City of Villains

• Platform: PC
• Published by: NCsoft
• Developed by: Cryptic Studios
• Release Date: Oct 31, 2005
• Genre: RPG
• Multiplayer: Yes
• Online: Yes

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City of Villains Preview

-- October 7, 2005 by: Chris Remo

As the small boat made its way through the pitch black night, we glimpsed our destination: the desolate and rocky island fortress of Alcatraz. Home to some of the best-known villains of the modern age, the legendary prison was both alluring and foreboding, a grim anachronism amid the distant sparkling lights of the shrinking San Francisco skyline.

That was the appropriate setting of a recent NCsoft event showcasing Cryptic Studios' City of Villains, the upcoming sister game to last year's well-received City of Heroes. That game, an MMO casting the player as a superhero out to cleanse Paragon City of evil, is probably best known for its incredibly deep and open-ended character creation system, which offers a startling breadth of body styles, costumes, colors, powers, gameplay styles, and so on. With this level of customizability, it's no surprise that one of the most frequent questions Cryptic has received since that game's launch is "Can I be a villain?" The option to pursue supervillainy was something the studio wanted to include from the beginning, but they also wanted to ensure they had enough content and features for a satisfying experience, and so it was planned for its own game.

That game, City of Villains, is almost here, and it's looking really good. As expected, character creation is as impressive as it was in the first game, with a staggering array of options. Thankfully, Cryptic has also streamlined the menu system a bit, adding drop-down menus for the various options instead of just left and right scroll buttons. There are tons of visual options available, spanning the sleek and sinister evil look to the brutal and spiky evil look. Sample characters on display included such varying forms as hulking cyborgs and skeletal pirates. Yeah, you can be a skeletal pirate, complete with old timey pirate coat, hook hand, and three-pointed hat. City of Heroes players who spend more time in the character creation utility than in the actual game should find plenty more to occupy their time with this game.

There is a new set of archetypes for your villain as well: Brute, Stalker, Mastermind, Dominator, and Corruptor. To a certain extent they correspond with the group dynamic roles fulfilled by the various hero archetypes, but in various different ways. For example, the Mastermind can summon in a variety of different henchmen depending on the specific origin and powers of the character. These range from robots to special ops teams (who are dropped in from helecopters) to zombies to even ninja. Being able to call in zombies and ninja at a moment's notice in the thick of battle has to be a plus in anybody's book.

Upon creating and naming your villain, you are thrust into a jailbreak situation. Your character is in the slammer, but is being busted out by the forces of Lord Recluse, Paragon City's resident criminal overlord. It seems that Recluse has had enough of months of Paragon's heroes being threatened only by NPCs, so he is inciting the city's less reputable population to rise up against the goody two-shoes might of the heroes. Cryptic claims that many of the details and motivations of Recluse's designs will be discovered by players in various stories told throughout the new zones that will be added in City of Villains.

The actual mission structure of the game will be essentially the same as City of Heroes' instance-based system. You'll accept either a solo or a group mission, then go off to complete it in your own private version of that mission. The actual content of those missions, however, is suitably different. For example, instead of preventing a heinous crime from occurring, you'll be the one going out and spearheading a casino heist. You know, villainous stuff like that.

Much more significant, however, is the addition of Player vs. Player gameplay to what has until now been a Player vs. Environment game. It would be unconscionable to add villains into a hero-based world and not have constant epic clashes between the two forces. In addition to all the villain-specific zones that will be added to the game--and Cryptic claims that the amount of new CoV-specific content is much greater than the amount of content at the CoH launch--there will be several new PvP zones. These zones will be accessible to players of either game, regardless of whether they have purchased City of Villains. Though I didn't get the chance to try out any PvP firsthand, it seems to be vaguely similar to the Battlegrounds recently added to Blizzard's World of Warcraft. That is, PvP will take place in specific dedicated zones, and in many cases it is objective based. One scenario might have both sides vying for ownership of a particular item, one has both sides trying to gain control of a computer terminal which allows the launching of a missile, and some are of course all-out never ending brawls between good and evil.

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