City of Heroes senior designer Bruce Harlick on return of The 5th Column
by James Egan 
May 29th 2009 at 3:30PM
Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Lore, MMO industry
Massively mentioned yesterday that City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary has gone into open beta testing. Along with that announcement and an overview of the Issue 15 features, Paragon Studios senior designer Bruce Harlick has written a developer diary titled "A Circle of Fifths: Designing the Ultimate Fifth Anniversary Task Force and Strike Force"
Harlick writes that when Paragon Studios was hashing through ideas for the game's strike force and task force for the City of Heroes 5th Anniversary, bringing the 5th Column back to Paragon City seemed the right thing to do. It also lets them bring The Reichsman into the game, leading to some interesting mission arcs. Harlick writes, "I didn't want the two arcs to be simple mirrors of each others, with the villains doing something and the heroes stopping it." He adds, "I wanted the villains to succeed with their plan and to deal with the consequences, and I wanted the heroes to deal with an emerging big problem."
Have a look at Bruce Harlick's developer diary on City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary, for more about what he describes as "a story that's worthy of the return of one of the biggest threats to ever hit Paragon City and the Rogue Islands."
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Fisty said on 4:03PM 5-29-2009
This should be pretty exciting. I was pretty happy with the clever way the 5th Column was re-introduced in the ITF, and now they're coming back full bore. And just in time for me to test out several of my heroes who've just made it into the mid-40's.
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jrtshadow69 said on 6:20PM 5-29-2009
Is it just me, or does it look like thats M. Bison in the picture? I didn't know he was branching out these days.
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Lemmo said on 9:08PM 5-29-2009
I think you've got it backwards, M. Bison looks like a Nazi SS officer.