When I was a kid, my Dad and I would spend hours discussing our favorite sci-fi movies, old episodes of Star Trek, or the intricate nuances of comic books. It was during one of those conversations that I noticed something odd. For all the time we spent discussing Batman, or Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk, we spent much more time discussing the Joker, Darth Vader, or picking apart the political structures of the Romulan Empire (OK, my Dad's a geek, too). When I asked him why we seemed to gravitate toward the villains far more than the heroes of these stories, I remember his answer as if it were yesterday:

"Villains are more fun."

It was my dad's comment that kept echoing through my mind as I bullied, slammed, and rampaged my way through the beta of NCSoft's City of Villains. If you were merely looking over someone's shoulder, it'd be easy to assume that they were playing City of Heroes, the original superhero MMO that debuted to fantastic critical reception in 2004. Many of the gameplay structures and classes are similar, and those that are unique to the game (such as the base-building mechanic and PvP), will be replicated in the companion product soon enough. The major difference I found while playing the game isn't really what you're doing -- it's the way you feel while you're doing it. My dad was right. Villains are more fun.


My game started out with the costume creator. Players who played the original game may remember how easy it was to get lost in the enjoyment of mixing and matching different costume parts, eventually creating exactly the hero they wanted. Well, the costume creator has only gotten more powerful in City of Villains. The creator now allows players to operate a lot more body sliders in order to customize their villain's appearance. The proportions of heads and body parts can be shifted to make a character appear smarter or dumber or older or younger. Villains can also be up to a foot taller than heroes. City of Heroes veterans may actually recognize some of the costume pieces that have moved into the villain selection, but most of the options available are new. They include monstrous heads, scarred visages, new skin textures such as insect chitin, and new accoutrements such as pirate gear and barbed wire belts and headgear.

The most interesting aspect of the costume creator, though, is how the development team used subtle design elements to make sure that costumes created for City of Villains felt appropriately "evil." Even those costume accessories ported over have been lengthened, made sharper and more angular. While a wide assortment of colors is available for a character, the colors are a bit different. They're more textured and tinged with grays, blacks, and yellows that ensure that even bright colors look more bilious than their clean, flat, City of Heroes counterparts, while dark colors feel greasier, dirtier, and more menacing.

When I started creating my own characters, I saw this in action. I have two main City of Heroes characters. The serious one is Jadefire, exiled Galactic policewoman. I've written about the other one in the past, the infamous SpyGuy. I wanted the characters I played in City of Villains to be their arch-enemies, which is how Grandmother's Hand and Marketing Weasel came to be. I put Marketing Weasel together first. He was actually the easiest, as his components are exactly the same as SpyGuy's -- a fedora, business suit, and aviator sunglasses. The difference is that SpyGuy wears a green suit, Marketing Weasel's is white.