Boomtown (not the one you think) Interviews Positron

Interesting tidbits:

• Shield Defense is intended to be stronger on teams than solo.

• Positron believes Villains need to have powers different from Heroes, specifically in the case of Pain Domination they were wary of giving Villains any healing sets. [I'm guessing based on this Positron isn't a fan of the idea of crossover either. That's good news for the anti-crossover crowd.]

• PvP was indeed broken with only a tiny fraction of the player base partaking, so things absolutely had to change. [The PvP conservatives need to just get used to it. The PvP they like is going away because nobody but them likes it. Good riddance to it, I say.]

• Day Jobs are this game's version of secret identities. [Though secret identities, in the way they usually work, just don't fit well into the City of Heroes world. Heroes are very much above board in this universe; even licensed, so the classic secret identity just doesn't fit. Day Jobs is a reasonable compromise, though I would also include "Alter Egos" in the future that would give you an Alter Ego costume slot and change the name that appears over your head.]

• Mission Architect is the only feature of Issue 14. [Bold move there, but I can see how that would be enough for its own Issue, it's so potentially game-changing.]

With the game reaching an all-time low concurrent player base, very stiff competition just around the corner (DC Universe Online is the one to watch as a potential threat; Champions Online is repeating a lot of the mistakes City of Heroes made), and such a long lag time between Issues (despite a larger team), the way the developers handle City of Heores in the next several months will be make or break for this game. Personally, I think the game is in an excellent position to maintain, and perhaps even grow, its player base if they play it right and if the larger dev team really starts churning results out.

City of Heroes has an exciting future!

Read the article at Boomtown.