The City of Heroes / Villains Development Team is constantly looking at ways we can improve the overall gameplay and “quality of life” for the users playing in the game. One set of improvements that are included in the next upcoming free expansion, Issue 12: Midnight Hour, are to the User Interface and Costume Creator used to create new characters or alter existing character’s costumes.

First, let’s look at what’s changing in the User Interface to create a new character. The improvements are tied to Issue 12’s improved implementation of the “Real Numbers” feature. In Issue 12, players will be able to view the real numbers behind all of their powers.

To allow this, an easy to use button has been added to Character Creation “Show Detailed Info” in the middle of the power selection screen. By clicking this, you gain access to view all the numbers behind the powers in the list as you mouse over it.

What’s more, you can grab the slider at the top of the Detailed Info Display and slide it to various levels to see how the power scales up as you level up! In this picture, you can see how Vengeful Slice will function at level 31.

Also, you can see how the power changes against another player target by clicking the “Show PvP Effects” button.

With the many additions of costumes over the years to City of Heroes and City of Villains, it can be hard to find all the parts and pieces of various costume “sets.” For instance, you want to make a Jester themed character using the all of the various Jester costume items.

Currently, you’d need to look through all the different categories to find each of the Jester items. Now, you can simply go to the “Costume Sets” user interface and select which set you want from a convenient pull down list.

As you can see, there are many different sets to choose from on the pull down, and they make great starting off points to develop a new character costume. Of course, you can just go with the Random button and hope for something good too!

Everyone will have the opportunity to check out these improvements once we enter the closed beta. While you may not be able to log all the way into the closed beta, everyone who configures to connect to the Training Room Test Server will be able to get to character select and character creation to check out these great new improvements!