The Sidekick Syndrome, as I call it, is something which happens in super hero games when the NPC heroes and villains are made much more powerful than the Player heroes and villains can ever hope to become.

This results in a feeling of never being able to measure up to these NPC giants, and really takes away from the feeling of being the big hero.

City of Heroes to some extent made that mistake with Statesman, and many players were quite happy when he was killed off.

This also is a major problem which plauges DCUO and I hope the developers of VO have a plan to avoid it in this game.

This is a great topic ZeeHero and it is something we worked hard to avoid early in production. As heroes and villains you'll likely find yourself teaming up with our signature characters that are actual controlled by us game developers. We've avoided having missions where you're fighting alongside server-controlled signature characters as we want you to experience actual human interaction and to know that the person you're allied with is equally as capable or incapable as you. Even though we're developers, our signature characters can fall during missions and are scaled to the average level value of the group or instance in which we're involved as well.

You'll be saving us at times, and we'll be saving you. I even managed to squeeze in some tech that allows us to spawn personal missions and team up with players and they get a unique mission. So we'll be playing together and win or lose.

I was more referring to the characters themselves and how they're portrayed. In DCUO for instance, you know your Exobyte empowered hero is never gonna be
as "big time" as Superman. becuase he's SUPERMAN. arguably the most powerful superhero ever.

Playing with the devs regularly sounds really cool though.

The same applies in that regard as well; no one character will ever be considered higher than any other. Note that our Terms of Service allows us licensing to include player characters in Valiance related presentations such as promotional art, comics, television shows, movies, or any related derivative. So it only makes sense to keep all our universe's characters on a balanced spectrum.

awesome idea ironsights, a great way to incorporate dev interactions i do think some of the most powerful signature heroes, that's lore makes them as powerful as a whole team of lesser supers/hypers should hold appropriate power in game though. although making those unique IO power variants(as you talked about in talk with the devs a while ago with 60 different IO variants) attainable with effort/making their power just a combination of attainable in game IO's to allow you to eventually mimic their power(or equal it in your own combo) with sufficient effort and the right IO's combo would be very very cool

IronSight wrote:
Valiance Online Comics
Valiance Online - The Movie

When will the movie launch in the cinemas?

Archanarchist wrote:
Who's to say which Super or hyper is "Lesser"? this decision should be left to the creators of the character.

in most situations young jubilee or kitty pride(latter era kitty pride could possibly beat him by just draging him into the ground, ei having the right IO's and all powers and experienced with them), beast, most of the morlocks extra extra arent equal to later era magneto or superman alone.
thats why they team up with people they dont get on with so they can beat them with teamwork/combined powers
(or a future version of them comes back and evens up the score extra)

That's true but what I meant is it should be up to the writer of the character (the player) to decide how powerful their concept is, and having NPCs which
far surpass anything their character can ever do in game is harmful to that goal.

I'm not against making characters have to work to get on the level of the strongest heroes and villains, but I am against them never being able to measure up to the "Big leagues"