City of Villains E3 2005 Preshow Report

Villainy is afoot in the world of City of Heroes, or at least it will be when NCsoft releases the long-awaited expansion pack to its superhero massively multiplayer online role-playing game, titled City of Villains. As the title would suggest, City of Villains will put you on the flip side of the typical heroic coin found in the game's metropolis Paragon City. You'll be able to create a supervillain of your own dastardly design and pit him or her against the do-gooders already patrolling the city. When creating your villain, you'll be able to choose from a list of new archetypes, costumes, and powers. These will provide a sinister counterbalance to the types of customizations found in the original game. There will also be an all-new villain group, titled Arachnos.

Once your character is created, you'll start out as a lowly thug and eventually work your way up to the pinnacle of supervillainy. Missions will include such devious tasks as kidnappings, heists, and infiltrations. When you're not busy kidnapping important people and robbing banks, you'll be able to create and customize your own hidden fortress complete with specialized weaponry and defenses that you can put together.

Of course, the one thing that was truly missing from the original City of Heroes was player-versus-player combat. Without an opposing force to fight, it wouldn't have made a lot of sense for heroes to go around beating one another up. Now that the archcriminals will be coming to town, PVP combat shall be fully realized, with heroes and villains able to go up against one another to defend territory and generally just blast the hell out of one another. To that end, villains will be able to take one another on as well, for as we all know, there's no honor among thieves.

City of Villains will be on display at E3, and we hope to get some hands-on time with this promising-looking expansion pack. The game will ship to stores in Q4 of this year.