City of Heroes: Rebirth Forums

News, Events, and Announcements => Announcements and Important News => Topic started by: retched on May 26, 2021, 02:04:22 pm

Title: Welcome to Rebirth Issue #1 and State of the Game - Spring 2021
Post by: retched on May 26, 2021, 02:04:22 pm
Evening and good morning. Welcome to the first State of the Game of City of Heroes: Rebirth!

I want to take the time to thank everyone who has helped with coding and especially those of you who have been playing on our PTS shard "Almost Tested". It is with the work of the volunteer coders and you the players that we were able to create Rebirth Issue #1: Guardians Rising. We've rested over the last two weeks and now we're starting the trek towards Rebirth Issue #2: [REDACTED]. (For those that get lost with the terminology: Issues are big major game changes. Editions are smaller patches.)

During our publishing push towards issue one, the Rebirth Dev team grew significantly. I’d like to take a moment to welcome Super Hero, Yikes, Zytonis, Thagdal, and NogardAirwing to the team and a hearty welcome back to Plutocracy who has returned from sabbatical. They join our very active dev team, led by erpmario: Farm Tank, El Bee, Xerephus, Profit, SilverAgeFan, Gothic Alpha, Nekrovile, Last Sanctum, Daigotsu, Jumpstar, and myself retched. Also, a special thank you to our mod team, our GMs, and all of our dedicated community members who do so much to make Rebirth the wonderful place it is to play. (Like GM Loriean who has been king on making sure that we get all of your bug reports and spelling errors over to the appropriate internal dev boards for adjusting.)

Looking forward to Rebirth Issue 2, I’d like to describe our efforts across four key components of the gaming experience: Gameplay, Gameworld, Powers and Archetypes, and Cosmetics.

Let’s start off with Gameplay:

I do a lot of daily reading of community comments. Whether it be here on Rebirth’s Discord, Rebirth’s Forum, the COH and COV subreddits on Reddit, or other community Discords. And one of the major complaints that I hear about is how "hard the grind is for Rebirth." As a matter of fact, that was one of the major talking points in several of our internal discussions.

So let’s talk about what exactly is happening behind the scenes. First, the basic gameplay loop as it stands now is: You complete a length activity, you get rewarded with Reward Merits, then you get some shiny. (IOs mainly.) The chief complaint that myself and the Rebirth team have been reading is that the grind for goods is, plainly put, god awful.

We realize that our player’s time is valuable and shouldn’t be wasted on a punishingly slow grind. So we’re looking at a few things to help alleviate that pain while still maintaining an enjoyable sense of progression, investment, achievement, and excitement. Dev and active community member El Bee is leading a major grind and economy overhaul with the help of many developers, including Hat Ghost, Farm Tank, and Profit:



We’re always looking at improving the back-end of the game, sometimes with small changes, other times with necessary overhauls. Every dev cycle gives us better insight into how to better optimize performance and eliminate bugs, including ones that have persisted since Live. We have some major projects we are currently considering for Issue 3 and we’ll reveal more as our plans solidify! 

(https://i.imgur.com/lEf4BiJ.png)
(You can click on any image on this thread to expand it.)

Part of what makes a classic MMO like Rebirth special is a vibrant Gameworld, filled with cool, varied locations and complex, interwoven stories. We here at Rebirth have big dreams for the distant future including new arcs, new mission maps, and even new game zones. We also have deep respect for the lore shaped by the many hands and voices that have worked on this game since its inception all the way back in 1999. We intend to respect that lore while still moving towards projects that give you new places to visit, characters to meet, and stories to play through.

But it’s going to take some baby steps to get to that new content. Some of these steps are there to help our dev team get a better handle on the relevant systems. Other projects are structural renovations that are intended to facilitate a better, more fluid game and lay a foundation for an exciting future!
Beyond these outlined projects for the near future, you can see by our Gameworld roadmap we have a number of initiatives plotted out to keep bringing you access to more content, always building up towards that big prize of new content that continues to tell stories befitting this multiverse we have all come to love.

(https://i.imgur.com/HihYwk4.png)

Issue 1 brought the new Guardian archetype to Rebirth. Looking at Issue 2 and beyond, we have a lot of exciting new things in the works for you all. Here are the more immediate highlights we can reveal at this time:

(https://i.imgur.com/jp7FYsP.png)

Let’s take a closer look at some of the new Cosmetics options coming your way thanks to our newly expanded art team.
(https://i.imgur.com/ydirtdF.png)

Here is a preview of some of Yikes and SilverAgeFan work to come.

(https://i.imgur.com/yvGYTMd.png)
Asymmetry in preview.

And here's a whole gallery from Yikes in regards to scarves,

Whew! So as you can see, our dev team is working hard to bring you a lot with Rebirth Issue 2! And this is in addition to all the other offerings of seasonal events; the rolling speed-run season; Sunday Night Fights PvP; GM run costume contests, monster mashes, and scavenger hunts; special boosted XP playtimes; and any events YOU our players might organize and run! I hope you’re as excited about this next year as I am!

As always, if you have any questions comments or concerns, feel free to visit the Discord and post in #suggestions-and-feedback or post up here on the forums. DMs are also open too.

Your Rebirth Head Admin,

retched
Title: Re: Welcome to Rebirth Issue #1 and State of the Game - Spring 2021
Post by: retched on May 26, 2021, 02:16:24 pm
For anyone wanting to discuss the "State of the Game" post on the forum, please hold the discussion here:

https://forum.cityofheroesrebirth.com/index.php/topic,91.0.html