It'll be a week before we've played enough to offer a final judgment, but in keeping with my new villainous persona, I'll offer a few spoilers: in my first few days as an evil bastard (all right, an evil bastard with super-powers), I'm having more fun than I ever remember having with City of Heroes. Just like Batman needs his Joker, Superman his Luthor, and Papa Smurf his Gargamel, the new gameplay elements introduced in City of Villains seem to add missing pieces that City of Heroes always lacked.

City of Villains is essentially a stand-alone expansion to City of Heroes. It can be purchased and played separately from City of Heroes, but existing CoH players can buy the CoV box and play a villain without paying a second subscription fee - a move that was lauded by CoH players everywhere. With the onset of City of Villains, a host of new features was added to the game, so let's take a look and see if its all worthwhile, shall we?

On the opening day of City of Villains, NCSoft is acknowledging the possibility that some of the Collector's edition boxes may be missing one of the seven limited edition HeroClix figurines they were supposed to include. NCSoft has set up a special page which they'll update as more information comes in, and they are urging all affected customers to hang on to their purchase receipts as they'll be needed in order to obtain the missing figure, once a procedure for doing that is available.

-- Ldy-Savannah @ 3:28AM Tue 01 Nov 2005

Bear Bit was drifting with his thoughts, back to when he had first formed the Teddy Bear Patrol. Oh after the big Bear Patrol boys had found him, things had been good. Shadow Frost had found the little techno-savant Bit bravely picking through the wreckage of a defunct Rikti drone. When Frosty had questioned Bear Bit as to his presence in a hazard zone, Bit had chuckled and patted his trusty assault weapon. Clearly of �home design,� Bit told the tall BP member that she had seen him though worse, and that he needed the parts from the drone to finish his most recent invention, a support android. Impressed with his genius, Frost took Bear Bit back to the others in Bear Patrol and he was sworn in as a junior member. But after a while it started wearing thin�

Is City of Villains simply the antithesis of the original superhero game, where you get to be a Hellion beating up on the� hero?

From the start, NCSoft has maintained that they want to keep the �moral tenor� of City of Heroes, if it was at all possible in designing a game where the villain is the hero. Surprisingly, they may have managed to do just that. In City of Villains, you don�t get missions to blow up good guys or innocent civilians or even goody two-shoes superheroes unless they happen to interfere with your plans. The enemies you face are just as villainous as, well� yourself. Your ultimate goal seems to be to reach the top of the dung heap that is Arachnos, the powerful group that rules the Rogue Isles and that masterminded your initial escape from the Ziggurat, Paragon�s own version of Alcatraz.

City of Villains' creative director Jack Emmert gives us some final thoughts as his online RPG prepares to ship to stores.