City of Heroes dev blog talks character customization

by Dev Blogger Jun 10th 2009 at 8:00PM

Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Expansions, Game mechanics, MMO industry

Massively is proud to host a new dev diary from the folks at Paragon Studios. This particular dev diary was written by Christopher Bruce, Senior Lead Animator/VFX Artist for City of Heroes, and it pertains to the character customization options that have been improved with Issue 15. Enjoy!

In addition to supporting the two new task forces for Issue 15, we also wanted to focus some attention on expanding our character creation system. Character customization is a hallmark of City of Heroes and we're always striving to improve and expand upon our players' ability to create a truly unique super powered hero or villain.

For Issue 15, there are two new costume sets available to everyone, created by the newest addition to our character artist team, Cheryl Austin. "Vines" is a new pattern while "Ulterior" is a new texture set, both of which work with most of the existing costume pieces. Cheryl has also created over twenty new face textures, something we haven't done since City of Villains launched. While our options for individual costume pieces and sets have continued to expand over the years, our selection of faces hasn't received the same amount of attention. Her goal was to create a set of new face textures that were a bit more subtle and realistic and while also working well across our full range skin tones.

Gallery: City of Heroes Issue 15: Anniversary

There are also a number of new costume change emotes in this update. As many of our players will remember, costume change emotes were something we introduced in the Magic Super Booster Pack. One of our goals with the Booster Packs has been to leverage them into adding things to City of Heroes that we otherwise wouldn't be able to include in a regular update. For the Magic Super Booster Pack, we were able to push for the programming support to do something that we've wanted to do for a long time: costume change emotes. Now that the technology is in place, Issue 15 is our first opportunity to provide a number of more universally themed costume change emotes as part of a regular content update for all of our players. It's our goal that everyone, even those who didn't purchase the Magic Super Booster Pack, will benefit from the extra time and resources that we've devoted to creating these booster packs.

While all of these added customization options are part of the immediate content going into Issue 15, it's really only a sampling of a much larger picture – as hinted by the recent announcement of the Going Rogue expansion. Our players can expect to hear some very exciting news about the new, much larger systems we've been working on to support and expand the customization aspect of City of Heroes within the next few months.

Tags: character-customization, city-of-heroes, city-of-villains, coh, dev-blog, dev-diary, going-rogue, ncsoft, paragon-studios

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

BIZKeT said on 9:28PM 6-10-2009

New costume bits are nice and all, but can they focus on making PvP more appealing for a while so I have people to fight? I don't care how they look when they are limp at my feet :)

Stark1 said on 10:36PM 6-10-2009

Wow, I am extremely...unimpressed. Call me when they implement the customizations on the same level as Champions Online.

TheDrago said on 1:19PM 6-11-2009

You haven't even played Champions yet. So, how the hell do you know? If you have played Champions, then you likely just violated your NDA.

Fisty said on 1:41PM 6-11-2009

Toon customisation is the very heart of the game. No, the PVP isn't "fixed", then again, COX isn't a PVP oriented game. If you want to PVP with heroes or villains, wait to DCUO.

I think it's great they're adding new faces and costume designs. The game's come a long way since its release in that respect, and for those of us who put a lot of thought in the design of our toons (and now our AE characters), it's an added treat.

Stark1 said on 11:38PM 6-12-2009

Drago, whether I am in beta or not(not that it is any of your business), I revealed nothing NDA breaking. The OFFICIAL news released on this game already mentions many aspects of the customization. Obviously, you didn't read Massively's time with the game that they reported here. Fighting stances, more non-human options, hell you can have your character run on 4 legs if you want and power customization are just a few items. I don't even see how you could have missed the last one(power customization) since it was mentioned from the very begginning. Each of these are something that CoH currently does not offer, thus better.