A View from Atlas Park: An Interlude

A View from Atlas Park: An Interlude

I haven’t been playing CoH.

It’s not because I’m bored or am going to quit, or that this column is some sort of “goodbye for now and I might be back someday”. That particular self-indulgent melodrama is still somewhere in the future. I haven’t been playing CoH because I’m waiting for I9 and Inventions to finally land.

After playing casually (a lot of it solo) since launch, my main is at lvl 41. I’ve noticed that it took little time to get from lvl 40 to 41, which was encouraging since it would mean I could have a lvl 50 hero soon-ish. However, there is no point in doing so until Inventions land on Live, or else I could end up with a lvl 50 character who is stuck scrabbling for exemplar missions or repeatable trials in order to get the ultra-valuable recipies and salvage I need for Invention Origin (IO) enhancements.

I’ll write up a column on Inventions at some point in the future, but I want more info before I do. Currently everything known about Inventions comes from minimal official posting, what seems to be a huge official leak and a whole lot of conjecture. From what I’ve read, Inventions seems like a great addition to CoH/V… but as we all know, the devil will be in the detail. To whit: how rare is “rare”?

So, I’ve been biding my time playing (and really enjoying) CoV. I’ve dabbled in CoV before – enough to get a feel for the game and play through the early Mayhem missions – but never really got into it, instead preferring to lvl up my hero main. Since playing my main seems counter-productive right now, my villain(s) have been getting a work out, which has been a nice change of pace.

Speaking of pace – if I9 doesn’t launch in March, the devs are really going to be pushing it to get another two issues out this year, assuming said issues contain substantial new content. Positron’s Warcry interview was big on the stuff that wsan’t happening, but didn’t really share any light on what IS happening. My main gripe is regarding powersets: what the hell is going on there? Street Fighting has been talked about forever, but still hasn’t been official confirmed as coming out in the next two patches. On top of this there is still a large range of powersets that are hero- or villain-exclusive that could be transported into the opposing side with what appears to be little effort on the part of the devs (balancing issues aside… but surely such balancing parameters for each AT are fairly well known by now).

Oh, and it’s nice to know that Akimbo Pistols are next up on the powerset list. But Corruptors only? Let’s hope that’s just a temporary measure and it won’t be long before Blasters can start trading in their Assault Rifles for something with a bit of dual-handling style…

– UnSub [@UnknownSubject] [email protected] 2 March 2007