Q&A - Brian Clayton, COH Executive Producer and General Manager

We recently had a chance to catch up with our friend Brian Clayton executive Producer and general manager of City of Heroes a NCsoft game to find out what's currently going on and future plans for the MMORPG title.

MMOABC: Can you tell us a little bit about City of Heroes?
We launched City of Heroes in April of 2004, just over four years ago. It was the first comic book themed MMORPG that allowed players to create their own personalized super powered heroes and set forth to fight crime and make a name for themselves in Paragon City. In 2005 we launched the stand-alone sequel, City of Villains, which let players be the bad guy and go about their own adventures based out of the Rogue Isles.

We have now launched twelve major free content updates for the City of Heroes / City of Villains universe. Some players prefer to play as heroes, some prefer to play as villains, and many play as both; but with each free expansion we give the players more content and continue to evolve the overarching storyline.



MMOABC: How does City of Heroes differentiate itself from other MMORPG games?
The comic book hero and villain genre remains its most obvious differentiation. Also, among MMORPGs it has an unrivaled character creation system that results in every character being different. Our players love to create interesting and unique characters as evidenced by over 32 million of them having been created in North America alone!

We also think that City of Heroes / Villains has a nice combination of mass market friendly gameplay and the right amount of depth to keep the hardcore gamer challenged.

MMOABC: Online hacking and spamming are widely evident in the MMORPG realm, how does City of Heroes control these disruptions?
We’ve been fighting spamming more so than hacking issues. A while back we empowered our subscribers with ways to report spammers and have them dealt with in a timely manner. Recently, we also tightened in-game email and chat features for trial accounts, which should significantly help.



MMOABC: Many MMORPG operators/publishers are currently hosting many games in different geographic regions. Some are "free to play" while others are "pay to play." What is your take on this?
As long as the quality of content and service provided is AAA, I believe that any business model can be successful. I think we’ll continue to see major successes with both types of models.

MMOABC: Congratulations on the launch of the expansion, “Issue 12: Midnight Hour” can you tell us what new exciting features will be in this release?
Thank you. We are really happy with Issue 12. Our new story content revolves around an organization called the Midnight Squad and includes some of the most fun and interesting missions in the entire game. It also leads players to a new Roman and Greek inspired zone called Cimerora, which is completely different from any of the other zones in City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Probably the other two largest features in Issue 12 are Villain Epic Archetypes, which are new archetypes that Villain players can unlock once they reach level 50 with another character; and Powerset Proliferation, which brings a new primary and secondary powerset to each hero and villain archetype. These two features offer so much incentive for players to create new characters that we have also included two additional character slots which players can allocate to the server(s) of their choice. Our Veteran Reward program also unlocks a new character slot after each year of paying membership.

Beyond those features we’ve made significant improvements to the Hollows zone, and we’ve included a long list of major quality of life and gameplay improvements (too many to list here). For anyone who hasn’t played COH or COV in a while, they will be blown away by how far it has come.



MMOABC: Are you guys planning to do any City of Heroes contest events in the next coming weeks or months?
We have a really cool contest (with huge prizes) kicking off at the end of this month but unfortunately I can’t tell you about it yet…so stay tuned! We also have lots of player run contests and events over the coming months.



MMOABC: Will the City of Heroes development team be attending any Video/MMORPG gaming events for 2008?
We’ll be at Comic Con, PAX & Austin Game Developers’ Conference. We’ll also be announcing a community Meet and Greet happening later this year in Northern California. All of these events are great because it gives us the opportunity to meet our players in person and directly thank them for supporting us.

MMOABC: Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to talk with us. We wish the best of luck on City of Heroes and the Issue 12: Midnight Hour expansion!

You can check out and play City of Heroes here:

http://www.cityofheroes.com