in the collective spirits, and “the Well” taps into that giant metaphysical aquifer. But there are many pools like it.
     

• When news first surfaced about a City of Heroes private server in April, 2019, what were some of your initial thoughts? What was your first reaction to the news?

  • “About time!” Well, no, it was more along the lines of “great!” And holding my breath that everything would turn out okay for them.
     

• With Homecoming and other servers coming online, did it surprise you the level of support City of Heroes received from old and new generation players alike?

  • Not necessarily the people interested in playing, but the amount of time people donate to develop and manage has vastly exceeded my expectations.
     

• Did you create accounts instantly and join us in grinding through the Sewer Networks / Death From Below—and we didn't even know that we teamed with you?

  • Sadly, no, I stayed far away early on to make sure that I didn’t complicate any situations. I feel better about contributing now, for sure.
     

• By now, wouldn't Boomtown and Galaxy City be rebuilt?

  • One of the reasons for floating the “Echo: X” mechanic was to let us do just that. But when I left Galaxy City had just gotten smushed so it would have been a lot longer imo.

    
    I think it would have been a cruel joke if we fix Galaxy City but its level is 45-50, and people are like “why?” You go there for the Galaxy City Reborn ribbon cutting event and it’s interrupted by the arrival of a Battalion ship which flattens the neighborhood once again.
     

• What are some of your fondest memories during your times at Cryptic and Paragon Studios? What were some of the more challenging obstacles? What major creative breakthroughs, disagreements, and funny/amusing memories do you have during the building of CoX?

  • It’s a bit cliche to say the people, but really the players and my fellow developers were the favorite part of the development experience. I had the chance to go to the last “Hero Con” event and later the “Player Summit” which were both great moments to connect with the players. In terms of my day to day, every time I solved a mystery or saved time for someone else on the team was the most rewarding.

    
    In terms of “best development moments” I have plenty to reflect on, so I’ll try to stick to only a few:

    
    We realized that quite a few of the badge titles didn’t quite fit once the player switched sides in Going Rogue, so I came up with almost all of the “alternate” titles and descriptions for them quite late in development. Some of which were very silly.

    
    I accidentally introduced a bug (also a Going Rogue side effect) which caused supergroup base turrets to attack villains. I rapidly advocated to fix the bug and we got a patch out real quick to live… but all the patch did was make the turrets attack both villains AND heroes instead. Everyone wanted to take more time before rolling out the next patch which ultimately fixed it.

    
    Bugs with Oil Slick Arrow had plagued Trick Arrow since its debut, and were still occasionally being reported. I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what it was (at this point a 6 year old bug) until I finally decided to simply reimplement the thing without using a particular feature that I suspected was the root of the problem. I did so, we shipped the new version, and (don’t dispel my bubble if this isn’t true) it never broke after that.

    
    We had ideas for several quality of life features that would make players' lives better and were frequently requested, and while we knew how to script them, we had no developer time to build a user interface so they could be set by the player. That’s when I had the (terrible) idea to make an NPC in Pocket D called “Null the Gull” (after a bug that took place during one of Andy Belford’s community events) and rig up those features to the already existing dialogue system interface on it. It was a wacky idea, but somehow I got it approved and it did go live!

    
    In terms of other things that I somehow got permission to do, I remember coming with Jeff and pitching Robert Anderberg on expanding our scripting capabilities for designers that ultimately led to me experimenting with integrating lua into COH - which I did! It was a lot of fun, and would have really unlocked the door to a whole universe of new power and content possibilities once design had access to an honest to goodness scripting language for the whole game. Sadly, it was only in beta at the time of the shutdown.
     

• What's your favorite thing you worked on that never made it live? And if possible, can you tell us why it didn't happen?

  • The lua scripting, and simply ran out of time.
     

• What is that one thing that you really, really wanted to finish developing for the game but ended up not working out in the long run?

  • Anti-exploitation for Mission Architect. I think there was a great deal of interest in this, but I think that it just might have been a cursed problem.
     

• Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us?

  • When my friends and I (one of whom also became a game dev and the other became a game streamer) first got access to travel powers, we would invite random people in the zone to our team and Recall Friend them off the edge of a tall building. Loads of fun!

    
    Also when a zombie puke debuff bugged out on my friend’s Skull Man Broadsword / Regen Scrapper and he had flies around him for something like three weeks. Also very fun.
     

• Can you tell us some about the various challenges encountered by the powers team as they developed things like zone pvp, arena pvp and the short lived base-raiding pvp? (Follow up question, is it true that the fiercest pvp was typically on the forums?)

  • Forum PVP was the most engagement driving of the lot and also the cheapest to implement.
     

• What happened to the rest of the world during the Rikti invasion? 

  • What rest of the world? (Just kidding)
     

• Which cities, besides Paragon, were the hardest hit?

  • Leeds.
     

• Did different nations fight back against the Rikti in different ways?

  • I think it was established that conventional arms would have been ineffectual, and there was a real risk that if things went too hot that nuclear arms would have ruined the planet, so the frontline remained with the heroes.
     

• Were there other portals to the Rikti Homeworld in other cities, or is the one in Paragon City the only one?

  • There was also one in Leeds.
     

• If you could design a power set, what would it be and for which AT?

  • Clown Summoning, for Masterminds and Moderators
     

• What was the original distinction between Hazard Zones and Trial Zones meant to be? The in-game explanations of the difference between those zones is a little vague. I got the impression that one is meant to focus more on "larger crowds of enemies" and another on "more dangerous enemies" from a mechanical standpoint, and that story-wise one is just "generally dangerous area" while the other is "defining story moment area", but comparing the zones to those definitions doesn't always make it clear. So, is this a thing where the definitions changed over time in response to how the players interacted with it? Was there an endpoint that the zones were going to transition to, or did the definitions stay basically the same, but the distinction between what they meant mechanically was more of a background detail?

  • IIRC it was basically just expected team size - Hazard being 3-6 and Trial being 6-8. All zones had spawndefs which scaled to the number of players triggering the spawndef, but Hazard and Trial zones did not go all the way down.
     

• For people interested in game design, a lot of people point out that you don't actually want a perfectly balanced game, because perfect balance stops being fun. But we also kind of intuitively know that you still want to shoot for a "balanced level of imbalance". So for designing powers in City of Heroes (or maybe even other games) is there a certain benchmark you use as a general guide for "the right level of overpowered" when working on a power conceptually before you push it to beta testing? (And on that note: to what degree should a power be built around the "fantasy" (this is the Grenade power set), and to what degree should it be built around the "mechanics" (this is the Knockbacks And Fire Damage set)?

  • It varied over time. It is completely fair to say that after a certain point we lacked the resources to balance anything beyond “rule of cool” / “vibes based” balancing. There was a core formula that related recharge time, damage, and end cost, and we tried to stick close to that in most circumstances. Overall animation time cost for chains of attacks also featured in general, but mostly when designing mobs.

    
    When it came to Incarnate powers and the Premium Powersets, we wanted something interesting and flashy, and if it felt “a little bit broken” that was just fine on the first pass. We also wanted a short communicable “high concept,” but really that was just following in the footsteps of so many powersets which already had established many of the conventions we were drafting off of.

    
    Fantasy usually drove the show, except in the specific case of “we built mechanic X, how can we reuse it?” I think Street Justice existed because of a brainstorm about reusing the tech underpinning Titan Weapons in a different way, and the idea of something fighting-game inspired appeared to us.

 

• There's a pretty nifty elegance to the Time Manipulation powers with the spinning circles going along with clock face designs, were there similar synergies planned to upcoming powers when the game's work had to stop so suddenly?

  • You say “synergy” and I say “asset reuse” – if we could come up with variations on a core element rather than bespoke elements for all 9 powers in a set it was very attractive.

    
    What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band? If you have an ingame character/nickname what is their favorite music/style?

    
    Various forms of beautiful symphonic metal: Nightwish, Epica, Amaranthe.
    Black Scorpion loves show tunes and novelty songs (as do I as well).

    
    What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others…

    
    If it hadn’t been for a targetable seagull with the (null) name over its head that crept into a community event, there never would have been a Null the Gull.

    
    In terms of bugs I caused - there was the time I messed up the flags on the superbase turrets which caused them to attack one side, and I “fixed” it by getting them to attack both sides. That one took me a while to live down.
     

• How do you feel about AE and fire farming?

  • Matt (Posi) used to say that players would find the shortest path to the rewards even if it was a completely terrible play experience that would push them away from the game, which totally fit this circumstance. I wasn’t around when AE shipped and I wasn’t able to meaningfully fix it, so I really regret it happening.

    
    Then again, I remember farming the sewers with broken Devices Smoke in Issue 0 days which burned me and my friends out on the game, so I really understood his comment.
     

• How would you have liked to see the Mastermind AT progress in terms of customization and powers?

  • Yes, MM pet and powers customization that I sometimes put some thought towards figuring out how to do it w/o breaking the bank. I would have liked to see things like power prioritization customization, or things the MM could do to alter the AI intents of its minions on a more interactive level (like Oil Slick Arrow type combos).
     

• What is most important advice you’d give to the Homecoming team?

  • Don’t burn yourself out.
     

• If you were to create a character right now, which AT and power sets would you pick and why?

  • Mind Control / Empathy Controller - to recreate my very first COH character - Tina Bradshaw (who I was playing at the time of the shutdown).
     

•  What's one thing in the game as it exists today that you'd like to see expanded or developed further?

  • More player generated content opportunities would be fascinating. Can you imagine player generated costume options like in VR Chat?
     

• What are your thoughts on Mission Architect, "good idea that got out of hand, good idea that didn't take off, bad idea in retrospect..."

  • It's something I quite enjoy, but it's obviously gone down a very different path at this point.
    
    Should have never had mainline rewards as a part of it. (Joe has basically admitted this in hindsight on multiple occasions.) Never really got a chance to thrive on its merits as a result.
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Don’t build something that you don’t have an idea as to how you can use it in multiple ways. Don’t worry about getting something quick out to see how it goes. Don’t skimp on refactoring things to be efficient and clear after you know they work.
     

• The many faces of Nemesis... I've heard some interesting and crazy theories about various Multiversal Nemesis over the years... DJ Zero is the Nemesis from his dimensions... Praetorian Nemesis was actually who Praetorian Hamidon was... (o.o seriously.. portal mission with Nemesis Hami, this needs to be done!).. Are any of these actually true? And where there any more planned Nemesesi?" 

  • If you don’t keep quiet about them, maybe WB will sue over the Nemesis system patent…

 

---

Hosun "Black Pebble" Lee:

 

Spoiler

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it

  • Everything I wanted to implement couldn't be implemented mostly due to resources nto being available versus tech. The COH engine is surprisingly malleable. There was a cool feature that was theorized but never got past that point. At one point there was a suggestion that we could use doppleganger tech to let you summon your offline friends to help you out.

    
    I suppose something I actually wanted but we couldn't get to work was people may remember that there was a flash app on the COH site before Freedom went live, that would estimate for you what your Veteran Rewards would translate to in benefits when Freedom launched. The original idea was you could log in and it would calculate your new in-game perks (instead of asking you to enter your years of play), and show it off in a cool way, but we didn't have the resources to pull that off.
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • Superdine
     

• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?

  • There's a pizza place I used to go to all the time when I was a kid. I went back there recently, and they're under new ownership and the menu is a lot bigger. Still, they have the same pizza and toppings I remember, but now I can get onion rings and sandwiches. And onion rings make everything better.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • I'm still in video games marketing. I like where I am and what I do, but I still haven't managed to find a place or project that had the same authenticity and awesomeness we had at Paragon Studios.
     

• Incarnates. I know they were initially mentioned *way* back when as EATs, and became the system we ended up with. It always felt... a little tacked on, to me, as it was. So, three questions related to that... *was* it kind of tacked on, at what point (if anyone recalls) was it shifted from "EAT somewhere in the way back burners" to "post-50 power and leveling system," and if you'd been given the go-ahead and funding for a COH 2, would you have created a similar system that meshed more into the game?      

  • The actual game folks could answer this better, but I know one of the reasons for the Incarnate system was to offer more levels without having more levels. We wanted to keep 50 as the max, but still give players an opportunity to grow their characters.
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • I'm most proud of the work everyone did in launching free-to-play. It required all teams, production, marketing, community, operations, customer support, finance, etc. to closely align together to pull it off. It ultimately led to stronger bonds between everyone. We all got smarter about how to get work done.

    
    It also helped to introduce a lot of internal systems and processes, as well as increase communications, that made creating new content easier and more efficient. The production pipleine before and after Freedom was night and day.

    
    I really hated the cave maps because they were so restrictive. Followed closely by the warehouse maps because they were so overused.

    
    I loved the Malta Group mostly because giant fusing robots makes everything good.
     

• Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

  • Horse-sized duck.
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • I think a lot of the systems in COH were implemented with the best of intentions, but without a long-term plan. Mission Architect, Praetoria, powers customization, bases, etc. That's not something unique to COH, as it exists in every game. People get really excited about implementing feature A, it gets in and suddenly everyone has to move onto feature B, and by the time they have a second to breathe they're already on feature R, and going back to feature A would break a lot of things.
     

• Why was Statesman chosen to be killed?

  • Because we needed to make a marketing/PR splash but I had no budget to pull that off with.

    
    I had to come up with the marketing plan for the City of Heroes: Freedom relaunch, but my marketing budget was close to non-existant. I had $500,000 to relaunch an MMO, but that had to cover all creative production, events, and the most important part - advertising. That was enough money to barely cover 3 weeks of low-profile online ads. A single website takeover could take $100K, for reference.

    
    So the only other recourse was word of mouth. What could we possibly do that was daring and/or dumb enough to get people to pay attention? I was (and still am) a big comic book fan, and this was not long after DC and Marvel kept killing/maiming their superheroes. So I was inspired to kick off a campaign where we would kill off our signature hero, Statesman. Nobody would expect that to happen.

    
    And after explaining it to Matt, I learned one of the reasons no one expected it would happen was because it would require recreating 7 years of content and zones to get rid of Statesman. A pretty significant task for a team that was already very lean, and there wasn't enough time to do so before Freedom launched.

    
    Still, Matt and the design team understood what I was trying to do and why. They came back with an alternative, better proposal. We couldn't kill Statesman off on day 1, but we could start building towards it 6 months later. We turn it into episodic content every month (The Telltale Walking Dead game had just come out a bit earlier), and instead of killing 1 hero we kill off 2, because nobody would expect that to happen. In fact it could even fool people into thinking that Statesman wasn't on the list.

    
    Then David N got involved and we had some rad teaser images we sent to press with broken bows, gauntlets and helmets to hint that one of these would die (mostly because those were the only Phalanx members that had gear that could be shown as broken).

    
    So that's why Statesman was chosen to be killed, how Signature Story Arcs happened, and why Sister Psyche also (temporarily) bit it.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • I think a large reason is nostalgia. City of Heroes was my first MMO, and I suspect that's the same for many of the current players. This also means it was built during a time when game balance, mechanics were fairly nascent. So there are many things COH does "suboptimally" that ultimately make for a more fun experience. Newer games have so much polish and iteration that they can often feel too similar to each other. I also think the nature of the game (be a hero, have amazing powers, fly) gives you a sense of power and freedom that most games can't afford to offer.
     

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched?

  • It's hard to find the kind of situation we had at Paragon Studios, where a single studio has the majority of the team in-house, making a game that's pretty profitable but not exorbitantly profitable.
    
    It's also become a lot more global, with a wider audience than before, which is good.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea?  Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • Give me back my 9 fire imps

    
    Aside from that, I know someone asked about European support, and I really wish we were able to offer a good global experience. The challenge is the concept of comic book super-heroes is very NA-focused. Even during the best of times, the bulk of our revenue came from North America. EU operations were difficult to justify financially, and the additional complexity of having to add localization was too much for our team to handle at our size and resources. I wish we could have found a way to get global support better.
     

• Are there any powerset (or incarnate power) concepts you wanted to explore that were unfortunately shelved due to the technical limitations of the time?  What powersets were you guys working on that you wish you had a chance to introduce to the playerbase? We know there were plans for 'Wind Control' and a suite of origin power pools, but were there any projects that were in the pipeline that were never fully realized before the game's closure? Are there any powerset (or incarnate power) concepts you wanted to explore that were unfortunately shelved due to the technical limitations of the time?

  • I think most, if not all of the in progress power controls like Radition Melee made it into the current game.
     

• What were you planning on adding to the game before shut-down?

  • Woofers. Make it happen! https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Woofers
     

• What is the one powerset you guys were mostly against adding but the powers that be pushed it or your least favorite? Which is a powerset that was in the works and you all would have loved to have seen? Lastly, why did you all not consider adding Swinging as a travel power or tunneling?

  • I don't think swinging or tunneling would have worked in the game due to environmental limitations. I would have loved for the dev team to be cool and give me back 9 fire imps.
     

• What do you all think of skunks? They're pretty nice animals. More importantly, were there other animal heads, like the monster ones and the piranha/bull/eagle ones, planned for the game? If so then which one was next to be added before the shutdown occurred, and what were long term planned additions?

  • I don't believe any more animal heads were in the queue by the time the studio shut down, but it doesn't mean there wouldn't have been an Animal Pack 2. It was one of our most popular booster packs.
     

• What was to come after defeating Tyrant? Was there ever plans for Infernal Trial? (We never fought him at all) What was your best accomplishment while working on COH? What games do you play in your free time?

  • I believe Tyrant was eventually going to take over the role of Statesman on Primal Earth at the climax of the Coming Storm.

    
    Best accomplishment was coming up with a way to organize our finances. When Freedom launched we had to deal with 3 separate account systems - Paragon (game info), NCsoft (account/billing info) and Playspan (sales info). Each system had different information about the player, but no system has a comprehensive view. So it was an incredibly manual process to run even a sales report. I ended up coming up with a mix of Excel scripts and pivot tables that basically sucked all of that information together to generate real-time reports. I've never been so gobsmacked by a spreadsheet before.
     

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂     

  • I'm okay. I need to get in better shape though. There seems to be a loose connection between my unwilligness to live healthy and my ability to be healthy.
     

•  If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • I'd like an offline character creator. If I can't get that, I want my 9 fire imps back.
     

• I remember it being noted once that costume pieces connect to a limited number of nodes but a few were empty and reserved for future additions.  What update to the costume system do you most wish could have been added to the game?

  • Too many systems were set up without long-term planning. Costumes are an example because of nodes. The animation system is another one, where everything had to be manually set up and couldn't be blended. The auth system (what we used to grant packs, perks like temp costumes) was another one. We were getting close to a point where we couldn't do any more temp costumes or booster packs.
     

• What are you reading?

  • The Satsuma Complex by Bob Mortimer.
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • I think I answered this elsewhere, but in my opinion, COX works for a combination (early MMO, nostalgia, broken systems, the sense of freedom, wholesome).

    
    I don't think COX as you know it would be built today. MMO's are a tough sell. Super-hero games are pretty tough to sell as well. The overall result would be a niche game that's unlikely to generate hundreds of millions a year. Twenty years ago, that was okay, but not so much nowadays. And publishers are reluctant to invest in new, inexperienced teams.

    
    The fact you had a team mixed of veterans and brand new designers, programmers, artists is what caused the beautiful mess that is COX. That kind of daring, creativity and mild ignorance cause chaos but also creates some pretty innovative work. That volatility isn't very common nowadays.

    
    That doesn't mean a new superpowered MMO couldn't work, but I don't think COX would have been greenlit today.
     

• How does it feel seeing how all the work you did when the game was live has been appreciated by so many people and impacted us in such a way that the game was essentially resurrected? What feature, power, story arc, content, etc that you worked on are you most proud of? And lastly, the question all of us are wondering: If you could nerf anything in the game as it stands right now, why would it be regen?

  • My contributions to the game were small, but I'm glad that it mattered. In the gaming industry it's common for games to disappear after a few years. Knowing that something I care about continues to give people joy makes everything worth it.

    
    I want regen players to feel the same sense of lose Fire/Rad controllers have felt since our imps were nerfed. Nerfing regen would be the first step in bringing everyone down to my level.
     

• Are there any progression, itemization etc. systems or ideas from other games that you have worked on since or have played since CoH's development that you can see working in City of Heroes? Do you have any advice you'd give to the current people supporting the game, or things you'd personally like to see, whether as a player or former developer?

  • We can accomplish so much when we take the time to have constructive, transparent conversations. This applies to whether you're working on the game or playing the game.
     

• What are some of your fondest memories during your times at Cryptic and Paragon Studios? What were some of the more challenging obstacles? What major creative breakthroughs, disagreements, and funny/amusing memories do you have during the building of CoX?

  • I wish we had more production resources, but I'm proud of what the production team creates considering how constrained they were.

    
    The game being all custom work made it tough to work on, even for things like asset capture.

    
    For Going Rogue, we made a bunch of /em Facepalm shirts because facepalm emotes were cool back then. There was a developer who insisted it was going to backfire on us, and I thought he was just being poopy. Well the studio shut down a few years later, so I think they were right.

    
    There was also a time when I gave Keetsie (Tunnel Rat) a compliment, and she decided to respond by smacking me. When I shouted "Ow" in pain (and betrayal), our HR rep shouted out "Keetsie, are you okay?!" ignoring the fellow in pain.
     

• What's your favorite thing you worked on that never made it live? And if possible, can you tell us why it didn't happen?

  • This is on a marketing campaign, where for I24, we were going to have a contest to let players submit a new character who would join the Freedom Phalanx. We had set up a deal with Rooster Teeth to create content and manage the contest, and I was going to see my dream trailer made to promote the event. There was going to be an awesome moment where you see the power of the character creator and get a 3d animated shot of a character going through hundreds of costume options. And the new character was going to be a permanent member of the Freedom Phalanx, it wasn't a dream, hoax or an imaginary tale! 
     

• What is that one thing that you really, really wanted to finish developing for the game but ended up not working out in the long run? Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us? Can you tell us some about the various challenges encountered by the powers team as they developed things like zone pvp, arena pvp and the short lived base-raiding pvp? (Follow up question, is it true that the fiercest pvp was typically on the forums?)

  • There were a dozen and a half more changes I wanted to put into demorecord to make my life easier, but no one used demrecord but me, so it was hard to build a case for it, even though it would have made so many people's work easier.

    
    I remember I was joining I think an ITF or Penelope Yin TF, and as it was about to get started I got booted from the group because the TF leader felt we had too many blasters. The proudest moment of my life was not using my GM powers to nuke the player into atoms. Yet the bitterness is still there!

 

---

 

Kevin "Freitag" Callanan:

 

Spoiler

• Are there any community posts, or phrases that still make you smile today? If so - what are they? Is there anything you miss about the CoH community in particular?

  • Honestly after so many years I'm struggling to remember too many individual posts or threads on the forums. I do think of City of Heroes every time I see "redname" used in other games.

    
    I remember being incredibly confused by how people called the game "CoX" until I realized it was an acronym for CoH/V. I was always really confused about it and I avoided using it (for fairly obvious reasons) alongside the rest of the community team.

    
    Then the f2p conversion came around, and people started calling the game CoHF, and we couldn't use that acronym either because someone googled it (possibly after the announcement? I can't remember the timeline) and realize it too could mean something inappropriate! Every now and then I'll be doing something at work and I'll remember all of this and it brings a smile to my face everyone time.

    
    As for what I miss about the community in particular, there's a lot, but overall I would say it's the friendliness. Everyone was so welcoming, excited, and passionate about the game and meeting people who played with their entire families or met spouses in-game or had the game impact them in some deep and significant way was mind-blowing to me. I'd been part of gaming communities before and have been since and City of Heroes really stands apart from the all the others for how special it felt.

    
    I was very lucky and perhaps also unlucky to have City of Heroes be the first game I worked on. Lucky because everything from the dev team to the player base were incredible and wonderful. Unlucky because it set the bar so high that I never had another experience like it.
     

• What was your favorite, or most memorable, interaction with a player or group of players?  

  • This is really tough. There were so many! I think my top one would be doing base tours and seeing all the incredible things people did within the constraints of the base-building system. The same is true for Mission Architect reviews, where my reaction was almost always "how in the world did they do this!" It really reshaped how I viewed games.

    
    Also right up there is the convention in Palo Alto where I got to talk to a bunch of players and see first-hand how excited they were about everything the team was creating. Watching a powerset be designed live on stage was a level of player engagement with the development process that I've never seen in another game.

    
    There was also a pretty funny thread on the forums where I got outed for never having watched Back to the Future and then everyone in the community piled on recommending more movies that I'd never seen that were classics. I did eventually watch BttF, but I haven't seen most of the other ones on that list. Sorry everyone!

    
    Last but not least, the day the servers were shut down was by far my least favorite moment but also the most memorable and (in retrospect at least) heartwarming. I remember hopping from server to server and sending global messages and everyone was being so loving and kind and the warmth of the community really touched me. I think I was in tears after I got done with all the servers but seeing the whole community come together for one final hurrah was inspiring and really changed my view of gaming communities and how much games mean to people.
     

• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?

  • City of Heroes didn't really click for me when I worked on it. I came to the team pretty late and had mainly played World of Warcraft previously, so CoH was very different from what I knew.

    
    Going back and playing now, I understand and appreciate things way more. I was able to level myself to 50 finally, get a bunch of incarnate powers, and I felt like I actually experienced the game for the first time instead of being thrown in the deep end.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • I worked in video games for a while after City of Heroes, but eventually moved toward more pure tech.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • My take is that MMOs that released in the early/mid-2000's were still in the initial stages of figuring out what an MMO should look like. There was lots of experimentation that resulted in really cool and unique experiences like City of Heroes.

    
    Fast forward a few years, World of Warcraft was doing gangbusters, taking over an entire industry, and a lot of the passion for innovation and novelty got distributed. It still happened (albeit imo on a smaller scale per game) because so many players' first MMO was WoW. Studios still innovated, but every good idea would get integrated into WoW sooner or later.
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • I was so happy to hear of Homecoming and the private servers. The death of an MMO is incredibly cruel in any case, and especially after how long City of Heroes had been around and how unique the experience and community was. Even among game shutdowns, the shuttering of CoH felt especially cruel and abrupt. 

    
    I'm just happy people can play again and enjoy the game, and that new people can experience the game their friends always rave about being so amazing.
     

• What are you reading?

  • I've been reading a lot of stuff on RoyalRoad recently (which to my shame I only just discovered). I'm all caught up with Super Supportive by Sleyca, which I think would really resonate with a ton of City of Heroes playes. Try it, you'll understand what I mean!

    
    The other story on there I've been loving so far is Godclads by OstensibleMammal. It hearkens back to the olden days of sci-fi writing where lots of new phrases and expressions are used, but the writing is top notch and if you can tolerate the body-horror and brutality of what happens in the world of the story, it's a really great slow burn. 
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • I think City of Heroes came at the right time for a lot of people who were just getting into video games. People who grew up on comic books in the 80's and 90's, etc.

    
    I think City of Heroes would look very different if built in 2024. I think a similar game could be made ... comics (e.g. webtoons and manga) have really grown in popularity lately, so the foundational interest and awareness of "heroes" and "villains" is there (not to mention the entire MCU and DC movie world). That being said, the MMO market (and to a lesser extent the gaming market as a whole) as become much more stratified. 

    
    MMORPGs have to be similar enough to WoW for people to transition relatively smoothly, while just innovative enough to get people to try it out. City of Heroes was so innovative and unique that I think people who have played MMORPGs for 20 years and have a bunch of expectations would regretfully not give it a fair shake at this point.
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Purely from the perspective of a community person, I would advise developers to always try and remember that when people are upset or frustrated with something in the game, it's because they're passionate and channeling that passion in often less-than-ideal ways. They wouldn't be complaining if they didn't care.

    
    That being said, sometimes developers shouldn't listen directly to the firehose of feedback from players. I've worked with developers who came to me in tears because they read something mean someone wrote on social media about their work. Everyone is trying their best but not everyone sees that or has it top-of-mind when they're publicly talking about the games they play. So just let the people who are responsible for reading, collating and processing the feedback do that for you so that you don't make yourself unhappy. Working in gaming can be really hard already. It doesn't need to be harder by trying to do more jobs than you have to

 

---

 

John "Protean" Hegner:

 

Spoiler

• What was it like working on a superhero MMO RPG, does it somehow felt different in comparison to other MMO's? In popular culture, it often happens that characters who were previously dead were resurrected in one way or another, in the case of the City of Heroes, would the deceased characters remained dead, as planned? What is your personal opinion about resurrections?  

  • City of Heroes was, and remains, fairly unique among MMORPGs. The main reason being that the game focuses on your character looking cool out of the gate rather than having to wrangle and chase gear. I think this is single-handedly the most powerful aspect of the game to make it stand out from its MMO brethren. Working on it was a dream come true as the moment I loaded up the character creator, I was hooked.

    
    The plan was to keep our dead dead. Though, obviously in the cases of characters such as Ghost Widow, or War Witch, there is a spiritual world that these characters can persist within, so there is always some way to at the very least talk to the dead. However, the goal remained that if we made a big dramatic moment about someone's death, we didn't want to cheapen it by bringing them back and treating it like nothing had happened. Doing so eliminates one of the most powerful dramatic tools from our belt and that would be like shooting ourselves in the foot.

    
    For me, resurrections can be a potent tool as well, but as sparingly as we should use the "death" tool from our drama tool belt, we should be even more sparing with the "resurrection" tool. In my opinion, a long time should pass between a character's death and any plan for resurrection. There need to be consequences for the passing of a hero or villain that the living must deal with; go through the stages of grief and healing, etc. Then, when you bring that dead character back, the world has changed and you have a whole bunch of new story to work with. If a majority of the characters have accepted the death of a character, how do they react when that dead character comes back? How does that character react when the world has moved on after their time? Is there a place for them anymore? Are they even the same person? Is anyone?
     

• I’ve had this theory that Praetorian Vanessa Devore is in Mother Mayhem’s original body, that’s why Tilman takes Aurora’s body and why P-Vanessa looks like a Carnie version of Sister Psyche. Was that ever the intention?  

  • That is a fantastic question and I wish I remembered the details of all of that. Sadly all of my design documents are no longer in my possession so I can't give you an definitive answer one way or another. However, that "sounds" correct.
     

• If you could go back and expand on any group that you feel didn't have much content made about them, who, why, and what would you want to do?  

  • When the studio was closed down we were in the process of revamping all of the old content. I had just fleshed out the Skulls in Kings Row to include the actual Veles Brothers (the leaders of the Skulls), which had never made it into the game. My goal was to bring the superadine gang wars between the Skulls/Trolls/Family vs the Hellions/Warriors to the forefront rather than relegating the story to getting lucky with which mission drops and contacts you got going through the early zones.

    
    As for a specific villain group though, I have a soft spot for Outcasts. From my memory, there isn't a ton going on with them other than being the tier 2 jerks you run into in Steel Canyon and a few other places. A lot of the story scenery in that level range gets chewed up by the 5th Column/Council and the Tsoo. Other than Frostfire, I can't recall much about their leadership or their motivations other than they are in a never ending turf war with the Trolls and the Tsoo.
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • I've got my spine, I've got my orange crush
    (Collar me, don't collar me)
    I've got my spine, I've got my orange crush
    (We are agents of the free)
     

• "Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?"

  • The big big big plan was eventually to go intergalactic planetary (when possible) and start saving intergalactic citizens who were under Battalion's thumb. This almost certainly would have included the Kheldians.

    
    This sounds like a good candidate for a Praetorian Moral Choice mission. Do you eat the Kheldian and thus remain strong enough to save Praetoria and serve the Emperor with distinction. (Loyalist)? Or do you refrain from eating the Kheldian and thus gain a powerful ally who may prove strong enough to help you save Praetoria together. (Resistance)?
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • Still working in vidja gamez. We're all over the place now. Infecting other studios with our awesomeness.
     

• Incarnates. I know they were initially mentioned *way* back when as EATs, and became the system we ended up with. It always felt... a little tacked on, to me, as it was. So, three questions related to that... *was* it kind of tacked on, at what point (if anyone recalls) was it shifted from "EAT somewhere in the way back burners" to "post-50 power and leveling system," and if you'd been given the go-ahead and funding for a COH 2, would you have created a similar system that meshed more into the game?
  
  The never-implemented EATs. (Coralax, Blood of the Black Stream, Incarnates, Avilians.) Was there any more of a foundation somewhere in the back of folks minds for their backstories and what they would be like from a lore and player-accessible-AT perspective, or did they pretty much stay "It's an idea?" And/or - since we obviously got Coralax in game as an enemy group, so I suppose with that specifically - was getting them in the game as NPCs adding to or taking away from the chance of having them as EATs? (IE, when they came up with COV, was the Coralax EAT brought back up as "OK, we should work on that too" or "OK, they're in the game, that does everything we really wanted to explore with them" - or was there some other issue, such as "how do we deal with an underwater set of races" with them and the Virtea, that prevented them from becoming an AT?
  
  Other than the moon 🙂 were there any ideas for expanding the COH world out into other locations- Egypt (yes, still thinking of BotBS,) South America, Antarctica (secret villain lairs!) , Cardiff - or would that have been something that, if done, would have been more of a COH 2 thing - or was it thought of at all?  

  • Paragon (originally NCSoft NorCal) was specifically spun off to both keep CoH running and to work on CoH2. However, things did not progress as expected with CoH2 development. So, we had the funding, but cooking gets messy and eventually we pivoted.

    
    Regarding Incarnates/EATs, someone from the powers team will have to talk about the specifics of that implementation. I just suggested dropping a nuke on the Magisterium to demonstrate how badass both Emperor Cole and the Incarnate players were during the showdown and the team took that idea and ran with it which was awesome.

    
    I recall discussing some Signature Story Arcs that took place outside of Paragon City, but getting the art done for new zones, let alone ones that were entirely unique new biomes was always a big ask. The moon went through a ton of meetings and compromises before we deemed it possible and all teams were happy with the amount of work to be done to achieve the deliverables.
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • The Praetorian Devoured were originally intended to have the Greater Devoured be the first ones you ran into. As you faced off against them, you would run into Devoured who had less Hamidon ick on them and slowly come to realize that they were humans who were infected (sorta like Cordyceps). This would eventually lead to a Moral Choice mission. There were also designs for making a PEAT (praetorian epic archetype) that was a "Liberated Devoured" which would unlock the costume pieces for the Devoured so players could make their own unique devoured character.

    
    My proudest achievement on the game was getting the Loyalist/Resistance factions and factional gameplay/moral choice side-swapping into the game. I think that made Praetoria really stand out as a unique experience rather than simply a mirror version of Paragon City.

    
    I wish we'd never shipped the name Noble Savage for the Praetorian leader of the Forlorn. The character wasn't intended to have that name be permanent, it was just a placeholder on a white board we used as a springboard to bounce character ideas and motivations off of, but it stuck after the concept art was made with the name emblazoned on it. It is common knowledge now that the term is problematic, but at the time it didn't raise any red flags because we were naive.

    
    Favorite enemy group is the Vazhilok, hands down. They had interesting mechanics that required you to think both before engaging them, and adjust your strategy during the fight. Do they have embalmed? Target those first. Do they have mortificators? Target those next. Do they have an eidolon? Shut that guy down third. Did we miss an embalmed or mortificator and now everything has gone sideways? Run!
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • I would go back and completely revamp the first story arcs that I added into Issue 13 (Dirge of Chaos, Magic Man, and Crown of Glory) from Mercedes Sheldon. I learned a lot of lessons between issues 13 and 24 and I would have made those missions much less of a slog.
     

• Why was Statesman chosen to be killed?

  • During my 1st year review at the studio I was asked by leadership if there was something I wanted to do in the game. I said, "We should kill Statesman." That was a rather shocking statement, but I began to explain that it would be a polarizing moment that would get people talking, and unlike Death of Superman, we should never bring him back.

    
    Fast forward 2 more years and a certain Signature Story Arc got approved and implemented.

    
    Fast forward 12 more years and here we are, still polarized and still talking about it. So I think mission was accomplished.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • Simply put, the character creator.

    
    A longer answer is, the character creator allowed the player to start the game being the fully realized super powered character they wanted to play without needed to acquire gear which then became their character's identity. Because of this choice, not all level 40 heroes looked the same, which meant everybody had an identity that was beyond their character name, it was also their costume. Because of this aspect, you were unique and proud of your character the moment they stepped out of the character creator and into the game.
     

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched? Anyone with knowledge of this, tell me about the.... Moon Base 🌚🏰    

  • The biggest change that I've seen is less/no crunch time. At most I'll "be on call" during the weekend before a release in case something went wrong and an emergency fix needs to be implemented, but that's the only time I am ever asked to be available outside of normal work hours anymore.

    
    Moon Base - There were plans for an obvious Vanguard Moon Base and a secret Arachnos Moon Base. The former would be your classic geodesic domes on the surface, while the Arachnos base was planned be hidden in the side of a big a fissure/canyon wall so it wasn't visible from Earth (think the city of Petra carved into the face of a canyon wall).

    
    The broad brushstroke story idea of the Moon Base was that it would have a big Rail Gun that was used to slingshot supplies to Mars as Earth was attempting to colonize there. My plan was to have this Rail Gun be used to help defeat Battalion by loading your strike team into a supply pod and shooting you into the Battalion flagship to take the fight directly to them as it was the only thing strong enough to breach their otherwise impenetrable force fields.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea? Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • A fun idea I had that never got traction was to add springiness to cars that you jumped on. I'm certain I wasn't the only one who played "the floor is lava" while navigating around the game, and I always wanted to jump on the hood of a car and have it give me a little bit of a boost to my next jump. It would have zero combat application, but just be a fun little thing to add in.

    
    Prior to shutdown I was in the process of revamping some of the older content in Kings Row and then Skyway City and Steel Canyon as it was some of our oldest content and there were stories about the various villain groups in those zones that didn't make it into the game that really should have been in there.
     

• Are there any powerset (or incarnate power) concepts you wanted to explore that were unfortunately shelved due to the technical limitations of the time? What powersets were you guys working on that you wish you had a chance to introduce to the playerbase? We know there were plans for 'Wind Control' and a suite of origin power pools, but were there any projects that were in the pipeline that were never fully realized before the game's closure? Are there any powerset (or incarnate power) concepts you wanted to explore that were unfortunately shelved due to the technical limitations of the time?

  • I wanted to do a "Guns, Lots of Guns" powerset that basically took what the Assault Rifle powerset did, but split out the various options into individual weapons: Pistol, shotgun, SMG, AR, Rifle, etc. My idea was to use Street Justice as a baseline, but instead of Combo Builders building up points, they instead bled points (i.e. ammo) from the weapon. Once the weapon was empty you could use a "finisher" to swap to another weapon with a boost to offset the animation time diminishing your DPS. The feeling would be the player blazing through the ammunition of one gun, then tossing it and drawing a new one to keep fighting (see: The Matrix lobby scene).
     

• Regarding the incarnate lore and plans for future character development, from other AMAs it seems the idea was that after defeating Battalion our characters would become an Ascended in a way, take in those stolen Wells of other species to become one themselves. I was always curious, how would that have been balanced in story? Would the character be bound to watch over their chosen species as a Well, offering most of that Ascended power back to the people of their chosen planet while retaining only a fraction for themselves for gameplay balance? Visiting and influencing a world your character would be the guardian of would've been all kinds of cool. How far was the cosmic story set up to go?"

  • Incarnate Lore: IIRC we had ideas on a whiteboard and that's about it. My recollection was that we planned for Issue 30+ to be where we would start that aspect of the story, so it was 2+ years out.
     

• What were you planning on adding to the game before shut-down?

  • Mime Melee and Clown Devices Secondary.

    
    j/k... but maybe there's something there?

    
    Revamp of older zones, expanded stories for villain groups in those zones, moon base, Battalion arc, and eventually interplanetary content. Much of this was still in brainstorm docs and whiteboards with sticky notes though.
     

• What was to come after defeating Tyrant? Was there ever plans for Infernal Trial? (We never fought him at all) What was your best accomplishment while working on COH? What games do you play in your free time?

  • Battalion was the next threat after Tyrant.

    
    We had talked about an Infernal Trial numerous times but it kept getting kicked down the roadmap to "later". You did fight him briefly in the Mortimar Kal Strike Force, but he wasn't the main adversary in that content.

    
    My best accomplishment while working on COH was doing the Praetoria content. Splitting it into 2 Resistance and 2 Loyalist sides and having the moral choice missions to swap between them was super satisfying.

    
    Games I play in my free time change year by year as new cool stuff comes out, but for the most part I play tabletop D&D and Battletech in meat space. Valheim, Conan Exiles, Helldivers 2, Manor Lords, HBS Battletech, Mechwarrior 5, World of Warships, and BG3 have all eaten up substantial chunks of my digital space time.
     

• What's the deal with the Angels of Mercy in Night Ward? Are they agents of the Well, low ranking members of Dimensionless, or maybe something else entirely? Were their any plans for Black Swan? She was one of the last Praetorians remaining who hadn't had her story closed. I'm aware that Praetorian Fatigue caused a lot of plans being canceled or postponed but if there was anything in the works for that I'd love to know. Why was Reichsman not given for the position of Champion by the Well of Furies? He seemed to fit the description pretty well. What was the deal with Praetorian Hamidon being so much more of a threat than the Primal version? Was he stronger or just more driven or both?

  • No idea what is up with the Angels. From my recollection we tried to stay away from modern religions and instead focus on mythologies and ancient religions no longer practiced today. Giving relevancy to any one religion (or butchering its message), while ignoring the others (or worse yet, misrepresenting them out of ignorance) was not a path we wanted to go down. We didn't always accomplish that goal, but we did try.

    
    Not sure on Reichsman. Somewhere else will have to speak to that.

    
    Praetorian Hamidon manifested much earlier on Primal Earth as a reaction to the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War on Praetorian Earth. This jump started the need to protect the earth earlier in Dr. Hamidon's life so it has had more time to evolve into a deadlier creature.

    
    Additionally, since the use of nuclear weapons was a threshold that was crossed in Praetorian Earth, Hamidon there also pulled out all the stops as the threat was more dire. The Tellurian Plague was Dr. Hamidon's answer to the belligerent use of such devastating weapons.

    
    Lastly, Marcus Cole (pre Emperor/Tyrant) and Dr. Hamidon made a deal to help put Cole into power and thus put the world into a state of relative "peace", ending the need for nuclear weapons. Hamidon would act as "The big mean threat" and Cole would become earth's savior by defeating him. With Cole in power he could keep humanity in homeostasis and thus keep the earth safe. Should he fail to keep up his end of the bargain, however, then Hamidon promised to finish humanity off once and for all. All of the propaganda in Praetoria reinforces this "truth" that outside of the city is evil devouring earth, but inside the sonic fencing is humanity's utopia where you are safe, so just stay there and be happy.
     

• If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • Fix rag doll so it isn't soooooo janky looking at times.
     

• Were there more plans for doing things in the Shadow Shard?

  • There was a plan I had for defeating Battalion somewhere around Issue 30 involving Dream Doctor making a deal with Rularuu to free him from the Shadow Shard in order to consume the majority of the Battalion invasion fleet. In the process, however, Dream Doctor would also be consumed as he is this dimension's Rularuu and that's how Rularuu moves between dimensions - he jumps to the version of himself in a dimension, consumes them, and in doing so consumes the entire dimension as well and then jumps to the next dimension.

    
    This was avoided in the Primal Dimension by the Dream Doctor using the Dagger of Jocas to cut bits of reality up for use in the creation of the Shadow Shard which they then tricked Rularuu into trying to consume instead of our dimension. Rularuu realized his mistake a moment before he consumed himself and what we have left is the Shadow Shard with Rularuu angrily trapped within it.

    
    So brokering this deal, Dream Doctor would release Rularuu to consume the portion of this dimension containing the Battalion fleet, and then leap to another dimension which would force Rularuu to follow him and consume him there instead, preventing him from ever™ returning to the Prime Dimension as there was no version of himself left there to jump to.
     

• How did you resist the urge to do "A Little Bit More" on various parts of the game? It honestly astonishes me how you can make something this complete over twenty something releases.

  • We didn't. We put all the physical and mental energy we could muster into this and there was no more to give. At least I did. I worked many late evenings and many weekends to push out awesome stuff that otherwise wouldn't have existed. I physically and morally cannot tap into that energy any longer and have a much better work-life balance because of that. Oh to be young again.
     

• Were there any plans to give Praetorians the option of going straight to First Ward as part of the storyline instead of going to Paragon/Rogue Islands first?

  • First Ward was originally part of the initial release plan for the Praetorian experience, but it got cut due to lack of time.

    
    There was no plan of returning to Praetoria after Neutropolis except for Incarnate raids later which were their own thing. Because of this we built the faction system for Praetoria in a way that didn't really play well if you came back.

    
    Then we decided after the fact to come back to First Ward which necessitated us to write it as Hero/Villain content instead of Resistance/Loyalist content due to the limitations imposed by how we did the factions.

    
    So initially, yes, we planned on First Ward being part of the main Praetorian experience. Then we had a plan for doing factions one way (which was much more involved) that gave us the flexibility to go to First Ward straight through if you wanted to skip going to Primal Earth at the end of Neutropolis. But that got canned in favor of a much much faster version that was viable after we were promised we wouldn't be returning to Praetoria in a normal leveling/zone manner. But then that decision got reversed after we'd implemented everything thus necessitating us to need you to leave Praetoria to become a Hero/Villain/Rogue/Vigilante, and then coming back so you could play First Ward using those factions instead of Praetorian ones.
     

• Was Officer Daniels in the tutorial a Nemesis plot?

  • No. But this answer is.
     

• Was going to space ever on the table for the dev team, especially during live days?  I always had hoped before Praetoria, that there would be another planet, perhaps similar to the Praetoria direction, but with alien race and new archetypes that would be in direct conflict with both the heroes and the villains in the other factions.

  • Yes, we wanted the Battalion arc to involve going to the moon and then potentially fighting on several space maps with weird gravity rules, followed by post Battalion arc going to alien worlds to help liberate folks from the various petty warlords left behind after Battalion's defeat at Primal Earth.
     

• How does it feel seeing how all the work you did when the game was live has been appreciated by so many people and impacted us in such a way that the game was essentially resurrected?  What feature, power, story arc, content, etc that you worked on are you most proud of? And lastly, the question all of us are wondering: If you could nerf anything in the game as it stands right now, why would it be regen?

  • City of Heroes has been and always will be one of my proudest experiences to play in, work on, and see people enjoy in my life.

    
    I'm very proud of how players seemed to respond positively to Katie Douglas / Seer 1381 and her story. Her story was one I crafted in tandem with the design of the Seer program and felt was a necessary story to have in Praetoria as the Seers were such a big part of the city and the authoritarian creep factor.

    
    It would be regen because I never used regen. 😛
     

• When news first surfaced about a City of Heroes private server in April, 2019, what were some of your initial thoughts? What was your first reaction to the news? With Homecoming and other servers coming online, did it surprise you the level of support City of Heroes received from old and new generation players alike? Did you create accounts instantly and join us in grinding through the Sewer Networks / Death From Below—and we didn't even know that we teamed with you? CoX's world building is some of the most impressive, vast, and substantial in any game. Where did some of the inspiration come from for CoX's various enemy groups and zones?Were there enemy groups and locations that were being formulated prior to City of Heroes' release but were shelved? What were some concepts that never saw the light of day? Were there ideas and plans in place to not only revamp zones/locations, but to expand on their size entirely? By now, wouldn't Boomtown and Galaxy City be rebuilt? CoX also has some catchy music! What were some of the inspirations behind the short hooks and musical textures that played in various neighborhoods in the CoX zones? How were different styles and pieces of music chosen for the zones? Were there ever music themes for CoX's signature characters or zones that were brainstorms? If you could give your characters theme songs, what songs would they be? From what artists? What are some of your fondest memories during your times at Cryptic and Paragon Studios? What were some of the more challenging obstacles? What major creative breakthroughs, disagreements, and funny/amusing memories do you have during the building of CoX?

  • I will try to answer all of these, no promises though.

    
    My first thought when I heard about Homecoming spinning up was more power to the folks doing that. CoX was a wonderful game that people enjoyed. If people can keep the servers running then no need to shut it down. Fun should be had by all.

    
    My initial reaction was "oh man, I hope my Issue 24 content got a QA pass, because we got shut down before that was started.

    
    I was not surprised by the outpouring of support for CoX. It's a fantastic game. Unique in the play space. It is a product of its time where we could jam in stories as fast as we could think them up, so there is something in the game for just about everyone if you look hard enough. I was stoked that new players would get to experience the hype. Like showing Lord of the Rings to someone who avoided watching it their whole life because it was "nerdy" just to see them transform into a super nerd in under 12 hours. It's wholesome.

    
    I did not create an account. I have a hard time playing content I work/worked on. I spent enough of my life building it and testing it to play it a hundred times over. But I am pleased as punch that others are jazzed and fired up to play it.

    
    Regarding World Building: I only got to work on a little bit of Primal Earth stuff, almost all of it using existing villain groups (though I worked closely with character art to make the revamped Skulls for the Issue 24 King's Row revamp). Most of my work was in Praetoria.
    
    The Syndicate were obviously influenced by cyberpunk, the video game Syndicate (guys in sunglasses, trench coats, and miniguns), and Shadowrun go-gangers/The Crazy 88 from Kill Bill for their low level biker gang thugs (the mission "It's Raining Men" has 88 Syndicate katana wielding go-gangers show up for the final fight for this reason).
    
    I got to design some of the powers for the Ghouls and Forsaken, specifically I'm responsible for the Painted Ones who mark people and make life for the Tanker hard.
    
    I wrote much of the dialog for Praetor Tillman/Mother Mayhem, who was fun as hell to write for.
    
    I also did Bobcat's silly BFF misadventure which was heavily inspired by the Batman Animated Series episode Girls' Night Out. 
    
    The Warden and Crusader factions of the Resistance are, of course, inspired by Battletech's two clan factions.
    
    Master Midnight was my call back to old AOL chat room roleplaying. His introduction is him narrating what he thinks is the coolest introduction to the player. Praetorian Percy Winkley is a strange individual.

    
    Shelved Enemy Groups and Locations: I have the original story bible and a huge chunk of the details for that had to be left out both for brevity as well as making it fit the story medium. When we got shut down I was in the process of moving the Superadine storyarc more to the forefront by revamping The Skulls and actually putting the Petrovic Brothers (the mysterious leaders of the Skulls) into the game finally. I'm sure some of the folks who worked on it before my time will have more answers though.

    
    Concepts that never saw the light of day I can't really recall. In part due to the passage of time, but also because they usually don't see the light of day for legitimate reasons outside of "we don't have time". You tend to remember the ones that were good but couldn't get in due to time. The bad ones you just let fade from memory or hold onto as cautionary tales to avoid pitfalls later in your career.

    
    Plans for zone revamp and size changes: I don't know about changing the footprint of zones. Many of the ones in Paragon City would have been surrounded on most sides by other zones, so that could potentially cause a fall of dominos. But revamping we definitely talked about. One of the dangers of MMO development is that the reality is that your player base is generally going to slowly atrophy in a downward trend, while keeping players interested generally comes from introducing more realestate for them to explore. What this results in is lower player density and eventually a feeling that the city/game is empty. To avoid that we talked often about revamping the zones so that we wouldn't need to make new ones and thus keep our density from dropping. One such revamp I wanted to do was change Perez Park into a level 50 zone because the Circle of Thorns raised Oranbega up through the middle of it and then declared itself a sovereign indigenous nation of the Americas to the U.N. and thus became a bit of a Rogue Isle inside of Paragon City problem to deal with.

    
    Boomtown/Galaxy City: The idea was that if/when we rebuilt those zones, we would repurpose them to be new level ranges with new content. It was on The List™.

    
    I can't speak to the inspiration for the music of CoX, but I did get to work with one of the musicians (Gunnar Madsen) on a different game before I worked at Paragon. It was an RTS game about the Trojan War that failed to launch. I still have the CD in my car. Good stuff.

    
    I'm not a music guy so most of the music questions I'll pass on. 😕

    
    Fond memories at Paragon: I fondly remember running some epic D&D games after hours at Paragon and made some great friends, many of whom I still talk to from time-to-time today, or ended up working with again.

    
    Challenging Obstacles: Time. We had so many great ideas (easy to do that for a super heroic game as any genre basically fits the genre) but not enough time to implement it all.

    
    Breakthroughs/Disagreements/Amusing memories: For amusing I remember as we were developing the Moral Choice missions for Praetoria I approached Sean McCann (Dr. Aeon) on his birthday and asked him "Birthday Moral Choice, Sean. Restaurant A for lunch, or Restaurant B?" or something to that effect, and he reacted as if it was a harrowing choice to make. A breakthrough/confirmation we made the right decision as at the Hero Con event where we unveiled Going Rogue the attendees immediately start picking factions and then deciding that the Syndicate were obviously a 3rd faction. Within minutes of that presentation someone showed me our forums had people already putting up signatures with art they'd captured from the presentation and cropped into some really sweet looking signatures to announce your Praetorian Allegiance. A disagreement was on how to do the Praetorian Devouring Earth as they were intended to be a bigger part of Praetoria but they ended up getting cut/punted along with First Ward necessitating a decent amount of rewrites.

    
    Whew, that's a lot of questions for one question. 😛
     

• What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band? If you have an ingame character/nickname what is their favorite music/style?

  • I like heavy metal and am a big fan of ManOwaR.

    
    I never really thought about the musical tastes of my characters. If I had to choose one for Protean, though, I figure it would be jazz, cause that stuff is all over the place, just like he is.
     

• What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

  • My favorite bug that didn't make it in was the night before the final build to release Issue 23 Night Ward I was working late and realized that there was an edge case where players could enter Night Ward but get into a state where they couldn't return. So I quickly cooked up a new NPC (Ksenia Stray), a new delivery mission, dialog, etc, and linked a new power that Jeff Hamilton (i.e. Arbiter Hawk) made me at the same time (we were both late crunching) in order to patch that edge case up, tested it, and got it into the build with about 10 minutes to spare.

    
    Another wasn't a bug but was reported as one during internal playtesting during the first playtest for the Ghouls. I didn't tell anyone how the villain group worked and that the Painted Ones basically marked you for death with a giant aggro generating AoE over time. The screams of frustration in the office were music to my ears as people used normal tactics only to discover the Tanker (if they had one) had their work cut out for them to keep aggro. At first they reported it a bug but then they figured out how it worked and sent the tank in first to absorb the Mark cast by the Painted Ones and then suddenly the tanker had an easy job holding aggro.
     

• How do you explain the excitement and continued interest of players for this game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year? Could you predict this popularity at the time?

  • We knew the game was beloved by those that played it. Hell, we felt the same way. Popularity I couldn't predict being this big this far down the road, but I knew that CoX would always leave its mark on those who played it. 

    
    As for why the excitement and interest continues, I think it's just simply a wonderful fun game that knows exactly what it is and what it is doing. That's it. It's simply CoX and there is no better way to really describe it to someone other than showing it to them and grinning like an idiot as they spend 10 hours in the character creator, AGAIN, on yet another character.
     

•  Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Put a little piece of yourself in there. There's room for everyone's story to be told in CoX, and every one of those stories makes us all better humans. Plus, it's easy to do what you like and know, so don't make it harder than it has to be.

 

 

---

Phil "Synapse" Zeleski:

 

Spoiler

• Howdy, Synapse.  Word is that you intended to either make significant changes to PPM (procs per minute), or scrap the system entirely and come up with some other system for procs.  Unfortunately, sunset happened.  Do you recall what you intended to do with procs?  

  • Hi @Lunar Ronin, unfortunately I don't remember. I think PPMs work fine, but the math behind it and how it interacts with things like enhancement recharge rate, passive powers, and the like make it pretty wonky.

    
    You can slap a ton of procs in a periodic power and have it proc way more than was intended, or you can have a guaranteed proc on a power with a sufficiently long recharge time. Neither of these are great. I'd probably want to find a way to set a reasonable floor and ceiling to avoid undesired gameplay.
     

• What were the plans for the rest of the Incarnate powers? (Genesis, Mind, Vitae and Omega)

  • Sorry, I wasn't involved in making the Incarnate Powers. I have no idea! (or if I did, I have forgotten.)
     

• If you were to add some more powersets, what would you add? Stretching? Webslinging? etc?  

  • I had a few power sets that I was drafting pitches for, the ones I remember off the top of my head:

    
    Eldritch Blast (Ranged Damage)
    Sort of a sorcery based set, where you dealt multiple different damage types (Cold, Fire, and Negative) depending on which "grimoire" was active. If I remember correctly, you would passively cycle through damage types, but you could lock in a damage type when you used the set's Aim equivalent.

    
    Envenomed Blades (Melee Damage)
    This was a melee set where your attacks were made with a pair of small poisoned blades, like daggers or knives. The intent was that the attack rate was very high and over time your attacks would build up venom on a target and at a certain threshold you would "proc" a big spike of damage. Sort of like how Bloodloss works in Elden Ring.

    
    Some other ones that were in some stage of development:

    -Water Armor
    -Water Melee
    -Water Control
    -Psychic Defense (yes, it was very different from Willpower)
    -Wind Control
     

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?

  • Well, this is going to sound weird, because the power set WAS implemented, but Titan Weapons. We didn't have the tech to do what we really wanted here, so there was a tremendous burden put on the Animation team (sorry Colin X_X).

    
    The idea was that momentum would boost your attack rate, like "Haste" does in other games. However, CoH's engine couldn't do that. So we used power redirection and due to limitations with how our game blended animations (it didn't) animators had to basically hand animate every power to essentially blend as cleanly as possible to any other animation. The end result was fine, but it could have gone better if we had better tools.

    
    I just want to reiterate that the set turned out fine BECAUSE of our awesome artists and the effort they put in to make it work, despite the above mentioned limitations.
     

• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?

  • I really love a lot of the stuff the Homecoming team has done. I have been monitoring the work here very closely as I have a deep love for this game.

    
    The biggest treats for me was to see sets I didn't get to ship make it across the finish line: Radiation Armor, Radiation Melee, Psionic Melee, and Savage Melee to name a few. Radiation Armor has a special place in my heart, because it was co-designed with the community.

    
    I also love how the Homecoming team make the Incarnate system more accessible by leveraging Veteran levels.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • I've been working on MMOs for the past twelve years since the studio shutdown. In fact, I am presently working on one to this day.
     

• What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V?

  • My proudest achievement was probably Street Justice. By all accounts, it's just another melee set with a really simple mechanic, but the idea for it came from a producer who asked "How would Batman fight?" and it kinda went from there. I just feel the gameplay, animations, FX, and audio all just landed right and made something really special.

    
    The thing I wish never landed in CoH was Titan Weapons, simply because we didn't have the tech to do it right.
     

• For anyone who's interested in answering, be it gameplay, story, etc: What parts of Homecoming's development of City of Heroes do you approve of? Which do you not, or would do differently if it was you in charge?

  • The tweaks to Homecoming that have been most exciting to me are ones that make complex features more approachable. I feel like a lot of changes made were a reaction to how the Homecoming players actually engaged with the game, not how the Homecoming developers WANTED them to engage, which is great.

    
    I think the only parts of Homecoming that I am not a big fan of are the revamps of some of the endgame enemy groups. The Council and Circle of Thorns really stand out as just annoying to fight. They aren't tricky or require counterplay, they just take longer to defeat due to resistances, revives and debuffs.
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • The release deadlines for power sets was always super tight, but I do wish a few sets had a bit more time to bake. Bio Armor and Titan Weapons had a ton of balance issues when they were shipped.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • I think it's a combination of factors. It has an art style that, while dated, is weirdly timeless. There's a sort of charming jankiness to it that I love. It offers a wide range of playable experiences and has a community that is really unique. It also has a tremendous amount of depth if you're looking for it.
     

• I'm curious what any of your thoughts are on the Advanced Content and the implementation of different versions of the same content particularly for the difficulty. It's my personal favorite additions. Building on that question, on the off chance any of you guys actually sneak around on homecoming what's your favorite addition they've made? 

  • I think the Advanced content is brilliant. It offers challenge to players who are looking for it, but it doesn't feel strictly necessary.

    
    I have actively played on Homecoming since its inception and I have half a dozen level 50 characters that I play regularly and a bunch of other alts that I split my time leveling. My favorite additions have been tweaks to the merit system and making the incarnate system more accessible.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea? Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • I really wanted to ship Radiation Armor before the game shutdown. Fortunately, that eventually got into players' hands.
     

• What were you planning on adding to the game before shut-down?

  • A whole bunch of power sets and enhancement sets. The latter I briefly describe somewhere else in these questions.
     

• Which is a powerset that was in the works and you all would have loved to have seen? Lastly, why did you all not consider adding Swinging as a travel power or tunneling?

  • For the power sets that I was most against adding, it was Titan Weapons. Not because of the concept, but because of landing it the way it was conceptualized in early design wasn't really possible with the tech we had. The end result put almost all of the problems on the animation team to solve and it was brutal.
     

• What was to come after defeating Tyrant? Was there ever plans for Infernal Trial? (We never fought him at all) What was your best accomplishment while working on COH? What games do you play in your free time?

  • My best accomplishment was probably shipping Street Justice. It got a lot of positive feedback, people seem to still like it and it was a hell of a lot of fun to make. The highlights of my time at Paragon was working with the animators, FX artists, and sound designers to deliver really cool power sets.

    
    In my free time I still play City of Heroes, but also World of Warcraft, FFXIV, and whatever big RPGs get released.
     

• If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • I'll TL;DR this one. I could talk for hours about it. I would love to revamp the combat system to make enemy control effects actually a threat to melee characters, but also way more forgiving for everyone else. Like, no stuns beyond 3 seconds ever. That's just awful and being stunned shutting down toggles was brutal. I would love to make combat more forgiving early on for more archetypes and more gracefully ramp into the complex madness that is CoH's endgame with IOs and the Incarnate system. Also, I'd love to revamp endurance to make it not so anxiety inducing to manage early on. I think it would be really tough to achieve all this and still deliver the same experience players love, but I would love to try.
     

• Players have been wanting an arcane/ mystic powerset for a while now. Did you have any plans on making or had planned on making a full magic-themed powerset to accompany the sorcery power pool? Also, where you going to add the awakened power for the player to use or a version of it?

  • I did have a plan for an Eldritch Blast set that was going to use a floating book and staff.
     

• Do any of you play Homecoming? What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming? What powerset do you think could use an overhaul?

  • I have actively played Homecoming since its inception. I would love to have been able to implement either Eldritch Blast or Envenomed Blades. There were a whole bunch of design landmines I would have loved to dance around and make something unique, weird, and fun.

    
    I would love to give a number of vanilla power sets a gentle (very gentle) complexity nudge. Like adding some power interactions and the like, while not annoying the people who enjoy the sets as-is. Before the shut down, I was planning an overhaul of Energy Melee that basically made all your single target attacks boost the damage and radius of WHirling Fists. Although, I think I like what Homecoming did instead. They leaned into the set's strengths instead of trying to shore up weaknesses. I'd also love to revamp Regeneration. I'm honestly not sure what I'd do, but it could use some love.
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • I think the secret sauce is a bunch of design chaos that made City of Heroes what it is. It's horrifically imbalanced and imperfect, but I think that's also what makes it interesting. The art style is certainly dated, but it holds up in its own way and quite honestly, people have invested a part of themselves into the identities of their characters. That's pretty sticky gameplay.
     

• How did you resist the urge to do "A Little Bit More" on various parts of the game? It honestly astonishes me how you can make something this complete over twenty something releases.

  • I didn't resist. I just loved the game so much, I was always thinking about it.
     

• Are there any progression, itemization etc. systems or ideas from other games that you have worked on since or have played since CoH's development that you can see working in City of Heroes? Do you have any advice you'd give to the current people supporting the game, or things you'd personally like to see, whether as a player or former developer?

  • As far as totally unsolicited advice, I offer the following:

    - Trying to balance this mess is a lost cause. Embrace the chaos, fix the very very bottom and very very top performers and always try to make things more fun.

    - This one is obvious, but it's amazing how often I have to remind people of this. Approach everything with goals first.

    - Ask yourself "how is this serving the playerbase?" "is this the best solution to this problem?"

    - Know that you're doing amazing work!
     

• When news first surfaced about a City of Heroes private server in April, 2019, what were some of your initial thoughts? What was your first reaction to the news? What are some of your fondest memories during your times at Cryptic and Paragon Studios?

  • First reaction to the news about Homecoming: tell my friends and download it ASAP. Some of you probably played with me.

    
    My fondest memories at Paragon was working with the awesome people there. My highlights were always seeing my designs come to life from the magic created by the artists. Big shout out to Keetsie, Leo, Nelson, Colin, and Adam and all the other artists who helped make power sets super cool.
     

• What opinions do you have on the new Symphony & Arsenal controller power sets? If you were to create a character right now, which AT and power sets would you pick and why?

  • I haven't played either Symphony or Arsenal. They seemed interesting. The former was more conal than I prefer as a player, and the latter seemed really awesome to combine with Traps on a Controller. It's on my list of characters to make.

    If I were to create a character right now? I am contemplating making a new tanker. Torn between WP/Psi and Rad/Rad...
     

• What's one thing in the game as it exists today that you'd like to see expanded or developed further? What are your thoughts on Mission Architect, "good idea that got out of hand, good idea that didn't take off, bad idea in retrospect..."?  It's something I quite enjoy, but it's obviously gone down a very different path at this point.

  • Whew... well, I blame myself for part of the mess that is Mission Architect. Well, most of the mess. It's a tricky problem to solve. If we don't have rewards in Mission Architect, is anyone going to play it? If we do add rewards, what is the right amount? Reward incentives cheapened the over all experience for a lot of players.

 

---

 

Stephen "Rockjaw" Reid -

 

Spoiler

• Are there any community posts, or phrases that still make you smile today? If so - what are they? Is there anything you miss about the CoH community in particular?

  • No. Okay, that's a bit blunt, so "no" but mostly just because of the passage of time. I can still see the (EU) forums, that light blue background, and I can remember dealing with them but... what can I say? Lots of community work since then.

    
    While I always thought of CoH as a global game, there was something particularly European about our part of the world, from the server names to the use of the letter 'U'. I miss that, in an odd way. Most projects I've worked on since have either been US-focused or just global.
     

• What was your favorite, or most memorable, interaction with a player or group of players?  

  • We used to run a "get your character drawn by a comic artist for charity" thing at almost every show we went to, and I used to love seeing people come back (again and again!) for drawings of their characters. A couple of years in people had literal folders full of drawings having donated considerable money to amass them, and I used to really enjoy chatting to them about their favorites, as well as seeing the endless creativity that was generated by using the character generator in-game. It still hasn't been surpassed (for superheroes), IMO.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • Working at NCSOFT (Europe) was a prelude to moving from the UK to the US and getting deeper into MMOs, where I stayed for close to a decade. I worked on the game that became Rift at Trion, various titles from Gazillion including Marvel Heroes, Star Wars: The Old Republic and more. Apart from a (non-planned!) "side-quest" into tech and a non-profit for a few years, I've been in gaming, or something gaming-adjacent, ever since. I honestly look back at my time at NCSOFT as some of the best years of my career, though.
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • When we launched CoH in Europe the decision was taken to rebrand the 'Nazi faction' to the 5th Column because of concerns about the German rating system. Those were warranted concerns - essentially you can't show Nazi imagery in a videogame - but I kind of regret I didn't get to kick Nazi butt on the EU servers. It would have been appropriate.

    
    As I didn't directly impact the game itself, I'd say the community we built around CoH in Europe and the events we had a hand in. In particular we brought Ms. Liberty and Ghost Widow to "life" for various events, which was fantastic fun. I'm also perversely proud that we made Ghost Widow her own business cards to hand to people. Oh and that we got a lovely Collector's Edition for CoV in Europe.
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • Who says he's really dead? This is comics.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • It baffles me that, with the exception of Champions Online (which was of course spearheaded by Jack Emmert), no-one else has tried to do a "generic" (ie non-IP based) superhero MMO. Well, it's not incredibly baffling given how hard MMOs are to make, but it's saddening to me that no-one came in to pick up the torch, so to speak.

    
    To put it simply though - it's not easy to do. There are so many powers, abilities, environments, characters etc that need to be made to even come close to emulating the "feel" of superheroes, that it's a very tall order. While I expect if you sat down and did the math it's probably not much harder than (say) a new sci-fi or fantasy setting, I think it's intimidating. Also bear in mind that there have been a slew of really great superhero games (well, more than a few anyway) that have raised the bar for gameplay in general. Would you want to just hit buttons and execute the same attacks for your Scrapper after playing Batman: Arkham City for example?

    
    I also think CoH was one of those special projects where everything just seemed to hit right. It's very, very rare in any medium and it's ever rarer in MMOs - if it was easy, Champions Online, etc would have found huge success, and nothing really has.
     

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched?

  • CoH launched pre-social media, which was the biggest change for me as a community person. It soon became part of our toolkit but over the years it's come to completely dominate the landscape of "fan interaction" (for better and worse). Suggesting you launch a game with forums now is almost laughable to most, which is frustrating at times, but that's another soapbox.

    
    The industry is also, arguably, much more risk averse, which is why you see so much investment in IP-based games and sequels to already successful titles. I don't think a straight pitch of CoH today - "a unique superhero MMO not tied to any IP" - would get a lot of traction today.

    
    In fact, MMOs in general are really on the decline. While we talk about "games as a service" or "live service games", the idea of an "all you can play" MMO with a subscription is anachronistic at best. Which is ironic given how much of the rest of tech is basically all subscriptions now.
     

• What was your best accomplishment while working on COH? What games do you play in your free time?

  • As I mentioned earlier we organized a "comic artists draw your hero for charity" thing we did at European events. We raised a lot of money, which was great. (We definitely undercharged, FWIW.) We also managed to do a limited run sketchbook with a bunch of art in it of the CoH 'official' characters, including Dave "Watchmen" Gibbons drawing Statesman for the front cover. That was awesome. I still have a copy around here somewhere.

    
    I actually don't play MMOs - I bounce between various indies most of the time. I tend to enjoy open-world "stuff" and also the "survival crafting" genre. Right now I'm playing a lot of the game I'm working on, which makes sense. I also tend to be multiple years behind whatever's currently hot but that's fine with me.
     

• What are you reading?

  • This surprisingly long set of questions? 🙂
     

    I still read and enjoy comics from the Big Two, and also still grumble about the directions that companies take the characters in the never-ending "illusion of change" that is modern superhero mythology.
     

• Do any of you play Homecoming? What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming? What powerset do you think could use an overhaul?

  •  I don't, but mostly through lack of time. I like CoH in my memories. I'd be worried it would fail to live up to that. But maybe one day just for the nostalgia hit.
     

• Was going to space ever on the table for the dev team, especially during live days?  I always had hoped before Praetoria, that there would be another planet, perhaps similar to the Praetoria direction, but with alien race and new archetypes that would be in direct conflict with both the heroes and the villains in the other factions.

  • I mean, back then space tourism wasn't really a thing, so even in the most generous of company offsites I don't think - ohhhh, sorry, in-game. I pass.
     

• Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us?

  • Our beta shutdown event was a lot of fun. We had a room full of people playing NPCs, etc etc and it was total chaos. It was a glimpse into a (financially impossible!) world where real people would play real NPCs...
     

• Where are the Rogue Isles? The official game material is vague; I have my headcanon but i was wondering if you had ever nailed down a specific area.

  • Not an "official" answer but I feel like every supervillain ever has put their island lair in the Caribbean, or somewhere like that. You gotta be close to the equator. Who in their right mind puts their lair somewhere like the North Pole? (Shut up Kal-El.)

 

---

 

Sean "Dr. Aeon" McCann -

 

Spoiler

• Who wrote the funniest lines?
  • I always laughed at Tim Sweeney's lines. He didn't write much since he was in systems but I'll always smile at Null the Gull.
     
• What was it like working on a superhero MMO RPG, does it somehow felt different in comparison to other MMO's? In popular culture, it often happens that characters who were previously dead were resurrected in one way or another, in the case of the City of Heroes, would the deceased characters remained dead, as planned? What is your personal opinion about resurrections?  

  • City of Heroes was interesting because you had to flex into a lot of different styles from a narrative standpoint without falling for the trap of self-awareness, "isn't this wild?". I loved working on Dark Astoria going from a contact who had you doing mini spy thriller work to a look at the nature of good and evil to then a time travel jaunt. It would be easy for those to feel disjointed but the earnestness of City of Heroes helped make it all come together. 

    
    I was dead set (badumch) on leaving Statesman dead. There were some discussions on having Sister Psyche return somehow since she had a bit more leeway. I don't know if that would've been the right answer. Personally, I think resurrections are dangerous to do because they rob the world of the gravity of death without a proper explanation. When a resurrection ends up serving as a reveal about a character (like Gandalf) that works, but a straight, "we plugged these things in and now Statesman is back" would feel like cheap to me.
     

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?

  • I don't know if this counts for, "the tech just wasn't there for it"... this is more, "the studio wasn't there for it". When we got shutdown I was working on the Kallisti Wharf story arcs and the Sirocco storyline. One mission I'm sad that never got to see the light of day was one where you would do a sort of tower defense in Kallisti Wharf to defend against incoming Battalion. The plan was the team leader would be the eye in the sky and other party members would be on the ground fending off waves. I never got the chance to see it in action, so maybe it never would've worked. 

    
    Other than that it was surprising the amount of things we actually did pull off. I remember long conversations with one of our engineers about traveling back in time in Ouroboros to change decisions you made in a storyline and then having those be reflected if you finished the story. That was so confusing! But we pulled it off. I think?
     

• Superdine or fixadine?

  • Don't do drugs kids. 
     

• Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?

  • I was going to skip this one because I never had any ideas on this since I doubt we would've ever gone as far into the future as that. However, I think there's some interesting ground there to cover in terms of, "kheldians are used as fuel" and, "we need all the power we can get to face off against Battalion". Maybe there's a story arc there about a kheldian sacrificing themselves to help earth's defenders reach Battalion? It could even be a redemption arc for Twilight's Son, maybe even the reveal of this is why Mender Silos kept him around.
     

• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?

  • I wish I could edit some of my stuff down! And lower the number of ambushes in the final Vincent Ross mission I made. Sheesh talk about long. It's great being able to play it again, and I love being able to show my kids the first game I worked on. I try not to go too deep into ideas of, "try this or try that" because otherwise I can't get out of that dark hole. I do really like being able to choose if I want to aggressively get to max level with XP boosts or slow things down.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • Still working on video games! I started at Paragon as the youngest designer there, now I'm married with a a few kids. Time flies!
     

• Other than the moon 🙂 were there any ideas for expanding the COH world out into other locations- Egypt (yes, still thinking of BotBS,) South America, Antarctica (secret villain lairs!) , Cardiff - or would that have been something that, if done, would have been more of a COH 2 thing - or was it thought of at all?     

  • We could've gone anywhere! The main issue would be assets to use for the outdoor world and interior missions. When you go to a place like Cimerora, we had you fighting in outdoor copies of the map and caves. All of our other mission assets like clickies etc. are unusable at that point, along with most enemy groups (hence why we probably had 5th column in there, lots that can be used). Doing something that's a mix of city / environment could've been cool! Like visiting Egypt in a partial city / partial desert environment.
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • We usually got to do almost anything we wanted to in the game. There were a few debates; Matthew Habashy originally was a coward who left his wife to die, not something where they got separated. This was a HUGE split amongst people who played the game internally of people liking it a lot and people hating it. We changed it to what it was because we were a super hero game and the first story arc shouldn't hit you that hard.

    
    Dark Astoria!

    
    It's cancellation! Easy answer right?

    
    Malta!
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • Vincent Ross's storyline with the side branching paths was way too convoluted and way too much work was put into it where I could've probably made a few other story arcs in the time it took to do that one. 

    
    There's a ton of things I'd do differently, but one other was is editing down the amount of text I wrote. I was really excited to jump in and make things, but I could've used an editor. Except for Dean MacArthur. 
     

• Anyone with knowledge of this, tell me about the.... Moon Base 🌚🏰    

  • My favorite memory of the Moon Base was me having a GIANT tiff with Positron about a plot point regarding a giant laser (I think?) on the moon. At the time I was being really stubborn and thought it was stupid (it wasn't). It got to the point where War Witch had to sit me down and say, "you've got to calm it down on this". Hindsight being 20/20, I was making a mountain out of a mole hill and the giant laser would've been awesome.
     

• Was there anything specific you really wanted to add to the game that never got greenlit/was turned down as an idea? Was there anything specific you really wanted to add/change/get to work on just prior to the shutdown of CoH?

  • The day before the shutdown I was working on the final part of Sirocco's storyline where he defects to Paragon. I was really excited to have that see the light of the day. There was an awesome ending sequence of Lord Recluse emerging from fire to face off against Sirocco. Would it have been good? Don't know!  
     

• What was your best accomplishment while working on COH? What games do you play in your free time?

  • My best accomplishment has to be working on Dark Astoria. I still have some saved messages from people on how they enjoyed it. I play MMOs, RPGs, and any co-op games that my kids can play with me now. That includes City of Heroes with whatever weird characters they want to make.
     

•  My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂    

  • Everything is great!
     

• Which zone do you most wish got a chance to be revamped and why? 

  • For zone revamps it always seemed like Boomtown could be fun. We would needed to figure out how is it different from the Faultline revamp, e.g. "look another hazard zone that's now being rebuilt". IMO we had that structure near the entrance to Boomtown that I think was meant to be a, "this is the way we'll get you to the moonbase". It could've been cool if we did something to tie that together. What if there was a laser on the moon base that shot down and destroyed Boomtown again to reveal more 5th column bases? 
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • It was a big relief to hear that Homecoming was made official, and very surreal seeing people playing through things I used to work on. There's always going to be a bit of, "oh I wish I could fix that" from various bits of content I worked on, but it's great to see people are still enjoying things!
     

• What are you reading?

  • Books on how to raise my kids!
     

• Do any of you play Homecoming?

  • I play!
     

•  Did you also tear up when you heard the music for the first time logging back in?

  • I wouldn't say tear up since I still listened to the title screen music every now and then. But the combination of it plus a working character creator did create lots of feelings.
     

• How did you resist the urge to do "A Little Bit More" on various parts of the game? It honestly astonishes me how you can make something this complete over twenty something releases.

  • The secret is having "a little bit more" scheduled in to the production. e.g. if we have 3 weeks of time to do something we schedule a week and a half of work to leave another week and a half for mistakes / polish / a little bit more. 

    
    A fun fact with this was the Penelope Yin Task Force. I was bored on a Sunday morning and bet Arbiter Hawk that I could bang out a task force in a day. So I went in and did the task force start to finish, then came in the next day to a, "ta da I did more!". But no one was scheduled to test it, we never had a kick off to see if it would work for the story, and no one from systems was scheduled to check out the powers. So now I went and added work to everyone because I was bored one day. 

    
    So that's when I learned that, "A Little Bit More" has to come with everyone that would be involved in it being on board... which is why it was always good to have that sort of thing put into everyone's schedule.
     

• Were there any plans to give Praetorians the option of going straight to First Ward as part of the storyline instead of going to Paragon/Rogue Islands first?

  • Oh boy that was such a nightmare of code wrapped together to move Praetorians to the main universe. There was a handshake deal made of, "we're always going to put you into Paragon/Rogue islands" so First Ward kind of threw that for a loop. Also that exit mission was MASSIVE with the number of branching paths, npcs, and dialogs that could happen. It'd be a shame to get rid of it.

    
    That being said, with the addition of First Ward / Night Ward... if we kept going down the path of more gold side content I could see a world where would have tried to figure out a way to make it work. But if we didn't add more gold side stuff it might've been hard to justify.
     

• Was going to space ever on the table for the dev team, especially during live days?  I always had hoped before Praetoria, that there would be another planet, perhaps similar to the Praetoria direction, but with alien race and new archetypes that would be in direct conflict with both the heroes and the villains in the other factions.

  • Yep we were working on the moon base. I remember a lot of the cool assets that were being made. 
     

• How does it feel seeing how all the work you did when the game was live has been appreciated by so many people and impacted us in such a way that the game was essentially resurrected? What feature, power, story arc, content, etc that you worked on are you most proud of? And lastly, the question all of us are wondering: If you could nerf anything in the game as it stands right now, why would it be regen?

  • It feels great to have been a part of all of this! I love running Death from Below on my alts and remembering when it was being put together.
     

• Did you create accounts instantly and join us in grinding through the Sewer Networks / Death From Below—and we didn't even know that we teamed with you?

  • I'm still joining Death From Below groups and you'll never know it's me. 

    CoX's world building is some of the most impressive, vast, and substantial in any game. Where did some of the inspiration come from for CoX's various enemy groups and zones?
     
•  What are some of your fondest memories during your times at Cryptic and Paragon Studios?
  • I still remember my very first day at Paragon walking through the studio with Joe / Hero 1 and being amazed that I was in the gaming industry. My desk was squeezed between two other people and all I could think was, "this is awesome". Everyone was so welcoming to me, a complete newbie to everything. I was amazed this place existed and that I got to go here every day. Joe / Hero 1 also gave me a piece of advice at the end of my first day which was, "the hardest skill to learn is how to get your job done in 8 hours and leave". I proceeded to *not* take that to heart until 2-3 years later.
     

• Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us?

  • One time 7 of us were playing at lunch time and got a random player to be our eighth for a few paper missions. The player started talking about a bug that, "would never get fixed" with some power set. What they didn't know was every person who could fix that bug (systems, FX, animation, QA) was on that team. After the lunch it was fixed in a few hours
     

• Were there any arcs or plotlines you felt didn't land as well as intended?

  • I've mentioned it a bit before but the ending of the Vincent Ross arc didn't stick the landing with assaulting an army of Legacy Chain. I also think Roy Cooling ended up introducing Malta way too early at the end versus keeping them a mystery. These are both my own arcs as an FYI. If I could turn back time and do a quick fix I'd remove it being a wave kill of legacy chain for Ross and just spawn a ton of them on a boat. Roy Cooling might be a bit harder since Malta is baked into the finale... maybe instead of a zeus titan it's an elite boss individual operative whose group isn't clear. Then again with all of this, what's done is done right? There's a slippery slope of too much editing of things that have been set in stone for a while.
     

• How do you feel about AE and fire farming? How would you have liked to see the Mastermind AT progress in terms of customization and powers? What opinions do you have on the new Symphony & Arsenal controller power sets? What is most important advice you’d give to the Homecoming team? If you were to create a character right now, which AT and power sets would you pick and why?

  • I love Mission Architect, it's how I got into the game industry. Fire farming is an unfortunate side effect of the system that was meant to be a way for players to deliver story content. It is a bummer to see well written story arcs being over shadowed by ways to level up as fast as humanly possible, especially when that ends up forcing players out of the rest of the game. I would be lying if I said I never tried out fire farming, but in the end it leveled me way too fast and never gave me the chance to really get attached to my characters. 
     

• What's one thing in the game as it exists today that you'd like to see expanded or developed further? What are your thoughts on Mission Architect, "good idea that got out of hand, good idea that didn't take off, bad idea in retrospect..."?  It's something I quite enjoy, but it's obviously gone down a very different path at this point.

  • Two mission architect questions in a row! I really love Mission Architect. I think it's important to get real rewards for it so it can serve as a, "I'm on my 120th alt and if I hear Matthew Habashy's intro one more time I'm going to scream". I think it's a massively complicated issue of how you balance that out so the efficient player experience is playing different player made story arcs and not fire farm #12875. 

    
    We had the concept of dev choice arcs, but that never ended up stopping the farms. There's probably a clever solution out there now that we're 10 years out of the shutdown. I think at its core Mission Architect is a great tool to help introduce people into the game industry. It's so powerful that it needs a ton of guard rails to avoid boiling an entire game down into one small room.
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Simplicity in your design is bliss. There are things that may make complete sense to you, but there's no way to actually portray that in the game. I look at my work on Vincent Ross (sorry Ross I'm bashing you a ton) versus Dark Astoria. Vincent Ross's arc with his multiple branching side arcs is way more complicated than almost anything in Dark Astoria. The game engine didn't really support what I wanted to do in Vincent Ross, so I tried to bend it as hard as humanly possible. Everything technically *worked*, but it wasn't very clear how to take advantage of it.
     

• The many faces of Nemesis... I've heard some interesting and crazy theories about various Multiversal Nemesis over the years... DJ Zero is the Nemesis from his dimensions... Praetorian Nemesis was actually who Praetorian Hamidon was... (o.o seriously.. portal mission with Nemesis Hami, this needs to be done!).. Are any of these actually true? And where there any more planned Nemesesi?" Time Travel. When the midnighter's club's ice and flame pillar was added and crimoria gone to, there was some talk about there being more future destinations (though it might have largely been Jack Emmert doing said talking). Where there any planned and never worked on? or worked on abit then reused for things like Praetoria? Since things like the moon, space station and shuttle got started and nixed a couple times, it would be interesting to hear about other intended locations and time... and what Requiem was ultimately up to.

  • I can answer the last part about Requiem. I always thought he was an interesting character. The idea of him leading the 5th column, then being ousted by the Council, then having the 5th column resume but under the Reichsman's command... THEN regaining control of it again painted him out to be the ultimate bad guy to me. I remember playing the hero arc where you found out his history and thought it was just so chilling. His connection to the Nictus felt like he was the ultimate big bad lurking in the background while other threats were happening. 
     

    I imagine Requiem would continue lurking in the background gathering power as the Battalion invasion of Earth ensued. There probably would've been some conflict between him trying to reach full incarnate status while using the Dirge of Entropy along with the empowerment machine that Reichsman lost. It's been so long that it's hard to remember the details, but I think the ultimate answer is, "Requiem is a bad guy through and through and is patient enough to wait for his plans to come to fruition".
     

• What was the intended purpose of Kalisti Wharf? Its set up like a PVP or CO-OP zone. What was the original plan and are there any future plans to populate it with critters or imbue it with a purpose other than a staging ground?

  • I might have this wrong since this is going off of memory of 10 years ago. I checked some answers past me did in some lore AMAs to try to summarize it.

    
    Kalisti Wharf was going to be a new zone for the Battalion invasion. Rather than make another co-op zone like the RWZ and Dark Astoria the idea was to make a zone where there were clear barriers where heroes and villains could and couldn't go without having to make two separate zones. There weren't any plans (yet) for PvP in it. The idea was having hero and villain story arcs taking place throughout the zone, mixing instance missions with the new office interiors and the usual other sets with instance missions taking place in chunks of the overworld copied into other maps. 

    
    Villains would've had their base beneath the giant stadium and we would've tried to pick things up where they left off with the Mr. G story arc if you did it. Heroes would do their usual hero thing. 

    
    The set up for the story was the creation of Statesman One Plaza in order to honor Statesman's death. The plaza would be a beacon of scientific progress, founded by a new character named Something Christie (I'll just call him Mr. Christie), who was one of Steven Sheridan's most promising pupils. Villains *I think* were planning a big heist on Statesman One Plaza during the opening ceremony. Things go wrong when Battalion shows up during the opening ceremony, forcing heroes and villains to change their plans and face off against the group. The villain arc afterwards would be, "how do I both defeat Battalion and gain untold power" and the hero arc would be, "how did Battalion get here and what are they up to?". I think villains may have kidnapped Steven Sheridan to help build up their base.

    
    The goal of the story was to set up the plot point that there were Battalion agents on Earth that were sabotaging our defenses all of this time. It was also going to set up a very clear, "it's got to be Mr. Christie because he was just introduced". Christie was the one who led the initiative to create Statesman One Plaza. In the end we find out the Battalion's plan is to open a massive portal into the Shadow Shard using Statesman One Plaza as a conduit. The goal was to destroy Rularuu using Shiva as Rularuu was the only entity that could threaten their control. This would've been the, "aha!" moment for Christie being the bad guy since everything added up of him being a new face and he was in charge of the creation of Statesman One Plaza. The twist would've been Christie revealing he was following the designs of Steven Sheridan for the building. That would've been the moment Sheridan played his hand, revealed he was a Battalion agent, and activated the building to open the portal to the Shadow Shard. I think the plan was to have a stub in for the villain character in the hero arc to have Sheridan at the plaza for that moment and have him wreck the players.

    
    The finale was going to be the heroes and villains working together (and saving my schedule to avoid making two finales) to stop Sheridan's plan to destroy the Shadow Shard with Shiva. Players would've found a way to go up to one of the shards of Shiva as it was barreling towards earth with Christie. Christie would've used Shiva to temporarily power up the player character, allowing them to go toe to toe with Battalion Sheridan. 

    
    The details at the end are a little hazy. I think we somehow get the Shadow Shard portal disabled, the shiva bits miss the portal and crashland into another part of Paragon (sorry Paragon!). You would've had a final battle against Sheridan in the crater where the shards landed. I think we had him get away at the end so he could serve as a personal face to Battalion.

    
    And that would've been Kallisti Wharf! Would it have been good? Who knows! Would the story have changed? Probably. We never got past the blockout stage for the content, so there would've been a lot of edits to figure out what things made sense and what didn't. 

 

---

 

C.W. "pohsyb" Bennett:

 

Spoiler

• When working on the game, did you ever think that its engine needed serious modification?  
  • If you are talking about graphics engine, no not really.   When I joined in 2002, rendering a full city in realtime was a miracle of computing.  As for fancy shaders and particle effects or whatever, the artists could already not control themselves, turning everything into a big mess once groups go together.   I remember stopping by an artist where he showed me all of the force powers, they looked great (and finished imo).  Two weeks later he was still working on it and had added so much noise and stuff to it....ugh.  Sometimes less is more.
     
• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?
  • I feel like tech was not usually the barrier, it was time and effort.
     
• Superdine or fixadine?
  • Superdine, its got "Super" right in the name
     
• Is there anywhere you would of liked to take the Kheldian storyline before the Battalion gobbled them up. Maybe going to some other planets that Kheldians inhabit like with the Dwarfs and Novas? Also, is it morally wrong to consume Kheldians?
  • We have enough aliens in paragon city, the kheldians should go back to space.
     
• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?
  • I left before the end, so I have no way to know what is new and what other developers did after I left.   
     
• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?
  • When I left Paragon, I left the game industry
     

• What's the one mechanic, story line, enemy, etc... that you wanted to see in the game, but couldn't for whatever reason (unpopular, infeasible, didn't get to it)? What's the thing you're most proud of achieving re: CoH/V? What's the thing you wish never landed in CoH/V? Favourite enemy?

  • Most Proud: Mission Architect
    Never Landed: PvP
    Favorite Enemy: Atlas Titan, specifically when the two little guys Voltron into the big one.
     

• Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?

  • Duck Size Horses, attrition would be on my side.
     

• With the benefit of hindsight, what is one thing that you wish you had done differently? Whether expanding upon something for the release, changing the implementation, outright not adding in something, whatever the case may be.

  • Rularuu was terrible compared to the original vision.   It could've been a clever way to reuse art asset in a new context, instead it was just weird nonsense.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • Comics is a genre that can pull from literally anything and it somehow still holds together.   Nazis, Aliens, Gods, Mechas, Pirates, Ninjas, Many flavors of Zombies.  We have it all.
     

• How difficult was it working with the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes and what were some unusual ways you overcame those difficulties to make it do what you wanted?

  • Spaghetti code!?  We only use Gotos a few times!   You should've seen some of the code when I got there.  The programmer I replaced was an assembly programmer from Atari and thought the best way to measure productivity was lines of code.   After he left, I deleted 80,000 lines of code one week. Best week of my life.
     

• What do you all think of skunks? They're pretty nice animals. More importantly, were there other animal heads, like the monster ones and the piranha/bull/eagle ones, planned for the game? If so then which one was next to be added before the shutdown occurred, and what were long term planned additions?

  • There is a piranha head!?  
     

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂

  • Living the dream
     

• If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • I'd brighten it up.  The game always looks so dark in screenshots.
     

• What are you reading?

  • Bug reports

 

• Do any of you play Homecoming? What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming? What powerset do you think could use an overhaul?

  • I don't really have a gaming PC anymore, strictly a Sony Pony.   You guys planning a PS5 port by chance?
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • There are not many games that let you just be whatever you want like CoH.  I think the time of the MMO has come and gone, so no, it couldn't be made today.  
     

•  Was Officer Daniels in the tutorial a Nemesis plot?

  • Everything is a Nemesis plot
     

• When news first surfaced about a City of Heroes private server in April, 2019, what were some of your initial thoughts? How were different styles and pieces of music chosen for the zones?

  • I was glad the game is not lost to time and space.  We had one sound guy that did the music, sound effects, everything.   
     

• What is that one thing that you really, really wanted to finish developing for the game but ended up not working out in the long run? Do you have a favorite old school in-game memory that you wouldn’t mind sharing with us? Can you tell us some about the various challenges encountered by the powers team as they developed things like zone pvp, arena pvp and the short lived base-raiding pvp? (Follow up question, is it true that the fiercest pvp was typically on the forums?)

  • Jack told me specifically not to add the little arrow in 3D space that shows you where the door is.  He thought it would break immersion and that everyone should navigate via the compass.   Poz hated the compass too and let me add the arrow.  The arrow was some glyph I stole from some other UI element (We never updated it while I was there).   After a company playtest, everyone loved the arrow, including Jack, so we left it.
     

• What happened to the rest of the world during the Rikti invasion?  Which cities, besides Paragon, were the hardest hit? Did different nations fight back against the Rikti in different ways? Were there other portals to the Rikti Homeworld in other cities, or is the one in Paragon City the only one?

  • Nothing exists outside the game maps...just an endless expanse of nothing.   Maybe Paragon just exists in a splinter dimension.  
     

• If you could design a power set, what would it be and for which AT?

  • My answer would've been time control, but that got added?   Probability manipulation?
     

• What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

  • Not quite a bug, but I accidentally deleted everyone's gloves one time.
     

• Where are the Rogue Isles? The official game material is vague; I have my headcanon but i was wondering if you had ever nailed down a specific area.

  • New Jersey
     

• How do you explain the excitement and continued interest of players for this game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year?Could you predict this popularity at the time?

  • I'm just glad its been preserved
     

•  How do you feel about AE and fire farming?

  • Players gonna play.  If people want to farm, they gonna farm no matter what you do. I'm not sure why so much effort is put into thwarting them.   
     

• What's one thing in the game as it exists today that you'd like to see expanded or developed further? What are your thoughts on Mission Architect, "good idea that got out of hand, good idea that didn't take off, bad idea in retrospect..."?  It's something I quite enjoy, but it's obviously gone down a very different path at this point.

  • I think Mission Architect is great, I think they should've just acknowledged Farm missions were going to be a thing and made that an official category. The would've have clogged up the rest of the discovery that way.  
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Don't let programmers talk to players.
     

• Can you say in particular where the idea for Nemesis came from?

  • Rick Dakan, he wrote all the original stories about the factions.

 

 

---

 

"TheOcho":

 

Spoiler

• I've been waiting for you! First, it's nice to see you back around and making yourself available for this Q&A—you've been missed!

  I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you again for helping me and my crew pull off a massive zone-wide drop ship challenge. It remains, to this day, 1 of the most fun things I've done in the game. Here is a little flashback for you. -  (we took out 18 ships)  

  3rd:  Peek at my forum picture. You gave me that title because I was then and am still now obsessed with this game developing a Trick Yoyo power set. I'm sure you recall all the annoying times I asked you about it, talked about it, and posted about it.. you finally relented and promised me you'd make sure I had it by issue 34. I want you to know I'm still holding you to that promise! You still have some time, and I'm still available to consult with you about ideas.  4th: In your opinion, was Champion server *really* the drama server?

  • Hi @Cherry Always good to hear from you! I still think about you every time I drive through your home town. Doing events like that was always a blast, although spawning in stuff had serious concerns for server stability; something I wish had been explained to me before I was given the power to do it! Still I somehow managed to ever avoid crashing things completely, although it was close a few times.

    
    Of course with the many twists and turns things have taken over the years, the exact contents of issues have had to shift slightly, I feel confident however the current team would see the injustice of denying you the power set you have so “patiently” waited for. So I’ll go ahead and promise it again, but maybe by issue 37 this time. 

    
    And finally yes, champion was most definitely the drama server. You folks took that challenge and ran with it. I don’t want to call out individual's, that’s not fun, but there were some real personalities on that server. I miss how individual each server felt, and how they developed collective personalities, something not typical in more recent games.
     

• Are there any community posts, or phrases that still make you smile today? If so - what are they? Is there anything you miss about the CoH community in particular?

  • There are the classic meme posts that folks remember, but in general the thing I remember most fondly are the individuals. Whether it was the various members of the ebil market cabal, the off forum troll discussion groups which I kept a close eye on, the same folks we’d see at every convention and herocon, or the tons of people who I talked to every day, often under difficult circumstances (such as telling them they had been naughty on the forums’).

    
    Empulse once told me that there is something special about a group of people who are drawn to the fantasy of being a superhero, and I think that’s partially true. Although I’ve worked on other superhero MMO’s and it wasn’t nearly as apparent in their communities. Maybe it is how much freedom CoH gives in creating your character, and how that leads people to be free to be more expressive and open in the community.
     

• What was your favorite, or most memorable, interaction with a player or group of players?  

  • There are so many good memories, I especially enjoyed interacting at live events. But my favorite memory of interaction with players came on the forums. The introduction of the science pack introduced the ability to change body type, including of course switching between male and female body styles. A few very vocal members were shocked at this, and adamantly opposed, but the overwhelming majority of players were accepting and encouraging of their fellow players who had experienced this sort of transition in their real lives and provided a ton of support. While I respect everyone’s freedom to believe whatever they want for themselves, it was good to see players en masse show support for their fellow players.
     

• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?

  • Still working in games all these years later. While my positions have grown in responsibility over the years, the experiences I had working on City of Heroes are still the formative heart of how I approach Community Management.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • City of Heroes came about in a time where MMOs were still able to be developed with reasonable budgets and with that came about a lot more creative freedom and far less economic pressures to have mass market success. This led to far more interesting ideas and unique ways to play, something which is definitely missing these days. I’ve worked on more than 30 MMOs at this point, and the vast majority of them were functionally the same game. Different themes and powers, different systems, but all basically the same.
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • I had recently worked at NCSoft again right before the negotiations started between NCSoft and the Homecoming team, so I managed to get really early word from friends at the company that this was a possibility. I was super excited for you folks, as I know how hard you had all fought for CoH to remain available and I knew there would be tons of people chomping at the bit for a chance to play again.

    
    But it’s a little bit complicated for me. These games aren’t just their source code, they are much much more. They are the team of super talented devs who I got to work with, whose ideas were so exciting to the community. And it is of course the community of players themselves, many of whom are no longer with us. So for me, there is no going home really. I’ve been involved in the shutdown now of more games than I can count, often being the one to guide the communities for them through the sense of loss and sadness. 

    
    And of course games are still how I make my living. And the unfortunate reality is due to how tax code and intellectual property rights work, it’s often impossible for companies to do what NCSoft has done. I give them a lot of credit, because they took a risk in even considering this as a possibility. Playing private servers, even authorized ones, is not something I’m comfortable with for myself. Although I have jumped in here and relived the glory days even if only for a few hours. 

    
    In the end, I’m appreciative of the team doing this and happy for all of you who have the opportunity to play again. Seeing all of your names has brought back a lot of memories, all of them good. I’ll cheer you folks on from afar, even if I can’t be one of you.
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later.. What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • It’s the character builder. I was at SOE when DCUO launched, and I immediately was like “how could they have missed the most important thing that made CoH great?”. Building the look and feel of precisely the character you wanted set the tone for the entire game, and is a huge part of the magic of CoH.

    
    The economic reality is that CoH couldn’t be made today. Game development has become exponentially more expensive, and the profit margins have shrunk tremendously. Games either have to be massive AAA blockbusters or small indie affairs. CoH is both too big a game to be developed by a small indie team, and too niche a game to reach the size of audience that supporting the team would require. It’s an unfortunate state of being; my hope is that advancements in tools continues to be able to make something like CoH possible again someday.

 

---

 

"Fireman" (aka Bass_Ackwards):

 

Spoiler

• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?
  • Not sure how far along it was, but there was a sniper set I remember reading documentation about. I want to see what that could have turned out to be! I believe it had a mechanic about "getting a bead on the target."
     
• Superdine or fixadine?
  • Remember kids, Heroes don't do drugs!
     

• Favourite enemy?

  • Favorite enemy would be the Knives of Artemis. We need more Lethal Ladies! 😉
     

•  For anyone who's interested in answering, be it gameplay, story, etc: What parts of Homecoming's development of City of Heroes do you approve of? Which do you not, or would do differently if it was you in charge?

  • I approve the proliferation of all other primary and secondary sets to Scrapper. Thank you Homecoming! ❤️
     

• Why was Statesman chosen to be killed?

  • Because John "Protean" Hegner said so, and that's the bottom line.
     

• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?

  • The different themes and character concepts you can play out are unparelleled. No other MMORPG compares. And you can customize so much! Build crafting is quite fun too!
     

• What games do you play in your free time?

  • Games I currently play in my free time: CoH, Vampire Survivors (on PC and Mobile), Killing Floor 2, and the critically acclaimed Final Fantasy XIV. I am eagerly awaiting Monster Hunter Wilds!
     

• If you were in a position where you could make any change to the game you wanted, regardless of whether it would make money for the company or be popular or not, total creative freedom, what would that be?

  • I would add more power customization animations. For all sets!
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? 

  • Excited beyond belief that an old friend was back, and officially too! CoH scratches an itch that no other games can for me. It is also great to see many old familiar names.
     

• What are you reading?

  • This question!
     

• Do any of you play Homecoming? What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming? What powerset do you think could use an overhaul?

  • Play Homeoming? Absolutely! I'd like to see a thrown weapons blast set. Overhaul might be too strong of a word, but I would like to see Broadsword and Katana have some uniquness added to them, to separate themselves from each other, but also from other melee weapon sets.
     

• If you could nerf anything in the game as it stands right now, why would it be regen?

  • Regen should have 100% Regen Debuff Resist!
     

• If you could design a power set, what would it be and for which AT?

  • For Scrapper I would want a sword and pistol for a primary set, and a psionic armor secondary.
     

• What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band?

  • I'm really enjoying synthwave at the moment, but my music tastes go everywhere.
     

• What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

  • What gave me endless entertainment wasn't really a bug, per se. It was how the ragdoll deaths would resolve on enemies. Sometimes you would get the most hilarious poses and I have tons of screenshots of such moments.
     

• How do you explain the excitement and continued interest of players for this game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year?Could you predict this popularity at the time?

  • I've been playing MMOs since Everquest, and if my time in these different worlds has taught me anything: It's that MMOs become homes for people and communities to come back to. If you make it, they will probably stay for as long as possible! I think that's how the saying goes...
     

• How would you have liked to see the Mastermind AT progress in terms of customization and powers?

  • I would love to see minion customization. If not granular like the character customizer then at least a female version of the male minion types, and alternate looks for demons/beasts/robots.
     

• What's one thing in the game as it exists today that you'd like to see expanded or developed further?

  • More Incarnate content. I think we were getting towards more cosmic threats and having more Incarnate powers to flex on them could be pretty fun!
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • It seems painfully obvious, but for QA you should strive to be a prompt, to the point, effective communicator. Back your findings up with data, repetition, and clear descriptions that can have even a non-gamer follow the reproduction steps. Get comfortable around managing quickly changing priorities, and their several possible contexts depending on what point of the project is at.
     

• Can you say in particular where the idea for Nemesis came from?

  • It came from a Nemesis Plot.

 

---

 

Nellie Hughes:

 

Spoiler

• What was it like working on a superhero MMO RPG, does it somehow felt different in comparison to other MMO's?
  • To answer the question about working on a superhero MMO compared to others, and how it felt different. City of Villains was my first game gig, so until I moved into the high fantasy realm, I think I took for granted the level of flexibility with the content I was building. When it came to the City of series I was able to have more over the top theming with my toon.
     
• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?
  • I would say the PVP base raiding that we were trying to do with City of Villans. It may have come after my time on the project, but I remember fondly play testing in the office with my coworkers and having a blast. 
     
• For any of you who've had the time to delve in and explore this and/or other community servers, what's it like to get to experience the game you worked on now strictly as a player, seeing how it's evolved under the direction of some of the very people you used to make it for? Any favorite new stuff or "why didn't we think of that" moments?
  • So in all transparency I haven't taken a dive into the community servers but more watching from afar type of thing. I personally think it's really really rad. Because City of was my first game project, I was very naive about games and the industry as a whole. When City of shut down, it really hit me that all this hard work folks have done for years and years is just "gone" and that felt horrible. When I heard about the community servers, I was elated that folks would still get to enjoy all the love, creativity and hard work that so many have put into the game. I'm 100% sure there is a TON of stuff in there that I wouldn't have thought of, and I'm gonna bet it's all pretty good.
     
• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?
  • I have taken a tour around the country, but yes still in games almost 18 years later. I went from MMO's development to people management to where I am now, a Design Director at Xbox Publishing. 
     
• Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?
  • horse-sized duck 100%
     
• Why was Statesman chosen to be killed?
  • ohhhh boy, not touching that one.
     
• Given the state of MMO today, do you have opinions on why CoX is such a unique game after 20 years?
  • I would say that it has a level of nostalgia that I've never seen on so many people because it was one of the first (if not the first) Superhero MMO, that had good pro-social features that encouraged players to work together without level gating the experience, like sidekicking. I can't tell you how many older folks (like myself, no age shaming here) will get SUPER excited when they find out you worked on City Of because they remember the game so fondly because of the amount of different types of characters you could make and play. And, flying - that s*it was so fun.
     

• How has the video game industry changed for you as a professional since City of Heroes was launched?

  • I would say we've grown up alot? I remember when I first started at Cryptic and went to GDC in 2005, and the "women and gaming" panel was just 2 people playing Dead or Alive on a large projector when I showed up. That would never ever fly this day and age (thank goodness).
     

• As far as the comic book runs, did you guys have any input on those? or the TCG/CCG?

  • I think Sean, Shane and Jack had input on the comics and games, but don't quote me on that. 
     

• My question is; How are you all doing?  Happy with your current work?  Family life good.  Health good?  I hope yes to all but that's why I asked 🙂

  • Life is amazing, I moved to a place that doesn't have a lot of snowfall at my house, but close enough I get to go skiing a few times a week during the season. My current work at Xbox is very exciting, and I love my project and the people I work with. Family and health are good (except the usual "hey I'm 40 and "X" brokedown on my body"l, but that's to be expected)
     

• When you first heard of Homecoming and the other private servers, what were your thoughts and feelings about your work here in City of Heroes coming back? And what were your thoughts and feelings when Homecoming received its official license?  Here we are, twenty years on, and there's a whole lot of us still playing and enjoying your game, what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

  • I absolutely love it. I didn't realize how special what I was working on at the time because I was an f'ing idiot, but after being around the block a few more years and hearing about the shut down and the rise of it again, it's so amazing.
     

• 20 years.. not all projects are still around 20+ years later..  What do folks think the magic or secret sauce was that resonated with players? Do you think CoX could have been built in 2024?

  • It was a truly unique game of its time, and let folks be whomever they wanted to be and I think that's a lot of the magic sauce. And if it could be built now? Not sure, it's a weird rough market these days, and I think that with some fancy gameplay features that could keep players engaged, there would be a definite chance. 
     

• Are there any progression, itemization etc. systems or ideas from other games that you have worked on since or have played since CoH's development that you can see working in City of Heroes? 

  • I always thought the Mastery System from Guild Wars 2 would be a neat addition to the COX games.
     

• What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band? If you have an ingame character/nickname what is their favorite music/style?

  • Oh I'd say techno/edm for sure. 
     

• Each of you has gained valuable insight into creating and managing experiences for  players across the world over the years. What nuggets of wisdom and advice can you pass on to all of the volunteer artists, writers, designers, programmers, QA, and community relation teams that steward this universe that you created?

  • Less is more, and always quality over quantity.

 

---

"Dark Watcher"

 

Spoiler

• If you could go back and expand on any group that you feel didn't have much content made about them, who, why, and what would you want to do?  
  • I always wanted to revisit the Hamidon raid to make it "Evolve" as players attempted to defeat it.  It was always supposed to be the pinnacle of evolution, so I thought it would be an ideal place to have it use a variety of strategies to make the raid not be something that was just a follow the instructions type of event.  Nowadays, it would be really interesting to use some ML to have it adapt to player's strategies and make it REALLY challenging.  (Of course, that would just be for hard mode!)
     
• When working on the game, did you ever think that its engine needed serious modification?  
  • The engine was constantly being upgraded and there were always more things we wanted to do with it, like new powersets, villain groups, events or even graphical upgrades.  Still, I think it held up very well and still runs strong even after 20 years now!
     
• Any memorable things that you wanted to implement but the tech just wasn't there for it?
  • I always wished we could have offered more live events or events that were run by actual, in person, GMs (game masters, not Giant Monsters!)
     
• Superdine or fixadine?
  • Chocolate.
     
• What have you guys been up to? Still working on video games or did you move on to something else?
  • I've worked in games on and off since Paragon, doing various tasks.  I still enjoy having people enjoying the games I work on.
     

• How difficult was it working with the spaghetti code that is City of Heroes and what were some unusual ways you overcame those difficulties to make it do what you wanted?

  • The code wasn't that bad.  Yes, it had evolved over 10 years of development, but in all honesty, I've worked on much worse.  Sometimes, though, it did take some rewriting and a lot of testing to make sure changes didn't break other things in unexpected ways.  One thing that really worked in our favor though was the pace of the improvement in computer hardware really allowed us to scale up and add new features without having to sacrifice old features to maintain the same level of performance in many cases.
     

• What do you all think of skunks? They're pretty nice animals. More importantly, were there other animal heads, like the monster ones and the piranha/bull/eagle ones, planned for the game? If so then which one was next to be added before the shutdown occurred, and what were long term planned additions?

  • We used to have a whole family of skunks that lived behind the Paragon office.  They mostly kept to themselves, but every once in a while, when we would be walking out to our cars, we'd see an adult skunk and trail of baby skunks dash across the parking lot.
     

• What are you reading?

  • Just finished M. K. Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy.
     

• Was going to space ever on the table for the dev team, especially during live days?  I always had hoped before Praetoria, that there would be another planet, perhaps similar to the Praetoria direction, but with alien race and new archetypes that would be in direct conflict with both the heroes and the villains in the other factions.

  • There was talk of a Moon base for a while and there were all kinds of brainstorming for expansion ideas that never really stuck.
     

• What is your favorite music genre/style or favorite band? If you have an ingame character/nickname what is their favorite music/style?

  • I listen to lots of different types of music.  I always imagined Dark Watcher, though, listening to New Orleans style jazz.
     

• What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

  • Three words:  Ghost shark gun.
     

• Where are the Rogue Isles? The official game material is vague; I have my headcanon but i was wondering if you had ever nailed down a specific area.

  • Somewhere lost in the Atlantic, I believe.  Maybe in the Bermuda Triangle.
     

• How do you explain the excitement and continued interest of players for this game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year?Could you predict this popularity at the time?

  • I'm happy to see that it's still popular after all this time.  We really do have a one of a kind community.

 

 

[Glacier Peak]

Fantastic read - love the insight and thank both Original Devs, the Homecoming Team, and the community for creating this. Great questions!

 

Edit: To see my question get answered by many of the original team, wow!

 

Edited June 5 by Glacier Peak

[TheImprobableMan]

Thanks Arcanum for posting the responses, and thanks to all the folks that answered!  It's great to hear from you all again.

 

P.S. I'm also glad to hear that I most likely did not break the door.

Edited June 4 by TheImprobableMan

[ScarySai]

36 minutes ago, Arcanum said:

I did have a plan for an Eldritch Blast set that was going to use a floating book and staff.

Based Synapse.

[Laucianna]

Thank you for answering the questions about Kheldians! ❤️ Though I was hoping you would all appose the consumption of Kheldians... And Pohsyb you are uninvited to all my birthday parties 😞 XD

[Greentea]

Damn, Synapse.

 

Eldritch Blast sounds fantastic, it's a shame. Others too, I bet psychic nexus from Yin/Scrappers/Stalkers is a part of Psychic Defense.

 

Anyhoo, it's cool to read their responses, thanks Arca.

[Abraxus]

Loved reading this retrospective on the game we all cherish so much.  The insight into certain aspects of the game that never saw the light of day, was very interesting.  Sounded like most of them pretty much left the game behind, when they left the studio.  But, it was nice to hear that they were so happy about the games resurrection, and it's potential for the future.

[Tag365]

Seems like more than one person answered my question about skunks.

[Solas67]

Okay, I'm very serious about this and I hope the community team sees this....but I'd love to remake Melissa's lost War Witch figure so if there's a way to arrange a delivery address of some kind, please let me know, I'll happily redo it and better this time.

Can we also please as a community help her rebuild some of her collection? 

[Monos King]

1 hour ago, Arcanum said:

Maybe there's a story arc there about a kheldian sacrificing themselves to help earth's defenders reach Battalion? It could even be a redemption arc for Twilight's Son, maybe even the reveal of this is why Mender Silos kept him around.

Hahaha yes! We're on the same page, Aeon!

 

(Also if any of you are lurking you should definitely join the Lore discord in my signature, 10/10 has shrimp tacos)

Edited June 5 by Monos King

[Greycat]

Fun read, all 'round. Thanks folks - always good to see you!

[Chuckers]

2 hours ago, Arcanum said:

What was your favorite bug? I remember the desk with a million hit points. I heard of the filing cabinet that when clicked on, ran away. Or the location in KR that collected NPCs? (later fixed and given a plaque.) I'm sure there were others...

• What gave me endless entertainment wasn't really a bug, per se. It was how the ragdoll deaths would resolve on enemies. Sometimes you would get the most hilarious poses and I have tons of screenshots of such moments.

 

Thank you all for answering my question... Arcanum, I remember thinking "good thing they're dead, cause that's gotta hurt!"

 

It was such a pleasure to read all of your answers to everything!! 

[Super Atom]

Synapse is the goat fr

[TECHWON]

amazing read

[Trickshooter]

3 hours ago, Arcanum said:

If you could design a power set, what would it be and for which AT?

• My answer would've been time control, but that got added?   Probability manipulation?

oh ho! Have you checked out my Arbiter Hawk-approved Probability Distortion powerset suggestion from back in the day? 😁

 

Anyway, a fun read, thank you guys for taking the time to answer! And for coming out to the costume contests, loved seeing some of you there!

 

Maybe someday we’ll team up (not that I’ll know)!

Edited June 5 by Trickshooter

[agentx5]

Wow this was an amazing read! Every one of these is fascinating and I could make this an extremely long post about each response to each question (and yeah I did read every word (and there were a LOT of words being said!)

 

I especially like the insight into the game philosophy, and hearing a little into what I always wondered about regarding the other unfinished incarnate tiers (Thank you Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney)

 

Although I must admit that the Synapse TF is my least favorite TF in the game (Dr. Q 2nd least), and most favorites including all of the FirstWard & NightWard arcs, Dark Astoria (just wish kept the creepy fog from the Echo:D.A.), the Number-Six arc (post-Magisterium-iTrial), along with the classics that are the ITF (especially with a kill-most b/c Cimerorans are fun to fight against), TinPex, and all the iTrials. I wish we could give those Synapse and Dr.Q an overhauls to make them fun.  Incremental improvements, made with love for the game, to bring fun to this unusually awesome community!

 

But anyways I digress, and speaking of missions & content to battle against: I would like invite anyone here (players or devs) of who would like a fair challenge (beatable, but legitimately dangerous enemies that use debuffs like players do), you're welcome to try my (imperfect, probably still needs edits, but a fun teamplay challenge) Alyssa TF "That Which Should Be Dead" (AE arc ID #47111 by @x5) with the custom factions of undead and demonic enemies (warning: it's intended for incarnates) from my very own Xzianthia lore meta-verse crossover. 

 

I would like to especially invite Floyd "Castle" Grubb to try after reading his responses above; as I was pushing the limits of what I could do in AE, and perhaps it could change/shift his opinion about AE content? Honestly the ability to create elaborate SG base maps (works of art, really), and make your own custom missions; however limited, is something just amazing to have in CoH.

 

Anyways, while I'm relatively new to the community, it's great to be a part of it and I'm blown away by what's been accomplished both in the distant past and recent past by game developers that clearly believe in bringing forth a fun game to share with the world and bring happiness to so many!  Maybe one day my baby daughter can play too!  Have a great one, stay safe everyone!

[DemonSeed]

Aeon gave alot of bits into the unreleased content. Love it.

[syntaxerror37]

Lots of fun reading this, even if my questions weren't answered directly, bits them were though other peoples questions.  Thanks again for taking the time to answer so much!

[SuperPlyx]

Absolutely amazing read,thanks so much for taking the time. 

 

 

 

And  oh my,what could have been:

Quote

Tim "Black Scorpion" Sweeney:
What powerset would you wish you could add to Homecoming?
Clown Summoning

Quote

John "Protean" Hegner:
What were you planning on adding to the game before shut-down?

Mime Melee and Clown Devices Secondary.
j/k... but maybe there's something there?

 

[John Phaser]

great reading, except no clear answer for EU localization....

[Helgrenze]

Thank you all for your time and insights. 

Special Thank you to those that were able to answer my question, about First Ward, etc..., I understand that situation much better. I am currently exploring some of the options available.

 

For the record, Pineapple on a white pizza with gorgonzola and pepperoni is fantastic. Just not 'Chicago Pub Style' a.k.a. "crackers and cheese pizza".

[pjmoyer]

6 hours ago, Solas67 said:

Okay, I'm very serious about this and I hope the community team sees this....but I'd love to remake Melissa's lost War Witch figure so if there's a way to arrange a delivery address of some kind, please let me know, I'll happily redo it and better this time.

Can we also please as a community help her rebuild some of her collection? 

For what it’s worth, the creator of the 5th Anniversary Shirt has the design up in her teepublic store - https://www.teepublic.com/user/StudioBliz - along with tees for Redside, Goldside, Statesman, and Ghost Widow.  (And all three sides in one tee!). Perhaps somebody could forward that link to Melissa Bianco?

[ShimmerDoll]

Awesome to read all their responses! I'm happy they're all doing well and some still play this!

Edited June 5 by ShimmerDoll

[Solas67]

4 hours ago, pjmoyer said:

For what it’s worth, the creator of the 5th Anniversary Shirt has the design up in her teepublic store - https://www.teepublic.com/user/StudioBliz - along with tees for Redside, Goldside, Statesman, and Ghost Widow.  (And all three sides in one tee!). Perhaps somebody could forward that link to Melissa Bianco?

 

That's be awesome! Admin, can anyone respond? Maybe we can start a paypal fund or something to get her stuffs?

[starro]

Ty for taking time out to organize this update 

 

it was a good 20th anniversary.