City of Heroes grows again News

NCsoft has revealed the 11th expansion for massively-multiplayer online game City of Heroes.

It's all about a bunch of really old aliens from the Ouroboros organisation who have time travelling powers you can use. This means you can "flashback" to historical moments in Paragon City's past, reliving major battles or doing quests you never had time for because you had to eat or go to the toilet.

But there are also new things to do, both for beginners and lifers.

There are two new power sets for Brute, Scrapper, Stalker and Tanker classes. Dual Blades lets you use a combo system to swish various weapons about in both hands. Willpower is for resisting and defending against attacks, and even allows you to regenerate your health.

On top of this are purple invention sets, or "very rare" crafted items to the likes of you. Taunt, Debuff and Buff powers have their own crafted sets now, too.

City of Heroes appeared in Europe on 4th February 2005 - just a handful of days before World of Warcraft.

But rather than allowing itself to be squashed under the success of Blizzard's creation, Cryptic Studios has continued to grow CoH by adding playable baddies in the City of Villains expansion and numerous other updates.

Cryptic Studios is also currently working on a 360 and PC MMO for Microsoft called Marvel Universe Online - based around characters from the same comic book licence City of Heroes was criticised for copying many moons ago.