City of Heroes Q&A
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 794
Q: Jack, I played COH for a while, and am still very impressed by it. You should be proud of your remarkable achievement of finding the right niche. But after playing a couple months and doing several story arcs, I fell into the level-grind abyss. Things stopped being fun. The distance to my next power was seen in terms of xp, not in terms of heroic adventure.
So, what is going to happen to get me back? How can you significantly reduce the "level grind" (even if it's just the feeling of grinding levels) to get casual players like myself back?
A: The first step, I think, is to make missions less repetitive. Every single expansion we release includes significant mission customization. This means that we go back into pre-existing missions and add new art & features. For instance, the infamous 'rave' mission now has an actual rave going on (as opposed to NPC's standing around in a warehouse).
The second step is adding new gameplay. In Expansion 2, we introduced badges which reward explorers and achievers. Certain combinations of badges open up Accolades - which are permanent powers! The next major new feature is our skills system, which will answer the question, 'what do heroes do besides fight?'
The third step is to create more benchmarks in the game; 'carrots' that players strive for. For instance, a player can get a cape at level 20. At level 30, a player can add ongoing special f/x to his avatar. We're adding two more important landmarks with Expansion 3. At level 40, a player can begin selecting Epic Powers that increase his characters' abilities outside the normal Archetype restrictions. And at the highest level, 50, players open up two Epic Archetypes, which are dramatically different than anything else in the game.
