Our producer is prepping a major game status update for our blog and shared some screenshots in the meantime...

Looks nice

Is it planned to have more freedom with costume/colors than the impression given by the screens in the final game?

cool, is their multiple body shapes yet or thats coming later and just standard humanoid for alpha?

I really hope to see a great leap forward for a playable alpha in this next update. i.e. better hit/reaction in combat, better animations(Ron Friedman quality yet?), better sound/particle effects. Or just see improvement in one of those areas would be great. I'm already liking costumes, backgrounds and the UI.

Archanarchist wrote:
For the alpha we have sliders that allow players to fully sculpt their characters. There are tons of facial sliders as well as various detail sliders for the body. The face slider setup has been taking us a while, but we have a huge set of sliders for it. You'll be able to sculpt your character to look any way you deser. I've even created a variety of creatures including fantasy characters like elves, all the way to the well known gray aliens. At the moment we haven't implemented the skin substance system, so you're limited to humanoid skin. That system will eventually allow you to change your skin's biological make-up. So you could have skin that has the same visual appearance as a human brain or make it extremely vascular, gel-like. That feature will come later in the alpha with the introduction of pre-designed "races", whereas players can choose an actual race of non-humans from the game's lore.

Anothername wrote:
The current system is in-place for the alpha and may change as our development infrastructure, servers and client technology expands. We've been looking at ways to do a full color swatch in a reasonable way with our current tech, but haven't quite come up with anything viable. We'll be returning to that further into development. Therefore, know that it's something we're working towards.

SavageFist wrote:
We've improved in all areas of production, but I think the area that you'll see the most significant progress in is visual effects and rendering. We're currently implementing aura and some impact effects, but I'm sure that's what people will be most excited to see. Check out the visual effects created by our visual effects designer:

You can see he's quite talent and most capable in his department; all of Valiance's abilities have identical quality.

Thats sick. Hey at 1:25 is that a power set for gravity? Also dig the firenado and ice holds.

OMG, THAT is the quality you are planning for super powers??? Ok, take your time, I will need to build up a crapton of vacation time because when this releases, I'm not doing anything else for quite a while.

Changing the colors, the ambient lighting effects during night, all the variety and just simply beautiful effects. Can't wait to see these in-game. I don't think I have ever seen anyone display just how much the Unity engine can do like this.

Love that crack in the ground that was glowing, the wormhole meteor effect(I miss that power from CoH), the lightning effect starting at 8:52...WOW so cool. Sound effects were great, seemed appropriate and had good impact. Amazing.

DeathClutch wrote:
It's from the power set Void Summoning. The Void Realm is a dimension that is mostly unknown to the people of the Valiance world, but a few people have advanced knowledge of the realm and the ability to access it. The villain Riftwalker is one of the few people capable of traveling into and out of the Void Realm.

valiance.shogn.net/game/characters/profile?id=1

SavageFist wrote:
I couldn't agree more. He has done some really advanced low-level effects as well. These are being used for many of the high-level ability attacks, but he has done some great work on the low-level attacks too. Many of the abilities really pushed us coders to dig deep to get them all working in-game appropriately. I look forward to seeing how everyone responds to them.

Also appreciated what I'm assuming are some physics effects. When there was some debris on the ground, it was neat how it was either pushed or seemed drawn to some focal point. Does that mean somewhat destructible objects in the open world or instanced missions?

Edit: had to watch that lightning again starting at 8:52. Absolutely love everything about it. You can practically smell the ozone, lol.

SavageFist wrote:
Yes, there will be a few in the open-world, and many during the instanced missions.

Outstanding effects. My excitement in renewed for VO if that is a taste of what is to come. Keep it up!

IronSight wrote:
"The first is preprogrammed into his suit used for quick escapes in emergencies that can teleport him to a safe location."

I always wanted that in CoH because when you get in the heat of battle it's not always easy to aim yourself out of the conflict. It would be nice to just hit a button and goto a pre-determined area to escape when you are overwhelmed. I thought it would be great if teleport as a defense mechanism was a two-part system where you can 'tag' any spot whether it be in the open-world or in a mission then only have to hit one key to teleport back there. This would be a separate power from teleport travel.

If there will be some form of Kredak's preprogrammed teleport in-game for players, it would be an amazing ability for those "oh, $#%&" moments.

SavageFist wrote:
That's something I've been planning for quite some time Savage. One thing about Valiance's powers is that they will all feel unique and as you level you'll start to basically see your abilities mature. So for example with Void Summoning, you'll start by being able to fling a few elements from void tears and something weak creatures. After a while you'll be able to pull enemies into void tears and eject them out of new tears; in some situations, based on the target's health you'll be able to banish them to Void Realm by closing the void tear after pulling them through. Some of the high-level Void Summoning abilities has you pulling yourself into a void tear and ejecting yourself out to a new location. The highest level Void Summoning ability allows you to create a large tear, aim somewhere or move somewhere then aim, and open another tear. Allies can run through the tear and come out on the other side, and it lasts long enough for you to do some really cool stuff. You can create a void tear, have your teammate with flight grab your teammate with teleport, and fly them to a mission location. Then your teammate with teleportation can use the ability Teleport Ally to pull you to him/her. After which you can create your second tear, and have all your teammates travel to the mission location almost instanctly.

As always, the void tears are often very unstable, and if the void tear closes while they're transitioning, they die. We're always looking for ways to expand the powers to give each of them a sense of individuality. So when you think of ideas like the one you had, please don't hesitate to share them here on the forums.

The more i hear about void summoning the better it starts to sound i swear.

Also, I really appreciate you guys giving us a pre look at the goods before alpha. By any chance would yall have a clip or screen shot. And are willing to post of perhaps a minion or pet?

Kind of sounds like The Spot from Spider-man?



Also, I like the added element of danger that using a tear could possibly kill you.

DeathClutch wrote:
We'll be showing some screens of the Necromantic Summoning set soon. Still working on some tech for it, but aside from the normal zombie and skeleton summoning, you can reanimate dead mobs to build your army. There are a few other pet sets in development, but they won't appear for a while.

SavageFist wrote:
That's how it will look.

Im happy with zombie minions.. I used to roll an zombie/dark Mastermind named Stubbstehzombie. The original name was taken but we never crossed paths.

Nice to see an update!

That effects video is awesome. It does make me wonder what sort of look you guys are going for with the game world though - obviously filters/post-processing come in to the game quite late so it's difficult to figure out given what we've seen so far.

Are you going for comic-book, CoH style or something a little more gritty? Sorry if I missed this in the past, I'm late to the party.

Solari wrote:
Mass Effect: Andromedia and Injustice 2 best represent the overall look of where we're going with regards to visual fidelity. We're not aiming for the cell-shaded look of Champions Online, and we're not going with a hand-painted texturing style like City of Heroes. We currently utilize a physically-based methodology; all our materials are rendered based on their physical, real-world alternatives. This allows us to offer players a familiar palette when coloring and defining the surfaces of their outfits. Eventually you'll be able to go beyond just picking a color for your character, you'll be able to pick its surface type. You'll choose a color and then define it as cloth, iron, rusty iron, fine steel, or plastic and the system will modify those physical properties to best create the chosen surface type.