City of Heroes will be getting some additional attention to the features of Issue 15. One area of key interest will be the features to character customization. Two new costume sets have been added to the Issue 15 update, over 25 new face textures and an assortment of other content. To preview some of this new content, the developers have sent us their latest 'Developer Diary' by Senior Lead Animator/VFX Artist, Christopher Bruce and several screenshots to show off some of the newest content.
A Paragon of Customization
Developer Diary Christopher Bruce, Senior Lead Animator/VFX Artist
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 were 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 havent 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 hasnt 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.
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 wouldnt 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 weve 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. Its our goal that everyone, even those who didnt purchase the Magic Super Booster Pack, will benefit from the extra time and resources that weve devoted to creating these booster packs.
While all of these added customization options are part of the immediate content going into Issue 15, its 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 weve been working on to support and expand the customization aspect of City of Heroes within the next few months.
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