Alien Invasion Ends City Of Heroes Beta

Thanks to the City Of Heroes forums for its reports on the Rikti alien invasion which signaled the end of the PC MMO's Beta phase. Elsewhere, there's also a large gallery of screenshots from this major Beta-ending event involving "a major [alien] strike... against Paragon City", and starring the other-dimensional villains from Cryptic Studios' superhero-based MMO game, which officially launches on April 28th. The event coincided with the wiping of the Beta characters - hence high-level alien-inflicted carnage, with "75-100 [heroes] just lying dead in Atlas Park", as well as the original poster's delight that he "managed to organize a mass suicide jump... before the Beta ended. About 20 of us jumped off the tallest building... [but] we all just sat at 1 HP." Update: 04/23 18:55 GMT by S : A press release from NCSoft regarding their E3 line-up announces plans for first expansion pack, City Of Villains, which "will allow players to take on the role of villain in Paragon's modern metropolis."

Too Bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the name reservation waffling pretty much ended up pissing off a good portion of the customer base twice.

Also, the removal of certain colors from being used on your uniforms pretty much punishes the wrong people (some idiots were creating 'nude' uniforms, basically: instead of banning those people, they removed flesh tones from the possible uniform colors).

The beta ending event didn't work across all zones, either, but heck, it is a beta.

Still, despite all that, the beta was a blast and I can't wait for the game.

Variant

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

This sounds pretty cool and is a nice story device for the players. I hope this game does very well and takes off. I don't care for the gameplay style but I would love this game if it were released as a single player extravaganza with a changed combat system. Basically, I'd like GTA with capes.

Back in the day, there was a Spider-Man game released for the Sega CD that hinted at this type of possibility. There were levels where you had to run left to right and defeat an end boss but along the way there were old ladies getting mugged on the street that you could save. The most recent Spider-Man video games have focused solely on guiding you from the start of the level to the end boss, with no time to just wander around the city. I'm thinking that if City of Heroes takes off, clones and variants may spring up and provide me with this type of gameplay - which I think a lot of people would enjoy, based on how well GTA sold and how well superhero movies have been doing lately.

They should do this for all MMORGs

[hambonewilkins]

Seriously. Imagine every addicted player sitting at their computer when suddenly whole races of people are killed off. Their own character, whom they've spent months developing, gone. At this point, the player stares in shock at the screen, but a glint of sunlight breaks in the room. He looks out the window, sees the "real world" and goes and builds up himself instead of a fake character.

Guess it's too much to ask for. And yes, I realize this was just the way to end the beta.

This was actually really cool.

[Hot Soup LD]

I was only able to participate for a half hour or so, but here's what I saw.

As soon as I logged in, I went to Atlas Park (the hub/newbie zone of the game). I looked up and sure enough, hanging in the sky right above the giant statue of Atlas was a large ominous sawcer. Very Independance Day-esque. I flew up closer (I play a lvl 24 blaster with flight) to the alien ship, and noticed there were little green flicks and flashes coming down from parts the ship. The Ritki aliens were dropping to the surface.

I flew down and saw what I did not expect. Hundreds of heroes banded together to form a line of scrimmage, using unprecidented organization to fight off one or two aliens at a time. The aliens were all 'conning' purple to me (meaning they were tougher than me, I suspect they were around level 30 apiece), so some aliens took many heroes to take down.

The wave of heroes moved forward until we had resecured the capital building from the alien onslaught. We then huddled around Ms Liberty in a mass of flying, jumping primary colors, and defended against another wave of alien attackers.

I probably hit the screenshot button more than the shoot button during this event.

I'm running an Athlon 1700+ with a gig of ram. I have a GeForce4 Ti 4600 with 256 megs. It was slow and choppy during the real heavy parts (I was getting about a frame a second whenever someone did a 'mass heal' to a batch of 50 heroes), but still remained stable and playable. I was still able to put some hurt on the aliens.

It was a very entertaining event, a successful stress test on the server (and the clients), and it definately made me eager to start playing an official character on Sunday.

If you see Kid Gizmo in the mix, send me a tell!

Rikti Invasion

[Michael Belrose]

I'd just like to point out that this event wasn't all peaches and cream. I've got a less than spectacular PC, and 100+ heroes within a 100 yard area is not a good thing. Lag and framerate issues made it impossible for me to even take part in the event, and I really hope Cryptic will do better in the future. What they could have done instead of having them all show up in the same place is just to temporarily replace the normal thug spawns with alien spawns, but I guess that would have made too much sense.

Re:Too Bad...

[johnkoer]

I had fun in the beta, but I dunno if I am going to purchase the game. I got one character up to lvl 13 or 14 and I started to get bored with it. I was always getting the same boring kill missions (or missions that were way too hard for my level). It was taking me forever to level up and it really wasn't fun for me anymore. I guess its just not my type of game.

Re:This was actually really cool.

[fallingdown]

It was a great event and actually high-lighted one of my favorite aspects of the game - no down-time. Being a newbie, I died about every 30 seconds but it took about that long to get back into action. I'm a big fan of this game. I only got to play it for a couple of days but it's got the finest low-level game of any MMORPG currently running. It will be interesting to see if the quality of the gaming experience continues as you progress.

This was actually not really that cool.

[Alkaiser]

I'm sorry, but I was in during the event too, and this wasn't that cool. I was in Steel Canyon, with my Level 9 Scrapper, Iron Chef.

Heroes were getting obliterated by the dozen. On my Athlon 1900+ and my GeForce FX 5600 with 256MB I was getting 1 frame a second. Since I wasn't a long range blaster this made it impossible for me to actually engage in combat.

I think I hit maybe, 6 of the hundreds of Rikti invaders. This isn't killed, mind you...I was doing around 11-17 points of damage to these guys while they were hitting me for upwards of 200. These guys were spawning in groups of 25-30, and I was able to target and touch 6. There's something wrong here.

Unless they work these lag issues out (I mean...it's just me, but if I was a citizen in the midst of an alien attack I couldn't possibly defend myself from, I'd probably stay the hell indoors, and not be all hustling and bustling outside. I certainly wouldn't be out robbing people.

To end it all, I was in Atlas Park as the big Rikti Spaceship loomed threateningly over City Hall, and then dramatically...disappearing.

I was up on that 20 story building before the others organized the mass "suicide" jump hoping to see some cool explosion or something, but no...poof.

The most entertaining moment of the evening was after it all ended people starting logging in and asking where all the aliens were.

Aside from that it was just a bunch of lag for me and the other close ranged attackers. I considered just logging out because I couldn't do anything, and then just decided to stick around to see if there was some cool finish to it all, but there wasn't even that.

It's been a pretty clean beta, with the exception of the last couple days where it's been hit by INSANE lag. I really like the game so far, but I'm being VERY cautious now.

Re:Oh god.

[realdpk]

This probably should not be flagged as a troll. This is what past history has dictated. Once a game goes public, the random events like this become few and far between, if they exist at all.

Maybe they'll do something different in this game, but it is fair to advise a little restraint when it comes to expectations...

Talos Island was the plece to be

[bbingham]

We had less than 100 heroes total and most of us were upper 20's - 30's or sidekicked up to that level.

We routed the invaders time and again with fairly minimal losses.

A real-life person was controlling the commander. He had some special powers and was very difficult to bring down, but eventually we did.

I was level 20, but sidekicked up to 34 so I did my fair share of damage to the ungodly invaders. Took a slew of shots of my team (3 beauties plus little old me). Good time had by all. Much less laggy than similar events I participated in back in the early days of Asheron's Call.

I recommend COH to casual gamers who don't want to twist their real lives around to have fun playing a game. I was always able to play 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there and feel like I was making progress and having fun.

Re:Oh god.

[josh glaser]

If "random events" consist of a bunch of aliens coming and killing everybody's characters, I don't think people would want them too. (Yeah, I know this is to end the beta.) My point is, just because hugely catastrophic things don't happen at a regular (and yet...random?) pace in "public" MMORPGs, doesn't mean there aren't "random events."

Re:Too Bad...

[dwaggie]

I wish so many other people just realized that, instead of blaming devs. This game is created with a certain mentality in mind. Just because Person A was GREAT at EQ or DAoC or AshCall .. that doesn't mean anything in CoH, and they blame the devs for it. Ugh.

Good on ya :)

Re:This was actually not really that cool.

[fallingdown]

I didn't have a problem with lag. Also, with level 7 powers I was actually able to perform the occasional "knock-down" on the higher level invaders. After we banded together to kill their commander however, a group of aliens showed up that had obviously been dial up a bit. They proceeded to wipe us all out and then camp the hospital entrance. It was literally in the last hour before the servers were to be shut down so my guess is they were sort of the party clean up committee. They clearly were telling us to "get the hell out" since no one in the newbie zone had a chance in hell of surviving their attacks. I had a good time last night. Having been a paying participant in many a lack luster MMORPG (SWG comes to mind)City of Heroes is a breath of fresh air. It's actually fun to play! I highly recommend it.

Re:Rikti Invasion

[schapman]

well.. you said less than spectacular.. so I'm sorry if I sounded trollish, but yes... you should be able to hand an event w/ that box. Is there many detail settings in COH?? just wondering, as I'm eager to check it out

Re:Oh god.

[xSauronx]

this is why im slightly interested in Lineage 2. Once the game gets into swing after the retail release (currently, there is a free open beta, with no character wipe) the game creates Castles (6 or so on each server)

Clans join together, hopefull dozens, to a couple hundred of mates, and schedule a time to fight for the castle. If you win, you get to build defenses and control local shops (get taxes and such from them) until the next attack; which you schedule, so other clans can sign up to try to take over your castle

Its expected that this will be done every two weeks or so (im not familiar with all the restrictions and rules and such regarding castles) but should make it regularly interesting to have dozens, even hundreds of players all participating in one massive event at once.