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The Mayhem Missions will be the big feature that will be upgraded for people who have an AGEIA-based hardware physics PC card. The GDC demo was in software mode only but still showed a fair amount of interaction from things as small as crates and mailboxes to large objects like cars flying in the air. When the patch for AGEIA supported PCs is released (no specific word yet on when that will happen) we are hoping that there will be even more destruction seen on our monitor screen.

More goodies

That would be enough expansion content for most players, but Cryptic and NCSoft plan for even more additions in Issue 7. City of Villains players can get new electrical-based abilities for the Brute class, Dark Armor and Dark Melee for the Stalker class, and new thug pets for the mastermind class. City of Heroes and Villains players get some new base features including storage items, support for super group banners all over you base and more. In addition, City of Heroes players get some graphical upgrades including higher resolution textures, bump and specular mapping and more. And even though the games' character creation system has without a doubt the most costume options ever for an MMORPG, Cryptic plans to add even more costume items to both games.

As we stated earlier, Issue 7 is the last free expansion for the game that will be heavily tilted for City of Villains players, but when we asked what the ratio was for playing the two super hero MMORPGs we were told that so far its been 50-50, which the development team admitted was somewhat surprising. As for the future of the franchises, Cryptic is already working on its next free "issue" but what about paid expansions (which City of Villains was originally supposed to be)? When asked the developers admitted they are in discussions now on how to proceed with the addition of paid content but have not yet announced any plans.


Based on our GDC demo, Issue 7 of City of Heroes/Villains will be a huge upgrade with some interesting multiplayer PvP play, some cool single-player oriented quests and even some of that new fangled hardware physics stuff that all the kids are talking about. If you haven't played either game there is still time to get in on the action and have your super-powered character ready when Issue 7: Destiny Manifest will be released for free sometime in April.