How the teaming up between Cryptic and Microsoft will affect City of Heroes/Villains and what is planned for the next two issues is explained in this developer letter from Positron. Enjoy!

Hey everyone!

I’m coming up for air to let you know about some of the impending stuff happening in the City of Heroes and City of Villains games. It’s been pretty crazy around here getting Issue 8 ready to hit Training Room, and we hope we can bring you all some exciting news about that in the very near future.

By now you may have read about Cryptic Studios and Microsoft’s upcoming new venture and we at Cryptic want to assure our loyal players that we and the good folks at our publisher, NCsoft, are fully committed to City of Heroes and City of Villains. We have a full team of programmers, artists, designers, and producers devoted to creating and maintaining the best experience in the “City of” world of games. This team is, and will remain completely separate from other teams working on other games at Cryptic. Like fantasy, sci-fi, and simulation, comic book heroes is its own genre, capable of supporting multiple titles. City of Heroes was created with a single purpose: bring the world of comic book heroes alive. With that in mind, Cryptic is investing resources into our “City of” team to fully realize its own unique vision.

I’d like to start out by mentioning Issue 8: To Protect and Serve. This is a hero-centric Issue that finally levels the playing field between Heroes and Villains. We have a ton of stuff being added with this issue that will please a variety of players. It begins the multi-year storyline that continues next year with Issue 9 (title to be announced). I9 brings with it a huge new gameplay system: Inventions. Players will be able to craft Enhancements and Costume pieces for their characters using recipes, and salvage that they find while adventuring.

Issue 9 will also have Statesman’s Task Force, the Hero equivalent to the Recluse Strike Force. Both of these mission chains are designed for eight max-level characters and have some of the best rewards in the game.

Issue 10 is a ways out, but it will bring us an update to an old familiar villain group. This group will have their power center altered and bring about massive changes to the game as a whole. Heroes and Villains will find themselves banding together against a common threat.

We will begin to reveal our plans for Issues 11 and beyond over the next year or so. We feel confident that you will be as excited about our plans as we are!

So as you can see, we at Cryptic and NCsoft have great plans for the future and want to keep making the “City of” games exciting and fresh. Our motto going forward is “Listen to the players and give them what they want (within reason, of course)”. Expect a lot of oft-requested features and ideas to be implemented in the upcoming issues!

Sincerely,

Matt Miller (Positron)