Back in 2008, NC Northern California presented their conceptual ideas for City of Heroes 2. The leaked Powerpoint presentation goes over the success of the original City of Heroes that launched in 2004 and made the case for a second game that would capitalized on "popular culture pumped" by recent cinema releases and on the strength of the company's wholly original IP.
The goal? "City of Heroes 2 makes the player feel unique and powerful".
To do so, a number of features would be put into place including:
- a robust and unique character generation tool that would include Character Creator 2.0
- unique playstyle with "completely customizable powers"
- offline player progression and Web 2.0 integration
- Reactive Heroes & Proactive Villains
- an Archnemesis system
- a Mission Architect 2.0 to allow players to create their own unique stories and missions
- console accessibility
- improvements on enemy and group AI
- destructible environments
- robust end-game
- PvP
- player-generated "epic battles"
- "Affect the world, leave your mark"
The goal was to launch CoH2 in 2012 to "retake our title of Best Superhero MMO" by taking advantage of 8 years of content and integration with CoH1. Presenters also showcased a roadmap for development that would have started in 2009.
You can read the full presentation here.
Tangentially related news: The developer of the now not-so-secret City of Heroes private server that was blown from cover earlier this week, has released the source code to "someone" with personal data scrubbed from it. Whether or not that will be released publicly or if it will remain a secret project to rebirth a CoH server remains to be seen.
