February Producer's Letter: Incarnates

Happy February, everyone! I wanted to take some time with this month’s Producer’s Letter to cover the upcoming Incarnate System launching with Issue 20 and address some of your feedback from the last Producer’s Letter. Now that we are approaching our seventh anniversary, the Incarnate System introduces a true “end game” to City of Heroes and Villains, and we are proud of how it has come together. For those who may have missed some of the buzz, the Incarnate System is made up of Incarnate Trials and the Incarnate Abilities, which combine to help you ascend to levels of might previously only reached by characters such as Statesman and Lord Recluse.

Evolution of the End Game
When I started at Paragon Studios, my first day began with a meeting about the Incarnate Abilities, and my second day ended with a playtest of what will now be one of our first two Incarnate Trials, Lambda Sector. Since then we have been developing and testing these events and the underlying technology that will make them possible.

Incarnate Trials are not Task Forces and Strike Forces with a different name, they are an opportunity for players to come together in a new way to team up as they ascend to power and overcome tremendous challenges. The Trials are built on evolutionary tech and design philosophies that have influenced the last few issues and which come together as the foundation of the Incarnate System. I doubt any complex feature we add to City of... will be the perfect fit for every single player’s preference (even a feature as straightforward as Day Jobs had its detractors), but every player with a level 50 character and who has Going Rogue can get into this endgame and profit by it if they so choose. We’ve made it accessible, challenging, and rewarding. You’ll feel powerful when you defeat these encounters and you’ll feel powerful using the Incarnate Abilities.

Accessible
Incarnate Trials are designed for players who don’t have hours every night to run content. All of the Incarnate Trials are meant to be completed in 30 minutes to an hour and a half. This will let you play them more often--or on more characters--and still have time to socialize, craft, apprehend miscreants, plan diabolically, and all the other great things you’ve been able to do for the past seven years. You don’t need a big group to play the Trials—the first two Incarnate Trials only require 8 players (Lambda Sector) or 12 players (Behavioral Adjustment Facility)—but you can also play them with up to double those numbers of players, each. The Incarnate Trials aren’t balanced for a particular alchemy of players—you don’t need exactly two tanks and three controllers and one stalker and etc. etc. etc.—you just need a big enough group with a variety of abilities.

About those groups, you don’t need to pre-assemble a team to get in. We’ve added new functionality to the LFG window to let you get directly into the Incarnate Trials without creating a group first. We call this the Turnstile around the studio, and all you need to do is open your LFG window, choose an Incarnate Trial, and join the queue. You can join the Turnstile with a team or join individually, and you will be placed in a queue with everyone else looking to participate in the same Incarnate Trial. Once the queue on your server is full enough—no matter how long it takes to get together 8 to 12 players—you will be teleported to the Trial by forces beyond mortal ken (i.e. the server). You don’t need to be in the most dedicated, largest Super Group on the server or have a friends list for your friends list’s friends list. Heck, you don’t even need to know anyone on the server. You just have to click a button. And while you wait you can craft, run costume contests, street sweep, go to the tailor, spend time at the Auction House, etc., anywhere in the world; of course you can always drop out of the queue if you want and rejoin at any time. (Once you join a Task or Strike Force or enter a mission map, you will leave the queue, however.)

In addition to the Turnstile, we have also added something we are calling “Leagues.” A League is a team of teams—up to six teams in a League, for a total of forty-eight players, and everyone in the Incarnate Trial is automatically added to the League for the duration of the Trial. There is a new UI to help track all these people, and you can do things like choose certain people to focus on--to watch them in a separate pane--so you can keep track of the health of the Tanks and Brutes, for example. We’re pretty excited about this, and in the coming months we will reveal some more details on how you can use Leagues for things like Hamidon fights as well.

Challenging
We want to keep these Incarnate Trials short, but that doesn’t mean we want them to be just “punch punch punch profit.” We want to give you new things to do. The BAF starts with a good ol’ fist fight with great big robots to get you warmed up, but then it becomes a mad dash in the dark to prevent prisoners from escaping, then some more fights using push-pull mechanics to get the job done, followed by a different kind of boss fight at the end that will require people to be on the ball a little more than usual. Lambda Sector has some of its own shenanigans, as well. As Positron has been saying, we want to give you reasons to use powers you haven’t clicked on in a while. But we also don’t want to change the foundation gameplay of City of Heroes, which is all about having a rousing good fight without being passed over for the group because you aren’t an exact archetype and powerset, so the Incarnate Trials will keep the challenge appropriate to your group and your foes won’t have specific weaknesses you have to account for with specific character abilities.

Rewarding
We also want you to feel rewarded for participation, and want everyone to have an equal chance at getting a reward, whether you are healing or buffing or debuffing or using pointy things to make moving things fall down. We also don’t want to heavily reward people who don’t contribute to the team effort. So when you help your team, you will get the good stuff. The more you help, the cooler the stuff will be, and/or the faster you will climb the Incarnate Abilities tree. But we also know everyone has a different level of investment, and persistence will pay off in the long run.

Powerful
We want you to feel powerful in City of Heroes. Does that mean you will beat every Incarnate Trial on the first attempt? Even the mightiest characters in comic book lore have to suffer a few setbacks every now and again to demonstrate that the stakes are high, and the stakes are really high in the Incarnate Trials. You will need to experience the fights a few times to get a handle on the mechanics and figure out the best powers and the best strategies. But once you triumph, you will realize you had the power the whole time to defeat some of the most challenging content ever in City of Heroes.

Part of the power you experience will be in the Incarnate Abilities. You’ll be able to do some truly impressive things to help you and your team, and we have gone to the next level with the visual and audio effects for many abilities, as well as their effect in the game. As you wield higher and higher levels of power, you should stand out in a crowd. Incarnacy may be its own reward, but it’s nice to make a big impression, too. (Note that I only say “Incarnacy” because it bugs Positron when I do.) Eventually, once we release all of the Incarnate Slots, you’ll even be a little overpowered for the first waves of Incarnate Trials, and by then, we’ll have something much more challenging for you to do with your newfound power. (Evil chuckle redacted.)

About That Accessibility Thing
For our more casual players, we have added an option for you to continue to build your way up the Incarnate Tree by collecting Incarnate Shards without doing any Incarnate Trials--you will even get Incarnate Shards when you are exemplared down. It will take longer than it will take by participating in Incarnate Trials, and you’ll miss out on some epic storylines, but you will be able to claim your seat at the Incarnate table nevertheless.

The End Game, not the End of the Game
We’re hard at work polishing up everything that makes up Issue 20, and we’re excited for you to see some of the other great features, as well. For the long term, the Incarnate Trials will be part of every Issue release, and the Incarnate Abilities will be expanded from time to time as well. As I said last month, we love you, man, and we will continue to provide lots of great content with every issue just as we always have: we are already hard at work on other great missions, enemies, and powers for the future. We are committed to creating more and more reasons for you to both create new characters as well as keep your established characters fighting the good fight (or the evil fight, as the case may be). And we are about to give you a preview of one of the Incarnate Trials: you’ll be able to experience the Behavioral Adjustment Facility, the Turnstile, and Leagues. Keep your eyes peeled for a Very Special Announcement.

I like being proved wrong.

Thank you for keeping on top of this schedule, and thank you for revealing more about this system. I still disagree with some of the implementation, but I'm still open to new options. Also, I am glad to see that 19.75 is right on schedule.

Loving this! Keep it up and I may not move over to SW:TOR...

Sounding good.

Are these new Raids level 50 incarnate content only, or can level 45s and up participate?

Wow, this all this stuff sounds so cool! I can't wait!

This is a Raid System. Going by the Hami Raid and the raids of other MMOs, 8 is indeed a very small group for a Raid. Raids are part of what makes the game Massively Multiplayer, for it is a MMORPG.

Another reason why, relatively, as far as Raids go, this is shaping up to be a very casual-friendly, low-server-population friendly system.

Thank you for continuing the Producer's Letter. More information is always helpful.

Challenge is good I am looking forward to it. But I hope you aren't going to go overboard to make certain powersets feel utter useless on the trials. Castle's recent 'balance' changes to to hit, accuracy and defense have created a big whopping problem for defense characters in some of the new content and npcs.

As a player with several shield defense and super reflexes characters. You can't help but be frustrated by it. Defense characters are pointless to play if everything and its mother keeps hitting you.

Make the content challenging but don't screw over survivability and mitigation of certain powersets anymore.

Second Measure is constrained to the terminology allowed by Marketing.


It would be more appropriate to say, "Eight is a big team. Eight is a small league."

I knew that Lambda Sector had to be for something - it was way to big and detailed just to be pretty zone filler

EDIT: As Lamba Sector is a Praetorian military base, I'd guess that the raid will be to try and trash some of Tyrant's troops before they set off to invade us?

Thank you, THANK YOU, Second Measure. This Producer's Letter is one of the best updates I've read in months. As much as I appreciate the recent communication from Posi and War Witch, it gets old after a while hearing "cool new stuff is coming in i20" but never hearing any specifics.

I'm excited about the Incarnate Trials and look forward to learning more in the coming weeks/months.

This is great news

I've never been happier to be wrong about anything