Issues 20 and Incarnates previewed for City of Heroes

It does kind of sound a bit like being told "you're getting a wad of $100 bills and a stick of gum"... but then, if you were told you're getting a wad of $100 bills and a stick of gum, what kind of person would complain about the stick of gum?

@Meagen: Our readers. :D

I must admit...I like some of Brad's suggestions. I should point out though, they do have factories and military bases along with warehouses....but shopping malls, appartment buildings and private residences would be a really nice touch. And new factory and miltary base maps would be good too.

Not a fair comparison, because I can't imagine anybody who thinks that adding 24-man public quests for uber loot to an MMO in 2011 is a revolutionary feature. Or even a significant one. Heck, other than the "for uber loot" part, it isn't even a new feature in City of Heroes, and I have the Rikti mothership badges on my CoH main character to prove it.

I just bring up both because even as underwhelming as that announcement is (and as mind-boggling that they thought they needed a super-secret signed-NDA special closed beta test to keep people from finding out about!), the new warehouse tileset is even more amazingly dumb.

Look, I get that this is a seven or eight year old game engine. I get that their art budget is limited because they're down below 100k subscriptions and falling. I get that the combination of those two factors means that adding any environmental art to the game, at all, takes an act of Congress and blows the budget for the whole year. But given those constraints, Bianco thought that the smartest use of her art department budget was /another warehouse?/ People asked for space station and moon base interiors, they asked for more kinds of civilian buildings like residences and malls, they asked to see the Rikti homeworld, they asked to see Nemesis' steampunk bases -- NOBODY asked to see yet more kinds of warehouses. This is the single dumbest expenditure of a tightly restricted art budget I have ever heard of.

Even dumber than making a big publicity deal out of taking a feature your game has in one zone, copying it to another couple of zones, sticking uber loot on it, charging a special fee for access to the uber loot from those public quests. And that, honestly, is saying something.

So funny it cracked me up. After trying CO again last week, I can say only one thing, even COH warehouse map is less annoying than CO's noisy tutorial zone.

Of course, this facilitates the addition of Warehouse Mastery as a new powerset.

Well, it is a 'sneak peak' at I-20, not an announcement of I-20. Heck, we're still just shy of having I-19.